The Roving Party (6 page)

T
HE 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.