The Nationalists E-Book

Vivian Stuart

• Herausgeber: Skinnbok
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Australians
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 418

Beschreibung

The twenty-first book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams.   The fires of nationalism are being kindled across the continent – especially in the hearts of the young.   The children of The Seafarers and The Mariners are growing up in a young country only just coming to nationhood. Some cry for unity while others raise the spectre of race hatred and violence. It is hard to see how these young Australians could ever realise their dream of one free and mighty land.

Leseprobe

The Nationalists

The Australians 21 – The Nationalists

© Vivian Stuart, 1989

© eBook in English: Jentas ehf. 2023

Series: The Australians

Title: The Nationalists

Title number: 21

ISBN: 978-9979-64-246-6

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

All contracts and agreements regarding the work, editing, and layout are owned by Jentas ehf.

The Australians

The ExilesThe PrisonersThe SettlersThe NewcomersThe TraitorsThe RebelsThe ExplorersThe TravellersThe AdventurersThe WarriorsThe ColonistsThe PioneersThe Gold SeekersThe OpportunistsThe PatriotsThe PartisansThe Empire BuildersThe Road BuildersThe SeafarersThe MarinersThe NationalistsThe LoyalistsThe ImperialistsThe Expansionists

1896-1899

Chapter I

Australia: 1896

In a grove of trees not far from the main house of a cattle station in Victoria owned by Jon Mason, a campfire flickered, alternating light and shadow across the faces of a half-dozen of the Aboriginal station workers.

An old man, a wise man, was speaking, his voice cast low in respect for the spirits of the night. His eyes were lifted toward the glowing heavens and the Southern Cross.

“In the Dream Time,” the old man was saying, “no blackfellow. Only kangaroo, iguana, the birds. All bin walk like blackfellow. Him all the same blackfellow after he bin turn into kangaroo, iguana, bird.”

Jon Mason’s son, Thomas, a serious youth of fourteen whose large brown eyes were glued to the face of the white-bearded old Aboriginal, had heard the story before, but he never tired of the tales spun so willingly by the old man. Beside him sat his mother, Misa.

From Misa, Thomas—called Tolo by all—had taken grace and some of the darkness of her Samoan skin; from Jon, his English father, had come a face of sharp lines, a nose of assertive character.

Misa had her arm across her son’s shoulders. She had matured in mind and body in the years since Jon had married her in Samoa and brought her back to his country. More shapely of hip and breast now, she remained thin of waist. She wore her ebony hair long, so that it brushed her shoulders, hanging in a loose cascade which smelled of flowers. Her features were not as broad as were those of most Samoans. Her lips were large but well shaped, her eyes huge, her smile a white blaze of pure happiness, especially when it was directed at Jon Mason.

With her husband away to attend to business in Melbourne and then to travel up to Sydney, Misa was free to pursue her special interest, the legends of the Aborigines. She herself was devoutly Christian, having been reared in a mission on the Samoan island of Apia, but she respected the old beliefs of the native Australians, just as she respected the beliefs of her own people.

The Aboriginal religion was totemic, based on the belief that all in the universe was a oneness. The ancient man’s story about animals that walked like men was leading to the statement that the spirits of the men of the Dream Time had become the animals of the present day and, thus, were akin to men in spirit.

Misa glanced at her son, saw a look of puzzled concentration on his face, then lifted her own face to stare at the stars, letting the words flow past her. The Aboriginal explained that there is more of the sacred, the good in life than the profane, or evil. All things form a unity. Man is fused with nature in art, belief, life, death, past, present, and future.

“I don’t quite understand,” Tolo whispered to Misa.

“Just listen,” she whispered back.

A man begins his life as the spirit-child of an animal, or a pool of water, or even a rock. He is incarnated by his mother.

The old man did not speak specifically of it, but Misa had learned, somewhat to her bemusement, that the Aborigines believed sexual intercourse had only an incidental role in the conception of a child. Sometimes, she knew, native girls were a bit too casual about sex. She had watched carefully a relationship that had grown up between her son and a girl on the station, Daringa, who was, Misa guessed, about sixteen.

Until a few months ago, Tolo, when not at his lessons under his tutor, had spent his time with the Aboriginal boys, practising the native art of killing birds and rabbits with accurately thrown rocks or with the boomerang. But now Daringa occupied his attention. It had been her brightness and curiosity that started their relationship. Daringa had asked Tolo what magic was held by a book that he was reading, and he had tried to explain, then had ended up by beginning the process of teaching her how to read. When she showed aptitude for the lessons, Tolo had asked his mother for help, and thus Misa, too, developed a special interest in the bright young girl who was so eager to please.

Daringa’s father was an intelligent man named Colbee, a valued and expert worker whom Jon had made his head stockman. Colbee was, however, a product of the old traditions, and his looks were dark and threatening whenever he saw his daughter reading from one of the white man’s books. He had told Misa that he did not know what spirits were contained in the book, but he knew that they could not be of the land, because they had been brought in by the white man, to this ancient place the white man had renamed “Australia.”

