The Roving Party (22 page)

In a fathomless part of the night Katherine woke Bill and took his hand, leading him quietly away from the fire while the girl remained sleeping under her rug. She pulled him into the gum trees and further on into the scrub before she stopped.

She come?

No.

They crouched there a while listening to the flames snap through the tree limbs and thickets, listening for any sound from the girl. Nothing. Into the darkness they pushed, her hand in his, and they had gone some way when off in the scrub the girl was heard to cry out as she awoke alone. It was a sound alive with fear and Bill felt the pit of his gut twinge. He turned as Katherine came to a halt beside him and they crouched in the bush with that heartbreak ringing around them. Bill wiped the sleep from his eyes. He removed his hat and rubbed his hairless head. Then he rose and put back towards the campsite where it glowed in the distance. And Katherine followed him.

T
HEY TOILED FOR THE EAST THEREAFTER
, the three of them, over the low hills, through the slackly grown coast scrub, then crossing plains still black where clans had burned back in passing. Two mornings out from the dune land they crested a rise and stretched out before them around the earth’s curve was the eastern sea. They stood squinting into the shimmer as docile clouds amassed upon the misthazed horizon. Pushing through some tea-tree they came onto the sands where a wrack of bull kelp lay mangled along the tideline and the surf beat against the beach. With one hand shading his eyes Bill surveyed the shore and the assemblage of fur seals upon it. The seals rolled off into the waves in pairs and packs. He crouched, dug his fingers into the soft grains and rested there. After a time the girl found a stick and began digging a hole in the sand, reaching her arm into the wet below. Bill watched her work. Beach lice sprang up on the slag heap she’d made and she pulled up thready white worms and threw them into
the water. Bill drove his arm down into the hole and heaved up a few handfuls too and the girl grinned. Together they dug deeper until sea water pooled in the hole and the sand ran as porridge. Katherine ignored them at their digging and walked off instead to gather mussels from the rocks. Along the beach the combers hit the shore, their spray curling and imploding.

As Bill lay on his stomach scratching in the sand he looked out across the sea. Skylit against the horizon was the grey shape of a gaff cutter nosing through the swell. He sat up. She worked a good way out but was bent tautly under her rigging and leaned into the wind as if she was well handled. He brushed the sand off his palms. No good size for whaling and more likely meant for putting about the shoreline after seals or swans or clanswomen. He caught the girl by the upper arm and hauled her into the trees where they might hide themselves.

He called to Katherine but she had seen it too. She tucked herself down behind the rocky headland and eyed the ship around the side. The cutter jounced across the whitecaps, making northerly at a clip, spray breaking on her bow. They remained hidden as she drew away. When she had receded Bill called Katherine closer.

We ought to go with her.

Eh?

Follow her north.

Follow?

Yes. A ship close in by the coast. Manalargena will find a means to get her trade. Be sure of it.

Katherine looked away. putiya, she said.

How else are we to find him? There is a lot of country out here and none of it friendly.

Them whites find us they take us.

I know it.

Take her, she said and indicated the girl.

Yes. Her especially.

No no no.

Then what? You mean to walk until your path crosses his?

She went down on her haunches. Took up a handful of sand and threw it.

In time Katherine stood up. She would not meet his eye but only dusted the sand from her palms and taking up her bundle walked along the beach, her feet in the dried sands squeaking like birds. So together they went along the shore with the cutter. Bill stayed off the beaches lest they were sighted by clansfolk and they tracked up and down the grassed sandbanks and through loose scrub stands. They crossed tidal creeks stained by the tea-tree and crowded with insect swimmers. Late in the day, as the sun burned into the hills, they looked up to see that the speck on the water had faded entirely from view. The sea was rolling inwards at their feet as they stood staring off to the north where the cutter had vanished beyond the boundaries of the world. There they stayed until
Bill called for a camp to be made and they dropped their heads and trudged into the scrub.

In the twilight they gathered driftwood and Bill knifed muttonfish from the stones below the tideline. They ate seaweed by the handful with the roasted muttonfish and drank Bill’s canteen empty. As they ate, the girl and the woman stared at each other across the smoke. The girl was draped in the old worn rug that Bill had carried the length of the island. She turned away from Katherine and gave her attention to the coals instead.

