Malik

Chapter One: The Taste of the Bores

An hour before dawn, in the cold that the desert keeps hidden under its heat like a coin under a stone, Malik heard the singing start.

It was not loud. It never was. Jamal Latif sang the string awake the way a man might blow on coals, low and patient, a thread of sound moving down the line of couched camels from the lead rope to the tail. The words were not English and they were not for anyone but the animals. Malik had heard them every working morning of his life, and his body knew them before his ears did. His jaw stopped its slow sideways grinding. His ears came forward. He rocked once on his chest pad and rose, back legs first, unfolding to his full seven feet at the hump with a grunt that was half complaint and half greeting.

He was five years old and pale as skimmed cream, which was rare enough that men remarked on it at every bore and siding between the ranges and the railhead. His hide caught the first grey of the sky and gave it back. He had a chest like the prow of a boat and a neck he carried high, and he knew, in the wordless certain way of a working animal, exactly what he was worth.

"Ho, Malik. Ho, my king."

Jamal's hand came out of the dark and laid itself flat on Malik's shoulder. The hand was small and dry and hard as harness leather, and it had been on that shoulder every day since Malik was a knock-kneed calf being taught to kneel to a stick tapped on the foreleg. The man was sixty-one and looked older, a spare figure in a long coat with a turban wound tight and a beard gone the colour of ash. He had come out from a country of mountains as a boy of nineteen with nothing but a name and a way with camels, and he had spent thirty-one years hauling wool, wire, flour, mining gear, sleepers, pianos, coffins and once a church organ across a desert that had never asked him to stay and had never quite let him leave.

"Hot today," Jamal told him. "Hotter than yesterday. You will be lazy, and I will be patient, and we will both arrive."

Malik blew warm air at him.

Behind him in the string, Laila got up.

She was three, a fawn cow with a soft eye and a permanent air of expecting something to go wrong, and she had been weaned in the same yard as Malik in the same week. Wind frightened her. Loose canvas frightened her. A crow landing on a packsaddle frightened her. The only thing that had ever reliably settled her was Malik, and she had a habit, when the string was couched for the night, of walking three careful steps and laying her long jaw across his neck and sighing like a woman putting down a heavy bucket.

She did it now, though it was morning and there was work coming.

"Yes, yes," said Jamal, moving past with a saddle over one shoulder. "Very touching. Both of you, get out of my way."

They were fourteen camels that season, down from twenty-two, though Malik knew nothing of the arithmetic. He knew the shape of the string. He knew that he walked at the head of it behind Jamal's own riding cow, and that the lead line came back from his nose-peg to the next animal's headstall, and from her to the next, all the way down to the tail, so that when he moved the whole desert moved behind him. He knew the weight of a full load — three hundred and sixty pounds, split even, cinched with a girth rope that a man braced his foot against and hauled until the camel grunted. He knew the moment in the loading when the weight came right, when the boxes stopped talking to each other and settled into one solid thing on his back, and he liked that moment. Some animals are made anxious by burdens. Malik was made whole by them.

The camp broke up in the blue light. Fire kicked apart, billy emptied, hobbles coiled, the swags rolled and lashed, and the long careful business of loading — Jamal working down the line saying each animal's name as he came to it, because a camel that hears its own name is a camel that is not surprised. Surprise is what breaks a load.

They were three days out from Warrinna Siding, running the last of a store contract to the outstations along the eastern bores. Malik knew this road. He knew two hundred miles of it by the taste of its water: the iron taste at Nine Mile, the soapy taste at the government tank, the sweet shallow soak past the second gate that was only good after rain, the bore at Wilga Downs that came up too warm to drink until it had lain in the trough an hour. Roads for Malik were not lines on paper. They were a sequence of tastes and smells and gradients strung together in his body like beads on a wire, and he could not have been lost on any of them if he had been driven out at midnight and turned round twice.

