Landscape of Farewell (17 page)

They walked all day down the narrow valley until it opened out onto the flat country where the haunted silence of the great scrubs awaited them, the thin trees tight-lipped here and not a word of comfort to be expected from them, but a shifting uncertainty in the flickering play of light and shade that might lead a traveller to lose his purpose and direction. They hurried on through the haunted scrubs without pausing until dusk each day, when they lit their small fires and rested until dawn. The messengers’ spirits were strengthened on this return through the dismal scrubs by having the famous warrior Gnapun as their companion, the hope in their hearts now that when he saw how badly things stood for them with the strangers he would become their champion and would help them. Their situation, they knew, was hopeless otherwise.

* * *

Gnapun’s people feared the visionary seizures that possessed him before a battle, and he had been required by custom since his early youth to sleep alone in order to remove from them the dangerous contagion of his powers. That night, in the desolation of the waterless scrubs, while he lay sleeping beside the cold ashes of his poor fire—the messengers were camped together some way from him—Gnapun was visited by a vision of such power it woke him with a start as if a woman slapped his face. He sat up, chilled and sweating, a deep pain gathering around his heart. There was no moon yet and he crouched beside the ashes of his fire in the blackness of the strange night, the deathly pain a tight band around his chest, like grief. It was surely death who had breathed on him while he slept. In the vision that haunted his waking eye he knew himself to be his own chief victim and understood that while he slept he had been magically inserted into the person of the leader of the band of strangers who had invaded the country of the messengers. In his vision he bore witness within himself to the slow death of this mortally wounded man, who was himself and was not-himself, a white man and a stranger to him, yet intimate and familiar, dear to him in ways he only knew but did not understand.

He saw through the dying man’s eyes as he lay on his side in the noonday sun. Through the crisscross of the trellis in the vegetable garden, beyond the patch of bare ground where he was lying like a piece of meat baking on the stones, he could see his wife. She was no longer young but was a handsome woman all the same. She was his faithful life’s companion and had shared his dreams and trials with him for thirty years or more. He loved her as he loved no other and knew no life without her by his side. He had lived in order to please her and his God. As she leaned forward, listening now, her dark hair falling across her face, he recalled the moment he had submitted willingly to her enchantment. Her hair shone now in the sunlight as it had then, falling lightly against the collar of her flowered dress. On her head the pale straw hat with the ribbon that lifted and was held by the breeze for an instant, then was released to trail over the flowers of her dress, like an indrawn breath that is held in expectation, then is slowly exhaled. She was standing very still, as if she had been alerted by a sound and was listening, her arms hanging emptily at her sides. She was looking away from him towards the hills, which were a smoky blue and just the colour of the ribbon in her hat.

He made to raise himself then, but cried out with the thrust of pain in his side where the spear had entered him and opened his liver, its fierce quartz point lodged deep in
the marrow of his pelvis. The pain was great and he closed his eyes and sobbed, his body trembling, the sweat coming out of him like grease from the flesh of a swan on the coals. When the pain subsided a little and he opened his eyes again his wife was no longer there. He heard her scream then. It was a howl sucked from her lungs by the agony of her moment. The terrible sound flew away into the emptiness of the morning, birds rising from the trees and shrieking with it, the air startled and the branches trembling. He felt his wife’s howl in his chest and the horror of his helplessness in her moment of utmost need. To know he could do nothing for her. He was unable even to brush at the flies that swarmed over his face, probing for the moisture in the corners of his eyes, his nostrils and his parted lips, as if he was theirs and had been provided to them by their unearthly god. He murmured a prayer to his own God, his Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, or perhaps it was directly to his God that he addressed himself at this last: O Lord forgive them!

The meat ants had found him and had begun to enter him. He would have twisted around and inspected the wound in his side, and might even have attempted to draw the spear, but the pain was so exquisite his body would not obey the command of his will and he was not able to stir. After her scream the stricken day was filled with the chorus of the cicadas. He could see his pocket Bible, given him by
his father more than fifty years ago on his tenth birthday, and never away from him since that day of blessed memory. It was lying in the dust two yards in front of him where it had flown from his hand, like a sudden black bird released when the heavy blow of the spear felled him. Lying beside his Bible were his broken spectacles, their lenses blindly reflecting the sky—reading eternity. The sacred book had fallen open and the light airs riffled its fine pages, as if an invisible hand searched the text for a suitable passage with which to memorialise the moment.

