Samuel is delighted at the thought of another debate with Bayliss, who would happily run a railway through his own mother’s dining room. Bayliss is laughing with the maid in the parlour. There’s a smell in the hall of beef and pastry. Outside on the river, the men who were fighting on the barge shout merrily at one another; gulls answer them. Samuel can no longer see Mary’s blue room or the light eyes of his unknown grandchildren. Instead, he feels the tug of the wide, green river. A pelican struts among the bankside rushes, dressed as a clergyman. Bayliss guffaws and the buzz returns to Samuel’s temples.

  Samuel gives his wife the letter for Mary—the one that promises to pray for her, but doesn’t mention making the journey north. ‘Address this for me, will you, my dear, and have Jenny send it straight out with the post.’

  Muriel Deniston looks over the letter. ‘No ticket, then?’ she asks.

  But Samuel is barely listening. He runs his spread hand down his beard, squares his shoulders, and turns his face towards the sound of Bayliss laughing in the parlour.

  Karl sits in the afternoon sun by the waterhole writing a letter to his friend Alström, who is also a painter. He’s shirtless and shoeless and can feel his skin burning, but that’s as it should be: he wants the sun to hurt him. It has claimed him, after all. Soon the gorge will be in shadow. The red gums around the waterhole are motionless, and so is the water; but every now and then, the surface of the pool makes a slight movement, as if something is stirring slowly far beneath it.

  Karl doesn’t know why he continues to write to Alström, who, on learning that Karl was emigrating to Australia, sent a letter saying, ‘My dear Kalle, there is, for us, no meaning to any artistic achievement that doesn’t grow from the soil of Sweden.’ More recently, Alström has achieved considerable success with new work inspired by the Norwegian coastline.

  Karl writes: ‘The sunset picture feels fated—what else could have brought me here to witness this sky? I have, until now, been scornful of painting sunsets—even the stupidest person finds them beautiful. But these are no ordinary sunsets. You won’t understand me—you can’t conceive of these skies without seeing them. Turner and Constable would be stiff with delight. Why, do you suppose, have the English specialised in sunsets, while we Swedes stick to pastel clouds and trembling aspens? We share their northern sun, don’t we? This southern sun, however, is a different star—I’m sure of it. There’s no way to describe these skies in words. If I had to try, I would say that they are light shipwrecked by dark.’

  Would ‘light capsized by dark’ be better? Lord God, thinks Karl, what am I talking about?

  ‘So, I have set myself quite a task. I’ll admit I have resisted the project. I’m reminded of the prophet Jonah, who fled God’s summons and was swallowed by the whale. The sky is my summons, the picture is my whale. Yes, I’ve struggled, but I’ve been swallowed, and the sky and I must come to an arrangement.’

  Must we? wonders Karl, peering up at the sun. What does it matter? If he does manage to paint the sky, Alström will almost certainly never see the picture. He could say anything in this letter. Karl looks over at Bess, who’s deep inside her room, working in charcoal. Bess, if she had been summoned by the sky (and she would never call it ‘summoned’), would decide immediately on form and colour, take up a pencil and brush, and get to work. Her picture would be excellent, and, most importantly, it would be finished. But would it be the truth? Can Bess see the sky from inside her room? There must be, thinks Karl—as he has thought before—some way for an artist to live that is both housed, as Bess is, and out of doors, which seems to be his fate. This is the sort of thing he and Alström would once have discussed while deep in their snaps at the Freden. Karl returns to his letter.

  ‘The picture, as I see it, will be square and exactly the length of my arm. I want a high horizon, a tilted plane for the ground, and a dwarfed figure over which the sky broods. The sky, you understand, will be allowed the smallest part of the picture—but it will dominate the scene, so that every contour, every mood and aspect of the ground and vegetation is altered by its rays.’

  No—the sun produces rays, not the sky.

  ‘Is altered by its searing glare. This dusk will be brighter than noon. The reds here are simply unimaginable, dumbfounding, the purest I have seen, as if fire itself has caught fire. Not to mention the deep purples, which are almost poisonous—when the sky turns red, the hills look bruised. I seem to be describing hell. But how to explain that, rather than infernal, the whole scene is sublime?’

  Karl remembers that sublimity is going out of fashion.

