They climbed down the mountain. First, of course, Jack darted back for the spear he'd left, returned it and clattered down to the sergeant, Thomas and the horses with their prisoner below. Sally came up into the grove of corpses with Ngarungadurung, Ngamurudyin and Murphy to point out traps, but left with Brigitte when the noble's presence seemed to draw an attention that was almost smothering and cause the ground to slightly shiver. Indeed, it was whilst suggesting she leave with a little more irritation than was truly warranted that Murphy came across Bowen's brush-heaped cache of weapons: most rusted or dismantled, but Brigitte's father's sword among them. The uneasy tremors lasted until she was back on her horse and trotting downward, but she decended with her family's steel. It felt good to have it back.
Ngarungadurung found his uncle with the dead. Murphy helped bring his gutted, tooth-robbed body down, and sought about for stones and traps whilst Ngamurudyin helped make a small fire to clean over the corpse with ash where smoke would no longer draw sweat for scraping and sing what soothing might be sung to one who had died roughly. The freckled man took a while to come back from one area off to the side of the grove, but reappeared before there was time to truly worry, looking very haggard and carrying something bundled in his kerchief that he only shook his head when asked to comment on, his fingers streaked with black. They made a rough cairn for the dead and decended, taking only Budyirikaranga's corpse bundled tight with grass string and wrapped gently in Ngarungadurung's cloak.
~
Down below, the sergeant had moved the group considerably away to a place where they might camp, consulting with Brigitte where his compass was useless and blazing the trail clearly for the others to follow. It was some time after they had found and begun to settle in what must have been Calder's second camp that Garangwaari reported Bowen seemed to be coming round. The sergeant asked to be told when the prisoner was awake, and when that was certain he came over to crouch and brush the blindfold away from their captive's eyes. Somehow his quiet greeting of
"'ullo, Sunshine," managed to be the most threatening thing any there had heard out of the redcoat's mouth.
It did not take threats to get Bowen to talk: he admitted that yes, he had killed Calder with a stone, and Mollingsbrooke by hurling him from a cliff, and Budyirikaranga after days' stalking with a knife. He supposed he had killed the Ryans, too, and confirmed he had worked alone save for his consultations with the angels: he gave them to know who might be dangerous or what he might need the better to help them and the way was shown to him in kind, though in what manner that was he had no language to describe. Those with Calder had to die because they might bring others to the place, more threats like Lewry; he had come down for the Ryans because he'd been worried the angels' children might die of thirst, that could not drink water, and the witch-ghosts had shown him how the best balance of liquid might be got; he regretted being unable to kill Mary Ryan as an adult woman for the mix.
There was much rambling, and several slaps from Sgt. Wilkins to bring him back on-topic, during which Murphy and his Aboriginal companions came out of the sunset's violet shadows to the camp. Murphy came over after being helped to dismount: he gave the sergeant his bundled kerchief without comment and the sergeant looked inside.
There were a few seconds where all could sense the sergeant's rising rage like a haze of heat before he went for Bowen like a dog loosed from a chain. Ngarungadurung and Murphy managed to prevent him beating the sick prisoner to death, but barely. Still seemingly uncaring about physical pain, Bowen's previous laid-back manner only cracked when confronted with the fragments of small, cremated, butchered bone. The pressure of reality between stark evidence and internal, emotional truth forced hard against Bowen's shattered mind and he broke into weeping.
He swore desperately through his sobs that yes, he had climbed in the window, wielded the knife, stolen and sheltered parts of the Ryan children past his own holy threshold of teeth, but he had not
hurt them. He was
saving them. The madman begged those watching to understand as though he spoke sense. Told them of his first adopted children, his sister's kin, how they had breathed air and lived and sickened on the ships and died and gone to water, how he could not bury them; how his gifts to the angels would be known forever and more thoroughly than mortal minds could grasp, down in some heaven in the earth, so long alive. Loved without thought or judgement or the possibility of sin - was that not salvation? He was saving all of them. He
had to save all the children. After some further crying wracked with incoherent fear, Bowen got himself together enough to begin pleading to be released. He kept this up intermittently through supper (soup, hardtack, and bush greens), heedless of when his own dammning words put him in mortal danger from his captors' wrath.