Above the hills white clouds bloomed. He imagined the clouds to be bed sheets tossed by an exuberant housewife. Perhaps his wife had been looking at the clouds and this was her thought that had entered his mind. He had often known himself to be one with her. They were companions of the flesh as well as of the spirit. This the secret truth of their love, the bond that united them and which had never been spoken of, but had been enacted. Another long drawn-out howl ended in a choking sob. He waited in the shrieking silence of the cicada chorus, his heart hammering, the sweat running from his pores, knowing the moment of her death now … But what was it to wait in this way after the death of the beloved? Now that the world was no longer his, for what did he wait? He was thinking of their two eldest sons, seeing the mob of sheep moving easily ahead of their horses, a fine
dust in the air, the boys travelling the mob through the great scrubs far to the south. The boys would be finding abundant feed along the way, for it had been a good year for rain and everyone was happy and filled with optimism by this, and the sheep would not lose their fine condition.

It was true, he had been careful to choose his moment and had been commended, and even envied, for it. His move to the north had been soundly based, cautious and well planned, a certain boldness of purpose made explicit to the admiring crowd of onlookers at the moment of their departure for these distant pastures to the north. There had been a natural expectation of establishing themselves here successfully. Theirs had been the most numerous, well-armed and best-equipped party ever to enter this region. He was proud to have been the leader of such a community of Christian men, women and children. To have done this was to have done more than most men aspired to do. And it was such a place of beauty and abundance. A place blessed by God. It had been a cause of great rejoicing among them when, on drawing up here, they found a plentiful supply of perfectly mitred stones lying about on the ground waiting for their skilled hands to build the walls with. This blessed place had needed only their presence to complete it and they were confirmed in their belief. They had dismounted and offered thanks. He had known an inevitability in removing his family
and his flocks to this place, for the voice of God’s messenger had come to him in the night and commanded him to go forth into the wilderness with his family and his flocks. It had been a venture determined by a higher motive than mere advancement of fortune. In coming here he had known himself to be the instrument of God’s plan. It is Providence that has set me here, not the greed of country that drives ordinary men into the bountiful wilderness with their flocks. This he knew in his heart. His purpose was a vision of love.

And he was modest in his love of his stewardship of this land. It is as if we have come home, he said to his wife that first night as they lay together under the stars. He was astonished to know a certainty in himself that the land had once been the home of his own true ancestors and was familiar to his blood. He even loved, with a kind of sad and helpless amusement of feeling, the little trellis that John made from wattles that first day. And loved too, in this same gentle and indulgent way, the vegetable garden his wife and the girls tended with the help of the women of these people. But, before anything, he loved these people themselves, and knew himself charged by God to bring them into the light of His redemption. Against the cautioning of his neighbours that they were not to be trusted as were the natives of the south from where he had come, he welcomed them into his home with respect and offered them the gift of the Gospels. He spoke with them of the
great mystery of the love of Jesus Christ, Lord and Saviour, redeemer of mankind. Death shall have no dominion. This blessed place. And they, these naked and benighted children of the wilderness, smiled into his eyes and accepted his gifts and took the hand of welcome he extended to them, holding his fingers softly in their own, entering his home at his wife’s modest entreaty, shy, trusting, curious and ready to believe. He was possessed by the passionate justice and the beauty of his vision of a Christian society in which black and white were to live in equal fellowship and not as master and slave. He knew himself to be no ordinary man, and that his new neighbours called him a fool, but he did not feel the passing shadow of imperial arrogance in his soul as they did. We have so much to learn from them, and they from us, he told his wife, her hand warm in his. And the sons and daughters of our mingling shall people a new Eden. It was his dream. It was her dream. Their shared vision of establishing Paradise on earth. He invited these people to sit at his feet while he read to them from the sacred Book: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And he saw how their eyes shone to hear the words. It is the book of God’s great plan, he told them, and promised to teach them the secret art so that they might read it for themselves …

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.