There’s no way to account for this sense of recognition. Karl simply knows that this boy has also stood for hours by the puppet show at Djurgården, watching Pulcinello argue with Death while the organ grinders sang of Stockholm’s latest murder: ‘He beat her, ladies and gentlemen, with a fire grate!’ He has laughed at and been frightened of the Djurgården monkey dressed as Napoleon, and fed it pancakes. This boy has also been to church with Karl’s mother, where the angels over the altar used to step down from the wall during the week and walk about, sleep in the pews, and rearrange the hymnbooks; you might see them at the windows as you passed by—though Karl never did. This boy knows that in the barracks down the street, an old guardsman made miniature churches all in wood, hinged to open on a congregation. The guardsman carved every candle flame and organ stop, children dozing on their mothers’ shoulders, and cats stealing in from the vestry. He would work on a church for weeks, then dress in full uniform and go out into the city to sell it. Sometimes Karl went with him to watch the way he sidled up to well-dressed people as if about to pick their pockets. The churches always sold, and the guardsman was drunk for days on the proceeds. Then he returned to the barracks and began another church. Karl understood that the guardsman had made a beautiful thing, and that because the thing existed, it could be bought. The boy with the bloodied feet and the apples has also coveted the wooden churches but known that, because he has no money, he’s not allowed to have them. Instead, he must make his own beautiful things.

  The boy yawns and Karl is reminded of a Leda he saw in Paris, a da Vinci copy: rosy Leda, the chummy swan, and four babies tumbling out of big eggs. This hatchling stares at Karl. The apple cores at his feet are crawling with ants.

  ‘Good morning,’ Karl says.

  The boy, properly awake now, sits up with a start. Then he freezes, much as the wallaby did before Bess shot it the day before yesterday.

  ‘Don’t be frightened, little one,’ Karl says. He sees that the boy has laid a dirty sack out on the ground to lie on. ‘What a nice morning for sleeping out of doors. Are you all alone?’

  The boy squints as if Karl’s face is difficult to see—and it must be. The dazzling sun is right behind his head. When the boy doesn’t answer, Karl says, ‘Are we near your house?’ The boy just watches him. ‘Well, then. Are you out for a long walk? Or could it be that you’re an explorer? By the way, I’m an explorer also.’

  Bess calls up from the gorge to say that breakfast is ready.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ Karl asks. ‘Or are you already full of apples? Can you stand?’ He holds out his hand but the boy doesn’t take it. ‘I’m called Karl. And you? Do you understand me? Don’t be frightened. Nobody minds about the apples. I think you must be lost. What’s your name?’

  ‘Denis,’ the boy answers, like a little Frenchman.

  ‘Bonjour, Denis,’ says Karl. ‘I think you must be hungry, yes? Come with me. You can eat, drink, wash. Doesn’t that sound nice?’

  The boy stands slowly. He’s taller than Karl expected. Karl continues to offer his hand, and the boy seems cautiously willing to take it, but he shies away when Bess calls again.

  ‘It’s only Bess,’ says Karl. ‘A kind and sensible lady who will take care of you. Come over here—look—can you see her? She’s cooking the porridge. She’s like a good fairy, the kindest in all the world.’

  Denis turns around and peers down into the gorge, where Bess is moving about the fire.

  Karl says, ‘She’ll make everything better. That’s what she does.’ He considers the wary set of the boy’s shoulders, the cowlick that sprouts from the crown of his head, and the smudgy birthmark behind his left knee. Then he steps close and lifts the boy by the armpits. Denis begins to shout but, though he’s full of conviction, he has no strength. He wriggles like a tired fish. Karl swings the boy’s legs up and carries him, cradled, down the rocky side of the gorge. Bess meets them at the bottom.

  ‘Allow me to present our apple enthusiast,’ Karl says. ‘His name is Denis.’

  Denis looks stricken. Bess reaches out to stroke his hair and he begins to cry, gulping into one bitten fist.