After a while Katherine clicked her tongue at the girl. Eh, she said.

The girl looked up.

Katherine jabbed a finger at her. mullar walter nela?

The girl didn’t answer.

She dont speak that tongue, said Bill.

Katherine looked at him.

Nor do I know hers worth a damn. I reckon she’s come from further south. But how can I ask her?

Katherine tried again. wunnerrer noogee?

The girl seemed to consider the question as if it was something momentous. Her forehead rumpled up. She said, Moyhenna.

They could not be sure if she had understood.

In the firelight Katherine’s face appeared to soften but it was only the light: behind it her features remained unmoved. She nodded.

They spoke no more after that. The cook fire died down as the sea winds played through the dunes, through the ratty wattles grown tip to tip and the florets of cutting grass. Bill leaned back, his eyes roaming the starlit sky. The stars themselves offered no counsel but he watched those teeming scintilla and marvelled at the promise their bright motes held.

They pushed up the coast two more days, eating well from the shoreline, sucking meat from seashells or yolk from swan eggs and taking weed off the rocks. When it rained they drank from rockpools and filled the canteen. On dusk they broke into the brittle coastal trees for a hidden place to sleep. Bill would not light fires now for smoke would show them up and in the morning they dragged branches through their campsite like outlaws and buried their waste in the sand. Surging waves crashed along the foreshore and the air was filled with a spray that sheared the sunlight into its constituent colours. They walked on around the bay’s restless arc, their gangly morning shadows mocking them.

On the third day moving north they came upon a river
spilling onto a beach where terns rode the wind above the outpour and dived on the silver life they spied. Seals wallowed like monstrous infants in the wash, honking to each other over the roar of the waves. To the east the sun rose out of the sea and cast the headlands in a blue and formless gauze. Pods of whales blew water spouts in the bay, immense buds dispersing on the winds. But it was the ship that commanded their attention. Off in the bay’s corner the cutter had heaved to and now bobbed dumbly on her anchor. The dinghy had been beached and hauled above the driftline, the oars left askew and sails lowered. At the distant end of the beach huge fires burned and the towers of smoke bent landward before the sea breeze.

Bill crouched long in the tea-trees surveying that scene, the cutter seesawing in the waves, her naked masts aloft. He watched the ship and at length he pulled the fowling piece off his back, removed the hood and charged a handful of ball down its belled throat. The girl knelt beside him and she ran her fingers over the hatching on the stock where the pattern had worn back but Bill pushed her roughly aside. When he was finished priming the gun he gave it to Katherine and stood behind a bush scanning each aspect of the camp along the beach. Then he removed his hat and knelt before the woman and the girl. The hat had lost its shape through hundreds of bush slogs and hung lifeless in his hands.

I see men moving around the fires, he said.

lamunika bungana?

Bill shook his head. Couldnt rightly say. But I reckon on him bein there somewhere.

Katherine stiffened. We go findim. Go now.

No. Not yet.

Why?

Let me think a minute. I need to think.

Bill pulled his hat brim through his fingers. He looked over his shoulder at the fires burning on the beach and he faced back to them and placed his hat upturned on the sand. Best wait for dark, he said.

Dark?

Yes.

Why wait for dark?

Same reason as any huntsman.

You no hide. Not from him.

Hiding aint my intention.

Manalargena bungana find you. He see you.

He will see what I’m about when I reveal myself. Not before.

Katherine flicked her hand, a dismissal.

You want to findim then go on. I wont stop you.

She peered into his eyes. You fear him.

Bill brought his knife out of its leathers, checked its blade and resheathed it behind his neck, turning again to study the fires burning in the far beyond.

There’s no shame in saying it. That headman has no equal
in this life nor the next. But I know something else. No man can have his throat slit and still yap about it.

You cut him throat?

I will.

She held up the gun. Shoot him now. Walk there and shoot.

I tried that once. He never even fell. And him with that waddy of his, he near broke my head open.

How you get out?

Get where?

You cut him you run away?

Run like all buggery.

How?

I’ll know a way when it presents.