At last, weak and defeated as the evening cooled and cicadas quieted, he quietly begged Jack:
"...look, I won't make it to Sydney...you wouldn't make all I've done for nothing, would you? Please...I can't take anyone else, couldn't carry them...please...they need me.." At some point in the night those sleeping woke to distant screams and Bowen gone. How Bowen had got hold of the sergeant's flint from his firekit to cut his bonds was unclear, but given no harm had been done, the sudden quieting of the screams - raw sounds of pain without a single note of fear - and the two moons hanging in the sky when looking towards the nest site, it seemed pointless to go after him.
The night settled into a deep quiet. It should not have been possible, but Sally slept like a log after that.
~
Dawn came like there was nothing wrong in the world. The party set their faces away from the high place where in the distant other world of the night there had been screams and decended. They made a broad swing about to strike the place they'd left supplies for Cotton at noon break, but found no sign of him there, just the good cool stream and Brigitte's scrape and Bowen's rambling, harmless now in the swinging dapples' play.
After some discussion the group decided to cut across to Calder's track for an easier route: though they would pass far closer to the witch-ghosts, Ngarungadurung had claimed he knew how to lay them, given help. The wives assented to the task, with Murphy brought in for use of his pistol. Murphy asked Jack along, to help spare his injured leg when without a horse, and Brigitte thought it best that they had another friend to help with eight fiends in need of slaying.
Sally stayed with the horses when they made camp the night of the hunt, with the sergeant and Thomas and the baby. The certainty of direction with which the rescue party moved downwards was making her feel increasingly light, parts of her mind crushed down by intense efforts to survive cautiously beginning to uncoil within. When she leant back half-propped into her bed of brush and watched the sky, Wadanggari nestled safely at her side and friends in calling distance, it was as though her heart started singing.
~
Hunting the witch-ghosts went more easily than had been anticipated by those that stepped carefully into the country's Dreaming on Ngarungadurung's footsteps. A Darug warrior with a crushed skull met them there, painted like a ghost, and Budyirikaranga crouched likewise at his side, grinning to see his sister's son. The latter explained to the whitefellas that Ngarungadurung's spears could be touched by such ghosts as they, now, so the living need get only close enough to the witches to cast, and the dead would pull them out - where Murphy could not simply draw close and use his fire weapon, of course.
His words became clearer when the hunters found how the witch-ghosts worked from this side: not a repeat but a frozen tableau until anything of the bound world approached close enough to thaw them. There was horror in the scene, and one heart-stopping moment seared into everyone's memory when a speared witch twisted away from the crushed man's grasp and was momentarily at liberty: her form shifted to a terrible burned state, spark-crawling naked lipless teeth and searing fingers, but Brigitte cut off her head at a stroke of beautifully-calculated momentum and the spear was taken out, and that was that.
The 'corpses' the witches left crumbled easily, there being no more reality to them than mud squished between the toes of a footprint on a bank; it was unsettling but quite satisfying to stamp and meet not bone but loam, the shapes easy to destroy. Some left nothing solid, some a fragment of bone or handful of teeth, somewhere near the heart. Freeing the sacrifices was harder but they managed it, bringing the family up and out of that dreadful place to their last dying, together and free. Murphy even managed to keep a straight face as the remnants expressed deep gratitude to the 'powerful cleverman Ngarungadurung and his devils'.
Those that had gone there limped back to the world and to camp, leaving all they'd seen behind. Though there were a few hours left to sleep, however, all who had gone felt as though they'd spent the entire night deep in dreams. All woke well-rested to the discovery that they were far enough from the fearful place above that the bush was filled with birds, and all of them yelling.
~
Early evening heat shivered the landscape, and those that had ascended straggled out of the treeline, tired and dirty and healing and alive. James Gill was the first other human they saw, leaving the bush behind them: the Cornishman nodded to them and pleased Murphy a great deal when his reply to a query of the day came back as the twentieth, only Monday.
The natives decided to camp out in the pasture and Murphy promised to be back and join them at daybreak or before, leaving the dead man curled by their expert hearth. The horses quickened their step at the sight of a barn and they came clattering into the Clearys' yard scarcely five minutes after being seen by Janey, who'd instantly run to herald them. Brigitte got a hug from the 'natural' as soon as she got off her horse, and before she could really object or recover from
that, pulled over to see the 'reeth' hung up on the farmhouse door, and into the kitchen to see dried fruit decorations.
