A HAZARD OF HEARTS by Frances Burke Read Free Book Online

father’s death she’d managed
to keep going, but now the last of her courage was seeping away like grains of
sand in an hourglass.
    Oppressed by the awful loneliness of the bush,
she listened to the night sounds and reasoned that she had nothing to fear. There
were no nocturnal predators at large in Australia. Well, none larger than a
rat. Not even the wild dogs, the dingoes, prowled after dark, did they? No, she
was sure they didn’t. Which left only one kind of hunter, man himself. The
blacks. But they were afraid of the night spirits. Surely she’d heard that.
    At last she slept, fitfully, wakening to a
blazing dawn and the chorus of birds high in the trees, and a terrible hollowness
within. She struggled up onto a log to tighten the bootlaces she’d loosened the
night before. Light-headed from lack of food, she licked the dew from gum
leaves. It was not sufficient to quench her thirst, yet something. She winced as
she ran her tongue over cracked lips. A search of the scrubby growth beneath
the trees disclosed a few flowering plants but no fruits or berries. She
tightened her belt and, because there was nothing else to do, set off down the rutted
track, hoping it would soon begin to slope downhill towards the river. Would it
be salt, so far up from the mouth? More likely brackish. If she could find it,
she’d drink it.
    But as the hours passed the track stayed level. She
didn’t dare leave it, despite the fierce heat, for fear of being lost in the
forest, which was closing in on both sides, thick with undergrowth. The gum
leaves drooped dispiritedly, each tree the same as the next – a mind-numbing sameness
that could quickly disorient a traveller without a path to follow. A million bush
cicadas shrilled in Elly’s ears, drilling through her brain. Her eyes ached. Her
tongue had become a wad of dry felt, so swollen it impeded her breathing. The
flies maddened, and her arm itched and stung where an ant had bitten her. She
meandered from side to side, scuffing in the sandy soil, only half-conscious.
    Her feet were two lumps of pain which extended
up her legs, each step jarring her knees, while her face and hands were on
fire. Knowing she couldn’t go much further, she considered crawling off into
the bush, into the blessed shade to wait for death. It would be so much easier.
Yet she still couldn’t do it. Something goaded her on – a stubborn
determination that forced one foot ahead of the other, forced her to stay aware
and upright for one more minute, then one more minute after that.
    As the afternoon shadows drew in Elly sensed
another presence. She stopped and, shading her aching eyes with her hands,
stared into the bush, her heart thudding against her ribs. No-one was there.
She tried to call out but her voice died in her parched throat. Was that
darkness beside a paler tree? A figure? No. Her eyes had tricked her. She saw a
branch wriggling across her path. A hallucination, she thought. Next she’d be
seeing a mirage of Sydney Town itself.
     The branch curved and reared a smooth flat
head. Eyes like boot buttons stared at her. Snake! With an inward scream Elly
threw herself backwards, overbalanced and fell. The strike was a knife-blade in
her arm. As the snake slithered off into the bush she glimpsed the red
under-belly. A venomous black snake.
    God have mercy on me, she thought, feeling her
senses slipping away.

 

CHAPTER FIVE
    The city had fallen. All twenty-two miles
of Nanking’s great walls, bristling with wooden beams and iron spikes, were breached.
All but two of the thirteen original Ming gates had been largely destroyed. Shops,
temples, houses, all had tumbled into smoking ruins, while twenty thousand
people lay hacked or burned to death among them. With their protective walls
destroyed, the powdered women in their peacock satins no longer lolled and
gossiped the day away, for they, too, were dead or fled; and in the bare
warrens the lifeless poor lay piled high.
    Pearl, crouched in a barrel