He shrugged. “I’m sad. But she wasn’t. She never let go of my dad when he died. She wanted to die, to be with him.” He turned to look at Diana. “Why don’t you stop hanging on to all those dead people?”
“What?”
“Leave this place,” he said. “Leave the ghosts you’ve collected—your dad, his girlfriend, their daughter.… You’ve got a whole Madame Tussaud’s here.”
“It’s my home.”
“It’s a graveyard.”
She gripped the wheel, too astonished to reply.
When they reached the flying ground, the eagle made a brief flight from the fence post to show her excitement. What if she doesn’t come back when I whistle her? Diana thought. What if she doesn’t wait on? Today, for the first time, she was going to fly the bird free.
She grabbed a rabbit from the cage and shoved the kicking animal under a bucket, then repeated the operation three times, at intervals of twenty meters along the flying ground. Romanus chose a spot close to the mountain, set up his tripod, and gave her a wave when he was ready.
She did not bother with the cantilever today: if all went well, she would need only her gauntlet and glove until the last moment, when the eagle returned to her arm. The bird had been observing the preparations with interest and was staring at the third bucket.
Diana undipped the creance from the jesses, offered her arm to the giant feet, and, when they fastened securely, turned her head away and let her arm drop with a jerk. The eagle’s wing flew open. Diana dropped her arm again and staggered back from the force of the eagle leaping into the air. She beat up two meters, three, four, ten. Diana turned up her face to watch her rise … and wait. At fifteen meters, the bird balanced on the air with short, strong wingbeats, looking down for a sign. Diana began to walk away at a leisurely pace, too slow for the eagle to follow her. After a moment, the bird lifted her head and shoulders to the horizontal of flight and began to flap away. Diana’s heart was in her mouth. Is she just raking off—or have I lost her? she wondered. She glanced at Michael, who was watching her, nodding, as if he knew what she was going through. A bolt of love for him went through her.
The eagle, meanwhile, had found a small thermal—there were many around at this late time of day—and had risen another twenty meters. She was now a hundred meters away, flying with slow, strong beats, beginning to turn. Diana flashed a tense look at Michael, who had not said a word, not even made a sound with his cameras to distract them. The eagle began to circle. Diana waited while she flew a complete revolution, rising higher on the hot afternoon air, the emarginated primary feathers on her wings making constant delicate movements, adjusting her flying to the air currents, keeping her head and body straight. She was a perfect creation, divine and serene. When she began moving out toward the lake, Diana blew her whistle and ran for the nearest bucket. Instantly, the eagle made a midair swerve. Diana rushed at the bucket and kicked it over. The flushed rabbit took off, with the eagle in pursuit. Five seconds later, the rabbit bolted into a hole, safe and free. Michael shouted, “Come on! Do it again!” grinning encouragement.
The eagle beat up once more, with increasing power this time, and raked off two hundred meters. She missed the second rabbit too. And the third. “She’s not judging her descent and sprint properly,” Diana called. “I haven’t given her any practice going for prey at this height before.”
Michael was beaming. “You’re fantastic,” he said. “I’ve got shots …”
“You ain’t seen nothin’!” Diana felt childishly happy as she ran back toward the row of buckets.
On the eagle’s fourth flight she flew higher, mounting with grandeur on the hot afternoon. She poised herself in the sky, long wings held in a shallow dihedral, wing tips fingering the air. She seemed enraptured by movement and by the wind in her wings, as if she wanted to fly forever. But when Diana flushed another rabbit, she changed immediately into a hunter. She descended fast until she was little more than a meter above the ground and only just behind the rabbit. Then she began to sprint, her wings flattening the grass and making a rushing wind. She was flying at forty kilometers an hour when suddenly the pale feet came down, the booted legs shot forward. The rabbit swerved—too late. The eagle flung her wings upward and stumbled a little as she came to rest on the earth, her prey impaled on one foot.
