The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  He tightened his grip on her shoulders, drawing her closer to him. ‘I’ll prove it, right enough.’

  The drive pulled out at first light. Maggie and Hud had their own waggon drawn by a pair of mules. Beneath its canvas canopy the waggon bulged with stores: pots, pans, farming tools, a double bed and goose feather mattress, a battered wooden chest of clothes, a squawking confusion of hens, all the paraphernalia of the home they had set up here three years ago and were now abandoning. Maggie climbed up on the driver’s seat beside Hud, seized the reins and yelled a command at the mules. The waggon wheels creaked as the mules, long ears flapping, set their shoulders to the traces. They drove away from the abandoned farm, eyes set firmly on the river of yellow sunlight flowing out ahead of them, and did not look back.

  Aggie rode at Matthew’s side. She thought of how things had been between them last night, her breast crushed against his, her eyes seeking his in the darkness. She had felt him filling her: her body, her mind, her heart. She had been unable to suppress the cries that rose again and again in her throat in response to a union that had little to do with the physical but a great deal to do with mind and heart. She knew she was committed. She would follow this man to the ends of the earth.

  In challenging him she had trapped herself. She believed he felt as she did but he had still not told her he loved her. Love is supposed to make us free, she thought. It did not. Matthew might not feel as she did but still she was bound because she loved him.

  Head high, heart suffused by love, Aggie rode on into the dry land.

  THIRTY-TWO

  The first Wilma saw of the stranger was when he rode out of the scrub immediately in front of them. He was tall with long greasy hair and carried a pistol in his belt.

  ‘G’day, gents,’ the man said genially. A mock bow in her direction. ‘And lady, of course. What brings you to this lonely part of the world?’

  ‘Riding northwest,’ Stubbs said cautiously, ‘same as you are.’

  The man smiled. ‘I wonder what makes you think you got the right to tell me what I’m doing,’ he said.

  He moved so fast that Wilma was aware only of a blur, then his pistol was in his hand. Before any of them could move or even speak he had discharged the weapon full into Stubbs’ chest.

  Before Wilma could as much as gasp Patchett had wheeled his horse and taken off, riding as though the devil were at his heels.

  ‘Stop ’im!’ the black-haired man bellowed. ‘Don’ let ’im get away!’

  Another of the bushrangers threw up his gun and fired and Wilma, watching, saw Patchett lurch in the saddle. He did not fall, however, and within seconds was out of range.

  Realisation of her own danger came to her. She wheeled her horse but before she could get away one of the men seized her bridle. Panicking, she slashed at him with her whip but he wrenched it out of her hand. She tried to fight free, cursing and pounding him with her clenched fists, until he back-handed her and she almost fell.

  The man with the rifle turned, a grin cracking his unshaven face. ‘Beauty!’ he exulted. ‘We got ourselves a woman.’

  Clive Brigshaw came out of the house he had built in such hopes almost two years before and scowled with a slow and smouldering rage at the cloudless sky. For a month the blacks camped along the creek had been prophesying rain but there was still no sign of it.

  The creek was dry now. There remained the one good waterhole beside which he had wanted to build the house when he and his wife first arrived. The blacks had warned him against siting the hut on the banks of the creek. Speaking through Murrumbee, a black stockman Clive had brought with him from Fort Bourke, they warned that when the rains eventually came the creek would rise and sweep away everything in its path.

  They might as well have built by the creek, Clive thought now. It had been dry for more than a year and the waterhole was reduced to half its original size and was shrinking every day.

  The blacks camped by the water for perhaps half the year. At other times they wandered off in the manner of their kind. They had returned only recently. Clive had feared they would no longer be willing to share what water remained but nothing had been said, for which Clive was thankful: he had no faith in his ability to deal with the blacks if ever they turned hostile.

  He had no faith in his ability to survive in this country at all, even if the promised rain did eventually arrive. It had been a mistake to come here. He had been a shop assistant in a small town in the green Victorian countryside; what did he know of the interior? What did anyone know?