They crouched there in the speargrass and sand dunes with the waves throwing a faint spray upon their skin. Watching the fires and the figures ambling around them. A cold wind angled in off the sea as the sun revolved behind a spread of cloud. They lay down out of sight and in that sheltered hollow they waited for nightfall.

A
BOVE THE SALT MARSH THE MOON
rose as white as parchment. The men of the Plindermairhemener, some Leetermairremener folk and some from even further south were gathered around the hearth fires by clan, a group convened from the remains of bands bitterly reduced by raids and wars and disease and every kind of misfortune the frontier could visit upon a people. The older men sat cross-legged near the fires on which crayfish shells steamed and oysters and mussels lined up on the stones had split open in the heat. They crunched meat and sand both and eyed the other clans eating likewise at their fires, whispering to each other. Naked, scarred and painted up like highlanders. They studied those foreign bands but if there were grievances and blood feuds unsettled they were set aside for the common cause of survival. For at the edge of the campsite, where the beach met the tussocked dunes, a party of whitefolk come in newly from the sea were stood around a great bonfire.

The seamen were of a sort common enough to those parts. They made a trade of skins and seal oil and they wintered in the islands of the strait where they had station camps arranged out of notice of the Royal Navy. At the fires they stood, sipping rum in tin mugs and taking chew dipped in the same, all outfitted in fur cloaks and breeches discoloured by the spilling of seal blood and shod in moccasins sewn from kangaroo tails. Beneath those vestments was hidden a selection of arms, leadweighted sealing clubs strung around their wrists, knives like bonesaws, and rusting pistols and hatchets meant for firewood. They spat tobacco liquor on the flames and crimped the fleas picked from their beards between the nails of thumb and forefinger. The whites did not come alone. Crouched among them were half a dozen black women taken or traded over the years from the coastal tribes. These native wives filled the men’s mugs from a communal bucket and roasted their potatoes in the coals, and while the wives worked they sang of the Christian devils who were their keepers. A doleful tune that sounded in essence like tribal chanting but bore the melodic rise and fall of a ballad. The seamen drank down their rum and stared at the young clan girls seated at the hearth fires with the natives and these girls lowered their eyes or looked away. But their meekness would not save them.

So when the Vandemonian appeared among the fullest shadows of the fire’s peripheries, a lone figure come on a sudden from the sedge lands beyond, the wives sang and the seamen
drank and for a time he remained anonymous. In the dark he searched around those faces for the headman, each face more grim than the one before. As he looked across the camp he saw one of the whites leave off from drinking and wander towards him through the shrubs and he felt for his knife. The seaman had a pannikin in hand and he sidled up to Bill, swaying beside him in the dimness as he raised the mug to his mouth with a staggered precision. He bore the flag of Nantucket stitched onto his lapel, the whale and the circle, and in his beard was a long beaded braid much in the manner of the old Norsemen. Rum drizzled down his chin into his whiskers. His earlobes were stretched like teats under a weight of iron hoops and he was pierced through the nose and lip as well. The fellow scratched himself.

Where’d you all come from? he said.

The Vandemonian looked at him, then looked away.

Kit up like all whatever. You dont look like no coon in that hat. The American swayed and shifted his feet to right himself. A bit of rum sloshed from his mug. I knowed a lot a coons too.

The wives struck up a new song that sounded like some sort of shanty and the seamen added their voices to it and sang with an affinity and feeling to which the elders at the hearth fires listened politely but did not understand.

Are you one of these yahoos?

Black Bill spat to one side.

Damn sure dont look like em.

A veteran, unusually stout through the forearms, started stepping out an impromptu jig. This spectacle raised a round of catcalls from the gallery as the shambling man went about on the sands holding up his thick arms like the wings of a grounded carrion bird and the clansmen seated at their family fires laughed openly at the foolishness.

The American gestured at Bill with his mug. You dont understand a word I’m speakin do ye? You half-assed nigger.

