The Roving Party Read online

  I saw her with my own honest eyes, he said above the popping of the fire. A woman hardly older than you, boy. Blackened about her eyes, missing her front teeth, bleeding and staggering and near enough to naked she was. Crying as if she never meant to stop. Something truly awful had visited her for which she had no words to tell. I never saw its like. I was raised in the house of James Cox, Esquire, raised as good as blood, raised alongside his own children. I saw a good many things in my life there but now I was seeing something wholly new. When this woman arrived at the house she was tended by Mr. Cox’s maid and given rum and water for the pain and put to bed. Come the following day she’d regained herself somewhat but more was the pity for her.

  I believed her deranged and I dont doubt even now that she was. I told Mr. Cox and he was inclined to agree but nonetheless we went to her room and tried to get some sense from her. In the darkened room where she tolerated no light and where she was hidden among the bedclothes with her face covered over she commenced to tell us her story. And Mr. Cox and I, we listened and scarcely believed what we heard.

  Bill paused in his storytelling and drank from his mug of tea. The rain was easing and the thudding on his hat had slowed. He raked his eyes across them.

  Two men—Jeffries and a companion—had fallen upon this woman’s hut and upon her family, he said, but to hear her describe them we thought they were devils set forth from the core of the earth all ablaze and bent on blood spill. Most of what come out was barely more than nonsense but what I heard, what I understood at least, stopped the marrow in my bones.

  Seems these men entered her hut in the evening. They had hold of a servant belonged of her neighbour and held a pistol to his head. They entered the hut where were sitting the woman and her husband and her infant and they screamed like animals and bade the householders to stay down. They knelt that old servant man among the child’s toys and proceeded to release the hammer. I saw his body when it was buried. The whole front of his head shot clean away. The woman’s clothes were rank with gore even a week later. Then a second pistol was produced and the husband was shot.

  The lags were unmoved by the tale. They pulled their blankets around and wiped their faces as the rain ran off their hair.

  Bill nodded, continued. Aye. If that was the worst, surely you’d sleep the night and wake come sunrise and never think again upon the Man Eater. But I have not finished. Not yet at least. So he marched that woman from her hut at pistolpoint while his partner sacked the place for food. The infant wailing in her arms. And he snatched the child’s leg and tore the child away and to hear this woman tell it he tore the very blood from her beating heart. He tore that child away and set to dashing it against a gum tree and all that sad scrub was filled with the sound.

  The company was silent as the Vandemonian swirled his tea and stared into the dark fluid as if he might there find an answer or at least find a question worth his breath. He swirled the tea and swallowed and went on.

  Having been marched a dozen miles by Jeffries and his partner and having suffered their depraved attentions over some days, the woman made her escape by chewing through her bindings in the black of night. Her husband had survived his wounds but even the living sight of him seemed no great comfort to her and it was some time before Mr. Cox’s maid was able to move her from that bed. I sat with her a good long while and listened to her ramblings and I came to know the Man Eater by his deeds and to see him outlined in my mind. So when Mr. Cox put together a party intended to track the pair, I was the very first to put myself forward. Our own Mr. Batman organised a party too, after hearing my account of the matter.

  John Batman nodded. It was meself, William Gould there and another fellow, Smith.

  What did they have on his head? said Howell Baxter.

  Ten pound and yer ticket.

  Ten pound?

  Ten. And I tell you, wasnt a scoundrel in the district thinkin of nothin else.

  Black Bill observed this exchange with dark and unblinking eyes. When a fresh silence descended upon the campsite he spoke again.

  It was Mr. Darke found the Man Eater when perchance he saw him skitter in the trees around the flanks of his farmhouse. Jeffries put into the scrub and lost Darke along the gullied banks of the Nile where no sort of bushman could lose his quarry. Tracks stay a week in the soft earth there and will even confide the frame and height of the mark for those adept at the reading of it. But Darke is no sort of bushman. No sort at all. I was in Mr. Cox’s party who set out with Darke that evening.

