One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (24 page)

But she was a woman and couldn’t understand. To be a Chief was to act swiftly and decisively. To be a Chief was to lose your hand in battle and tear out the heart of your enemy with the remaining hand.

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Doya was with me when we found the wreck.

She should have been in the caves with the women, but first she said she needed fresh air and then she whispered in my ear that she wanted to show me something in secret. When she leaned away from me, the condensation from her breath turned cold against my cheek.

The women indulged her because she was the daughter of the first whaler. I indulged her because soon, when we both turned fourteen, she would become my wife. A man’s clothes were made by his wife, and if he wanted to be comfortable on the hunt he had better keep on her good side.

Doya’s handiwork was magnificent, there was no doubt about that. She made clothes for her father, thick pelts of wallaby and possum put together so seamlessly that the garments might have been his natural skin. When he was drowned and his clothes were turned inside out so that he might find his way to the land of the dead, the colourful embroidery that had been hidden was exclaimed over by all the tribe.

I knew that when I died, the Lady would welcome me with open arms, if I wore tribute such as that.

“
What is it you want to show me?” I asked when we had put the caves behind us, the onshore winds reddening our cheeks and terns floating through the fog like children’s kites on invisible strings.

Doya brought out a skin and a stick of charcoal. I put out my hand to stop her; charcoal was used to plan out the patterns on the inside of fur cloaks before the embroidery was begun. That was not for men to see. But Doya shook her head. Her dark eyes were bright. There were tiny water droplets on her long lashes.

“
It is not an embroidery pattern, Toman. Look.”

I looked. She had drawn seven fish, point-down, and the outline of a single barnacled whale.

“
What is it?”

“
I had an idea,” she said. “In the silverfin season, the men go out in the great canoes. They return every three days to the store cave, and if the cave is not filled, they go out again. Every time they return and put out again, they risk the run past the rocks. What if they didn’t have to?”

I stared at the drawing. Slowly, ever so slowly, I realised what it was.

“
A message,” I said. “This is a message that is not spoken.”

“
One man in a skin boat could safely bring many messages to shore. The catch could be tallied by the women in the store cave. Signal fires could be kept burning until enough fish and whales to fill the store cave had been caught. Then the fishermen and whalers could return all together.”

“
If such a system had already been in place, your father might not have died.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she nodded.

I began to think of other uses for unspoken messages. Possibilities unfolded before me. Giddily, I realised this was another advantage for the Pale People that the Tall People did not have. If raiders came again, Doya’s tallies could be used to count and map the positions of enemy warriors.

“
This is very clever, my wife-to-be,” I said. “I will show it to my father.”

She hugged me, but very briefly, for we were of an age when hugs could turn quickly into something they should not. Not before we had been given the Lady’s blessing, anyway.

We crossed Snake Beech Stream by its luminous yellow lichen-covered stone bridge. Grazing hook-footed wallabies scattered before us as we descended the stone slabs of Southworn, heading for the beach of boulders below Stinging Cape. My father had led a border patrol the previous night and was due to return any time.

I saw the wooden beams before Doya did and my heart raced. Building materials were scarce, as the whales caught in the previous two seasons had been small and few in number. Driftwood was precious. We had no wish to provoke the Tall People by taking trees from their land. I seized Doya’s elbow and pointed to the half-submerged trunks.

“
It is part of a great canoe,” she cried, leaping ahead of me from boulder to boulder, calling for any fishermen that might be trapped in wreckage.

There was nobody.

We searched the wreck but found no sign of the canoe’s masters.

“
The beams are connected with ropes and these round things like coconuts with the ropes running through,” Doya said.

Together, we hauled a sheet of white cloth out of the waves. The weave was very fine. I’d seen nothing like it, not even from the flax looms of Moht.

“
By the Lady’s birth canal,” Doya swore. “Do you know what this is, Toman?”

Shocked by her language, I shook my head in silence.

“
It is like a kite. It is for catching the wind.”

We stared at each other, breathing quickly. For if the unspoken message was a great advantage, the means to cross wide, hostile seas was an even greater one. It was possible to trade furs for woven cloth in Moht, but though they had timber, we could not transport it home to Culwinna in skin boats.

With a great canoe such as the one suggested by the beams, we could.

Labouring in silence, we rearranged the beams and ropes and fabric on the beach, until they lay flat in the pattern in which they must have made when upright. It became clear that the wind must catch the white fabric and drive it like an albatross over the waves.

Doya made a drawing of what we had pieced together with her charcoal and skin.

“
Who could have built this, Toman?”

“
I do not know.”

But secretly, I was glad that none had survived. For if such a mighty people as these came to the lands of the Pale People, we would surely be helpless to repulse them.

Perhaps that was why the vengeful, bloodthirsty Lady had destroyed them before they could make landfall. Her eye was everywhere. I glanced over my shoulder at the disc of the sun and shivered.

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My father did not care about the ship.

Neither did he care for the drawings made by Doya.

“
That girl will carry your children, Toman,” he growled, “but her words carry no weight with the tribe. Kite canoes and foolish scribbles? You should have salvaged the wood for the tribe, not gawked at it until the tide carried it away.”

And he beat me until I could not stand, but the true pain that I felt was the pain of realising my father was lacking in vision and understanding. While I gasped and shuddered on the floor, I felt anger but also a terrible pity. The Lady had endowed me with gifts that she had not seen fit to give my poor, stupid father.

I realised I must learn more. I must leave the island. When I returned, it would be with such knowledge, such advantages for the Pale People that no rival tribe would threaten us ever again. If we were able to cross the South Swift Sea and bring back supplies from warmer, richer countries, we would never go hungry. There would be no more need for war.

