The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  ‘Best do what he says,’ the leader of the group called to Patchett, ‘if you don’t want no bullets in your hair.’

  Patchett rode forward, yard by tentative yard, until he reached them. ‘What do these blokes want?’

  ‘We’ll tell you what we want,’ the farmer told him. ‘Git down off your horses.’

  ‘You can tell us just as easily with us still mounted,’ Stubbs said evenly.

  Another of the men, younger, clean-shaven, with a soiled hat pulled down over burning, angry eyes, leant forward in his saddle. ‘You’ll do what we tell you,’ he said, ‘unless you want a hole blown through you.’

  ‘You don’t look like murderers to me,’ Stubbs told him. ‘What’s this all about anyway?’

  The middle-aged man asked, ‘Did you notice a trail off to the right, about six miles south of here?’

  ‘Might have done,’ Stubbs said. ‘Didn’t take it, though.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re headed north, not exploring the country,’ Stubbs told him. ‘We had no reason to stop.’

  ‘See any other riders?’

  Stubbs shook his head. ‘Not since the Hawkesbury.’

  ‘Maybe there weren’t none,’ the young man said. ‘In which case—’

  Stubbs had had enough. ‘If you told us what all this is about it might help.’

  ‘Don’ see how,’ the leader told him, ‘if you didn’ ride down that side trail.’ But told them, nonetheless, of a burnt cabin and a farmer’s body inside it. ‘Reckon we’d all have thought it was an accident,’ he said, ‘but it seems the men who did it were still there when two of our neighbours decided to borrow a plough. Must’ve rode straight into ’em, I reckon. They killed Chester but Dave managed to ride for help. He was the one told us there was three of ’em.’

  ‘He’ll tell you it wasn’t us,’ Stubbs said.

  The spokesman shook his head. ‘Can’t do that, mister. He died an hour ago.’

  ‘Surely he would have said if one of them had been a woman?’

  The man nodded slowly. ‘I reckon he would.’ He turned to the others. ‘False alarm, boys.’

  The young man clearly did not want to believe them innocent. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Because they didn’t deny they’d seen the trail to McGhee’s place and they didn’t pretend they’d seen other riders on the trail. If they’d done it I reckon they’d have said both those things.’

  ‘Who did it, then?’

  ‘There was that gang of bushrangers they mentioned in the paper,’ a third man said. ‘The ones held up a gold coach down in Victoria, killed the troopers and the driver? The Schultz gang, they called them. They said they might be headed north. Looks like they have.’

  Daisy came out of the door of the cabin and took a deep breath, dragging the hot dry air painfully into her lungs.

  ‘These damn pipes of mine …’ She was in an evil mood as she clumped around the corner of the building looking for the two no-good blackamoors who were supposed to be helping her in exchange for rations but who more often than not seemed to be absent on some business of their own. ‘Hilda …? Johnnie …?’

  No sign of them. Always the same. Want something done, you were better off doing it yourself, which was why she was aggravated now.

  ‘Husbands are the biggest aggravation there is,’ she informed the gum trees leaning their white trunks over the sandy banks of the duck pond. ‘Them and chooks,’ as half a dozen fowls came clucking towards her. ‘At least chooks lay eggs.’

  Each morning since Aggie had left Daisy had wasted good time trying to persuade Rufe his leg would mend more quickly if he got off his backside and did some work.

  ‘I’m not sayin’ go and fell trees,’ she told him. ‘Feed the chooks, maybe. Good for your leg and good for me.’

  Rufe wasn’t interested. He had nearly died and planned to trade on the fact a good deal longer. Besides, feeding chooks was not man’s work.

  ‘Man’s work,’ Daisy said crossly. ‘Some man he is.’

  Out of habit she scanned the heat-smeared plain to the southeast—the direction from which visitors usually came—but saw nothing. She wasn’t surprised. It was only a week since Matthew and Aggie had left. She couldn’t expect excitement like that every day.

  She turned back to the house and walked around the corner of the building. Three men were standing there.

  Daisy’s hand flew to her mouth and her tortured lungs convulsed. Her first reaction was that she couldn’t imagine where the strangers had come from. Then she took in the pistols they carried in their belts and thought, Bushrangers.

