In a pause from her labours Mrs Roxburgh had gone into deeper scrub for the simple purpose of urinating. She had barely finished squatting when, to the embarrassment of each, she saw the great pseudo-black approaching. In the dusk the axe-head resting on his belt was more than ever a focus point. It convinced her that the man was some escaped prisoner who had taken up with a black tribe and probably acquired their more horrid ways to add to his natural propensities.
At the same time the longing to speak again with someone of her own kind (if such he could be called) produced in her throat and side a felted chuffing almost as distressing as more dangerous symptoms.
The man came straight towards her, and when they were but a few yards apart, was brought to a halt. She saw that, in spite of his size and strength, his shanks, his dangling hands, were trembling.
To help him out of his difficulty she said to him in her native tongue, ‘Where’s tha from, eh?’ then, on remembering who she was supposed to be, she sternly asked, ‘Are you a Christian?’
The man stood mouthing sounds, like an idiot, or one in whom time or shock had destroyed his connection with the past.
Her hopes shrank. Where she had glimpsed for an instant the possibility of rescue, it now seemed as though it was she who must become the saviour, not of a rational being, but a lost soul.
‘If you can’t tell me who you are,’ she babbled breathlessly, ‘perhaps you will still be able to help me’ and stepping forward, she took him by the hand.
The man might have been struck. His formless mumbling loudened, in the course of which saliva flew out from between his lips, almost as though he were taken by a fit. But she had reached a stage where she could not have felt frightened, nor disappointed, only detached from everything that had ever happened or might still be in store for her. She had been rendered as impervious as lead, and would sink, if necessary, without a qualm.
When she thought she could detect in the man’s gibberish the first semblance of an intelligible word. ‘Gee — a—jur — juk — juk — tch — ar — tchack!’
‘Your name is Jack?’ She all but wrung his hand from him.
‘Jack — CHANCE!’ He pronounced it ‘Chaunce’, and there followed a smile which the effort and a battered face could not prevent looking misshapen.
Gratitude and relief threatened to spill out of her eyes and mouth, but she managed instead, ‘My name is Ellen.’
He had withdrawn inside his leather mask, through the slits in which, eyes of a pale, drained blue were looking at her suspiciously.
‘We shall have to trust each other,’ she persisted. ‘Only bring me to Moreton Bay and I promise they’ll give you your pardon.’
The mask in wrinkled leather immediately set into a rusted-iron visor. ‘No—ppardons—for the likes a’ me. A stripe for every day since I bolted!’ He produced a noise which may have been intended as a laugh.
She realized she was still holding his hand and how cold and hard it felt in hers. He must be hard; the life he had been forced to lead could only have made a brute of him, if he were not one by birth.
Then the brute began shivering, and she dropped the hand lest his anguish should prove contagious.
‘They can’t refuse you a pardon — Jack — if you bring me to them. It would be unjust and unnatural.’
‘Men is unnatural and unjust.’
She was so desperate she cried out in anger. ‘They won’t dare! I am Mrs Roxburgh!’ Had she not temporarily lost her detachment she might have heard herself and disbelieved.
The convict evidently had. He looked her over quickly in the manner of a professional who could have made his first mistake, and disappeared through the trees in the direction of the hubbub and fires.
She had scarce time enough to indulge in self-pity, for two of the women came in search of her and dragged her with them, back to the scene of the festivities.
It was by now fairly dark, so that the fires, behind which the female blacks were seated in rows, burned more brilliantly. Somewhere about the middle of the dark assemblage the captive recognized the women of her own tribe. Here her companions led her, after considerable trampling between the rows of seated figures, and vocal protests and outright blows from those who were trampled over. The errant three were squeezed at last into the conglomerate, sweating mass.
From where Mrs Roxburgh found herself she saw there would be no opportunity for escape, either alone, or accompanied by the convict were he to experience a change of heart. If anything, she felt relieved. To have started screaming in a drawing-room would not have been worse than to return by the way she had come, between the rows of correctly seated black women.
As yet, there was not a man in sight, although from the surrounding dark, voices could be heard whenever women’s chatter and the roar and crackle of the fires allowed. As the fires heaved and resettled the sparks shot upward towards a sky pricked with their counterpart in early stars.
The women were growing impatient: they sighed, groaned, some of them shouted; the rows of seated figures swayed with what looked like an early stage in drunkenness.
Ellen Gluyas swayed with them as a matter of course. Pressed in amongst the black women, her body had begun, not disagreeably, to sweat.
The darkness erupted at last, hurling itself in distinguishable waves into the firelit foreground. White-ribbed men were stamping and howling the other side of the fiery hedge as they performed prodigious feats related to hunting and warfare.
The rows of women swayed in time with darkness, slapping their thighs, or in the case of the older, croaking grannies, the possum-skin rugs covering their string-and-paper thews.
Ellen Gluyas was swayed with them, although she would rather have joined the men, the better to celebrate what she was re-living. She was again dancing as they carried in ‘the neck! the neck!’ at harvest, and as she danced she twitched the corner of her starched apron. (It was, in fact, her recently renewed fringe of leaves.)
One of her neighbours looked at her askance, but only for an instant. They were all swaying seated melted together in runnels of light and sweat.
The dance performed by each successive tribe made its own comment. Now there was a great snake uncoiling, at first slowly, then in involuted frenzy. Arms worked so hard their elbows threatened to pierce the ochre-stippled chests behind them; black thighs in motion were all but liquid with reflected light.
The women swayed in time, and bowed, and swung their too-heavy heads, and righted themselves, and clapped or slapped, either with a smart sting of flesh or the muffled thump of opossum fur.
Dust rising made the captive sneeze. But she bowed her head and swayed in time. She slapped and moaned, and was carried away. She might have been carried further still had it not been for the sudden vision of Mr Roxburgh: his beard failed to conceal the wound in his throat through which the blood continued welling. (Or had they burnt him? In her drunkenness she could not be sure.)
She clapped and thumped and moaned, and bowed her head until it hung between her thighs. It inspired her neighbours to increased frenzy.
Her vision was making her cry out: one of his legs had been torn off at the hip; she could smell the smell of crackled skin.
Now when the great luminous ochre-scaled dripping snake had almost driven itself into the dust by its exertions, she saw upon raising her head that the tail’s hindmost vertebra was becoming detached.