Dark Horse (16 page)

B
rody’s description of the destruction and scrubbed-out sections of the mountainside was spot on. Sarah used his stories as a guide. They rode up through a silt-filled gully, sinking in it, each step slurping and sucking at Tansy’s hooves. In some ways the carnage aided Sarah and Tansy, without the drifts of topsoil and fallen leaves and wreckage Tansy would have nothing to help with her foothold. For the first section of the climb, the helicopter hummed above them, Sarah caught glimpses of it through the trees, then it rose and disappeared completely. She assumed it was due to the increasing winds. Treetops smashed and trembled. Branches rubbed and squeaked together. Sarah kept turning in the saddle to look down the slope behind her. It felt like the men were following her, she was yet to see any sign of them to confirm it. Proof might come in the way of a bullet. She might never know how close they came – dead before she knew what had hit her.

Sarah’s hope was that the police didn’t know the mountain. She prayed the men were on a different track, that the helicopter hadn’t seen her through the trees and hadn’t been able to direct the men on foot. Trappers trails made little sense to anyone but trappers. Their paths wandered off into dense vegetation, they looped, crossed over, and then inexplicably ended in amongst a patch of weeds. Trappers weren’t looking for the most direct route; they were looking to outfox the foxes. This line that Sarah was on was an exception to the rule – this track had the hut as its destination. And when a trapper did want to get somewhere specific, they did so efficiently.

As she climbed she could see how Brody, with his natural athleticism, had managed to make the climb in the rainstorm that day. He would have scaled the mountain rapidly, even in the downpour. She could imagine him doing it. His knee had been a constant hindrance in the week she’d known him, but it didn’t stop her appreciating that the guy could move. His voice was replaying in her ears. It was as though he were guiding her up the mountain. She had her own earpiece in, her own intel and advice, Brody’s.

Sarah patted and encouraged Tansy. The horse was doing all the work. Sarah was merely holding on. She relayed to Tansy some of the things Brody had said –
up through the second gully it flattens out.
She needed to make her horse relax. Sarah had to act as she usually did, and she often talked to Tansy during a ride. She had to keep the confusion out of her voice and the stress out of her body, or Tansy would tire more quickly and start to struggle. Animals were hard to fool though. They could detect emotions a mile off. There was only one way to trick an animal – Sarah had to believe the lie. Once she believed that they were just doing a particularly gruelling endurance ride, so would Tansy. Those police were the checkpoint people. That helicopter was a bit of hubbub on event day.

Tansy moved with extra strength and speed.

‘Good girl,’ Sarah said.

A cliff face sheltered them from the wind. The track led off to the left, where it used to meet with a kinder gradient up into the bush above, but here was evidence of one of those new ravines Brody had spoken of. Soft earth at the base of the cliff had been washed away, forming a deep, twenty-metre-wide chasm. They stood on the edge looking over at where the trail continued. There was no way to get across. The ravine sides were unstable. There was an overhang of crumbling earth, threatening to cave in with the slightest pressure. Sarah turned and walked Tansy to the right. Pure bush air, the kind Brody loved, blew along their sheltered path. There were no claggy notes in this breeze, it was the distilled scent of bark, dry brown leaves, pale new green ones, tall sharp shards of grass and the mulched-down mosses. She dragged it in, deep into her lungs. It reminded her of Brody. He’d come to this impasse too. He’d looked up into the rain, like she was looking up into the wind now, and squinted up at the cliff top. He’d thought he’d have to go back down the mountain. Then he’d remembered the ledge.

Sarah dismounted and led Tansy through the scrub. She looped the reins over a branch and she went back to put small logs and larger rocks over the hoof prints they’d left behind. Sarah scattered leaves and tossed about some branches and pushed up the grass they’d flattened. A bushman of any merit would laugh at her efforts to hide their tracks. Good thing there weren’t many bushmen left in the world. The four policemen following her were not like the police of old, those that had tracked Sid. She fussed around some more nevertheless, arranging bushes and plumping up squashed moss. It was a chance for Tansy to catch her breath. Sarah took a moment too. Although the backpack was padded, the jack had been digging into Sarah’s spine. Her lower back was bruised and sore. Her neck muscles were burning. She sat the backpack in the grass and crouched beside it. She rearranged the heavy items and found her drink.

Tansy nudged her.
Why are we stopping? The race isn’t over is it?

‘No, a little bit to go yet.’

Sarah led Tansy onto shaly ground. They pushed through some bushes that closed together nicely after them. Wind blasted in their faces and pummelled the front of their bodies. A vast and untamed back view of the ranges stretched before them. They were on a rocky ledge at the top of Ten Tower Heights. A skyscraper drop lay beyond the ledge. At the bottom were the blackened tree trunks from last year’s fires and the green regrowth foliage. The ledge continued around the mountainside. It was wide enough for them, just – each step they would be confronted by the fall.

