The Roving Party Read online

  So he come, said the headman. The cold wind. The cold wind. In he blows.

  By God you put that down. The American had pulled an archaic duelling pistol from the rope in his pants and steadied it at Bill’s temple. Put it down and stick up yer hands.

  Bill did not move. He watched the headman.

  Stick em up less you want yer whole upper storey blowed off, you son of a bitch.

  He no listen. No hear. The headman shook his head.

  He’ll damn well hear me soon he doesnt drop that blade.

  Put away gun, said Manalargena.

  I said drop it.

  When Bill moved the knife came so fast and precise that the American never even gasped until Bill was upon him. He grabbed the pistol, pushed it aside and as it fired into the sand he cut the muscle of the man’s upper arm with a single pass. The American hollered and clamped his hand on the wound. He stumbled back towards his crewmates. They looked at each other nervously, gaffs and knives and oars held up in defence. Once at the fire the American dared to lift his clamped hand to study the laceration but the sight of his arm laid bare caused him to wail and fall to the sand.

  The headman never removed his eyes from Bill. orrercarner nicker?

  I mean to take my redress.

  Manalargena came forward and the children arranged around his legs moved with him. He rested his empty hands on them, stroked the head of a spindly girl. And my daughter? You kill her? My sister son? He touched the children in turn as if to indicate them.

  I do what needs doing.

  You keep sorrow, said the headman. He touched his cheeks. Keep it here. But sorrow is you deserve. It is belong to you.

  His men, all armed for warring, ranged out behind their leader now in a crude division. Among that mix of clansmen all knew the deeds of Bill’s history and they knew the havoc he’d sown in their lands as a vassal of Batman. When Bill inched forward with his knife displayed the warriors were stayed by his fearful standing and they raised no cries of war nor called on their ancestors but heard only the squeal of his boots through the sands. He moved and his blade glimmered.

  I speak truth here, said Manalargena. You strong man. Yes. But you cannot eat stone. Not stone.

  Manalargena reached down to pick up a hand axe off the rocks. It was a simple tool meant for dressing animals and a mess of fur remained around the heel from this work. Its iron head was hafted on a hardwood waddy and affixed in place with resin. It bore no adornments of any kind save for ridges along the handle and the blade was notched where it had struck against bone or rock. He held this curious weapon down by his side. On the beach the fires twisted.

  You did something to my boy. I know it.

  Ah. The child.

  What did you do?

  Yes. The child is justice. Your owing is paid.

  Without any sort of notice Bill lunged forward and swung the knife at the headman’s gut then slashed it upwards. The startled children fell away behind the ranks of men. Manalargena skipped back, clutching the hand axe to his chest.

  The child was no part of this, said Bill.

  He moved in again and whipped the knife left and right in a motion as fast as a snake strike and this time it caught the headman across the wrist and opened a wound. The clansmen stationed at his back lifted their spears and beat their waddies on the shafts and the clamour grew as they readied to attack.

  The headman stuck out his axe. mullarner! he said.

  They halted. Some made war calls and others leered at him but they did not ship their spears. A flow of blood began down the headman’s fingers and he flicked it away. He continued pacing and watching the Vandemonian where he stood with his knife at his waist.

  I not kill you, Tummer-ti. This is finish. You go now. As he pointed out across the marsh tussocks blood ran from his fingers, ran down the thousand scars crisscrossing the skin of his blighted arm.

  He was my son.

  Bill swung his knife again. The blade passed cleanly by the headman’s throat and before that movement ended he’d caught Bill’s arm and turned it against his shoulder. Bill was pushed off balance. In a stroke the headman brought around his axe and buried it to the marrow in Bill’s thigh. The Vandemonian cried out. The headman jerked the edge free and a flow of blood splashed down Bill’s leg. They backed away and stood facing across that small distance, the headman bearing his axe like a butcher’s hatchet and the sand beneath Bill’s feet thickening with his blood. His leg, his whole side, was in torment.

  Go, said the headman. Again he pointed into the darkness.

  Bill spat, his eyes like gun black.

  Manalargena brought up his arms. His gaze swept across the clansfolk. nara relipianna clueterpercare, he said.

  This was met with the crackle of waddy on spear.

  Then Manalargena looked to the American. He brave man, yes?

  Son of a bitch near cut off my arm. He needs hacking up is what he needs.

  Once more Manalargena faced the Vandemonian, waving his axe around in agitation. You murder us. You come in the night. You hide. You shoot. With pimdimmeyou you come. And you bring sorrow. So I call your child and he listen. My demon call. He hear our music that child. This is justice, he said.

  Blood pooled in his boot. His hand was weak around the dagger and he focused on sounds nearby as he tried to slow his labouring heart and fight the nausea brewing in his gut but there was so much pain he could think of nothing else. After some breaths he raised his eyes to the unbending frame of the headman. He clutched his knife and limped forward.

  Come, said the headman, and I teach you.