But as he turned to stagger off, a tall, broadchested figure came trotting through the campsite with children clinging to his legs. In the middle of that eccentric muster the children of the clans had begun upon a game and they stalked this big fellow through the camp’s darkened borders. Children squealed in delight and swung off his legs to bring him down but the fellow howled in their ears and freed them to begin the chase again. That reckless pack harried him between the trees, dogs and children both, the dour lumbering demon fleeing in feigned terror. Through the dust of the jig, the smoke and stink, the Vandemonian saw him, unsheathed his dagger and established a stance with his blade shining and his bleak purpose reflected in his features.

bungana, he called.

The game suddenly ended. With the children still ranked up around his legs Manalargena turned to regard the Vandemonian. The headman was breathing heavily, sweating. The men around the fires numbered perhaps twenty and they
rose on his word. The clatter of clubs and spears being taken up killed off the singing. The seamen also fell silent and some backed slowly into the darkness out of sight while some brave souls felt for their weapons.

So he come, said the headman. The cold wind. The cold wind. In he blows.

By God you put that down. The American had pulled an archaic duelling pistol from the rope in his pants and steadied it at Bill’s temple. Put it down and stick up yer hands.

Bill did not move. He watched the headman.

Stick em up less you want yer whole upper storey blowed off, you son of a bitch.

He no listen. No hear. The headman shook his head.

He’ll damn well hear me soon he doesnt drop that blade.

Put away gun, said Manalargena.

I said drop it.

When Bill moved the knife came so fast and precise that the American never even gasped until Bill was upon him. He grabbed the pistol, pushed it aside and as it fired into the sand he cut the muscle of the man’s upper arm with a single pass. The American hollered and clamped his hand on the wound. He stumbled back towards his crewmates. They looked at each other nervously, gaffs and knives and oars held up in defence. Once at the fire the American dared to lift his clamped hand to study the laceration but the sight of his arm laid bare caused him to wail and fall to the sand.

The headman never removed his eyes from Bill. orrercarner nicker?

I mean to take my redress.

Manalargena came forward and the children arranged around his legs moved with him. He rested his empty hands on them, stroked the head of a spindly girl. And my daughter? You kill her? My sister son? He touched the children in turn as if to indicate them.

I do what needs doing.

You keep sorrow, said the headman. He touched his cheeks. Keep it here. But sorrow is you deserve. It is belong to you.

His men, all armed for warring, ranged out behind their leader now in a crude division. Among that mix of clansmen all knew the deeds of Bill’s history and they knew the havoc he’d sown in their lands as a vassal of Batman. When Bill inched forward with his knife displayed the warriors were stayed by his fearful standing and they raised no cries of war nor called on their ancestors but heard only the squeal of his boots through the sands. He moved and his blade glimmered.

I speak truth here, said Manalargena. You strong man. Yes. But you cannot eat stone. Not stone.

Manalargena reached down to pick up a hand axe off the rocks. It was a simple tool meant for dressing animals and a mess of fur remained around the heel from this work. Its iron head was hafted on a hardwood waddy and affixed in place with resin. It bore no adornments of any kind save for ridges
along the handle and the blade was notched where it had struck against bone or rock. He held this curious weapon down by his side. On the beach the fires twisted.

You did something to my boy. I know it.

Ah. The child.

What did you do?

Yes. The child is justice. Your owing is paid.

Without any sort of notice Bill lunged forward and swung the knife at the headman’s gut then slashed it upwards. The startled children fell away behind the ranks of men. Manalargena skipped back, clutching the hand axe to his chest.

The child was no part of this, said Bill.

He moved in again and whipped the knife left and right in a motion as fast as a snake strike and this time it caught the headman across the wrist and opened a wound. The clansmen stationed at his back lifted their spears and beat their waddies on the shafts and the clamour grew as they readied to attack.

The headman stuck out his axe. mullarner! he said.

They halted. Some made war calls and others leered at him but they did not ship their spears. A flow of blood began down the headman’s fingers and he flicked it away. He continued pacing and watching the Vandemonian where he stood with his knife at his waist.

I not kill you, Tummer-ti. This is finish. You go now. As he pointed out across the marsh tussocks blood ran from his
fingers, ran down the thousand scars crisscrossing the skin of his blighted arm.

He was my son.

