Strandloper

by Alan Garner

  “The Father-of-our-Flesh gives his eagle to tell you this,” said Nullamboin. “This man is mulla-mullung. He has forgotten, but he will remember. Do not be afraid. Bunjil gives him his eagle. The strong singer claims his spear. Murrangurk has come.”

  “It is as you danced,” said Bundurang. “Kah.”

  “Take him,” said Nullamboin. “The net is thin, and must mend with blood, and honey, and bwal, and gunyeru. Take him to the fires.”

  The men stamped, and danced, and with their spears they gashed their arms and chests, so that their life flowed for the man before them; and Bundurang, and Marrowuk, and Mamaluga and Konkontallin went to the mound and took him on their shoulders and laid his spear over him, letting their life run along him, so that the net would hold. They danced with him towards the fires, singing his Kal Dreaming, lest he should die again.

  The women heard the song, and they sang their grief at his long going from them. They tore their hair to let free their power for him, and ripped their flesh to give him life, putting their firesticks to the blood to make it spirit for him, and, singing, they went out to meet the men and to bring him home.

  But Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin stayed by her fire, and mixed water, and honey, and wallundunderren gum with her hands; and when the men came they laid him by her, and she put his head in her lap and let the yellow trickle from her fingers to his lips.

  He did not move. She stroked his mouth. His lips opened, and she fed him slowly from her fingers, while the women sang and the men danced, to hold him and make good the net.

  The men and women left. Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin took a shell, and with its point and edge she cut the maggots from the sores of his body and burnt them, and cleaned the sores with bwal sap. He cried out, and slept.

  The men built a tall fire at either end of the Place of Growing, and when that was done they covered their bodies with kowir fat and rubbed it in. Then they painted each other with white clay: circles around the eyes, for the sacred ground, lines along the brow, down the nose, one down the cheeks, to the chin; lines on the arms, the chest, to the stomach; from the stomach to the legs and feet; so that the spirit would run from the earth to the centre, and from the still centre to the eye, and the eye send it out.

  As the night came, they lit the fires, and went to gather branches of green bwal. They tied bwal about their arms and ankles, and Nullamboin put fresh red clay on his headband, and kowir feathers around it, and plover in his hair.

  The men passed from the firelight into the dark, and the women carried the man and laid him before them, and sat around the edge of the Place of Growing, their wolard skin cloaks rolled tightly and held across their thighs.

  They beat the rolled cloaks, which sounded under their hands in rhythm; and from the darkness the men came stamping into the light, carrying long clubs, and sticks that they beat to answer the women’s drums with the rustling bwal.

  They sang, and played and danced on the ground that was hard with the stain of blood and life. Below the ground, the earth boomed in the hollow logs that were buried there. And in the shadow of the flames they sang, and played and danced gunyeru for the man that had come to them, giving his spirit all their spirit, dancing towards him with the bwal branches high, brushing the ground, and back; the clapsticks speaking the voice of air; the drums and the feet speaking the voice of earth, and the power of the ground rising through the limbs, kept at the centre, cast from the eyes.

  The man was awake, and watched. Nullamboin left the dance and went to him. The man spoke, but Nullamboin slung a bag of woven hair over the man’s shoulder and under his arm, showed him the crystal stone glinting rainbows of fire so that no one else could see, and put it in the bag and went back to the dance.

  Through that night the People held his spirit, until their strength was gone. But the sky paled, and their strength came back to dance for the Morning Star. And, at the frenzy, the men raised their clubs and shouted with one voice. “Mami-ngata!”

  Silence. Gunyeru was done.

  Nullamboin, sweating, looked at a woman, and she held the man and set her running breast to his mouth. The man fed.

