Triskellion 3: The Gathering

by Will Peterson

  “Don’t worry,” Levi said, reading their thoughts. “After the first hundred kilometres or so it all goes much quicker.” He grinned at their astonished faces. They had assumed they were already within striking distance of their destination.

  “So how far are we going altogether?” Adam asked.

  “About a thousand kilometres,” Levi said. “But who’s counting? It’s easier if you don’t think of it in terms of miles or kilometres. If you just think of it as a distance that needs covering, it becomes longer or shorter, depending on your state of mind. Kind of like time.”

  Rachel knew what Levi meant. Although a hundred years was obviously way out of her own life experience, sometimes ancient history could feel as if it had only happened yesterday. She walked on, losing herself in thoughts about the past, and the track seemed to melt away under her feet…

  Laura had made it no further than Kalgoorlie the night before. Five hundred kilometres had been the most she had been able to manage and she had checked into the Nelson Hotel at nine, exhausted and in need of a drink. Laura always stayed at the Nelson when she passed through Kalgoorlie, partly because it was quiet and private, but mainly because she and Kate had made a pact that, should anything happen to them, this hotel was to be their emergency refuge. It would be a meeting point and somewhere they could lie low for a few days. Being a mining town, plenty of people came and went in Kalgoorlie, and it had a reputation for turning a blind eye to people’s indiscretions.

  It was a good place to hide.

  Laura now wished that she and Kate had told Rachel and Adam about their back-up plan, but they had always assumed that they would be with the kids if anything ever happened. Besides, they hadn’t wanted to burden the twins with the fear that they might be under any kind of threat.

  She had tried calling Kate again that morning to let her know where she was, but the tone had told her that the phone had been disconnected, and that had made her anxious.

  Laura revved the engine of the old Jeep and headed out on the road from Kalgoorlie. As she drove, she willed herself to see a pair of twins and an Aboriginal boy on the road, repeating the words “Rachel” and “Adam” over and over to herself, as if by speaking their names she might summon them into existence.

  She turned on to the Great Central Road that ran east towards Uluru, Australia’s best-known natural landmark. As a child, Laura had become obsessed by the isolated mountain. She had been fascinated by the way it stood alone in the desert, squarely in the middle of the continent. It was as if someone looking down from outer space had stuck a pin at the exact spot that marked out the centre of Australia.

  She still loved the mysterious way that the rock changed colour with the climate and the light. It could be silver-grey in the rain – streaked with black where algae grew in the damp crevasses. It could glow red at sunset, partly from the light and partly from the iron oxide particles rusting among the sandstone. At dawn it could appear violet as the early light caught the quartz that made up twenty-five per cent of its composition.

  But it was not just the unique structure of the giant rock that had captivated Laura’s imagination, or the fact that three-quarters of it was underground – iceberg-like – a piece of information which had made early geologists think it was a meteor. For Laura, it was more to do with the primal feeling she got every time she looked at the mountain. She could never suppress a flutter of excitement at its great age and the myths that surrounded it.

  The legend of the Anangu, the Aboriginals who traditionally owned the area, said that before the world was fully formed, two creator beings – brothers – had fought in the wet mud, creating the table-topped mountain. The Aboriginal belief was that the spirits of these warring brothers still inhabited Anangu land.

  Given her research credentials and the special relationship she had built up over many years with the local tribes, the Anangu had given Laura almost total freedom to continue her study of the monolith. She knew where the Dreamtime tracks ran. She knew the sacred areas that could not be photographed and she respected the traditions.

  And she knew the perfect spot to hide something very valuable.

  The most obvious place in Australia.

  Some time must have passed before Levi spoke again, because as he did so Rachel and Adam suddenly became aware of their surroundings again, as if awakened from a daydream. Looking behind them, they could see that they had already walked a very long way. It was like they had been mesmerized by the heat and the sunlight and the soporific buzzing of the insects.

  “How far have we walked?” Adam asked.

