Flight of the Eagle (19 page)

The horse raised its head from nuzzling at the dry grasses and stared at the shimmering line of people slowly wending their way towards them. He snorted when their strange scent reached him on a tiny zephyr-like breeze but Kate was only aware of their presence when she thought she heard the murmur of human voices through the buzzing of the flies that crawled all over her.

She tried to turn and scan the plain but the effort caused her pain and the voices seemed to stop when she groaned with the shock of the pain. She closed her eyes to try and block out her agony. When she opened them she gasped with sudden fright at the unexpected sight of the tall, skinny warrior standing over her with his spears grasped in his hand. But when she stared into his bearded face she saw a kind expression of sympathy and not animosity. She smiled and the nomad returned the smile.

He turned to call over his shoulder and an Aboriginal woman appeared to kneel beside Kate and cluck with maternal sounds at her distress. Then the Aboriginal spoke to Kate in a language she did understand! ‘By jingo, Missus, goodfella we painum you, my word. Bigfella bird he bringum message to blackfella.’

The significance of the man's words was lost on Kate as the contractions became sharper. She was now in full labour but she had many eager women's hands to help her bring her son into the world.

And so Matthew Tracy was born in the shimmering heat of the late afternoon. Covered in the red earth and with bits of stick and grass adhering to his birth slicked body, the squalling baby was passed to Kate's breast by her Aboriginal midwife. The woman beamed a broad, white toothed smile at the shared pleasure of a new life brought into their harsh and arid plains.

Willie returned later that evening. Exhausted from his hard ride, he brought back with him the wife of a shanty keeper and her son, a gangly youth who drove the buggy conveying her.

Willie had seen the tiny campfire on the plain and it had guided them in the dark to the dray. He virtually fell from the saddle when he saw Kate nursing her infant son. She appeared well but her long tresses of dark hair hung lankly about her face.

She smiled weakly at her visitors who stared at the pair propped by the big wheel of the dray. ‘I had help,’ Kate said hoarsely and gazed down on Matthew Tracy with an expression of complete serenity. ‘But my helpers have gone back to the bush.’

‘Darkies?’ Willie asked in awe. ‘Some blackfellas help you?’ Kate nodded and Matthew thrust his head from side to side in his way of telling the source of his sustenance that he had enough for now.

The wife of the shanty keeper knelt beside Kate and admired the baby which appeared to Willie merely as something wrinkled and ugly. Only a woman could find a kid so appealing when they looked like that, he thought, and shook his head. His laughter pealed across the plains and he whooped for joy as he slapped his thigh with his broad-brimmed hat. Kate was well and she finally had the baby she had wanted for so many years!

The visitors remained for the night. In the morning they left to return to Julia Creek. Kate thanked them but the woman roughly dismissed her thanks with embarrassment. She didn't think she had done a favour, merely what any person would do hereabouts when called on.

Willie harnessed the dray horse. Rifling through their supplies he noticed most of the flour, sugar and tea were missing. Kate told him she had given the food to the Aboriginals in gratitude for their kindness. He growled that the gesture was too extravagant but Kate answered that they had enough to return to Townsville.

The young man was surprised at her decision, but relieved at the same time. She had her baby to think of and the long trip ahead would tax the strength of a fit man, let alone a mother weakened by the rigours of childbirth.

But Kate was not thinking of her strength which she knew could have carried her on in search of her husband. She knew that the search was futile because her beloved husband was certainly dead. He had come to her in the early hours of that morning, whilst they had slept in the fading glow of the dying fire. He had stood on the plain and smiled gently on her and their sleeping baby. In her mind she heard his drawling, gentle American voice telling her to return to Townsville. Her search for him was futile, he told her, for he lay in a lonely place that no man would find for many years. He also told her that when they did eventually find his bones, his words of love would be there to reach out to her in the distant years ahead. Then he smiled and walked away from her across the plain towards the western horizon. He was gone and only his memory remained in Kate's dreams.

