The Roving Party (16 page)

Pigeon, he called, and he pointed.

The Dharug men approached with their weapons raised before them, the stocks pressed into their waists.

Watch it. She has a waddy.

She no trouble. Are you, missus?

She did not move as the men straddled the rocks and drew up around the small cave, and she showed not the least astonishment at their presence.

Somethin wrong with her, said Pigeon.

Bill gazed around at the world rendered mute by the storm and then back at the woman. I dont see tracks leading up here. She’s been sitting a while just so.

You got yourself a proper good spot here, missus.

Might be she was left behind.

I go call Batman. Pigeon climbed on top of the ledge. He waved his arms and waved his piece.

collare lueth win? Bill said to her.

Naked but for a kangaroo mantle and the pouch and strings of shells hanging at her throat, her dry breasts draped like leather stockings, her gaze as level as a marksman’s, she looked up at him with changeless brown eyes. She looked right into him and he pushed back his hat, biting his lips in thought. Beside him Crook became uneasy. He shifted backwards a few halfpaces and he gestured at her chest and said something.

Black Bill leaned down and raised her mantle. It was fashioned from the fur of a white kangaroo and showed high
standing among her own kind, for such skins were exceedingly rare. Beneath the mantle the skin of her torso was writ with chartings of power by means of glass or tektites or perhaps knives. Crook saw it for an omen and he scratched himself and stood further off. Black Bill cut the strap of the pouch looped at her throat and weighed it in his palm then stuffed it in his knapsack.

By now the rovers were alongside them, staring down at the woman. John Batman considered this new turn of events.

Where there’s one there’s fifty, he said. He bent over the woman. collare lueth win? he said.

But the woman lowered her head.

I tried that already, said Bill.

You get much?

Bout as much as you just got.

She must be sick or somethin.

Bill shook his head. She’s not sick.

Might be she was waitin fer us. Just sittin here like this.

Yes, said Bill. It might be.

The snow was killing whatever hope remained of finding the source of the smokes, and the party men waited with snow trembling in their beards and the winds freezing their soaked clothes. There seemed a good amount of sense in making camp inside the stone alcove where the woman had fixed herself. Batman pulled his flask from his shirt but it was empty and he held the bottle before him as if he intended to cast it down on
the stones. Instead he ordered the canvas breakwind erected. Then he pulled the cork and took a deep draught of the rum scent inside the glass.

The snow fell and fell. The rovers hovered near the glow of the little fire Batman had raised from his tinder but the fire cast no heat nor did it improve their nerves as would a good blaze. They shivered and could not stop. In the eerie halflight Black Bill emptied the contents of the woman’s pouch into his hat and fingered through the few effects. Half a child’s jawbone inset with milk teeth, a small spoon scored and tarnished, a nugget of ironglance for blacking about the eyes, and a clawshaped impactite. He took the glassy fragment and raised it before the flames. It was translucent and darkish green, serrated along one edge. He placed the impactite into the breast pocket of his shirt and the rest he scooped back into the pouch, which he returned to his knapsack. The woman stared at him. Pigeon had bound her with a woven cord and she held her hands in her lap and watched Bill at every movement.

Got a vicious set of eyes on her, dont she? said Jimmy Gumm, forgetting his own wandering eyeball.

John Batman leaned forward. Ask her again where the rest is.

Black Bill put the question to her.

The woman turned slowly and regarded the rovers and her expression grew bitter. In the long silence that followed, Bill’s query went unanswered.

nina tunapri mina kani, he said.

The woman brought her peculiar gaze to bear upon him, her head turning to his as if wrenched by some unseen hand. Bill watched that inscrutable face. She put her forefinger to her cheek then pointed at him once more, a gesture of knowing, of connection. He watched and waited. Then the cleverwoman began an oratory directed at the Vandemonian alone. She called him the relentless wind at dawn and she described for him the method by which the ear might be stopped with clay to prevent his evil entering the brain. She flourished her bound hands in agitation. The scars along her arms were raised and purple in the cold. Then she proffered for the Vandemonian the notion that he had given birth to himself, disgorged whole from his own mouth as it was supposed by some. But this was a theory she did not credit for she believed him a man like all men, fed by a mother, carried by a father.

Shut that sound up, said Batman. He tapped his pipe on the midden stones around the fire.

Bill moved towards the woman with a rope in his fingers. When he caught her wrist she jerked away and continued her speechifying. The men of the roving party, caped in blankets and snow, watched him at his mishandlings.

She saw disease upon him, she said. Some devilry had passed behind his eyes or burrowed through his mouth and infected him. Now he walked that evil over her country. Shadowed under his hat, his boots blackening the pastures. She spoke and spittle gathered on her thin lips. The first notion of white men, she said, was to possess. Now Bill brought their notions into her country like a man bearing antridden firewood.

Woman, I tell you now: shut your hole, said Batman, drawing his skinning knife.