  The tallest of the three, a man with a hard face and long black hair, grinned at her.

  ‘Social visit, missus. Seein’ as we’re passing.’

  Wilma rode at Stubbs’ side towards the distant cluster of farm buildings. It was the first sign of human life she had seen since they had left those fool farmers back in the mountains and she was fit to scream with the heat, the dust, the monotony of it all. Somewhere behind them Patchett was probably as sick of things as she was but he could sort out his own problems.

  They reined in outside the building: a slab-built cabin with a single window and unpainted door standing ajar. The air was heavy with the murmur of flies. They waited a minute but no one came.

  Stubbs frowned. ‘Where is everyone?’

  ‘Maybe there’s nobody here.’

  ‘You stay here,’ he instructed her. ‘I’ll take a look inside.’

  He dismounted and went into the house. Within a minute he was back. ‘It’s lived in, all right, but there’s no one there.’

  They walked around the corner of the building.

  Patchett had just reined in his horse when Stubbs came hurrying up to him.

  ‘I need you to give me a hand,’ Stubbs said.

  ‘Why?’ Patchett made no attempt to dismount.

  ‘There are two people dead,’ Stubbs told him impatiently. ‘We’d better bury them.’

  Patchett couldn’t see why. It made more sense to ride on. If they were dead already it wouldn’t hurt them. But Stubbs’ expression made him dismount before he could be tipped out of his saddle.

  ‘And don’t take all day about it.’

  Patchett followed him. He didn’t like being ordered about and took his time in order to make the point. When he reached the back of the shed he wished he had taken longer.

  There were two of them, as Stubbs had said, a man and a woman, although after the flies and heat had been at them you had to look twice to tell which was which. Neither of them was young and what had been the woman was so huge it looked like a sack of raw meat. Both of them were naked and had been left spreadeagled in the sun, their wrists and ankles lashed to pegs driven into the ground. The smell was terrible and there were flies in their thousands.

  ‘Who are they?’ Patchett asked.

  ‘Probably the farmer and his wife,’ said Stubbs, ‘but there’s no way to be sure. There are some graves behind the house—three little ones and one recent one full size—but there’s nothing to say who any of them were.’

  ‘Someone can’t have liked them very much.’

  ‘Looks like those damn bushrangers again,’ Stubbs said grimly ‘Someone’s going to have to deal with them before they kill the whole Colony.’

  That was fine with Patchett as long as he wasn’t the one who had to do it. ‘We seem to be following in their footsteps,’ he said. ‘I wonder why that is.’

  ‘We ever meet up with them you can ask them before they shoot you,’ Stubbs told him.

  They dug two graves alongside the other ones, put the bodies in them and covered them over. It was a horrible job. The bodies were in a bad state and Patchett nearly threw up more than once but at last it was done.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

  Wilma was thoughtful, fidgety, a strange smile lurking at the back of her eyes. ‘I don’ feel up to riding,’ she said. ‘I’m goin’ to have to stay h
ere overnight to get over the shock.’

  The two men looked at her. She had never seemed fragile before.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Stubbs wanted to know.

  She simpered, running her hand up his arm. ‘Why should I be up to anything? I suppose I ain’t as tough as you two.’

  Which was a joke, Patchett thought. Wilma was as tough as any two men together. The feverish brilliance in her eyes made him feel uneasy but he wasn’t about to start wondering what it might mean.

  They pitched camp well away from the house with its gruesome memories but even so Patchett wasn’t happy. He went and lay at the very limit of the firelight, his back to the farm, and hoped he wouldn’t dream.

  At Stubbs’ side Wilma sat and watched the darkness. The shapes of nearby bushes crouched like black shadows. There was no moon but the blaze of stars iced the edges of the leaves with silver. She could make out the shape of the farm buildings but the graves were invisible. She had plans for tonight, something to ease the God-awful monotony of the ride, but knew better than come straight to the point. She turned to Stubbs.

  ‘Where’s all this gold you’ve been talking about?’

  Bodies or no bodies, Stubbs was always willing to talk about gold. ‘A man in Castlemaine told me there’s a reef somewhere near Fort Bourke. Something miraculous, he said.’

