The Burning Land

by John Fletcher

  Sarah called out again and Catriona heard the soft clucking sounds as the black girl attended to her. Look at me, Catriona thought. Dirt poor but with a servant to help me. Whoever would have imagined it?

  She paused on the doorstep and again looked northward. Now the black band extended a full hand’s breadth along the entire northern horizon. Catriona’s eyes widened and she took a sudden, deep breath as a gust of cool wind raised dust in shimmering spirals across the plain. A treacherous hope welled up in her but she would not acknowledge it. She watched, holding her breath. The strange shimmer of light came again and she gasped, hand to her throat, conscious of her heart beating fast in her chest. The flicker stitched the base of the indigo blackness and for the first time, as a distant rumble shook the ground, she recognised it for what it was. Lightning.

  Transfixed, hand clutching the rough door frame, Catriona watched as the clouds swept down out of the north, driven by a great wind. The temperature dropped. Lifting her skirts, Catriona ran frantically across the bare ground towards the creek where she had seen Clive an hour earlier. The thunder was much louder now.

  ‘Clive,’ she cried out, ‘Clive!’ Her voice screeched in excitement. Like a cockatoo, she thought and laughed hysterically, not caring. ‘Rain,’ she cried. Tears were coursing down her face. ‘Rain!’

  Clive came hurrying up from the creek. He stood at the top of the bank, short-sighted eyes blinking at the northern sky. She rushed and hugged him. Joy and exuberance filled her. ‘It really is‚’ she cried triumphantly. ‘Rain! At last.’

  Clive stood still within her arms. ‘I think you may be right‚’ he said. ‘I must fetch the cattle from the far side of the creek. If it comes down they may be cut off.’ He freed himself from her arms and scurried away, expression anxious, eyes turned apprehensively towards the black cloud bearing down upon them.

  Deflated, Catriona sighed and thought, I don’t care. I have been praying for rain for months and now it’s coming at last. She lifted her arms from her sides and faced the north, luxuriating in the breath of the approaching storm, face turned to the clouds.

  The wind strengthened and grew colder. Catriona had a fleeting impression of Clive riding past her, hooves clattering on the baked ground, of Clive’s voice telling her to get inside the house at once. She did not move. The first great drops fell on the parched and waiting land. They flattened at once into dark spots of moisture, large and round as coins, to be joined at once by more. Spots fell on her face. She felt their coldness, their moisture, and laughed out loud, holding her mouth open to taste the drops on a tongue that had almost forgotten what truly fresh water was. The thunder bellowed in mounting cadence, lightning flashes lit up a day suddenly dark and Catriona heard a rumble that swelled from the faintest whisper to a roar that shook the ground.

  She stared about her, bewildered, wondering where the sound was coming from. Realisation dawned. ‘The creek‚’ she cried to the black clouds, the wild gusting wind that had grown within seconds to a near gale, ‘it’s the creek!’ But the rain had barely started; how could the creek have filled so soon?

  She ran to the bank, feeling a steady fusillade of drops on her back and not caring, seeing the branches of the paperbark trees as stiff as wire beneath the onslaught of the wind. At one with the storm, Catriona stood on the bank of the creek, empty for so long, and watched as a creamy tongue of water swept down from the north, rising within seconds to a chocolate-brown flood that swept branches and twigs and rubbish away on its curdled crest, the waves sucking and surging, drowning the algae-scummed pools, the banks of white sand, the exposed roots of the trees. In an instant the creek bed was full. Before the rain had had a proper chance to wet the surface of the ground the water had begun to push out through the ancient gullies and breakaways that had been dry for as long as Catriona could remember.

  Blazing lightning shattered the sky, thunder bellowed and from the native camp downstream came a wild triumphant chanting. The rain came in a tempest of sound, silver rods so close together they seemed one. The creek, roaring now, rose to meet them and Catriona, soaked to the skin and shivering with cold, her hair in wet strands about her face, turned and ran for the house.

  Gasping, water pouring off her, saturated skirts heavy about her legs, she went inside and pushed the door shut against the fury of the tempest.

