Chapter Text
YEAR 3, VERY FAR TO THE SOUTH
Whatever this new disease was, Warri didn’t like it. It made the land sing wrongly. Sometimes the land stopped singing altogether. Once a few of the animals were infected it didn’t take long for people who came near them to start showing a weird rash. And the tourists spread it - from Spud’s Roadhouse to Mintabie and Coober Pedy, then out onto the Plain. Even one of the weather watchers from Giles had caught it and died, and another had been infected, he had heard, but that one didn’t die - the landspirits told him that the fellow had wandered away from the weather station, raving about voices calling him, then hid in a gully in the range behind the station, where he turned into…… something. None of them recognised what he was now, but the thing he had become was still there, lurking in cover and grabbing other creatures that went near, both the healthy and the infected, adding them to its mass until it was bigger than any animal he had ever heard of, bigger than the elephants in the old movies about Africa.
The rash reminded him of the smallpox his grandmother had once described, and the measles he had survived as a small child, and of the rashes people grew when the winds blew from where the bombs had been tested back when he was young, but it was different. It felt like no natural disease, not even like what people caught from the poisoned winds from the bombs. Most of the animals and people that caught it just died, but some of them……changed. The things they changed into killed whenever they could, or tried to attack other people and animals, almost as if they were trying to spread the disease.
He had himself been bitten by something that had been a sick child he was tending until it suddenly twisted under his hands and went for his throat. Warri shuddered at that memory. He had crushed the thing’s head, then had to fight off the frantic mother of the little boy it had been. Then he had fled into the wilderness, sick with horror at what he had done. He had expected to die there. But after half a month he was somehow still alive. The bite healed, leaving him with no more than an ugly scar, but the child’s spirit had still cried out to him, and the rituals and songs he would normally have used to settle it into peaceful waiting would not take hold. Then Sun Woman came to him in a dream and taught him the songs he would need to lead the child’s soul to rest. Since then he had rescued the souls of many others of the infected, leading them to the places where they would wait to be reborn into a healthy body. But there were still so very many……
Warri sighed. Memories could wait. Now he had work to do.
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After a night spent with the landspirits, asking their help in setting up a space, he had trailed sand into the spiralling pattern needed for the Dance. He called power into it from the songline, naming each feature of the Plain, calling on the ancestral spirits which inhabited each rock outcrop, spring and cave. The place looked empty to outsiders, he understood, but to him it sang with life. When he looked at it with the sight of the marngits, the barren area vibrated with life, a web of light binding the land together, flowing along the songline like water in those ‘rivers’ he had heard of down south and in the far north, but had only ever seen in the films shown when the travelling picture show passed by the railway work camp every few years, or the ones his granddaughter had insisted he come and watch at her school. The only river he had ever seen for himself was the one that ran underground through the caves below the Plain. The tiny creeks in some of the gullies of the Range didn’t really count as rivers, but they too were part of the web of life.
He spared a thought for his granddaughter, now nearly a year dead. When she had caught the disease, there had still been hope of finding a cure. Although the doctors from Adelaide had stopped coming, some of the Nungkari healers from the Lands had tried to help her. Nothing had worked, not songs or herbs or calling on the power in the songlines. Then two of the healers had themselves caught the illness and died. When the child had begun to take on a distorted shape and started snapping at the last healer, the woman might have died too. Warri still remembered his shock when the old Kadaitje man had appeared as if from nowhere and he had not resisted when the man had plunged a flint knife into the brain of what had been his treasured grandchild.
Warri still remembered how the man had looked at him with pity, something he had never seen before, then had spoken to him, another thing he had never known to happen. Normally the kadaitje did not speak, but came and went silently in their feather shoes, dispensing justice, warding the land from dangers both physical and subtle, killing by stealth or from afar when dealing death was needful. But this one had turned to him and said: “If there had been a choice I would have let her live. The thing she was becoming knew no justice, no love, only hunger, suffering and hate. She could not have infected you, you are immune to this sickness, but she would have killed you and you must not die until your proper time. The land and all the lives in it have need of you. Some other creatures are also immune, some few men and animals, perhaps as many as one in ten. I have seen no bird catch this sickness, nor any snake or lizard. The infected ones can kill them, but cannot give them the sickness. The animals that came in with the white men seem to catch it as easily as the people do, except for their cats. I have seen horses infected, and cattle, dogs and camels…..” The kadaitje man shuddered, showing more emotion than Warri had ever seen from one of his kind, then went on. “Worse, the landspirits can be infected. I saw one of the Mimi……”.
“No, you will see it all for yourself soon enough. For now you must sing the girl’s spirit home to a safe place where she can wait to be born. Do not forget her. When people and animals start to turn into these things, they must be killed. Be careful with the blood, it can infect others, until it has been in the sun for half a day. Bright sunlight hurts the things, and can kill them - it burns them clean of the sickness. Use a blade into the brain, or crush the head. Unless they have grown armour, the bones are soft. And when you talk to Singer, be sure she knows of this. I fear that her people too can be infected. Every creature I have so far seen infected has been of one of the kinds that bear live young and feed milk to their young. Good luck. Live.”
Without another word the kadaitje man vanished as silently as he had come.