The night had swung the stars across the sky overhead and the bush made quiet noises around their fading fire. The prisoners, like the horses, had been left to sleep with tied forelimbs since there were weapons to be got, the rope run under the sergeant's blanket to wake him should one start to wander.
Thomas Daniels slept like the dead, conserving energy. Jack was more wakeful at first from the itching of poison saps that had struck his chest and arms through the course of his cutting, part-surfacing at times to see Murphy sat quietly alert, toying with some small object, or the dim shape of a wife pacing out the dark. Brigitte had a deep and private nest of brush to lay her blankets on, and tiredness from the heat and unaccustomed work of heaving up and cutting water-branches scrubbed the memory of dreams from her mind. She remembered only
seeking, and
depth. Thomas also recalled little of his dreams, save a sense of accusation, of trying and failing to get somewhere before
something...scrabbling at the ground in an attempt to reach a doorway, cursing, his fingertips raw and the ground smeared, then welling with old, foul blood like groundwater.
Jack woke with a crushing, dream-deep sense of failure within: he had been buried alive among scratching roots in his dream, and Peggy and his child were desperately calling him, searching side to side alone in the vast bush; he knew he could be distingished from the background sounds of insects and birds if he could call to them, but he had to call out to both, and
he had forgotten his child's name. The sense of being a terrible father was wrenching. It took two aching, upset breaths to come fully awake and remember he was himself, above ground, and didn't have any children.
Everyone had risen with the racket of the birds in the blue-grey of dawn and breakfasted on tea and a coal-warmed mash of bush yam and something that tasted like nuts and scrambled eggs. The dish's exact nature remained mysterious, since the sergeant would not let Garangwaari translate the word "burradhan" around Henry or Brigitte. Henry seemed to have slept poorly and his skin had not calmed at all, leaving him fidgetty and inclined to poke at his face. Sgt. Wilkins took rum with his breakfast without comment and inviting none, clearly having slept ill himself. Once another round of water had been cut and drunk by horse and human alike they had got on their way.
The day was a hell of heat and thickets. Even under the canopy, the humidity pulled from the punished soil almost cancelled out the mercy of altitude, leaving everyone breathing hard and at points forcing the riders to lead the horses, as none had breath to spare for carrying their weight. The baby cried in complaint whenever energy permitted, desperate that the adults who met all other needs should make the breeze get up and the heat just
cease. Flies came to drink their sweat.
Jack slept like a pile of potatoes at noon break, despite the baby and the cicadas' screaming: he woke to the others loosely grouped about him, seeming relieved that he'd finally shown some response to noise and shaking. Murphy insisted Jack be given at least some hours off, and Garangwaari came and gave him a small ball of clay to roll about in his mouth for medicine as well as water, saying it had the 'right salts'. He tasted earth for the rest of the day.
Henry volunteered himself as second cutter, and matched Thomas' afternoon speed quite well, despite the difference in their reach. Jack did get put to another stint of bushwhacking
"in case you start getting a mind to be lazy, my lad - faints won't get you out of it", but not for very long. They made camp where it seemed Bowen had done, a natural clearing a short walk from a stream running deep through current-carved stone to the north, and overlooked by a rise of rock on the western (upslope) side. Garangwaari filled her cradle-basket with water and bathed the baby; Ngamurudyin made up a yellow paste for paint.
Sgt. Wilkins decided to carol as he made up the supper, passing through a deeply sardonic '
We Wish you A Merry Christmas', figgy pudding and all, to a surprisingly tuneful and sincere '
Adeste Fideles'. This round of soup was better fortified, with rind at the bottom and bush greens thrown in, though most of the party would have eaten their shoes, assorted rocks, or
parrot at that point if it took off the effects of the heat. Wilkins read more of Calder's journal when they were done, though soon flagged and laid off, telling the rest
"-and it gets stranger from there," before going to do some negociation with the guides.
Beds were secured and Ngamurudyin took first watch. There might have been drumming, far off in the night. Mostly there was the first stirrings of cool air to breathe, and with it, sleep.
Morning broke between the close bars of overcrowded trees, though the birds sounded a bit more distant, their voices echoed down rock with a bright, ethreal quality. The crowded bush seemed to suck down light even before sunrise, outlining its vine-drowned trees and teeming leaves with excessive clarity, as though all were seen through blue glass.
Jack surfaced slowly, though today the vague ache in him was only physical.Finally properly awake, the trees above him soar and sway in a bewitching canopy. The thumping in his head is gone, but his mouth somehow still tastes of earth.
Thomas stirs, and he knows he has been looking for Sally Jane in his sleep - Sally Jane who was trying to tell him something, desperately. In his dreams glyphs crawled out of rocks like flattened spiders and the trees grew fungus that was really teeth. A circle of trees. A circle of teeth. A circle of foul and poisoned water. A surrounding arc of fifteen smooth spheres of unknown rock. A circle of...his mind flinched and would not answer, bringing him awake. The sergeant is boiling water for tea three or four paces away, not yet aware Thomas is awake.
There had been stranger dreams for Brigitte: she had definitely been further down the great well (
the spire, above the tower, above the palace that was perhaps above a city, fathoms deep where things lived lightless and could not imagine the existence of the sun), far closer to the base. She knew she had slept on the stair, and gathered some kind of hairlike fungus for sustenance there before resuming motion, as though her dream self continued her questing whilst the other self was awake. There was something...large, to a sense she could not describe, and it had smelt her, or done something like smelling her, following the colour of her thoughts, and it had got
close.
Great-Grandmother's 'voice' had faded as she pulled away, but Brigitte had woken with a start as Melusine's scales had touched her side.
She finds herself kneeling under a slight overhang of rock just in earshot of camp. Her wrists hurt slightly, and looking down Brigitte sees she has been digging, or rather made some halfhearted attempt to dig, achieving no more than a shallow scrape in the earth. She looks up and sees that Bowen was also here, for that design of haloed circles and reaching limbs (or tongues, or flame) is above her on the rock.
This one is the most recent she's seen, its bloody charcoal crisp and dark.
It bears a new legend below:
TheRe are WorDs BENeATH tHat CaNnoT be Spoken in Air.
LiBErAtioN liEs in thE GoSPel; the GofPEl is iN the bODy ToOtH and BoNe
I Shall ReaD. I aM REad. I am KnoWN to Them.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:05, Wed 01 July 2020.