  ‘Bring him out of the sun,’ Bess says, and leads Karl to the rusty gum nearest the fire, where he sets the boy down in the shade. He didn’t think to pick up the boy’s sack. Once Denis is settled, Bess smiles at the little thief in a way that Karl knows as private. It’s the smile she often gave Karl during their final winter in Stockholm, when he was very sick, and it means that there’s no need to be afraid, because Bess is here and she’s going to take you into her room, where everything is calm and simple. She’ll look after you there. Karl knows that Denis understands the smile because the boy’s whole body relaxes. Yes, thinks Karl, go into her room while she allows it. Out here, where I am, the Djurgården monkey dances in his bicorn hat. But Bess’s room is quiet. It opens on a hinge, like a wooden church, and Karl and Denis peer into it, full of longing. Karl would live there forever if he could.

  Bess whispers with her head bent low over the boy, kissing his ham-coloured forehead. Denis wipes his wet nose with the back of his hand and gazes up at her. Karl knows that, in this instant, the boy feels like the most precious thing alive.

  Bess looks at Karl and says, ‘We’ll need water.’

  So Karl brings water, some of which the boy drinks. Then Karl watches Bess bathe the boy’s face and neck; he watches the boy allow it. Bess unpeels the boy’s shirt, and his trousers, and the vest beneath his shirt. She leaves him in his stained white underpants, and Karl feels his own dignity threatened by Denis’s soggy, unclothed blinking. She cleans Denis’s arms and legs and chest, and the boy leans forwards so that she can scrub his back. She washes his blistered feet, then produces, from her pack, the aloe leaf she had been so pleased to find on their way out of Fairly. The end of it is tied with string; she slices off this end and squeezes juice from the aloe, which she rubs over the boy’s burned skin. Denis looks at the aloe as if he’s never seen anything like it.

  How does Bess know to do all these things? She takes the pot of porridge off the coals, stirs salt into it, and spoons it into Denis’s mouth, which waits, open, like a chick’s. Then she takes a darning needle and thread, pierces the largest blister on the boy’s left foot, and passes the thread through it. Denis allows all this, barely flinches, and never speaks, although Bess doesn’t seem to expect him to. She pops the other blisters, murmuring to him as she works, always telling him what she’s going to do next. At one point, she looks up at Karl and says, ‘Eat, if you’re hungry.’ He tries the porridge; he doesn’t like the saltiness, but knows it’s for Denis.

  Bess is combing the knots from the boy’s hair. His eyes, with their fringe of blond lashes, flutter open and closed—he’s falling asleep, and Bess shifts until his head is resting in her lap. Karl is standing beside her in a stony gorge with the taste of salty porridge on his tongue, but he’s also asleep in Bess’s lap and he’s also watching Pulcinello beat Death with his cudgel. The red rock of the gorge curves protectively overhead. Karl thinks of a Pietà, but he also thinks of the feeling he wants to capture in his sunset picture: the feeling of being both claimed by and exiled from the world. He feels it as he both sees and is the boy in Bess’s lap. The absolute terror of childhood, and also the sudden shelter. The lost child out of doors, and the lost child returning home. How unbearable it all is, under the terrible, beautiful sun! Bess combs the knots from his hair. Then she looks up at Karl as if it’s time for him to do something.

  The thing to do is to love the boy and take him home: Karl knows this and can see its general outline. But he forces himself to think, as Bess would, about the specific, practical steps that will make this beautiful thing possible; he thinks of things Bess would do, then tells her he’s going to do them. He tells her that he’ll wash the boy’s clothes in the waterhole and hang them to dry over the branch of a tree. He tells her that they’ll let the boy sleep, and recover a little, then take him to the nearest house, where someone will direct them to his home. He studies Bess’s map (seeing, and ignoring, Wilpena Pound to the north, where his painting awaits him) and, although he’s not entirely sure of their location, says, ‘We aren’t so very far, in fact, from the town.’ He brings Bess tea and porridge; she drinks and eats, then leans back against the tree with the boy still in her lap and sleeps herself, which is unlike her. Because he said he would, Karl washes the boy’s clothes, which look rather meagre once they’re clinging, wet, to a branch. He finds cut shoelaces in one pocket, and a very dirty sock in the other.