Brody had edged his way out onto this precipice in the rain, felt his way along the cutting, crawled in some places. During one of their talks he’d told her about it, about the rain, and how it had been tumbling like a waterfall from the overhang above, pouring over him and over the ledge, forceful water, pulling at him, pushing him, wanting to take him with it. Light had been fading. Too late he’d realised how treacherous the pass was in the storm; turning back would have been as risky as going forward once he was out on the ledge. It would be the same for Sarah and Tansy: once they’d committed to going, they had to keep on going; the lip was too narrow to turn around on. Brody said he had never before been so afraid. His life had flashed before his eyes. Once safe and off the ledge, in the bush again, the experience had remained with him. He said he’d sat down, weak and shaken, and asked himself –
who have I got?
Who was the one person he could call his own? He said it was then that he’d realised what being alone meant. It wasn’t that he wanted to race down off the mountain and rush off in search of Miss Right, it was that he had sudden insight into what his life might be like if he never found anyone to love.

In the wind the ledge was frightening too – any conditions, any time it would have been – the air was like the water, it got in behind them, pushed them and pulled them. Sarah wrapped the reins around her wrist; she was conscious of her light body weight in comparison to Tansy’s, and thought if she was swept off her feet, Tansy might be heavy enough to hold her until she regained her balance. Sarah tried to block the image of her and Tansy tumbling through the air, a horse and rider free-falling beside one another. She couldn’t stop the pictures playing out within her mind though – the crash of Tansy’s body through the blackened branches of the trees below, the brutality of the hoofed animal snagging and catching in the charred limbs of mountain ash, half alive for a few minutes, moving, head hanging, tail and mane streaming down, while Sarah’s human form was, for some reason, a less foreign object hurling from the sky and landing in the treetops, a hand that could grip a branch maybe? Like a monkey could. A body that could climb down, if not broken, haemorrhaging and dislocated at every joint.

They made it around and off the ledge, into the steep bush again. No time to contemplate a lonely life like Brody had, they didn’t pause. They found their way back to the cliff. Now at the top, they walked along the edge of it, looking down at the ravine below. Sarah could see parts of the mountainside they’d ridden up. She could see the swat team moving through the bush.

The four men were spread out, climbing, bent over and grabbing onto saplings or whatever they could to help them. Their sleeves were rolled up, and under the helmets their faces were shiny with sweat. A tough day at the office. Or maybe they enjoyed it? Sarah reined Tansy to a stop. She stayed seated in the saddle and watched as the men drew nearer to the cliff base. The wind stripped her of any chance of hearing their conversation. They came together and stood where Sarah had, back from the ravine edge. There they discussed their options, and looked around them, at a loss as to where Sarah had vanished to. One man went off looking for her tracks. The other three caught their breath, resting with their hands on their hips. The man looking for her tracks walked in circles. He looked up at the top of the cliff and Sarah quickly reined Tansy a few steps back. When she peered over again, he’d turned back to the other men and was pointing off in the wrong direction.

B
rody had not once touched her horse. Sarah had never stepped down from the van to find him in Tansy’s stable, befriending and patting her mare. He dealt with Tansy exactly as he should have – with kind matter-of-factness. He was aware of Tansy and the things she needed, but his attentiveness ended there. Sarah liked it. He showed respect. If his dog had been alive, she wouldn’t have beckoned it to her.

And Brody was a great kisser. Not as flippant or irrelevant as it may seem: when she’d accused him of not telling her the big picture, she’d been underplaying the kissing – everything he couldn’t say out loud, he said then. Kissing was his secret conversation, where words didn’t complicate things, intricacies were there, contradictions made perfect sense, complex, immoral, dirty, idealistic, romantic, he locked lips and told her everything, he railed against the norms, asked her to jump on-board with him. She had – kissing him back and telling him all the things she found hard to put into words.

Sarah’s cataloguing of Brody’s positive attributes and her justifying of her behaviour might have continued, but the ground suddenly levelled out.

Tansy was taken aback too, having barely made it up a rocky embankment, hooves clattering and a groan emerging from deep down inside her, the veins of her face popping out, and then to stagger forward into soft soil and a level stand of grey gums. Horse and rider straightened their bodies into a taller pose. They stopped and eyed the bush and the even ground. Had they made it? Sarah knew that the hut and camping ground were a little way off yet, but was the climb over? Tansy was blowing. She was foaming at the mouth, dripping froth. She lifted her front leg as they stood there and touched the ground with her hoof, before placing it back down. Sarah leaned forward in the saddle. Tansy’s legs had taken a battering over the last and rockiest section of the ride. There were scratches down her neck and sides, nicks in her coat, a bloody, bruised patch on her shoulder. Her mare wheezed. ‘Hey.’ She egged Tansy gently forward. ‘Walk it out.’

The ground they’d travelled up sloped away behind them. Sarah looked back piecing together how they’d scaled it, how Tansy had.

‘You’re okay,’ Sarah told her horse, concerned that in fact she wasn’t. Sarah placed her hand on Tansy’s neck and felt the heat. ‘Easy now, nearly there.’

The gusting wind would help to cool her mare.