Bill swung his knife again. The blade passed cleanly by the headman’s throat and before that movement ended he’d caught Bill’s arm and turned it against his shoulder. Bill was pushed off balance. In a stroke the headman brought around his axe and buried it to the marrow in Bill’s thigh. The Vandemonian cried out. The headman jerked the edge free and a flow of blood splashed down Bill’s leg. They backed away and stood facing across that small distance, the headman bearing his axe like a butcher’s hatchet and the sand beneath Bill’s feet thickening with his blood. His leg, his whole side, was in torment.

Go, said the headman. Again he pointed into the darkness.

Bill spat, his eyes like gun black.

Manalargena brought up his arms. His gaze swept across the clansfolk. nara relipianna clueterpercare, he said.

This was met with the crackle of waddy on spear.

Then Manalargena looked to the American. He brave man, yes?

Son of a bitch near cut off my arm. He needs hacking up is what he needs.

Once more Manalargena faced the Vandemonian, waving his axe around in agitation. You murder us. You come in the night. You hide. You shoot. With pimdimmeyou you come. And you
bring sorrow. So I call your child and he listen. My demon call. He hear our music that child. This is justice, he said.

Blood pooled in his boot. His hand was weak around the dagger and he focused on sounds nearby as he tried to slow his labouring heart and fight the nausea brewing in his gut but there was so much pain he could think of nothing else. After some breaths he raised his eyes to the unbending frame of the headman. He clutched his knife and limped forward.

Come, said the headman, and I teach you.

Bill aimed for the ribs, came up and under. The headman knocked his arm wide and brought around the blunt side of his axe to crack Bill on the nape. It was a heavy blow and he staggered. Now the headman caught his knife arm and he fought Bill backwards onto the sand where he straddled his chest and angled the axe hilt across Bill’s throat. Bill struggled and kicked but the headman leaned his weight upon the handle and pushed to stop the air in his neck. Bill’s knife arm was pinned to the sand. His vision began to flicker. Seamen jeered and whistled. Then the headman eased off.

This is finish. You go. Go now.

Manalargena stood up and paced back out of reach. The Vandemonian gasped air as he rolled onto his side. The wild men ringing around him with spears and waddies and seal clubs called on him to stand and fight. He raised himself to his knees. But even as he felt for his knife in the sand a shot boomed out on the salt marsh. The headman slumped. Fiery
red stipples appeared along his leg where buckshot had entered the flesh and he pressed his hands to the holes and blood seeped through his fingers bright against the dark of his skin.

Now a general confusion seized hold of the camp. Some of the clansfolk picked up the headman and carried him into the firelight and others scattered away in fear of being shot but one or two looked at the Vandemonian and they raised their waddies to beat him where he crouched. He drew his body into a huddle but the blows against his ribs were skilfully delivered and drove the wind from his lungs.

noneta! noneta! noneta!

A woman’s voice cleaved the discord of the campsite. In that moment the waddy blows ceased and the clansmen ran. Bill scrabbled away over the sand holding his damaged leg and when he raised his eyes he saw Katherine revealed from the darkness by the fire’s irregular glow, and borne at her hip was his fowling piece. She approached and those clansmen fled like children before the muzzle of her gun. But her intentions lay not with them at all and when one of their number pitched a spear she knocked it aside with the barrel and then renewed her levelled gaze upon the headman.

He was lying near the fires. His wounds and his bloody fingers were grimed with sand and he wore a look of great astonishment at the sight of her. The clansfolk around him had bolted into the night. Down on the beach the sealers were mounting their masted dinghy into the breakers and their calls for haste
could be plainly heard above the waves. Only the seamen’s wives remained and as Katherine stalked into the campsite they began upon a song. It was a canticle of the devil’s prowess in war and the soothing words he spoke for the dying as he dispatched them towards his own realm on the point of his waddy. From the beach the whites called to their wives but the women sang on and on.

Manalargena faced her across the smoke and flame. The mother, he said. Yes. Shoot, Mother, or go. I not fear you.

She thumbed back the mechanism.

Bill rose off the sands, bloodstained and beaten. Leave him be, he said. Leave him.

He placed his hand on the barrel and tried to push it down. She shoved him off but he gripped the piece and would not let go.