Triskellion 3: The Gathering (5 page)

“Sir, yessir!” Rachel said, mockingly.

Levi studied the long, straight stem he had snapped off and began shaving its tip with a stone, weighing it in his hand as if it were a spear. Then, when he was satisfied, he turned and walked away from the clearing.

Twenty minutes later Adam had collected a dozen or so yams, while Rachel had amassed a small pile of resin and enough twigs and small branches for a decent fire. Levi reappeared then, having crept soundlessly up behind them. He held up a dead lizard. It was more than sixty centimetres long, with a hole in its neck where Levi had speared it.

“Goanna,” he said, smiling. “Now we can eat.”

“Oh. My. God,” Rachel cried.

Levi knelt down and laid the pieces of resin among the dried wood. “It’s like a natural firelighter,” he said.

Adam picked up two short sticks. “Do I rub these together or something?”

Levi grinned. “Well you
can
,” he said; “but seeing as we’ve got a lighter in the bag…”

Adam tossed the sticks away. “I thought you could set fire to pretty much whatever you liked,” he said. He was remembering the newspaper on the bus. “Whenever you feel like it.”

Levi looked up at him, his eyes suddenly hard. “I can only do that when I’m
really
mad.”

Once the fire had been going for a while, Levi washed and gutted the goanna and placed it on its back in the hot embers. Its head looked scaly and devilish, its tongue lolling out from between sharp teeth. Rachel stared at it with disgust.

“You’ll eat it if you’re hungry enough,” Levi said, reading her thoughts.

“I’ll try anything once,” Adam said. “Besides, I’m so hungry I could eat my own foot.”

“That’s the idea, Adam, but hopefully it won’t come to that.” Levi prodded at the goanna. “This is part of your education. The tribes round here weren’t too good at looking after themselves, either, until the ancestors came from the sky and showed them how. The tribes were pretty primitive then, back in the Dreamtime, and the ancestors taught them how to hunt and fish. They taught them how to make fire and how to cook what they killed.” He grinned at the twins. “Some people
still
need to be taught…”

He lifted the lizard from the fire and peeled off its skin like it was a baked banana. He pulled the flesh from the bones with expert fingers and laid it out in strips on a large leaf. Then he dug the yams out of the ashes and split them with a penknife.

Rachel and Adam tucked into the hot yams, which tasted like sweet potatoes and were all the better for being eaten in the open air. Levi offered them the meat. Adam took a strip and chewed it, his face registering at first squeamishness, then pleasure.

“Eat some, Rachel.” Levi offered her the leaf. “Think of it as chicken. It’s kind of related to a chook, if you go back far enough.”

Rachel took a deep breath. It did
look
like chicken. She picked up a small piece of the roasted lizard and put it in her mouth. It was better than the best chicken she had ever tasted: tender and smoky from the fire. Delicious.

Once the leaf was stripped of goanna meat and all the yams had been eaten, Rachel, Adam and Levi licked their lips in satisfaction.

“Tempt you to an apple…?” Levi pulled half a dozen small apples from his pocket and passed them round.

The apples were cool and sweet and cut through the greasiness left by the meat. Rachel rested her head on her backpack, her stomach full and contented. She looked up at the stars, clear in the blue-black sky above. She could feel the warmth of the embers on her cheek and, while Levi hummed a faint tune, she fell fast asleep.

T
he sky is unnaturally blue: turquoise and glowing with a new light. Tall eucalyptus trees dot the landscape, their thin trunks skin-smooth, their sparse branches reaching up, fluttering long fingers, towards the sky.

The girl looks up at what appears to be the sun, but it is a sun that is coming closer. As it approaches, she sees that it is spherical: an orb created from spinning wheels of light. She should run, but she does not. She is hypnotized by the spinning wheels that intersect one another and come closer until she can almost see flames flickering across their surface. She shuts her eyes, momentarily blinded by the white light, and when she opens them again, she sees something else, something within the ball of light.

It is a figure, man-like, silhouetted within the wheels.

She is frightened. She is about to run, but there is no time – just before the orb crashes into the desert, it explodes, flattening her to the ground.

The explosion makes no sound. Thousands of smaller orbs are dispersed into the sky. They explode, filling the air with glittering fragments that tumble to earth like tiny stars. When she raises her head, the sky is black and thick with buzzing insects. They swarm around her head, crawling into her ears, her mouth, her nose.

Bees…

But they do not sting. She spits them out and brushes them off with her hands. Getting to her feet, still covered head to toe in bees, she starts to run. As she flees, fat drops of rain begin to fall, cold on her skin. The drops quicken and fall harder until she is soaked by the pouring rain.

She runs.

The dry desert floor becomes wet and slippery, then disappears under her feet as if she is flying several centimetres above the ground. She moves faster, not feeling her feet, the landscape flashing by in fast forward, bees flying off and trailing after her.

Then, she stops.

A huge parakeet squawks overhead, before swooping down and drawing her attention to something on the ground.

The creature is long and fat, like a catfish. She cannot see whether it has feet like a lizard or is more like a snake – but as it slithers along, it leaves a deep groove in the earth, slick with slime. She knows she should not go near it, but she is transfixed by the swirling pattern on its bronze-coloured skin. She knows she should not touch it, but it moves so slowly that it will not be able to escape, and she cannot resist it.

