Death is Forever (30 page)

After sunset Cole pulled down the canopy and spread it for a groundcloth.

“Too dark to track him,” Cole said simply.

Erin nodded. As had become her habit despite the heat, she curled up against him and slipped into a state that was neither sleeping nor waking.

The night passed in a torment of thirst that was barely touched by the aromatic water they’d drunk from the solar stills. But unlike other nights, the clouds didn’t thin and dry up as the darkness wore on. Huge sheets of lightning arced across the sky, transforming half the blackness into a blinding blue-white light. Thunder exploded. The last echoes hadn’t faded before a different kind of fire came from the sky, snake tongues of lightning licking at the edges of darkness, flaring in patterns that evoked ancient pictographs drawn on coarse rock walls.

Besieged by thirst and taunted by hopes of rain, Erin and Cole slept badly. When the first light separated sky from earth, he slipped away to see if their guard had returned during the night.

He found nothing but broad, barefoot prints in the dust where the man had circled their camp before heading off into the bush.

As Cole headed back to Erin, a sprinkle of water fell. The raindrops were heavy and wet and teasing. But the promise of real water wasn’t kept. Reality was the savage burning of the rising sun.

“Hurry,” Cole said, gathering everything. “Sign-cutting light doesn’t last long in the tropics.”

She dragged herself upright. “How can I help?”

“The first slanting light of day made tracks jump out of the landscape like neon paint.” He pointed to the footprints. “That’s one end of our lifeline,” he said, drawing a line in the dust in front of the prints. “The other end is somewhere out there at a waterhole.”

Where the prints were clear, Cole walked quickly along the trail, marking tracks by drawing a circle around them in the dirt, then looking for the next track. When he lost the trail he returned to the last marked track and began again.

The tracking itself was enough of a novelty at first that Erin could push aside her thirst while she watched Cole read the land in a way that was almost eerie. But as the sun rose higher, beating down on them again like a hammer, she felt strength flowing out of her in an invisible tide.

He forged ahead without a pause, cursing the changing angle of the light that smeared and smudged signs that had formerly leaped out of the ground to his eye. Then all signs of tracks vanished on a stretch of windswept, sunbaked rock.

“Stand here,” he said, pointing to the last tracks he could find.

She stood beneath the brutal sun while he checked the entire perimeter of the slab of hard stone before he found the tracks again.

“Got it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

She walked across the rock, wondering if the stone was truly hot enough to cook eggs. It felt like it, even through the thick soles of her walking shoes.

At a spot where the terrain presented several choices for a man walking over the land, Cole knelt and sighted along the hot ground, searching for the shadow traces of the trail the Aborigine had left.

“How far would he go for water?” Erin finally asked.

“As far as he had to. But he’s moving at a good pace. He’s not doubling back or casting around, and he’s not climbing hills to get a look at the countryside.”

“Is that good?”

“It means he knows where he’s going. All we have to do is hang on to his trail.”

Cole’s eyes narrowed as he spotted a slight, regular disturbance in the surface of the earth. When he shifted to hands and knees, the pattern disappeared. He sat on his heels and sighted along the direction of the trail. A vague notch showed in the landscape ahead. Beyond it rose the flat-topped, steep rise that seemed little closer for the hours of walking.

When he stood up, Cole had two pebbles in his hand. He brushed them off on his shorts and offered one to Erin. The other he put in his own mouth.

“Think of it as a lemon drop,” he suggested.

Her salivary glands responded instantly to the idea. For the first time in two days, her mouth was moist again.

“It only works the first time,” he said, almost smiling at her startled look when saliva ran once more. “But even when it doesn’t work, the pebble gives your tongue something to do besides feel dry.”

“A trick, huh?”

“That’s all life is,” he said roughly. “A trick played on death.”

She followed him through increasing heat and humidity while monsoon clouds thickened and billowed toward the instant of rain she no longer believed would come.

The trail was difficult to follow. Time and again Cole had to cast around beneath the brutal sun while Erin waited and watched.