They walked into the sunrise. The gibber plain came up out of the dark, mile on mile of red-brown stones polished by a hundred thousand years of wind, laid so close together they looked poured. The sun came off them in the middle of the morning like light off water. Jamal walked at the head, one hand loose on the lead, and every hour or so he sang a few lines and the string's ears went forward, and then it was quiet again except for the pad of forty-eight big soft feet and the creak of ropes.

At noon he couched them in the thin shade of a stand of mulga and they chewed and dozed and let the day burn past, and in the afternoon they walked again, and at dusk they came to the bore.

There was a truck at the bore.

Malik smelled it before he saw it: a hot metal, hot oil, burnt-air smell that was not in his catalogue of smells and that he disliked immediately, the way an animal dislikes anything with no shape it can read. The thing sat by the trough on four black wheels, a flat tray behind, mud-red to the axles, ticking as it cooled. Two men were at the trough filling a canvas bag.

Jamal stopped the string a hundred yards off, which was courtesy, and waited, which was also courtesy.

One of the men straightened. He was big through the chest and going soft at the belt, in a clean-ish shirt with the sleeves turned back, a wide hat pushed off his forehead. He had a broad, pleasant, ruined sort of face, the face of a man who smiles first and means it second.

"Well," he called. "The camel express."

"Good evening, Mr Meldrum," said Jamal.

Jim Meldrum ran haulage out of Warrinna. Three trucks two years ago, six now, and a shed with his name on it in white paint two feet high. He came round the trough wiping his hands on a rag.

"Still going, eh, Jamal."

"Still going."

"What are you on — the store run?"

"The store run."

Meldrum shook his head slowly, and there was something almost kind in it, which was worse than cruelty. "I did that run last Tuesday. Warrinna to the four eastern bores and home. Left after breakfast, slept in my own bed." He let that sit. "How long's it take you?"

"Nine days."

"Nine days." Meldrum whistled. "Mate. Mate."

The second man had come round the truck. He was younger, perhaps thirty, lean and long-armed, with pale eyes and a mouth that rested in a half-smile. He carried a nose-peg's worth of casual violence about him in a way Malik registered instantly and without being able to name; the camel's head came up and his nostrils widened, and a slow bubbling growl started somewhere in his chest.

"Steady," said Jamal, without looking round. "Steady, Malik."

"He don't like me," said the young man, delighted.

"He does not know you."

"That's a good bull." The young man came closer than a stranger should, and looked Malik up and down the way men look at things they might one day own. "Cream. You don't see that. What'd he weigh?"

"Sixteen hundred pounds."

"Carry?"

"Four hundred, if I ask him. Three-sixty because I do not."

"Huh." Alf Craddock — that was the man's name, though Malik would know him only as a smell and a sound for years to come — put a hand out towards the nose-peg, and Malik swung his head and Craddock stepped back fast, laughing.

"Alf," said Meldrum mildly. "Water."

Craddock went back to the trough.

Meldrum turned to Jamal and lowered his voice, which was his version of decency. "Listen. I'll say it once, because you've been out here longer than me and I've got no wish to see a man walk into a wall with his eyes open. The stores are going to me. The mine's going to me. Kearney's wool's going to me next clip, and he knows it, and he hasn't got the guts to tell you. There'll be nothing left in this district for a camel string by the year after next. Nothing."

Jamal looked at him with an expression that gave away nothing at all.

"Sell them," said Meldrum. "There's a man in Adelaide buys camel for pet meat, and I'll freight them south for you cheap, because I liked your father—"

"You never met my father."

"Figure of speech."

"I know." Jamal's mouth moved slightly. "Thank you for the offer, Mr Meldrum. We will water when you have finished."

They watered when Meldrum had finished. The truck went off into the dark with its lamps making two yellow tunnels in the dust, and the noise of it went on and on across the flat country long after the light was gone, and the camels stood with their heads up and their ears back until it faded.

That night Jamal hobbled the string in a patch of good bush and made his fire and sat by it a long time, and Malik, chewing, watched the small figure by the small light and understood nothing and everything: that the man was troubled, and that the man had not gone to sleep, and that therefore something in the world was not right.

Laila came over and laid her jaw across his neck.

He let her.