Across The Wall Part 9

Not that anyone would want to turn off Lisden's field. Or banish it, since no one really knew what made the Fields occur. Some said mirrors in the sky, and others fire or ice elementals mixed together.

Kilman certainly didn't want to change his oasis. Despite being obscure, it was only eighteen days' sail from the Republic, and there was a growing desire among the wealthy citizens for travel and well-regulated adventure.

Lisden would perfectly meet the demand of this new industry. In his imagination he saw hostelries spring up all along the coast, and houle gardens. There would be khat netting parties and Kranu hunts with steam harpoons. The lemon groves would give way to a dalliance maze, where masked frolics could be conducted, with refreshments and prophylactics sold at exorbitant prices.

Margalletta, sharp eared and sharp eyed, heard him whispering to himself, and saw the thick mouth move, saliva wetting the lower lip, as if he were about to moisten his finger to count money. She no longer felt sorry for him. Instead, a slight twinge of alarm caused her to open the power venturi further and accelerate rather violently out of a turn. Kilman didn't really own the island, but he thought he did, and to such a man, that might be enough to eventually make it so.

'There is a lookout at the top of the mountain,' Margalletta announced, as she slowed to negotiate another corner. 'You will be able to survey the whole of the island from there . . . the entirety of your realm.'

'My realm . . .' Kilman repeated, his chin thrusting out and up, right hand once again thrusting between the third and fifth gleaming bronze jacket b.u.t.ton. 'My conquest!'

Margalletta suppressed a shrug of distaste. 'Conquest' indeed! The man was more unpleasant than she had thought, and clearly not an object of pity. He was also dangerous. Kilman's wealth gave him a weapon-and he lacked both the morality and the sense to use it wisely.

Still, by calling the island his conquest, he had clarified Margalletta's role.

To have a conquest, one must conquer an enemy. If he had truly conquered the island, she would be his enemy. Now, though he only thought he'd conquered the island, it might still become a reality. Margalletta would be his enemy then, so she might as well think and act like an enemy now. Logic was not her strong point, but she rarely needed it, having intuition and common sense instead.

'This road will have to be widened,' Kilman p.r.o.nounced a few minutes later, as they bounced around yet another bend. 'At least four lanes. Or maybe we could get one of those cable-car things . . . you know.'

Margalletta did know. Unlike most of the islanders, her parents had dragged her around many parts of the globe, believing travel to be far superior to a school education.

One of her most unpleasant memories was of being stranded for hours in an antique clockwork cable car, swaying a hundred span above an icy creva.s.se, the wind screeching through a gap under the ill-fitting door. It had taken everyone on board six hours to rewind the mechanism, taking it in turns. She still had nightmares about cold, heights, and a slowly turning key.

Her silence did not dissuade Kilman from further musings. A few corners on, with perhaps a third of the mountain still to come, he suddenly sat up like a spring-wound Archimedes jumping out of a model bathtub.

'A railway! It could circle all the way around, with stops every forty-five degrees of circ.u.mference. Viewing platforms. Bars. A summit restaurant. The Kilman Express.'

'A railway?' asked Margalletta. 'There was one once. A clockwork rail, to take the tailings from the glazmium mine.'

'Glazmium! No one told me about glazmium!' Kilman squawked. Fear and greed were evenly balanced in his voice, but the scales were teetering. Margalletta decided to give them a push.

'Oh, there's no glazmium now,' she said brightly. 'Only the waste from the mine. We used it as infill for the breakwater. And the village. Not to mention this road.'

Kilman was silent for a while; then Margalletta saw him take out a slightly soiled dove from his right sleeve and shake it awake.

It was one of the new paper-and-blood doves, short-lived but swift. He whispered to it with his habitual secrecy and cast it out the window. The wind shook it into life and it grew plump, winging down to the waiting ship.

Margalletta drove with newfound glee. She had defeated him so easily, with a lie about as digestible as a logy Lisden haddock.

