men’s mates. Honour kept him from breaking the law and intriguing for relief. But his eyes often followed the swaying hips of a woman. Perhaps he could seek a mate from some stranger-community. This was permissible and some of the other men had foreign wives. He observed these matches and was deterred. The men, unlike those who married women from the customary groupings, seemed like shellfish collected in a basket. Foreign women expected their men always to return laden with game from the hunt. They expected their menfolk to be always attentive and when they quarrelled, the wife instantly threatened to return to her own country or to find a better man. Seeing this, and seeing it too often, Wooreddy put the idea of a foreign wife from his mind and began to look for a local girl for a mate. Or rather his father did the looking, while he suffered the pangs of lust and waited for the event to happen.
Women and marriage were not the only things he saw with that detachment which had become a mannerism from that day, seven years ago, when the omen had forced itself upon him. He watched a man burn his mate. He squatted just beyond the light cast by the fire to observe the cremation. The woman had been murdered by ghosts and this made her funeral of special interest. Everything had to be done just right, if the spirit, tormented by the loss of a young and healthy body, were to be sent away towards the Islands of the Dead. The family gathered the material for the pyre. The father belonged to a different clan from Wooreddy. One in which he could marry, he thought, as he watched the three daughters working. Moorina and Lowernunhe were past puberty and taken, but the third one was only twelve and possibly still unattached. She was a female with a strong will. Everyone had become aware of this when, as a child of five, she had dived after her sisters into the surf and almost drowned. He knew that a great future as a provider had been predicted for her – and much sorrow for her mate!
Wooreddy dressed his hair as he waited. He rubbed a plain grease over it, then searched his chin for any lengths of hair growing on his cheek. He found one or two and pulled them out. Dawn turned into morning, and the family members probed further into the bush for timber. Finally, Mangana, the father, determined that enough had been collected. He stood beside a shallow square dug into the earth and muttered a few incantations before beginning to stack the logs up in the form of a hollow cube. When he reached a metre and a half, he stopped and began filling it with twigs, leaves and bark. Wooreddy noticed that the structure had begun to sag at one corner, and sighed. The old ways were losing their shape and becoming as the cube. Mangana, he had heard, on hearing of his wife’s murder, had only shrugged his shoulders and muttered: ‘It is the times.’ His words summed up the general mood of the community. No one had any trust in the future and they accepted a prophecy that passed among them: fewer babies would be born to take the place of the adults dying ever younger; fewer babies to be born, to be weaned, to die – and this meant fewer mature adults to keep and pass on the traditions of the islanders. Thus it was, and it was the times. Everyone knew this and accepted it. Wooreddy alone knew more. He knew that it was because the world was ending.
From a bark shelter hidden beneath the down-hanging branches of an ancient tree, the husband carried out the corpse of his wife. The three daughters began snivelling. Wooreddy was impressed by the solemnity of the occasion, by the sight of the man carrying to the fire the dead body of his mate. Mangana gently placed the corpse on top of the pyre. Softly Wooreddy moved closer to see if custom was being observed. The limbs were folded against the trunk and tied there with woven-grass cords knotted in the proper manner. He nodded: it was as it should be. He turned to where Mangana squatted at the fire, poking a long stick into the flame and muttering a short incantation until the end caught. Then he rushed the stick to the pyre and thrust it through the special tunnel which led into the heart of the cube. Tendrils of smoke pushed up past the corpse. A few licking tongues of fire erupted to dance into a hungry red mouth under the spell of the onrushing morning wind. The roaring flames carried the female spirit up and away from the land of the living leaving behind loss and sorrow. Mangana groaned out his pain. His daughters wailed out their pain. One by one the man took up his spears and broke them. It was an abject sign of surrender. One disarmed oneself before an enemy of overwhelming strength and cast oneself on his mercy.
Mangana’s wife had been raped and then murdered by num (ghosts) that came from the settlement across the strait. What had happened had had nothing to do with her, her husband or her children. It had been an act of Ria Warrawah – unprovoked, but fatal as a spear cast without reason or warning. No one could have protected her, and thus Mangana broke his spears and cast the pieces on the blazing pyre. This showed that he, and all who were associated with him, were at the mercy of forces which he could only try and propitiate through magic. He snatched up a sharp pebble and slashed at his chest. Blood dripped upon the earth. He flung drops into the flames. He groaned and raised his lacerated breast to the first rays of the sun. Black blood turned as red as the fire consuming his mate.
This was not the last tragedy Mangana was to suffer, or Wooreddy to witness. More and more people died and the frightened survivors huddled together. Family groupings had been created by Great Ancestor. From the first he had bound individuals together in biological groupings. No one was alone. But that was how it had been. Now some families were reduced to only a single member, and with all their relatives gone they were alone in a country of strangers. Wooreddy found himself in this predicament, but instead of giving way to despair he applied himself to rectify the situation. A thinker with a family was a thinker in custom; a thinker with only his thoughts to keep him company was an outcast. He could not live alone and needed allies. He was drawn to the remnant family of Mangana.
He spent much time sitting with the father. Now that so many custodians of lore had been swept away, Mangana could be classified as an elder. He might have knowledge and Wooreddy, a youth with too big a brain, wanted to get some of it. This, apart from his need of allies, was a strong enough reason to stay close to the older man. But Mangana did not pass on any wisdom. That which he might have once possessed had been destroyed by the times which had personally struck him such a vicious blow that he had been knocked into premature senility. For most of the day he sat and watched the flickering flames of his fire which Wooreddy kept up. He sat subdued while ghosts roamed his land and marked it out as their own. Within and without there was no hope, and sometimes Wooreddy heard him softly moan as he probed the wounds of his sorrow. Too often silence settled on man and youth, and that silence was the brooding of Ria Warrawah. It hung between them that day when the thudding of tiny feet imprinted themselves on it. Wooreddy recognised the feet as those of Trugernanna. As always he was correct. Hunter as well as thinker, he could identify individuals by their footprints. Trugernanna flung her body into the clearing and stood panting before the two men.
Her father slowly lifted his face and asked in a monotone: ‘Why haven’t you collected some food? I’m hungry!’
The child answered in a similar dead voice: ‘Three ghosts came rowing into the bay. They took first and second sister away.’
Mangana looked from his daughter to the youth. He began to speak perhaps with a slight intention of justifying his listlessness and his numb reaction to the loss of his two eldest daughters.
‘Num come; they see what they want; they take it. It is their way. They do not know Great Ancestor and his laws. I remember when I first saw their big catamarans. I did not know what they were, or perhaps I did because they scared me. They scared all of us and they still scare us. We have lived in fear since they came and can do nothing to put an end to that fear. When we first saw them, we talked about them and decided that they were spirits of the dead returning. Soon we found that they were not our dead, but perhaps those of our enemies. They were under the dominion of the Evil One, Ria Warrawah. They killed needlessly. They were quick to anger, and quick to kill with thunder flashing out from a stick they carried. They kill many, and many die by the sickness they bring. Now all I have left is my little daughter. Once nine shared my campfire. Now it is hard to find nine members of my clan. A sickness demon takes those that the ghosts leave alone.’
Wooreddy seized on the last sentence and added it to his own foreboding. The island was haunted and unsafe to humans. He must escape before he became a victim