  ‘In truth, there is no sign of God in this red immensity; nor is there any sign of humanity, and yet I have never felt more like a man. Perhaps it is perverse to add—I am quite sure you won’t understand me—that I have never felt more like a Swede. We Swedes are, after all, barbarians, and this is barbarian country. It is truly primitive.’

  Karl doesn’t think he believes any of this. He’s also worried that he may have gone too far, so he writes, ‘I would need to stay rooted to this spot for three years to paint anything worth looking at.’

  He reads over the letter and a picture does begin to form in his mind. Oh, why not—he could at least make a sketch or two in pencil. He often has to trick himself into working. All right, here’s the high horizon—here, the tilted ground. So, look, the plain rises to meet the lower slopes of the ranges—but be sure to show that the ranges are the stubs of mountains, the shoulders of mountains, they’re so worn down. Exhausted by the sun. The rhythm here is horizontal—fallen mountains, fallen trees. Long lines—like this. Only the sky is vertical. The sun lifts it. A low horizon, then? No, he likes the idea of a small sky that nevertheless crowds everything else—it feels true. How else to express the feeling of standing on this empty country, knowing how big it is because you’ve travelled weeks from the sea and haven’t yet reached the centre? (God, what he wouldn’t give to paint—or eat—a fleshy little oyster!) And then this sky comes along and flattens you, overwhelms you, but without ever making the country shrink. The sky pulls the land up to it. It involves the land. How to get this feeling out and onto paper?

  He begins another sketch. The horizon is more emphatic in this one, and a sentence occurs to him: ‘The horizon participates.’ He makes a note to ask Bess, later, if English has more than one word for horizon, as Swedish does—there’s the simpler ‘horisont’ and then the larger word, ‘synranden’, which implies the act of looking, the very edge of seeing. Similarly important: the sun doesn’t set in Swedish, it walks down. So much more activity in his first language: seeing, walking! Ah, the continual flawed translation of the world. The horizon participates. In what? He’s close to something. Felled trees. An empty riverbed, with no beginning or end, mirror to the horizon. And what about the figure he mentioned, the dwarfed figure? A struggling figure, like this? Or is the struggle over? Or is there no struggle at all, but a unity between the figure and this bright red world? The sun sinking, holy, over the ruins of nature. The holy sun burning the cathedral of nature.

  Karl throws down his pencil and, knowing that Bess will be irritated by the theatricality of this, picks it up again (he does look to see if Bess has noticed but, as always, she’s busy with her own work). He’s dismayed by how quickly this new picture of his has turned into an idea. That’s all his friends talk about—ideas. All their paintings are ideas: what is Sweden, what is art, what is man, what is woman, what is nobility, what is nature, what is the life force? They call a painting of a winter field Solitude; Karl would call it Winter Field. He wants to do what comes easily to him, which is to be a body encountering the world. He wants sensory experience first, then emotion, then intellect (actually, that’s quite good, quite lucid—he’ll write it down). He wants a painting of a field under snow to feel like a field under snow. He wants a painting of the molten sun to burn. Why does he care what his Swedish friends think? To hell with Alström and his Norwegian coastline.

  Karl begins a third sketch. The same forceful horizon, the same dry river. The dull teeth of the ranges. This should be simple, almost medieval. The picture’s form begins to take shape: pines to the left, an ancient forest, which draws away from the figure in the right foreground. No, remove the figure, substitute with one of those huge skeletal trees—the viewer can’t delegate the act of looking to a figure. The viewer is the figure; he participates in the picture, in the horizon. The viewer looks, the sun walks. The tree should seem to be burning (it won’t be burning). And the sky is unbearable. Yes, that’s it—I’ll paint a sunset so awful and so beautiful that no one can bear to either look at it or look away. Is this possible? It all depends on the red.

  Yes, the red! You have, thinks Karl, made your old mistake of beginning with form when you should begin with colour and with tones. Let the land provide the form: perhaps he’ll find it in the vista they’ve been promised further north, the famed Wilpena Pound (he and Bess will have to find another name for it). He needs Wilpena Pound. It’s too late to leave this camp today, but he’ll have them up early and on the move tomorrow. Karl is trembling. The urgency of Wilpena! Meanwhile, he’ll think in red. He’ll consider the emotion of the picture—its occasion. He makes a note: ‘both claimed and exiled’. He’s not sure what that means, but it feels important. This is only a beginning, but he’s on his way. He understands that this picture is the one that counts. It’s the beautiful vessel he’s been waiting for, into which to pour his true skill and feeling.

