Ch. 2: The Elders' Wisdom
The afternoon heat had compressed itself into something you could almost touch, a weight against the skin that made every movement deliberate, considered. Waratah sat where she had been since the circle dispersed, the bird having recovered enough to flutter into the low branches of a dying paperbark, her empty cup still cradled in her lap. The red gum had darkened with her palms‘ sweat, the grain rising in ridges that her thumbs traced without her mind’s participation. She was listening. Not to any voice she could name, but to the quality of the silence between the camp's sounds—the cough of a child, the distant percussion of someone working flint, the wind moving through eucalyptus leaves that had begun to curl upon themselves like offered hands.
Aunty Mirri came to her without footsteps that Waratah could detect, the elder's presence arriving first as a shadow that crossed her knees, then as the scent of old smoke and the particular oil that silver hair acquires when it has spent decades beneath sun and stars. The coolamon she carried now held something wrapped in possum skin, something that shifted with a soft, dry music as she settled onto the earth beside her granddaughter.
“You sat with the bird longer than the bird needed,” Aunty Mirri said. Not a question.
“It needed to be seen,” Waratah answered. “Even after it stopped needing water.”
Aunty Mirri‘s laugh was low, a sound that seemed to come from her chest rather than her throat, warm as embers breathing beneath ash. “Oh, little flower. That is the whole of it, isn’t it? To be seen. To be known in the giving.” She unwrapped the possum skin with movements so slow they appeared ceremonial, revealing not food, as Waratah had expected, but a length of hair string, ancient by its color, darkened to the hue of old blood by years of handling. And within the coils, something that caught the afternoon light and held it—a small carving, perhaps of wood, perhaps of something else, worn smooth as river stone.
“This is the story I did not finish,” Aunty Mirri said, and her voice had changed, dropping into the register she used for the oldest Dreaming, the ones that came before naming. “The maiden who gave her heart's love—do you think she walked to the mountain in an afternoon? Do you think the spirits accepted her offering because it was easy?”
Waratah's thumbs stilled upon her cup. “I think she was afraid,” she said, the words arriving before she had considered them. “And she went anyway.”
“Ngaya.” Aunty Mirri used the word as approval, as recognition. I am. Or perhaps: you are. “Her name was lost before my grandmother's time, though some say the birds still remember it, carry it in their spring songs. What we know is this: the thirst upon her country was worse than ours, the rivers not merely low but vanished, the ground opening in cracks that spoke in voices. The elders of her camp could do nothing. The hunters found no game. The gatherers scratched dust. And this maiden, this one with no totem mark upon her skin, no special gift that anyone had noticed—she rose one morning before the sun and walked to the Sacred Mountain.”
“The same mountain?” Waratah asked, though she knew. Gadigal Country held only one mountain that answered to that name, its peak visible from the camp on clear days, its slopes thick with bush that had grown grey and thirsty like everything else.
“The same. For the mountain is where the spirits dwell, where the Dreaming runs closest to the skin of waking. She walked three days without food, though she carried water. She walked through country that had forgotten green, that offered only stone and the bones of trees. And on the third evening, as the sun bled into the western ridges, she found the cave.”
Aunty Mirri had lifted the carved thing from its wrappings, and Waratah saw it more clearly now—a bird, perhaps, or a flame, or something that held the shape of both. It sat in the elder's palm, drinking light, giving back a warmth that seemed disproportionate to its size.
“What did she find there?” Waratah whispered.
“The spirit of the land itself. Not a figure, not a voice you could point to and say ‘there.’ But a presence that filled the cave like water fills a rock pool, that pressed against her skin and her thoughts and the hidden places where her dreaming lived. And the spirit asked her—” Aunty Mirri paused, her eyes distant, seeing something beyond the camp's boundaries, beyond the afternoon. “It asked her what she offered. Not what she would give, but what she already held, what she had cultivated in the quiet places where no one watched.”
Waratah felt her own hand move, unbidden, to her chest, the heel of her palm pressing against her breastbone where the heart lived its hidden life. “And she said—?”