  Inside the room it was midnight dark. Disturbed by the sound of the thunder, the rain beating on the roof, Sarah was wailing, cradled in Cassie’s thin black arms.

  Catriona went to take her. ‘Let me have her.’

  Cassie looked disapprovingly at her drenched clothes. Catriona had painstakingly taught her a few words of English although her accent was such that Catriona could barely understand her even when she used them. ‘Wet‚’ Cassie said, her tongue trilling and lisping. She flapped her hand up and down. ‘Take off clotheses.’

  Catriona had never stripped in front of another human being; even with Clive she undressed in private, but Cassie had assisted her in childbirth. Her body held no secrets from the black girl. She stripped herself naked, dried herself with a cloth, rubbing her skin until she was rosy and tingling, and put on dry clothes. Then she took the baby, hushing her, cradling her to her breast, saying, ‘Rain, Sarah. Your first rain.’

  Holding the child in her arms, she went to the door and pulled it open. Outside, the rain was so heavy that Catriona could not see the shed they had built ten yards away. It struck the ground with such violence that it rebounded fully a foot into the air and the sound it made drowned all other sounds. Standing well back inside the door to protect Sarah from the spray Catriona raised her in her arms, showing her the deluge.

  ‘See the rain‚’ she told her, laughing, ‘see how beautiful it is.’

  Night fell but Patchett was barely conscious of the darkness. Fever blazed in him, his whole body a pit of shaking, trembling pain. Twice he had fallen from the horse; twice, somehow, he had dragged himself back into the saddle. He had no idea where the river was or where he was headed. Head down, hands clutching the pommel, exhausted body swaying, he went wherever his mount took him. Eyes wide, he saw nothing, neither his past life nor his present predicament, but existed in a world rimmed by fever and pain. His mouth, flayed by the sun, was raw and bleeding, swollen to twice its normal size. His face felt as fat as a ball. His head, too, was filled with pain: a headache that pounded and pounded within his skull like a demon hacking its way into the light.

  ‘Let the bastard pound,’ Patchett said to the indifferent night. ‘I got a hard head. He ain’t goin’ to escape.’

  He did not know he was talking, did not know anything, but at times during the night he spoke again, addressing the scrub, the dimly seen shadows, the hazed sky bright with stars, as though they were old friends.

  At length, when he thought he could stay on no longer, Patchett dismounted. He secured the horse and slept or fell unconscious. He awoke to the first stirrings of the dawn. A faint breeze came gusting, spiked by the thin cries of unseen birds. Wearily he forced open eyelids swollen and sore from yesterday’s sun to find that the horse that he thought he had hobbled securely was gone.

  He looked about him with rising terror. The bush, threadbare and parched, stretched away into the distance. Of the horse there was no sign.

  He staggered to his feet and picked up the empty water bottle. He shook it, cursing, and hurled it away. It skittered across the dust and lay like a symbol of discarded hope in a patch of grass as dry and yellow as straw.

  At least now he knew where east was. He set off in that direction, walking as quickly as he could through the cool morning air.

  Periodically he paused, panting, mouth already gummy in the rising heat, scrutinising the far horizon with painful care. He was looking for a line of trees, a hint of green, that might tell him that the course of the river was near, but he saw nothing.

  The sun climbed, pulsing with heat in the pale sky. Its light struck in cruel crimson flares between eyelids that
were now swollen almost shut. His shoulder was agony. Pain and thirst tormented him. Heat radiated from the naked ground, burned through the soles of his boots, licked up his legs. The weight of the clothes on his back became steadily more intolerable.

  Some time during the morning he lurched to a halt. Crushed beneath the weight of the sun, he stared about him. He had long ago lost any sense of where he was or where he was going. He could no longer bear the weight of his clothes and began to rip them off in mounting frenzy. At last he was free. The rays of the sun fell like an armoured flail on his unprotected skin.

