The Roving Party (23 page)

There is nothing here, he said.

In the dark of the dunes the clansfolk gathered together and they enjoined the headman to flee but he paid them no attention. He sat staring into the great black cavern of the muzzle. pressing his hands to the pits driven into his leg. Sand and blood in his wounds mixed in rich amalgam. Then Katherine screamed at him. A long torn miserable wail ripped from the very well of her being. In the face of it the headman merely raised one hand to her, showing blood and sand both.

Bill hauled at her elbow and called on her to move. She lowered the gun. Shouldered it. The wives sang on yet she would neither look at them nor would she listen. The two together left the camp and no one dared follow.

S
O IT PASSED THAT NONE OF
them noticed the girl. The remnant clans reconvened at dawn in the long golden sun blades angling over the water. On the bluestone sea the gaff cutter leaned under her sails and as she hauled away, the clanspeople stood along the shoreline, their faces impassive. Manalargena was consulting with his demon silently before the fire. He had removed the shot balls by means of a glass spear point, washed his wounds in the sea and dressed them with pounded herbs, and now he allowed the leg to dry in the fresh air. His eyes were closed and as he whispered his scarred arm twitched with life. When it was done he led his people down the coast, the women and children from the south and east, the men of his own clan. As that conglomerate people walked the girl tracked along behind them over the coastal plains, keeping them in sight as she made through the tea-trees and candle heath ranged above the beaches. She clasped a possum skin around her shoulders and in her hands a bundle of shellfish
rolled in soft bark and knotted. Things given to her by Black Bill and his woman. On dark the remnant tribe settled in around a cook fire and the girl watched them for a time from her hide and then she descended out of the grassed dunes and into their campsite.

T
HEY WALKED THROUGH THE DARK HOURS
, the Vandemonian limping badly, and in the early pallid dawn they saw from a balded peak the sea laid out like slate miles to the east. The waxing sun lit the speargrass marsh but there was no sign of men crossing that range in pursuit. They rested for a time as Bill vomited quietly over the stones and paraffin bush and dried his forehead on his sleeve each time after the pain swept his body. Katherine led him through the gums at a slow pace, with Bill holding onto every trunk and overhang and favouring his good leg. Blood had congealed inside his boot and each step sounded an odd swampy suck from its depths. They pushed on down a shaded ridge where the branches curled under a weight of glossy herbage and it brushed against them without cease. In that shade the cold was compounded as their clothes took the dew from the leaves. Bill shivered and hopped down the embankment until he could go no further and he called to Katherine. At first she kept on walking for a dozen yards or so, with no sign it seemed of any
kind of mercy. He slumped down at the base of a blackwood and stretched his ruined leg out in front of him. He could not see her and he waited in silence before she reappeared.

She came up the slope and stood assessing him at a distance, her few provisions bundled with the fowler on her back, her blankets horseshoed across one shoulder, a sort of sullenness on her face which he knew as its chief feature. He waved her closer. Silvereyes were roosted there in profusion and as she approached between the trees they took up in warning to each other. She leaned over Bill and gripped hold of his thigh to better know the injury, turning it this way and that until he gritted his teeth all the harder for the pain. Straightening up she began to unload her blankets and bits and pieces onto the ground beside him and she walked out among the pine and white gum and currant bush mounted on that shadowed ridge and went from tree to tree gazing up into the highest parts, her great double braid of black hair trailing like a mooring rope down her back. She selected one tree which appeared most likely and all the while the little silvereyes warbled. From out of the rubble, the blown branches and bark and leaves, she picked up a chunky stick and walked back to Bill. He hoisted himself upright with it and followed her through the shrub to the blue gum she had chosen. She hooked her foot into his hands and clambered onto the bottom limb where she found some holds that allowed her to ascend the trunk at speed. Bill watched her vanish into the canopy. He sat down and waited.

In the end he heard the possum long before he saw it. The silvereyes had fallen silent and Bill was lying back as if he might fight off the pain through sheer force of will. He heard the catsounding screams and looked up but could see nothing of Katherine through the tangle. He watched and waited and soon a shape came tumbling out of the tree limbs and thudded in a rise of dust upon the stones. Bill was over it, hobbling, clubbing it around the head, and the possum gave one short smothered yowl as it made to flee but Bill brained the thing mightily. He took it up by its curled tail and turned it in the sunlight, knocking aside the joeys clinging precariously to the pouch, and carried the carcass to a clearing where a fire could be stacked. Katherine came backwards down the trunk and hung off the final branch, swinging to and fro then dropping to her feet.

They roasted the possum below the shade of the sassafras and ate every part, ate the tail and the eyes from its skull—one each—and fried the giblets on a skewer. When they were done Katherine chose the thinnest of the forearm bones and with the knife she halved it down the centre, then quartered it. She took up one quarter and worked the tip into a point by filing it against a stone. Bill was stretched out near the fire and in the measured light his face was grey and his eyes mooned oversized in their sockets. He watched her stand and strip off her pants and using the bone needle she proceeded to pick loose a few threads of cotton which unwound like tiny worms into her sandcoloured palm. Greasing the thread with a dab of possum fat she passed it
through the eyehole she’d cut into the bone. Then she shuffled over to Bill. He rolled onto his side to present to her the cleft hacked in his thigh. From the ground he retrieved a stoutlooking piece of black gum and placed it between his jaws.

Every pass was purest distress. Katherine gathered the livid flesh together in a pucker and pressed the needle through and her hands were heavy with blood, and blood and sweat ran in equal proportion through Bill’s clothes and dampened the litter beneath. He did not cry out but bit down on the wood until his lips also bled. Finally it was at an end. She tied the thread, bit it off, and towelled her hands on her pants before she pulled them on again. Bill lay on his pallet of twigs and leaves, his eyes half closed, palms open, and he did not see her take the knife and put out into the trees.

When he awoke it was near on dark. He had a great thirst and he sat up and cast about for the canteen. Katherine was staring at him across the fire and she tossed the bottle through the smoke and onto his lap. He winced as it struck. His thigh was bound up in a poultice of tea-tree leaves and the vapours they shed brought water to his eyes. A wrap of paperbark fixed the poultice in place, the whole like some tumorous growth of his own flesh, seeping greenish ooze. He drank deeply and slumped back.

Why him not kill you? she said.

Bill opened his eyes. What?

Why him not kill you?

He looked at her. He shook his head.

Old now that bungana. Old. Dumb. I would kill you.

Yes. I reckon you would.

He closed his eyes and lay still in the fire’s warmth. A wind rolled in that stirred and reddened the coals. Bill screwed up his eyes for the smoke drifting past. He lay back alone with the misery in his leg.

Manalargena told me a story once, he said. My father used to sing the same story whenever we saw a snake. He’d point to the snake and start up singing but Manalargena’s story differed on some points. His folk have their own telling I reckon.

Story, she said. She stoked the fire with a possum bone. What story?

It concerns these two brothers, said Bill. And their neighbour.

He was quiet for a spell. Then he said, I hear you now.

After a while Katherine rose and stepped past the fire and handed him the tiny skull she wore always at her throat. Mooncoloured and frail and jawless. Bill cupped it in his palm, this last piece of a son he’d known only in dream. He looked upon that relic, desolate of heart as he spoke the boy’s name, the secret name he had given, and he said goodbye in his old tongue. He caressed that pearled bone and he promised the boy he would not forget him. He lay there for a long time with wind dousing his skin, watching a cinder sky churn above the forest, the skull clutched in his hands and his son’s secret name upon his lips. Longing for the deep dreams when he would visit.