  A big red ant, slightly translucent, hurries across Karl’s sketch and he brings his fist down fast to squash it. Now the ant is a sunset. This feels auspicious: maybe he has reached an arrangement with the sky. He looks up at Bess, who’s deep inside her room, working, working, and feels a tug of doubt. The picture will require a lot of him. Is he prepared for it? Yes, he’s almost certainly prepared. He’s willing to give up anything and everything for this picture—he’ll give up Sweden, youth, happiness. He’ll give up other women, which means that the pretty German girl, Minna, will have been his last kiss from a woman who isn’t Bess. He’ll give up anything at all, as long as he gets to have this picture. It will make him brave enough to face his own talent, which others have frequently described as so immense, so full of potential, as to be startling. Do you hear me, sky? That’s our arrangement. I’ll visit you this evening, I’ll let myself participate as the sun walks down, and tomorrow you can take me to Wilpena.

  Bess’s dark head is bent over her drawing. He won’t give her up. But that’s all right—she’s on the side of the sky. She brought him here, after all. She wants him working, and she makes work possible.

  Karl is suddenly extremely hungry. He calls out to Bess—he has to call twice before she raises her head. She peers at him as if waking from a deep sleep.

  ‘What is there to eat?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes,’ Bess says, and puts her work aside.

  Once Minna and the Axams have left Undelcarra, Joy goes out to hoe the northern wheatfield, over which she has been given responsibility. Ada and Noella have been sent to school in clean Monday pinafores. Lotta, who isn’t old enough for school, is sorting her collection of bird feathers into coloured piles. Cissy, who always has to be involved in everything, has gone out searching with the men. This leaves the wheat to slow, lazy Joy.

  Joy isn’t slow or lazy—not really. She’s full of subterfuge, but it’s not malicious; only self-interested. She intends to endure. Joy’s heard herself compared to a cow, but she thinks of a bull instead: her size, her strength. At night, when she dreams of sex, she rides on top. She cultivates her languor, which by now she’s been forgiven; it’s a way to conserve strength. Other girls her age have been sent out to work, but she’s kept home to help Mam because—she knows this—no employer could be satisfied with her, unless all they needed was heavy things moved from one place to another, and not too many of those. As it is, Cissy is the biggest help to Mam, and she still goes to school. Cissy is rather old, in Joy’s opinion, to be wasting her time on something as unnecessary as school, but Mam had a lot of schooling and wants that for her girls, where possible. What use will it do her, thinks Joy, when six months from now Cissy will be a maid at a hotel in Quorn, or housekeeping for some scabby farmer with wandering hands?

  Joy is saving her strength for the man she’ll marry and the children she’ll bear. She can already feel herself carrying child after child. She wants a husband with nothing, so that she can make something for him. She’ll look ridiculous in a wedding dress with ruffles and buttons and satin bows—it doesn’t matter. They’ll leave the church on foot if need be, walk out into the bush; she’ll take her dress off to make a tent, they’ll sleep beneath it while they build a house. She’ll use the satin bows for bandages. The worst thing had been childhood—that was needless. Now she’s ready.

  None of the men in Fairly is fit for what she has in mind. She’s interested in the solitary men who come and go, the hawkers with their carts full, the swagmen who trim their beards with lighted sticks, the shearers, the railway men, the workers on the Telegraph. She’s interested in what Sergeant Foster would have been thirty years ago: ambitious, ready, but unfixed. She could, if necessary, have picked up the chair with Foster in it and carried him into the ranges. It wasn’t necessary. She was practising on him because she saw how he appreciated her bulk.

  Joy is casual about working the wheat. She runs the hoe over the top of the soil so that it looks disturbed. She pulls some of the larger weeds by hand; others she buries with the toe of her boot. She’s connected only lightly to this land and will leave it soon enough; when she has land of her own, however, she’ll break her back for it. If Denny were her child, she’d walk the Earth for him. Let Cissy finish school and be the one to play at mother’s helper—Joy was made large for the large world.