  He set off again through the bush, stumbling and lurching, uttering wordless cries that echoed in his head with no more force than the calling of the birds he had heard in the dawn’s cool light. He fell, rose, staggered another few steps and fell again. He rested, panting, eyes staring unseeing at the ground. Eventually, with what seemed a superhuman effort, he rose again. Next time he fell he lay full length with his face half-buried in the burning sand. Agony consumed him. He turned his back to the ground, his long thin legs drawn up, his sunken belly and wasted ribs exposed to the sun’s fury. He twisted and choked, turning his head restlessly against the ground. His eyes were swollen shut: he could not have opened them had he wished. His lips, blackened and blistered, were drawn back over his teeth. Unknowing, he grinned up at the sun’s might. He moaned on and on, breath broken and harsh in his throat, fingers clutching sand.

  He was no longer conscious of the sun, of the burning heat, of pain or thirst. There was water at the bottom of a shaft dug through yellow clay. It covered his boots, his legs, it cooled his chest. He looked up. Rain was falling. Stubbs was saying no damn good, Shanks, no damn good at all, we’ll have to dig again. Under the coolness, the grey sky, the steadily falling rain.

  A woman with red hair and hard, flashing eyes was calling him. He had thought he was in charge of her. Now he knew he was in charge of no one. The light above him went out but he could no longer open his eyes to see what had caused it. A coolness stirred against skin that had forgotten that coolness existed. A heavy rumbling filled the air. A pattern of dust drifted over his body like fingers trailing caressingly across his scorched skin. He made a last effort to straighten his legs, to turn. The river could not be far. He could see it so clearly, set about by gum trees. The light trailing through the branches sparkled on the surface of the water. He leant down and put his face into the water. He felt it wash away dirt, heat, sensation. His mouth was open. Moisture touched his gums, his swollen and protruding tongue. He sighed once and was still.

  Rain beat down upon the dead face.

  Water ran in trickles, in spurts, in widening circles of foam. At first it inched along, swallowed up almost at once by the cracked and thirsty land. Then it flowed: an inch, two inches, a foot deep across the flat plain. Finally it gushed in streams, in surging torrents, crests breaking like the waves of the ocean, bearing before them the detritus of the years: branches, trees, the tumbling bodies of animals. The rain lashed spray from the rising water and drummed furiously upon the roof of the house.

  ‘Thank God we built the house up here‚’ Catriona said to Cassie, uncertain if she understood. ‘It was your people taught us that.’

  She wondered without anxiety how Clive was doing. He was no bushman but she could see no reason why he should come to harm. The worst that could happen would be that he might have to stay out overnight until the floodwaters went down.

  Some time towards evening—with no time piece and the day so dark it was impossible to tell what time it was—Catriona went to the door and opened it, the black girl looking timidly over her shoulder. Together they stared out at a changed world.

  The rain still fell vertically. Floodwaters covered the plain, as grey as the sky but far more turbulent, their surface broken by swirling currents, tumbling tangles of vegetation, by foam that circled in cakes of yellow and brown and red. The water gnashed its teeth through the fallen branches of trees. It had crept more than half way up the rise upon which the house had been built.

  ‘This house is twenty feet above the creek bank‚’ Catriona said, more to herself than to Cassie. She remembered Clive telling her so himself when they had built the house. Should be safe enough, he had said and they had both laughed at the ludicrous idea that the water from the creek could ever be expected to rise even to the top of its own banks, never mind twenty feet beyond them.

  ‘That means the water must be ten feet deep‚’ Catriona said. ‘More in the creek itself.’

  It was hard to accept—ten feet of water here meant ten feet for miles—but the evidence was irrefutable.

  For the first time she felt alarm at her husband’s predicament.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Fort Bourke was a disappointment: a scatter of slab buildings on either side of a churned street of black sand, three pubs and two stores, the Darling River flowing listlessly down the middle of a shrunken channel. Gum trees stood along its course, dry leaves rasping together in the constant wind.

  They rested the cattle outside town while Matthew and Charlton rode their horses north to check on the water situation.

  They rode for half a day before turning back. It was an arid and desolate place. A hot wind blew steadily from the north, bringing with it a gritty film of dust. The stark land stretched away on all sides, as empty as the sky. They found no water and back at Fort Bourke they had been told that the Warrego, somewhere over the horizon to the north, had ceased to flow.

  They got back to town at sunset. In the western sky the sun floated like a huge pale balloon above an empty horizon.