  Wilma didn’t believe in miracles. ‘He say where it was?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘More or less?’ she repeated. ‘There’s a lot of country out there. You could spend the rest of your life lookin’. Unless you know more’n you sayin’.’

  Stubbs said nothing.

  She said, ‘I bet you do,’ thinking, that’s all right. I’ll get you to tell me, see if I don’t.

  She put her hand in his lap.

  Stubbs shifted irritably. ‘Stop that.’

  ‘Don’ you like it?’ Tightening her grip.

  ‘It ain’t decent, for God’s sake, not with those poor souls fresh in their graves.’

  But that was why she wanted it so much, to celebrate that she was alive while they were dead. If she could have talked Stubbs into it she would have liked to screw on one of the graves—in it, even—but knew better than to suggest it.

  She began to work him gently, knowingly. ‘Ain’t you the big man?’ she said.

  ‘Shanks will hear.’ Protesting still but weakening, she could tell.

  ‘Let him hear.’ Suddenly impatient, she urged him, ‘Come on. You know how long it’s been?’

  He turned to her as she had known he would. Triumphant, she smiled at him and lay back on the ground. His fingers fumbled with buttons, with laces.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she cried later. ‘Oh yes!’

  For the first time since leaving Sydney, since killing Brown, in this place of death she felt alive.

  THIRTY

  ‘Thirsty work,’ Matthew told Charlton, ‘I’m beginning to understand what you’ve been talking about.’

  It was their fifth day on the Namoi River, if you could call a succession of green-scummed pools separated by sand drifts a river. At least it was water, the only water in all that thirsty landscape.

  ‘We’ll see worse before we’re finished,’ Charlton told him, determined as always to make the worst of the weather prospects.

  ‘How far does this river go?’

  ‘Joins the Barwon about a hundred miles northwest from here. It’s another hundred and fifty miles from there to Fort Bourke.’

  Matthew reined in his horse and looked about him. Everywhere drought was tightening its grip upon the land. Between patches of dusty mulga scrub the surface of the parched plains was broken into a crazy pavement of widening cracks, each plate of sun-dried mud curled at the edges like the scales of a gigantic lizard. In the distance dark columns rose tall against the clear sky as the hot wind raised the sand in spinning whirlwinds.

  ‘Without this river we’d be dead,’ Matthew said.

  ‘That’s why we came this way,’ Charlton told him. ‘We’ll be right for a while yet.’

  Certainly the cattle and horses seemed in reasonable shape although away from the river the grazing was almost nonexistent.

  ‘As long as there are waterholes I suppose we’ll survive,’ Matthew said but it was a worry all the same. They had so far to go. What would happen if the pools dried up?

  Riding ahead of the herd the two men came across a waterhole that was several hundred yards in length.

  ‘We’ll rest the herd here for a day or two,’ Matthew said. ‘You and me’ll push on and see what the water’s like ahead. I want to be sure there’s enough to carry us through to the Barwon.’

  ‘Always assuming there’s water in the Barwon,’ Charlton said.

  ‘There was enough for that steamer.’

  ‘That was back in February.’

  Matthew was impatient with Charlton’s determined pessimism. ‘We’ll take a look anyway. At least that way we’ll know.’

  Aggie was riding in the waggon with Nance. They had got on well from the first, something that Nance certainly hadn’t expected. When she had first heard that Matthew had invited Aggie to join the drive she had been jealous; jealous of her position as the only woman, jealous above all that Matthew, to whom she had offered herself back at Ballarat, should have done such a thing.

  What’s she got that I haven’t got? she had thought, but later common sense had prevailed. She and Matthew, for better or worse, had passed each other by. Her future was with Git.

  It hadn’t been difficult; it wasn’t as though she had ever loved Matthew. Besides, she had quickly found that Aggie was easy to like.

  ‘Was it because of Matthew you came on the drive?’ Aggie asked in her blunt way: she had been intrigued to discover that Nance had known Matthew for a long time.

  ‘I’m with Git,’ Nance told her.

