The Clay Dreaming

Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
I: Sport
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER I: THE HUNTING PARTY
CHAPTER II: BACK AND FORTH
CHAPTER III: PERFECT GENTLEMEN
CHAPTER IV: BIRDS OF NO FEATHER
CHAPTER V: FORMAL INTRODUCTIONS
CHAPTER VI: INTO LONDON
CHAPTER VII: AT THE OVAL
CHAPTER VIII: BLACK GOLD
CHAPTER IX: THE CRICKET BALL
CHAPTER X: TJUKURPA 
CHAPTER XI: A REVELATION
CHAPTER XII: SLINGS AND ARROWS
CHAPTER XIII: CUTTING REMARKS
CHAPTER XIV: BUGARAGARA
CHAPTER XV: AN AWAKENING
CHAPTER XVI: HIS MAJESTY
CHAPTER XVII: GUARDIAN OF THE DEAD
CHAPTER XVIII: THE REJOICING CITY
CHAPTER XIX: JOURNEY’S END
CHAPTER XX: A NAME
CHAPTER XXI: OMPHALOS
CHAPTER XXII: PALE SHADOWS
CHAPTER XXIII: ONE TREE HILL
II: Martyrdom
CHAPTER XXIV: A NEW WORLD
CHAPTER XXV: DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES
CHAPTER XXVI: LOST, AND FOUND
CHAPTER XXVII: STORYTELLING
CHAPTER XXVIII: ‘HORED AND DREDFULL’
CHAPTER XXIX: THE BUSH OF GHOSTS
CHAPTER XXX: UNTIMELY CREATURES
CHAPTER XXXI: GETTING AND SPENDING
CHAPTER XXXII: DOUBLE LIVES
CHAPTER XXXIII: ‘UMBRA SUMUS’
CHAPTER XXXIV: THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
III: Persecution
CHAPTER XXXV: THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
CHAPTER XXXVI: THE DREAM THAT IS DYING
CHAPTER XXXVII: THE DARK TWIN
CHAPTER XXXVIII: RETURN OF THE KING
CHAPTER XXXIX: LORD OF MISRULE
CHAPTER XL: THE DEVIL’S FOOTPRINTS
CHAPTER XLI: IDYLS OF THE KING
CHAPTER XLII: STATIONS OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS
CHAPTER XLIII: THE MARK OF CAIN
CHAPTER XLIV: DISINHERITANCE
CHAPTER XLV: MISSING LINKS
CHAPTER XLVI: REGENTS IN EXILE
CHAPTER XLVII: THE PROMISED LAND
CHAPTER XLVIII: SUPERSTITION?
CHAPTER XLIX: SUPERSTITION TOO?
CHAPTER L: BETRAYAL
CHAPTER LI: BROKEN BONDS
CHAPTER LII: FIAT LUX
CHAPTER LIII: THE FORCE OF SHADE
CHAPTER LIV: JACK ALIVE
CHAPTER LV: BECOME AS LITTLE CHILDREN
CHAPTER LVI: ARDENT SPIRITS
CHAPTER LVII: THE HAUNT OF MEMORY
CHAPTER LVIII: SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
CHAPTER LIX: THE LONGEST DAY
CHAPTER LX: ILL MET BY MOONLIGHT
CHAPTER LXI: WORLD WITHOUT END
CHAPTER LXII: WHO SAW HIM DIE?
CHAPTER LXIII: THE SLEEP OF REASON
CHAPTER LXIV: DARK MONARCH
THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS
EPILOGUE: THE LAST OF ENGLAND
Acknowledgements
Sources
AFTERWORD:
ABOUT THE CLAY DREAMING:
ABOUT ED HILLYER:
About the Author
Copyright

King Cole is in motion, and that is all he cares to know as he dashes headlong through the streets of London. Blindly he runs, into a spin of lights.

Hills are lifted up, high towers, high mountains and fenced walls – such shapes as he has ever Dreamed. Behind the lights the buildings pile black on every side, threatening collapse.

One Big Ant-hill Creek, this is.

An Australian Aborigine, Cole is not daunted out Bush. His heart is open, his liver glad. He yells for joy.

Light to dark and dark to light, he races through the arches of the Adelphi along the Strand. The streets, filled with a riotous, milling throng, roar and whirl about at every turn. The window displays of bright-lit theatres and their print-shops draw the crowd – figurines no more real than the coloured shapes they stare at, looking-glass images of themselves.

He hears again the wheezing violins, strains of a waltz, sees the white men all in black, their ladies dressed as flowers, smelling not of flowers. They poke and prod and stare until he leaves them all behind, leaping from that cliff above Pall Mall.

A yellow whoosh of flame turns his head – fire-juggler. Cole collides with a column of smoke. A barrel-organ clatters and rolls. Impressions strike with physical force. His skull throbs and his scalp tingles. No matter – after the suffocating attentions of the Athenaeum Club, to be ignored is bliss.

Every few steps, scenes shift beneath his feet. They take on forms new and more clinging. Cole runs on the spot: it is the great globe that spins. He has to run to keep up.

Cityscape darkening, the frantic passage eventually slackens in its pace. Churning thoroughfares give way to ever-narrower lanes. Away from West End glory, night skies return, clear, with very little cloud.

