The Roving Party Read online

  IN THE FOREST SHADOWS HORSEHEAD DREW up beside Jimmy Gumm and leaned slightly into him. His vagrant’s face was gathered in a scowl. He spoke hotly on Gumm’s neck. He’s by hisself.

  Gumm nodded. He smoothed down his beard, unlooped the drum from over his head and set it down. His hands clenched in two broad fists as he spoke to Horsehead.

  Watch them others dont get wind of this. Till I’m done at least.

  The boy was squatting in the ferns near the outermost of the native shanties with his trousers bunched about his knees. Flies crawled along his legs and he brushed them away but they rose and returned as before. He shat quietly on the ground then plucked coarse bracken fronds, crushed them into a ball and dabbed at his hole. He was reaching for a second handful when Jimmy Gumm emerged from behind a silver wattle, glancing over his shoulder before coming forward. He gestured at the boy and looked away.

  Stand up now. Take the hidin that’s comin to ye.

  The boy hiked up his trousers and moved back. His leavings steamed in the ferns between them. He retied the cord of his pants. What hidin?

  The one I owe.

  The boy looked around but there were none present save the wattles. He drew himself up and pushed out his jaw.

  It’s a matter of my dignity and what you done to it, said Gumm.

  You brokeheaded old fumbler. How’s a lag like you got any dignity?

  That’s enough out ayou.

  Gumm lumbered forward and grabbed him. For an instant he had the boy by the sleeve and was bringing his fist about to crack him in the teeth but the boy was too sly. He snatched his arm away and jumped outside the line of the punch, countering with his own. It struck Gumm square in the throat. He gagged, closed his eyes and stumbled but the boy was on him now, kicking at his groin and driving his awkward fists into the side of his head. The bigger man dropped onto his rear and the boy stood back with his fists raised as Gumm grasped his throat, coughing. Gumm rolled over in the bracken and bits of bark and muck clung to his clothes. On all fours he looked up at the boy and winced. He tried to speak but could not.

  From behind the great flutes of a blue gum two men slumped, holding each other, their faces squeezed up as they cackled like beaten cats. Tears leaked down the slates of their cheeks. Gumm lowered his head.

  Oh, said Horsehead. Oh he’s done it to you again. Oh dear oh dear oh deary me.

  Baxter threw back his head and howled from deep down inside his long frame. A madman’s guffaw.

  You miserable bastards, said Gumm through his hoarse throat.

  But it only had them laughing the harder.

  THE EARTH WAS A MESS OF tracks where natives had come and gone for days but Pigeon and Crook went about bent over in diagnosis until they agreed that the natives had decamped eastwards in number. Black Bill considered the trail, running his hat brim through his fingers. The Parramatta men were gone off into the scrub and Bill fell in behind them as they picked out the way and led the company onwards after whatever faint trace they saw there. The air was full of the sound of their passing: the creak of boots, the sweeping of branch against thigh. They curved over a rise and down a slight shaded gully where it banked and the damp earth turned under their bare or booted or bandaged feet. Here the men drank from a creek that sputtered along the gully floor and they filled their canteens from a rockpool set about with tree ferns. The sun above was dimmed by the canopy and in the halflight the mosquitoes swarmed upon their naked parts so that every hand they raised sent up a flotilla, mindless, maddening, until it forced them to move on once more.

  Mid-afternoon Crook started singing. He chanted as he walked, an unelaborate tune rising and falling upon a rhythm only the whitebanded and ochred men of the Dharug understood. Black Bill heard in it the echo of the crow shrike and the chiming of the quail-thrush, the age-old song of an arid land. Pigeon joined his voice to it and those two sounded out their chorus upon the landscape as the party men looked about in cold disdain or shook their heads.

  Then Jimmy Gumm found voice too. Flecks of spit caught in his beard as he sang. Good people what will you of all be bereft? Will you never learn wit whilst a penny is left?

  All the colonials knew that tune. Even Batman, who had never placed a foot upon English soil in his life. They sang together. We’re all like the dog in the fable betrayed, to let go our substance and snap at the shade!

