Lieutenant (20 page)

Much too far, in other words, for thirty heavily armed but lightly provisioned soldiers to go in pursuit.

They tramped back to the pool behind the beach. Warungin made no signs of leaving them. Willstead grumbled that he was hanging about in the hope of a meal at their expense, but Rooke did not think the delights of dry crumbled bread, and a handful of shreds of salt beef, would be much of a temptation.

As the men cut ferns to sleep on and gathered wood to last their fires through the night, Warungin did in fact disappear. Rooke and Willstead paused to watch the lightness of his step as he went off down the path with his fishgig swinging backwards and forwards.

‘They come and go like children,’ Willstead said. ‘He is a good enough fellow, I suppose, but you could never rely on any of them. When the whim takes them, off they go.’

But, by the time they had the fire going, Warungin was back, eight plump mullet hanging from his hand, strung together with a length of vine. He scraped a few flat places among the coals, briefly cooked his catch, and then broke the fish into pieces with his fingers and shared them out among the officers. Laughed to see how squeamish they were about the heads. Took them back and crunched the heads entire, indicating how good they were.

‘Well,’ Silk admitted after he had licked his fingers clean, ‘he may be a savage but he does seem to have some idea of
quid
pro quo
.’

The fire blazed up into the growing darkness. Rooke lay back on the sand with a sigh, feeling the tension ease in his shoulders. The shape of the ground pressed up against him. Through the treetops he could see Betelgeuse, very red tonight, winking in a gap between the leaves.

In the morning there would be a few more hours of pointless tramping through the forest, then they would direct their steps back towards Sydney, empty-handed but blameless.

Silk’s face was swarthy with a day’s beard, sunburnt and shining in the flickering light. He would come out of this well, Rooke thought. He would regale the governor with every detail of the business. The governor would think him a fine fellow,
heap praise on his head, mention him in his next despatch.

The attack on the village would make a good chapter in Silk’s narrative. He had orchestrated an impressive performance. The checking of the watches was a masterstroke that would add colour to the account. Silk would mask the failure of the expedition with an amusing ruefulness and self-deprecation. There might even be a hint that the failure was no accident. He would emerge as a man who had picked his way with tact and humanity among the pitfalls of the situation. At a time when feeling ran high, he had talked the governor down from ten natives to six. The final triumph of his genius would be to come back with none, and still be praised.

It was a pity Rooke could not share his own triumph with Silk. What a lively chapter it would have made in the narrative: the neat sidestepping of a difficult situation by the unexpectedly deft Lieutenant Rooke.

He sat up, hugging his knees. There would be time now, all the time in the world, all the time in a life. He would apply for another term of duty, and another beyond that. The specifics of the future were not clear, but the outline was wonderfully simple: himself in New South Wales.

He would go on talking with Tagaran and the others. He would master the language. The day he had written
I kaadianed
it
, without thinking, he had taken a step on a journey he wanted never to end.

D
ouble rations, and the failure to capture a single native, had made the men raucous. Beside their bonfire on the other side of the clearing they were having something of an impromptu party. Silk looked over now and then but let them go. Among the three officers there was a peaceful silence, each man gazing into the fire with his own thoughts. Warungin was half-asleep, staring glassily into the flames, his body relaxed.

The moon rose, bright enough to make the flames sallow. By its light Rooke watched Silk unbuckling his pack and groping in it, he supposed for his journal. Rooke leaned over to help him by holding the awkward flap.

‘I look forward to seeing what you make of our expedition,’ he began, but he had taken hold of the bottom of the bag by
mistake so that the thing upended on the sand. A hatchet slipped out, its freshly honed edge gleaming in the moonlight. Bent around it were several folded canvas bags.

‘Why Silk, were you planning to cut your own firewood?’ Rooke said, feeling the edge on the hatchet, sharp enough to shave with. ‘With thirty men to do it for you?’

In his expansive mood, after the days of anxiety, the idea of Silk with the hatchet in his hand, chopping his own kindling, seemed the funniest thing in the world. But Silk was not amused. He grabbed the hatchet out of Rooke’s hand, thrust it back into the bottom of the pack, picked up the bags and tried to jam them in after it.

Willstead was watching with an expression that Rooke could not read. There was something about the hatchet, something about the bags, that Willstead knew.

‘Well, Silk, out with it!’ Rooke cried. ‘Did you hope to bring back a couple of trophies for Dr Weymark to paint? Or add illustrations of your own to your narrative?’

