The Roving Party Read online

  The night sky cleared as they settled their first camp at the rim of one such pasture with the wild stars already above giving light. Bill shot a native hen which they plucked and roasted and ate in silence. When it was fully dark an emerald rippling unfurled across the sky like the underside of a wave breaking upon the bladed shore of stars. They watched the aurora for a long while but they knew not how to read it. The Vandemonian took up his dagger and sharpstone and Katherine heaped up the fire. She stretched out for sleep beneath her skins and Bill sat with his back to the blaze grinding his knife with the stone, watching the jade-coloured glare in the sky manifest along the mirrored span of steel.

  They trekked days through the hills east of Ben Lomond without sight or sound of another soul. They ate possum taken from the gum trees or little lunna bunna the shape of kidney potatoes or fern roots which they dug up with a stick. They found bush cherries. Pigface. Mushrooms where it was damp. On the fifth day they happened upon a rivulet bedded with small pebbles that Bill fingered through for some quartz pieces with which to strike fire. At dusk they found high ground and watched the sun melt at the fringe of the world. They scanned the blue-grey landscape for pinpoints of fires, only lighting their own when Bill was satisfied there burned no other. Through those days they shared few words so it surprised Black Bill when one night Katherine looked him in the eye.

  Her name Kittawa, she said.

  Bill was picking over some possum bones and he set them aside. He picked his teeth. Who? he said.

  Katherine clutched the skull bound at her throat. As if nothing further needed saying.

  He shook his head.

  She need name. I call her Kittawa. Now she rest.

  It was a boy.

  Eh?

  You heard me.

  Katherine’s mouth drew into a grim line. pudeyar, she said. lobudenday.

  Woman, I tell you it was a boy. I got eyes in my head and I know what I saw.

  She went quiet now. Her fingers felt around the cranial separations and the toothless jaws then she lowered her eyes. Bill laid the meat bones across his lap and continued picking flesh from the joints, the crevices.

  With the morning’s first blue gradations Bill perched on the ridge to study the country below. A tableland patterned into clearings by curving tree formations, the meadows like missing puzzle pieces. Away on the far side of one field burned a fire and that smoke was the only sign of life he’d seen in a week. It was a mile or more distant but as thick and threatening as the fires lit by whole companies of men. He shook Katherine awake by her shoulder and they ate a breakfast of cold meat, sharing water from the canteen. A few embers remained among the hearthstones so he wrapped them inside bark and tied it with grass. As he was crouched there at the fire pit he looked at her face, drawn and dulled. Bill retrieved his fowling piece and he called for her to follow him down the slope.

  They walked the verge of a grassed basin, keeping to the trees and looking over the sweeping depression to where the smoke billowed. The hills had opened into flat country clumped with wattle and gum as hunting hides for the spearsmen but the hides had become overgrown through disuse as the spearsmen had been driven off. Later in the day they mounted a rise and Bill removed his hat and held it before the sun to shield his face as he studied the bivouac before them. Two white men wandered around the fire building it up. They had a captive bound and laid out in the grass. It seemed to be a naked black child. Bill replaced his hat and sat on the rocks and Katherine took seat alongside him and together they watched the goings-on. The men dragged the child around by the neck and dropped their pants and had turns with it. Bill looked away, then he looked back towards the men. He sat there awhile watching. A lone dog wandered near the fire. The child cried out.

  It was enough. Bill picked up his gun and walked down the wooded hill. He meant to keep going, to make towards the coast where the Plindermairhemener were likely snugged up. He walked through the scrub and his ruined boots rang on the rocky ground. But Katherine did not follow. She remained staring out across the pasture. Bill waved to her but there was no response so he clambered back up to her lookout and stood beside her watching. She placed her hand inside his own and she pointed at the child. Pointed and squeezed his fingers. For a short time Bill stayed with her and clasped her calloused hand but then he rose and struck out for the camp.

  They’d absconded from somewhere. That much was apparent from the broad arrows they still wore with their ankles and wrists exposed in those undersized government issues. One of them had a kangaroo skin cast about his shoulders like a cloak. His cohort carried a stout club. They waited by the fire as the Vandemonian crossed the field in full view. He cradled his piece in the bend of his arm and was some time reaching the place but he did not deviate nor did he move his eyes off the two men. As he neared, their dog started barking and its dorsal hair bristled.

  She’s trained to eat blacks that one, said the fellow in the skin cloak.

  Black Bill walked unconcerned past the dog then stopped and glanced around their camp. A wallaby lay half in its entrails. Their hands were bloody and one of them had a knife. They stared at him.

  I would use the fire if I might, said Bill.

  You what?

  The fire.

  It talks, by Christ.

  A talkin ape, aint it.

  They both studied the long gun in Bill’s arms.

  I have a pipe. Some baccy. If you let me use your fire.

  The one with the club leaned forward. What kinda darkie sports a gun like that? Eh?

  Bill turned on his heel and began to walk back the way he had come but he hadn’t gone more than a few steps when they called to him, Oi! Bring yer good self back here. We dont mean no harm.

