And Bess, who is also an artist but for the time being works only in black ink, says, ‘The first thing to do tomorrow is find the waterhole.’

  ‘Then the green glass.’

  ‘We might need rain for that.’

  ‘And for the waterhole,’ Karl says.

  Bess closes her eyes. He has a minute or two left with her—soon she’ll fall asleep and enter the room she lives in without him, and Karl will be alone in the cold hills. In an attempt to keep her for another moment, he says, ‘The dust today.’

  That afternoon, they’d watched the dust storm advancing over the wrinkled plain: a russet cloud with a froth of light on top of it. He and Bess both sketched the cloud and half hoped it might reach them, but they were high enough, or far enough away, and were spared.

  Bess says, ‘I kept waiting for it to open up and Moses to come walking out.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Karl, but he was waiting for something else: for the dust to plunge him into darkness. After all, this is the desert—a prophet should meet the Devil here. But a true prophet, Karl acknowledges, wouldn’t undertake his pilgrimage in spring. A prophet wouldn’t bring his wife with him (or, for that matter, be ordered on the pilgrimage by his wife, who has arranged the sale of an album of desert drawings to a list of valued subscribers). Is it possible to turn a desert into a house? It is, for Bess. Lying beside him, she builds four walls, a roof, a door that has a lock in it, lamps lit and soup on the stovetop. She makes things comfortable, but not by fussing; it’s that she’s so practical. More than practical, which sounds dull. How to explain it? Wherever she goes, a room comes with her, and that room contains everything necessary to a proper, useful life. Sometimes Karl joins her in the room. Other times not: the door is locked. It seems to Karl that Bess, unlike other people, goes on living her palpable life when no one else is present.

  Bess yawns and says, ‘Goodnight.’ Then she says, ‘But every night is good. No flies.’

  Which makes Karl laugh, and the horses stir, but she responds to neither sound: she’s said goodnight and is in her room. The door is locked. Bess sleeps deeply—deeper than other women he’s known. He can push his blankets off and stand up, he can walk down the slope and piss, and none of it will wake her. He can stand by the horses and smoke, leaning against a shabby tree. He can sing a Swedish lullaby that the horses seem to like; the packhorse in particular rubs against Karl when he sings. So Karl stands and walks and smokes and sings, and he watches the sky, which he doesn’t trust.

  He first became suspicious of the sky just after they left Adelaide—that charming, airless town. He and Bess had both been glad to leave it. They travelled first through the green wine valleys by coach, and when they stopped to pick up horses at Wingaree, a sheep station north of Clare, the late afternoon produced an unusually multicoloured sky: white at the horizon, grading into orange; above that, apple green; then a large band of rose, blending into crimson. Above that: a true blue. Above that: olive green, then lavender. As sunset approached, the sky turned such a vivid red that it looked as if a smokeless fire were burning just over the horizon. Men were sent out from Wingaree to investigate. They came back and said it was only the sun. Only the sun! The sun come to devour the stars—the cannibal sun. The sky remained bright and heavy for about half an hour; its pigments, if Karl were to paint it, would have been ochre and Indian red. Then the sun disappeared below the horizon, but the sky didn’t grow dark—there was still red in it, diffuse and radiant, like a steady flame seen through waxy paper. Above this red, Karl saw a swarm of green lights. The waxy red faded, then the green; the twilight turned a violent purple; and when the moon rose, it was blue.

  Karl didn’t sleep that first night at Wingaree. Instead, he sat beside the window and watched the bruised moon. Bess woke early, as she always did, and asked what he was waiting for.

  ‘The sun,’ he told her.

  Bess laughed. ‘Do you think it might not come?’ She kissed the top of his head and went to wash and dress.

  When the sun finally rose, Karl thought he saw a ring around it. The ring was blue, with a russet outer rim, and the sun itself was faintly tinged with lavender. That evening, the sky again turned an apocalyptic red, but this time—knowing there was no fire—the residents of Wingaree went about their ordinary business, and seemed surprised by Karl’s continuing interest in the phenomenon. Once something has happened twice, can it be called extraordinary? So he and Bess were left alone to watch the sunset, and just after the sun disappeared they witnessed a strange and brilliant cloud that Karl thought was new. It spread out above the horizon like the last wash of a wave onto a beach, thin and rippled, and it appeared to produce its own grey light.

