The Bone Clocks

WE WALKED MOST of the night to an outcrop whose Noongar name meant “Five Fingers” in English, not far from present-day Armadale. This was home for the warriors’ clan, and the season’s residence for Esther. When day broke, I tried to make myself as useful to my hosts as I could, but although I’d been resurrected as Itsekiri, Kawйsqar, and Gurage tribespeople in earlier lives, I’d grown pampered as Lucas Marinus, Klara Koskov, and Pablo Antay, and two centuries had passed since I had hunted and foraged for dinner. I was of more use in helping the women to cure kangaroo hides, setting a broken arm, and gathering bush honey. I also busied myself gratifying my curiosity as a proto-anthropologist: My journals describe the burning of scrubland to smoke out game; totemic animals; a visit by five men from the south to trade red ocher for prized burdun wood; and a paternity suit, settled by Esther, who ingressed into a fetus to perform a psychosoteric DNA test. Esther’s skin-group showed me the pity owed to a simpleminded uncle, a distrust of my Europeanness, and respect for a Boylyada maaman colleague of Moombaki’s. The children were the least reserved. One boy named Kinta used to borrow my jacket and hat and strut about, and they all liked showing off their bushcraft skills to the clumsy pale visitor. My attempts to speak Noongar caused endless amusement, but with the tribe’s help Pablo Antay compiled the best extant glossary of the Noongar language.

Moombaki, I learned, was not thought of as a god but a spirit guardian, a collective memory, a healer, a weapon of last resort, and a sort of assize judge. She moved from skin-group to skin-group at the start of each of the six Noongar seasons, helping each family and clan as best she could, and circulating the idea that violent resistance to the Europeans would result in more dead Noongar. Some called her a traitor, she told me, but by the 1870s her logic was demonstrable. The Europeans were too many, their appetites too voracious, their morality too fickle, and their rifles too accurate. The Noongar’s slim hope of survival lay in adaptation, and if this altered what it meant to be Noongar, what choice was there? Without knowledge of the Ship People’s minds, however, even this slim hope was doomed, and so Moombaki had chosen a ten-year-old half-caste girl for her present sojourn. Similarly, she had invited Pablo Antay to Five Fingers with a view to learning about the world and its peoples.

By night, then, Esther and I sat across the fire from each other at the mouth of her small cave and subspoke about empires, their ascents and falls; about cities, shipbuilding, industry; slavery, the dismemberment of Africa, the genocide of the natives of Van Diemen’s Land; farming, husbandry, factories, telegraphs, newspapers, printing, mathematics, philosophy, law, and money and a hundred other topics. I felt like Lucas Marinus once did, lecturing in the houses of the Nagasaki scholars. I talked about who the settlers landing at Fremantle were, why they had voyaged here, and what they believed, desired, and feared. I tried to explain religion, too, but the Whadjuk Noongar had a distrust of priests after men had distributed blankets “from Jesus” to several clans up the Swan River, only for the recipients to die a few days later of what sounded like smallpox.

In most other subject areas, however, Esther was the teacher. Her metaage became apparent one night when she recited the names of all her previous hosts, and I lined up one pebble per name. There were 207 pebbles. Moombaki sojourned into new hosts when they were about ten and stayed until death, which implied a metalife stretching back approximately seven millennia. This was twice as old as Xi Lo, the oldest Atemporal known to Horology, who at twenty-five centuries was a stripling compared to Esther, whose soul predated Rome, Troy, Egypt, Peking, Nineveh, and Ur. She taught me some of her invocations, and I identified within them various tributaries to the Deep Stream from long before the Schism. On some nights we transversed together, and Esther enfolded my soul in hers so I could spirit-walk much further and faster than I was otherwise able. When she scansioned me I felt like a third-rate poet showing his doggerel to a Shakespeare. When I scansioned her, I felt like a minnow tipped from a jar into a deep inland sea.