  Jeffries wasted no effort hiding his trace and it ran so plainly we went at a trot and followed the tracks without danger of losing them. All night we followed and we arrived at a lonely stock hut as the sun was staining the sky and we found inside some of Mr. Darke’s men sleeping off a skinful of rum. You could smell the reeking even outside the hut. Mr. Darke called them out as drunkards and promised floggings for all and raged until a bottle was handed his way. He partook of a dram and then it was himself splayed out between them, necking from the bottle and sleeping through the freezing dawn.

  The men had their ears bent listening to Bill’s tale and when he paused to take a sip of his tea they also raised their mugs and drank. The Vandemonian flicked a finger at the billycan in the fire for another serving and the boy obliged by lifting it away with a stick and pouring using his sleeve tugged over his fingers against the burning handle. With a fresh steaming mug in his hands Bill went on and the men listened now like he was giving scripture.

  Jeffries was nearby for sure. I read his trace past the hut and off aways. I surveyed the shifting weather and scouted Jeffries’ trace some hundred yards onto Mill’s Plain. As I was running my eye across the line of trees I saw him, dressed in a long dark coat of leather and wending through the gaunt scrub. To my eyes he was wholly unnatural in that landscape. So I shouldered my weapon and drew a sight on him.

  Bill pulled on his tea. I could have struck him, he said. No doubt in my mind. But if I missed he was off once more into the wilds and gone. I had to be sure, you see. For that reason I returned to the hut and woke Mr. Darke and the others and they come half dressed and stinking drunk and we surrounded the Man Eater before he knew it. One of Darke’s men was up to him first and presented his gun to Jeffries, which reduced him to grovelling of the most pitiful sort. They beat him and kicked him and stomped him. Even Mr. Darke, even Mr. Cottrell the constable. I stopped them; if I hadnt surely one more murder would have been committed.

  That Man Eater, he was a sorry wretch. Sorry of sight and sorry of deed. They turned out his pockets and what do you suppose they found? You know well and good what they found. An arm severed at the elbow. Rancid and chewed up. It was belonged of his partner murdered cruelly in his sleep. That was a revelation to harden the most amiable among the hunting party. One of Darke’s men urinated on the Man Eater’s bare skin and a knife was pressed to his shoulder and someone screamed that he would be served his own fried arm for breakfast. The Man Eater was hysterical. They beat him out cold. Then he was roped and dragged naked to Mr. Cox’s residence and that’s how it was done. How he was caught.

  The boy spoke up. You oughta of killed him.

  Would you have?

  My bloody oath, said the boy.

  Then you would have hanged alongside him. Bill turned and looked across the selection of gaunt faces. I took my leave from Darke for fear of being a party to murder and I fell in the following day with the Leetermairremener, who are a kind people. Around their hearth fire we gathered and I ate their possum and offered my tobacco and I told the story of the Man Eater and the slaughter he so freely countenanced. The old men of the tribe allowed me measure to speak and called me son and smoked my tobacco but I was clothed as a white man and they understood me as white. They listened and nodded as I spoke and the children hid from me behind their mothers. Some of their retinue wore shirts or trousers looted from stock huts and they had a single flintlock which was rusted all but useless and I believe they thought themse
lves versed in the comings and goings of whitefolk, but as they listened to the awful tale I told, the old men of the tribe grew into the knowledge that their solitary ways were ever closer to being undone.

  They waited for Bill to go on but he drew on his tea and listened to the trees groan like the damned and presently they understood that his tale had finished.

  No more was said. The wind shearing through the campsite drove the company men deeper into their blankets for refuge. By now the rain had ceased but the ground was sodden, except at the base of the thickest trees, and they contorted themselves between these roots for shelter. Darkness lay beyond the firelight and their eyes burned as they scrutinised that formless sweep of black. Nine men cloistered among the recesses, as cold and dulled as stones. What might be conceived of as a measure of men was for them a simple paucity. For that which moaned inside them was given no idiom to show itself.

