A Solitary Journey (3 page)

S
he was smothered in darkness, and nothing touched her senses—not sound, nor light, nothing except the feeling in her feet and legs that she was standing on firm ground. But she had a compulsion to go forward. Someone was waiting beyond the darkness—someone who needed her—someone that she felt she should know, even though she also knew she had never met him. And somehow she knew that he would be waiting in a veil of green light…

She flinched. Something had bitten her cheek. Her left eye snapped open and a black bush rat stared inquisitively at her with hungry black eyes. ‘Go away,’ she rasped. The rat stared silently. ‘Go!’ she snapped and flinched. The rat vanished. Her right side, from head to foot, was so cold that her right arm had no feeling and she had to think hard on making her arm move before it responded by pushing down into the squishy mud to lever her body out of the water. Water. She was parched. She lowered her head, her arms shaking, and sipped, savouring its soothing freshness over her lips, tongue and down her throat.
I’m not rat food,
she thought, as she dragged herself out of the
reeds onto the sloping earth bank. She rolled onto her back and lifted her left arm to shield her eyes from the sharp sunlight, squinting at an intensely blue cloudless sky. She dropped her arm across her face and stayed on her back, soaking in the sensations of her aching limbs, the warmth on her chest and legs, the emptiness in her stomach.
Where am I?
she wondered.
Why was I lying in the water?

Energised by the sun, she sat up to discover that she was at the edge of a green stream of water. A mother water hen and five chicks were paddling against the current nearby. She looked into the grey and yellow reeds from where she crawled and saw the flattened greenery and depression where she’d lain.
Why was I there
? she wondered again. She saw a rat watching her from the reeds. Across the stream, on the far bank, the gutted shell of a charred building, a smoke-blackened stone chimney the only recognisable structure, sat between two broad, tall gums and the remnants of another incinerated building lay to the right. ‘What is this place?’ she whispered. She crawled to the crest of the bank and found more burned buildings. Two crows perched on a bloated corpse stared with black-eyed indignation at her unexpected appearance and when she got unsteadily to her feet they took flight, cawing their annoyance.

She was in a village—at least it
had
been a village because every building was destroyed and the place was ripe with the stench of rotting corpses. She wandered the road through the village centre, puzzled by where she was and how she had got there. The place had familiarity, but she couldn’t recall names.
What is my name?
The hot sun prickled along her shoulders so she retreated to the shade of a large gum at the edge of the village to take stock of the situation. Two dogs loped across the road from one blackened ruin to begin rooting in the detritus of another.
The black-and-tan
dog’s name is Possum. How do I know that?
she wondered. ‘Possum?’ she tentatively called. The black- and-tan dog lifted his head, ears erect, and gazed in her direction. ‘Possum,’ she called again. The dog’s tail wagged slightly, but he turned and rejoined his canine companion in the hunt through the ashes.
How do I know that?
she thought again.

She obeyed a compulsion to look to her right, towards another charred ruin a few hundred paces from the village centre, and her curiosity drew her from the shade. Approaching the mound of ash and blackened stumps of building poles, she felt as if she should know this place—its familiarity was stronger than any she sensed in the village. Smaller ashen piles suggested that other buildings had stood near the main one. A boy’s corpse, distorted by putrefaction, was lying twenty paces from the main ruin. Fifty paces beyond that, in a half-mown patch of golden wheat, a murder of crows squabbled as they fed on three more corpses. She knew these people. She knew she knew because she was overcome by a profound sorrow welling within that poured out in a wail of grief and made her collapse to her knees, crying into the dry earth.

There was little of use left in the village as she searched, but she found a shovel on the ground near a corpse and a pickaxe on the bank of the stream behind a pile of ashes and laboured in the late afternoon sun against the hard earth to dig shallow graves for the four bodies. The stench, her hunger and weakness slowed the process, but she finished in a series of working spells and rests as the sun settled on the hilltops. When she looked up she saw a black bush rat sitting in the shadows of a bush watching her and she was certain that it was the same rat that was sitting on her when she woke. She picked up a stone and hurled it in the
rat’s direction and it scampered away—and then she collapsed, exhausted, sweating and ill, and stayed on the ground staring emptily sideways along the dust at black ants bobbing and weaving between pebbles.