  ‘I know you’re with Git. But if you knew Matthew back in Victoria—’

  ‘That was just a coincidence,’ Nance said to shut her up but Aggie was not shut up so easily.

  ‘It’s why I’m here.’

  Nance looked at her curiously. ‘Because of Matthew?’

  ‘And to see the country.’

  Nance laughed. The waggon creaked and complained as it bumped over the stones and sun-baked earth. ‘You’ve already seen all the country there is to see around here, I reckon.’

  The fact was Aggie hadn’t known what to expect when she set out, from the drive, from Matthew, least of all from herself. She had told Matthew it was to see the country but that was rubbish. Face it, girl, she told herself, you came to be with Matthew. But with him in what way? Would she have fought Matthew off if he had come to her bed the first night out? Or welcomed him?

  She knew the answer to that, too, but the question had never arisen because Matthew had not come near her. She should have been relieved but was not. Am I so unattractive? she asked herself crossly.

  Aggie looked about her. The vast plain had a beauty of its own, particularly at sunset when the horizontal rays of the sun kindled red, ochre and blue tints across the landscape. Then the string of lowing cattle, the bunch of horses, the figures of the riding men glowed in the light as they pressed slowly onward through a cloud of golden dust. At night the darkness was shot through by an infinity of stars that kindled silver glints on the leaves of the bushes and provided a serene backdrop to the outlines of the men gathered about the campfires. Even the succession of pools they passed had a beauty of their own: the green waters like jewels in the yellow sand of the creek bed, the trunks of gum trees white as bones pointing to the brilliant sky.

  On the far horizon the columns of wind-driven sand were on the move. Aggie watched as they merged and began to boil higher and higher in the air.

  ‘Look at that cloud,’ she said.

  Nance turned her head to look where she was pointing. ‘It’s a sand storm.’

  The cloud grew rapidly as they watched it, its shadow looming over the plain. A breath of hot air, g
ritty with dust, blew over them.

  ‘It’s coming this way.’ Aggie looked about her. Fifty yards away Matthew and Charlton had their backs to the threatening cloud as they rode side by side through the twisted, blackened scrub. The rest of the team was busy with the cattle. ‘We should tell them,’ Aggie said.

  ‘They must surely have seen it for themselves,’ Nance said.

  ‘The day I take it for granted a man knows something better than I do will be a day to see,’ Aggie said, jumping down from the waggon. ‘Hey Matthew …’ At the sound of her powerful voice the men turned in her direction. She pointed at the cloud. ‘Sand!’ she yelled.

  The roiling red-brown curtain had grown to cover half the sky. It looked no more than five miles away and was bearing down on them at the speed of a galloping horse. Sunlight mixed with dark bands of shadow reflected off its swirling surface. The voice of the wind, faint at first, grew in volume. It filled their ears with a banshee howling that deepened to a roar and drowned the bellowing of the frightened cattle. Everywhere men were riding to and fro in a frenzied but futile endeavour to prevent the herd from stampeding. They had no chance. With the earth shaking before the approaching storm, the beasts turned and fled. Aggie had seconds in which to see Nance trying frantically to unharness the team from the waggon before all sensation was swallowed up in a cauldron of heat, screaming wind and driven sand. The storm fell upon them.

  Heat. Pain. After what seemed hours of apocalyptic noise, silence. Aggie stirred cautiously beneath the blanket of sand. The stillness itself was menacing. In the overwhelming silence the hiss of the sand as she dragged herself blinking into the sunlight was like an avalanche. Her hair was full of sand. Her lips, the corners of her eyes, her skin were crusted with it. She shook herself, drawing a deep breath into lungs that had seemed too long deprived of air, tested her limbs cautiously for evidence of injury—nothing—and looked about her at a landscape as unfamiliar as the surface of the moon.

  Brown sand blanketed the landscape as far as Aggie could see. The harsh surface of the rocks was buried in it. Here and there contorted branches of mulga scrub thrust through the cover like the fingers of drowning men; otherwise all identifying landmarks were swept clean. Even the pools of water between the shrunken riverbanks were gone. As far as she could see nothing stirred. Aggie was alone in a wilderness of dry sand without food or water or companions.