  When she finds a bloodied handkerchief in one corner of the field, Joy doesn’t think of Ralph Axam and Minna out here two hours earlier: she thinks of Denny. She thinks, too, that the handkerchief is an excuse to stop hoeing and go back to the house. Only incidentally, while walking, does she look for a monogram; she doesn’t find one. When she’s close to the house, it occurs to her that another girl might be made squeamish by the blood, so she pinches one corner of the handkerchief and holds it away from her body. This is how she’s first seen, carrying the handkerchief—by Lotta, who for some reason has abandoned her feathers and is squatting tearful in the garden.

  Inside, the women fall on Joy—what’ve you done, are you hurt, what’s this, what’s all this? And then, where did you find it? Whose is it? They look for the monogram that isn’t there. They look at the quality of the linen and feel for the amount of starch, then conclude that it’s a man’s handkerchief. What’s more, a gentleman’s. Someone raises the possibility of Joanna Axam’s boy, who walked in that direction with Minna Baumann earlier today, but Joy hasn’t told the entire truth about where she made her discovery: she shouldn’t have reached the corner in which she found the handkerchief as quickly as she did, so she’s said she found it deeper in the wheat, where Ralph Axam would never have been.

  The women are full of speculation, much of it delivered in low voices with their hands held up to their mouths so that Mam won’t hear or be able to read their lips. One woman says, ‘There’s not so much blood, not really,’ and another, ‘I’d say it’s a child’s.’ Joy doesn’t see how it’s possible to tell. Mam touches the handkerchief where someone has laid it out on the table; then she goes to the door and stands there so that Lotta knows to come inside. Lotta comes and Mary picks her up. Lotta’s bare feet catch at Mary’s skirt so that Mam’s red flannel petticoat shows. Because of the handkerchief, the red of the petticoat feels shocking in the room—as if all instances of the colour red are further proof of something. Of what? Nobody will say, exactly. Mopsy cowers in her basket. Lotta’s sweaty face looks pleased above Mam’s shoulder; she wrinkles her nose at Joy, who feels chastened for bringing bad news home. But at least nobody expects her to go back out with the hoe.

  After almost an entire day of searching, Mathew and Billy have picked up the trail they saw yesterday evening, then lost again: the tracks of the booted man and his lame horse, which were trampled by the cattle coming down to the dam to drink. Mathew, more sensible than he was yesterday, has conceded that the footprints belong to a man, but he persists in thinking that Denny made the cut on the tree. He’s formed a theory—an awful one: Denny is with the man, but he’s left no tracks because he’s been put on the horse. Mathew is reluctant to share this theory with Billy, as if saying it aloud will make it true.

  As soon as they start following the trail, it’s clear—even to Mathew—that it makes no sense. The tracks take the most difficult path over rocky outcrops, loop back on themselves, swerve unexpectedly, and pause to make strange scuffling dances. After an hour of this, Mathew halts Bonfire, spits in disgust, and says, ‘Whoever we’re following is thick as two bricks.’

  Billy, stopping Virnu, shakes his head in agreement.

  Mathew says, ‘It’s a madman we’re after.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Is it blackfellow business?’

  Billy’s face registers the unlikelihood of this. He asks, ‘You want to keep on?’

  Mathew fears that he’s reached one of those crucial points at which he’ll make the wrong choice. He looks back along the route they’ve come, and then ahead. The tracks are leading them towards the western edge of the plain, where the striped ranges rise in overlapping saw-toothed ridges. It’s a scorching afternoon—his wheat will be drying out. You would assume, looking across the plain, that not even the smallest soul could get himself lost on it: it appears flat from east to west, with only a scattering of hillocks. The scrub is low, the few trees are thin. But the plain is pleated with furrows and channels where water’s had its devious way, and Denny could be hidden in any of them. Also, a haze rises from the hot, flat earth, and looks sometimes like smoke, sometimes like an expansive lake; it drowns distance. The fens were like this too—deceptively flat and good for hiding in. But much wetter. Mathew wants water for his crops, but he’s grateful to be looking for Denny in the dry. On every side, the ranges pile against the sky, red in sun and purple in shadow.