Patrick White - The Fringe of Leaves

The two parties halted. Had she not been so closely confined by those surrounding her, the chill which swept over Mrs Roxburgh might have betrayed itself after some grotesquely physical fashion; for she could tell that her keepers and the physician-conjurer were entering upon a contract of which she was the principal, perhaps even the sole clause.

The outcome was that this ‘Turrwan’, as the others constantly referred to the magician, took charge of her, and she could but presume that she had become his property.

The new owner behaved respectfully towards her, less from thoughtfulness she felt, than because he was an elderly man. The hut he occupied was in almost every respect similar to the one from which she had been given away. The eyes of two other women dozing beside a fire were kindled by the newcomer’s entry. No doubt resigned to custom they gave no indication of active resentment.

As the slave prepared herself for the night by easing a hip into the ground not too far distant from the fire, a child started crying, and she thought how she might console herself eventually by caressing and consoling this child. But for the time being it was Turrwan who distracted her attention in that she was the object of his. Although of an advanced age he was wiry enough to be reckoned with and had an eager eye which she must quell by a coldness in her own.

Mrs Roxburgh would not have believed that she could act so cold.

Turrwan seated himself at last on the opposite side of the hut, and after taking out his magic crystal from the dilli, and polishing it awhile to impress, he lay down, if not to sleep, to watch.

She composed herself, but did not sleep, or perhaps she did; for how else can Ulappi have entered? to be standing over her. She has nothing to fear. He is a tinner from near Truro, deported for taking a donkey from Hicks’s field, at Michaelmas.

Herself was the donkey. She must have slept in spite of her intention not to lose consciousness. She lay and listened to her ‘husband’ the magician having a nightmare or pleasuring one of his true wives the other side of the dead fire. Ellen ground her cheek against the twigs with which the floor was littered, and wished for morning.

The following day was a drowsy one filled with haze. Her improved station relieved her of some of the drudgery. She was kept company by a handful of older ladies who would have taught her how to spin a thread out of hair or stitch together an opossum rug had she shown any inclination. Instead she could now afford to feel bored, or within reason, give way to anger. She lay beneath a tree, her back towards them, idle to the elbows and the ankles. Had she known the language she might have commanded somebody to fan her or tell her a tale.

Incidentally she realized that most of her life at Cheltenham had been a bore, and that she might only have experienced happiness while scraping carrots, scouring pails, or lifting the clout to see whether the loaves were proved.

It was in consequence a relief as evening approached to join her inferiors in the preparation of fern-root. All around them was the sound of chopping. It soothed her somewhat, until she cut her finger on the sharp edge of the shell she was using. She sucked the wound, before remembering to rub it with charcoal.

Some expectancy, evening smoke, or the men’s return from hunting, made the women restless.

A kangaroo was put to roast.

Turrwan appeared and squatted but too visibly beside his acquisition. She did not so much as avert her eyes since the film of coldness she was learning to assume made this unnecessary.

Whatever entertainment might have been devised for the evening, she soon realized it would not take place according to plan. A discordancy was arising, nothing audible in the beginning, nor were there visible signs of dissent. She was aware of it, however, in puffs of smoke, through currents of air, in the sound of sticks breaking underfoot.

Suddenly the surrounding scrub exploded. A fight was on. She had no means of discovering what had caused it. As dusk fell, warriors came and went in the clearing where the women continued at work. Blows were exchanged, to the meaty sound of thwacked flesh and the stubborner thud of wood upon bone. A spear whirring and hissing through leaves was arrested in flight by the trunk of a great, shaggy tree.

A second spear met with what must have been its intended target: a man fell headlong into a fire, from which the women dragged him not to safety, but to a less-agonizing death. The black buttocks quivered an instant, twitched, and contracted.

The fact that this was in earnest did not make the occasion more real than the corroboree of the night before. The rites of each were equally inebriating, or so it seemed to one spectator, as the man who had danced their way through the maze of dreaming now made the more direct approach to death, which in her own experience was but another figure in the dance.

Some of the women had started screaming; they were pulling one another by their short hair.

In what was becoming a darkness, of night, dust, heaving branches, and a soft, sticky rain of what she did not have time to discover, she might have made some contribution of her own, and went so far as to indulge in an initial twirl when she was stopped short by running against a human being.

Before she could evade the consequences of this too-precipitate encounter, she was seized by the hand, and whether she liked it or not, forced to depend on her abductor for any further step she might take in the savage dance. For the moment there was nothing for it but to mark time amongst the milling bodies involved in this orgy of bashing and blood, until he saw an opportunity for making his intentions clear by extricating himself and his prize from the scrimmage. She was dragged behind him like some inanimate object, away at least, until she collided with a sapling, when both of them, because joined, were unavoidably halted. Had it been daylight still, she would most probably have been temporarily blinded by the blow. In the circumstances she was only deafened by the drumming in her ears.

She might have continued rooted like the sapling, had he not dragged her away. It was the only outcome for hands which were welded together.

He was as steel to her more passive lead, but when she was not a painful lump condemned to bumping behind, and at intervals, against him, she thought to hear an insubstantial tinkling as she flitted over the uneven ground.

Always joined: it was ordained thus by the abductor become her rescuer.

That he had chosen to play the latter role was doubtless the subject of an unintelligible mumbling such as she remembered from their first meeting. On this present occasion she felt too dazed to help him out, but he succeeded at last in breaking into speech of a kind through his own efforts.

‘The crick,’ she heard. ‘… leave no tracks i’ the crick—’

Shortly after, she stumbled, and felt water round her ankles, at times up to her knees as she floundered in unsuspected potholes; sand, soothing to the feet, gave place to more deceptive mud, with the occasional rock or log against which she stubbed herself. She imagined the rosy veils the water must be weaving from her blood.

‘Do you know the way?’ she asked in the course of their silence, and thought he mumbled back, ‘I oughter know unless I forgot.’

If allowed, she would have been happy to subside anywhere in this dark world, since exhaustion was making their journey, finally her life, pointless. But he forced her on, and by degrees, sensing that it was neither will nor physical strength, but a superior mechanism which drove him, her mind and clockwork limbs learned to cooperate with his.

At last when light began to thin out the solid but no longer painful darkness (she had grown too numb to react humanly to the most vicious blows and scratches) she heard him say, ‘I reckon we’ll camp here for a bit in the gully,’ and felt at liberty to fall down where she was. She lay there as grey and indeterminate as the early light surrounding them.