  20

  THEY PUT HIM on a rug under a shelter of bark, and Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin came and lay against his front, pulling the rug over them both. He smelt woman’s smell, but it was different: part rank, part musk; and the skin was velvet. A dog lay along his back to keep him warm. He moved in and out of sleep, until the fingers stroked his lips again, and the liquid was in his mouth, sweet as honey, mixed with a sharpness, as strong as turkey rhubarb, vinegar, sour. The fingers pushed between his teeth and rubbed the flow onto his tongue. The fingers went and came back, again and again, until the taste was comfort, and life was in his throat. He felt the crystal through the net.

  When he woke, he was alone. Across from him, old men with grey hair were sitting on their folded legs and talking beside a fire. At another fire, old women worked and laughed. Some children were playing.

  He watched and dozed. All day, a man or a woman would check that there was water in the bowl beside him; but, except for that, they took no notice.

  As the sun dropped, the younger men appeared, tired and dusty, with only their weapons in their hands. Soon the women came, chattering and laughing, with babies on their backs, and bags filled with roots and berries, and small, dead animals. They were followed by children, who dragged wood for the fires.

  The day became busy night. Food was made ready, and, after they had eaten, they sang and danced, until the end, when the People turned to their fires and slept, and Purranmurnin Tallarwurnin gave William more of the yellow gum and lay beside him, the dog behind.

  So each morning he watched the men leave, in silence, carrying spears and shields and curved pieces of wood; and the women would wander off more slowly, holding pointed sticks, and always talking, always laughing.

  Sometimes the men came back with fish and eels, and sometimes they had things that he had never seen, so big that it took two men to carry them. Then there was shouting, and a special fire was made, and the animal was thrown into the flames to singe the fur or the feathers, and it was pulled off the fire, raw and charred, and cut into pieces with stone and shared with all. But he was given none. For him, the old men and women made a different food, and fed him small pieces through the day.

  After they had all eaten, they sang and danced: different songs, different dances, different patterns on their bodies. And the songs and the dances made William stronger than did the water he drank or the food he ate, and the strength stayed with him.

  “Eh! Taffy!”

  The old men looked up.

  “Taffy! Fetch us some baggin!”

  A man came to the shelter and checked the water bowl. He said something.

  “Nay. Is that all they learn you?”

  The man made more sound.

  “Give over mollocking. All yon ‘yanna-koojalla’ nominy! Can you not talk like a Christian?”

  The man went to a woman. She put handfuls into a shallow dish and pummelled with a stick and gave the dish to the man. He brought it. Inside was a paste with small pieces that were dark and hard, and the paste looked like a flesh.

  “What’s this tack? I’ve never seen owt of that afore.”

  The man spoke, and pointed to his mouth, and went back to the other men.

  He sniffed.

  I doubt there’s not much cop here.

  But he was hungry, and he took some of the paste on his finger and sucked it. It was a kind of meat, and there were juices, yet it tasted of nut: a rich, sticky nut. He ate more. Well. None so bad. He scooped out the dish. There had been only a little, but it was enough. As he swallowed the last lump, a part of it twitched.

  What he liked best was to watch the children who stayed behind, the sun golden on their yellow hair. The girls played cat’s cradle; and the boys played at being men.

  The men had their pieces of bent wood, and so had the boys. They would stand and hold the wood by one
end, behind their head, and throw it over their shoulder. It spun away in a line, and then turned and looped in all directions: right, left, up, down; and then it would hover, twirling like a sycamore key, and, still spinning, come back to the thrower, so that it fell at his feet; and, just before it fell, it hung still in the air. And every flight was different, and every drop the same.

  One boy stood, and the rest were quiet. He made his throw, and watched it all the way; and, at the moment when it hung above him, and the spin that would have broken his hand stopped, before it fell, he reached up and took hold of the wood at the centre of its curve. And the other boys danced and cheered.

  Well, I’ll go to Buxton!

  Forgetting that he was too weak to move, he got up and walked out from the shelter towards the boys.

  An old man spoke, and they scattered, except for the boy who had just thrown.

  “Hey! Now then, Dick-Richard! Whoever learnt you to do like yon?”

