The Call - Michael Grant [38]
Miladew smiled a shaky smile and nodded at Grimluk. “Lead us, Grimluk.”
Grimluk closed his eyes and formed a picture of Gelidberry and the baby. It suddenly occurred to him that he had a good name for the baby.
“Victory,” Grimluk said.
“Victory or death!” Bruise shouted.
“Yeah,” Grimluk said less enthusiastically. “Or death.”
Then, in a clear if nervous voice, he cried, “Throw open the gate!”
The gate wasn’t so much thrown open as hauled.
Vargran spells flew. The enemy surged. And Grimluk led the Magnificent Twelve straight into the teeth of foes as numerous as the stars.
Twenty-one
Looming ahead, larger and larger, was the rock. Ayers Rock. Uluru.
It sat there like the world’s biggest blood blister. All around, in every direction, the land was flat. But there, for no good reason, was this massive, incredible brown-red rock.
If by “rock,” you mean “mountain.” Or at least, “squashed, flat-topped mountain.”
“They say it just dropped out of the sky,” Jarrah explained, shouting to be heard.
“Who says?”
“The people it belongs to. The people who lived here long before Europeans showed up. Mum’s people. My people, too, partly.”
Karri looked up from her laptop to say, “It’s an inselberg. It’s what’s left after a much bigger mountain has eroded. It’s the hard core of an ancient mountain. The real mystery is not how the rock got here, but how the people did.”
“Why is that a mystery?” Mack asked.
“The Indigenous peoples have been here for at least forty thousand years. You may have noticed Australia’s an island. So how did they get here thousands of years before anyone had learned to sail? And once they got here, why did they seem to forget how to use the sea? Why did they come to live in the most desolate place on earth?”
Mack pondered this while he stared at the rock. They were moving again, getting closer. Jarrah was driving at a somewhat more reasonable speed, and they were now circumnavigating the rock.
“It seems…,” Mack started to say. Then he couldn’t think of quite what it seemed.
“It seems familiar,” Jarrah said.
“Yeah,” Mack agreed, surprised.
“Like it’s something you remember but you’ve never seen it before. Like maybe it was in some dream you had and forgot. But even that’s not quite it. More like this place is deep down inside your head. Like it’s down in your DNA.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly it,” Mack said, frowning.
Jarrah winked at him. “Most people—people who aren’t complete nongs, anyway—feel that way.”
They stopped when they reached a small camp. There were three dusty tents and half a dozen vehicles. The camp was at a respectful distance from the thousand-foot-high wall of Uluru.
It was hot out, but nothing Mack hadn’t experienced before. Uluru was rushing toward a setting sun, and the rock surface glowed redder than before. Up close it wasn’t as smooth as Mack had expected. In places it looked as if the rock had been sandblasted, like some giant had set out to etch the surface and stopped before revealing any sort of pattern.
“Is this where we’re going?” Mack asked.
“No, this is just our base camp. We’re going up there.” Jarrah pointed toward the top of the rock. “The Indigenous people dislike folks climbing on it. It hurts them. Like watching someone tread on the flag, I suppose. Tourists do it anyway, but this is a sacred place.”
“Like skateboarding in a church,” Stefan said, tilting his head back.
Mack noticed Jarrah’s eyebrows go up, admiring Stefan’s metaphor. Mack suspected it wasn’t a metaphor at all, but something Stefan had actually done.
“But we have permission,” Jarrah’s mother said, “because we’re not skateboarding in church, we’re learning about the church, discovering it.”
“We have to climb up there?” Mack said dubiously.
“It’s not so bad,” Jarrah said.
It was so bad, despite a rope handrail that had been set up in places. They climbed inside a deep crease in the rock face, and in places the cleft was so narrow that Mack had to beware of scraping his shoulders.
By the time they reached the top, Mack was exhausted and his thighs ached and his knees were wobbly.