“You must not be so old-fashioned, Colbee,” Misa had replied.

“But why does she read the white man’s book?” Colbee had persisted. “She will never be white.”

For that Misa had no answer. Indeed, the question had forced her to look back to her own trials since first arriving in Australia. . . .

It had not taken long after Jon had brought her from Samoa for Misa to realize that her initial fears about marrying into white Australian society had not been groundless. Jon and she had discussed the European settlers’ attitude that Australia was for people with white skin only, and he had assured her that he would allow no one to insult her. He had been true to his word. No man, no woman dared insult Misa—to her face, at least.

Jon Mason was one of Victoria’s richest men, and consequently one of the state’s most powerful citizens. Ironically most of his wealth had come from his stepfather, Marcus Fisher, whom he had despised so much that he had changed his name to that of his maternal grandfather. Fisher had perished in Samoa during a great hurricane in 1889, shortly before Jon’s marriage to Misa.

That Jon and Misa had married at all was an act of a loving God. Years earlier, Misa had been one of many Polynesians, known as Kanakas, who were indentured workers in the Queensland canefields, lured there under false pretences by white Australians. She had given herself to Jon in exchange for his help in liberating her people and setting them on their homeward journey to Samoa. Out of that union had come Tolo. It was only much later, shortly after the hurricane, that Jon found Misa again—and was introduced to his son for the first time.

When Jon and Misa returned to Australia from their honeymoon voyage, accompanied of course by Tolo, they learned that Marcus Fisher’s body had been recovered on Apia and legally identified. By law all of Fisher’s vast holdings now belonged to the stepson whom Fisher had formally adopted when Jon was a boy. The properties included a fine manor outside Melbourne; a town house and business property in the city, including a shipping company; cattle and sheep stations in both Victoria and New South Wales; and sugarcane plantations in Queensland.

Jon at first wanted nothing to do with Fisher’s wealth. The man had so mistreated his mother, Caroline, while she was alive that she had been driven to drink and nearly to madness. “Misa,” he declared when he received the list of Fisher’s holdings, “I don’t want that man’s money or properties. I’ve been doing all right with my own trading activities. We’re by no means rich, but I’ll be able to provide for you and Tolo very well on my own, thank you.”

Misa, however, had tactfully pointed out that Jon had inherited not only riches but obligations. “Don’t they still use indentured Kanakas on those sugarcane plantations?” she asked. “I wonder if there are men with whips driving them to work harder. As owner, Jon, you could see that the Kanakas are treated fairly, along with the Aboriginal stockmen who are on the stations.”

Jon, who had quickly come to respect his bride’s surprisingly practical mind, listened attentively.

“Consider this, too,” Misa went on. “Tolo, who is half Samoan, will one day be alone in this country. I think that he will find less prejudice if he is very rich, don’t you agree? So look upon the wealth that you have inherited from Marcus Fisher as security for your son.”

Jon had accepted his wife’s logic, for prejudice there surely was. Though he had been aware that he was going against Australian custom by marrying a woman of dark skin, the virulence and extent of the hatred for her nevertheless shocked him.

He would have been less surprised had Misa been a true blackfellow, a full Aboriginal. It was an accepted theory among white Australians that the unique Aboriginal population was a dying race, a subhuman species destined to wither away before the competition from the fully developed white race. And he had known that some of this same prejudice extended to any race of brownskinned people, including Samoans and all of the peoples of Asia.

Nevertheless, he had not expected his own friends to shun his family. Living in the great house by the lake—where his poor drunken mother had imagined that white swans swam on the waters before the house—Jon had attempted to introduce his wife and his son to Melbourne society. He had met with so little success that he often wished he could take a gun and blast the smug, tight little smiles off the faces of the people who spoke to him in public—and ignored his invitations.

It was when Thomas began school and found himself taunted as a half-breed that Jon gave up on Melbourne society. He took the boy out of school and hired tutors for him, a solution that suited the youth well, since it gave him more time to be with his father and explore the outdoors. He especially loved the lake in front of the house, which his father now stocked with swans, in memory of Caroline.

Then Jon decided to abandon Melbourne altogether. He took his family to the most pleasant of his cattle stations, a move that pleased his wife and son. The station was close enough to Melbourne for Jon to make regular trips to town to attend to his prospering businesses there; seeing that his wife and son were happily situated, he soon began to make regular trips farther afield, to Sydney and Queensland.

He also began to raise his voice in the growing debates centering on the efforts to unify the separate Australian states into one commonwealth. It was a matter that would have consequences for the entire subcontinent and, indeed, throughout the entire British Empire. Jon felt it was odd that his opinions on such a public matter were given careful attention when, by contrast, the very men who listened to him in debate would not have him and his family home to dinner. He was getting a bitter lesson in both the power of wealth and the irrationality of bigotry.

