The Roving Party Read online

The sergeant clapped his hands and appealed for quiet and the protests died away. They’ll be fed. More than that I cant swear to.

  Protests began afresh but he signalled the guardsmen to lead the captive clansfolk into the gaol’s wooden maw, the children gripping the women’s cloak flaps as they went and the warrior boys straight-backed and meeting the eyes of all. At the doorway leaning on his weapon was Black Bill and as the clan filed past him, each in turn stared into his dark face, seeking some show of solidarity, some inkling that their fate lay with him, but the Vandemonian bent his head and would not look. He stared down at his boots, split open at the toe and caked with street crud, exuding a fierce stench. He stared down even as the door squealed shut on its hinges and the clansfolk vanished from sight.

  Bill turned up his thick collar—there was an edge of snow on the breeze—and lowered the brim of his hat and put forth along the road alone. John Batman called his name, the name given to him by James Cox, Esquire. The boy called it too but the Vandemonian walked and ignored their cries. He walked and the townsfolk parted around him.

  BEREFT OF THEIR WOMEN AND CHILDREN the clansmen crossed their clanhold at pace and progressed along the frontier as if they were as insubstantial as the stays of mistfilled light between the silver wattles. After them came the rovers, unhindered by their roped prisoners and full of their own success. The rovers traced them over shale and peat land and plain, heard of them spied atop a certain hill or camped on a certain riverbank. They walked the sun up and down eating what they shot and sleeping on the bare granite. Spring snows, a foot deep in the back hills, slowed their pursuit but they did not relent. Late October they came upon some little mia mia contrived out of broken branches and stocked with looted blankets and clothes. In the hearth pits were dead fires kindled from books torn savagely apart. The party men took rum against the frostbite, relit the native fires and slept in the native shelters. In the following days a great tail of smoke led the rovers to the corpse of a young stockhand smouldering in a hut which had been razed around him. His body black bones but his head oddly intact. His two boiled eyes steaming in the cold. They kicked through the ashes for things of worth and Batman lifted the lock of a gun with a stick and studied the redhot iron. The stockhand had made a stand inside his shelter until the bark roof was set alight by brands; no doubt he recognised a worse fate than burning awaited outside, yet no blood and no dead blacks were to be found in the underbrush. The assignees grubbed out a shallow hole in the ground into which the stockhand’s bones and his roasted head were thrown and they raised a little cairn upon the grave mound so that the devils might be kept off the corpse. From that place they trailed the war party around Ben Lomond. It was a mob of at least twenty they were hunting, warrior men, youths, a meeting of broken bands come together before a foe that ran them without halt. Lately the weather had begun to advance and the spring coolness changed to an unmuzzled heat. With this the bush also altered as the trees grew brittle and the parched leaves rattled in the desert-driven northerlies. It was here, amid the rows of blue gums and acacias dried by the elements, that the war party crossed their tracks and cut back behind their pursuers. The Dharug men lay on the ground reading the faint signs pressed into the earth and they tested the depressions by finger but the deception was only understood when the blue gums along their back track flared alight like matchsticks. In all directions towers of smoke began to rise and the rovers saw there their fate. They bolted up the slope as the conflagration drew the wind inwards and climbed until they found sanctuary on a ridge. That night the underbelly of the clouds burned orange and showed the rolling front of flame and the smouldering star points in its wake. They stared at the bushfire and held their empty bellies till dawn. Come morning they walked down through the burn, their clothes blackened and their feet blistering through the skin shoes. There was nothing but devastation in all directions and even Bill knew not where to lead them in a land become suddenly alien. From there on they passed days and nights in search of the clansmen’s trail. They crossed and recrossed the same cuts of country. Saw the same shepherds working the same beasts. And as the heat of summer peaked and the days began to shorten the inescapable truth presented ever more insistently. They found themselves one morning crouched over ochre diggings weeks old and collapsed under the rains and no heading could be taken nor sign discovered. John Batman looked up to the sky as rain came anew and in that moment his resolve shifted. He looked to his men, shook his head and walked away from the diggings. They passed a hard night billeted among the lime ferns and prickly box but soon after he led them homewards, goading them on like cattle when they tired. Some days later they spilled from the forest onto the cleared ground of Kingston and for a few beatings of their scabbed hearts they were satisfied, even the Vandemonian. That night Batman made free with his rum and the men drank. William Gould produced a piccolo upon which he played over and over the same sad song and the men danced at first but soon took a seasoning at the rum keg and slipped into a sullen stupor. The fire burned low and as the men passed out one by one, Black Bill was left to drape blankets on them and watch another dawn disfigure the treeline.

