The Roving Party (3 page)

Bill maintained his ground, raising one open hand. Watch yourself, was all he said.

But the overseer closed that distance by skipping his feet to hold his stance correct. He lashed out with a right. Bill was up to the task. He moved his head and shuffled back and when the overseer came again faster he struck out with his fist. The strike sat the soldier on his hindquarters. He was up smartly but Bill was over him and snapped him straight to the face hard. The overseer staggered under the blow. He stepped back and drew a hand across his face. Blood messing the front of his filthy undershirt. Blood in his teeth like a fiend on the kill.

You’re done for fucker, he said. From inside some disguised pocket of his coat he retrieved a little highland dirk and circled Bill with the blade outheld, bloody strings swinging from his chin. You miserable nigger, he said.

The overseer feinted with the dirk and Bill pulled away. As he lunged again, Bill swayed back sinuously but the blade opened a gash in his shirt. He removed his hat and tossed it aside and his eyes were dark as coals. He assessed the overseer where he held position, dirk gripped for another pass. Warm blood spilled down the inside of his shirt. He said nothing. Instead he came forward with renewed precision, with a cold certainty about his every movement.

The overseer watched him. Then he lunged, the blade passing near Bill’s chest and slicing back again but the Vandemonian timed his swing and caught the overseer across the chin with
a punch that sent his head around brutally. He stumbled but held his feet. Already the swelling around his eye was growing blue and bulbous and he turned his head as if he was seeing his suroundings for the first time. Bill allowed him a moment to find what he could in the way of sense. The overseer looked around at the gathered men but no one spoke for a calloff. He spat out more blood and stepped closer.

This time he made no feints but moved straight into attack. Bill grappled his arms and they fell, each clutching the other, the knife blade flashing. The Vandemonian caught a handful of hair and yanked back the overseer’s head, ramming his forehead into the soldier’s face. Bickle was put out cold in that instant and Bill rolled off him. He stood up, retrieved his hat and checked the cut on his ribs. From where he lay the overseer raised one hand and let it fall again onto the mud and he moaned and gagged.

Black Bill came alongside him and John Batman also and together they raised him upright, those loosened eyes rolling about in their skull holes as he tottered to his feet. His lips and nose like broken fruit beneath his overgrowth of russet hair.

That’s a goodun, Bill said to the overseer.

He raised his head. A goodun? he said.

Bill dipped his head towards the dirk.

Aye, said Bickle. She cuts fair. Good Scottish steel that.

Bickle’s bleeding mouth stumbled over his words. You cut?

Not much, said Bill. He touched his chest.

Those men who’d gathered in audience whispered between themselves and stared at the black man until John Batman waved them away.

He’s flogged you like a rented mare.

The overseer took up his knife where it lay on the grass and cleaned the blade on his forearm. He spoke to Batman without looking up. He made his case. I see now I was in error.

Seems you still owe me though, dont it.

You bloody scoundrel. You’ll have yer money.

With that Bickle was gone back to the dray, coat in hand and rank with blood, and his junior climbed aboard also and they departed.

The razor wind plying through the fields caused Bill to pinch up his eyes. In the far distance the sheep turned as if blown so by the winds and Bill sat a spell on the verandah watching the last of the sun. Every spring this wind bowled down from the hills, curling the trees over and setting the clouds skating out of the east. The clansfolk followed that salted breeze from the coast into the western hills where the snow dried before it and they harried the kangaroo herds of the lowland plains with their spears, their dogs. He held his cut chest and gazed up at the mountain. Their kind would soon have more than the wind for company.

Batman appeared, cocked one boot up on the decking, leaned on his knee. Well, he pulled a blade. As you said he would.

Bill looked up at him. He knows no better.

Sharp little bastard it was too.

In the quiet that followed they watched the dray haul away up the track with the wheel rims showering gobs of mud and the horse straining at the yoke.

mina carney he mengana knife, he said to Batman.

narapa, said Batman. mina tunapri.

D
AWN CREPT UP LIKE A SICKLY
pale child. William Gould walked over the frosted ground to the stables and went man to man, nudging the assignees awake with the toe of his boot. He dropped a pile of clothing on the ground and stood by as the assignees stripped out of their slops. They pulled on the pants and undershirts and workshirts. A turned and mended coat was among the pile and the boy had hold of it but he was shoved off by the blackbeard who wrenched the coat onto his own back. Over everything they hung rawhide tunics stitched from an assortment of skins that shared little accord of colour or shape, and bound their feet in the castoff slops for want of shoes, glancing about at each other but saying nary a word against it.