  “Why do you need to keep counting?” Levi laughed. “Let’s just say a fair way.”

  Rachel could tell by the position of the sun in the sky that they must have walked for three or four hours at least.

  “This is where we turn off,” Levi said. He checked some stones at the side of the road and looked across the plain to an area of sparse shrub land. “We should get off the road, because if anyone’s on our trail, this is the only way they can come. We also need somewhere to sleep tonight and some food.”

  Adam looked around and, seeing no sign of a town or even a roadside motel, began to fear the worst.

  “We’re sleeping outside?” he said.

  Half an hour later Levi led them into a small clearing surrounded by scrubby trees and bushes. He surveyed it and spread his arms out as if he were leading Adam and Rachel into the lobby of a five-star hotel.

  “The Garden of Eden,” he said, grinning.

  The irony was not lost on Adam. “You can be Eve,” he said to Rachel.

  They lay their bags down on a soft, sandy area, and almost immediately, Levi began scratching around in the earth with his hands. Within seconds he had uncovered a large, brown-skinned ball, the size of a large potato.

  “Desert yam,” he said, pulling the stalks off the tuber and brushing the sandy earth away with his hand. “Great to eat. Can you find some more, Adam?”

  Levi took Rachel to the line of tall stems that grew along one side of the clearing. He snapped one off at the base and showed her where dried sap had formed into waxy chunks of resin near the roots.

  “Can you collect some of this, Rachel?” he asked. “And when you’ve done that, we could do with some firewood.”

  “Sir, yessir!” Rachel said, mockingly.

  Levi studied the long, straight stem he had snapped off and began shaving its tip with a stone, weighing it in his hand as if it were a spear. Then, when he was satisfied, he turned and walked away from the clearing.

  Twenty minutes later Adam had collected a dozen or so yams, while Rachel had amassed a small pile of resin and enough twigs and small branches for a decent fire. Levi reappeared then, having crept soundlessly up behind them. He held up a dead lizard. It was more than sixty centimetres long, with a hole in its neck where Levi had speared it.

  “Goanna,” he said, smiling. “Now we can eat.”

  “Oh. My. God,” Rachel cried.

  Levi knelt down and laid the pieces of resin among the dried wood. “It’s like a natural firelighter,” he said.

  Adam picked up two short sticks. “Do I rub these together or something?”

  Levi grinned. “Well you can,” he said; “but seeing as we’ve got a lighter in the bag…”

  Adam tossed the sticks away. “I thought you could set fire to pretty much whatever you liked,” he said. He was remembering the newspaper on the bus. “Whenever you feel like it.”

  Levi looked up at him, his eyes suddenly hard. “I can only do that when I’m really mad.”

  Once the fire had been going for a while, Levi washed and gutted the goanna and placed it on its back in the hot embers. Its head looked scaly and devilish, its tongue lolling out from between sharp teeth. Rachel stared at it with disgust.

  “You’ll eat it if you’re hungry enough,” Levi said, reading her thoughts.

  “I’ll try anything once,” Adam said. “Besides, I’m so hungry I could eat my ow
n foot.”

  “That’s the idea, Adam, but hopefully it won’t come to that.” Levi prodded at the goanna. “This is part of your education. The tribes round here weren’t too good at looking after themselves, either, until the ancestors came from the sky and showed them how. The tribes were pretty primitive then, back in the Dreamtime, and the ancestors taught them how to hunt and fish. They taught them how to make fire and how to cook what they killed.” He grinned at the twins. “Some people still need to be taught…”

  He lifted the lizard from the fire and peeled off its skin like it was a baked banana. He pulled the flesh from the bones with expert fingers and laid it out in strips on a large leaf. Then he dug the yams out of the ashes and split them with a penknife.

  Rachel and Adam tucked into the hot yams, which tasted like sweet potatoes and were all the better for being eaten in the open air. Levi offered them the meat. Adam took a strip and chewed it, his face registering at first squeamishness, then pleasure.