Diana ran over to stand beside Romanus again. “I might loose her here,” she panted. “She’ll want to take the food up to a tree to eat, instead of eating on the ground. Since she’s free, and fed, she may not come back.” The eagle tore apart the rabbit where she had caught it, but when Diana approached her and gave a whistle, she flapped to the proffered arm. Diana hooded her and carried her to the van.
Sunset was approaching, sending the first pale-orange streamers of light out across the lake. Waterbirds set up their evening ruckus of honking, grunting, and quacking, while frogs in the marshy foreshore began to chirrup. Romanus folded his tripod and took it back to the van.
“What now?” he asked.
“Let’s watch the sunset,” Diana said.
He was standing with his fingers on his hips, one eyebrow quizzically crooked.
“I’ve got a rug in the van if you’re getting cold.”
“A rug?” He wished he hadn’t grinned. She’s so nervous she looks ready to bolt, he thought. He found her magnetically beautiful.
They walked to a place where the ground was more or less even and lay down to watch the fire of the day playing above the water. Michael stroked her face and hair. “Let go, Diana. Let go of the past.”
That night, back at the house, she took him shyly into her bedroom. In his urgent embrace she felt years of loneliness dissolve and turn into joy. Toward dawn they put on some music and got out of bed to dance barefoot, circling slowly as light filtered into the bedroom and birds began to sing.
Two weeks later, they set out with the eagle, hooded, in the back of the van. They were both bundled up against the winter cold. The land was an emerald sea of wheat and oats. Paddocks were full of young lambs.
“We used to start marking and castrating the lambs at this time,” Diana said. “Tails off, ears marked, inject ’em with 5-in-1. That was against tetanus, pulpy kidney, and blackleg.”
“Blackleg?” Michael liked playing city slicker, because it made her less shy. She was still only half tame, he felt, still half afraid of him. She could toss her head like a wild mare and bolt.
Today she was going to free the eagle. Instead of driving to the flying ground, they were making a long detour to the other side of Mount Kalunga, where a trail led to the top of the mountain. The eagle had been fed well the night before and again in the morning, so she could survive a couple of days of unsuccessful hunting. Diana was anxious to release the bird today, because yesterday, at the flying ground, they had seen another wedgetail and Diana feared the new eagle had claimed the mountain and lake as its own territory. Her bird would have to drive it out or find a new home for herself.
The mountain path was slow and difficult. On this side, away from the moisture of the lake, vegetation was light, and the trees were predominantly gray box and ironbark, with some mulga. Michael, with the cameras, and Diana, with the hooded eagle, had been climbing for half an hour, when Diana stopped and looked up, then grabbed the binoculars with her free hand.
There, way above the mountaintop, the foreign eagle was soaring on long wings, its broad wedge tail like a rudder. From the color of its plumage, it was a young adult, but whether male or female, and how large, she could not tell.
She was filled with foreboding.
At the top of the mountain there was rocky ground and a stand of gray box. She perched the eagle on a broken-off branch near the ground; Michael put down his gear, and they rested for a while. The foreign eagle was directly above them, but so high it was only a dot.
“This is it,” Diana said at last.
She felt shaky. In minutes, all her months of effort could be ruined, her eagle a fugitive, or cri
ppled. She gloved and gauntleted her arm and, holding it straight, squeezed her fist shut in the strange falconer’s gesture that Michael watched, each time he saw it, with fascination. She did not bother with the cantilever, for the eagle would ride for only a moment on her arm.
She went to the branch and with ceremony cut the jesses from the bird’s ankles, then plucked off the hood. “C’mon, Aquila,” she murmured. The bird stepped solemnly, one unbound foot, then the other, onto the gauntlet. But in a fraction of a second she had looked up and seen the other wedgetail. Her feet grabbed and pushed down. Thrashing wings overshadowed Diana as the eagle mounted the air. In seconds, she had found a thermal and was rising in a soaring spiral, pausing, rising again, weaving a pattern against the sky. The other bird was descending and had turned from a dot to a large dark spot, which assumed eagle shape.
“No!” Diana wailed. She turned her face away.