The sergeant slid from the saddle as Tom Cleary appeared and broke the news about Cotton and Bowen and Jack's exoneration somewhat bluntly, requesting a drink. Cleary had the ticketmen see to the horses and further explanations were somewhat lost as everyone was brought into a kitchen that smelled of spices and cooking pastry and roasted beef. It didn't matter. The bush was a different world to this, the bustle and the walls, clothes, lack of cicadas, and there wasn't much they could tell. Thomas had kept a journal, like his others. Sally was fussed over by Maggie Cleary and promised a bath after Madame d'Anjou was seen to. Jack's heart pulled towards the tavern though his body pulled towards rest and his steed slept, deservingly, in the stable.
Murphy -
Charlie - joined him on the porch after taking a portion of the steak and kidney pie that had been supper and some rolls out to the natives, setting a glass of rum down beside him. Sally was taking her bath and Brigitte and Thomas had already retired to sink into clean sheets. It was good to just sip rum and speak Irish, seeing the little light of the natives' fire out in the dark. Murphy clapped him on the shoulder when retiring, wishing Jack well in case he didn't see him on the morrow, and merry Christmas, and the hoof-struck bruise had faded out enough that it hardly hurt.
~
In the morning, Murphy had gone with Ngarungadurung, the corpse-bundle and his friends. Corellas screeched in the trees and the magpie dwelling behind the house made its liquid warble. Breakfast was cooled porridge and brown sugar, warm buttered bread, grapes and strawberries, though the sergeant declined the latter luxuries and started out for Sydney, not expecting any particular farewell.
A rider was dispatched to the Wilson farm to let Sally's employers know where she was and in what state, though Tom Cleary was clear she'd not be sent back for even light duty before Boxing Day at soonest. She was given Cotton's room to lie at rest in, and Thomas was given leave to read her some of Mrs. Cleary's books, if she'd like.
Brigitte and Jack's weary horses were left to rest into the afternoon when the shadows' sharp edges softened: Brass pretended to be lame, but put the hoof on his injured quarter down eagerly enough when he realised where they were going. The two crossed the dry landscape under the high vault of blue and were passed by a couple of kangaroos paying them little heed at all though in honesty Jack wanted to race them. A snake slithered from their path just before they entered the tavern yard and Brigitte had to call out for attention on opening the tavern door, though the reaction was immediate: after an intense flurry of tavern buisness Brigitte found that a bath, various brushes, and means of tending to her hair and smoothing off her skin had been made available, with a tray of marchpane, tea and cake set beside her dressing-gown.
Her maid Peggy seemed to disappear off the face of the earth for the next two hours, however, at least as far as any of the other hands seemed to know of. Had she asked, Jack Duggan would have been found to be missing for the same length of time, though she did not, nor needed to, simply taking the time to bask in home and water, upstairs and safe. Here, too, Time proceeded as it should, the soldier had long returned to Sydney and all was well. Very nearly, all was well.
~
The dust-coloured horse bore Budyirikaranga to the place to make his pyre. The wives had parted ways with the men a half-day before, willing to wait for Murphy to circle back and join them awhile before heading to report in Sydney but loath to intrude on funerals or another mob's quiet patch. Ngarungadurung had felt his scrapes and bruises itch away on the journey to no more than tender skin, willing the confusion of his thoughts to heal the same way.
Speckles offered his hand or forearm to clasp when they parted, and nodded to him before turning his riding-beast into the trees, seemingly with great respect. The chant for Budyirikaranga went as well as it might, even though Ngarungadurung would never see that grin again. In the final way, Ngarungadurung called fire to him and danced his uncle home to country. When the ashes were cool and the fragments properly gathered and dealt with, Ngarungadurung paused awhile and went for water. After that, he began to run.
Long strides, long slopes, clearings and mallee and burnt patches: he knew where his band would be deeper than his conscious mind would calculate. He ran through living country as silently known to him as his own veins' push of blood, feet falling between and towards and over songlines his ancestors had drawn century on century without confusion, not hesitating. The land gave him shortcuts and easy places and he loped over them, part of the chant of knowledge kept under the thump in his chest and his indrawn breath: he ran like a shadow before the deep-gold evening, and found a patch of dust-dry flat beside a creek as the twilight eased to blue.
His son called out and made a toddling run for him as soon as he caught sight of him, excited to see his father back. The elders looked over with amusement as Ngarungadurung had to speed up across that bare patch and slow swiftly to give the child safe legs to stumble into, sure between themselves none would come to harm. Ngarungadurung found his knees grasped by small, warm hands. A bark of baked moths was held aloft over at the camp, shown saved for him, and his wife, his own wife, levered her limbs upward and began to sing a welcome song for him, her arms open wide.
~