  The boy put out a hand and touched him, then smelt his fingers. He moved forward and looked up, offering the curved wood.

  “Wangim,” he said. “Wangim.”

  “Oh, crimes!”

  The boy’s eyes were covered with a white film.

  “Wangim.”

  “You conner see!”

  “Ongee. Wangim.”

  The boy felt for his hand and put the bent wood in it, then pointed.

  “Wangim.”

  “Wangim?”

  The children clapped and shouted: “Wangim! Wangim!”

  “Right, mester, right! Four nobles a year’s a crown a quarter! My song! Let’s give it some fullock, shall us?”

  He held the wood as best as he could remember, and threw it hard. It tumbled straight and clattered into a tree. The children screamed with laughter, and even the old men and women joined in. Someone ran to fetch the wangim, for him to throw again. But he was gripping the boy by the shoulders, and looking at his eyes.

  “Nay,” he said. “If you can thole, what’s up with me?”

  “Wangim?”

  He let go of the boy.

  “Not wangim, youth. China.”

  He was unsteady, but he could manage. Nobody tried to stop him. He did not know which way was north, but he could make a compass later. He set off away from where the hunters had gone. One of the old men put his hands on his thighs, and hummed softly, deep in his chest, and the note did not pause or change as he breathed.

  He kept going. The giddiness left him, but he often had to rest. Yet he kept going. He was in the great silence, and, since all looked the same, he tried to walk forwards, so that he would not wander and come back. He had seen how the men walked, one foot in front of another, not to the side, unwavering. He did the same, slowly, but that did not matter, so long as he moved on.

  He would be hungry. He would have to thirst. But he had lived before, and now there was food, and there was water, if he could find them, and, because of that, the land was not empty, and he was not afraid. And even in the great silence he was not alone. The ground would not let him fall. His foot spoke the earth, and made it new, now and in its beginning; and that earth spoke him now, new, in step and breath that met in its dance, so that the ground and the man sang as one. To China, all the way.

  “Cooo-ee!”

  The cry was behind him.

  “Cooo-ee!”

  To the side.

  He looked. Four men trotted in and out among the trees, carrying spears and shields.

  “Oss off! Oss off!”

  He tried to run, but he had forgotten how, and when he moved faster, the earth did not listen, and would not hear. And he, deaf as before, stumbled, the song out of tune.

  “Cooo-ee!”

  The four caught up with him and surrounded him, but did not take hold of him. He had to stop.

  “Damn yer to hell!” He was crying. “Leave me be! Oss bloody off! I’m going home!”

  But they were crying, too. The tears were on their cheeks. They tapped his chest briefly, as if fearful, and thumped their own, then beckoned and pointed back the way he had come.

  He moved to pass them, but they blocked him, still not touching, still crying.

  He fell on his knees, and the men stood over him, in anguish.

  “Het! It’s no use! Het! I tried! It’s no use! Het! They’ll not let me!”

  21

  HE WAS DREAMING; and he knew that he was dreaming. He lay under the rug, and the woman in front of him, the dog behind. But he was dreaming.

  The men had brought him back to the fires, still not touching him, not even to help him when the weakness slowed his step, but smiling, laughing, still at the edge of tears. They had taken him to his shelter, and the woman had given him water. She had come back from her gathering to be with him, and she stayed all day to feed and comfort him.

  Then, after the dancing, she had drawn the rug over them, and slept.

  They were asleep now, he knew. But he was dreaming. He was dreaming the fires, and the sleepers, all as they were.

  The man with feathers in his hair, who had given him the woven bag for the swaddledidaff, came towards him. He was painted with red clay, and he looked down into his eyes, then turned and walked. He followed him. Neither the dog nor the woman moved.

  They walked among the trees far beyond the firelight, under the moon, and came to a lake. Near it was a rock, and beside the lake a tree grew, away from the other trees, and, though it was not tall, its trunk was wider than its crown.

