Moonlight Downs Read Free Page B

draw him away from me. Blakie glared at him, yelled something I couldn’t understand. The two men flew into a fiery debate—or rather Blakie did, while Lincoln tagged along behind, looking in turn puzzled, sceptical and finally concerned.
    My Warlpuju was almost as rusty as Bindi’s rifle, and whenever elders were talking business the language became arcane, but from what I could follow Blakie was issuing some kind of threat. Or was it a warning? With Blakie there wasn’t much difference: it’s easy to be a prophet of doom when, should the prophesied doom fail to occur, you’re crazy enough to make it happen yourself.
    Blakie stood there snarling and growling, his great brow buckled, his beard fierce, his nostrils winged, his eyeballs snaking sideways. Something had been stolen. Or speared. But what? Wartuju juntaka . A fire bird? And someone was going to pay for it. I had no idea who, but Lincoln certainly wasn’t his usual easygoing self.
    The argument ended when Blakie suddenly wheeled about and gazed up into the hills from whence he’d come. We followed him with our eyes. Somewhere in the distance I heard a jet plane passing with a high thunder that sounded like an echo of Blakie’s tormented mind.
    ‘See-im that?’ he growled.
    See what? I thought. A plane? Big deal.
    He stood for a moment, a wild, solitary figure with a corrugated forehead and a cavernous mouth, hearing what sounds or symbols I couldn’t imagine.
    Then he strode off in the direction of the camp.
    ‘He’s going to be our guest for the night?’ I asked nervously.
    ‘ Yuwayi . Bit of a wild bugger, innit? Still one of our mob, but.’
    Weird bloody mob. ‘What was that all about, anyway?’
    But Lincoln wasn’t listening. He stared after the receding maniac, an uncharacteristically troubled look on his face, then turned his gaze up into the ranges.
    ‘Lincoln?’ I repeated. ‘What was Blakie on about back there?’
    ‘Mmmm? Oh that? Nothin. Just dreamin. Business.’
    But he didn’t look as though it was nothing, and some of the heaviest shit I’d ever seen—guys cauterised inside because a rock was moved, somebody speared because somebody else had killed the wrong animal—was ‘just dreamin’.
    The Dreaming—the Jukurrpa — is everything to the Warlpuju: a map, a mythology, a memory bank, a song cycle, but also a code of conduct, out of which you step at your peril.
    ‘Which dreaming, Lincoln?’
    ‘Mmmm?’ He looked like I’d just woken him up, like he suddenly remembered he had a guest. He smiled the old compassionate-Buddha smile, patted my shoulder. ‘Oh, not your worry, h’Em’ly. You got enough on your plate, comin home after all these years. Me I might head up north tomorrow, take a look round, see what ol Blakie’s on about.’
    ‘You want some company?’
    ‘Eh? No, not this time. More safer you stay ere.’
    ‘Safer?’
    ‘Maybe.’
    I was curious, but didn’t press him. Regrettably, in the light of subsequent events.

    He came to me in a dream that night, Blakie. Or a nightmare, a nightmare in which a big, black man, heavily bearded and caterpillar-eyebrowed, was hunting me over an open plain. I was running for my life, summoning up every ounce of energy my body possessed, but it was no use: my legs were growing heavier, my feet were sinking deeper into the drifting sand. When I collapsed, as I’d known I would, he loomed over me, staring, his eyes burning.
    Then he crouched down, thrust a knife-like hand into my right side, ripped out a chunk of dripping flesh. He gazed at it malevolently.
    A kidney.
    I sprang up in horror and clutched the sides of my swag, grimacing. My heart was spitting sparks. Shit, I thought, I hate dreams! Been hating them for years. A kidney. Christ! What was that supposed to mean? Kidneys have got all sorts of magical implications out here: they’re the key to the soul, the powerhouse.
    I’d parked my swag out on the edges of the single women’s camp. Typical, I thought: