By Hamish Duncan
He was a Wiradjuri boy, and she had been born in Leeds, though all she remembered was the colony near the Cudgegong River. They were not friends, exactly, but he was the one native that was allowed to approach her, and she the one coloniser that didn’t treat him like a prisoner in his own country. His name was something she couldn’t pronounce, and so she called him Willy. Her name was Margaret, and he couldn’t pronounce that, and so he simply called her, with a heavy lisp, Miss. That was unfair, she thought, but she knew she would have no luck changing his mind, and so they entered into an uneasy alliance, each wishing they could give something more to the other, growing up together and apart.
Margaret’s parents had been bakers first, then convicts, then bakers again, freed in their new land so they could plant wheat, and fill the belly of a cruel man everyone called the Governor, but who was really only a lowly Commandant.
Willy, who was raised on and by the land, and had more mothers and fathers than could be humanly counted, and didn’t keep up with the comings and goings of the white men. But he had sighted the so-called Governor, Mr. Tully, from time to time, and he knew in his heart that he was evil. He also knew that he wielded a vast amount of power. It was the kind of power that didn’t take the form of brute force, like a fist or a foot; Mr. Tully was a weakling, one of the shortest and widest in the area. His was a power that was assumed and elusive: something you felt coming before you saw him clearly, and only understood properly once he had disappeared, and the dust had settled. He knew, most of all, that it was best to steer clear of him as much as he could.
They had been walking for half a day now; a new suit had been sent to the Governor in Bathurst, and they had been tasked with its collection. Normally there were a variety of boys, white or black, that would have jumped at the chance to perform some thankless task for their leader, but gold was said to have been discovered in the rivers nearby, and that thinned the ranks considerably. Disease and gold, those could be relied on to empty the streets.
Margaret’s parents, their faces dusted with flour and their eyes bloodshot and drunken, had seemed unconcerned with the idea of their fifteen-year old heading off on some useless errand across wild land. They simply asked that “your little friend” accompany her, and the two of them had set off within the hour, happy to escape the confines of their civilization, if only for a day or so. But they had run out of things to talk about almost immediately. Life at the colony was slow, and lacked any real gossip or intrigue. Not helping matters was the landscape that confronted them. This was bare land that did nothing; hills simply rolled endlessly onwards, and horizons never materialised. For a while, Margaret was concerned that they weren’t heading in the right direction, but Willy seemed certain. She trusted him; he could tell which way was south indoors and blindfolded.
“I’ve been here before,” Willy had been saying, as if it were the kind of thing that started a conversation. Margaret simply nodded in response, and after the third time he said it, she stopped replying altogether. It didn’t matter what she said, for he was only filling empty space, accompanying the bird calls, and the sound of wind through grass. She had her mind on other things: life beyond the colony. What she could do, exactly, to escape a future that seemed to have already been decided for her.
But these thoughts only dulled her mind further. They were bland wishes that everybody – and so really nobody – experienced, endlessly, every day of their lives out here. Desire exhausted her. She would prefer that something good happened without having to anticipate it. But you couldn’t anticipate a surprise, could you?
Willy stopped talking after a few hours, and started singing instead. She wouldn’t describe him as talented, but it was beautiful in an ugly kind of way. It was a song that emerged from the bottom of his throat, like rocks being stirred in a barrel, but there was the occasional leap into a higher register that sent an ache through her bones.
“What is that you’re singing about?” she asked, finally, as he came to the abrupt end of another cycle of hums and grunts. Willy didn’t answer her. It was as if he hadn’t heard her at all; his attention was far away and fully diverted. He was staring off into the distance, with his brow furrowed into a straight line across his forehead, and his lips still pursed into a shape left over from his song. Margaret followed his eyes, her arms crossed and her patience wavering in the heat. In between the gums and the silky oaks, she saw what it was that had captured his attention.
A strange object sat shimmering in the daylight at the base of the nearest hill. Judging from the path of torn-up dirt and grass that preceded it, it seemed to have come to an abrupt stop from a high speed. There was smoke, both pale and dark, as if several fires had been lit and put out over a period of time. When she blinked it was still there, and when she moved it moved with her. This was no spell put upon them by empty bellies and parched throats.
They stood there for a second, unsure whether or not to proceed. They could have kept walking; Margaret still had the chance to pretend she hadn’t seen him staring at this strange vision. Her foot hovered, wavering, above the grass. The magpies sang.
The pull towards the unknown was too strong. They stepped closer, curious and cautious, as if approaching a sleeping beast. Under his breath, Willy asked what it was they were looking at. She had no answers for him. “It looks,” she said, “like it has fallen from the sky.” But this was no bird, nor was it an angel sent down from heaven. It was something… out of a dream, she supposed.
“Shall we take a closer look?”
Without waiting for him to answer, she moved closer still.
The object was steel, about twice the length of a horse carriage, roughly circular, and coloured a scratched silver, like tossed aside cutlery. There were markings up and down the side that weren’t quite English, but the letters were similar. Margaret recognised the text from crates that had arrived for the Governor, full of mysterious liquids and acrid foodstuffs from some far away land. Leaning closer in, she saw that there was a bubble of shattered glass across the top of it. Inside were dials and further sights that teased her curiosity. Some of them were still spinning, as if they were clinging to some strange version of life.
Willy felt deeply unsettled. He certainly feared the object, which looked like a great big dead bird, but not knowing why he feared it was the worst of it. He knew a snake might bite, or that a white man might whip him for walking too slow, but this was a complete unknown.
“We should go,” he said. “This is bad. Nuh-uh. Don’t like this.”
Margaret gently touched the side of the object, apprehensive at first and then with more solidity. It didn’t come to life, or rear up on its hind legs breathing fire.
Inside she saw what looked like a seat, divided into two sections, with a front and a back, and a handle like a solid rein at the far end. Blood lay crimson and sparkling on the seat. It was fresh, and it seemed to lead outside, away from them.
“I think this is a… vehicle of some sort,” she said, astonished, her heart cascading inside her chest. To speak with their full voices felt inappropriate, and she found herself whispering. She turned back to Willy, still several paces clear. “A carriage. I’ve never seen…”
Willy took another step back, and as he did, Margaret’s eyes were drawn upwards.
There was a floating circle halfway up the sky, like someone had drawn the moon closer than it had ever been, and turned it jet black. It was flashing; a thunderstorm lined the edges, as if some impossible amount of electricity was powering its existence. It was not visible seconds previous. They had walked into its field of view; from the other side, it was not visible at all.
“Did this thing,” she asked, her finger raised, “arrive from that?”
Willy shook his head, and she learned something about him in that moment. She had never thought less of him, the way others in the community did; his ancestors may have been so-called savages, without plumbing or tall-ships, but they were intelligent people that easily adapted to the strange new lives that had been thrust upon them. Willy especially. She had seen him wrangle horses and use his hands better than any white man she knew. But here, he was petrified, at a deep and spiritual level, something far beyond what she was capable of. Where it was simply an oddity for herself, this disagreed with his soul on a fundamental level.
There was a sound like a jug of water being emptied at great force. She looked back up at the hole and it was gone. The sky was the dull blue it had always been, the encroaching sunset poisoning it a tepid pink. She searched the rest of the horizon to see if it had moved, but it was nowhere, if it had ever been anywhere in the first place. Willy finally moved forward and approached the object with something approaching courage, but only so he could take hold of Margaret’s arm and try to drag her backwards.
“We can’t stay here,” he said, “and we gotta go now, before it’s proper dark.”
“Get off me, will you?” She wriggled out of his grip and, feeling adventurous, stomped further towards the front of the thing, stepping under the parts of it that jutted out from the side like birds’ wings. She saw for the first time that there were scorch marks on the front end of it, where it came to a sleek point that was painted another colour. Parts of the steel casing still seemed to hum with a fire inside; it was warm to the touch, more so than the sun could have made it. She felt that warmth beneath her hands, but something deeper too, like a current of water deep below a bed of stone. She reached inside the window carefully, and could just about lay her hands on the reins in front of the seat. It moved back and forth at her touch, but it felt broken in some way.