  Sometime later Eliza shook him awake. He was lying backed against the store shed in the sunshine and on instinct he pulled his knife and raised it. Her hard eyes searched him over as he sat upright, straightened his hat and sheathed his blade. The pockmarks in her tanned cheeks stretched and shifted as she spoke.

  You best see yerself home, Bill, she said, those green eyes lingering on him. Yer wife has need ayou.

  Yes mam, he said. He stood up.

  As he picked his way among the unconscious assignees lying on the ground he passed by the boy, who opened his eyes and rolled over. Bill continued on for the fields but the boy called to him.

  Where you off to? he said.

  Bill looked around. Back home.

  You dont got one.

  I got one. He pointed out the knot of shaded scrub beyond the sheep fields. Out bush there.

  In the bush?

  Yes.

  Like them blacks back there?

  No, not like them. I got a humpy. Got a woman.

  Can I see it someday?

  Anytime, boy.

  Batman wont allow it, will he?

  Bill shrugged. Who knows what that man will do?

  Are we to be given tickets now?

  That there is the Governor’s business. He does as he sees fit but were I him I would see my way to it.

  The boy drew his knees up. Take care of yerself.

  Yes, boy. And you too.

  He took the track through the scrub to his humpy at a jog. The shadows dappled in a weave patterning his skin, his booted feet slapped the earth and his fowler clattered on its securements. Long before he made the hut he smelt a smoke tang on the air and he saw the column of it rising white and crimped and brittle through the canopy. Soon he entered the clearing he’d cut by axe and shovel in the middle of that bush gully. Hearing his noise, Katherine appeared in the doorway in a disheveled pinafore and she bore in one hand a smallmouthed pistol of the kind favoured by gamblers and charlatans. She stared at him. The weapon was on the cock.

  Missus, if you shoot some fellow with that little thing and he finds out, by God he will come back and flog you, Bill said and he laughed.

  But his woman disappeared inside. He looked over the gums pressing in on all sides and he dropped his kit by the door, following her in. She cut strips of mutton onto a plate and placed it before him at the table where his mug filled with river water was also put down. In the smoky light Katherine appeared much aged and hard done by. The months alone had done her no favours.

  Where’d the pistol come from?

  I trade. Rifle too big.

  Too big. Yes, I reckon it was.

  Bill’s woman bent down to the fire with her legs splayed outwards to permit the swell of her belly and her knees made a stretched leather groan under the load. He ate meat with his fingers and watched her set logs in the firepl
ace, the flames licking around her fingers. Then she turned to face him, eyes pinched against the smoke.

  You find that bungana? she said.

  No. He has some cunning in him.

  The fire popped. She watched him a moment longer, intently, then went back to the wood and reaching flames.

  DAYS PASSED WHERE THE FOREST IN all its dead summer heat resonated with cicada song but Bill could not be still. He crossed the fragrant gullies and hills searching the sky for smoke. He shot possums and wallabies and in those lonely backwoods he catalogued every place a man might prosecute an ambush. He knew the likely approach routes to his shack too, stepping out distances and firing test shots at a roo skin propped on a branch until he had his range from all parts. Mornings he went ahead of his woman as she walked the miles to Batman’s house into a sun that cast long stabs of yellow through the trees, and evenings he waited for her at the forest edge where she came carrying what few rations Batman had allowed for her day’s work and together they returned to the shack.