  He blamed himself for having agreed to such a harebrained scheme when his wife had first suggested it. The truth was he had fancied the idea of protecting her in a hostile environment, of building a house for her and living in solitude, just the two of them, while their cattle grew fat around them.

  It had not worked out like that. She had proved considerably more adaptable than he was. He pined for the cold weather and cloudy skies, the greenness of what they had left; she never did. It aggravated him. A woman had no business to be better in the bush than a man and there were times when he hated her because of it.

  Clive bent and picked up a handful of soil. It formed a reddish pile in the middle of his palm. He opened his fingers and the wind took it away. All that was left of his dreams. Dust.

  He turned and walked slowly back to the house. Its walls, leaves mixed with mud and packed into position between parallel boards set in the ground, were the exact colour of the earth from which it came. All this way to live in a mud hut, he thought. What will happen to that if it ever rains? He had a momentary vision of dissolving mud walls, a roof collapsing to leave both them and the baby exposed to the malice of the rain. Clive’s life was nothing but a succession of fears that chewed at him and that he feared would in the end destroy him. That is what freedom means, he thought. Freedom to fear. Freedom to be alone.

  I am sick of this life, he thought. Sick, sick, sick.

  He paused in the doorway of the hut. There was no sign of his wife. She must be attending to the baby.

  ‘Catriona,’ he called, ‘I’m back.’

  Ned Logan, one of the three bushrangers, said, ‘I’ll be glad to get to a town. I’m fed up with this country. There ain’t nuthin here.’

  ‘We found Wilma, didn’ we?’ Schultz, the leader of the gang, rode close beside her, grinning, and squeezed her thigh. ‘You ain’t complaining about that, I take it.’

  ‘Wasn’t all we found, as I recall. The bloke that got away, we’ll be in strife if he ever meets up with any troopers.’

  ‘What would troopers be doin’ out here?’ Schultz asked. He grinned at Wilma again.

  Wilma rode quietly along, saying nothing. When Stubbs had been killed she had tried to ride off after Patchett but they had caught her almost at once. For a time she had panicked but had recovered pretty well and when they had stopped for the night had been quite prepared to accommodate all three men.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ Schultz had said to her.

  Wilma had looked at him scornfully. ‘I’ve had more men than you’ve had hot dinners,’ she told him.

  ‘Most of ’em was pussycats in comparison with us,’ he said, testing her. ‘We could kill you easy as you like. Ain’t no one to stop us.’

  ‘I ain’t such a pussycat myself,’ she said. She was scared but determined not to let him see it. ‘Don’t tell me what you can do. You already killed Stubbs and there wasn’t no call for that far as I could see.’

  ‘You want to know why I did it?’ Schultz was obviously in a chatty mood.

  ‘It makes no difference what I want,’ she said. ‘You want to tell me, you’ll do it.’

  ‘I killed him because he was the only one of you who might have caused me any problem,’ Schultz said. ‘I believed problems are there to be solved. I solved him, right enough.’

  They rode on, now taking their time. The herd of cattle they had been following was somewhere not far ahead of them: there was a hint of dust in
the air and the piles of dung were fresher than they had been.

  ‘Why not join them?’ Logan asked. ‘They ain’t going to do nothing to us. I wouldn’t mind somebody else’s cooking for a change.’

  ‘I don’t want to get too close,’ Schultz said. ‘The girl might talk.’

  ‘Cut her throat. That’ll keep her quiet.’

  Schultz laughed, not seeming to care how much of their conversation Wilma heard. ‘We ain’t had her but five minutes. Be a pity to waste her so soon. What we’ll do, we’ll circle around ahead of them. There must be some more farmers up there somewhere.’

  They rode west for a day before turning north once more. The ground here formed a shallow hollow criss-crossed by the meandering courses of dried-up streams. There must have been water under the soil because for the first time in days they saw patches of grass—poor and mangy, it was true, but still grass—and there were more trees. The hooves of the horses made hardly any sound as they rode through the scrub. They breasted a slight rise and came face to face with a group of black figures standing not twenty yards from them.