On the night that Tolo and his mother were sitting under the stars with the station’s stockmen and their families, listening to old Abo myths and watching the campfire flicker, Jon was in Sydney preparing for a convention of the Australian Federation Leagues, to be held at Bathurst, not far from Sydney, in November 1896.

At Caroline Station—Jon and Misa had renamed the large land holding northwest of Melbourne in honour of Jon’s mother— Misa had long since established her authority with a calm certainty, leaving no doubt in anyone’s mind that with the master away one had best obey the mistress. For matters having to do with the cattle and sheep, the head stockman, Colbee, had primary responsibility, and Misa rarely ventured into his arena of expertise except as an interested observer—and then usually at the insistence of Tolo.

It was a beautiful life for a boy not long past puberty. Tolo was content, and as far as he was concerned, Melbourne could rot. There was water for skipping rocks and for swimming, and horses, and interesting stretches of grazing land that merged into the woodlands. There were several varieties of lizards to chase and catch. Now and then he would join in a spirited hunt when a morning outing showed eager boys the diggings and furrows of a night-feeding wombat. He also searched the woodlands for tiger snakes, whose venom was so virulent that one milking produced enough poison to kill one hundred eighteen sheep. He had gleaned this information from a book in his father’s library and had imparted it to his Aboriginal friends, only to meet blank stares. If anything, the Aborigines would have said that the tiger snake could kill many times more than one hundred eighteen sheep.

Tolo got along all right with his present tutor, an Englishman named Dane de Lausenette. Born into an impoverished family, Dane proudly claimed that his French-sounding name had come to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and had continued in an unbroken line since. He was a slim, handsome man in his mid-twenties, and in the early going, when he had discovered that Jon Mason was to be absent frequently from Caroline Station, he had envisioned intimate moments with the beautiful brown-skinned mistress of the house. But his one attempt at flirtation with Misa had been so coldly and finally rebuffed that he never dared try again.

Dane did not, however, let his rejection by Misa as a would-be lover depress him. Other females lived on the station, women of darker skin and coarser features, to be sure, but female nonetheless. Recently he had narrowed his attentions to Daringa, not because she was younger and more attractive in his eyes, but because she was close at hand. Tolo had made it easy for the tutor when he asked Dane to assist him in teaching Daringa how to read.

There were those who said that the Aboriginal proved his inferiority and demonstrated his less-than-civilized status by the fact that he had never invented any form of alcohol. Learned men wrote that civilization began when hunter-gatherer clans learned to ferment grain to make alcoholic beverages and settled in one spot to grow grain in order to have a constant supply of beer. Accordingly, the Abo was not civilized. Being unaccustomed to alcohol, he was easy victim to the white man’s liquor.

It cost Dane de Lausenette only a bit of wine to make Daringa giggle and beg for more, and only a bit more to get her to agree to undress. After the first time she was always willing to lie with Dane, in exchange for a glass or two of the tasty wine that made her feel so happy and full of ghosts. Her trysts were limited by opportunity to no more than one a week, and those became more and more risky when others began to notice a change in her actions and attitudes.

The first to become suspicious was a young stockman named Bennelong, to whom Daringa was promised. No longer was she willing to walk into the forest with him, there to play the games that were allowed to man and woman so promised. In fact, Daringa now showed Bennelong nothing but scorn, an attitude that caused the young stockman much puzzlement and anger.

Tolo, too, was spending less time with Daringa, and one day Misa asked him, “Why are you no longer giving Daringa reading lessons?”

“She says she has learned enough,” Tolo replied. “She claims she’s not interested in reading about white people who live far away.”

On the morning after Jon and his mother had sat by the fire, listening to the old man’s tales, Daringa was in the loft of a cattle shed, lying contentedly on loose straw, hands behind her head, a stem of dry grass in her mouth. Soon Dane would be with her, and the sensations would begin. She felt no guilt, only some regret that it was necessary to hide in a loft to enjoy love with the man of her choice.

She tensed in anticipation as sounds came from below. She raised herself to one elbow and was smiling when the tutor’s face showed above the floor level as he climbed the ladder.

There were few preliminaries, and that suited Daringa well, for her body was more than ready to receive the strong Englishman when he lay down beside her on the straw.

The giving was mutual and strenuous, so that both were breathing hard when it was over. Dane lay on his back beside her.

“A spirit has entered me,” Daringa said.

De Lausenette had not become as familiar with Aboriginal ways as had Misa and Tolo. “What I put into you was not a spirit,” he said, grinning lustily.

“What I am saying,” she told him carefully, “is that a spirit has entered me to become incarnate as a child. So you see, you will have to marry me now.”

“Bloody hell,” Dane said, sitting up and tugging at his clothing.

“But this is for the good,” she said. “I wonder if our child is a spirit of the water, or perhaps of the kangaroo.”

De Lausenette, recovering his composure, laughed. “Look, girl,” he said. “How many blackfellows can also be father of your child?”

Daringa’s thick-featured face pouted in puzzlement. “No blackfellows. Only you.”