  This particular afternoon as he waited for his woman on the fringe of Batman’s cleared land he read the weather in the flight of certain birds he knew and he understood the heat would break. And so it did. When the sky split open sometime that night the rain battered the roof and water seeped through the shingles and turned the dirt floor to mud and dampened their bedding. As they lay listening, Katherine kicked out her legs. She moaned and rolled. Bill turned to study her.

  Are you sick? he said but she said nothing.

  The rain bore down and she writhed on the bed, her groans guttural and her breath ragged. He huddled down for sleep that never came and sometime near midnight he climbed from the bed of possum skins to stand over her.

  I’ll fetch Mrs. Batman, he said.

  Stay, stay, she said. She was breathless.

  He crouched beside the bed, the sound of the rain deafening him.

  He held her hand and she howled, throwing back her head as if she was a penny girl having her throat cut. In the quiet moments he felt between her legs for signs before the screaming came again and she struggled anew on the sweatslicked rugs. When in time he could see her outlined on the bed in the first blush of sun the head was coming through and he knelt and received the child where it was birthed. It made no sound but squirmed and contorted as he held it nearer the light and appraised the thing in its first few moments. It was glossy like a carcass peeled of skin. The head was mishapen and lurid welts showed where eyes should have moved.

  Give me, she panted.

  But he did not.

  Give me, she said and pushed herself upright.

  The child’s features, the neck and the veined head, were run together in one lumpen misconception. Bill clenched his teeth.

  Give me here.

  He drew his knife, severed the cord and swaddled his child, his son, with a soft wallaby skin Katherine had readied. Then he passed her the bundle. Nothing needed to be said. She cradled the child as it drew the only breaths of its short life and she watched it claw its face in pain and soon it ceased moving. Bill relieved her of it. Katherine clutched her belly and she began to cry. Her throat was hoarse and her woe was queerly muted. She huddled on the bed and cried as if she had lost everything in this world and the next.

  He carried the dead child outside into the wet as the first slate shades of dawn towered above and laid the tiny bundle on the mud. In the near dark he fetched up some firewood and erected a pyre of stones and branches in rough accordance with the Panninher ritual, this custom almost lost to him. Onto the firewood he poured a flask of Batman’s rum kept over from his rations. Then he laid the wrapped body of his son among the sticks and lit the blaze with a brand taken from his hearth, moving back to watch the smoke funnel towards the boiling grey sky. As the body was consumed Bill tried to sing those old dirges he’d once known but they were gone from his memory. Instead he sat upon the stones, bearing witness to this time.

  The vague sun tracked unmarked across the gloom. Black Bill stayed long by that fire staring at the flames while the sky sagged. Katherine wept on her bloodied skins yet he remained impassive. A likeness of a man carved in cold black marble. All he felt was the pain. The pitiless certainty of this death. He weighed a length of wood in his hand and poked at the coals with it and by the time night had fallen again on the forest he knew this evil was the headman’s doings. He gripped the wood and pondered on his redress.

  On the morning of the following day Bill stood on John Batman’s verandah looking everywhere but at him as the man ranted about the new laws the Governor had passed, laws that protected blacks beyond the settled districts. Their bounty hunting was at an end. Manalargena was known to be sojourning on the east coast beyond the frontier where settlements encroached upon his homelands and in a place where food was readily come by. In those parts he still had domain and he did not run or hide but led his band in the habits of old. But the rovers couldn’t hunt him. Batman folded his arms and spat off the deck. His native boy, Ben, was squatting in front of the house and Batman and Black Bill watched the child drag his fingers through the mire and take handfuls of it for throwing. He was crouched between his knees, his short pants and shirt ballooning like a nightdress.

  Bill cleared his throat. My boy died. The Vandemonian looked out across the paddocks. He come out all wrong. I reckon he died of it.

  His old friend inclined his head slightly then looked away. Tis the nature of things, he said.

  Batman had lost a child once, a son. He was buried in an unmarked hole and spoken of never more. The mound of dirt had been dug up by the devils soon after and the tiny foetid boy devoured but Batman had put his men to refilling the hole and straightening out the little stones before Eliza saw those desecrations. She remained unknowing even now. Batman stepped down and caught up the native boy in his hands. He carried him up to the Vandemonian and offered him over. Bill looked at the boy and he looked at Batman. Then he took the boy against his chest and kept him there just so as they spoke about farm business. Talk that Bill had no mind for as he cradled the boy and thought long on the headman.