  “Eat some, Rachel.” Levi offered her the leaf. “Think of it as chicken. It’s kind of related to a chook, if you go back far enough.”

  Rachel took a deep breath. It did look like chicken. She picked up a small piece of the roasted lizard and put it in her mouth. It was better than the best chicken she had ever tasted: tender and smoky from the fire. Delicious.

  Once the leaf was stripped of goanna meat and all the yams had been eaten, Rachel, Adam and Levi licked their lips in satisfaction.

  “Tempt you to an apple…?” Levi pulled half a dozen small apples from his pocket and passed them round.

  The apples were cool and sweet and cut through the greasiness left by the meat. Rachel rested her head on her backpack, her stomach full and contented. She looked up at the stars, clear in the blue-black sky above. She could feel the warmth of the embers on her cheek and, while Levi hummed a faint tune, she fell fast asleep.

  The sky is unnaturally blue: turquoise and glowing with a new light. Tall eucalyptus trees dot the landscape, their thin trunks skin-smooth, their sparse branches reaching up, fluttering long fingers, towards the sky.

  The girl looks up at what appears to be the sun, but it is a sun that is coming closer. As it approaches, she sees that it is spherical: an orb created from spinning wheels of light. She should run, but she does not. She is hypnotized by the spinning wheels that intersect one another and come closer until she can almost see flames flickering across their surface. She shuts her eyes, momentarily blinded by the white light, and when she opens them again, she sees something else, something within the ball of light.

  It is a figure, man-like, silhouetted within the wheels.

  She is frightened. She is about to run, but there is no time – just before the orb crashes into the desert, it explodes, flattening her to the ground.

  The explosion makes no sound. Thousands of smaller orbs are dispersed into the sky. They explode, filling the air with glittering fragments that tumble to earth like tiny stars. When she raises her head, the sky is black and thick with buzzing insects. They swarm around her head, crawling into her ears, her mouth, her nose.

  Bees…

  But they do not sting. She spits them out and brushes them off with her hands. Getting to her feet, still covered head to toe in bees, she starts to run. As she flees, fat drops of rain begin to fall, cold on her skin. The drops quicken and fall harder until she is soaked by the pouring rain.

  She runs.

  The dry desert floor becomes wet and slippery, then disappears under her feet as if she is flying several centimetres above the ground. She moves faster, not feeling her feet, the landscape flashing by in fast forward, bees flying off and trailing after her.

  Then, she stops.

  A huge parakeet squawks overhead, before swooping down and drawing her attention to something on the ground.

  The creature is long and fat, like a catfish. She cannot see whether it has feet like a lizard or is more like a snake – but as it slithers along, it leaves a deep groove in the earth, slick with slime. She knows she should not go near it, but she is transfixed by the swirling pattern on its bronze-coloured skin. She knows she should not touch it, but it moves so slowly that it will not be able to escape, and she cannot resist it.

  She kneels down and her arm moves involuntarily towards the creature’s slippery skin. The head rears back fast, revealing a silvery underbelly and tiny eyes that glint on either side of its head. The mouth is no more than a hole surrounded by small barbs that latch on to her arm. Sinking in and locking on to her flesh, it begins to suck…

  Rachel woke up and a spasm of shock ran through her body. She checked her arm. There was a small bump. A mosquito bite, maybe.

  “You OK, Rach?”

  Rachel looked over to the other side of the campfire where Adam had been sleeping. He still looked a little sleepy, but his eyes were wide and slightly panicked.

  “Bad dream… Did you…?” Rachel asked.

  A nod. “With that … thing, whatever it was.” Adam shuddered at the memory.

  “Guess eating lizard doesn’t agree with me.”

  “Won’t be the goanna that gave you dreams,” Levi said. “We’re right on a Songline here. That’ll be where your dreams came from, telling you stuff about the history of this place from millions of years ago.”

  “Do you know what we dreamed about, then?” Rachel asked.