“Not on your bloody life,” Dane said. “Look, Daringa, you know that what you’re saying is bloody nonsense. I, marry you? Impossible.”

For the first time Daringa was feeling fright. It was fine, the way of nature, of the great oneness, to have a child growing inside her belly. It was the way of her people to accept the will of the spirits. Now it was time to marry, for the spirit-child in her had been aided by this white man, and his responsibility was clear.

“But I will be in disgrace,” she said, “unless you, who aided me in calling the spirits, become the father.”

“Look, Daringa,” Dane said. “There’s a very simple solution to this little problem. You say you haven’t been doing the old slap and tickle with blackfellows.”

“No,” she said crossly.

“Then go to that young buck, what’s his name? Bennelong? He has desire for you. This you have told me. Give yourself to him, and then the child will be his. Do you see how simple it is?”

Daringa frowned. “I will not lie to the spirits.”

“You won’t be lying to the spirits, only to Bennelong.”

“The spirits would curse me, and the child.” She lifted her chin and said firmly, “When I tell Mistress and my father, they will see to it that you do as the spirits have willed.”

“Now look, you,” Dane said, in sudden anger, “you will not speak of this, not to anyone. We both agreed. You said that you would keep it a secret, for to tell would bring displeasure from your father.”

“That was before the spirit-child entered me,” she said. “You will not marry me?”

“No, damn it,” Dane said. “Listen to reason, girl.”

She leapt to her feet, pulling down her dress. “I will go now and tell Mistress,” she said.

Dane caught her by the leg and pulled her down beside him. “You will do no such thing,” he hissed.

She was surprisingly strong. She wriggled out of his grasp and scrambled to her feet. She was running toward the edge of the hay loft, for the ladder. He jumped to his feet and made a grab for her, but his feet slipped on the loose straw and he fell heavily, his weight striking the back of her legs. She was propelled forward off the edge. She gave one cry of alarm as she fell head first. There was a solid thud followed by a silence. De Lausenette looked down from the loft. Daringa lay on her side, her neck twisted oddly. Her legs jerked for a few moments, moving spasmodically as a chicken moves when its neck is broken, and then she was still.

Dane’s only thought in the face of this sure knowledge of Daringa’s death was to get out of the barn before someone came. He was not, at that moment, even sorry that she was dead. Her death, he calculated coldly, in fact cleared up a troublesome situation. He considered himself fortunate to have come into the employment of one of the richest men in Australia, and he had ambitions to be more than a tutor. He had worked hard to establish a good relationship with Jon Mason, and Daringa’s announcement that she was with child had posed a threat to that relationship and the potential for future advancement in Mason’s employment. Now all he had to do was get out of the shed and pretend that he had not seen Daringa since the last time he had helped Tolo give her a reading lesson.

He scurried down the ladder. He had to step over Daringa’s bare black legs. Her simple shift was hiked up to show her thighs. He moved around her and started toward the door, then changed his mind and looked to the back of the shed, where a smaller door exited into a cattle pen. And there, standing in the door, was an Abo boy of about ten years, his wide eyes fixed on the still body of Daringa.

“She fell,” Dane said. “It was an accident. I was just coming into the shed when she fell.”

The boy’s eyes shifted to Dane’s face, and Dane saw there a look of contempt that told him the boy knew all—that he had seen Daringa fall and then had seen Dane climb down from the loft. Dane turned and ran to the front door. The yard outside was empty, and he ran to the house and entered his quarters.

He knew now that he had said good-bye to all his hopes of becoming an important man in Jon Mason’s business empire. He had only one choice now: to flee, to leave Australia behind. First he would have to reach Melbourne, then board a ship. Fortunately he had plenty of time before Mason was to return from Sydney, and the overland trek to Melbourne would not be all that difficult. He considered taking a horse, but decided that to go back to the stock sheds would be too risky. Already the Abo boy was probably spreading the news of Daringa’s suspicious death.

Dane took only bare necessities. He left most of his clothes and his collection of Australian rocks, but packed all of his savings into his small bag. He slipped out of the house unseen, he thought, leaving by a back door. Bending over so as to be less visible, he ran to the cover of a copse of trees and then crossed the stream to the dense woods. He would go cross-country for a while, for to take the Melbourne road would be too risky: On the highway the Abos from Caroline Station could easily run him down on horseback.

What Dane did not know was that Tolo had seen him hurry into the house, and the boy had gone to the tutor’s room to see if he wanted to go swimming in the creek. Puzzled and curious when he saw the tutor packing in haste and leaving quickly, Tolo followed him.

The bush held no terrors for the youth, who had often travelled through it for miles, either alone or in the company of Abo boys. He took the strange affair to be a game, pretending that he was an Abo tracker on the trail of an escaping criminal. He could not imagine that Dane, who was by no means a bushman, would go far into the woods.

When night overtook them and the tutor settled down to sleep with his back against a large tree, Tolo found a suitable tree, nearby but out of de Lausenette’s unsuspecting view. Then he climbed it, propped himself into a comfortable fork, and was asleep almost immediately.