  Wilma had less than a second to form an impression of skinny limbs, naked bodies patterned with white clay and thin spears that were suddenly flying towards them like a flock of deadly birds. Schultz’s gun roared and in an instant, without her doing anything about it, her horse had broken into a gallop and she found herself at Schultz’s side, charging full tilt towards the scattering black men. Schultz fired again, twice, somewhere behind her another gun spoke and she saw some of the skinny, fleeing men stumble and fall. They rode right through them and turned, horses rearing, dust and gun smoke swirling in a bitter cloud about them. Wilma looked about her. All four of them seemed unharmed.

  ‘Fired them spears too soon,’ said Logan, panting, wiping his sweating face. ‘Lucky for us.’

  ‘Made ’em jump,’ Schultz agreed with satisfaction. ‘Can’t have heard us coming. I reckon we taught ’em a lesson all right.’

  Several black bodies lay motionless or writhing feebly on the ground behind them. One leg trailing, a man was dragging himself towards the sparse shelter of a group of bushes ten yards from the scene of the brief encounter. Schultz reloaded, watching the man with merciless eyes as he crawled. He let him get almost to the cover then grinned at Ned Logan.

  ‘Going to let him get away, are you?’

  Logan shook his head. ‘What harm can he do?’

  ‘Kill him,’ Schultz ordered.

  Wilma saw uncertainty on Logan’s face but the habit of obedience was too strong. He rode forward until he reached the bushes into which the injured man had disappeared. Pistol ready in his hand, he parted the branches, peering.

  Wilma heard Logan cry out. He reeled back in his saddle, fingers clutching at his chest. For a moment she could make no sense of what she was seeing, then recognised the head of a spear protruding a foot behind his body. Logan’s fingers relaxed their grip and he fell heavily to the ground.

  Schultz galloped forward. At the edge of the scrub he threw himself off his horse. Running as his booted feet hit the ground, he crashed through the branches. Wilma heard him fire again. Shortly afterwards he reappeared, twigs and leaves in his hair, a deep scratch furrowing one cheek where a branch had scored him.

  ‘That’s one damn savage won’t give us no more trouble,’ he said. He paused, turning Logan’s body over with his boot. ‘Never knew what hit him.’

  ‘What about Ned?’ Waldo Cummins was the third bushranger. His voice quavered on the question.

  ‘Guess he won’t trouble us no more, either. Go through his pockets,’ Schultz directed. ‘Take any money or ammunition he’s got. Bring his gun.’

  ‘Ain’t we goin’ to bury him?’

  Schultz stared scornfully at him. ‘You want to stick him in a hole you can,’ he said. ‘I ain’t waiting around while you do it.’

  ‘Don’ seem right jest to leave him,’ Waldo protested.

  ‘He’s dead, mate. And them black fellers may be back.’ He scowled. ‘Leave him. Walking into a damn spear … Serves him right, I reckon.’

  ‘Spears is what we’ll all get if we don’t get out of here,’ Wilma said. She had heard all about the tracking powers of the blacks and had no wish to put them to the test.

  ‘I shan’t sleep tonight,’ Waldo said dolefully.

  ‘Might as well,’ Wilma told him. ‘Stayin’ awake don’t stop a spear. Look what happened to Ned.’

  The plain wouldn’t stay still.

  Shanks Patchett slumped in the saddle, body screwed up against the waves of pain that radiated from the bullet wound in his shoulder. He shut his eyes tight and shook his head but the problem would not go away; when he opened them the empty plain with its thin fur of scrub swayed and swung before him as drunkenly as ever.

  I’m delirious, he thought. It wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was that he was still alive. When the bullet had grooved the top of his left shoulder the impact might have blown him out of the saddle but had not. He had managed to hang on while the panicked horse had stretched its stride into a full gallop. Normally a gallop terrified him but this time he had made no attempt to slow the animal but clung on, fists twisted in its mane, eyes screwed shut, the pain already beginning to run through him in sickening waves.