On the next corner, the dove was back. Obligingly it flew into Kilman's lap and expired, becoming paper again, with a message shining wet and red upon the sheet.

'The breakwater and the village?' murmured Kilman, reading the message. 'Well, I guess it must have been mighty low-grade glazmium. My Bonesman on the Gad Gad says his skull hardly chatters. Was it buried a long time ago, Miss Margalletta?' says his skull hardly chatters. Was it buried a long time ago, Miss Margalletta?'

The unexpected counterattack is the most effective. Margalletta flinched, nodded halfheartedly, and sat up straighter, taller by several inches. Kilman disgusted her now and, being cleverer than she thought, frightened her more too. For his part, Kilman felt her shadow fall across him and increase as she stretched. His previous good feeling, dissipated by the glazmium scare, ebbed further. He was tired of the road, tired of the car, and tired of its driver.

'How long till we get to the d.a.m.n top?' he asked, querulous, as if he'd missed his breakfast by several meals. 'And what's there anyway?'

'I believe I mentioned the view,' Margalletta replied stiffly. 'It is most spectacular from the lighthouse.'

'Lighthouse! Why didn't you say so? I love lighthouses!' He did, too, though Kilman had never actually bothered to set foot in one. He liked pictures of lighthouses, and the idea of lighthouses. The only thing wrong with lighthouses was that they cost money instead of making it. That was why they were the natural monopoly of governments. In Kilman's worldview everything that cost money and produced no revenue was the business of the Republic.

He was unaware that the Lisden lighthouse was a great revenue producer. It had begun life as the folly of a Lirugian colonial governor, grown to maturity under a Hamallish one, and been b.a.s.t.a.r.dised by a Treton, who used it as gull shooting platform. But as far as anyone living could remember, its main purpose was as a giant trellis for pa.s.sion-fruit vines, and its biannual crop was flavoursome, heavy, and lucrative.

To Kilman, at first sight, it just looked as if it were painted a particularly rich green. He didn't really see it anyway, for his imagination had added gas flares, spelling out KILMAN'S OBSERVATORIUM in letters of fire. It would be huge, a landmark for all the visitors to the island, seen from every angle, the backdrop of every organised and expensive activity . . .

He didn't even notice the vines as they parked next to the entrance, and Margalletta jumped out to unlock the lighthouse door.

3. DEPARTURE.

'The lighthouse is sixty-four merads, or 189 spans high,' Margalletta said, as she trod purposefully up the winding stairs. 'There are 277 steps, of varying height, due to the different building techniques employed and different builders over the seventy-seven hundred years it was under construction.'

'Where's the altivator?' asked Kilman, chuckling to show it was a joke. He knew about lighthouses. He had open-cut diagrams of them. Books with plans. A snow dome featuring a famous lighthouse on some rock in the Boratic Ocean. He forgot its name.

Margalletta led the way at a cracking pace, rejoicing at the wheezing noises behind her, praying he would have a heart attack. Not that she believed in a single G.o.d, though most of the islanders did. Just in prayer. It was good for you, even if it didn't work.

Kilman wheezed, but it was only cosmetic. No heart attack was in the offing, and none eventuated. They both reached the top breathless and red-faced, but with arteries intact and pounding. Margalletta opened the door, pulled-back hair encountering the wind and defeating it aided by a large black comb and rigid preparation that morning. Kilman's toupee, less disciplined, rose from his scalp and flapped like a hatch on a hinge, till he clapped one hand upon it and pushed past Margalletta in an urgent, embarra.s.sed rush.

She waited for a few minutes, then closed the door and went down. Fortunately, the steam car was on the opposite side from the balcony door, so there would be no need for further panel work. The pa.s.sion fruit hadn't fared so well, as Margal-letta discovered when she walked around-the vines were all torn away near the top. There was a particularly nasty bare patch, just where the balcony railing would have been, if only the Treton governor hadn't dismantled it for being Hamallish and getting in his field of fire.