Without warning the world began to dim and revolve slowly about an unknown center. She sank to her hands and knees, head hanging, until reality shifted back again into the dusty sun-hammered pastels of Western Australia.

Slowly she realized that Cole was standing over her, shading her with his body and the khaki shirt he held between his hands in a makeshift canopy. When she tried to stand, he put his hand on her shoulder.

“Rest. The dizziness will pass.”

This time.

But he didn’t say it aloud. He’d expected Erin to reach the end of her resources yesterday or the day before. Her continued endurance in the face of a climate her body was badly prepared for both amazed him and made him more determined than ever that she would survive.

“Better?” he asked finally, his voice gentle despite its dry rasp.

She nodded.

“Ready to try standing?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

With his help, she pulled herself to her feet. He led her to the thin shade of an acacia and started making true shade with the survival blanket.

“No,” she said hoarsely. “We’ve got to keep going.”

“Not yet. Give yourself a chance to recover.”

He put his shirt back on and studied the land from the sanctuary of the artificial shade he’d created. The surrounding ground was still largely flat, still the floor of a basin that had no visible outlet. The only real landmark among the broken hills that surrounded the basin was the flat-topped hill that had been receding before them like a mirage.

At least the hill didn’t look flat any more. Nor did it look like a hill. It was like a rough-surfaced mesa. Wind-and water-sculpted stone formations poked above the sparse vegetation.

“Cole?”

He looked away from the tortured rock shapes to the woman whose determination to survive was as great as his own.

“Are you sure we haven’t been here before?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She shaded her eyes and squinted, trying to see through the odd gloaming beneath the restless, opaque sky. Her breath came in with a tearing sound.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“In the Kimberley,” he said gently.

“Yes, but where? Are we close to any of Abe’s claims?”

He thought for a moment, reviewing his memories of the maps he had spent hundreds of hours studying. He checked the compass, glanced at his watch, did a few rough calculations, and looked back at her.

“We could be on the edge of one,” he said. “Why?”

For a moment she couldn’t answer. She felt like she’d been sleepwalking and had just awakened to find herself in a new world.

“Were you ever here before?” she asked.

“No. It’s a small claim. Gold hunters worked it over real thoroughly forty years ago. They found just enough dust to keep them trying for years before they gave up. Too dry for placer mining.”

“Did you ever hear Abe mention this claim?”

“Only when he was drunk, but he mentioned a thousand places when he was drunk. He never attached any particular importance to it. Why?”

“I think that’s Bridget’s Hill,” Erin said simply. “I can’t be sure because the angle is different. If that’s the hill, the photographs were taken from somewhere off to the left and looking more north.”

He narrowed his eyes and compared his memory of the photographs with the worn, eroded land.

“Be damned,” he said. “You might just be right. If you are, there should be water at the base of the hill during the dry. That would explain how Abe camped there. And that’s where the tracks were headed before I lost them.”

She struggled to her feet.

“Easy,” he said, bracing her. “There’s no rush. That pile of limestone has been there a long, long time. It will be there for a few more hours.”

“But will I?” she whispered as the world dimmed and brightened in time with her erratic pulse.

He tightened his hold. “You’re stronger than you know.”

Thunder rolled in the distance. A breeze came from the direction of the blackening clouds.

When he looked up, he saw that the clouds had thickened, dimming the sun’s brutal strength. A dense, sultry wind gusted, bending spinifex and spindly gum trees alike. He sniffed the air as intently as any wild animal, and his nostrils flared at the unmistakable scent of rain.

“Cole?” she whispered, looking at the sky.

“It’s coming, honey.”

“When?”

Lightning arced invisibly, burning pathways through the clouds. Thunder came again. It was closer, louder.

“I don’t know. I’ve seen it go on like this for days. And I’ve seen it rain an ocean within hours.” He looked down at her pinched face and the green eyes whose beauty even exhaustion couldn’t dull. “We’ll be able to find both shade and shelter at the base of Bridget’s Hill.”

“And water?”

He didn’t answer. He’d never lied to her. He didn’t plan to start now.