“She said nothing. She placed her hand upon her heart, and she gave it. All of it. The love she held for her mother dead these ten years. The love she held for a young hunter who had smiled at her once by the River of Stars. The love she held for country itself, that had no object but the land's own existence, its particular beauty, its right to thrive.” Aunty Mirri closed her fingers around the carving, and the light seemed to dim. “And the spirit received it. The ground shook. Water broke from stone. And from the place where she knelt, where her tears had fallen—tears she had not known she was shedding—from that place grew the first waratah. Crimson as blood, as sunset, as the heart exposed. The flower that does not fade quickly, that holds its color against the heat, that says to all who see it: love was here, and love remains.”
The silence between them had changed quality, become something they could both breathe, heavy with meaning that neither wished to disturb first. Waratah heard her own heart, felt its rhythm against her palm, steady, trustingly oblivious to what she was considering.
“I will go,” she said.
Bilang came to her as the light began to lengthen, the shadows stretching eastward with a patience that mocked human urgency. He had heard, of course. In a camp this size, wounded by silence, nothing remained unspoken for long. She saw him approaching from where she sat with Aunty Mirri, saw the particular way he carried his shoulders, as if bearing a weight that wanted to bend him toward the earth.
He did not sit. He stood above them, his shadow falling across the possum skin and its revealed treasure, his face carved in the lines that worry had deepened over months of watching his people diminish.
“No,” he said. Simply. The word falling flat as a stone into dust.
Waratah looked up at him, her neck craning, seeing the grey that had begun to thread his temples, the way his hands hung at his sides as if they had forgotten their purpose. “Father—”
“No,” he said again, and this time the word cracked, revealing what lay beneath. “I have buried your mother. I have buried my brother to the fever, two summers past. I have watched the land turn its face from us, and I have held my silence because what can a man do against the anger of spirits? But this—” He gestured, a violent movement for one so controlled. “This I will not accept. You are eighteen summers. You have not lived enough to know what love you offer, what you would be giving away.”
“I know what I feel,” Waratah said, and her voice was soft, the voice Aunty Mirri had described, the one that asked questions because it genuinely sought answers. “When I gave water to the bird, I felt—”
“A bird!” Bilang‘s voice rose, and heads turned across the camp, children pausing in their listless play. “A bird that will be dust before the new moon, that no one will remember, that took water your own body needed. This is what you would follow? This—” He struggled for words, his hands rising and falling without completing their gestures. “This impulse? This moment’s feeling?”
Waratah stood, though she did not step toward him, respecting the distance he had placed between them, the boundary of his fear. “It is not a moment‘s feeling,” she said. “I have felt it my whole life, though I did not know its name. When I walk upon country, even now, even thirsty—something moves in me that is not only me. When I see the children with their hollow cheeks, when I see you return from hunting with nothing, when I hear Aunty Mirri’s stories and feel the truth in them like water underground—” She pressed her hand again to her heart, the gesture becoming natural, necessary. “This is what I have to give. What else is there? What else am I for?”
Bilang's face worked, the muscles around his mouth trembling with efforts at control. “You are for living,” he said, and the words emerged rough, unfinished. “You are for marriage, for children, for the years I did not have with your mother, the years stolen by the birthing. You are for—” He stopped, his throat moving with swallowing. “You are for me. Is that not enough? Is my love not reason to stay?”
Waratah felt tears rise, hot and sudden, and did not check them. They were part of the gift, part of the truth. She stepped toward him now, close enough to touch, and took one of his weathered hands in both of hers, feeling the cuts from the morning's digging, the calluses built by decades of holding, providing, protecting.
“Your love is why I can go,” she said. “Because I know what love is. Because you have shown me, every day of my life, that it means giving what you cannot spare, hoping it will be enough. You gave me your heart before I knew to ask. Now let me use what you taught me.”
Bilang's hand closed upon hers with desperate strength, and she felt him shaking, the tremor that passed through his body and into hers, a current of grief and pride and helplessness. He did not speak again. He stood with her in the failing light, the first stars beginning to pierce the darkening blue, and the silence between them held all that words could not.
Aunty Mirri came when Bilang had released her, had turned away to stand at the camp's edge looking toward the mountain neither could see in the gathering dark. The elder moved with purpose now, the coolamon set aside, only the carved thing still in her hand, the bird-flame that held warmth.
