The Roving Party (7 page)

Black Bill stared along the barrel of his piece as he moved among the bark huts. Around the darkened edges of the village Pigeon and Crook skulked in a strange parody of the vanished clanspeople they hunted, grim and watchful. Bill went low past the rough dwellings and into the trees edging the village and here the screaming wounded could be heard between all the weapon fire. By the smokeblue moonlight Bill made out the headman carrying a child under each arm, bursting up the wooded slope in great strides. His greased skin
showed in silver flashes between the trees as he ran and the children’s legs bounced. The Vandemonian called him out with a hoarse roar. Manalargena stopped and turned and his white eyes loomed stark in his face as he called down to the Vandemonian, Tummer-ti makara!

Give yerself up.

milaythina nika.

Black Bill felt the belled muzzle buck as he fired. The report played out in the hills. Through the haze he saw the headman buckle but then right himself and the children screamed as he broke away for the mountain folds to the north, bearing them with him. Bill followed, pulling himself up the steep slope by handfuls of bracken and entering the gums after the headman. If there was blood it was lost in the dark. While the roar of firearms flattened behind him in the cold the Vandemonian studied the dogwood but he saw no trace of the headman. Bill came to a fallen tree in the scrub where a plush moss grew and covered the trunk entire. He felt along its surface for signs of disturbance but in that abysmal dark he saw barely where to place his hand. He stood and turned, listening over the beating of his heart. He heard nothing. All was still. He moved on another few hundred feet and crouched in the bushes and here he reprimed his weapon and dosed the pan from the powder bag. As he moved off there came a snivelling from further up the rise, then the clatter of underbrush. The children were clinging together among some burly knotted blue gum roots
when he saw them. He came through the brush angling his body that he might approach unheard but when the children looked past him he knew himself outplayed. He aimed his fowling piece upon that clearing where long fissures of moonlight issued through the woven canopy but Manalargena fell on him from behind, assailing him across the neck with his great blackwood waddy. It pitched him forward, the gun knocked out of his reach, and Bill rolled up to face the headman where he stood holding the club above himself. He beat the waddy down upon Bill’s upraised arms and hammered at him until the Vandemonian no longer fought but merely took the blows. Only then did he cease. Manalargena called the children to him and once more they made forth into the heavy bushlands around the mountain, joining a retinue of the desolate borne along in fear of the gunfire they heard coming back off the mountain.

I
N THE NIGHT
B
ILL
’
S UNBORN SON
found him and ran a hand across his stubbled brown cheek. It woke Bill and he looked long into his son’s face before he recognised it. At once he felt the ache in his bones and the misery of being lifted from his frame. It was overwhelming and his throat thickened as he asked his son how he’d found him here in foreign country.

I followed you, he said.

Bill was weeping. He held his son’s shoulders close and in that grip he knew this was the right and true of the world, this warmth of bodies, this tightness of throat. Bill held his son and sobbed with sweet relief. It was over. He was freed. He raised the boy high to his shoulders where he gripped the ochred ropes of hair on his father’s head like the reins of a carthorse. Together they walked.

The birdlife that rose with the sun chattered and stirred Black Bill awake. He was stretched out on the rot of the forest floor in the long shadows of dawn. He felt his misshapen jaw and the blood caked on his face and for a moment he lay back and emptied his gaze as if he was the last man on God’s dying earth.

One of his teeth was loose. The first fingers of his left hand were plainly broken, hooked where they had been straight. He felt himself over and found the side of his head clagged with blood, his ears swollen badly and a gouge full of muck above his eye. He pushed himself upright. A few feet away his piece lay where it had fallen, dusted in dirt, and he used it to stand.

The bonfires were burning yet and the glow led him into the campgrounds once more. Dogs paced before the fires, master-less, turning in chaotic gangs that neither began nor ended but ran always together. Bill leaned on his gun and surveyed the scene from some cover at the edge of the clearing. So many dogs that the shadows seethed with them. Nothing else moved in that devastation save the steady whipping of flames, so he moved forward into the rising sunlight, and sat himself down to wait for John Batman.

Soon one person and another and another emerged from the bush. Ominous figures, rifles borne in their arms. They did not cooee but came cautiously into the clearing through the smoke
billows. The dog packs parted and closed behind them. Some growled but this the men disregarded and kept on towards the few scattered temma where Black Bill was crouched observing their progress. He rose from his position and walked the length of the camp to meet them.

In his hands Batman held a length of rope and at the end of it was a young girl. The rope was tied around her neck and she did not resist but followed where he hauled her. The child she carried in her arms was equally meek and she clutched it to her chest as she stumbled along behind Batman. They were three where eight had gone. Batman and Jimmy Gumm and the boy. All moving at pace and glancing frequently to the rear, they approached the fires, dropped their knapsacks and knelt to repack the barrels of their weapons.

Some bastard’s followin, said Batman. Watch them trees there.

The two assignees glanced around at the scrub and at Bill where he stood armed and damaged and they drew their weapons tightly to their shoulders.

What’s happened to you then? said Gumm as he studied the Vandemonian.

But Bill only spat blood on the ashes.

Hold her, said Batman.

He passed over the lead rope and took hold of the girl as if she were a cull ewe. He forced her head to the ground and Bill looped a hitch around her feet so that she was barely given slack to breathe. Her dark eyes widened as the rope drew taut. Batman made to
pry the child from her arms but the girl held on with a fierceness that had the child near to ripping apart and he wailed all the more loudly for it. The awful sound had Batman soon relenting and the child was left howling and holding his mother. Batman reached for his fowling piece, eased his knee from the girl’s back.