  Bill returned through the bush from Kingston with small sacks of flour, tea and tobacco in his pocket and a weight of mutton across his shoulder. It was generous. He knew Batman would not have given so much but for the misfortune. By now the pyre was gone cold. He dropped the stores beside his shack and walked over to pick through the ashes for pieces of bone. He found the skull and a reedy thigh bone and using handfuls of sand and water he rubbed the pieces over until the charcoal was polished away. The white beneath glistened. In the doorway Katherine sat holding her belly and watching him at his work. When the bones were clean she placed them in her palm, little shards of porcelain shattered in the heat. Clutching those bones she gazed across the entanglement of bush running down the gully as if she thought to see some wild apparition working its ruin upon her again. But there were only the trees, robed in their long shadows. She gripped the skull and stared.

  The following day Katherine was splitting wood and fetching up water in the dress she’d worn for months: ragged, yellowed, disintegrating, and now stained with afterbirth. Bill removed his hat and from a wooden bowl kept for the purpose he fingered out some animal fat and smeared it across his face, following the line of his jaw. He stropped his knife a few times against the heel of his boot then shaved his chin and throat. He wiped the blade on a gum leaf and made another stroke. Katherine placed a bucket of water before him that he might check his reflection and wandered off inside but he called to her, his voice enormous in the clearing.

  I mean to find him, he said.

  She reappeared in the doorway.

  Find him and be done.

  At her neck was strung the child’s skull on a woollen cord and she closed her hand around it.

  He looked at her. I’m leaving at dawn, he said.

  I come, she said. I help.

  No. You cant barely walk.

  I can walk.

  No. />
  Katherine stepped inside and was gone a moment before she stood again in the sunlight showing her pistol. With her free hand she palmed back the hammer.

  Before he could speak she aimed down at his feet and fired. Bill dropped the shaving knife and skipped back as the dirt blossomed. The emptied gun hung quietly between them and he moved over and took it from her hand. She looked him cleanly in the eye.

  You sleep I cut your throat, she said. You walk away I shoot your back. You take me. You take me or you be killed.

  He slipped the pistol into his pocket. Then he looked out across the stumps and the bracken growing in the cleared spaces around the shack. Better get some decent walking clothes at least then. A blanket. A drum.

  Katherine didn’t answer. She stood there in her tattered dress and her hand went again to the skull. Then she turned away and stepped into the humpy where the sound of her movements drifted to him through the cracks in the bark walls. Bill retrieved his knife and once more set to working the sharp edge along his cheek. He flicked the scum off the blade and taking another glob of possum grease smeared it over his scalp. With the knife set on an angle he began to shave the hair away. Inside he could hear her throwing things, the chair, mugs, and he stopped to listen for moment then shook his head and went about his shaving again.

  They awoke with the birds and put forth in the dark before dawn. With them they carried neither flour nor mutton, flint nor tinder. Bill rolled a heap of embers in damp bark for a firestick and slung his fowling piece across his shoulder. He filled his powder flask, loaded his pockets with ball. That was all he needed. Katherine kitted herself up in his spare dungarees which she rolled at the ankle and hitched the waist with cord, and as she walked the hems scuffed along the ground. The two of them made towards the dawn’s flameglow where it bloomed beyond the hills. As they moved into the forest a miserable rain began and where it fell the bark litter darkened and the pungency of wood rot grew; the rain accompanied them that long day as they walked the unburnt back country of the Plindermairhemener. In the afternoon they crossed pastures where saplings and wild grasses stood so profuse that the grazing wallabies were hid entirely and their small furred heads rose and fell above the level as the herds bounded away. Bill checked his trail and saw his woman coming some yards behind, the grim line of her jaw unchanged and her hair and clothes speckled with grass seed. He waited while she approached and together they pushed on.