Curiously enough, one of Mr. Kilman's blood-and-paper doves had fallen out of his other sleeve and seemed unharmed by the fall. Margalletta picked it up and whispered into its ear, breath bringing it slowly to life.

'h.e.l.lo. Is that Mr. Kilman's ship? I'm afraid there's been an accident. I gave Mr. Kilman some bad news about his purchase, and he . . . he . . .'

Margalletta released the dove into the wind and let them imagine her sobbing. She watched it fly down to the golden ship and she laughed, laughed madly, the sound twining up around the lighthouse like the vines and off into the bright-blue sky of summer.

THE HILL.

INTRODUCTION TO THE HILL.

' THE HILL' WAS WRITTEN FOR AN interesting international publishing scheme, in which a bunch of publishing houses in Europe, and Allen & Unwin in Australia decided to simultaneously publish the same collection of short stories in English and four European languages, with the theme of the new millennium.

I was one of two Australian writers invited to partic.i.p.ate, and I wrote 'The Hill' in an attempt to try to tell an overtly Australian story-something I'm not known for, since nearly all my work is set in imagined worlds. This proved to be somewhat problematical, particularly when in the first drafts of 'The Hill,' I made the major characters part Aboriginal and tried to interweave a backstory involving Aboriginal myth and beliefs about land. I knew this would be difficult to pull off, but I didn't expect my Australian publisher's reaction, which was basically that, as a white Australian, I simply couldn't use either Aboriginal characters or Aboriginal myth. My initially simplistic att.i.tude was that, as a fantasy writer, I should be able to draw on anything from anywhere for inspiration; that I could mine any history, myth, or religion.

After some discussions with both the publisher and an Aboriginal author, I realised that the issue was more complex, and that many Aboriginal people would feel that I was not inspired by their myth but was appropriating something valuable, one of the few things of value that hadn't been taken over in the process of colonisation. It would be particularly hurtful because, as an Australian, I should know that some Aboriginal people would consider this yet another theft.

So the fantasy element of 'The Hill,' inspired by some Aboriginal myths, was removed, and I rewrote it in a more straightforward way. However, given the constraints of the multi-lingual publishing schedule, and some misunderstanding along the way, the original version of the story is the one that got translated and is in the Norwegian, French, Spanish, and German editions. Only the English-language version is different.

I'm still not quite sure where I stand on the matter of allowable use of myth, legend, and history, save that if I do decide at some point to seek inspiration from the rich traditions and lore of the Australian Aboriginal people, I will ask permission first.

THE HILL.

ROWAN SNIFFED AS THE AWFUL HOSPITAL smell met him at the front door of the Home. A mixture of antiseptic and illness, hope and despair, churned by air-conditioning that was always slightly too cool or slightly too hot.

He ignored the reception desk, which was easy, since no one was there, and went straight up the stairs, leaping two at a time, unconscious of the old eyes that watched him, remembering when steps were not beyond them.

His great-grandfather's room was the first on the left after the nurses' station, but no one was there. Rowan stuck his head around to make absolutely sure, then continued on to the television room at the end of the hall. He slowed as he approached, reluctant as ever to see the group of old people who suffered so much from Alzheimer's or senile dementia that they couldn't speak or move themselves, so they just sat watching the TV. Or at least had their faces pointed toward the set. Rowan wasn't sure they saw anything.

They were there, but his great-grandfather wasn't. Sister Amy was helping one of the old ladies sit back up. She saw Rowan and gave him a smile.

'Come to see your great-grandpop, then?' she asked. 'He's out in the garden.'

'Thanks,' said Rowan. 'Is he . . . ?'

'He's having one of his good days,' said Amy. 'Bright as a b.u.t.ton, bless him. I only hope I do as well at his age. If I even get that far, of course. Now, up we go, Mrs. Rossi!'

