by Alex Miller
From beyond the vegetable garden, at the place where he saw his wife a moment ago—if it were only a moment ago, for he was no longer clear about the lapse of time since the blow of the spear felled him—where she stood then, now a naked young man stands. The young man is looking at him, his skin shining in the sunlight as if he is cast in polished bronze. He is tall and beautiful and is perhaps no more than twenty years of age. He knows him. He is the young man who approached them on the track when they were riding out inspecting the country and with whom they exchanged a degree of confidence, his manner intelligent and quick, evidently understanding at once the benefits and the dangers to his people of the arrival of such a strong party as theirs. The unexpected assurance with which the young man addressed them in his own language, as if he believed himself to reside at the linguistic centre of the world, a place to which all men must aspire, and that they would understand him. It was with a smile that he told them his name, as if he believed they would have cause to remember it, or perhaps believed they already knew it. ‘Gnapun,’ the young man murmured in his soft voice, touching himself lightly on the breast with the tips of his fingers and smiling. It was as if he said to them, I am the black prince of this domain. He smiles now, perhaps from his memory of their meeting, then he turns and walks away, not looking back nor hurrying his pace. He is carrying something that swings heavily from his right hand, the set of his shoulders compensating for the weight of his burden, and he calls to his companions, who are farther off, gathered within the shade of the great dark tree that first attracted them to this spot as they approached …
Could it really have been a trellis through which he saw the figure of his wife? And then the figure of the young man? Or was it in the delirium of his agony a deceiving lattice of cast shadows from the slim stand of gum trees? Could it really have been a vegetable garden? Had they been here long enough to have established such a garden? Had they been here years? Decades? A lifetime? Or only days? Hours even? He no longer knows. Certainty has slipped from his mind and the shattered structures of his delusions draw him deeper. It is growing dark. The white pages of the book lying out there in the sun are a distant star now, the flickering pages signalling a message to him that he will never understand. If only he could have one last moment of lucidity … Or was it simply that his wife turned to him and remarked when they drew up here, There is the perfect place for a vegetable garden, and at her words of hope he saw a well-ordered garden such as the one she had cultivated at Mount Erin? A period of nineteen days is in his mind. Or is it only sixteen? But that cannot be right. There are nineteen of them all told in the party, this he is certain of.
The smell of burning is growing stronger and he is finding it difficult to breathe. Behind him he is aware of the conflagration, the house is burning, roaring, cracking and splitting, exploding into the shrieking air. They are all dead. They are all dead. His wife is dead, his daughters. All of them lie in their blood. Butchered and destroyed utterly. Or is it God who has died? He who drew them here only to abandon them? With his last breath he cries out the question that he has known men of his kind to cry out at their faithless end for thousands of years: My God, my God, why have you forsaken us? He enters the darkness alone. There is no companion at his side. No God waits to receive him.
When the moon rises he steps silently across to where they sleep and wakes the messengers. They leave the night camp and make their way cautiously through the listening scrub. As he walks behind the tall messenger all that day and the following day Gnapun rehearses the scenes of his vision, his hand tightening involuntarily on the long shaft at the moment of driving the point into the leader’s side. He is hungry and they have drunk no water now for two days and there has arisen in his thoughts this nagging, disgruntled suspicion that such visions as these do not always see events with certainty, but that jealous demons sometimes mislead men who dare to exercise the power of foresight. His own father also possessed this ability to dream himself his own victim before the death blow was given. But there is no place for such knowledge with the rest of his people, so he lives a life of privileged isolation, looked up to and feared, as princes always are. That he must keep such knowledge to himself makes him lonely and he longs to take a wife and to have her companionship at his fire as other men do, and one day to see his own children. As he walks hour after hour behind the tall messenger his hunger and his thirst make him wish to be an ordinary man welcomed among his people.
So they travel together for three days to the country of the messengers and there he recognises the place of his vision and knows it already, even to the detail of what he will see when the leader’s dark-haired daughter takes his hand and leads him into their dwelling, observed and smiled upon by her mother and father. It is on the track that he meets the leader himself, the man he will kill when the moment comes for him to strike the blow. He is gratified to see the curiosity and the courage in the leader’s steady gaze, and knows him at once to be a worthy adversary. He tells him his name. ‘I am Gnapun,’ he says, touching himself on the breast, and at this a smile is forced into their eyes. It is a smile of recognition and is filled with such lively intimations that they are both abashed by the unsettling intimacy of the contact. What deepness is this between them that they acknowledge? When the leader and his companions have ridden on a way, the leader lays a hand to the cantle of his saddle and he turns around and looks back. Gnapun is still watching him—the way death watches, dispassionately, for the moment when it will strike us down and see us come to our end. Seeing the leader turn in his saddle and look back at him, Gnapun lifts his hand and the leader returns his salute. They are brothers, there can be no doubt of it, and it is their brotherhood they acknowledge with their salute. Their intimation of familiarity. And in this moment they each know themselves to be men first and only the sons of their fathers by the accident of birth. One of them will surely slay the other. The unseen hand ceases to riffle the pages of the sacred Book, for it has found the passage it seeks: And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand … And so the fear in his heart. But what is there to fear if death is not to be feared? Gnapun asks himself. And he is remembering the night in the scrub when his heart cringed by the ashes of his fire and he knows there is something greater than death, something more terrible and more final, and he is aware that he has begun to wait for it and that it begins to possess him. He does not know what this thing is that he waits for, and his ignorance makes him uneasy and distracts him. He is not himself and speculates that perhaps some part of him does not belong to his people, but belongs only to himself, marking him for what is to happen. This sadness on his heart. Why must it always be like this?