In secret, I began to modify one of our wooden canoes. Doya helped me, but no matter how we tried, we could not replicate the windcatchers that we had seen. Our pitiful models were knocked over by the gentlest breezes. I stared furiously at their upturned hulls, at the water sliding off their blunt keels.

“
Don’t give up, Toman,” Doya urged. “We’ll make the next one heavier, the keel sharper and deeper.”

When summer came again, we were married. By the time we had made a model that remained upright, Doya was pregnant, and emptying her guts daily into the sea.

I walked about flushed with excitement. My father thought my impatience and anticipation was for the child growing in Doya’s belly, and so he did not suspect that my kite-rigged canoe was provisioned for two, ready to take my wife and me on the journey of a lifetime.

“
Is it time to go, Doya?” I whispered.

“
I can’t,” she moaned, and vomited on the floor. “Perhaps when the pregnancy is a little further along, Toman. They say the sickness wanes in the fourth month.”

The fourth month came and went. Doya began to bleed, erratically. The other women confined her to bed and would not let me see her.

I brooded in the place where I had hidden the kite-rigged canoe. It seemed to whisper with the Lady’s voice, promising vistas never before seen by man, by any eye but the Lady’s.

The translucent, resilient leather of the sails, though, was Doya’s. The weave of the spinifex ropes was also hers. I had cut the altered curve of the bow, but it had been Doya’s drawing that I’d followed. The canoe was, in truth, more her work than mine.

The baby was born, a girl. I named her Tooha, for my mother. My father made his disappointment at the baby’s sex known. Once the child had suckled, my father forced me to go to Doya and try to make another child immediately.

Doya was weak and bloody like a warrior returned from battle. I held her while she slept.

Days passed, and she remained too weak to walk. Once, in the blackness of night, my father’s scorn fresh in my mind, I touched Doya very gently while she was sleeping. She turned her face to me to be kissed, and I traced the contours of her fuller, more beautiful body. But then I brushed the place where she was torn when the baby emerged, and she shrieked and twisted away from me.

She cried, and I cried, too, not with remorse, exactly, but with frustration.

“
When will it be time to go, Doya?”

“
There are no other nursing mothers. Who would care for our child?”

I said nothing. A black hole was growing in my heart. We would have to wait until Tooha was old enough to be away from her mother. That would be another season, and another after that.

The seasons passed so slowly that it seemed a lifetime before I asked Doya again.

“
Is it time to go, now, Doya?”

“
I am with child,” Doya said, her face white.

It was then that I knew my father was right, that women were fragile, that they could never be like men, to make decisions and defend the tribe.

Doya could not come with me. I must go alone to the country of the shipmakers. So she had helped make the canoe. So what? If it weren’t for me, she would never have been allowed out of the caves in the first place.

When I set sail, there was nobody to see me.

Nobody but the Lady with her ferocious, burning eye.

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I was the son of a Chief, but they cut my hair.

They whipped me for not understanding their language. Afterwards, I lay in the blackness of the belly of the ship, salt crusted on my lips, calling for Doya in my delirium.

A woman held a leather cup to my mouth. The water was cold and sweet. Her name was Gawa, the Kestrel, but the boar-men on the ship called her Daisy.

“
They are not boars,” she said when she had taught me enough of the boar-men’s language for me to understand her and them. “They are pink and hairy but their blood is red, the same as ours.”

There was no disputing that, for the boar-men beat each other and cursed each other and cut each other as though they were at war with themselves instead of the sea. They had been prisoners, once, guilty of some crime and abandoned on an island, but they had built themselves the ship and planned to fill it with seal skins, some forty thousand of them.

It was a number I could scarcely comprehend. The Lady would never give permission for such vast colonies of fur seals to be killed, their meat abandoned to scavengers on land and at sea. Yet the schooner,
Nowhere
, pursued the stench of seal excrement like a liver-eater pursues a female in season, anchoring off countless unknown shores, sending the sealing gang out in a longboat made more cunningly than any I had seen before.
 

“
I wanted to learn to build ships the way the invaders made them,” I told Daisy, laughing hollowly. I knew I would never see Doya again.

“
That you’ll learn, soon enough,” Daisy answered, and she was right. Despite the cleverness with which it was put together, rough seas broke up the longboat. I was sent with the shipwright, Smith, and the other two slaves to cut local timber and learn the labour of forging iron nails and ship fittings over cruel coal fires. Daisy was never allowed on shore.

“
My home is that way,” Daisy whispered, her eyes fixed on a cluster of stars. “Six times, I’ve run from them. Six times they brought me back. But your home is the other way, isn’t it? You’re not as pale as they are, but you’re one of the Pale People. You’ve lived in the ice so long that you’ve started to become like it.”

“
Why won’t they let you go home?”

I knew the answer even as I asked. Daisy was wife to a different man every day and every night. They had her on the deck in the sun; they had her in the dark on the bundles of foul skins; they had her, bent over the wicker cages where kangaroos were kept for fresh meat. They had her, one after another, while she lay, glassy-eyed, as if dead. Even the other two slaves took their turn, grunting and thrusting and grinning to themselves afterward.

“
I can’t swim,” Daisy said. “Or I would go.”

“
There is the longboat. We could take it.”

“
We? When you are ashore, I am here. When you are here, the men sleep in the longboat. The hold is too full of seal skins. Soon, they will sail for Canton. Their fortune will be made, and we’ll be sold, and never see home again.”