When she rose, her hunger drove her from the village into the bush to search for the yams and wild grasses she’d eaten as a child.
How do I know this?
she pondered, as she tore seed nuts from a bush and dug between tree roots for sweet-tasting yams. The night was seeping through the bush by the time she gathered and ate her tiny feast. A potoroo, thin snout, rounded rodent body and rat-like tail, hopped into her clearing in search of insects, spotted her and hopped away in fear.
Sunfire loved hunting them,
she reminisced, and then wondered who was Sunfire.

Hunger sated, she headed back towards the village, stopping at the edge when she spied a dog pack scavenging through the ruins, instinct warning her that the village was not a haven. She retreated, climbing a hillside until she found a protruding rock ledge. She snapped branches from a bush, crawled under the ledge, dragging the branches behind her to shield herself, and curled up to sleep.

Three children ran towards her—two boys and a girl. The leading boy was eight years old, with red hair, gangly, laughing and calling her Mummy. Behind the children was a man on a crutch, smiling as he followed in their wake across the freshly mown wheat field. She was surprised to see them, surprised that they were calling to her, but she was also happy. And then they vanished in a white cloud, and the wheat field of her dream was empty and dead.

You need me, the dark voice whispered. She was nowhere. That was how it felt. Yet she also knew the
place—she’d been here before. ‘Find your way to me and I will show you how to find your way to them,’ the voice said.

Where are you? she asked.

You know where I am, the voice replied.

When she woke, the world was draped in night and the dreams faded the moment she tried to recall them. Consumed with unfathomable sorrow, she wept against the cold earth.

Crisp frost crushed underfoot as she descended the hill and entered the ghostly ruins. She startled a small tribe of grey wallabies that bounded into the bushes by the stream from where they gazed at her warily as she headed for the village centre. She stopped at the bridge and climbed down the bank to slake her thirst, rinsing her face with the chilly water and pulling back her unkempt red hair. She needed basic things—string or wire, a pack, a waterbag, food. Yesterday she hadn’t found much of use in the ruins, but then she was thinking of burials. Another scavenge through the ashes might be more fruitful. Food was the only commodity she knew for certain that she would have to forage for beyond the village, but other items might be obtainable.

By the time the stream was sparkling with morning sunlight, she’d found some of the items that she sought—an old ball of frayed string, a coiled length of wire, a needle and thread. She also discovered a waterbag in a pile of rubbish behind a large ruin, discarded because it was ruptured. She checked that the cork sealed adequately before she used string to tie the ruptured corner and made a string strap to hook the waterbag over her shoulder, cork facing down, so that it would serviceably hold half the quantity of liquid it had originally been designed to contain.
When she couldn’t find a pack, she improvised by tearing strips of cloth from the stinking corpses and washing them to expunge the odour before she crudely patched together a bag out of the pieces.

As she stitched the last segment of cloth, a bush rat scuttled across a patch of ground between two ruins, stopped, sat up and stared. The vision sparked a curious memory. ‘Whisper?’ she murmured. The startled rat bolted for cover and disappeared, and she gazed at the hole in the ruin where the rat had gone. ‘How do I know that name?’ she muttered.
Why would I speak to a rat?

The sun was angling into midmorning when she trudged past the last blackened ruin, heading south. She had a simple choice—either follow the road north or south—and she chose south because her feeling was to go that way. A pack of four dogs trailed her for a short distance before they diverted towards a mob of kangaroos and gave chase. She was glad to lose them. She didn’t see the tiny black shape following further back.

The midday sun’s heat was merciless. She passed incinerated huts along the road that left her pondering what had happened to these places and the people who lived in them. Her waterbag was running low by midafternoon when she reached the charred ruins of a tiny settlement that again felt familiar. The sight of a man’s flyblown corpse dangling by one leg from a branch on a rope beside the largest ruin made her ill, but she steeled herself to retrieve water from the nearby well and replenished her waterbag before moving on quickly.