Outside in the sunshine Ben Lomond was a rise of crag and battlement white with silvered snow. The mountain’s shadow jagged across the fields but where sunlight fell, the frost glittered salty white. The assignees squinted as they took stock of
the squares of land girdled by chock and log fences: the mix of bigboned mutton ewes and Bengal-cross cattle meant for their beef, the little shepherd huts smoking serenely against the morning sky. Likely to their eyes the whole of Kingston farm was a swath of order hacked out of chaos, a stamp of authority hammered into Van Diemen’s Land.

But when Bill surveyed that grant he saw the ancient constructions of the Plindermairhemener, the precisely burned plains carved over generations to advantage the hunter, the lands called up anew with every footfall. He found John Batman working at his shambles. A ewe laid open at the throat was raised up by her hocks by a block and tackle. Batman leaned against her as he peeled the woollen skin away with a finely bladed knife which he stropped occasionally on a belt hung from the cross frame. The pooled blood beneath the ewe was flecked with ants and strands of her viscera hung from the stomach cavity. Black Bill held the ewe’s foreleg outwards as Batman sawed the shoulder, and as he bent the leg backwards against the joint the bones popped in the silence.

Said Batman: You seen them smokes?

I seen em.

The campfire smokes hung in the sky, long and white and bending in the winds, emanating from some deeply hidden quarter to the east of the mountain. Country known only by the clans that walked it.

How far you reckon?

Bill examined the luminous blue above the hills. Eight mile, he said. Ten.

They wont wait for us.

No, they wont.

The foreleg came away under Batman’s knife and Bill moved it onto the butchering stand nearby. Batman towelled his arms clean. These reprobates will eat better than landed gentry by Christ.

No sooner had he spoken than the men in question came towards them from the stables, led by William Gould. They made a miserable sight dressed out in furs and barefoot but for the rags bound and tied at their ankles. Gould had in his arms a collection of fowling pieces which he gave out to the assignees and they turned those pieces in survey. They were weapons worn by the passing of a thousand hands and of that selection not one was fit for any purpose more than culling sick animals. The rust had been filed back along the barrels, the stocks nailed up where the weather had split the grain, and they’d been slung off kangaroo-skin lanyards barely tanned and lined still with fur.

John Batman looked along the rank. Your name?

Jimmy Gumm.

What?

Jimmy Gumm, sir.

You?

It’s James Clarke, sir. Most calls me Horsehead, but.

And you, Maypole?

Howell Baxter, sir.

Welshman are you?

That I am, Mr. Batman.

You shot a man before, Maypole?

Not without call, Mr. Batman.

Well you have call now.

Baxter tapped his weapon. This here gun aint much good, he said.

That particular piece had been restraightened under the blunt side of an axe and was now given to firing along a lunatic trajectory. He made to hand the damaged firearm back but Batman only stared at him.

They’ll make fine sport without a gun. Fine sport.

The assignee lowered his eyes and held the gun to his chest. Stood off aways was a boy of hardly gaoling age. He had his arms wrapped around himself against the cold and he scowled at the men and their business.

Do you know guns, lad?

I do.

The other men shook their heads. He dont know nothin of the sort, said Horsehead.

He has a knack for lyin, dont yer, said Gumm.

They all watched the boy, shivering in his outsized clothes, glaring back at those men, daring them to come at him.

Batman nodded his head and waved Gould over. He passed
a weapon to the boy. Either way you’ll know it soon enough, he said.

A wooden balance and a pack of iron weights were taken from the store shed along with the sacks of flour, tea and sugar. William Gould put the men to measuring the flour into ten-pound portions. Sugar and tea were split between the men at sugar three ounces a day and tea a half-ounce. Once packed these rations would feed them for a week as they walked the back country, forty pounds or more hauled in kangaroo-skin bags. Gould held the balance while the men cut down the portions then took their weight against an iron counter, the little sacks being tied off with twine as they were finished. Batman stood by in his heavy greatcoat sipping rum from his flask and supervising the work as it progressed.

Do you have a name? Batman said to the boy.

Thomas.

Lad, you waste that flour and you go hungry.

The boy brushed what flour he could off his arms into the open mouths of the portion sacks. The tendons showed through the skin of his neck as he looked up. His hair would have been a fair sandy shade but for being matted with muck and it sat square razored across his forehead. He gave the gravest of nods and went on adding flour to one side of the scales.