They cantered at a steady pace. Every kilometre Sarah changed her mind: she went from thinking Brody was in the hut, to thinking he wasn’t. One kilometre closer she told herself the place would be swarming with cops, the next she told herself that none of them could have climbed the road in the time she had made it up, and with no sound of the chopper it was likely she’d arrive at the clearing and find herself alone with Brody. Her expectations lifted, fell, rattled around inside her. Her back was incredibly tender under the jack. Her shoulders ached.

Before the border of blackwood trees the trappers track petered out. With the bush swaying, any sounds from the camping ground were obscured. Sarah ducked low on Tansy’s back and they squeezed in between the low-growing branches and thick foliage of the blackwoods. Gauging from the position of the afternoon sun she’d been gone much longer than two hours.

Another slip, a bigger one, was in front of the border of trees. The bog that she’d dragged Brody from was now a hole in the earth. The log he’d sat on was covered in mud at the bottom of the pit. The ground had fractured, wetly, off from one side of the hole. As they slow cantered the perimeter of the camping ground, Sarah came to see that the earth was slipping in two slabs – above the hut, and this soggy tear above the shed. This second slip ran through the centre of the bush helipad. The police would not have been able to land the helicopter. The open space was torn and gaping, like the stitching on an infected wound come undone. Dirty water seeped out. There was no sign of anyone, or that anyone had been here since she left.

She rode with increasing speed to where the camping ground was firm. Sarah kicked Tansy into a faster canter along the bridging finger of land, followed it to the shed.

The hut chimney had not collapsed. Wind raced through the clearing as Sarah dismounted. The chimney looked as though it was tilting back and forth, hopefully an illusion created by the sky moving behind it. Grass tipped hard one way and then hard the other. Sarah hurriedly led Tansy into the stable. She slid the pole across. The toppling sound of a rock, the crash of it onto tin reminded Sarah of the rolling thunder on Christmas Day. The bang was an alarm warning Sarah to move faster. She took the backpack off and ran with it in her arms.

He didn’t hear her coming. Wind was whistling through the gaps in the fallen hut, it was flapping the loose iron and wobbling the torn sheets of plywood. Another loosened chimney stone toppled and landed with a smack on the tin. But it wasn’t the wild noise that prevented him hearing her arrival: Brody didn’t hear her coming because he had put himself into a meditative trance. His eyes were closed, his back was pressed against the stonework of the fireplace, as though his shoulders and backward pressure might be all that was holding the chimney up, and he was murmuring to himself. The ceiling had sunk so low that he couldn’t wear the helmet; his neck was twisted, his head was on an angle; he could barely move.

As she picked her way closer she heard that he wasn’t in prayer, he was muttering the lyrics to a song. She crawled to him and couldn’t help but smile; he was grittily singing country tunes. When a third stone landed with an iron crack on the tin directly above his head, he stopped singing, listening for more falling rocks, braced for the cave-in, teeth bared, nose screwed up, snarling dog-like, in what looked to be intense hatred for the wind, the hut, the ceiling bearing down on him, the way the conditions were torturing him, one inch lower at a time, one stone at a time, one gust at a time, then he continued singing, out of tune.

‘Hey.’

His eyes snapped open.

‘Told you I’d come back.’

Five pumps of the jack was all it took. He pulled his foot free, touched it, wriggled it, and then crabbed sidewards on the stone hearth. It looked as though he had spent the hours trapped working out exactly where he’d place his feet and what he’d climb over the moment he was able to. He stopped.

‘Sarah, leave it.’

She was getting the backpack.

‘Leave it!’ he screamed.

As well as the wind blasting and the stones falling, timber beams were groaning, there was the sound of trickling water beneath the floorboards.

‘Come on,’ he said, incredulous.

They were down to minutes, seconds. The ground beneath the hut had turned to liquid mud. If the wind didn’t topple the chimney, the shifting earth soon would. Brody grabbed her by the wrist and yanked her with him.

‘There’s no time!’

The left-behind items played on Sarah’s mind as they scurried up out of the rubble . . . that was until the screech of twisting timber filled her ears, the tumble of stones and scrape of tin. She felt the listing of the timbers and iron – the sea
was
beneath them. Earth swelled like an ocean, debris pitched like rafts in the waves. In the rush and panic Sarah’s thoughts were suddenly collected and composed. She thought about how the more life that was crammed into any given moment the less real it became. Mysticism swirled in the fluid soil, and in the way one second was time enough to survive, two seconds time enough to be safe, every single movement mattered, a blink had importance, a breath, a step was immense.

On the grass, Brody tripped and staggered. He began crawling.

Sarah was crawling beside him.

They dragged themselves up onto the solid land above the slip. Brody collapsed onto his back in the grass. One of his hands rested on his bare chest, the other hand was beside him. In the scramble to safety he’d lost his left boot, the one Sarah had loosely laced. His headlamp was around his neck. Dust clogged his nostrils. He coughed and cleared his throat. Dirt was in his lashes and it streaked darkly from the corners of his eyes. He lifted his hand from off his chest and placed it gently over his face. His eyebrows pinched together. He began to cry.