For Colbee, Daringa had been the last of several children by three different wives. Since she was the last blessing given to him by the spirits of the Dream Time, she had been of special value. To see her lying in the dirt of the shed, her neck twisted like a bird killed for Sunday dinner, was a deep sadness to him. He turned to the boy who had fetched him, signalling him to leave; then he stood alone and motionless over the lifeless body for long minutes. Finally he sat down, legs crossed, his knees almost touching Daringa’s body.

The pained look on Colbee’s face relaxed so that his expression was unreadable. His eyes squinted and seemed to glaze over, and he could no longer hear the sounds from outside, the lowing of a cow, the crow of a rooster. He sank deep, deep, and was transformed into pure spirit of grief, and in a place of blackness and warmth he sought answers.

The boy who had summoned Colbee could not keep still about what he had seen. He next sought out Bennelong, Daringa’s betrothed, and ran after him as the young man hurried to the shed. Bennelong paused at the half-open door and looked in at Daringa’s body and then at Colbee, who was still in deep meditation.

Bennelong yearned to go to Daringa’s side, but from childhood he had been trained to respect the meditation of an old man. When an old man sat motionless by himself, he was never to be disturbed, for he was focusing his own thoughts to call on the miwi, the power. The miwi was located in the pit of the stomach, and with miwi the wiringin, the “clever man,” could leave his own body to envision things that were far away.

For the better part of an hour Bennelong stood in the open door while Colbee sat motionless. Meanwhile flies had taken the moisture from the lips of the dead girl, and the stench of her death-spasm excrement had filled the shed. When at last Colbee stirred and came back into his body from far away, Bennelong moved forward and knelt beside Daringa. He used his fingertips to close her eyes. Then he looked at Colbee.

“Do you see?” Bennelong asked.

“He flees through the bush,” Colbee said. He pointed toward far Melbourne. “There.”

“It is to be mine,” Bennelong said.

Colbee nodded.

“Shall I help you carry her?” Bennelong asked.

“No. She is my daughter,” Colbee answered.

Bennelong left the father to bend and lift the dead weight. He walked with his head erect, his eyes seeing into distances, to the cabin that was his, and had been intended for Daringa as well. He had the special things hidden in the bottom of an old trunk, carefully protected: emu feathers and hanks of human hair. He placed them on a table and, sitting down, took his knife and made a careful, shallow cut in the inside of his elbow. He let his rich, copper-smelling blood run into a dish. Before he had enough, he felt a bit dizzy, but he took that to be a sign that the spirits were talking.

He used the human hair to link together the emu feathers, cementing the union with human blood, which dried into a glue. There took shape two almost identical objects, circular, cupped. They were kadaitcha shoes, spirit shoes—more anklets really than shoes, having no soles to leave a distinct print in the dust.

Only Bennelong, in his tribe, knew the secret of fashioning the shoes. Only he had been appointed by the elders and the spirits to be the kadaitcha man—the man chosen to deal with anyone who broke the tribal law. As kadaitcha, Bennelong had one duty, to punish offenders. If the offence were serious enough, the punishment could be death.

He worked on the magic shoes far into the night. There was no hurry. The spirits—and the almost uncanny ability of the Aboriginal to follow a trail—would guide him surely to the man who had killed Daringa. The shoes would protect him against the white man’s law, for they would leave no tracks, no trace of Bennelong’s vengeance. He was gone with the first light of morning, the shoes on his feet.

Colbee knew of Bennelong’s departure without having seen it with his eyes. He had spent the night sitting beside his daughter’s body, in communion with the spirits. During the long night it had seemed just and right that Bennelong was fashioning the kadaitcha shoes.

But with the dawn the spirits of anger and loss gave way to the spirits of caution. To kill a white man was a serious thing. Even if Bennelong had been made invisible and trackless by the kadaitcha shoes, the white man was not stupid. Suspicion would fall first on Daringa’s male relatives, and then on the man to whom she was promised. If Bennelong killed the white tutor, there would be serious repercussions for all of the Aborigines who worked on Caroline Station. Jon Mason was a good man, a fair man, but not even he could accept the killing of a white man by blackfellows.

Dane de Lausenette was not making good time. Shortly after dawn he had entered an area of dense undergrowth, and he had to move carefully lest his clothing and his skin be torn by long, stiff thorns. Soon, he thought, it would be safe to cut to the east to the Melbourne track.

He sat down to rest. Suddenly he heard the snap of brush behind him, and his heart raced. He jerked his pistol from his belt and waited until he heard the noise again, closer this time. Turning and moving cautiously back along his trail, Dane hid behind a large tree and, as Tolo came alone, head bent to follow the tracks, he stepped forth.

“Bloody hell, boy, what do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.

Tolo made a face, chagrined that he had been discovered, but still playing his game. “My question is, sir, where do you think you’re going?”