  “Probably. You see, that stuff is literally set in stone. The earth keeps memories, and when you’re on a Songline, they come back to you.” Levi kicked dirt across the cold ashes to hide them. “That’s why I brought you this way – to bring you up to speed. It’s part of your history too.”

  Rachel felt uneasy. What had seemed like a simple and beautiful landscape of sun and eucalyptus trees suddenly gave her a sinking feeling. She felt that something else, something frightening and dark, lurked just beneath the surface.

  As if to confirm her worst fears, two figures were beginning to appear out of the shimmering heat haze on the horizon. They were upright and humanoid; their bodies were spindly and marked with white shapes, as if their skeletons were visible through their skin.

  “What shall we do?” Rachel looked nervously at Levi, whose face was impassive.

  “Wait,” he said.

  They stood frozen as the figures came nearer, each one carrying a tall spear. Rachel could see that they were men, not unlike Levi himself, and very dark-skinned. What had appeared to be bones from a distance were in fact chalky-white markings painted all over their bodies.

  The men eyed the twins without emotion, then stepped forward. They mumbled something and made what Rachel took to be signs of deference to Levi. The boy made similar signs back and then a grin spread across his face. The formalities clearly over, the two men grinned back, and all three fell into a hug, patting one another’s backs and chuckling.

  Levi pulled away and dragged the two men across to Rachel and Adam. “Rachel, Adam,” he said, “meet Clifford and Charlie Possum.”

  Rachel and Adam said hello.

  “These guys are Anangu,” Levi continued. “They’re the traditional custodians of the rock. The government handed control back to them a few years ago.”

  “So, we can be your guides,” Clifford Possum said. He reached into a small leather pouch and offered them damper, a kind of floury bread with a lump of dark golden honeycomb in the centre.

  “You keep bees?” Rachel asked.

  “We don’t keep them,” Clifford said. “They’re wild. We harvest the honey from the colonies out in the bush.”

  “The Anangu were the world’s first bee-harvesters,” Charlie said. “Story is that the bees came from the sky with the ancestors, so they could pollinate all the plants and help us develop our crops.”

  Rachel blinked, remembering her dream: the insects that had scattered like pin-pricks of light when the orb had crashed to earth.

  “Without the bees we couldn’t survive,” Clifford said. “And we know every single colony from he
re to Uluru.”

  “How far is Uluru from here, then?” Adam asked.

  Clifford Possum screwed up his brow. Distances were clearly as irrelevant to him as they were to Levi. “Dunno,” he said. “Guess about four hundred kilometres.”

  Rachel was both amazed to hear how far they had come in a few hours and alarmed to discover that they still had such a long way to go. Adam clearly felt the same.

  “Four hundred? Are we going to walk the rest of the way?” he said.

  Clifford chuckled. “I think you’ve done enough walking.”

  Rachel began to wonder how they would get to Uluru. There were clearly no horses or cars. “Are we going to travel along the Songlines?” she asked.

  Clifford and Charlie Possum seemed to find this idea funny and roared with laughter. “No, you crazy girl,” Charlie said. “We’re not walking all that way.”

  Clifford grinned. “We’re going to fly, like the bees!”

  Down towards the end of Broadway, beyond the fashionable areas of SoHo and Tribeca, lies the financial district of Manhattan. Among the steel and glass office blocks that thrust into the New York sky and drive the money markets of the world are the headquarters of a very different kind of organization: the Flight Trust.

  The Flight Trust was founded in the early twentieth century by a group of upstate philanthropists who had benefited from the boom times and hoped to give something back to America other than their taxes. One original trustee with a passion for man-powered flight had backed the Wright brothers in their pursuit of conquering the air. The enterprise had made little money – but it had given the trust its name.

  The Flight Trust had continued to sponsor pilots and explorers, such as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. It had also invested in providing new technology for the air force in the First and Second World Wars: invaluable research that the Trust had traded for government bonds, making it a very rich organization indeed.