  ‘The cattle will never last‚’ Matthew said. ‘I haven’t brought them all the way from Moriarty to have them die on me now.’

  ‘What do you plan to do?’ Charlton asked him. ‘Wait here until it rains?’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘That could be months. What we’ll do is get the herd settled in while some of us push on up the Warrego and see what conditions are like further north. That way we’ll know where we’re headed at least.’

  Charlton nodded. ‘In that case we might as well let the boys into town to enjoy themselves.’

  ‘Not all of them at once‚’ Matthew warned. ‘We still need someone to work the cattle and I suspect the ones that go won’t be up to anything after they get back.’

  The boys drew lots and Joe Ogle and Brett Noonan went into town first.

  ‘Think I’ll go with them‚’ Hud Orford told Maggie.

  She gave him a look.

  ‘They need an older man to keep them in line‚’ he said.

  ‘Did I say anything?’

  ‘You looked. I don’t see why. I ain’t had a drink in over a year.’

  ‘Because there weren’t no drinks to be had‚’ Maggie told him. ‘Well, go if you must. I just hope the others are sober enough to bring you back safely, that’s all.’

  They were. They were all drunk but Hud was the worst of the lot.

  ‘Disgraceful‚’ Maggie said to him next morning.

  One of Hud’s most infuriating characteristics was his ability to get stinking drunk without suffering from a hangover in the morning. It made Maggie wonder about divine justice. Now he grinned and said, ‘Dunno what you’re making such a fuss about. A few drinks, that’s all it was.’

  ‘A few‚’ she repeated scornfully. ‘Lucky them boys was there, that’s all I can say, or you’d never have found your way home.’

  ‘You talk no sense‚’ Hud told her. ‘I’d have ridden back good as gold. Even if I hadn’t Bessie would have seen me right.’

  Maggie sniffed, hands busy preparing damper. ‘Enough to aggravate a saint,’ she said.

  ‘Why, Maggie,’ Hud said, ‘I thought you already was a saint.’

  ‘Closest thing to one you’ll ever see,’ she said complacently, believing every word. ‘That don’t mean I don’t get mortal sick of your shenanigans. I loves you with my whole heart, as well you know, but there are times I wonder about the
good Lord’s sense, laying you on me along of everything else.’

  And slap, slap, went her hands through the flour, terrifying it into submission as she did everything in life.

  ‘Love me with your whole heart?’ Hud said. ‘I thought it was only God you loved like that.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I loves you with my heart. I loves God with my spirit.’

  ‘Sure you don’t fancy Him a bit too? That old man with the white beard? Sure you don’ have no ideas about Him?’

  ‘Blaphesmy!’ Maggie was outraged.

  ‘Blaphesmy?’

  ‘Takin’ the name of the Lord your God in vain‚’ she told him in righteous fury. ‘You make sure ’E don’t strike you down.’

  ‘How’d He do that?’

  ‘With a pestilence. Or maybe a lightning bolt.’

  Hud looked at the clear sky. ‘Don’ look like lightning to me.’

  Maggie stamped out to give Aggie a hand with some baking. Hud hadn’t laughed; he hadn’t even smiled but behind his solemn eyes he was laughing, sure enough. The knowledge enraged her.

  ‘How is he this morning?’ Aggie asked.

  ‘The Lord has seen fit to give him to me‚’ Maggie said. ‘He sent that man to be a source of joy and tribulation to me. He has surely been that‚’ she added with satisfaction. ‘But the Lord wants me to make a thing of beauty out of the material He give me and a thing of beauty I will make.’ There was a flourish of trumpets in Maggie’s voice and she punished the damper with her knife. ‘My husband‚’ she said reminiscently, ‘is a very passionate man.’

  Aggie thought how she had seen Hud last night, drunk as a galah and ready to fall down at any minute. ‘A thing of beauty?’ she repeated.

  Matthew and Charlton left the rest of the party in Fort Bourke while they pushed ahead to scout for water. They were two days out when the rains hit them.

  ‘Just what we need.’ Matthew had to shout to make himself heard above the violence of the deluge.