“None of your business,” Dane said, trying to act nonchalant. “But if you must know, I was heading south . . . to find a particular Abo village I’ve heard about. Seems their customs are a bit different from what we’ve seen around the station, and I was curious.”

“You’re headed in the wrong direction, then,” Tolo said. “Since two hours before sunset yesterday you’ve been travelling directly west. And there are no Aboriginal villages that way for a hundred miles. It’s too dry out there, even for them.”

De Lausenette was fuming at being shown up by the boy. “Why did you follow me?” he demanded.

“To see where you were going. Shall we go back now?”

Both the simple question and Tolo’s open look told Dane that the boy knew nothing of Daringa’s death. “I think you’d better go back by yourself,” he said.

“And if you lose your way again?”

De Lausenette shrugged. He looked up at the sun. True, he’d been stupid, but now that he had regained his senses, he knew he could go east and find the Melbourne road. But then he realized that if he let Tolo go back, the youth would be able to tell everyone the direction of his tutor’s travel. “On second thought, Tolo, I think you’d best stay with me and guide me to the main road. Once we’re on the road, we’ll meet someone who can give you a ride back home.”

“I don’t think you’re interested in any Abo village,” Tolo said. “It’s not like you.” He paused, scrutinizing the tutor, reading his expression. “You’re trying to get away from something, aren’t you? Why? What is it?”

Thrown off balance by the boy’s accurate guess, de Lausenette was momentarily speechless. “It’s an adult matter,” he replied at last.

“Is it because you’ve been tupping Daringa in the hay shed?” Tolo asked.

Startled, Dane asked, “How did you know that?”

“Don’t worry,” Tolo said, “we didn’t tell anyone.”

“We?”

“Canby and I,” Tolo said.

“A boy about your age?”

Tolo nodded.

“You bloody little bastards,” Dane said. “You’ve been watching!”

Tolo flushed and turned his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I only watched twice.”

“Bloody hell,” Dane said.

“Canby said that Bennelong would be angry. Do you flee from Bennelong?”

“No, not at all!” Dane said heatedly. “What do I have to fear from him?”

“He’s kadaitcha. If he wants to catch you, he can, at any time, and you won’t even be able to see him unless he wants you to.”

“That’s Abo rot,” Dane said dismissively. “All right, let’s go.”

“This way, then,” Tolo said.

Tolo, who at first had been confused by his tutor’s wanderings, was as surprised as de Lausenette by his own accurate guess that the man was fleeing something. He was not surprised, however, when, before they had travelled a mile to the east, Bennelong seemed to materialize from the bush to stand in de Lausenette’s way.

The tutor’s hand went for his pistol, but Bennelong moved with the swiftness of a striking tiger snake, knocking the pistol from de Lausenette’s hand with the sharp point of his spear, his nulla nulla. The tutor jerked his hand to his mouth, for there was a cut and blood was oozing.

Bennelong spoke in a flat voice, a voice that made chills run up and down Tolo’s back. “You have killed.”

“It was an accident,” Dane said. “She fell.”

Tolo knew then that it was Daringa who was dead, and he felt a wave of sadness. He also knew that the man who had caused the death had to be punished. The God that his mother talked about said that justice called for an eye for an eye. The spirits of the Abos also taught that blood called for blood.

“The boy, Canby, saw you push her,” Bennelong said. He drew back his arm and sent the spear toward Dane’s chest, halting it at the last moment with the sharp, iron point resting against the cloth of the tutor’s shirt. “I can kill you in this manner. It would be many small pricks, not one final one, and the blood would flow slowly.”

“I tell you, Bennelong, it was an accident,” de Lausenette said. “I didn’t intend to push her.”

“Did you force yourself on her, and was she trying to get away?” Bennelong asked.

“He has been tupping her,” Tolo said.

Bennelong looked at the boy. “So said Canby. It is true, then?”

“Yes,” Dane said, thinking frantically. “I was going to marry her, you know. She was with child.”

A look of pain crossed Bennelong’s face. “I can kill you with an arrow,” he said, in that flat voice. “But that would be too quick. Perhaps I will sing you with the snake, so that you will die slowly, as if from the bite of the tiger snake. Your legs will go numb first. The trouble with that is that you will die in three to four minutes and I want your death to be as lasting and as painful as possible.”

De Lausenette was looking around in desperation. His pistol lay ten feet away. He had no other weapon.

“I think it will be the death of ten thousand wounds,” Bennelong said, thrusting his spear skilfully to make a small cut on de Lausenette’s forearm. The tutor winced at the sharpness and leapt backward. Then he made an effort to run, but ran into the arms of Colbee, who had just approached.

“Thank God you’re here,” Dane gasped in mistaken relief. “Colbee, this maniac is trying to kill me.”

“With good reason,” Colbee said. “However, you will live, for now.”

“I claim my right,” Bennelong said.

Colbee lifted his right hand. In it was a gleaming white object. Tolo recognized it to be a bone, but he did not know at that time that it was a human femur bone, sharpened and polished.