  While doing these things, Karl thinks about the sunset picture. Everything he sees and does is part of the picture; Denis is now part of the picture, and so is taking Denis home. Wilpena is essential to him, but it will have to wait. He thinks of what he’ll write to Alström: ‘The boy isn’t a distraction so much as an escalation.’ And, ‘For once, the world and the work demand the same thing.’ This must be how Bess feels all the time. Karl goes to fetch the horses from where they’re grazing deeper in the gorge and is newly struck by the startling angle of the veins in the red rock. It occurs to him that he’s mischaracterised this vast, empty country by thinking of it as new and strange. In fact, it’s old and half remembered, like childhood. It’s ancient and awful and beautiful, like a civilisation you used to be a part of and forgot all about. You can only peer at a place like this, the way you look for the angels you know are walking in the church. Only a boy lost in the desert or on the streets of Stockholm could understand the ways in which it isn’t safe to be alone under this appalling sun, and only that boy could know true shelter when he finds it. Karl leads the horses back to the waterhole, ready to be saddled and loaded, and wakes Bess by bending down and brushing the hair back from her forehead.

  ‘Oh,’ says Bess, looking at the boy in her lap. She gestures for a blanket, which Karl brings; gently, she lifts the boy’s head onto the blanket. Then she kneels by Denis, inspecting him. Both she and Karl watch to see if the boy will wake. He doesn’t. His eyelashes tremble against his blistered cheeks.

  Karl waits for Bess to set in motion the business of packing up their camp. She’s much better at this than he is; she’ll issue instructions and he’ll follow them; and she will, naturally, want them to get away quickly, so that this boy can be returned to his mother as soon as possible. Karl thrills with the urgency and mystery of it—a lost child returned to his mother! Yes, now is the time for action and haste, which Bess will facilitate. She’ll know, as always, exactly what to do. And after that, Wilpena Pound.

  Bess is still kneeling, studying the boy. Then, instead of standing, she takes pencil and paper from her pack, sits beside Denis, and begins to draw him.

  Billy waits at the flat rock west of Ewart’s Bluff until the two local men pressed into service by Sergeant Foster finally arrive for the rendezvous. Foster’s man Wooding appears soon after, along with the native tracker known as Copper Bob. When Billy introduces himself to Bob, Wooding says, ‘Don’t you lot all know each other?’ Wooding pulls out the bloodied handkerchief and is visibly disappointed to learn that it isn’t news to Billy, but his mood picks up when he hears of the recovered boots and the fire in the western hills. Both local men thoroughly handle the handkerchief and theorise on its significance; it’s never offered to Billy for inspection, but he studies it from where he stands and is grieved by the thought that this may be Denny’s blood. The men, having exhausted the handkerchief, explain where Foster can be found, then set off for Undelcarra to locate themselves some breakfast. They have, overnight, become allies, and they ride away with the camaraderie of men who have grievances in common.

  Now to find this Sergeant Foster. Constable Wooding defers to Billy in the matter of directions: ‘You know the area,’ he says. Yes, Billy knows the area. He knows the path the sun takes over the ranges in all seasons. He knows the signalling stars; which trees control the weather; which stories made which places and were made by them in turn. Where Wooding sees scrub and rock, Billy sees a language and can interpret it.

  He leads Wooding and Copper Bob up a scree slope, around a stony crest, and through a folded gully golden with flowering nguri. As he leads them further into the eastern ranges, he rolls one aching shoulder—a souvenir of last night’s fight. He thinks of the hurt and fury on Mathew’s face, and he thinks of the laws he has broken in his long life. For example, he’s helped Henry hunt urnda, the white-shouldered scrub wallaby, for sport. He’s eaten red kangaroo that hasn’t been prepared in the right way by the right people. But he’s never killed his totem animal; or looked twice at a girl from the wrong kinship group; or been on forbidden country. If Henry had allowed Billy to be initiated into the second stage of the law, he could have gone with Mathew into the western hills; things being as they are, he can’t walk on that country without risking the anger of old spirits, which might harm Denny. Denny would understand this, Billy thinks. Not the details of it, but its profound truth. Billy knows that Mathew will forgive him neither the refusal nor the broken nose.

  Foster has made camp in a broad, level gully beneath a sandstone ridge. Billy, Wooding and Copper Bob find it deserted, but Foster and his other tracker aren’t far away—they’re standing among grass trees on top of the ridge, studying the stony open ground of the next valley. Foster’s arms are crossed. Wooding whistles and Foster raises one hand, then starts down the slope towards the camp. The tracker follows in his skin cloak—when Billy nods at him, the man nods back. He descends the rocky slope with a lightness and control that suggest he’d make a decent bowler.