  In front of the rock sat the old men, in a circle, and all were painted with the red clay. They sang, and clapped the ringing sticks together. The man led him into the circle and painted him as the men, and then stood him before the rock. He forced his right hand open against the stone, and sprayed red clay over it with his mouth. The print of the hand was sharp on the stone. The man wound a net about his head, so that he could not see, and held him by the arms from behind.

  The old men stopped their song, but still beat the sticks, slowly, and the echo of them bounced off the rock and grew louder, until the rock itself was ringing, and he could no longer hear the sticks behind him, but only the clashing of the rock before. He felt the hands on his shoulders tighten, and they moved him into a balance, holding him, and then, at a pause between the echo, he was shoved forward, and would have fallen, but for the hands, and the echo was behind him, then silent everywhere.

  The hands unwound the net. He was inside the rock, and the old men were sitting in a circle, and the walls and roof and floor were all of shining crystals.

  He turned around. There was no way out of the cave. He was in a skep of brightness and humming light.

  Each crystal fitted the next, though they were of different size and shape, but he saw that they had five sides. Even the smallest made a clunch of five.

  But the wall was not right. There was a hole. He went to it and touched it; yet, though he could see the hole, he could not put his fingers in. The air would not yield.

  He looked at the man. The man looked at him. He looked again at the hole. He knew the shape. It was not five sides, but an egg, rough, and black. There was no moon outside, but the black was full of stars, and it was not one sky but many, bubbled as a brain, and every sky had stars, and the stars were of the humming.

  He took the swaddledidaff from the bag at his shoulder and placed it against the hole. The shape fitted, and the air held it. The swaddledidaff left no gap; the wall was made.

  He looked at the man again. The man reached forward and pulled out the swaddledidaff and gave it back to him, closing the hand about it. There was no hole in the wall.

  He put the swaddledidaff in his bag. The brightness and the humming grew, and the rock parted. The man dragged him between the gap, and the clash of its shutting was behind them. The old men sat, silent, in the moonlight.

  He went and lay in the circle, on his back, and the man knelt and took his head between his knees. He gripped the flesh of the middle of the nostrils with his finger and t
humb and dribbled his own spit onto it, while the old men sang again to the clapsticks, but this a song of happiness; and, when the flesh was slippery and loose, the man thrust a sharp bone through the nose, turning the bone until he had pushed it to its thickest point; then he slid it out and stuck a wooden peg in as far as the peg’s middle, so that the ends were level with the side of the mouth.

  The man held the peg at either end, and lifted him to his feet, and led him to the tree.

  The tree was hollow, and the man moved him against the bark, and he felt himself sink into the bark. He could hear the men and the ringing sticks.

  There was light in the tree. It came from the bodies of snakes that covered the inside so that the wood was hidden. They twined about each other, and their light was the coloured fires of the swaddledidaff, and they twined about him: his feet, and legs, and arms, and hands and body, and their curling lifted him. He looked, but there was no crown to the tree; only an open pillar of snakes rising upward and lifting him with them. The song and the music faded and he was carried by the writhing light that breathed and whispered and was dry and rippled along and about him and in him, becoming his bones, his throat, his veins and all his being, an endless tree of light, of snakes, of a man borne to the sky. Until there was the egg of the cave, one sky, now smooth, both tips round the same, and no stars.

  The sky grew bigger as he was carried up, and then it was all that there was above him, dark, and the coiling lifted him against it, and it was hard. Yet though it had no beginning, and no depth, there was a pattern carved upon it: five lines inside each other of diamond pane, and, in the pane, six rings with one middle; but he could not feel them as his face was pressed against the sky and it was hard.

  He tried to shout, but he made no sound. And this was death. He knew. Fingers took him by the peg on either side and drew him into the darkness, through the rings, through darkness that clung as black as earth, and into light.

  He was in the oak, beside the mere, below the Hamestan, under the moon. Grandad held him by the peg with one hand.

  He sat on his legs, as the men did, and from each shoulder a crystal went up the sky, and to them there was no ending.