Black Bill stood over her and he forced one knee down and pinned her against the stones beneath. He looped the cord through her mouth and yoked a fiendish hitch knot behind her ear and she gagged on the bit and slaver coursed down her chin where blood also ran. They had themselves then a fine unbroken silence.

Hobbled among the rocks and drifts of snow the cleverwoman lay, soundless, her mantle frosted and her eyes tracing the tumult of embers smouldering in the darkness.

T
HEY ROSE WITH THE SUN
. O
VERNIGHT
the snow had ceased and the settled inch on the breakwind had started running as the temperature increased. No provisions remained for any sort of meal so they heaped snow on the fire to extinguish it completely and waited and shivered while Crook and Pigeon sought a bearing from the sun as it surged higher through the slanted ranks of trees. After some discussion Pigeon took Crook’s bare foot in his hands and heaved him into the limbs of a cider gum that stretched into the canopy out of sight. Crook spidered up the branches and set them shaking and the snow lumps falling. When he’d made a decent height he turned his head to look about.

What’s he see? said Batman.

Pigeon called up to him.

A reply echoed down.

He see your wife take bath, said Pigeon. See her great big tits. Can the dirty beggar see any smokes?

Pigeon called up again and the call came down. A lake, he sees a lake.

A tract of forest banked down to the waterhole and they inched the awkward decline holding handfuls of shrubs that cut their palms. Jimmy Gumm pressed his foot to one snowshadowed fold that gave beneath him and he toppled sideways across an outcropping. Bill was the man behind him. He took grip of Gumm’s clothing and dragged him upright. It was a deed simply done. After a month of bush life Gumm was all bone and beard and bitter feeling.

Bleeding treacherous, he said, a man’ll kill himself.

Horsehead gripped Gumm’s foot as he descended. You should hope it.

I’ve no desire to die on these rocks.

Better to go all sudden like that, Gummy. Save havin one of them poison spears hooked in yer breastplate.

Shut yer piehole, Horse.

The cleverwoman clambered down the rocks, pressing herself flat through the cracks and taking grip of the clefts. Bill fed out the slack on her tether and sent her first down the roughest stretches then followed the route she’d taken. She would squat and wait for him to arrive. There was a starkness about her eyes warning him never to show his back. They walked in single
file through the last few gums to the water. It was some kind of natural catchment or crater and the shrunken pines about the banks grew at odd angles, clinging fistlike to the granite. Within the mire of ice and mud turned the pure planed eye of water. They followed Crook around its rim.

In the snow at the pond’s shore tracks like plaster reliefs of feet ran everyway. They were sharp and the bottoms hard-packed. Crook spoke at length on what he saw there, indicating with little dips of his head where the clansfolk had descended into the gully and where, having filled the watercarriers, they continued around the waterhole and off into the woodlands. Pigeon listened and put to him questions about the nature of the clan and they conferred on the age of the tracks and the sun’s influence upon their definition. Then Pigeon approached the party men.

Plenty folk. Some kids I reckon. One bugger drag foot.

How long?

Not long boss. Hour or two.

John Batman smoothed his hair back, replaced his hat. A lone currawong was turning against the sky where long blades of sunlight knifed through the cloud cover and broke open their mass.

There isnt the man alive what can hide when an inch of fresh snow is present.

No sir.

Onwards, he said. We’ll havem by darkfall.

But the assigned men didn’t move. They looked at each other and at Batman.

We aint got no vitals, said Horsehead. He was sleepless, pale, the ridges of his skull showing through his skin.

John Batman regarded him blankly. There is food to be had all around.

Nothin an Englishman would eat.

Just as well you aint English then.

Course I am.

No. You are Vandemonian now. My word you are.

Horsehead eyed him suspiciously. I should know what I am and what I’m not.

Batman was done talking however so he moved away towards the lip of the pond where he filled his canteen and drank and watched the black shape of the currawong repeated on the pummelled surface.

They slogged out through the scrub, stepping in those native tracks or on what bare ground they saw. The icy drifts of snow grew brittle and transparent as the day wore on and their numb feet stumbled through the slush, the few birds that still held the trees staring down upon them. They passed beneath a leather-wood where lichen platelets laddered up the trunk and the ground seemed mostly dry. They called upon Batman for a spell
but he neither spoke nor spat and merely kept at the chase. They crossed a stand of pandani gathered like longhaired madwomen, snow blooms borne aloft in their axils. Crook signalled the party men onwards with his hands as he went from log to rock barefoot as a cat. He crouched atop a fallen tree and studied the crescent valley in its finery of snow. Behind him the company gathered and gazed too over that desolate country. The cleverwoman among their ranks breathed grimly around her gag and the assigned men gritted their eyes into a wind that blew ice flakes from the branches. Batman bunched his blankets around himself then called them forward into the teeth of the gale.