  ‘Maybe it’s just a local kind of cloud,’ said Bess. ‘A native cloud.’

  But Karl was certain that God had just invented it. The new cloud faded as the second wave of red flooded the sky, with the green light above it and the lilac clouds above that; these colours drained into the purple twilight; once again the moon was blue and, the following day, the sun wore its halo. Karl and Bess left Wingaree on their borrowed horses, heading for a property called Thalassa, where they had an introduction. They travelled north, towards and through and beyond Port Augusta, over the Pichi Richi Pass and out onto the Willochra Plain, and every evening the sky turned this livid red and the moon shone blue. One night, when they were staying at Thalassa, Karl saw the new cloud again: long, sheer and luminescent. So, he’s concluded, the sky is changing its colours and its forms, and he doesn’t know what to do with it.

  Karl is a painter of filtered sunlight, subtle effects and tonal harmonies—in Stockholm, his humid pastels were considered ‘unduly French’ by at least one patriotic critic—but this disastrous South Australian sky makes demands of a more emphatic kind. It says: I’ve arrived, like history. It says: you have no choice but to paint me. Yes, you—a painter of stippled shade and blurred horizons—you’re going to have to think in red. The sky has chosen Karl for its own mysterious reasons. Why else would he be here, now, in this unlikely place? Who else is going to record this calamity? Certainly not Bess, with her black ink.

  But Karl dislikes demands. He prefers things to come easily, knows this about himself, and tries to disguise it. His biggest fear is that, as an artist and a thinker, he is lazy, superficial and incapable of seriousness. Pleasures tend to arrive in his life, and he tends to enjoy them; this has, he suspects, limited his capacity for hard work. Years ago, a peevish lover speculated that a fairy godmother had granted baby Karl talent and beauty but overlooked enterprise and persistence.

  He knows he is a good painter—even a very good one. Is he good enough for the sky? He might be. He could, he supposes, lay everything aside and learn new forms, colours, tones, resemblances; he could pay attention to new vibrations of the sun. The red sky’s demands are simply light making its rightful claim upon him. He has, after all, spoken passionately about the supreme truth of light—has stated more than once, drunk among his friends, that light is his religion. I love it more than beauty! I swear to devote my days to its worship! Karl is superstitious about breaking public vows of this kind, but finds private excuses for doing so. Bess (whom he married, in part, for her capacity for seriousness) tells him that, having agreed to emigrate to Australia, he must adapt himself to painting Australian subjects. But no Australian subject (is there such a thing?) has interested him—until this sky, the thought of which exhausts him.

  So, on the night of Minna Baumann’s wedding, Karl leans against a tree in the foothills of the Flinders Ranges, smokes, and sings his lullaby designed to put the sky to sleep. When it’s awake, the sky makes him think of ways to paint it, and he isn’t ready yet. He doesn’t trust it and he doesn’t trust this country, which claims to be a desert. But there are trees, grasses, flowers. On this particular hill, tonight: trees resembling pines, my God! As if this were a scraggly outpost of the Schwarzwald. Bess, worried about his lungs, insisted that he leave Sweden for a warmer climate—fine. But they might have gone to the ochre streets of Rome, or to the Holy Land, to paint wan pictures of palms and ancient walls. Yet here he is, so far south that he’ll soon fall off the Earth and pass through the skies of Europe like a comet. No, it’s emphatically not Palestine, though there are, as it turns out, camels here. Which stink and scare the horses.

  Karl finishes his pipe and kisses each horse goodnight. He looks down at the Willochra Plain; he can see a few faint lights, and he thinks that if he lived here he would make every effort to leave. He would be capable of working hard at that. He opens Bess’s pack to look at what she’s worked on today: every sketch is skilful, tense and limited, as if under obligation to someone. She’s far too careful. But Bess, sleeping neatly on her bedroll, has made so many things possible: hard work, good health, this desert journey. She’s the gift of enterprise and persistence. She’s like a cloud that shines without the sun behind it. Thank God for Bess, thinks Karl, lying down beside her, but he turns away so as not to see her sleeping in her room, without him.