Erin stared at the rugged thrust of land that was their destination. It looked very far away. She forced herself to walk forward.

For the first few steps Cole stayed beside her, ready to catch her if she fell. Watching her ragged progress tore at him, but he knew it would be stupid to carry her one step farther than he must, because his own stride was uneven, his own vision uncertain, his own body succumbing to dehydration and savage heat.

The teasing swirls of rain-scented wind lured Erin forward. Slowly she pressed on toward the hill she’d first seen in photographs that had been taken when Abelard Windsor had still been young enough to believe in a woman’s love.

Bridget’s Hill seemed to be retreating a step for every one Erin walked.

“Are they moving it?” she asked finally, her voice raw. “We aren’t getting any closer.”

“Halfway,” he said. “We’re halfway there. The flat ground and the heat waves fool you.”

They walked on another half mile, then another. Gradually the ground fell away beneath their feet in a long decline. The hill loomed even larger above the depressed earth, crouching over the land like a demon wrapped in shimmering waves of hot air.

Erin stumbled over a bit of spinifex. Cole caught her and supported her, drawing one of her arms across his shoulders and anchoring it with one hand while his other arm locked around her waist.

“Leave me—here,” she said.

He didn’t bother answering.

“Damn it—
leave me
—”

“Don’t talk,” he said. “Walk.”

Half carrying Erin, half dragging her, he pulled them toward the dark, ragged limestone formation crouching above the steamy flats. Thunder rumbled directly overhead. Neither of them noticed. Their entire beings were fixed on the darker shadow of land rising above the shimmering flats.

The closer they came, the more certain Cole was that Erin had been right. It was Bridget’s Hill looming over them.

She staggered and would have fallen if he hadn’t already been supporting her. He waited, breathing hard. After a minute she straightened and resumed walking, or trying to.

Two hundred yards from the base of Bridget’s Hill, they stumbled across the remains of a bonfire. The charred ends of branches were partially buried in red sand. The fire had been huge. This was the gathering spot of several groups. Broken beer bottles and crumpled cans of Black Swann ringed the fire. There was no way to know the age of the tracks scattered everywhere, only that the Aborigines had visited this site since the last wet.

A shaft of lightning arced down to the top of Bridget’s Hill, dimming for an instant even the savage light of the sun. Thunder followed instantly, waking Erin from her exhausted daze. Air twisted and rushed past them as though disturbed by a ghostly force. She shuddered and swallowed dryly.

“It’s sacred—ground,” she said.

“Everything is, to them.”

“Them?”

She blinked and looked around. For the first time she realized she was standing in the midst of a huge circle of burned wood. There was a ring of packed dirt, then another ring of broken glass and discarded beer cans.

Slowly Cole and Erin walked away from the bonfire to the blocks of limestone rubble that had collected at the base of Bridget’s Hill. The steeply sloping landform was more mesa than hill, more reef than either, a massive network of compressed, interlocking, water-soluble stone that had been buried in the outwash of a higher, younger Kimberley Plateau. Now the dead sea’s limestone bones were slowly being resurrected by erosion.

Cole looked at the steep, eroded limestone and knew that only a fey, wild white girl would think of climbing it, and only an equally wild white man would follow her up to take her picture. The ancient limestone had been eroded in unpredictable ways. The top of the formation would be a network of deep cracks and crevices, potholes and solution channels, a tortured landscape where nothing could live but lizards or birds. There was no way of knowing whether Bridget’s Hill was the last remains of a once-huge limestone mass or the tip of a stone iceberg that went deep beneath the dusty lid of soil.

No matter how carefully he looked, he didn’t see any point along the ruined face of the limestone where a lush green exclamation point of foliage marked a seep or a spring.

Lightning stabbed down repeatedly, dancing across the top of the hill. Thunder followed instantly in a drumroll of sound that shook the earth. Wind sighed down the steep, ruined face of the limestone and lifted veils of grit from the dry land.

“Water?” Erin asked, her voice hoarse.

Without answering, Cole started for a notch cut in the base of the steepest part of the hill. It was the only place where a spring or a seep might be hidden.