  Foster looks and walks and speaks like a man who has always been in charge, but one who hasn’t slept: listening to Wooding on the subject of the handkerchief, his face takes on a sceptical, harried look. He all but snatches the handkerchief from Wooding and holds it up against the sky, peering at it as if he might find something decisive in its fibres. When he hears the news of Denny’s boots and the fire in the hills, he turns to the other tracker and punches him lightly on the shoulder.

  ‘D’you hear that, Jimmy? The boy’s not gone a-wandering—he’s been abducted.’ Foster shakes his head. ‘Abducted!’ He uses exactly the tone in which he might announce the name of a winning horse on which he failed to place a bet.

  Copper Bob goes to stand beside Jimmy, as if awaiting orders, but Foster draws Wooding aside to confer. Billy watches him stamp his foot and say, ‘Wasted! Wasted time!’ Jimmy rolls his neck with audible cracks, and Bob whistles through his teeth like a man waiting for the mail coach.

  Billy is afraid of two terrible things: Denny’s death, and who will be blamed for it. He climbs the low ridge to look at the country beyond—country he’s allowed to walk on. The sun is high now, and the shadow of a wedge-tailed eagle crosses the stony valley; walking down there, a horse’s shoes would ring like a blacksmith’s forge. Billy would like to pick up a stone and bowl it into the valley. But knowing, as he does, exactly where the stone would land makes the actual deed unnecessary; this is why he needs other players, who’ll introduce variables. He longs to be evenly matched and to prove himself. Lately, Billy has been teaching Denny how to bowl. Denny has a natural understanding of the seriousness of games, and his aim is improving. Billy jogs back down to the camp without having bowled anything.

  Here in the gully, Jimmy talks softly to Copper Bob, gesturing with his uncloaked arm, and Bob nods in agreement. Foster arrives, aloud, at the decision that he will go to the place where Denny’s boots were found and take at least one of the trackers with him, but that to completely abandon this north-east trajectory would be reckless.

  ‘He says there’s a track,’ Foster snorts, swatting a hand at Jimmy. ‘It’s no more than a day old, and there’s no horse. He says. But bugger me, this boy can’t have gone in two directions at once—so what’s he following? Probably a wallaby for his bloody supper. But if there’s a track, it has to be followed.’

  Billy stands between the two groups of men, waiting to see what will be required of him. Foster strides and stamps and firms up his plans. Billy will take him to where they found the boots, and on into the western ranges. Jimmy, who’s decidedly out of favour but is obviously considered the better of the two trackers, will come along with Foster and Billy. Wooding and Copper Bob will continue to follow these north-eastern tracks.

  Billy wonders if the rest of his life will be spent crossing back and forth across the plain, which he has heard described as an empty wasteland but knows to be dense with motion: the motion of ancestors, spirits, the animals that should be here and the animals that shouldn’t, songs, stories, people, goods, water, minerals, the railway, the roads, stock tracks, fire and the celestial bodies. When he crosses the plain, he both lives inside this density and passes over it. If Henry Axam hadn’t singled Billy out, he would know how to speak to dust storms.

  Billy makes a noise of assent when Foster issues his instructions, though he knows Foster neither expects nor needs it. Billy’s tired and his horse is tired. When Billy approaches, Virnu swings his long head with its wide white blaze. He’s a good horse—very calm. He used to startle when Billy bowled stones and wads of newspaper and imaginary cricket balls, but for a long time now he’s shown no interest.

  Cissy, Mathew and Robert, in search of last night’s fire, have followed a goat track up the hillside, and Cissy is disgusted with it: she would like at least one piece of ground to be flat. She would like, also, to lie down on clean bedding in a cool room, flyless, antless and fatherless. With Denny at her side. Even once they reach the top of the ridge, they have to scramble over rocks and through thick mulga scrub. If her father reaches out a hand to help her over a gap or up a step, Cissy refuses it. There are multiple reasons for this rejection. They include Mathew’s unexplained black eyes, his bewildering decision to stop for the night despite spotting the fire, and the fact that, as they set out this morning, Cissy told her father about the Training College and he scrunched his face and said there was no way to pay for such a thing. Then he tried to hurry Cissy—who had slowed her steps to match with his—by employing, in front of Robert, a phrase he often uses to move his horses.