The air, however, closes, rank with rotting vegetation. Hissing and growling sounds – King Cole finds himself in a downtrodden neighbourhood, much emptied of humanity. The front door of nearly every low, black house gapes onto the highway. Deep within dance kitchen fires, ringed with nightmare silhouettes. Queer animal shapes throw themselves across cracking walls and filthy floors.

He pauses a moment to catch his breath.

Were it not for the gas lamps marking the street corners, jutting from blackened brick, they would be no different from clumps of brushwood. By
their flickering light Cole can make out other shapes crawling the street. Taking a step back, he disappears into a recess.

Their clothing much resembles the fine dress he is lately used to, but grown shabby, ill-fitting and old. Battered top hats fold in on themselves. Huge, filthy overcoats part to show second, no less ragged coats beneath. Baggy trousers, rope-tied at the waist, dissolve around gap-toothed remnants snarling at their feet. These stinking, outsize garments swamp the bodies of the pale and stunted creatures that bear them. Despite their obvious burden, they are spectral and insubstantial beings.

Under his breath Cole murmurs an incantation, a charm to ward off evil. He peels himself off the dank wall, lest he stick there, permanently, like a fly to a sticky-bud.

Borne on an east wind, saltpetre, sharp and corrosive, stings Cole’s nostrils. The foetor of burnt flesh and charred bone catches the back of the throat. Beneath his feet, a black slime of damp pyrean ash coats the stone paving. Mixed with the ineffable charcoal scent is an alien tang Cole cannot identify – potassium nitrate.

In spite of it all, he senses the proximity of water.

A scattering of trees brackets a black-spired church, some almost as tall as the terrifying spike at its centre. With a trained eye Cole selects the most suitable. He reaches for one of its lower branches and hauls himself aloft. Setting the soles of his bare feet against the trunk, he grasps it firmly between both hands and, glad of the bark beneath his fingers, executes a nimble ascent. In a matter of seconds he nears the treetop.

Balanced between the high branches, King Cole swings back and forth, surveying the surrounding country – his eternal domain.

Immediately to the southeast he can make out a derelict marketplace, then scraggy patches of open ground. To the south lurk vast waterholes, deeper and darker than any salt lake. From these sprout entire forests of dead wood – ships with sails mournfully struck, tightly bound to skeletal masts. As he watches they in turn show indistinct, run aground amongst the misty ghosts of houses, houses of ghosts.

And beyond them all – to his horror – he sees, coiled and slick, the Great Serpent.

In the beginning is the Song, and the Song is of earth, and the earth is Song.

And the earth is without form, and void: and the blank face of the void is white.

And the singers of the Song pick their way across that void, until another song should reach their ears. Faint, hard to place, it grows steadily louder. Brazen, discordant, the music is new to them – the theme all too evocative: a savage song fit to fire the heart, or to curdle the blood.

Song, and dance – barely discernible smudges separate out from the solidifying plenum. Dots here and there in the nowhere, the vibrations begin to take on physical form.

The brute chorus, more urgent now, is calling all of Creation forth.

Gnowee
, the Emu’s egg, is born from the land. The darkness divides from the light. Etched across this new horizon are the shadow-sequences of Dreaming. Silhouettes, they loom, assuming substance: becoming…

…a tree…

          …a startled bird…

                …a serried rank of scarlet jackets.

The North Downs of Kent, a lush, undulating landscape, lay couched in morning mists. No rain fell, but the clods of saturated earth exhaled moist breath. The sun was little more than a bright disc, suspended, its heat remote.

It took Time to burn a hole through the air.

Crisp, white chill gave way gradually to dew. Dawn opaque as pearl turned a translucent opal – a child’s marble, red shift tense within.

Hue, and cry – a pack of foxhounds romped across rough pasture. Giving tongue, they announced their quarry cornered; a huntsman’s horn quavered in reply – sounds neither of triumph, nor of mourning, but imbued with the hollowness of each.

In a copse at the base of a steep slope, the Master of Hounds caught up with his charges. Ringed tight about a dense covert, their white bodies thrashed like maggots in a wound. They yelped and snapped and scratched and howled.

‘Ware Riot!’ the Master called.

Crashing through barriers of undergrowth, the leading body lurched to a halt. Hunting pinks pulsing in pallid twilight, the West Kent gathered, eager for the kill. They could taste metal on the air.

The horses reared and circled, huge heads tossing, their eyes rolling; flared nostrils snorted gouts of steam. Something lurked in the clump of trees ahead, causing the animals to panic. Stabbing hooves churned the damp ground into a thick paste. Stumbling in the mulch, the frenzied hounds risked being trampled underfoot.

‘Forrard!’ cried the Master. ‘Hoick to’m!’

But his hounds, whining, kept their distance. Smartly he dismounted, strode forward, and brought up his whip to part the curtains of vegetation. Dismayed, he hollered a caution. Taut reins restrained horse and rider from their sudden urge to flee.

Gasps and oaths escaped the ruffled company. Gentleman farmer, lord and lady alike stared, slack-jawed. There was the dead fox, lolling, back broken, held tight in the grip of a black fist. The hand belonged to a man – very obviously a man. A living soul, he rose up, as if of earth itself: formed of the dust of the ground, in their image, after their likeness – and yet shockingly other.

Stark naked in that glade stood a Stone Age relic – an Australian Aborigine.

‘Not just one, but three of the buggers, black as sin!’