“Sun’s going down!” Willy pleaded, as if she hadn’t seen the lengthening shadows herself. She heard him, of course, and she knew they had to continue on, but there was something else on her mind.
“Do you think you could take me back here? Do you remember the route exactly?”
His face blanched, and his eyebrows narrowed. His head lolled from side to side. The fear had completely overtaken him. “Miss, I want to keep walking and never see this thing again…please.”
She was tempted to say I could make you come back, knowing that she could, if she was feeling truly cruel. But the look on his face said it all. To force Willy back to this strange object would be to treat him like her father and his friends treated him. She wouldn’t do that. And she knew that, even though she may have had some sort of innate power over him, he was the elder one, the stronger one, and the one entrusted with ensuring her safety. Any idiocy on her part would be blamed on him alone.
But she could return on her own. They had only followed one path, and perhaps at home, Willy would be more open to guiding the way, nudging her in the right direction.
Cursing the fact she had spent the trip staring at the clouds instead of the path in front of her, she began to walk back where she had left her pack, already coming up with excuses that, when back home, would get her out on the road again.
“We’ll keep moving, Willy. It’s okay… You can breathe again.”
He scooted up behind her, then took the lead, clearly feeling that she was walking too slow for his liking. “Come on, we need to find a place to camp.”
Smiling to herself, she turned back around to take one more look at the strange, smoldering, newly-dead thing that had been waiting for them at the bottom of the hill, and that would hopefully be waiting for her when she returned in a week or so. Maybe, with another week roasting in the sun, its silence would be more absolute, and less dangerous a thing to reach out and try to —
There was a man standing next to her. He had been hiding on his haunches in a patch of scrub, but had emerged, silently, when her back was turned. His face was stained with this foreign soil, and the blood from his nose was soaking his chin. Through the muck she could see his eyes: blue, and clear as crystal, and terrified. In one hand, shaking, was a tiny, blunt knife.
“Wer bist du? Wo bin ich? Sag mir!”
Willy hadn’t seen him emerge. He was further ahead, with his head down, his feet on their continuous march, and completely out of earshot; the wind was masking the strange, otherworldly murmur this new man was making.
After the shock subsided, fear struck Margaret through her gut; she pictured being taken hostage, beaten, and hurt, and disappeared forever. She was barely fifteen after all. But looking closer, it was clear that this man was just as petrified, shaking uncontrollably, ready to attack whatever tried to harm him, but with no real force. He was clearly exhausted, too. A beaten dog fighting for his life.
Behind him, the source of his exhaustion, lay his partner in this journey. He had not been so lucky to survive the journey and the crash. The bottom half of his body lay untouched, if dusty, but his top half had been decimated by their sudden arrival here. His innards had popped out of him, like he had been twisted in half by some enormous creature, and his head was completely black, like a scorched piece of wood lying in the middle of a fireplace.
Hands shaking, she put her finger to her lips and nodded towards Willy. The man turned, worked his jaw for a moment, and nodded with eventual understanding. Perhaps he figured that Willy would be a threat if he tried anything. She saw that he was wearing a dark mustard coat of leather and wool, with all sorts of tools attached. He was a soldier, she thought, something she recognized, even if he was one that had fallen from the sky.
With her hand still to her lips, she took a few tentative steps in Willy’s direction. All the strange man needed to do was put a hand out and she would have stopped, but the weight was too heavy; both arms stayed by his side, and the knife dropped to the ground.
She sped up and took the lead back from Willy. When she looked back again, past him, the man in the leather coat had crouched back down into the bushes, eyes wide and adrenaline quickly wearing off. He was staring at his fallen comrade, wondering, maybe, what he was going to do next.
They camped that night without talking about what they had seen. Willy spoke freely the whole next day, but he wouldn’t sing. She never heard him sing again.
When they got to Bathurst, they found out the Governor’s suit had already been collected. And so they filled their canteens back up and walked home a different way. Margaret moved to Melbourne, and died, still wondering, in 1899.