Dont know no modesty does she, said the boy. He gazed at the half apples of her breasts.

Are you hearin me? Watch them trees.

I’m doin that.

The Plindermairhemener girl was tall and thin and her child was much of a kind with her. Her patterned scars were dabbed over with ochre and she was otherwise painted up for a ceremony she would never undergo. Her scalp was freshly shaved and bloody scabs showed where the scallop shell had dug too deep. Bill crouched beside her and put out his hand to the crying child. The girl called out.

What’s she sayin? said Gumm.

Bill looked up at him. Help me.

Christ, he said, you’d swear she was bein skinned. He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. Then he brought his gun up. I seen somefink, he said.

He pointed to the smoke drift and the ghostly line of swamp gums behind it. John Batman scanned those trees and he also perhaps saw some form of what Gumm had seen because he signalled to take cover behind a fallen tree, a massive thing of two hundred feet or more. The men found cover behind its
mossy bulk and propped their pieces upon it, watching the trees around the clearing. On the open ground the girl lay struggling at her bindings. She raised her voice once more in a plaintive cry to her clansfolk.

Take care and dont shoot Pigeon or Crook neither, said Batman.

Bill cupped his shattered fingers as he watched the treeline.

I’ve no ball left, he said to Batman.

Just keep yer head down then.

I see one.

Where?

Over there, said Bill. You see it?

I dont see nothin.

There.

Batman narrowed his eyes. By that rock you mean?

Aye, that’s it.

Bugger me, you’ve the eyes of a needlemaker.

Batman pressed his cheek to the small of the stock, took sight of the underscrub and released the cock. The thunderclap caused the girl to cease her mournful calling and there came from the bush opposite the sounds of men.

Dont shoot you bastards, we’re white.

They lowered their weapons as the remnants of the roving party appeared in the campsite. They stumbled past the bald, rounded temma and vaulted the fallen tree to join the company men in the cover it afforded. John Batman offered a flask
of water and the newcomers drank and wiped their whiskers backhanded. Pigeon and Crook were the last into camp, the last into cover. They refused the water flask and remained standing and watchful where the others seemed content to rest. John Batman put questions to his servant Gould as the assignees checked the wrappings on their feet.

See any?

A good few.

Put them down, did you?

I shot up near on a pound of powder. I saw a deal of blood. More than that I cant say.

Howell Baxter shook the mud from his bindings and rewrapped his feet. When he spoke his fathomless voice was full of the same weary ache they all felt. But that mongrel Horsehead, he said. He’s gone and disa-bloody-peared somewheres.

It was the Vandemonian who finally went to see about the girl and her child. He poured a measure of water down her throat and wrapped the child in a possum skin. She had no broil left and sipped the water he offered. Her damp eyes closed. Black Bill corked the canteen, stood and returned to the company. The Dharugs were sharing a pipe and they offered the stem to Black Bill. The smoke rose and filtered through the feathered fronds of the wattles parasoled above them. Bill pulled a turn on the pipe
before Pigeon slipped the pipe back into his own mouth, clattering it along his teeth to and fro.

I dont see no dead ones nowheres, said the boy. He was looking across the barren campfield. Where you spose they went?

We didnt kill none, said Jimmy Gumm.

But I saw em fall.

Gumm held up a pouch of shot. This weight wouldnt knock the grin off a halfwit. Wastin our powder, we are.

That weight’ll do what we need, said Batman, and he tipped back his hat and stared.

If you need them blacks mighty startled it will. If you need em killed use decent ball I say.

Batman raised his doublebarrel gun and the wide-bored holes were two sightless eyes which he brought to bear on Gumm. Well hows abouts you stand up and tell me how startled you get, he said.

Jimmy Gumm ground his jaw, his loose eye gazing offwards. I was just sharin me opinion.

An opinion worth less than the spit you made it with. Now I’ll shoot every last black hide on this mountain and be glad for it but if you want yer ticket you’ll take in some live head with me. Batman lowered his weapon.

They had a meagre breakfast squatting there at the fires, gathered where the sun had chased away the shadows and the frost. William Gould passed around a damper nub which they broke into and shared. Every man of that company watched the scrub
flanks and the stands of man ferns for the clansfolk that they supposed at any moment would fall upon them, yabbering in tongues and waving their spears, but no such events occurred. Instead, the sky held firmly blue and the sun beamed warm on them as they slurped their tea. The girl was roped up spitting distance from the fire where they were cooking, her animal skins askance and her chest revealed. Thomas carried a pannikin of sugared tea to her and held it to her mouth as he had observed Bill doing previously, waiting while she sucked it back.

You ought to cover yourself up, missus, he said.

He gave her a share of his damper and he dipped some into the tea to soften for the child to eat. With his shirt sleeve he cleaned her face of dirt and ochre and she sat timidly while he did so, her child perched in her lap like some bald and doleful cat.

But the light showed them also the extent of the blood across that clearing; it was everywhere in a pattern that spoke of the chaos they’d wrought. As they ate, Batman and Black Bill studied the spatterings, each at times gesturing at places that the other had not seen. When they called Crook over to make sense of the trails, he offered his thoughts in his own tongue. He waved towards his legs, at the sky, at the bush. He laughed. He tugged at the fuzz on his chin.

Some dead he reckons, Pigeon said.

Crook nodded and gnawed on his damper.

What do you reckon? said Bill.

I reckon same.

Batman looked around at the blood trails. I want any dead found. I want em tallied. We’ll see what we have bagged us.