“Your way, my son,” Colbee said to Bennelong, “leaves evidence for the white man’s law.” He lifted the bone and pointed it at de Lausenette.

Bennelong lowered his weapon. “So be it. I bow to you, Colbee.”

“You’re not going to let him kill me?” Dane was astonished.

“No,” Colbee said. “Your punishment comes from another source, a source that cannot be traced by the white man’s knowledge.”

As Colbee began to chant, low and soft, shaking the bone at de Lausenette, Tolo saw his tutor’s puzzled expression give way to one of relief. The Englishman had been near death at the hands of Bennelong, and now that danger was past. Instead, the older Aboriginal would simply chant at him and shake a human bone in his face.

It went on for perhaps five minutes. Tolo stood quite still, for the sound of Colbee’s voice, and the words of the language that he knew, told him that something quite serious was going on, at least in Colbee’s and Bennelong’s minds. Then it was over.

“Take the boy back to the station,” Colbee ordered de Lausenette.

“He wouldn’t know the way,” Tolo explained. “He got lost getting this far.”

“Then you, boy, take him,” Colbee replied.

“I can’t go back,” de Lausenette said. “When word gets to Mr. Mason—”

“He does not need to know,” Colbee said. “Do you agree, young master, that this affair is best kept among ourselves?”

“I think so,” Tolo allowed. “But hasn’t Mr. de Lausenette done an awful thing?”

“Let the spirits decide,” Colbee said.

“Well, Colbee, if you say so,” Tolo said. “May I tell my mother? She’ll be worried, you know, with my having been gone all night.”

“We will tell her that you were with me,” Colbee reassured him. “Now, if you hurry you will be home before dark by travelling directly, and not in a half circle as this one came.”

Tolo found that Misa was, indeed, concerned. She had sent stockmen out to look for her son, and was about to send a messenger to the next station to ask for help when Tolo and the tutor came up the lane from the direction of the woods and Melbourne.

Tolo and Dane’s joint explanation that they’d decided to take a nature outing with old Colbee seemed reasonable, but Misa was not clearly satisfied until Colbee himself appeared and explained that he had sent word to the mistress by that shiftless child, Canby, who on the way had forgotten his mission. Misa, who knew the casual ways of the Abo, could accept that, and she laughed.

“In the future,” Misa instructed her son, “you will come to me and tell me of your plans yourself. You can’t imagine how worried I was. And you, Colbee, how could you go off into the woods so soon after the death of your daughter?” Then she put her hand to her lips, for Daringa’s death had happened while Tolo and the tutor were gone.

“It’s all right, Mother,” Tolo said, “we know. Colbee told us. He was in the bush to commune with the spirits because he was so sad.”

Dane de Lausenette retired to his quarters. He was more than a little disoriented. It seemed odd that he was going to be let off so easily, but then the Abo was a funny blackfellow, with funny attitudes toward life. The spell, or curse, that Colbee had put on him in the forest did not concern him. He had never been impressed by the Abo’s tales of magic. He swiftly undressed and fell into bed, exhausted.

When he awoke to a new day and things seemed normal, Dane sighed with relief. Upon reflection, he realized that he had been foolish to run away from the Mason station. It was his flight that had drawn attention to him, his flight that had aroused suspicion. The more Dane thought about it, the more he came to believe that even with the Abo boy—Canby—as witness, he could have maintained that Daringa’s death had been an accident. In fact it had been an accident. To be sure, his trysts with Daringa could not have been denied, since Tolo as well as the Abo boy had seen them. But Daringa’s death was quite another matter; no white law officer or jury could have concluded that her death was anything but an accident—or even that he had anything to do with it —not with just the word of an Abo boy to go on.

Still shaken but much relieved, de Lausenette decided that he had been very stupid—and also very lucky. Colbee, whatever his reasons, had decided not to speak to Jon Mason about this matter. That was fortunate indeed; Colbee was a trusted man whose word could be accepted. So Dane’s position at the Mason station would be secure, and from now on he would watch his step, to see that it remained that way. His future was too important to him to run any further risks for the sake of casual pleasures.

He spent extra time on Tolo’s lessons that morning, determined to carry on as if nothing had happened.

But then on the following morning Dane awoke with a vague but persistent pain in his lower legs. By afternoon the pain had reached into his thighs, a numbing torture that felt as if fire were running through every vein, every tiny capillary. He took to his bed at the end of the second day, the awful cramps in his stomach doubling him over. Misa, alarmed, sent an Abo for the travelling doctor, knowing all the while that the doctor would not arrive for several days. Meanwhile she did what she could, dosing the tutor with various patent medicines.

It was all to no avail: De Lausenette died in agony one full torturous week after the onset of the pain in his lower legs, where Colbee’s white bone had pointed.