  Bill aimed for the ribs, came up and under. The headman knocked his arm wide and brought around the blunt side of his axe to crack Bill on the nape. It was a heavy blow and he staggered. Now the headman caught his knife arm and he fought Bill backwards onto the sand where he straddled his chest and angled the axe hilt across Bill’s throat. Bill struggled and kicked but the headman leaned his weight upon the handle and pushed to stop the air in his neck. Bill’s knife arm was pinned to the sand. His vision began to flicker. Seamen jeered and whistled. Then the headman eased off.

  This is finish. You go. Go now.

  Manalargena stood up and paced back out of reach. The Vandemonian gasped air as he rolled onto his side. The wild men ringing around him with spears and waddies and seal clubs called on him to stand and fight. He raised himself to his knees. But even as he felt for his knife in the sand a shot boomed out on the salt marsh. The headman slumped. Fiery red stipples appeared along his leg where buckshot had entered the flesh and he pressed his hands to the holes and blood seeped through his fingers bright against the dark of his skin.

  Now a general confusion seized hold of the camp. Some of the clansfolk picked up the headman and carried him into the firelight and others scattered away in fear of being shot but one or two looked at the Vandemonian and they raised their waddies to beat him where he crouched. He drew his body into a huddle but the blows against his ribs were skilfully delivered and drove the wind from his lungs.

  noneta! noneta! noneta!

  A woman’s voice cleaved the discord of the campsite. In that moment the waddy blows ceased and the clansmen ran. Bill scrabbled away over the sand holding his damaged leg and when he raised his eyes he saw Katherine revealed from the darkness by the fire’s irregular glow, and borne at her hip was his fowling piece. She approached and those clansmen fled like children before the muzzle of her gun. But her intentions lay not with them at all and when one of their number pitched a spear she knocked it aside with the barrel and then renewed her levelled gaze upon the headman.

  He was lying near the fires. His wounds and his bloody fingers were grimed with sand and he wore a look of great astonishment at the sight of her. The clansfolk around him had bolted into the night. Down on the beach the sealers were mounting their masted dinghy into the breakers and their calls for haste could be plainly heard above the waves. Only the seamen’s wives remained and as Katherine stalked
into the campsite they began upon a song. It was a canticle of the devil’s prowess in war and the soothing words he spoke for the dying as he dispatched them towards his own realm on the point of his waddy. From the beach the whites called to their wives but the women sang on and on.

  Manalargena faced her across the smoke and flame. The mother, he said. Yes. Shoot, Mother, or go. I not fear you.

  She thumbed back the mechanism.

  Bill rose off the sands, bloodstained and beaten. Leave him be, he said. Leave him.

  He placed his hand on the barrel and tried to push it down. She shoved him off but he gripped the piece and would not let go.

  There is nothing here, he said.

  In the dark of the dunes the clansfolk gathered together and they enjoined the headman to flee but he paid them no attention. He sat staring into the great black cavern of the muzzle. pressing his hands to the pits driven into his leg. Sand and blood in his wounds mixed in rich amalgam. Then Katherine screamed at him. A long torn miserable wail ripped from the very well of her being. In the face of it the headman merely raised one hand to her, showing blood and sand both.

  Bill hauled at her elbow and called on her to move. She lowered the gun. Shouldered it. The wives sang on yet she would neither look at them nor would she listen. The two together left the camp and no one dared follow.

  SO IT PASSED THAT NONE OF them noticed the girl. The remnant clans reconvened at dawn in the long golden sun blades angling over the water. On the bluestone sea the gaff cutter leaned under her sails and as she hauled away, the clanspeople stood along the shoreline, their faces impassive. Manalargena was consulting with his demon silently before the fire. He had removed the shot balls by means of a glass spear point, washed his wounds in the sea and dressed them with pounded herbs, and now he allowed the leg to dry in the fresh air. His eyes were closed and as he whispered his scarred arm twitched with life. When it was done he led his people down the coast, the women and children from the south and east, the men of his own clan. As that conglomerate people walked the girl tracked along behind them over the coastal plains, keeping them in sight as she made through the tea-trees and candle heath ranged above the beaches. She clasped a possum skin around her shoulders and in her hands a bundle of shellfish rolled in soft bark and knotted. Things given to her by Black Bill and his woman. On dark the remnant tribe settled in around a cook fire and the girl watched them for a time from her hide and then she descended out of the grassed dunes and into their campsite.

  THEY WALKED THROUGH THE DARK HOURS, the Vandemonian limping badly, and in the early pallid dawn they saw from a balded peak the sea laid out like slate miles to the east. The waxing sun lit the speargrass marsh but there was no sign of men crossing that range in pursuit. They rested for a time as Bill vomited quietly over the stones and paraffin bush and dried his forehead on his sleeve each time after the pain swept his body. Katherine led him through the gums at a slow pace, with Bill holding onto every trunk and overhang and favouring his good leg. Blood had congealed inside his boot and each step sounded an odd swampy suck from its depths. They pushed on down a shaded ridge where the branches curled under a weight of glossy herbage and it brushed against them without cease. In that shade the cold was compounded as their clothes took the dew from the leaves. Bill shivered and hopped down the embankment until he could go no further and he called to Katherine. At first she kept on walking for a dozen yards or so, with no sign it seemed of any kind of mercy. He slumped down at the base of a blackwood and stretched his ruined leg out in front of him. He could not see her and he waited in silence before she reappeared.