She pressed it into Waratah's palm, and the warmth spread, not imagination but something real, something that settled beneath the skin and joined itself to the pulse.
“This was hers,” Aunty Mirri said. “The maiden's. Passed from elder to chosen one for generations beyond counting. It carries the memory of her gift, the shape of her courage. When you reach the cave, when you face what waits there, hold it. Let it remind you that you do not walk where no one has walked, give what no one has given.”
Waratah closed her fingers around the carving. It fit her palm as if made for it, though it had been shaped long before her birth. “What is it?” she asked. “Exactly?”
“A spirit stone,” Aunty Mirri said. “Warmed in the heart-fire of the first waratah, carried by every one who has made the journey since. Some returned, blooming with the gift they had given. Some—” She paused, her old eyes holding stars. “Some became part of the mountain itself, their love so thorough that no separate self remained to walk back down.”
“I understand,” Waratah said, though she was not certain she did, not with the part of her that thought in daylight, in practical terms of steps and breath and return.
“No,” Aunty Mirri said, gently. “You do not. But you will. That is the nature of this wisdom—it arrives only when it is needed, not before.” She reached up, her fingers finding the brittle remnants of flowers in Waratah's hair, drawing them free with small crackling sounds. “These are finished. Wait.”
From her dilly bag, woven tight with patterns of running water, she produced fresh blossoms—not the dried eucalyptus and boronia of before, but something else, something that caught the starlight and held it. Tiny flowers, white as hope, with a scent that spoke of rain on warm stone.
“Snowberry,” Aunty Mirri said, weaving them into Waratah's hair with fingers practiced by decades of such tender work. “Not native to this country, but brought by the winds, by the birds, by the long traveling of seeds. It grows where others cannot, finds water where none seems to exist. It will remind you that persistence is itself a form of love.”
She stepped back, assessing her work with the critical eye of one who had prepared others for ceremony, for challenge, for transformation. “Now. What do you carry?”
Waratah had already gathered it, while the light lasted, while her father‘s turned back still allowed her the privacy of preparation. A coolamon, the same her mother had used, its wood dark with handling. In it, water—her ration for two days, clear in a skin bag, measured with the care of one who knew its value. Nothing else. No food, though her belly would clamor. No extra covering, though the mountain’s nights would bite. No weapon, for what would she defend against, and with what right?
“My courage,” she said, and was surprised to find it present, to name it and have it answer. “And this.”
She touched the spirit stone where it hung now against her chest, threaded on the hair string that Aunty Mirri had provided. It pulsed there, warm as a second heart.
“And water,” Aunty Mirri said, nodding to the coolamon. “That is right. Water to offer, water to sustain. But know, little flower—the mountain has its own springs, hidden, ancient. If you are worthy, they will find you. If you are not, no water you carry will be enough.”
She drew Waratah into her embrace, the old woman's frame surprisingly solid, smelling of smoke and the particular sweetness of aged skin, of wisdom kept long enough to ferment into something stronger than its original form.
“Go now,” Aunty Mirri whispered against her ear. “Before your father‘s courage fails him and he speaks words that would wound you both. Before your own heart finds reasons to hesitate. The mountain waits, as it has always waited. And the spirit—” She released her, held her at arm’s length, her gaze searching. “The spirit has already heard you, I think. When you spoke to the bird. When you sat with your emptiness and offered it anyway. Go, and let what will happen, happen.”
Waratah lifted the coolamon, settling its weight against her hip, feeling the water shift within. She looked once toward her father, whose back still faced her, whose shoulders moved with breathing she could read even at this distance. She looked once around the camp, the humpies clustered close, the fires burning low, the people she had known every day of her life moving through their evening routines with the careful economy of the thirsty.
Then she walked toward the eastern boundary, where the bush thickened and the path began that would lead, eventually, to the mountain. Behind her, no one called out. But she felt the eyes upon her, her father‘s, Aunty Mirri’s, the children's who did not understand, the elders who understood too well.
The spirit stone beat warm against her chest, and somewhere in the darkness ahead, the Sacred Mountain waited beneath stars that had witnessed this journey before, that would witness it again, that held in their distant light the memory of every heart ever offered in love's name.