When he and the messengers reach the camp of the strangers he is shocked to see the terrible evil that has been done there. No fiend, in all the great store of teachings, has ever been said to have done such a thing as this. He stands looking on at the nightmare before him, numb with disbelief. How is he to understand that one people can treat another in this way? The thought that enters his mind then is like a sharp splinter of poison and it makes him tremble: The strangers do not respect the reality of the messengers’ people, but see them as beings who are less than human. What other explanation can there be for this horror? For the strangers have collected the stones of the sacred playgrounds of the messengers’ Old People and have built walls from them. Gnapun turns to the tall messenger and he puts his hand on his arm and tears roll down his cheeks. They weep together helplessly. Even though there are old men among the messengers’ people who know the position from which each stone has been taken, everyone knows that to restore the stones to their places would not restore them to their power. Having been taken from their places, Time has been brought to the stones and they are lost to the eternal present of reality. They were there, now they are not there. They have lost their position in the sacred Dreaming and their power to sustain the messengers’ people can never be restor
ed to them. Set once again in their old places, the stones would themselves only belong to the past and would be merely history, there to remind everyone of what had once been and has been lost. The messengers’ people, Gnapun sees, as he stands there weeping beside the tall man, cannot survive this but have been made exiles in their own country. They have been rendered capable of suffering from their past, an evil previously unknown to them, and a punishment no people has ever had imposed upon it before this day. For as everyone knows, to suffer from one’s past is a punishment without remedy. It is the end of belief. To sing, after this, would be a blasphemy. After this there can be no innocence. The Old People of the messengers have been banished and humiliated. How will anyone ever bring them back?
As he stands there in sorrow looking on at the scene of activity before him, the stone walls and bark cottages occupying the sacred site of the playgrounds of the Old People, the timber yards, the cows and pigs and sheep and the horses and the men and women, the terrific noise of everyone hurrying about their work, hammering and sawing and calling out to each other, the familiar trellis and the vegetable garden, he sees before him at last the thing that is greater than death and knows it for what it is. He is too stricken by grief for the people of the messengers to enter the camp of the strangers, and he turns away and walks alone into the forest and finds a place to lie down where he will not be seen. And there he stays and weeps, not eating or drinking, for three days and three nights. On the morning of the fourth day he rises and goes in search of the principal camp of the people of the messengers, and when he has eaten and his strength is restored, he speaks to the tall man of what must be done.
When the tall man calls the young men of his people to him they all come and not one stays away or finds an excuse to decline the invitation. They listen to Gnapun in silence and when he has told them his plan, they arm themselves and go with him readily to a waterhole in the thickest part of the forest not far from the camp of the strangers, each one of them considering it an honour to be a member of Gnapun’s war party, and none fearing death so greatly that he does not welcome this opportunity to demonstrate his courage at the side of such a leader and to revenge his people. The tall man leaves nothing unsaid in praise of Gnapun, but is eloquent in his enthusiasm. ‘Gnapun cannot die,’ he shouts at the young men, waving his skinny arms over his head, so that their eyes follow his arms as if they follow little birds flitting about in the scrub. ‘We may die but Gnapun will live forever, a hero in our hearts and in the hearts of our people,’ he yells. ‘And those who go to war with him will be remembered as heroes with him. This will be a war of vengeance, which we all know is the fiercest kind of war. It will be bloody and terrible and will help us for a little time to deal with this grief in our hearts. It is better to die as a warrior where the playgrounds of our Old People once stood, and to shed our blood there, than it is to live filled with hatred in shameful exile on our own country.’
When the tall man at last stops speaking, Gnapun cautions patience and, leaving his weapons with them at the waterhole, he goes alone into the camp of the strangers. Men and women are busy ploughing the ground and planting seeds, and yet others are baking bread and milking cows. There is no end to the activity, and the country all around echoes to their shouting and laughter and to the bellowing of their milk cows and the bleating of their sheep. Gnapun goes among them, observing their enterprise, and seeing that it is their intention to change everything and to leave no sign of the old world. Already many of the great trees that have shaded the playgrounds for centuries have been cut down and sawn into lengths, the tender flesh of the timber gleaming palely in the sunlight where it lies, the sky open and blank.