Kate had woken in the early hours and saw the meteorite blaze its brilliance across the darkness of the western sky. ‘Luke,’ she whispered as tears choked her plea for him not to go. For a long moment she watched the night sky as her quiet sobbing racked her body.

Exhausted by the long and hard ride, Willie meanwhile had slept soundly nearby, curled under his blanket. When Matthew woke and began to cry Kate lifted him gently from the shirt to place him on her breast. His crying had stopped as she rocked him, continuing to gaze at the beautiful canopy of stars overhead. She talked to Luke in her mind until she was weary and at last a peace descended from the stars to wrap her gently in the mysteries that lived beyond the science of men.

Willie saddled his horse and swung himself into the saddle. They had set out to find a dead man but had found a new life instead, he thought somewhat philosophically. Now it was time to take Kate back to her home and for him to go in search of his own life.

He could not go south to Sydney without money or supplies. He would work his way south with one of the cattle drives, or even get a job as a driver with the Cobb and Co coaches that now crisscrossed the colony. Eventually he knew he would confront the man who was his father and kill him.

The eagle soared above the tiny plume of dust that trailed behind the dray and the lone horseman heading into the rising sun. While at a campsite on the northern plains of the Gulf country, a nomadic people sat in the shade of the trees of a creek discussing the birth of the white baby who had been born to fly with the eagles.

THUNDER
AND
LIGHTNING
1885

SEVENTEEN

S
outh of the great Nubian desert, and north of the mystical mountains of Ethiopia, a soldier curled in a foetal position. He lay in a bed of sand and in his exhaustion was oblivious to the desert chill of the night – or the night noises of an army at rest: the soft murmurs of men whispering their thoughts and fears to friends who could not sleep; the camels, mules and horses restless as if sensing the excitement that was like an electric presence in the newly arrived contingent of volunteers from the Australian colony of New South Wales.

It was fortunate that there were such sounds as they helped muffle the tiny, child-like whimperings of Captain Patrick Duffy. Under an uninterrupted canopy of twinkling Sudanese stars his body might have been asleep but his repressed fears came in the night to haunt him and he twitched and turned in his troubled sleep. For the moment he was a long way from the reality that would come to him harshly in his waking hours: blistering deserts and sudden, obscene death. For the moment he was in a world of Celtic mists where a beautiful and naked red-haired goddess lay on a bed of wildflowers. Her ivory white legs were spread enticingly apart and a full moon caused the exposed rose petal swelling of her womanhood to glisten with her lust. A naked stranger stood at her feet as she beckoned with sweet, throaty words …
I am Sheela-na-gig … enter my body and slake the heat of your desire.

But the stranger turned to gaze with a triumphant and malevolent smile.
It was Brett Norris!
Patrick watched helplessly as Norris lay on top of Catherine and entered her body with the
gae bulga.
She turned to smile, a distant smile of erotic detachment. She moaned with pleasure and clung with her legs to his back as he entered her and his was the seed she took into her while Patrick watched helplessly with a fear for the fate that was more terrible than death – the loss of his goddess.

‘Captain Duffy, wake up, sor.’
She was gone …
‘You feelin' unwell, sor?’ a concerned voice asked. ‘Not a touch of the fever would it be?’ Patrick slowly opened his eyes to focus. Private MacDonald was bending over him with an expression of concern.

‘Thank you, Private MacDonald,’ he mumbled. ‘I just had a bad dream.’

‘That's orright, sor,’ the huge Scots soldier replied with a sigh of relief in his thick Glaswegian burr. ‘This place be a place of nightmares.’ Patrick pushed himself into a sitting position and rubbed his eyes as the burly Scotsman placed a mug of steaming tea in his hand. ‘Get this into yor, sor, help clear yor head.’

Patrick accepted the tea with gratitude and sighed. ‘What time is it?’ he asked as he took a tentative sip of the strongly sugared brew.