Further down the hill the Dharugs led them upon a fire pit strewn about with possum bones and wood spirals where spears had been carved and hardened in the flames and rounds of breadroot had been cooked. The men sniffed at the leavings then ate timidly, picking over the bones for meat skerricks. In the trodden soil around the fire Black Bill read the tracks of children pressed in perfect detail of toe and arch, his gentle fingers feeling over the imprints. Then John Batman hounded them on by waving his weathered hat and they followed the black men where they led.

Soon they passed out of the alpine country into a gully of fern trees that choked off the light. They descended over an hour
into a rainforest dressed with species of mountain ash and man fern. At the base of a colossal candle gum Crook came to a stop. All around their thighs bracken stood as if arranged in vases and the gums and the thinner wattles of the underscrub ran aslant along the upslope. He raised his hand for silence as he studied the hillside where breaths of wind caught the tree-tops and stones broke the mountain snowfall. He looked and listened. The assigned men and John Batman stood deployed behind him in a line. Upon the winds they heard the humming of voices.

Batman signalled to seek cover and the men dispersed among the ferns and scrub that smothered the valley floor. They arranged themselves in silence and muffled the blow of their breaths behind their collars. The rainforest spanning the hill seemed suddenly filled with a life of its own. As they watched, some of the nearby trees began to shake and a black dog appeared on the hill, then another and a third and fourth, dark shapes against that green world. On their flanks were broken images and shapes of suns and dotted lines traced in ochre. Several of the men trained their guns on the game hounds but Batman motioned them to lower their weapons; no sooner had he done so than two bald black heads showed starkly in the foreground. They passed behind a tree but soon reappeared and the cleverwoman beside Black Bill tried to call around her gag until the Vandemonian caught her throat and cut off the air. The native women were carrying firesticks. Bill saw only
two but reckoned a further three from the scrub by their firestick smoke. The two women neared, scrabbling down a bank of mossy rocks, the children they lugged on their backs sitting small in their grey fur slings.

Hold now, whispered John Batman.

Among the group of five women now appearing from the trees were a pair of young warrior boys. The foremost boy was bare naked but for a huge corduroy jacket that hung off his bones like fool’s costuming. He jostled the other with his bony elbow and seemed to be retelling some hunting story as he raised his thin spear and mimicked a throw then elbowed his mate again.

Black Bill kept his neck lock on the old woman. Her breath drew woundedly as the dogs trotted within yards of the hidden rovers and put their noses to the air. John Batman, holding his hat, looked up and down the ranks of fellows concealed in the brush and motioned them to lay aside their arms. At first they were confounded by this but he made the gesture again and the assigned men put down their guns and knapsacks. Then without warning Batman lunged out of the underbrush. He rose to full stature like the fabled barbarian all garbed in wool bedding and bearded and the sight put the dogs into a frenzy. From beneath his blankets he levelled his belt pistol on one and fired and its skull shattered in a spray as if a bottle of claret had been dashed against the cobbles. The whole of that native body cried out at his appearance: wa wa wa! they called but he was already among them, grabbing at the nearest woman.

Following his example the assigned men circled about and took hold of the women and their tots together and wrestled them to the ground. The young warrior boys brought up the blackened points of their spears but Bill caught the first spear when it was thrust and disarmed the boy. As the second spear pierced Bill’s shirt folds he twisted and seized it also with his free hand and likewise tore it from the youth’s fingers. Both spears he then broke in his hands. Gumm cracked one boy viciously across the face, bloodying his nose and dropping him cold.

The women rubbed their cheeks in shock, the little ones slung upon their backs wide eyed and staring. Gould looped a length of cowhide cord around the women’s hands and feet and some of them lowered their heads and cried out and made gestures of horror while others called out their shame with sounds most pitiful to hear. Their miserable cacophony filled the gully and John Batman paced before the captives, striking them about the head to regain some silence, and they cowered and wept and fell quiet.

Where are the men? John Batman scrutinised the man ferns and the sunless dells all around. Where’s the headman?

The faces of the clansfolk were lowered but their eyes cut towards Batman as he seated a shot ball in the breach of his pistol. Batman turned to regard that mob. bungana? he said. bungana?

Please, no men. One of the women raised her head. No men,
no men, she intoned in a weird echo of the whites. She carried no child on her back, and her skin was lighter than the others.

Stand her up, said Batman.

Bill picked her up by the arms.

Cranking back the cock, Batman placed the gun to her temple. Bill angled his face away from the blast but Batman only held the weapon steady. Held it close enough that she might study the patterned engraving upon the forestock.

You call em in, he said.

The woman stared along the barrels at Batman’s blank face and whatever she saw therein convinced her of his cold intent. She called into the unkept land that ran down the valley, her cry played away and died. She waited then called again.

Tell that chief I am here for him. John Batman spoke evenly.

Eh?

carney Manalargena, he said.

The woman turned and looked out at the forest. She seemed unsure whether anything she might say could summon the headman and she looked at the forest and then back at her captors. Batman put his hand to his mouth in a motion of yelling. So the woman raised her hands reluctantly and copied him. A small sound gone upon the air and lost. There came no reply.