  Billy Rough, Mathew’s hired hand, lives in a shepherd’s hut. The hut is a remnant of an earlier time, when the whole northern part of the plain was parcelled out among vast sheep and cattle properties. For years, hooved animals trampled the Willochra, until the South Australian government decided that the area would be better under wheat. It was arid land, yes—the Surveyor-General said so—but everyone knows that rain follows the plough. Most of the big properties were broken up and their parts were leased as smallholdings, like Undelcarra. Billy remembers those pastoral days, and the days before them. He was born on this country fifty years ago. He’s left it many times, but he always comes back.

  Billy’s hut stands in a grove of she-oaks just over a mile from the red hill. It has a three-legged camp oven in one corner, a bunk, a perch on which there is no bird, and here Billy’s happy, here at the end of the day he can tend his own fire. He’s boiled his tea and eaten his supper. Often Billy has visitors, people passing through, some of the Thalassa mob—he never knows who might appear. Tonight is quiet, though. He can hear the sound of the fire, the faint hush of the she-oaks, and Virnu walking with a whinny in the yard. The fire jumps and spits.

  On his way outside to relieve himself, Billy tests the muscles of his arms and shoulders. Then, on the clear ground in front of the hut, he takes three long, deliberate, springing strides. To anyone watching he might be dancing—but he isn’t dancing, his right arm is straight behind him and it windmills over his shoulder, there’s nothing in his hand and he sends nothing ahead of him like a small, hard ball. Every movement is so controlled—the run, the trajectory of his arm, the forward motion after opening his hand—that if there were a small, hard ball, a cricket ball, it would travel just as Billy willed it. There’s no need to stop and watch where and how the ball lands: Billy knows where and how it lands, and that there is no ball. But he stops anyway, because he can hear a horse approaching.

  It’s Mathew on Bonfire, and he calls out from beyond the trees with a long, loud whoop, which is his way of saying: it’s me, get ready, I’m coming. Billy can see Mathew’s lantern among the trees and, a moment later, the lift and roll of Bonfire’s big head. Mathew is talking as he appears, saying Denny was out when the dust came up, hasn’t come home, and was last seen heading north-west. So Billy sets the fire to smoulder and not blaze, saddles Virnu, and the men ride out into the night.

  Cissy got as far as Fairly Creek on foot, so they ride to Fairly Creek, shouting for Denny all the time. They leave the horses there, then follow the creek north-west, searching in dips and gullies, calling Denny’s name down the washouts that open up across the plain. They turn off into the creek’s tributaries and search along their banks, behind their boulders, among the roots of their trees and in their few pools of water. Billy says that if they haven’t found any sign by daylight he’ll go to the camp at the Thalassa ration depot and bring back a tracker.

  ‘A good one,’ Billy says.

  Mathew says, ‘Aren’t you all good?’

  Billy is surprised; Mathew rarely refers to his blackness. He seems generally to operate on the principle that the less he acknowledges it, the more likely it is to go away. Billy says, ‘Some are better.’

  ‘If nothing’s turned up by morning I’ll go to the police.’ Mathew swings his lantern, calling, ‘Denny!’

  When Billy was a boy in camp, he knew not to go far from the fire: take care, there are men out there with trackless feet. His mother used to sing him a lullaby about a girl carried off by an eagle, and he knew that if he walked too close to the edge of a cliff he might be pushed over it by a spirit. But Denny has his own ways of being frightened—Billy has noticed Denny’s watchful way of being in the world, his dislike of sunset, the way he speaks to invisible things, and his fear of the red hill. Denny has a gift for fear, and along with this gift comes courage, which is required of him in the world he knows. Billy approves of this: yes, be frightened; yes, be brave. With Denny’s fear and courage in mind, Billy changes the way he calls out in the night.

  ‘Denny Wallace!’ he calls. ‘It’s your dad and it’s Billy! It’s us two all alone looking for you, Denny!’ He and Mathew drop down into a creek bed and Billy calls, ‘It’s us two only! It’s Billy and your dad!’

  Mathew grunts. ‘Who else would it be?’

