AUSTRAL CHAPTERS
The church had warned him about the pale child. Said it was a savage. A cacodemon. Some motherless omen sent not to guide them, but to taint their prophecy. This thing, its suspicious aura unrevealing, possessed by a dark Jinn-like magic unknown. Some rumoured to know its maker, said they had envisioned it, the albinos path mirrored in foretelling bowls of liquid ritual. It’s Him, it’s Him, it’s Him… Yes, it is no lie. The antipodal one has cast out His token. He, the dark comedian, whose eternal jest brings no laughter.
The First People say He rules this land… The natives call Him by many names. Tales told of this creator-destroyer who moves in many forms, whose story is of great loss and echoes still far beyond these anonymous stretches. He who walks behind the sun, who takes the Serpent’s skin. His forked tongue in the ears of everything.
It was to be a lone crusade, the priest of occult origins and his orphaned prisoner. Through the red desert, the austral bushland, the many colonial towns. To convert those who knew not His word. To guide. To rule. The paired horses and wagon paid for by the church and the supplies provided by the church also. Jars sloshed with alchemic solutions. A cloned embryo. Nameless tinctures, ebon and hallucinogenic. Phosphorus powders and boxes tight with ammunition, bullets enough to fill the sky like locust stories of old.
He rides hunched and robed in a pious all-black, this insect figure over seven feet tall. Tattoos on the backs of his hands, geometric lines connecting star patterns belonging to visions only and not of this realm. This dark nomad, his eyes shadowed beneath a broad hatbrim, their colour unknown, suspiciously kept to that redrimmed horizon. And never has he witnessed a place like this. No, not in his most lucid of dreams.
The shackled albino kept out of sight, behind, inside. At sundown the wagon rests and the child is fed enough to survive him, but this is not sundown. Night, in these vast stretches, may never come. And under the sun the boychild remains locked from wrists to ankles, pinned to the wagon’s inner walls. Steel cuffs the dull shade of storm clouds, portentous and foretelling of trials to come. Quiet now in these present moments. Not a word from the white one. Not a sound. Only the clinking of glass jars, the groan of wheels. Sweat dripping from chin to floor. This travelling ghost unreal, a desert mirage until living eyes fall upon it. Until one’s hand reaches forth and touches its skin.
Not a sound… Not a sound…
Godly hours inching headlong, immeasurable within this heat thick as water. The reddened waste all about sore as a maimed heart, a seared and calloused heart. No life out here and all time at a still. Visions in the heat. Dreamtime spirits awash in the mind’s eye. And what are these strange figures that play with the retinas? Where have they come from? What are they trying to tell you? Purgatory shifting inward and outward. A prehistoric bonebird spreads it’s wings across the high sun. It collapses, then burns. Flames tracing gasoline mythologies across the sky’s all-blue.
The Occult Priest peers over his shoulder, he speaks slow and eloquently to the child. Him being an outsider of high intellect. His voice weird and dreamlike and barely audible. The language imponderable to the minor, a garble of foreign sounds not yet belonging to the land. He whispers secrets of the underworld. This stranger has met with the Devil plenty. Has seen what he can do when given the opportunity. And how does one compete with the Devil? By taking up His own game, of course. Through trickery. Through temptation and torture. With language. Wisdom. Fear. Time. Control. For in a realm ruled by He, only the man who takes His gamble can outwit Him. He who wields His hand. His word. He who sees what He sees.
You will not certainly die. For God knows that when you eat from the tree your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
This wagon of foreign wood, crafted by hushed followers in secret ceremony. Biblical numerals
ו ו ו
hand-painted white at the rear. Gloomily creaking onward, its make a shadow so small and moving so slow upon that endless path beneath the high sun. The Occult Priest slackening the reigns and with his free hand adjusting his hat to offset the sun, the wide-brim domed at the crown. His tattooed skin a sickly white from where the sun does not reach. He whips at the leads and with a huff the horses clop unevenly, the road in all directions leading only towards that great horizontal divide. And no movement out there. No wind. All dust at a settle. Only the sun, the heat. The dead red dirt stretching to meet the cloudless sky endless and achingly blue. The Occult Priest crooks his head slightly to measure the pale child chained behind him, through the wagon’s peephole, his clerical eyes always hidden. He sees it there, the youngling, alien in its civil garb, eyes closed and pretending to sleep. Chained wrists raised like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but this thing… this thing is no man. This is but the symbol he had long predicted, the missing link to connect all that will meet it’s maker. To rule the gathered. To master the herd.
And through this land you shall journey, dark devotee of irregular creed. Through this clandestine realm which wakes only to greet the moon, the night’s light, the Yolngu’s Moon-man. Ngalindi.
Onward, dark traveller. Onward.