Tolo had promised not to tell of the events in the bush. According to what he had learned from books, from Dane, from listening to other white people, Aboriginal magic was nothing more than ignorance and superstition. And yet de Lausenette had died in agony, just as Colbee had promised. There were, of course, many diseases peculiar to the Antipodes that were not yet understood by doctors, and de Lausenette’s death could well have been attributed to one of them. But Tolo had seen Colbee dance stiffly around de Lausenette and chant a prophecy of the white man’s death. More than once, in the days that followed, Tolo questioned individual Aborigines, including his friend, Canby. He got only vague answers about the power of the spirits.

One evening, shortly before his father was due to return, Tolo questioned his mother. “The Abos are interesting fellows, aren’t they?”

“Yes, dear,” Misa said.

“In Samoa, before the white man came, did our people believe in spirits?” he asked.

“They worshipped the old gods,” Misa said, “until the good missionaries came and told them the truth.”

“How do we know what is the truth, Mother?”

“Ah, such big questions for one so young,” Misa said fondly. “In the library there are huge books that approach such deep questions, books almost as large as you, son. But if you want to learn, maybe you can pick them up, eh?”

Chapter II

Egypt and the Sudan: October 1896

The Darb el-Gallaba, Road of the Traders, rose out of the narrow Nile valley and onto the Nubian Desert of the northern Sudan so suddenly that Lieutenant Slone Vincent Shannon was not mentally prepared for the change.

Sitting a bit uneasily on his camel, he observed carefully as he and his party passed from the sweetness of water and green growing things to the sere and blasted limestone bed of the desert, where sand and rock reflected the strong rays of the equatorial October sun. He squinted and looked back toward the town they had left, near the second cataract of the Nile. Wadi Haifa was no longer visible.

Another mile farther and Slone had to look closely to see any evidence of the great African river in the cliffs that marked the limits of its narrow fertile zone. The evidence was there, discernible to experienced eyes. Along the old road he began to see hundreds of cairns of small stones, built up stone by stone over the centuries by travellers returning from the desert, in thanks to their gods that they were once again nearing the blessed Nile.

But Slone was not returning; instead he was departing, heading southeast across the endless wastes of the Sudan.

Beside him rode Lieutenant Percy Girouard, the officer in charge of the engineering survey party of which Slone was a member. He was Slone’s senior in age as well as rank, having passed his twenty-first birthday while Slone was still not yet nineteen. Both men wore the uniform of the British desert army: knee-high boots polished to a black sheen each night by native servants, tapered khaki pants fitted inside the boots, a tunic with a choke collar emblazoned with the insignia of rank and service, and the pith helmet, vital protection from the sun for a white man in Africa.

The two officers were loyal servants of the Queen, although they had been born on different continents, oceans apart. Girouard, a French-Canadian, was a graduate of the Royal Military College at Kingston, Ontario. Slone Shannon, fresh from two years of intensive training at the British Royal Military College at Sandhurst, was Australian.

Slone’s father, Colonel Adam Shannon, had distinguished himself in the Maori wars in New Zealand and later had helped to bring under control the rampant piracy in the China Sea. A genuine war hero, twice winner of the Victoria Cross, the elder Shannon had retired from the New Zealand militia and settled with his wife, Emily, outside Brisbane, in Queensland.

From his father Slone had inherited the tendency to look younger than his years, and at Sandhurst he had taken a lot of ribbing about his “baby” face. He had endured the jests so long as they were good-natured, but when the taunts had turned nasty, the sons of old England had found that the boyish-looking colonial from down under knew how to handle himself in a fight. Slone’s five-foot-ten-inch frame packed a surprising quickness and solidity of muscle.

Though trained as an engineer, Slone’s interests were not confined to that subject. From the moment he had entered Egypt through the port city founded by Alexander the Great, he had been sending back to his parents a continuous stream of letters describing the country, which he found ranged from a lushness reminiscent of The Arabian Nights to a barrenness that reminded him of his native Australian bush country.

Leaving Alexandria, Slone had passed through bustling Cairo and then up the Nile past the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings and queens. During the trip he had pored over books purchased in Cairo, and by now he knew a great deal more about the history of both Egypt and the Sudan than anyone else in his party—more than Percy Girouard, who had little interest in history and took things as they came; more than the grizzled sergeant who had been stationed here for years and had organized the camelmounted group; more even than the native Egyptian soldiers who made up the work force and guard.

* * *

North of the city of Khartoum in the Sudan, the Nile’s course sweeps through the scorched Nubian Desert in wide bends that on a map look like the letter S drawn by a shaky hand. In six places the flow of the great river is accelerated by granite constrictions—the famed cataracts of the Nile.

Throughout recorded history, men have for one reason or another struggled against the natural obstacles of these cataracts and the desert to journey from Egypt to the south. For some the attraction was natron, a substance necessary in ancient times for the embalming of kings and queens. For others the lure was gold, said to be found in the Land of Punt, the Egyptian name for the lands east of the Sudan. Still others found the Sudan to be a rich source of slaves; as Slone Shannon and his little group moved southward, they passed thousands of little gravel heaps, the ruins of fireplaces in which the slave caravans had baked their bread.