  He looked around at them. The dog snarled but stood off. He moved towards the fire again and took up a place in the grass. They’d humped up some firewood nearby for the night and propped against the heap was the native girl, no more than ten and collared with a length of roo hide. Bill kept his gaze away from her as he produced his pipe from his jacket, stuffed it with weed and passed it to one of the runaways. The fellow lit it with a handful of burning grass.

  Holdin any rum about you there, blackie?

  Bill shook his head.

  No, I didnt reckon you was.

  Why would some pisspoor old blackfella be holdin rum? said the other.

  I supposed I might ask at least.

  Did you now.

  Who knows what he has stashed?

  You howling bloody simpleton.

  Their hair was matted like flocks of wool, their chins grimy with unshorn beards. They stared and he stared back.

  Lookin to trade that piece are ye? said the man in skins.

  Bill laid the weapon by but within reach. It was loaded, cocked. No, I have need of her, he said.

  Take that dog for it. And some shot.

  I dont need dogs.

  Every bastard needs dogs.

  Not every.

  The man in skins stood up and moved around to Bill and held the pipe out and Bill accepted it with a nod, placed the stem to his lips and sucked. Flame leapt from the bowl as he puffed. He pushed back his hat. I wouldnt have thought females too common hereabouts, said Bill.

  The men looked at each other and at the girl. She belong to you or somefink, blackie?

  No.

  The pipe hissed.

  Got any kids have you then? said the man in skins.

  I have a son.

  Your kind ought to be gelded. You illbred fuckers.

  The white men stared at him waiting for any signs of anger. But Bill just passed the pipe on and the man in skins closed his hand around the bowl, a hand shy its first and second fingers. His woody stumps tottered against the bowl as he drew. He watched Bill and Bill never blinked.

  Is somethin painin you, blackie? he said.

  I dont reckon.

  Where’d you come from then?

  Come out of them hills away west there.

&nb
sp; The hills.

  Aye.

  Crept up liken old tomcat, didnt you?

  The man in the skin cloak tapped out the spent pipe onto his palm. Make it the dog and the girl then, he said. And leave us a bit of ball.

  No.

  That’s a fair offer.

  No.

  Out on the grass the emus raised their unclad heads, sounding their deep-throated drumming. The Vandemonian stood with his weapon, slung the strap over his shoulder and paused only a moment to stare at them, straightening his hat. He left for the hills and they watched him go. One of them called to him, You want yer pipe?

  Bill never looked back. I’ll find it after, he said.

  They watched his dark figure shrink into the distance. The fellow in skins laid the pipe on the ground near the huge fire and looked at it. Then he turned his eyes back across the field where the Vandemonian retreated.

  What’s he mean, after? he said.

  There was no moon at night so the scoundrels’ fire shone upon the darkened plain like a sun alight in the universal vacuum. There was an hour or two before dawn and the men were curled in blankets soundly sleeping, the dog at their feet. By the fire the girl lay huddled, chewing at her bindings, working her wrists back and forth to loosen the cords and every so often she craned her head back to watch the slumbering men before she went again at the cords with her teeth. But the leathers in which she was cinched would not give and she could not advance her cause. Again she bent her head around to study the men where they slept, both with their mouths ajar and wheezing. When she turned back she saw something shifting beyond the light’s throw. It seemed at first a trick of the mind or some other phantasm until she saw the steel blade in his teeth which showed him as separate from the night itself. The naked Vandemonian crawled nearer and cut her tethers.

  laykara laykara. The words were thinly spoken.

  But the girl only stared.

  Bill pushed her. laykara.

  Away into the dark the girl stumbled but her first movements woke the dog. It snapped up, baying as if for battle. The first of the men rose from his blankets and saw the severed ropes before the fire, saw the cleanly cut ends of them. As he surveyed the great unbroken blackness circling the camp he was caught from behind by the hair and a broad winking blade cleaved his throat to the vertebra. Holding the yawn in his flesh the fellow tumbled as blood burned down his arms and his heart pulsed everything onto the grass. The Vandemonian toppled him sideways onto the fire with one bare foot where his clothes burst alight and his rich blood bubbled in the depths of his wound.

  The man in skins awoke to see the blazing body and even as he fumbled in his bedding the naked black man reared up from behind the fire pit, an archfiend smeared with gore. He leaned down out of the darkness but the man in skins scuttled out of his reach, found his feet and bolted into the undefined gloom. He ran blindly through the grass as the dog yowled somewhere behind him on the plain. Turning his head to sight his pursuer he saw the Vandemonian bearing down and made a sudden jag and changed flight. The naked black man was with him however and he threw himself forward and brought the coward down. They tussled on the ground. Bill rammed the knife into his back over and over again in cruel succession and the fellow screamed until his throat was opened upon the trodden grass.

  Black Bill dragged the ruined corpse before the light of the fire where burned the first dead man and he stopped there to empty the fellow’s pockets. A skinning knife spilled out, caked with fur, blunt, useless. Bill turned it in his fingers and threw it on the flames. The dog lay nearby watching him above its paws. Inside the fellow’s waistband he found what he was searching for: his old oakwood pipe. He stuck the stem in his teeth, rolled the corpse squarely upon the coals and stood back as the skins blackened. With the bonfire at his back he set out across the grassland for the trees where Katherine was waiting and where he would sleep till dawn. The dog rose and began to trot behind him but he rounded on it and snarled through the darkness and the miserable thing cowered away, ears against its skull.