The hatchet had drawn blood, black in the firelight, on the ball of his thumb.

‘Not so far off the mark, Rooke,’ Willstead cried. ‘Trophy is very near the case!’ He was vastly entertained by some idea.

Rooke saw him glance across the fire at Warungin.

‘Lieutenant Willstead!’ Silk exclaimed. ‘I will thank you to hold your tongue!’ He had at last got the pack closed again and pushed it behind him, in the shadow cast by his body.

Willstead smirked at Rooke but said no more.

It was not the hatchet, not the bags, but the set of Silk’s face, half visible in the firelight, and a tone in his voice, that sent a chill into Rooke.

A breeze passed over the trees all around, a long shiver of sound like a sigh.

A peculiar kind of sum was working away in Rooke’s mind: the hatchet plus the bags, multiplied by Willstead’s smirk and divided by the look on Silk’s face.

‘Silk,’ Rooke started.

His voice caught in his throat. It seemed to have closed around the words. He coughed, tried again.

‘Silk, a word, might I have a word?’

He got to his feet and jerked his head towards the darkness. Silk hesitated, then got up and followed him. Out of earshot of the men around the fire, Rooke turned to him. In the dimness he could not see what sort of expression was on his friend’s face.

‘The hatchet, Silk,’ he said. ‘And the bags.’

He could hear his own voice as neutral as a man laying out the propositions of a calculus.

‘May I ask for what purpose they were brought?’

‘Well, Rooke, natives were by preference to be captured and brought in,’ Silk said. ‘But if that did not prove practicable, then my orders were that six be slain.’

‘Practicable.’

‘Yes, practicable.’

‘And the bags?’

‘The heads of the slain were to be brought back.’

‘The heads of the slain,’ he repeated.

It was just words, a phrase of poetry or items off a list.

‘The heads, Rooke, were to be brought back in the bags provided. Having been severed with the hatchet provided. The governor’s argument was that it was necessary to act harshly once, in order not to have to act harshly again. The punishment inflicted on a few would be an act of mercy to all the others.’

‘You did not tell me.’

‘Rooke, my friend, the thing was never going to happen. I did not mention the hatchet because it was never going to be used. Old fellow, what is the difficulty here? No natives have been captured and no heads have been…removed. Nor will they be.’

Rooke was looking back at the men around the fire. Willstead was standing, speaking to Warungin who was sitting on the ground beside him. The light picked out parts of Warungin’s face as he moved: now the cheekbone gleaming in the light, now the nose, wide and flattened, now the teeth as he laughed at whatever Willstead was trying to explain with his hands. He was leaning back, his face turned up to Willstead so the firelight shone on his throat.

How could you cut off a man’s head?

You would have to make sure he was dead. That would be
the first thing. Then you would need to turn him over on his front. What with the protuberance of the nose, the side of the neck would be uppermost.

Then you would take up the hatchet. The handle was short, so you would have to get in close. It would not be a matter of one neat blow. You would have to hack at the slack skin of the neck. It would tend to slide away from the blade and the jawbone would present an obstacle.

Someone would have to hold the head so the bony part of the neck could be got at.

Then there was the matter of putting the head in the bag. Someone would have to pick it up. How heavy was a head? To pick it up by the hair would probably seem easiest. Another man would have to hold the bag open.

Whoever had the job of carrying the bag back to the settlement would be followed by a cloud of maddened flies. He might tie the bag to his knapsack to start with, but its bouncing would irritate. He would find it easier to carry it. It would be heavy: he would need to swap it from hand to hand. Could he do that without thinking of what was in there: a human head, a human face? A face like this one in front of him now, laughing with an expression half sly, half amused, and the human soul behind it, with all its exquisite nuances of feeling?

Rooke heard himself gasp, he could not catch his breath, his heart was climbing up out of his mouth, agape for the air that would not come.

Over at the fire, Warungin looked at him, half rose, put out a hand. Had he seen that Lieutenant Rooke of His Majesty’s Marines was the colour of lard, and was even now stumbling away into the bushes, where he was loudly, thoroughly, sick?

When the spasms had passed Rooke went down the track away from the camp. The bushes seemed to have grown over the path in the night. He buffeted his way through.