Mrs. Rossi dribbled all over Amy's shoulder as she was lifted up. Rowan mumbled a good-bye and fled, wanting to get out into the fresh air as quickly as possible. He was glad Great-grandad was having a good day. It would make everything much easier. On his bad days, the old man wouldn't talk, or possibly couldn't talk-and he didn't seem to hear anything either.

But as Amy said, he was still a wonder, even on his bad days. When he wanted to talk, he talked intelligently and clearly. When he wanted to walk, he walked, with the aid of two canes. But he was most remarkable for his age. Albert Salway was the oldest person in the Home, the oldest person in the city, the oldest in the state, maybe even the oldest in the country. He had been born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and now he was only a day away from the beginning of the twenty-first. He was 108 years old and was actually Rowan's great-great-grandfather. But he always said that was too many greats, and anyway, he preferred Rowan to call him Bert.

He was sitting on the bench next to the roses, watching them sway slightly in the breeze, petals ruffling. As always when he went outside, he was properly dressed in moleskin trousers, a flannel shirt, tweed coat, and hat. His two blackwood canes were propped up against the bench, their bra.s.s handles bright in the sun.

'h.e.l.lo, Bert,' said Rowan. He sat down and they shook hands, the old man's light and brittle in the boy's, the pressure of his fingers very light, their skin barely touching. Bert smiled, showing his gold tooth on one side and the gap on the other. Apart from the gap and the gold incisor, he still had all his own teeth. Bert had outlived four dentists who couldn't understand the healthiness of his mouth, and many more doctors who couldn't believe his age and condition.

'You've got troubles, my boy,' said Bert. 'I can see it in your face. Is it school?'

'No,' replied Rowan. He coughed and cleared his throat, uncertain of how to go on.

'Hmmm,' said Bert. 'Something you don't know how to tell me. Is it a girl?'

'No,' said Rowan, embarra.s.sed. 'It's Dad.'

'Ah,' said Bert, letting out a whistling sigh. 'What's my great-grandson done now?'

'He's . . . he's selling the Hill,' Rowan blurted out. He knew he had to tell Bert, but he was afraid the news would hurt the old man badly. Maybe even kill him.

Bert stared at him, his sharp brown eyes seeming to look through Rowan and off into the distance. To the Hill, Rowan thought. The Hill was all that remained of their family property. A great saddleback of earth and stone, crowned by a forest of ancient gum trees, lording over the flat farmland around it.

The Hill was the centre and the most important part of the 5,000 acres that had belonged to the Salways since 1878.

'He can't sell that land,' said Bert finally.

'But he has!' exclaimed Rowan. 'I heard him telling Mum about it last night. He's getting three million dollars and we're all moving to Sydney. But I don't want to go. And I don't want the Hill to go, either.'

'He can't sell that land,' repeated the old man. He started to struggle up, his crooked, shrunken hands taking up the canes. 'Give me a hand, Rowan.'

'What are you going to do?' asked Rowan anxiously.

'We're going to pack my stuff,' said Bert, leaning forward onto his canes, Rowan steadying him as he took his first step. 'Then we're going to move back to the Hill. I'll need you to get a few things, Rowan. It's been a few months since I've been up there.'

'You've been up there that recently?' asked Rowan, almost letting go of him in surprise. 'How? I mean, Dad wouldn't even take me this year. I had to cycle last time, and it took three hours. He shouted at me when I got back and told me to keep away from it.'

'Taxi,' said Bert. He didn't have a lot of breath to talk when he was walking.

They had a bit of trouble getting out of the Home, but Bert had known the Matron-or Guest Health Services Director, as she was now called- for a long time. They spoke together briefly, then she even phoned for the taxi herself.

'Make sure he doesn't get wet or cold,' she said to Rowan as she helped Bert into the car. 'Good luck, Bert.'

They stopped on the way to get some food, bottled water, blankets, and kerosene for the old stove in the shack. Bert had quite a lot of money with him. Old fifty-dollar notes, the paper ones that were replaced by the smaller polymer variety years before. The checkout girl didn't want to take them at first, particularly from Rowan, but when he showed her Bert waiting in the taxi and explained that he didn't like the 'new money,' she relented.