‘One o'clock, sor. The Brigade Major says we are to join Captain Thorncroft and the Tommy stalks on the left flank for the advance.’

‘Damn! I was supposed to see the B.M. at ten o'clock last night,’ Patrick said and came immediately out of his sleep-induced torpor. ‘You should have woken me.’

‘Hoot, mon! Major Hughes told me not to,’ Private MacDonald said soothingly. ‘He said you deserved a wee sleep.’

Private Angus MacDonald had been assigned to Patrick as his batman while he was on secondment to the New South Welshmen from his posting with his Scots' Brigade. The giant soldier had fought beside Patrick at Tofrick ten days earlier when the Dervishes had surprised Brigadier General Sir John McNeill's infantry at an improvised defensive enclosure. Tofrick was only a short distance from the bustling port of Suakin on the Red Sea and the attack by the fierce desert warriors had taken a heavy toll on the defenders. It was only beaten off after ferocious fighting with bayonet, rifle butt and bullet and at one stage in the fighting Patrick had been felled by a bullet that had passed cleanly through the muscle of his left upper arm at the shoulder.

He had been locked in hand-to-hand fighting with two white-cloaked tribesmen armed with spears and shields when the shot had felled him. His revolver had jammed and he vividly remembered a spear poised above him to deliver the fatal thrust. Then he heard the sweet sound of an enraged Scot in a full killing rage. He remembered also the blood that sprayed him as the butt of a rifle being swung like a club crushed the Dervish's head in a single blow. And from that moment on the big Scot formed a bond with the young captain who he had always respected for his natural warrior abilities. It was a bond understood by soldiers regardless of rank. Although the captain had an Irish name it was rumoured he was half-Scot anyway and this helped endear the tough Glasgow-born soldier to Patrick.

And now they were returning to the scene of the bloody battle. Patrick had requested Private MacDonald as his batman for his secondment to the
Tommy Cornstalks
, as his native-born colonial countrymen were called by the British troops. The nickname was in deference to the noticeable greater height and lankiness of the colonials compared to their British-born cousins. For the Tommy stalks, the Sudan Campaign was the first time they had served alongside British and Imperial forces as an official contingent. Admittedly, only the Colony of New South Wales had supplied a small force of infantry and artillery but both were acutely aware that they represented the country of Australia as a whole.

In the early hours of the morning the bivouac stirred into life. The New South Welshmen would get the chance soon to show their well-experienced British soldier cousins what they were made of.

Patrick stood and brushed himself down. He no longer wore the kilt as he had at Tel-el-Kibir. The British army had finally learned the lesson of camouflage and the khaki uniform they now wore in the field was designed to blend with the surrounding dry and rocky countryside of the Sudan. Although the Australian contingent had marched off the ships wearing red jackets and blue trousers, they soon exchanged their ceremonial uniform for desert khaki. Tea, coffee and tobacco juice had been used to stain the otherwise white belts, straps and pith helmets and they now blended with the huge army of Imperial and British troops.

Patrick adjusted the straps and pouches of his marching kit and slipped the revolver from the flapped holster. He quickly cleared the weapon's mechanism of sand and carefully reloaded each chamber. ‘Lead on, MacDuff!’ he said to Private MacDonald who pulled a face in the dark.

‘It's Private MacDonald, sor.’

Patrick grinned and shook his head. It was obvious the big Scot was not a reader. But that did not matter; his brawny arms and roared slogans of the MacDonald clan in the heat of battle counted for far more in the Sudan.

The two soldiers had little difficulty finding the left flank of the ten thousand strong army camped in the desert. Both men were seasoned campaigners whose knowledge of many bivouac layouts instinctively guided them through the throng of camels, mules and horses which were tended by a small army of camp followers. The army of Sir Gerald Graham was formed into a giant rectangle, the dimensions of which were approximately two hundred by five hundred yards. To all intents and purposes it was the same British square formation that had stood against the terrifying might of Napoleon's cavalry at Waterloo.