The strange eagle had folded its wings to stoop while Aquila hovered in midair. The other wedgetail was now traveling like a torpedo and in moments would smash into Aquila. “Fly!” Diana yelled. She lifted the whistle to her mouth, then hesitated: something extraordinary was taking place. The strange eagle suddenly pulled out of its dive, swung up like a pendulum, and rolled and somersaulted through the sky. Diana and Michael were openmouthed.
“What’s it doing?” he asked.
“I’m not sure if it’s attacking her or …”
Again the young bird stooped, falling on closed wings like a crashing airplane. Then it flared, made a vertical climb, and stalled, wings open, pinned to the sky like the eagles that stand for empires. Once more it swooped and rolled and turned a cartwheel in the air. They had never seen anything like it: an eagle dancing.
All this time, Aquila had been flying in a leisurely circle. But when the strange bird stooped at her for the third time, she abruptly began to fly at the spot where it would begin an upward climb.
“Here she goes,” Diana whispered. “She’ll either fight or …”
Swooping up toward each other, the two great birds flung themselves backward, their legs outstretched. Their feet locked like acrobats’ hands, and one above, one below, they whirled through the sky—and whirled, and broke, and leaped apart, and seized each other again to spin, tumbling and twirling, in the nuptial dance.
• • •
Almost a year later, Michael and Diana were at work together in a bird sanctuary on the far northwest coast, outside the town of Broome. They arrived in September to record the numbers and races of half a million migratory wading birds. The birds lived part of each year in the sanctuary before returning to their breeding grounds in Siberia. The water off the coast was famous for its milky turquoise color, and the earth, too, was strange in this part of the world: redder than rust. According to local Aborigines, it was the place where divine spirits had first set foot on the planet and begun to sing.
Sometimes tourists came to see the birds, but mostly Diana and Michael were alone on a long, pale crescent of beach. Their love had deepened in the year they had known each other. Diana no longer feared that he would reduce her to something less than she had been before they met. He had made her happy, more able, more filled with hope. To him it seemed as if his life before he met her had been off-center and all his restlessness was a search to find his point of rest, which was in this woman’s love.
When they went into town they bought the newspapers, days old, flown in from the south. Otherwise, they were cut off from the world except for a radio, on which they listened to the BBC news. It was from a shortwave signal that faded in and out like a nervous voice that they learned Otto Grossmann was dead. He had died just before Christmas, in his house in Bangkok, from what was believed to be a leak of poisonous chemicals. Four of his household servants perished at the same time. Police in Bangkok evacuated other houses in the area, including some diplomatic residences, in case the poison spread.
When Michael heard the news he telephoned friends in Thailand for details, but nobody knew any more than the media reported. Police had called medical experts to Grossmann’s house, he learned. Some foreign journalists claimed that the eyes of the corpses were covered in a film of thick white matter, unlike anything ever seen.
He and Diana talked for hours about Grossmann’s empire, the rumors Michael had heard about a disease that struck its monkey house in the 1980s, and how John Parker had been brought in to help. But when there was no more news from Thailand, their interest waned. Each day there were thousands of beautiful birds to occupy their attention: redshanks, broad-billed sandpipers, Asian dowitchers, yellow wagtails—all growing plump from feasting on the bounty of the milky blue water. By March the birds were brilliant with breeding plumage and ready for the journey north.
One morning in autumn, Michael was alone at the hut above the beach, writing up notes from the day before and listening with half an ear to the radio news: The city of Calgary is in panic tonight following the deaths of three thousand office… The signal faded.… died in the … one of the tallest buildings in the world. Poisonous gas spread by … Islamic fundamentalists are suspected … He was still half listening when the next sentence made him jump. The same symptoms as those of the industrialist Otto Grossmann, who died along with household servants in Bangkok last year.