  Black Bill awoke to the prodding of a bare foot, cold and split-nailed in the fireless dark. He pushed his hat from his eyes. A figure stood over him training a weapon upon the square of his chest. The other men slept a dead sleep and stirred not a wink when Horsehead, with his consumptive’s wheeze, drew down the hammer on his piece, the unoiled creak of it like floorboards giving.

  Hand us them boots, darkie, he growled.

  The Vandemonian pushed back his blankets and tenderly raised himself up.

  Horsehead was shrouded in his own blankets and his breath showed in the void between the two men as he spoke. You got no need of em.

  Black Bill slid against the tree he’d been sleeping under and rose to his full height. From behind his neck he drew his dagger, the blade held downwards. He waited and stared. In the silence Horsehead made no move nor did he release the hammer. He was in a bind: firing would wake Batman and Batman was likely to respond in kind. Bill raised the blade alongside his cheek from where he might better strike a blow.

  It was a long instant as the pair stood off like dogs and the ragged snores of the company men came from the darkness. Bill clenched his fist upon the bone handle.

  Horsehead went backwards a pace and wheezed at the Vandemonian, I’m takin to the bush. I dont want no part of this madness. Now givem here. Elsewise I’ll finish you with ball. He watched the Vandemonian’s blade wink and he studied that hardened face for evidence of fear or doubt but all he beheld was clear intent.

  He moved back another pace, then another. At length Horsehead lowered the mouth of his gun, but even as he rested the weapon upon a tree root and raised his hand to signal for calm the Vandemonian kept his knife bared. Eventually the assigned man sat himself beside his gun and tugged his damp blankets across his legs like some shabby squatter taking his ease.

  Keep the bloody things then, he said.

  Black Bill pulled his hat brim low and stared at the creature hunched down beside the fire, shivering beneath his bedding. And he watched that figure until the sun flowered behind the horizon.

  ALL THAT NEXT MORNING THEY FOLLOWED where the Parramatta men led, going over the rough underscrub sorely and without enthusiasm. To the rear John Batman followed with his gun crooked over one arm, watching every movement of the scrub as if it meant him ill. The shoeless men slipped down the banks and mossed chines, struggling through their long task without a break. Their empty guts cramped up and they hounded Batman for food but he would not be swayed. In the hour before noon they cut across a markener snaking through the bush that had been hacked by clans passing around the mountain. It was a fine track that followed the mountain’s swells and hollows and Pigeon considered both courses a moment, the other men watching him at his deliberations. He waved the mosquitoes from his neck, folded his arms across his chest. Then he led the party off along the markener’s northern route. The markener had not seen fire in many a year; at one time it had been wide enough for two men abreast but now it was narrowed into archways of sinewed leatherwoods and in the light wells young shrubs of every sort swallowed up the path and clawed at their clothes. The bush was festooned with leeches like gaping black worms reaching from the branches and as the men walked they plucked them from their skin and burst them between their fingers.

  In the afternoon they moved up through thinner groves of rainforest and through squatly grown tree ferns and their pace picked up. John Batman took up whistling a broken tune which dipped and rose across the same few bars over and over as they strode along; the emus he raised with that sound crashed off among the trees in threes and fours, booming deep down their throats in alarm. Somewhere a lone crow called. A few more miles around the swollen base of Ben Lomond they crossed a stand of black gum, towering like immense stone pillars. The company men climbed over the roots and tipped their heads back to study the ironcoloured sky labouring past the crests of those trees. The uppermost branches stirred as long gusts full of the cold of the southern ice lands flowed through. The men moved around those colossal gums, watching the rotting turf that shifted with the little scurrying life, but they had not got far before Black Bill held aloft his hat and brought the party to a halt. He was stood with his six-foot fowler trained on the trees and he raised a finger for silence. The company men waited.

  tawattya, Bill called but it soaked into the forest, lost amid the bird cry.

