It was no easy trail, ascending into the Blue Mountains. At first it was merely a slow ride whilst breathing hot, forest-sheltered air, the natives taking turns to get some way ahead and find the trail there. They rested over noon, heat-sapped among the shivering leaves and thoughts deafened by cicadas until awareness was reduced to taking air into the pile of hot meat that was their bodies and letting it out again.
Though there were less flies further from farmland and the ritual site, nonetheless a few dogged insects came to crawl about and inspect those there. Sgt. Wilkins took a nip of rum and rationed the prisoners' water tightly, portioning more to the horses. The warm liquid felt barely there.
Later, they passed through a clearing that briefly sent Jack's mind reeling though the echoes of a dream that was and was not a dream: the blackened stump, the arrangement of twigs before it. He
knew those like a landscape, each leaf and lump and fern, the way a child would know the exact shape of a healing scab. Ngamurudyin confirmed it:
"Duggan fella come from up, fall down here. No-boots whitefella come drag 'im." Then Garangwaari had called that the trail was found again and they moved on, leaving that memory of a red face and white teeth where it was.
Then as the afternoon drew on and began at last to dim, the forest started to close in like latticed fingers over some captured thing. Garangwaari and the baby were off keeping track of the nearest water sources as Ngamurudyin followed the trail alone, often picking up sign now invisible to the rest. At last Jack and Thomas were given instructions to thrash the brush for snakes and then given knives (his own, in Jack's case) and set to cutting a path for the horses through the untended undergrowth whilst Wilkins watched, his pistol laid against the saddle ready at hand. They became glad of the water rationing, then, as the level heat kept under the trees only encouraged the sweat the work raised, until they might as well have poured buckets over themselves. That the supply lasted until they broke through to a patch of straggled brush and heath on a broad ledge below a higher cliff seemed mildly miraculous.
[[If either of you wish to roll back shirtsleeves or remove shirts entirely, give me a Luck roll. If not, CON roll, please.]]
The guide wives made camp as though commanding it to appear, a small fire started on the rock within moments of Ngamurudyin's attention on the task. Garangwaari asked Brigitte to bring her sword and help her cut certain boughs and roots, making a funnel from the bark of one down to a likely hollow in the stone before asking that the lengths of wood be chopped again, placing them on a simple arrangement of two rocks and a dead branch so that the water from within ran down to the basin.
"This is one day water, needs to be used when you cut it or the next morning," she warned, testing it by taste for any contamination from the bark.
Wilkins had told Jack to walk down the horses, though they were hardly hot from excersise. Murphy had quietly stepped in and taken that task with no more than a look, taking charge of getting the animals watered within good sense and rubbed down with gentle grace. The sergeant set to making supper, cutting two potatoes into tiny cubes over his billycan and throwing in a few pieces of portable soup. When the horses had finished he'd added sufficient water from the 'tap', salt and pepper from his spicebox, and left the stuff to its own devices whilst getting out and butchering half a loaf from the Cleary farm.
The cicadas begin to quiet as the stars appear. Henry points out every snake he finds whilst trying to make himself a secure sleeping spot. The soup cooks, and is eventually distributed via tin mug and bowl and bark cone-cups fashioned by the natives, along with the bread. The horses eat their grain and the humans now are only warm, not baked or boiled as on the way up. Not thinking about another day and a half of this at minimum they might find some rest.
Then the sergeant pulls Calder's field journal from his saddlebags.
"Right then, since it's what we're 'eaded into, who fancies a bedtime story?"
~