Then the last bush fell away before him and he was standing on the top of the dune behind the beach alone in the great cathedral of night. Ahead of him was a wide dark flatness. The shores all around seemed to have retreated in the night. To left and right the low runs of land were nothing more than a distant uneven line, blacker against the darkness of the bay and narrow as a ribbon. Above, the sky was another darkness, the full moon luminous, a wide eye watching.

He took a few steps down the dune and sat on the sand. On the glassy water the moon was broken up into a patch of separate shifting points of sharp light, as white against the black as a magnesium flare.

The surface seemed still, and yet small waves slid up the beach, then drew back with a hiss, leaving the lace edge of a different darkness on the sand. As each withdrew, a new flow swelled in and met the outflow with a quick liquid crash and
scrape. That sound was not the wave itself but the turmoil where the coming met the going.

If you looked out at the bay, the specks of moonlight sliding across it, you would have said that it was as still as the water in a cup. Yet here it was at the edge, moving up and down, in and out, never at rest.

He could see it now as he had never seen it before: one body of water encircling the globe, the continents nothing more than insignificant obstacles around which it effortlessly flowed. The land, much less the people on it, was irrelevant to this enormous breathing being.

It was divided up on the map, its parts given different names. The names were not just irrelevant but false. It was all one, every drop acting separately and yet together with all its fellows, swelling and sinking in accordance with that plate of yellow light in the sky.

A soft shawl of cloud had come from nowhere, teased out along the leading edge like carded wool. It slipped over the moon that could be seen travelling through it like a bright eye.

Of course, it was the cloud that was travelling. It was like trying to think in two languages, knowing with the evidence of your eyes that the moon was moving through the cloud, and knowing with the evidence of your education that it was the cloud moving.

His body was pale in the moonlight when he had rid it of all its coverings. It seemed in some way another man’s. Under
his feet the sand was cool and satiny. He was surprised to see no blood on his hands. Only, all around him, a dark halo, the smell of his own disgust.

Breaking the skin of the water and sliding beneath it was like slipping into an extension of himself. It was warm, warmer than during the day, almost the temperature of his body. It buoyed him up, lapping itself around him, making him a floating nothing, not of land, not of sea, not of this world, not of another: not Daniel Rooke who occupied the rank of second lieutenant, but a mass without a name, displacing a certain amount of Botany Bay.

When he stood up in the shallows, he heard the water sluice off his body. He rubbed at his hands, his face, his hair. Snorted the salt up into his nostrils and out again, rinsed and spat, rinsed and spat, until the salt was stinging, his eyes flooding.

He looked back at the dense blackness of the land. He could not see the fires of the expedition from here, but could glimpse their glow, the light on the underside of the trees. He watched a mass of sparks fly up as some invisible hand threw on more wood. He heard the clink of pannikin against kettle, a sneeze, a burst of laughter.

A swell flowed in from the bay, encircling his ankles as if reminding him it was there.

He waded out of the water, walked up the beach, sat down and smoothed his hands over a patch of sand, feeling its silky coolness, the last flicker of warmth on its surface. The
moon was bright, but he could see Sirius, that gem of the summer sky.

The natives would have a name for Sirius. For them it would not be part of the Great Dog. They would have some other story altogether. But whatever you called the stars, their light and their patterns were the same. Beyond the chatter of human argument was their plain statement:
Every thing is part of
every other thing, now and forever
. There was no debating with them. Logic was irrelevant to them. They were blissfully indifferent to the dilemmas faced by Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, that speck of consciousness. By the timeless light of the heavens, his flicker of life meant no more than one of those sparks that flew up from the fire.

The stars could always be found where the
Almanac
put them. About the heavens, it was simple: right or wrong. Down here among the workings of humans, there was no guide that could be relied on for an answer.

Rooke had accused the governor of faulty logic. He had scoffed at Silk for it too. But he had used the same sophistry. He had persuaded himself that, as long as the expedition failed, there was no harm in being part of it.

He thought he had been so clever in warning Tagaran. He had cranked the handle of his stratagem, had smirked to see the gears mesh, the wheels begin to turn in the machine that would let him obey while keeping his hands clean.

What he could see now was that he was exactly as guilty as
the governor and as Silk. Like them, he had allowed self-interest to blind him.

He heard himself groan, a heavy inarticulate
Oh
.

It was the simplest thing in the world. If an action was wrong, it did not matter whether it succeeded or not, or how many clever steps you took to make sure it failed. If you were part of such an act, you were part of its wrong. You did not have to take up the hatchet or even to walk along with the expedition.