*
They march across a tableland of red sandstone studded with clusters of ironwood and paperbark trees. The stone is cracked and layered, forming natural steps in places and wide slabs that look like theatre stages where Greta Maze could perform all five acts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Molly hopes Greta Maze made it out of the maze. She hopes she’s on her way back to Darwin now. I never should have mentioned the gold pan map to her, she thinks. I never should have dragged her through the darkness of Candlelight Creek. Never dragged her through the colourful wonders of the floodplains.
Yukio, Molly says to herself. She wishes Yukio Miki had never fallen from the sky. And if she has a stone heart inside her, it’s fracturing and cracking in two. It is useless to her now. Rock is not hard. Rock is brittle. Rock is weak.
‘Rapids,’ Molly says. She hears them first. Then she sees them.
They have come to an open expanse of rugged sandstone cut deep by two parallel rivers tumbling down from higher up the range on Molly’s left, their white waters rushing through narrow gorges towards the eastern edge of the plateau. Molly steps towards the first gorge and feels the spray from the water slamming against rocks. The gorge is about fifteen yards wide and there is only one place where it can be crossed: a thin makeshift bridge made of four slender eucalypt trunks tied together with thick vine. The bridge is not fixed in place, its ends simply resting on the rock, and with the rapids roaring no more than six feet below them, the tree trunks have turned slimy and black and slippery. Molly walks to the start of the bridge and turns around to look tentatively at Aubrey.
‘Walk,’ he says, not feeling the need, yet, to point the handgun at Molly.
Molly steps carefully onto the bridge. She puts her arms out to balance herself and she shifts some weight onto her left leg to test the integrity of the structure, which tilts and bends even under her modest weight. But she walks on, boot after boot after boot, and the tree trunks bear her weight. Halfway across, though, she makes the mistake of looking down and she is momentarily transfixed by the rapids’ power, the deadly confusion of all that pressure and all that water and all that rock in a meeting that has lasted millennia. Her legs wobble briefly, but she looks up and focusses on the end of the bridge and her balance is restored. She’s so frightened and in such a hurry to get off the tree trunk platform that she shuffle-runs across the last six feet or so. Reaching solid ground, she exhales and closes her eyes before turning round to watch Aubrey make his unsteady way across.
She asks things of the water. Take him down. Take him down, down, down into the black. She watches him step awkwardly to the centre of the bridge then she looks down at her end of it. She could heave that end up and tip the whole bridge into the water and Aubrey Hook would be tossed in with it. He would be sucked over the side of the range and his shadow would never cross her light again.
‘Get back,’ Aubrey calls from the bridge, pointing his gun at Molly. ‘Right back.’
Molly retreats as Aubrey advances to the end of the bridge.
‘Walk,’ he says.
*
It’s a short walk across stone to the second river, where the bridge is made of just three eucalypts but the crossing is only ten yards wide. The gravedigger girl steps carefully across it. On the other side the plateau ends at a narrow sandstone promontory. It’s oval and featureless. There is nothing here. There is nothing but rock and air and sheer drops on all sides. To her left she can look over the edge and see the rivers dropping down the side of the range then merging and running beneath a majestic rock arch. To her right she can see another river system being sucked into a narrow valley that, she thinks, must push the water on down the range so that it can end with a curtain-call bow at one of those spectacular waterfalls that spills into the kind of crystal pools that exist only in dreams – dreams that unfold in colour far above the grey sky.
And from that grey sky the lightning strikes again and the wild and terrifying grandeur of this strange place wraps itself around the gravedigger girl. The dream of it. A paradise for her light and for her black shadow. A city of elaborate, ancient rock architecture threaded by rivers that twist and turn and dive deep into black holes. The promontory feels like the central point of all this natural wonder and she turns in a circle to drink in the cave dwellings she can see on a distant cliff face, the rainbow-coloured and red and black velvet birds flying in circles around her. These birds call as if they are welcoming her, as if they are congratulating her for coming so far into the deep country. She breathes deep and she smells the rapids and she senses the earth shifting deep, deep, deep underground and she feels the electric air that turns like this only when it’s about to storm in the north of a raw southern land. And the Lightning Man in the sky mansion bends the rods down from his ears and the forks of his magic seem to strike directly above Molly Hook’s head and the wind blows her hair across her face and it blows the hemline on her sky-blue dress and the grey sky wants to weep so hard that the gravedigger girl can feel it in her cold bones. And she looks ahead across the rough surface of the narrow promontory and she can see now where she must go. So she starts walking towards the