She kneels down and her arm moves involuntarily towards the creature’s slippery skin. The head rears back fast, revealing a silvery underbelly and tiny eyes that glint on either side of its head. The mouth is no more than a hole surrounded by small barbs that latch on to her arm. Sinking in and locking on to her flesh, it begins to suck…

Rachel woke up and a spasm of shock ran through her body. She checked her arm. There was a small bump. A mosquito bite, maybe.

“You OK, Rach?”

Rachel looked over to the other side of the campfire where Adam had been sleeping. He still looked a little sleepy, but his eyes were wide and slightly panicked.

“Bad dream… Did you…?” Rachel asked.

A nod. “With that … thing, whatever it was.” Adam shuddered at the memory.

“Guess eating lizard doesn’t agree with me.”

“Won’t be the goanna that gave you dreams,” Levi said. “We’re right on a Songline here. That’ll be where your dreams came from, telling you stuff about the history of this place from millions of years ago.”

“Do you know what we dreamed about, then?” Rachel asked.

“Probably. You see, that stuff is literally set in stone. The earth keeps memories, and when you’re on a Songline, they come back to you.” Levi kicked dirt across the cold ashes to hide them. “That’s why I brought you this way – to bring you up to speed. It’s part of
your
history too.”

Rachel felt uneasy. What had seemed like a simple and beautiful landscape of sun and eucalyptus trees suddenly gave her a sinking feeling. She felt that something else, something frightening and dark, lurked just beneath the surface.

As if to confirm her worst fears, two figures were beginning to appear out of the shimmering heat haze on the horizon. They were upright and humanoid; their bodies were spindly and marked with white shapes, as if their skeletons were visible through their skin.

“What shall we do?” Rachel looked nervously at Levi, whose face was impassive.

“Wait,” he said.

They stood frozen as the figures came nearer, each one carrying a tall spear. Rachel could see that they were men, not unlike Levi himself, and very dark-skinned. What had appeared to be bones from a distance were in fact chalky-white markings painted all over their bodies.

The men eyed the twins without emotion, then stepped forward. They mumbled something and made what Rachel took to be signs of deference to Levi. The boy made similar signs back and then a grin spread across his face. The formalities clearly over, the two men grinned back, and all three fell into a hug, patting one another’s backs and chuckling.

Levi pulled away and dragged the two men across to Rachel and Adam. “Rachel, Adam,” he said, “meet Clifford and Charlie Possum.”

Rachel and Adam said hello.

“These guys are Anangu,” Levi continued. “They’re the traditional custodians of the rock. The government handed control back to them a few years ago.”

“So, we can be your guides,” Clifford Possum said. He reached into a small leather pouch and offered them damper, a kind of floury bread with a lump of dark golden honeycomb in the centre.

“You keep bees?” Rachel asked.

“We don’t
keep
them,” Clifford said. “They’re wild. We harvest the honey from the colonies out in the bush.”

“The Anangu were the world’s first bee-harvesters,” Charlie said. “Story is that the bees came from the sky with the ancestors, so they could pollinate all the plants and help us develop our crops.”

Rachel blinked, remembering her dream: the insects that had scattered like pin-pricks of light when the orb had crashed to earth.

“Without the bees we couldn’t survive,” Clifford said. “And we know every single colony from here to Uluru.”

“How far is Uluru from here, then?” Adam asked.

Clifford Possum screwed up his brow. Distances were clearly as irrelevant to him as they were to Levi. “Dunno,” he said. “Guess about four hundred kilometres.”

Rachel was both amazed to hear how far they had come in a few hours and alarmed to discover that they still had such a long way to go. Adam clearly felt the same.

“Four hundred? Are we going to walk the rest of the way?” he said.

Clifford chuckled. “I think you’ve done enough walking.”

Rachel began to wonder how they would get to Uluru. There were clearly no horses or cars. “Are we going to travel along the Songlines?” she asked.

Clifford and Charlie Possum seemed to find this idea funny and roared with laughter. “No, you crazy girl,” Charlie said. “
We’re
not walking all that way.”

Clifford grinned. “We’re going to fly, like the bees!”

D
own towards the end of Broadway, beyond the fashionable areas of SoHo and Tribeca, lies the financial district of Manhattan. Among the steel and glass office blocks that thrust into the New York sky and drive the money markets of the world are the headquarters of a very different kind of organization: the Flight Trust.

The Flight Trust was founded in the early twentieth century by a group of upstate philanthropists who had benefited from the boom times and hoped to give something back to America other than their taxes. One original trustee with a passion for man-powered flight had backed the Wright brothers in their pursuit of conquering the air. The enterprise had made little money – but it had given the trust its name.

The Flight Trust had continued to sponsor pilots and explorers, such as Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. It had also invested in providing new technology for the air force in the First and Second World Wars: invaluable research that the Trust had traded for government bonds, making it a very rich organization indeed.

The Trust’s headquarters had been housed on the same spot for as long as anybody could remember. The original brownstone had long since been demolished and replaced with a modern mirrored-glass block that towered above all the buildings around it. It was an iconic part of the New York skyline and its elegant tower rushed skyward from the street, a vast pair of aluminium wings opening from its summit.