It took half an hour by taxi to get to the Hill. Rowan had expected the gate to be locked and had worried about the climb up the track for Bert, but it was not only unlocked, it was open. The track looked a bit rough, but the taxi driver said it wasn't his cab so he wasn't worried.

'Besides,' he added, 'if a big Mercedes like that can make it up, we can.'

He pointed through the windscreen, and Rowan and Bert saw that there was a very large dark-blue Mercedes parked next to the shack. Two men were standing next to it. Rowan recognised his father and felt the lump of anxiety that had been in his stomach all day flower into panic. He didn't recognise the other man, the one in the suit and glittering sungla.s.ses.

'Dad's here already!' exclaimed Rowan.

'Not for long,' said Bert. 'Just park up next to the shack, will you, mate?'

Rowan felt himself instinctively crouching down as they approached and both men looked over to see who it was. Both looked puzzled; then his dad's face bloomed red as anger sent the blood swirling around his nose and cheeks. He stormed over and yanked the door open, pulling Rowan out by his shirt collar. 'What the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l are you doing, son?' he shouted.

'He's helping me,' said Bert, who was being helped out the other door by the taxi driver. 'Let him go, Roger. Then you and your friend have got two minutes to get off my property.'

'Your property?' said the man in the suit, smiling. He looked at Roger. 'I don't think so.'

Bert laughed, his gold tooth gleaming.

'Another smart a.r.s.e from the city who hasn't done his homework,' he said. 'Perhaps I should introduce myself. I'm Albert Salway.'

'Salway?' said the man. 'Salway!'

He looked at Roger Salway, the smile and his relaxed slouch gone. He was angry too, now.

'What's his relationship to you, Roger? Does he have any claim over this land?'

'He's my great-grandfather,' muttered Roger, not meeting the other man's eyes and not answering his question either.

'It's my land,' repeated Bert. 'Has been for nearly seventy years. And like I said, you have one minute to get off my property.'

'Well, we seem to have got off on the wrong foot,' said the businessman, trying to smile again. 'Let me introduce myself. I'm John Ragules, representing FirstLaunch s.p.a.ce Services. We plan to build a satellite launching facility in this area-a s.p.a.ceport. We need this hill, for . . . well, we call it the ski launch component.'

Rowan listened in astonishment. This was the first he'd heard of the Hill being used to help launch satellites. His fascination with s.p.a.ce was almost as great as his love for the Hill, and for a moment he found himself thinking of how fantastic it would be to have a s.p.a.ceport close to home. Then he remembered that they would be moving to Sydney anyway, and that the s.p.a.ceport could be built only if he lost the Hill.

'The Hill's not for sale,' said Bert. 'Plenty of other places you can build your s.p.a.ceport, Mr. Ragules. Places already ruined.'

He leaned on one cane and gestured with the other, a wide sweep that encompa.s.sed all the huge grey gum trees that stood around like an army of giants, whispering in the wind.

'There's trees here that are hundreds of years old,' said Bert. 'Animals that have fled here from the farms and the city. Birds you don't find anywhere else anymore. There are stories here, in the stone and the red dirt, in the bark and the leaves, in the ants and the spiders, the wallabies and the kookaburras. You build a s.p.a.ceport and they will all be gone, forever. You've got thirty seconds now. Roger, you can hand over the key to the gate as well.'

'Like h.e.l.l I will,' said Roger. He stormed over to the old man and seemed about to shake him, till he saw the taxi driver watching with an unblinking stare, the tattoo of a snake on his forearm twitching up and down. Instead he bent over and whispered, 'We can sell this place for three million dollars, Bert! Three b.l.o.o.d.y million! We'll never get offered that kind of money again.'

'The land isn't for sale,' Bert said. 'We don't need a s.p.a.ceport here, anyway!'