  A thin watergrey autumn fog covered all the back country. On the broad and greasy gum leaves the dew beads balled and the sun showed only as a queasy presence pale beyond the gloom. It was under this muted dawn that Black Bill lay listening to the whistles of scrub wrens and honeyeaters, his hands stained with men’s blood. He shook the dew off his possum skin and shouldered his fowling piece, looking for sign of his woman. He studied the range of dark mangy trees, looked along their length side to side, contemplating the trail he now saw Katherine had opened through the grass and the wet. After a minute he went onwards for the plain with an eye on the hills away east that were his landmark, hills that in the murk seemed mere rumour. As he walked he plucked a gum leaf and sat it on his lip.

  He found her at the centre of a hunting ground, a broad span that she had bisected directly through the middle. Roos like a hundred gang men raised up their heads and studied the Vandemonian as he passed, but they did not flee, merely watching him while they chewed. Halfway across the open field he stopped. Katherine was crouched there collecting mushrooms and placing them in her shirt pockets. She looked up at him and handed over a fistful which Bill brushed off then placed into his mouth. They ate as they wandered through the mist, and the condensation formed on the loose strings of her hair and ran down her cheeks. Bill wiped her forehead and walked beside her.

  The South Esk River ran through the farthest end of the valley. She was a long silverhaired old girl laid out in sand and stones and they were all the cold day reaching her. The river was edged with shrubs and leaning trees and they walked the bank a good while before finding a suitable place to cross at a little beach where the teacoloured water washed up in a lather of foam. They forded there in the shallows and upon the far shore Katherine was shuddering hard enough to crack her teeth. Bill watched her sitting purple with cold in the limeferns and he waited with her but she would not move. He knew they would go no further that day so he gathered the rudiments of a fire, struck a spark off his quartz into some wood fibres and in the withering light Katherine pressed in by the flames, outfitted in her blanket.

  They had a nugget of possum meat in paperbark which Bill removed from his coat pocket and unwrapped. There wasn’t more than a mouthful. He loosened his boots, unthreading the laces from the eyelets and knotting them together into a line. He tied on the possum meat and carried this crude tackle over to the water’s edge barefoot. Billowed sails of final sunlight stood above the hills. He lobbed the meat beneath an overhang in the creek and sat there with the shadows filling around him. Sat there a good while until he felt the first tugs, then he drew the line inwards and teased the cray along. He put his face near the water and snatched at the creature, which flapped mightily, but he had it well caught. He scooped it onto the grassy bank.

  The fire crackled. He stirred the embers with quick strikes of his hand, raised smoke and sparks, and he buried the crayfish in ash. Inside the coals the cray began to bubble at the mandibles and it clambered like a charred and smoking spider from the flames but Bill flicked it back into the coals where its legs soon curled inwards. He removed the cray and broke away the tail meat, which he passed to Katherine, keeping the head for himself. As he was fingering the yellow mustard from the carapace she clicked her tongue and tipped her head towards the river.

  You see her? she said.

  Bill dried his chin. I seen her.

  She follow all day.

  Yep.

  Tell her go. We got no food. Got no blanket.

  We have food now.

  Katherine pulled white flesh from the tail. Tell her go.

  luekerkener, Bill called out.

  There was no reply.

  tyerlarre luekerkener, he said again.

  At first it seemed they were alone. Then the underscrub along the river whispered as the native girl revealed herself. She was slight and her joints bulged through her skin; she watched the travellers out of eyes that knew hardship.

 
There now, he said. You tell her that yourself.

  Katherine kept her face lowered, picking at the crayfish flesh, passing hunks of it up to her lips. On the river’s far edge the girl stood waiting but Katherine would not look at her. The girl approached the stream and crossing the water she pulled herself onto the bank, huddling within her own arms as she came to crouch beside the fire. Bill gave the girl a few legs off the crayfish. Gave her his possum skin. The girl perched under the furs and cracked the shells apart and pulled the meat with her teeth. She wore no marks of initiation but what scars she had suggested kinship with coastal lands. Her bald head bore a stubble of regrowth. Bill watched her suck the meat from every stem and toss the shells on the coals. She licked her fingers clean.

  How you feed her? said Katherine. How?

  You wanted me to help her. Well I done that. Now she’s on my ticket, aint she? I’ll find her something, dont worry.

  When they rolled up by the fire for sleep later on it was some time coming. The final violet sun had seeped away and the air began to grow ever colder as Bill loaded up the fire and lay back with his coat hunched around himself. Beyond the river the valley plain dimmed from view in the twilight. The girl watched the coals pulse but was silent. Bill propped himself nearer the flames and in the end he found some comfort backed against a river tree out of the wind and a fidgeting sleep overtook him in the small hours. Later he woke in the dark at some animal call and sat up and felt for his knife. The girl was staring into the fire as she had been, the milks of her eyes never moving. Bill studied that delicate face. He pulled his jacket up and shortly after drifted off.