  Eventually the horse had pulled up, blowing hard. He had been afraid to dismount in case the animal took off again so stayed in the saddle until the beast moved on.

  Where he was going he did not know. How he was going to get out of this he didn’t know either. A part of his mind was telling him he wasn’t going to get out of it at all, that he was finished, but another part would not accept this. As long as he stayed near the river he should be all right, he hoped. He had little food, the wound had made him ragingly thirsty and he was completely lost but at least with water he had a chance. Without it he had no hope at all. The trouble was he had no idea where the river was.

  He turned awkwardly in the saddle, cursing the pain as it bit into him. As far as he could see there was no distinctive feature to the landscape at all. The cracked soil, red as rust, the scrub like a tired stubble across the face of the land, extended without variation to the horizon.

  He plodded slowly on, uncertain what he should do. He had lost his hat in the mad scramble to escape. Now the sun beat down remorselessly on the back of his neck, his foul-tasting mouth was gummed almost shut, the pain had swollen to take over the world. He had an inch or two of water in the bottom of his water bottle but some feebly functioning instinct warned him not to touch it until nightfall. That water was all that stood between him and death. He dared not touch it until he had found the river.

  Patchett squinted up through sweat-blurred eyes at the fierce golden eye of the sun. It was still too high to be able to tell with any certainty which way was east, the direction in which he was almost certain the river lay. He knew he should remain where he was until evening but could not bring himself to do that. He was afraid that if he stayed out here until nightfall without help, without water, he might not be alive by morning. With trembling fingers he explored the wound, wincing as he did so. The bullet had struck him high up on the shoulder and driven a furrow through the muscle. As far as he could tell it was no longer there. He could not move his arm but was unsure whether the shoulder joint had been damaged or the injured muscles had simply ceased to function.

  He looked up at the sun again. Was it his imagination, or had it begun its slow descent into the west? He looked around for a tree tall enough to throw a definite shadow but there was nothing.

  I’ll wait a bit longer, he told himself. Then I’ll know.

  Catriona Brigshaw was behind the house when she first noticed it: an odd shimmer along the northern horizon. She studied it, raised hand shielding her eyes from the sun. Sweat ran over her, an errant wind blew dust like fine grit, but Catriona had long ceased to notice sweat and dust.

  The shimmering light looked strange to her, It was not bright, as she would have
expected, but dark, almost black. How could a shimmer be black?

  She thought of calling Clive but did not. He would no doubt be busy at something or other and they had long got beyond sharing such things with each other. Clive was a prosaic, unimaginative man. She had known it before she married him but had told herself, as she regularly did now, that prosaic and unimaginative men make the best husbands. Clive was settled in his way of thinking, in his attitude to life. It would never have occurred to him to move north if Catriona hadn’t driven him to it. She had felt suffocated in Jim Jim. There was a whole world out here of which she knew nothing.

  She had waited two years. She had heard that Matthew had made money on the goldfields but he neither wrote nor reappeared. Eventually she had agreed to marry Clive. ‘He is stable and responsible‚’ she told her father who disapproved of the match. ‘I shall know where I am with him.’

  Clive was the last person on earth to take off in pursuit of a dream, yet it was for that reason that she had been compelled to move—a combination of Clive and Jim Jim would have suffocated her. Unfortunately Clive had brought his stable ways with him.

  Why complain? she asked herself crossly. That’s why you married him.

  He is a good man, she told herself again, returning to the house. A stable man. The husband I chose.

  Inside the house Sarah cried out briefly. At three months she was as good a child as anyone could have wished, although Catriona would never forget the ordeal of her birth, assisted only by the black girl Cassie from the native camp down by the river. That wasn’t her real name, of course. That was Nandalie, or some such heathen sound, which Murrumbee had told them meant Fire in the language of—what had he called them?—the Kalkadoon people, but that had been too much of a mouthful for Catriona.