  She came up the slope and stood assessing him at a distance, her few provisions bundled with the fowler on her back, her blankets horseshoed across one shoulder, a sort of sullenness on her face which he knew as its chief feature. He waved her closer. Silvereyes were roosted there in profusion and as she approached between the trees they took up in warning to each other. She leaned over Bill and gripped hold of his thigh to better know the injury, turning it this way and that until he gritted his teeth all the harder for the pain. Straightening up she began to unload her blankets and bits and pieces onto the ground beside him and she walked out among the pine and white gum and currant bush mounted on that shadowed ridge and went from tree to tree gazing up into the highest parts, her great double braid of black hair trailing like a mooring rope down her back. She selected one tree which appeared most likely and all the while the little silvereyes warbled. From out of the rubble, the blown branches and bark and leaves, she picked up a chunky stick and walked back to Bill. He hoisted himself upright with it and followed her through the shrub to the blue gum she had chosen. She hooked her foot into his hands and clambered onto the bottom limb where she found some holds that allowed her to ascend the trunk at speed. Bill watched her vanish into the canopy. He sat down and waited.

  In the end he heard the possum long before he saw it. The silvereyes had fallen silent and Bill was lying back as if he might fight off the pain through sheer force of will. He heard the catsounding screams and looked up but could see nothing of Katherine through the tangle. He watched and waited and soon a shape came tumbling out of the tree limbs and thudded in a rise of dust upon the stones. Bill was over it, hobbling, clubbing it around the head, and the possum gave one short smothered yowl as it made to flee but Bill brained the thing mightily. He took it up by its curled tail and turned it in the sunlight, knocking aside the joeys clinging precariously to the pouch, and carried the carcass to a clearing where a fire could be stacked. Katherine came backwards down the trunk and hung off the final branch, swinging to and fro then dropping to her feet.

  They roasted the possum below the shade of the sassafras and ate every part, ate the tail and the eyes from its skull—one each—and fried the giblets on a skewer. When they were done Katherine chose the thinnest of the forearm bones and with the knife she halved it down the centre, then quartered it. She took up one quarter and worked the tip into a point by filing it against a stone. Bill was stretched out near the fire and in the measured light his face was grey and his eyes mooned oversized in their sockets. He watched her stand and strip off her pants and using the bone needle she proceeded to pick loose a few threads of cotton which unwound like tiny worms into her sandcoloured palm. Greasing the thread with a dab of possum fat she passed it through the eyehole she’d cut into the bone. Then she shuffled over to Bill. He rolled onto his side to present to her the cleft hacked in his thigh. From the ground he retrieved a stoutlooking piece of black gum and placed it between his jaws.

  Every pass was purest distress. Katherine gathered the livid flesh together in a pucker and pressed the needle through and her hands were heavy with blood, and blood and sweat ran in equal proportion through Bill’s clothes and dampened the litter beneath. He did not cry out but bit down on the wood until his lips also bled. Finally it was at an end. She tied the thread, bit it off, and towelled her hands on her pants before she pulled them on again. Bill lay on his pallet of twigs and leaves, his eyes half closed, palms open, and he did not see her take the knife and put out into the trees.

  When he awoke it was near on dark. He had a great thirst and he sat up and cast about for the canteen. Katherine was staring at him across the fire and she tossed the bottle through the smoke and onto his lap. He winced as it struck. His thigh was bound up in a poultice of tea-tree leaves and the vapours they shed brought water to his eyes. A wrap of paperbark fixed the poultice in place, the whole like some tumorous growth of his own flesh, seeping greenish ooze. He drank deeply and slumped back.

  Why him not kill you? she said.

  Bill opened his eyes. What?

  Why him not kill you?

  He looked at her. He shook his head.

  Old now that bungana. Old. Dumb. I would kill you.

  Yes. I reckon you would.

  He closed his eyes and lay still in the fire’s warmth. A wind rolled in that stirred and reddened the coals. Bill screwed up his eyes fo
r the smoke drifting past. He lay back alone with the misery in his leg.

  Manalargena told me a story once, he said. My father used to sing the same story whenever we saw a snake. He’d point to the snake and start up singing but Manalargena’s story differed on some points. His folk have their own telling I reckon.

  Story, she said. She stoked the fire with a possum bone. What story?

  It concerns these two brothers, said Bill. And their neighbour.

  He was quiet for a spell. Then he said, I hear you now.

  After a while Katherine rose and stepped past the fire and handed him the tiny skull she wore always at her throat. Mooncoloured and frail and jawless. Bill cupped it in his palm, this last piece of a son he’d known only in dream. He looked upon that relic, desolate of heart as he spoke the boy’s name, the secret name he had given, and he said goodbye in his old tongue. He caressed that pearled bone and he promised the boy he would not forget him. He lay there for a long time with wind dousing his skin, watching a cinder sky churn above the forest, the skull clutched in his hands and his son’s secret name upon his lips. Longing for the deep dreams when he would visit.