  ‘Nobody else,’ Billy says, but he continues to call this way, identifying himself and Mathew, and Mathew goes on calling, ‘Denny!’ They rarely exchange words, but this isn’t unusual; they’ve worked together for years now, first when Mathew was head stockman at Thalassa, and then when Mathew employed Billy on Undelcarra, and they’re comfortable with silence. They climb out of the creek, call, go back to the creek bed and call again. They startle kangaroos, scatter lizards out from under saltbush clumps, turn to peer at fleeing dunnarts, and, lifting the lanterns, they see corellas and galahs sleeping in the branches of the gums. Billy would like to whisper in Denny’s secret ear: nothing but us two searching you out, nothing coming for you, nothing looking at or thinking of or paying attention to you, just us.

  They follow Fairly Creek over the plain, splitting up sometimes—Billy takes the land north of the creek and Mathew the south. They always come back together. This is easy enough to do, what with the lanterns and the shouting. Billy doesn’t think Denny could have made it this far from home, but he waits for Mathew to signal when it’s time to return. Mathew does this, finally, by standing beneath a red gum with his hands on his hips, looking around, nodding his head and clearing his throat. Then they follow the creek back to their horses and reach them at the earliest sign of light. The air is cold; there’s a crack to it as they breathe. The cold may not be the source of Mathew’s trembling.

  ‘To town, then,’ Mathew says.

  They stop off at Undelcarra on the way, and Billy waits while Mathew goes inside. The first fly of the day hovers at Billy’s left eye. Cissy already has the Shires in the yard and is mucking out their stalls with a passion that suggests they have done her some personal wrong. Mathew returns with food and tea, and Mary comes out to stand on the verandah. Billy looks at her and touches his hat; she gives a slight nod in return. Mary has always been guarded with him, but she’s courteous.

  On the way to town, Mathew says, ‘Couldn’t hurt to go on to Thalassa and see about that tracker.’

  Billy nods. He’s going to Thalassa; he always is. Thalassa is home.

  The sky is lighter when they part in town, but still quite dark.

  Minna Baumann turns in her tender bed. Her husband breathes against her shoulder; he’s tired, but he kisses her when she asks him to. They haven’t slept yet. Tonight is their first time in a bed together and the fact that everything is permitted excites them. They’re used to being discreet, so they’re delighted by noise. They keep the lamp lit and study each other, touching what they see. When Robert gets up for water, Minna studies his knotty shoulders, the three dark moles like a lucky constellation on his upper thigh and the whiteness of his backside. And when, later, she gets out of bed to stoke the fire, she makes sure he’s watching her. This is her first night in her new house, which has the added piquancy of being attached to a police station. She prowls naked through the bedroom, touching objects that now belong to her. Robert falls asleep.

  Robert has so few personal possessions: his clothes, a mantel clock, a few books, a blank postcard from the Riverina, his guns and sword and, propped in one corner, a long, thin native spear. His clothes are neat—except for the suit he was wearing today, which she kicked beneath the bed at some delirious point. It’s his uniform that interests her. The first time she saw him, not long after he arrived in Fairly, he was wearing his uniform and he made her think of a field of ripe wheat: dark ground, bright head. But the pinkish mottle of his skin also brought to mind her mother’s stories of the golem, a creature made from clay that might be good or evil. It had seemed imperative to know, and quickly, whether Robert was good or evil.

  When Minna was twelve, a friend of her father’s—staying for one night on his way further north—had come into her room and touched her growing breasts. Sometimes, afterwards, she thought about it with curiosity: the way he pursed his lips, didn’t look at her, and breathed loudly through his nose. She imagined a boy in his place, which interested her more. She knew she was pretty. Her mother would inspect her and say, ‘I knew my children would have looks,’ but if Wilhelmina were in a bad mood she’d say, ‘Even the Devil was beautiful when young.’ Minna’s mother still talks a lot about the Devil; they’re old acquaintances, and Wilhelmina has a proverbial mouth, which she says is true of Germans. She speaks of the Devil’s preferences—his favourite piece of furniture, his favourite food, his favourite kind of girl—and these are all allusions to things Minna shouldn’t be or like. Mama knows endless tales about him, which Minna as a girl used to ask for until every sound at her midnight window was Mephistopheles. Then the thorny German script on the wall that said ‘A mighty fortress is our God, a mighty shield and weapon’ seemed to confirm the dangers of the world.