  And so Crook’s song coalesced into one discordant wail with the ballad, the amalgamation ringing around the mountainside like the death cry of some misbegotten beast, while Black Bill quietly studied the sheer gorge they walked through.

  Late in the afternoon as the sun burst on the horizon in an outward copper spread Pigeon crouched at a grass embankment, his fingertips caressing the face of the earth in that long light.

  First mob come up ere, said Pigeon. He pointed out the marks.

  A few yards away the grass rose upwards into scrub again and Pigeon walked nearer, watching the ground as he went, his forehead creasing. He paused at the grass edge and pinched the flattened stalks to reckon the passing of time. Charcoaled tree husks intermingled with the living where a fire had burnt through some years back. The squeeze of black gum and pine was looser here and the scrub was easily covered on foot, save for the many saplings germinated in the blaze; these whipped their legs and caught them up.

  Second mob come that way, he said and gestured down the mountainside. All go together. One big bloody mob now them buggers.

  Batman eased the cork from his quart flask and poured a measure into his open mouth. They watched him survey that country where it rolled away down the slope towards the blue-hued mountains in the south masked by a haze. The dark shapes of hawks crawled across the clouds. He removed his hat, his hair crowned in where the hoop had sat.

  Seems we’ll be made to earn our payment, he said.

  Plenty dogs. Plenty kids too, said Pigeon.

  Horsehead raised his eyes at this, his pale features a mess of wrinkling and his mouth hard set. Kids? he said.

  Batman drew another mouthful.

  The light was thinning. Pigeon strode into the scrub where he was followed by the roving party coming ever slower for want of rest and food. The wide trodden trail led them past swamp gums hung with long bark spools that turned in the breeze. All of them walking with heads down as the sun withdrew behind the mountain’s dripping wax crags, wheeling along its ancient gutter downwards into the underworld.

  An hour along the trail they tasted wood smoke upon the wind. The bush was a grim assemblage of shadows by now and the chirruping and howling of night creatures grew bolder as the light evaporated. The Parramatta men picked out a path among the trees where the party would not be seen. Batman allowed no speaking nor spitting and Pigeon and Crook mutely gestured to guide the men on. To still the rattling locks of their weapons the assignees stuffed gum leaves under the mechanisms. Batman and Bill quieted their boot soles with kangaroo hide. Where the path narrowed the men drew into single file and their passing was evidenced by little more than the whisper of the understorey as it closed behind them.

  Before that hour had ended all of the company could see the blinking fires in the scrub away down the slope. It was a sight that tested their resolve. From the banks of a fold they surveyed the land south. The stubs of firelight glistened in the dark of the forest. As the men of the roving party stared across the moon-silvered bushscape, John Batman ordered them down. They crouched behind the trees and unslung their weapons. Among that company only Batman and Black Bill continued to watch the fires burning in the distance. Bill on his knees pulled off his hat as he tallied first the fires then the clansfolk around them. I make it ten fires, Bill whispered.

  I see dog tracks by the fives of thousands, said Batman. They are some big lot.

  Aye.

  How many men you see? said Batman.

  A good few.

  Hazard a guess.

  He was quiet a moment. Eighty, he said. A hundred.

  Jimmy Gumm shook his
head. And here’s us nine.

  The boy was squatting like a river toad in the weeds. Glad you give me a gun now, arent you? he said.

  Nine will do, said John Batman. It will do superbly.

  There drifted in the night air the sound of a story being danced around the bonfires, the sound of one voice performing for a hundred souls. A single clansman passed before the flames and that warrior with his coiled ropes of hair was distinguished in silhouette, treading out the shapes of his narrative. His song rising and mingling with the drifts of smoke. In the late darkness a cold descended and even wrapped in blankets the party men could not escape the bitterness. The Parramatta men so recently come from their dustlands seemed crippled with it and sat huddled together, silent and rigid. Only Bill forwent his blanket. The jacket he wore was thin but if he was cold he made no show of it. He was cleaning the gunblack from the pan of his oversized fowler. It was a venerable old piece hooded with possum hide to keep the lock dry. He wiped out the pan with the edge of his shirt, primed it for firing and replaced the hood.

