The Roving Party (21 page)

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.

Three wearied beings walked that humped land following a creeklet that vanished under rocks and hillocks. In the afternoon they broke off into the trees and at length crossed into a field of dunes where nothing grew save speargrass. The tops of dead trees showed clawlike in the sands, their trunks worn smooth. The travellers passed down the sand hills leaving divots where they stepped. They passed an escarpment of weathered stone and the Vandemonian kept his glance ahead but the girl arched her neck to see where the ridge met the living trees on the hill. Halfway along the length of the escarpment was a cleft run deep into the stone. The girl scrabbled down the dune and stood looking into the recess and then on her knees she stuck her head into the cave.

Bill saw that the girl was gone somewhere so he chose to have a spell in the shade and he eased down onto the stones and drank from the canteen, handing it to Katherine. The canteen passed between them as they waited. Shortly after the girl reappeared
with something in her hands. As she approached they saw that it was a bullkelp waterbag. Bill thumbed back his hat. The waterbag was dried and stiffened and drawn closed with a braid of sinew. The girl squatted on the sands, placing the shapeless relic between them, but even before she’d buried her hand inside the pouch Bill was filled with the dire urge to stand and run. He got to his feet and when he looked at the girl she was extracting something darkly shrivelled from the bag. A slender desiccated hand, old beyond knowing. The girl turned it gingerly.

nara trew? she said.

In an instant Katherine stumbled away from the girl and her horrors, clambering up the dunes on all fours until, finding her feet, she made for the peak and Bill likewise bolted up the sands holding his hat as he ran. The two of them stood on the dune watching what the girl would do next and she seemed now to understand her error. She dropped the mummified hand and moved backwards. But as she shifted she upset the waterbag, spilling out a handful of leathered organs, a knot of black hair bound around in cord and a mess of painted votive stones. The girl stared at the grim remains.

You see now, said Katherine. That girl no good. I tell you this. She was squatting in the drifts and she dared not look at the girl or the grisly arrangement before her. No good, she said.

Bill waved his hand. Girl, come away from those things, he said. tyerlarre tyerlarre. They have power. They will hurt you. tabeltee.

The girl began to cry and she cried and would not stop. Katherine and Bill took up their burdens, walking on beyond the fringe of the little dune land and still the child cried and paced behind. They looked back at her but said nothing. Walking out of the dunes into the dry sedge and onwards into the gums, they left the relics cast upon the sands.