Sound (13 page)

Billhook nodded, a lot. Finally, when the man stopped talking, Billhook handed him his bag full of treasure. Albert sat down and spilled the contents over the ground. He fingered the whalebone shark hook and felt its barb, nodding. He examined the sinewed join between paua and wood and put it back in the bag. He took all three awls and tied the whalebone hook to his possum string belt, clucking happily. Then he handed the bag with the items he didn't want back to Billhook. He said a few words to him and jogged away down the track, the white hook bouncing against his bare thigh.

Billhook waited for a while, amongst the acrid stench of burning swamp wood, not sure of what to do, or even if the meeting had been the success he'd planned. He began the trek back to the beach, to where his boat lay in the corner by the rocks. Even if he honoured Albert's wishes and hunted for roo away from his fired country, he had no hope of persuading men the like of Bailey or Hobson to do the same. They'd already reminded him of the folly of going ashore unarmed against the blackfellas.

He was treading around the sharp, broken scallop and helmet shells on the shore, thinking about all this, when he heard a shout. Albert picked his way over the grassy dune and down to the shore where Billhook stood waiting for him. He no longer held his smouldering banksia cone but instead, a grey, furry bundle of limbs and tails. He handed it to Billhook.

Four huge eyes stared at him. Two thin white tails wrapped
themselves around his wrists. The fur was impossibly plush and smelt like rutting marsupials. As they were. It wasn't one creature but two. The black man had given him a mating pair of ringtail possums, their bodies bound tightly together with hair string, with instructions to allow them to breed on Breaksea Island.

The sealers stamped out their fires and watched the ship for a good part of the day. The man-o'-war worked with short tacks on a north wind to stand off Breaksea Island.

They looked to be waiting for favourable wind to come in, positioning themselves for an entrance into the Sound. In the afternoon the wind turned to the south-west and the ship sailed slowly between Breaksea and Bald Head, its tattered white sails vivid against the streaky bosses of granite.

On the windswept peak of the island, the sealers gathered: Jimmy the Nail, Billhook, Samuel Bailey, Neddy and Sal, Dancer and Mary, Tommy Tasman, Weed, Hobson and the others. They passed Jimmy's looking glass around and strained to see the man-o'-war's sails furled at the channel entrance to Princess Royal Harbour.

“French,” said Jimmy, lowering his glass. “They're putting out an anchor on the port side. Not going to try scudding that sandbar in the harbour by the looks. Must be sixty fathoms where they are now.”

“They'd be resting up for wood and water,” said Bailey. “And to fix that rigging. Looks like they had a rough crossing.”

In the evening the wind dropped. The sealers lit a small, furtive fire on the north side of the island and discussed their situation. There were opportunities for gunpowder and rope, items they were now in dire need of, and also a berth from the Sound to Sydney. As they talked, hope rose in each of them like
reptiles feeling the first warmth of sun after sleeping season.

“Tomorrow we keep a weather eye on them,” said Jimmy the Nail. “See what they're up to. You women,” he nodded to Sal, Dancer and Mary, “you get some muttonbirds in the morn. They'll be wanting fresh meat. Where are those possums, Billhook?”

“Best to leave them 'til after they've kidded,” said Billhook. “Plenty more then.”

“Nah, they'd be worth a skerrick of powder,” said Bailey.

Billhook flashed with anger. He'd worked hard for that deal. “They'd be worth more later when I'm in Port Jackson Town and you're still here looking for a feed, Bailey.”

The men were quiet for a moment.

Jimmy said finally, “You're my crew, Billhook. And now that Boss Davidson is out of the show, I'll say who stays and who goes.”

Billhook stood up and walked out of the camp.

My parents were proud when I was given the berth aboard the sealer, he thought. They knew it to be my future as a seafarer and adventurer. They saw me as the seed that flies through the air and travels on the water to other lands or the bird who returns with a twig in its beak so they can grow that twig into a tree. Jimmy the Nail is not my decider.

The Pākehā only want a man who can kill. They know that we Māori are brave in the face of a whale or a seal; we have no fright to come alongside and drive in the pike, hold it fast, dodge the slimy brown teeth of the bull. That's why the white men like us, for we are strong and we are brave. What they don't know is that the young men they gathered from the bays and inlets of Otakau were offered up by our families as a privilege because we have strong hearts and are sons of high birth.