  What’s he singin about down there? the boy said to him.

  Keep yer voice down, said Batman.

  We ought to just get down there, the boy said. Surprisem in the dark.

  Lad, if you had any sense of what’s comin you wouldnt be in no hurry for it. Batman was stretched out at rest beneath his hat and his eyes remained closed as he spoke.

  The boy watched him. He hugged his knees up and looked away.

  At midnight Batman dug an oilcloth from his drum and set the boy to polishing the pans and the boy bowed his head over each mechanism as if he was whispering something inside, fingering the cloth into the workings and drying the parts. Batman took the cleaned pieces across his knee where he tested the mating of lock and frizzen and when satisfied he passed them off one by one to the assigned men. They readied the weapons sorely slowly in the cold. John Batman, with his doublebarrel gun on his shoulder and his two fists clenched inside his greatcoat, stepped before the rovers and offered them what small words he had.

  If you want them tickets of leave from the Governor, you’d best save some live head. Makes for good show bringin em in.

  They saw the sense in it and said so.

  On the approach they wove a path down the slope and Howell Baxter in his odd gait tumbled and muddied his clothes. They waited while Baxter found his feet and then Pigeon, Crook and Black Bill carried on towards the towering light of the native fires, forcing the rest to jog a few paces along the track cut by the passing of the clanspeople. Pigeon drew long lungfuls of air through his nose. Then he followed the westerly into the scrub downwind of the campsite and the rovers followed.

  What Black Bill witnessed from that cover stayed with him all his days. A crowd of shining damp faces were gathered in the firelight and its shimmer picked out incisions raised on their chests and streaks of ochre they wore like costuming. Manalargena strode among the revellers and bellowed out his epic: a tale of animosity among clans and the requital he’d delivered for his people when his cousin’s wife was carried off and he’d led men against the trespassers. He was naked, his greased skin aflame. He walked and he clapped and the singing rose around him into the sky as the voices praised their ancient dead. Above it all the full moon rolled like a blinded eye as Black Bill gripped the loaded fowling piece tighter.

  They formed a line eight abreast. John Batman bade them to put the hammers on the cock and on that signal the strike of settling mechanisms sounded along their line. In formation they moved upon the two conferencing clans, wading through the loose packing of brush, their weapons at their shoulders. It was dogs scavenging at the edge of the campsite that started barking first, lean and boney mongrels working through the refuse where wallabies had been gutted. They bayed at the interlopers and the noise broke the headman from his narrative. As his singing waned into quiet talk the clansmen took up waddies and spears, peering into the scrub from where the roving party came on them like ascended deadmen, eerily pale, gaunt, ungraceful.

  Tails of flame shaped the clansmen from the dark in a volley of shots and the bright gouts of their blood erupted. Two were felled, the others fled, the common squall of their cries sounding while the rovers repacked their weapons. Black Bill was first reloaded and first into the campsite, his eyes cutting every way. He shouldered past a stumbling woman, stalked deeper into the camp with his weapon trained on the ragged torn shadows cast by the fires. A great knot of people broke off before the party, naked women hauling naked children, young men as thinly boned as the spears they threw, the whole howling in one voice of consummate horror. Without thought the ruiners lay about themselves with the butts of their weapons, knocking down whoever strayed too near or firing into that mass unhindered. Some of the clan ran through the fires to escape and some trampled the fallen where they screamed. An old man tottered as he held a wound in his ribs. Black Bill drew his knife but the fellow was lost and gone in the blind dark scrub and Bill moved off through the pall of sulfur after the headman.

  It had become by now a scene of great misery. Wailing sounded in the bush beyond the firelight as the clansfolk decamped for the fastness of the mountain forest. The assignees followed the cries of which they had no understanding but Black Bill did and he knew parents called for children and wives for husbands and above it all was the war cry of men steeling to fight. They gave fire without discrimination into the body of stampeding people who fell all alike. The assignees stopped to reprime their weapons and fired on one knee or at a run and soon the drifts of gunsmoke choked the air and the blood trails tracked across the campsite shone in the light of the bonfires.

  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.

  IN THE NIGHT BILL’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.