Down on the beach, the wind, a thousand meters up, had begun blowing from the southeast. This was the monsoon the birds needed for their northern flight, and they started to rise from the sand, a few at a time at first, then by the hundred, crying and calling for the others to follow. Michael scrambled up. “Diana! Diana!” he shouted. But she had heard the cries of the birds and had gone down to the beach, where a flock now circled. If the wind kept blowing for twenty-four hours, the birds would leave in their thousands, until not one was left.
Diana gazed in wonder at the wheeling sky, but when she saw Michael running toward her, awe turned to alarm. “What is it?”
“The news on the radio,” he panted. “The same thing that killed Otto Grossmann has been used on a whole building full of people in Canada.”
All day and all night the wind blew from the southeast, shaking the thin walls of their hut. Diana lay in Michael’s arms as they talked into the night. “But how could the disease Parker was working on at the Research be involved?” she wondered. “He died in the plane crash.” Michael cocked his head to listen. In the pitch dark, above the sound of the wind, they could hear the birds crying as they took wing.
At dawn he began photographing them. Birds rose from the shallow water, joining the huge flock that cried with twenty thousand voices. Suddenly they turned, as if at a signal, and headed for the open sea. When Diana came down to the beach, the sun shone on her face, turning her skin the color of wet sand. “Do you remember the day we met?” she asked.
Michael lowered his camera. “Is this a trick question?”
She shook her head. “I was thinking about those people at the Research, and out of the blue I remembered that a few hours before I saw you, I stole a lab book and hid it in the garden. I know exactly where I put it.” Her eyes said, I want to go home.
Michael took her hand. “Wherever you are, I am,” he said.
“Let’s get packed,” and she smiled.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I thank the Literary Arts Board of the Australia Council for a two-year fellowship, which enabled me to work on this novel.
Many people gave generously of their time and knowledge to help me with research. In the scientific and medical field, I wish to thank: Dr. C. H. Tyndale-Biscoe and Dr. Mark P. Bradley of the CSIRO; Dr. Peter Stewart of the Faculty of Science, ANU; Mr. Robert Chiew of the Microbiology Unit, West Mead Hospital; Dr. David McGavin, Webster’s Vaccines; Dr. David Handelsman, Royal Prince Alfred Hospital; Dr. Ian Clarke, Prince Henry’s Institute for Medical Research; Dr. Gerry Both, CSIRO; Allison Imrie, St. Vincent’s Hospital AIDS research; Dr. Marcus Sacks; Mr. David Woods, for a fascinating afternoon on anesthetics; Stan Wesley of the Public W
orks Department for information about air-conditioning; and finally and especially Dr. Andrea Nicholson, of the Garvan Institute, for the hours she spent explaining and demonstrating the processes of genetic engineering.
In the animal field, I am in the debt of Fred Spiteri, Steve Wilson, and Judith Chapman for information about raptors and for eyeball-to-eyeball experience with eagles and falcons; and vets Mike Cannon and David Bell. Paul Davies, chimp keeper at Taronga Park Zoo, was very helpful, as was Tim Childs of Animal Liberation.
On illegal matters, I was greatly assisted by Commander Ray Philips of the Australian Federal Police and Detective Superintendent Bill Harrigan; at Sydney Airport, Chief Inspector Ian Taylor of the Australian Customs Service was most generous, as was Mike Shannon of the Civil Aviation Authority.
Nancy Knudson helped me understand running a small airline; Audrey Raymond explained decoupage, and Jon Lewis talked to me about photography.
Trevor and Jackie Bolte of West Wyalong were most generous with their time and hospitality while I was doing research in and around the town.
For reading the manuscript and making suggestions, I wish to thank friends John Lonie, Sandra Hall, Carl Harrison-Ford, and Rose Creswell, and for her editing, Bryony Cosgrove of Penguin Books. At a late stage, Bob Asahina of Simon & Schuster, New York, made some excellent suggestions. My agent, Tony Williams, was, as ever, encouraging and cheerful.
On page 42, the reference to seeing one’s reflection in a black piano lid is from the poem “A Mirror We Face All the Time,” by Jaan Kaplinski of Estonia. I thank my dear friend for his permission to use it.
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