Jimmy Gumm watched the boy also. He put down a sack of tea-leaves from which he was measuring, spat in his hands and rubbed them over. Be a good boy and hand me another, he said.

The boy paused in his work. I aint yer boy.

No. You was mine I’d beat three colours of snot from you.

The others laughed.

What are you laughing at? said the boy. They looked at him and by turns they bent their heads back to their portioning. Jimmy Gumm leaned over and removed from the pile beside Thomas a little knotted sack. As he moved away he cuffed the boy once around the ear, a decently weighted blow that rocked the boy backwards, before Gumm returned to filling the bags with tea-leaves. Sheep wailed far off, their lonely mewling matching the boy’s low voice when he spoke. You wont touch me no more if you know what’s good fer you, he said.

Wont I now.

No.

There was an eeriness about Gumm’s eyes, one of which wandered loose of the other. I know what he done, he said. I know what Jock’s Mal done to you. He done what he done to all the lads.

The boy kept his face down. The other men watched him scratch his forehead and leave a track of flour there.

He was puttin it around that lockup. Choice words they was too. Told to anyone who’d listen. Jock’s Mal said to me, he said, Jim, I never even got a squeal out of the little devil.

The men laughed anew. The boy’s face remained blank as he worked from the flour sack filling the smaller one at his feet.
He scooped up more and filled another sack, the drifts of powder rising about him as he worked.

You’d best be careful, boy. Elsewise you might get more of the same out there in the quiet of the wilds. A young buck like you. This time Gumm wasn’t laughing.

The boy ceased what he was doing. In one action he picked up his heavyended fowling piece and flipped it about and took it by the barrel. Two white handprints were left upon the stock. He stepped towards Gumm, moving like a man at some trifling matter.

What’s this? Gumm glared up at him. But even while the words were shapes in his mouth the boy was bringing the butt down across his skull. As he raised his arms the boy swung again, full and heaving, and Gumm cried out. No one made any movement towards them. Thomas struck again. Blood ran freely from Gumm’s forehead. He scurried off across the bare earth on his hands and knees and the boy followed him. Whaling him over the back. Christ Jesus Christ Jesus, Gumm was saying.

A final blow then Gumm went limp. The boy held the piece ready but brought it down no more. John Batman pushed back his coat and ran his eyes over Gumm where he was laid out cold in the muck.

Turn him over so he dont choke at least, he said.

The boy rolled the fellow over and stood looking down on the battery he’d done as the life inched back into Gumm. He
walked back to his bags with the eyes of the other men on his every step.

You save that for the blacks, said Batman. No bastard here wants to see it.

The boy never even glanced at him. He went once more about the packing and weighing of flour, tying off each sack as he went. He kept himself tightly drawn but those men saw the jitter in his fingers and heard his quick breaths.

The axe rang upon the fragrant hardwood and Katherine raised it once more and brought it down. The head bit deep and split the log evenways. She reached for one fallen half and sat the hunk again on the block where she cut that piece also into pieces, every sound of the axe coming back a second later off the mountain. She had a decent pile cut for Mrs. Batman’s stove and wanted only a few more for the fireplace. The handle rasped in her palms as her upper hand slipped down the polished wood. The blade passed cleanly through the log and buried in the block beneath. She stood there in the new silence, her hands still on the handle, looking across the grazing land. In her belly the baby struggled and she put a hand there to contain it.

We’ll be back in a week or so.

She turned around. Black Bill was standing with his hat in his hands, running the brim through his calloused fingers. She
turned away and tugged the axe head loose of the block and brought the weight down upon a square of wood, the collision jarring her arms.

Mrs. Batman will put you up here at night. In one of the huts.

I go home.

She pulled up the axe as Bill stood by watching her minutely. Over the paddocks the shepherds were rousing their flocks for the pens. Otherwise there was just the scratching of Bill’s hat in his fingers.

And what if nine aint enough to take him? said Bill. What then?

bungana Manalargena not hurt me.

Woman, he’ll string yer limbs from the trees.

No. I go home.

Bill slowly exhaled. Think of the child.

She turned to face him. I think. Always. But you, you follow Batman.

He puts food in front of us. We are in his debt.

Dont eat his food.

Well, he said. I’m wasting breath here.

He replaced his hat and headed down the grassy slope towards the little fire the new men had burning, around which they had gathered to brew tea.