Jimmy the Nail had just made it clear to him, that Billhook
was a mere minion to Boss Davidson – who was more interested in selling a ship that didn't belong to him than honouring a promise – and a sidekick to Bailey's folly with kid thievery. Bailey holding that wriggling child under his arm, Tommy and Jack standing on the white beach and waving, and Dancer's lifeless body mauled by barnacles and later by Jimmy the Nail.

At that moment on Breaksea he wanted nothing more than to be away from these useless violences. There was Captain Kelly to find and Otakau to defend. There was his father to honour. The arrival of the Frenchmen had cleared his position in his mind, the way autumn rain washes the dust haze from the horizon.

He sat on a rock that still seeped the warmth of the day's sun, above the women's camp, and looked out across the water to Michaelmas Island. Beyond the island, a swelling moon rose over a hill on the mainland. Four dark figures – three women and the child – trod silently along the path in front of him and made their way to their fire. They didn't notice him sitting there as they passed but he could smell the muttonbird oil that they had smeared on their bodies.

Sal placed more wood on the fire. Dancer and Mary pulled off their sealskin frocks. They warmed muttonbird fat in their palms and smoothed it over their breasts, stomach and thighs in long, sure strokes. Weed sat in the dirt beside the fire and watched them.

Mary spoke. “We cry on the islands. Plenty blood. Plenty cry, yes, us Tyreelore
.
Island wives. We cry for our families.”

Dancer laid huge hands over her breasts and rubbed in glistening fat. “Plenty cry all over country,” she said and then she told her story in language and Mary repeated her, translating. “Her sister … three shepherds hanging her by her feet from a tree. Sister … dead from a gun in her stomach. Brothers killed by guns.”

“Clansmen bones on every beach.”

“People getting sick inside.”

“My mama's head. I found it in the hole.”

“Take us little girls away to the islands and make us their wives. Call us their Worthies.”

“Babies buried all over the islands.”

“Fill mouth of my white man's baby with grass, bury her on the island. We cry, we cry plenty then.”

Dancer and Mary kept anointing themselves with ochre and grease and saying terrible things of finding the mutilated bodies of their kin, killing the offspring from their repeated rapes, their kid siblings stolen for farmers' slaves, an old man who bled to death with stumps where his hands once were.

They stopped talking. Mary breathed in deep. Her torso gleamed as she straightened. She seemed to suck all those stories inside herself. Billhook saw her body lengthen. The short, stumpy woman was suddenly tall. Dancer stood tall also.

“Renner – Mother Brown – she made this dance for us. Devil Dance is the dance of the Tyreelore. All women like us on the islands, kept on the islands by the Ghosts. Devil makes you sing plenty and sing good.”

Dancer and Mary looked across the fire to Weed.

“Devil Dance sends all your crying away. Devil Dance makes you strong again.”

Sal set a rhythm with her sticks. The Pallawah women began singing. Billhook had heard the song's strains through the night air from the women's camp in the days since Mary was reunited with Dancer. But he'd not understood that it was the famous Devil Dance song. Every Straitsman he'd met spoke of this dance with lust and fright in their eyes.

Fire gleamed against their limbs and splayed fingers as the women danced. Hips forward, Dancer and Mary thumped their
feet towards the flames, their hands steepled into diamonds over their wombs, chins and lips thrusting their singing up with the fire sparks that plumed into the black sky. Their shell necklaces fell back, clattering between their shoulder blades.

Weed was staring at Dancer and Mary. She seemed unable to move but her eyes were wild and her teeth shone. Sal nodded to her and Weed began patting the ground, thumping it in unison to the women's feet.

Billhook climbed off the rock as quietly as he could and followed the track back to the sealers' camp. His own problem with being dishonoured and disrespected by the likes of Jimmy the Nail and Boss Davidson now seemed a petty quarrel. Behind him, he heard laughter and a clatter of Sal's sticks as the song ended.

They watched comings and goings from the French ship for two days. Small whaleboats beetled across the Sound to Oyster Harbour, or into Princess Royal Harbour from the channel, returning in the evenings. One tender ferried back and forth from the ship to the nearby watering point inside the channel heads.