  In the near distance was a ring of temma. They were built on loose uneven soil but the clans had little ground now to choose from, as Batman had the best of it for his sheep. Bill approached each of the temma in turn, calling, and peering inside. He stepped over a dead hearth fire strewn about with the shattered bones of wallabies, their fur and dark signs of blood and he held his hand above the coals a moment then tipped back his hat at an angle. The party men emerged and moved guardedly into the village with their weapons to their shoulders, studying the stretchings of bush that led off away eastwards around Ben Lomond. Away from the temma, piles of scat lay cast over with handfuls of grass caked in wipings and the Dharugs nudged at the turds with the points of their toes. Blackening, hard, juiceless. Crook pinched a clod in his fingers and it split open. Wet inside still. They were not long departed. He showed Bill.

  Two days gone, said Bill. Not more.

  Batman gazed up at the mountain. Two?

  Not more.

  Aye. Well then.

  They took a spell there, kneeling among the native huts. Out of his drum Batman produced an apple, a perfect red apple, and quartered it with his skinning knife. Liquid ran clear over his knuckles and he sucked them clean and then laid the segments neat before him where they glistened under the gaze of eight men.

  I never had apple before, the boy said.

  Batman gave a quarter to every man and the fellow beside him to divide how they saw. Howell Baxter and Jimmy Gumm halved a quarter widthways and ate it. Black Bill placed his segment in his creamy palm and looked at the boy.

  Have it, he said.

  Without a word the boy snatched the apple and stuffed the lump sideways in his mouth. He resembled the beggar children in the back alleys of Launceston, those tiny souls stealing food from households and pleading coins from passers-by. Bill had given them his pennies and his last wedge of bread and then his blanket. They’d thanked him and asked if he was a nigger and he’d replied that he was a Vandemonian born and grown; they’d nodded like old weathered sages and shaken his hand. They stank of the muck of the towns and their eyes loomed too large in their skulls.

  What’s he done? said the boy.

  He? said Bill.

  This witch.

  Boy, what is your name?

  Thomas Toosey.

  You shouldnt be here, Thomas.

  Well I know he done somethin.

  Dont concern yourself with it.

  The boy jutted his head at the armed men settled thereabouts. It is my concern though, aint it.

  Bill allowed that point. He did as we all do, he said.

  Did what?

  No more questions. You are a boy.

  I’m fifteen.

  The boy licked apple juice of
f his fingers. Black Bill took up a handful of leaves and let them fall. The leaves turned wounded spirals.

  He’s just a man is all.

  There was more the boy wanted to ask and he showed it by shifting his weight to get a better view of Bill’s face. The shredded sunlight through the trees cast them over in speckling, as if they were fish lying idle in shallows. But Black Bill stood up and walked off, leaving the boy alone with his questions.

  The temma were woven from slabs of bark laid over a frame of curved branches that had been jammed into the earth. Skins covered the earthen floors inside, the whole teeming with fleas. As he tossed through each hut for things of worth Black Bill upended a hessian sack. A hand mirror, half a broken teacup patterned with prancing horses, an empty jam tin, a broad red book. Nothing of any value or use to a mob of wandering clansfolk. He reached down for the book where it lay.

  A Bible. As sturdy as firewood in his hand. He turned the damp pages one by one and every page, every column of text, every inch of every surface was inked with arcane circles, spirals, in bloodred ochre. The broken halves of the words hanging between those scrawls were rendered useless. Whatever authority the volume had held was muted by those fierce curls and angles, shapes echoed in the very build of the world. He closed the book and tossed it on the dead fire.

  Jimmy Gumm was likewise engaged in plundering and he watched Bill throw that blemished Bible aside. He snatched the book from the ashes and tucked it inside his drum where he’d also stashed a native shell necklace, a sarcenet ribbon and a hairbrush of turned whalebone and boar bristles. He resettled the weight of the bag across his shoulder and nodded at the Vandemonian who was stood at rest in a warm sun streak.

  It’ll do for wipin me fundament, he said.