Hunger forced her from the road into the adjacent bushland in search of berries and roots and leaves, and while she nibbled on a handful of yams she fiddled with the wire she was carrying to fashion a simple slip-noose
trap. She rolled it over in her hands, studying the design, curious as to how she knew how to make it. Then she hunted through the bush for signs of animal movement, until she found a droppings patch and a run for a small marsupial. She carefully positioned her trap on the droppings patch and hid in the undergrowth opposite, waiting for the sun to sink and the animals to come to their common ground.

The sun was rising and she was walking towards it. The land had no familiarity—the trees were different, there were mountains, the birds were wrong. She was walking with someone, a stranger, and although she couldn’t turn her head to look at him she knew that he didn’t look like anyone she knew. She was compelled to keep heading east, to a place where there were books. What was strange about the dream was that she was an old woman.

She stood on the ridge, looking south. Smoke drifted across the horizon, the haze a golden brown in the early morning sunlight. Heading in that direction no longer seemed wise, although she had a nagging curiosity to see what was burning. She shrugged and looked in every direction. From where she’d come, to the north, the land gradually rose into distant hills and she had a sense of higher lands beyond them. To the west the land was dark and flat, but it also rose into hills. East, into the rising sun, the land rose again sharply, into mountains, and to the south, where the road led and the lines of smoke rose to form the haze, the land was flat. She’d followed the road from the north, but the southern path was no longer inviting. She descended the ridge, heading east, across country through the bushland. Her decision wasn’t based on logic—only that the world to the east looked lighter and more inviting.

By midmorning, she was on the bank of a stream, contemplating whether to cross or to follow it a short distance south in the hope of finding an easier way over. She climbed down to the water’s edge and studied the depth and flow. It was too deep to wade, but she could swim across easily. That would mean wet clothes and goods and she was reluctant to get her things damp, so she decided to follow the stream for the morning and if she hadn’t found a crossing by midday she would swim. Along the bank she spied a black bush rat drinking. The little animal reminded her of the one she’d seen in the village and the vision filled her with curiosity. She straightened, but her movement startled the rat and it retreated into the bushes.
It couldn’t be the same rat,
she chided herself, and shook her head.

Waterbag refilled, having snacked on leaves and berries, she traipsed through the bush, shadowing the stream, watching for narrow or shallow sections. As she walked, she recalled the dream she’d had the previous night, a strange dream that she was moving with a crowd of people, like a great herd of animals journeying across a broad plain. She also dreamed that a voice was calling to her, begging her to come back. A word remained from the dream—
glyph
—but she had no idea what the word meant, or who had used it. The dreams puzzled her because they lingered, or resurfaced in the daylight as memories.

Before midday, she faced a conundrum. The stream broadened and met a larger body of water—a river three times the size of the stream—and she was caught at their junction. She should have crossed when she first encountered the stream. Now she would have to backtrack to a narrower section to cross over.

She sank in the shade of the gum trees and drank from her waterbag, and rested, watching black-and-
white pelicans drifting in the current on the rippling water. The day was hot, like all of the days since she woke beside the stream in the burned-out village.
Why can’t I remember any days before then?
she wondered.
Why was I in that village? Was it my home? Who did I know there?
She recalled a name—Button Tailor. It must have meant something important to her. And other names came spinning out of her memory—Dawn, Tiler, Pace, Jon, Peter, Mykel, Daryn. Why were those names coming back? To whom did they belong? She brushed an ant from her grey trousers and studied the dark bloodstains on her khaki tunic. There were two holes in the shirt; one by her left rib and another on her left shoulder.
What made them?
she wondered.

At the crack of a twig she turned her head to discover a flock of emus sheltering deeper in the bush. Their elongated necks bobbing, camouflaged in ochre-brown feathers, the big flightless birds were studying her with dark shiny eyes. Then she was aware of a buzzing noise, so she searched the trees until she spotted a bee circling erratically. Several paces on was a hive in a tree trunk knot, thick with bush bees.
Fresh honey,
she thought.
I need a fire for smoke.
The problem was that she had nothing with which to light a fire. But honey would be so tasty—if she was quick and calm enough.