On the evening of the third day, Jimmy, Bailey, Hobson, Smidmore, Black Simon, Hamilton, Billhook and Neddy prepared one of their boats and sailed across the Sound. They intended to arrive under the cover of darkness but the rain cleared and the moon picked up their white sails above a glittering sea. At nine o'clock they arrived in the port shadow of the ship and the sailors were waiting for them.

“Permission to board!” shouted Jimmy, and Black Simon repeated him in French.

Captain d'Urville of the
Astrolabe
must have donned his regalia to receive the visitors. His brocaded high-necked collar was brass-buttoned around his white shirt, so tightly about his throat that it resembled an armour. His florid face, resolutely pressed lips, waving red hair and snakey eyes indicated that he would give no quarter to the men whom he had doubtless already assessed as brigands. There was nothing for it but to appeal to his sympathy and his need for the brace of freshly killed muttonbirds in Billhook's hands.

“We have been shamefully treated by Captain Davidson of
the
Governor Brisbane
,” said Jimmy the Nail, and went on to say how Boss had left two men at Israelite Bay and then their present group at the Archipelago and Fairy Island. They were living from their fishing and birding, having run out of gunpowder. They had no flour, rope or rum left either. The sealers were, in effect, destitute. Jimmy didn't need to embroider the truth. He told d'Urville of the meeting with the Yankee captain and the news they'd gleaned from the
Hobart Town Gazette
.

When Jimmy finished his sorry tale, d'Urville looked at the circle of eight men intently and launched into his own.

“We have had a … a … very bad cross from Tenerife,” he said in poor English. “One hundred and eight days, half of them in terrible weather and big seas. I lost a man. Today I have discovered that, from three hundred tins of braised chicken, one hundred and forty tins are spoiled, completely putrid, and we have thrown them overboard. There are all sorts of damage to be repaired and all rigging must now be inspected. The timekeepers need regulating so that we can navigate. My men need resting. They are very tired and sore.”

D'Urville sighed. His speech seemed to have annoyed and exhausted him further. To Jimmy he said, “I do wish to husband my supplies cautiously until we reach Port Jackson. In the meantime we will be anchored here for several weeks until we are refreshed and replenished, Mr Everett.”

“Would you accept these birds, in return for your hospitality tonight?” Jimmy took the muttonbirds from Billhook and held the brown bundle of feathers out to d'Urville. D'Urville's nose twitched and his lips clamped even thinner. He looked quickly to the shore and Billhook followed his glance to the thin orange light of a fire behind the trees. D'Urville had some men camped there. A sail-making or coopers' workshop, perhaps.

D'Urville made up his mind quickly, calling over the cook
and nodding to him to take the birds. The cook, a short, pointy man, hurried across the deck to Jimmy the Nail, grabbed the bunch of birds by their feet and disappeared into the galley.

“Stay aboard tonight,” d'Urville said to the sealers. “I would like to know things about this King George Sound. Guilbert! See that these men get some ship's biscuit and brandy. Plenty of brandy.”

It was well after midnight before Jimmy and his crew turned in, climbing into empty bunks and hammocks. Above the sound of two dozen snoring, snuffling men, Billhook heard the strains of singing on the wind from the Frenchmen's shore camp, inside the channel. French lyrics wove into familiar melodies that he'd heard on ships and islands all along the Southern Ocean. Then the blackfellas replied in song, one child shrieking exuberantly above the other voices. Billhook thought their songs may come from Albert, his boy and his countrymen, singing with the sailors of the
Astrolabe
. The music faltered and ran out. Laughter. The Frenchmen began another song.

Lying in the hammock, woozy with brandy, he went over the night's talking in his mind. D'Urville seemed reluctant to trade his powder and shot, though he was stocked well enough, and offered up his men for a hunting trip within the next few days. The captain did not trust them with powder, Billhook knew this. He did not trust them at all. The captain offered the sealing crew a night aboard where he could keep an eye on them, so they did not wander ashore to invade the land party. Judging by the ship's empty bunks, half of the
Astrolabe
's men were staying the night there.