He sees the woman with the dark hair watching him from the doorway of a hut and knows her to be the leader’s wife. When she sees that he has noticed her she smiles and beckons to him. He walks across to her and stands before her, examining her. She reaches and touches him lightly on the arm with her hand. ‘Gnapun,’ she says and smiles. Her eyes are beautiful, her thoughts soft and dark and filled with curiosity and confidence. He touches her arm and then his own breast, asking her name, and she replies, ‘Winifred.’ They stand smiling at each other. She takes him by the hand and leads him inside the hut, where her two daughters are at work making cheese. The young women welcome him and show him their work with enthusiasm, the youngest taking his hand and directing him to touch the smooth handle of the churn. At the touch of the girl’s hand the rage swells in his breast and he grips her fingers fiercely. She whimpers and shrinks away from him, and he smiles and releases her. Her mother goes to the girl and comforts her, looking at him with reproach, the air between them quivering. A shadow falls across Winifred’s features and Gnapun turns to the door. The leader steps into the hut and greets him. Outside the hut Gnapun signs to the leader that he wishes to help, mimicking the actions of a man who is sawing timber nearby. The leader readily accepts Gnapun’s offer of help and signs to him that if there are other strong young men like himself who are also willing to help, then Gnapun should bring them in and he will give them work. Gnapun observes the man and understands him with little effort. ‘We are short of labourers,’ the leader signs to him. ‘Our ambitious building plans must be completed before the arrival of my two eldest sons and their numerous party, who are approaching through the southern scrubs with the flock.’
When Gnapun understands this, he knows that he cannot delay but must act swiftly, and he returns at once to the waterhole where the young men are waiting for him. He tells them he will take them into the camp of the strangers a few each day, so as not to alarm the strangers. ‘You must make yourselves useful and act with friendliness and decorum at all times. When our entire war party has assembled in the camp of the strangers and they have grown accustomed to our presence and are at ease with us, then we shall destroy them. A night will come when I shall instruct you to arm yourselves with your favourite weapons. And the following morning you will come into the camp as usual, ready to work, and will each choose a stranger to slay and will stay close beside your chosen victim, your weapon concealed, which you all know well how to do. When we are assembled and I see that we are each of us in our place, I shall give the cry of the Wylah, the funereal black cockatoo, for you all know by now that this is the bird of my spirit and you will recognise my command in its cry above the clamour of these people. At the sound of the Wylah’s cry you will deliver the death blow. If the strangers should be given a moment to sense our intention and to arm themselves, then our chance of success will be lost and we ourselves shall be the ones to lie on the old playgrounds at the end of the day in our own blood. And if by some mischance the battle is not going well and you see your friends and brothers dying around you, and you feel like running away, remember that Gnapun the warrior is with you and he will fight with you and will die in your country rather than run away to the safety of the scrub.’ He does not disclose to them that the leader’s two oldest sons are soon to arrive with their own men and a flock of sheep, for he does not want them to be distracted and to be forever looking over their shoulders during the battle.
Days go by and Gnapun takes the young men into the camp of the strangers in ones and twos and they willingly join in the work, bending their backs and shouting and laughing with the strangers, cheerfully sharing their meals with them and showing them the best places to catch fish in the river. It is not many days before the young men are skilled in the use of the axe and the crosscut saw and the iron wedges and the great heavy bars and have become well liked and respected by the strangers. One or two are much admired by the young women of the strangers and are inclined to respond to their smiles. Gnapun warns them not to be distracted in this way but to be alert for treachery. He points out one particular young man who is never without his weapon at his side. ‘You have all seen him and know with what malice he regards us. He would give the order to shoot us all if his father were not to be a witness to it. This man is the leader’s youngest son. He watches me clo
sely and shows me great distrust no matter how I strive to beguile him with the innocence of my intentions. He is angry with his father for allowing us to join them and warns his father to be on his guard against us, telling him he should not have permitted so many strong and agile young men to come into the camp. His father lays his hand to his son’s shoulder and, with a gentle smile, for he loves his son, he admonishes him, advising him to place his trust in the Lord and to treat us with respect and kindness, For that is the way of the Lord and it will profit us in the end. And he takes from the pocket of his black coat the book he always carries with him, just as his son always carries a weapon at his side, and he reads to his son from the Book. And his son listens in sullen silence to his father, who he respects and knows to be a worthy and a good man. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. This is your country he is talking about.
‘And he reads much more than this, telling his son that the Book and not the gun will rule the new Jerusalem and that things will not turn out here as they have turned out in other places, where men of different creeds and races are forever in dispute with one another. This is the blessed country of our Lord, he says. He has prepared it for our coming and we are the first pioneers of His Providence. These people who are already here are the children of His country and from them we shall learn the ways of this land, which is their mother, and in return we shall give them the gift of the Gospels and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Saviour of all mankind, and they will make us welcome in their turn and this land shall be our mother also. And together, hand in hand, just as you see us working and laughing around you this very day, so the leader tells his son, we shall build the new Jerusalem. He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son, so saith the Lord our God. Such is the promise to us of His great plan.
