I Got His Blood on Me: Frontier Tales

by Lawrence Patchett

  At length John whispered, ‘Are you firm in your faith, Edward? I know this campaign has complications for you. Family connections.’

  I chose not to say anything to this.

  ‘I know about your brother. I know who he is. But only I know it—only the prophets and I. None of the others are aware. Your secret is safe.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a good man, Edward,’ he said. ‘We all have courage, in our way.’

  I glanced sharply at him. It was an odd thing to say.

  ‘It will be hard, what follows,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’re firm? How’s your faith these days, Edward?’

  Although he looked straight across the clearing to the tents, his jaw was clenched tight, as if my doubt antagonised him personally.

  But then he received the signal and was up and running, halfway across the clearing before I’d even moved. Running after him I felt the exposure of it, this open clearing and its dangerous light. Then I was stumbling into the largest tent.

  ‘They’re all out,’ said John. He was lifting blankets and boxes, peering under them, moving on.

  I waited for my eyes to adjust. The tent’s neatness was a shock. Bunk beds made of bush logs were stacked at the back wall, the blankets folded; a low table of tea-crates sat in the centre of the room, even a rude stool. It was supposed to be the enclave of unholy slaughterers, yet it was more domestic than my own hut above Bluff. On the table someone had scribed the name of some woman of a faraway port, with a quaintly off-colour limerick underneath.

  ‘Edward!’ hissed John. ‘Wake up!’

  He was holding muskets towards me, three of the long-barrelled things found under some bed, plus a blanket to wrap them in. Shoving all this at my chest, he dashed back to the bunks and returned with a pair of long knives.

  ‘Look alive, Edward. They’ll be back and you’ll still be standing here, half-asleep.’

  But it wasn’t clear what else I should do. He hadn’t told me, so I stood with my pulse hammering as he nipped along the wooden bench that was hammered into the wall-posts, his fingers quick among the provision-jars and cooking tools, searching, I supposed, for maps or logbooks.

  ‘Wrap the weapons, Edward. Wrap them in the blanket. Hurry!’

  Now infected by his haste I bundled it all on the table while he went one more time round the tent.

  ‘It’s enough,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the weapons. Come on.’

  I bolted out the door and tripped on the pugged bank and stumbled on towards the boat. The others were already aboard, the Blacksmith and older DeMarinis at the oars, the younger brother holding the mooring-rope. I lumbered in, then John was climbing over me to get to the stern where a rudder had been improvised from an oar.

  Then the Blacksmith pulled on the oars and we were away, stealing the boat. I held the weapons and panted with blank terror, anticipating at any moment my brother’s arrival from nowhere to crash aboard and bludgeon our heads, to sink his own boat under vengeful boots.

  Perhaps half an hour passed before John guided us into a small inlet, he and young DeMarinis’s wife wading to the beach to trample the sand and break into the bush before returning to leave the false trail. Then we rowed on, the Blacksmith indefatigable at the oars, John steering us toward a small tributary he had identified from the top of the hill.

  Once at the creek we quickly foundered and began carrying the boat up so we could hide it inland, far from my brother’s men. It was a wet staircase and we all slipped, my shins smashing on the rocks as I came behind with the bundle of weapons in my arms. But at last John directed us into the bush at our right, two men going in front to ease aside the vines and branches so the boat could come through. The dark was coming down before we stopped to hide the boat under fronds and camouflaging moss. Under rotten logs I buried the weapons, returning the violent metal and wood, according to Order doctrine, to their natural state.

  With my brother’s crew by now certain to be aware of our raid, John deemed it too dangerous to light a fire, so we sat under tents to eat by shaded candlelight. When passed the hunk of bread my throat gagged with nerves. Tomorrow I and these Orderists would meet, at last, my brother’s savage and fabled crew. John was not the only one to see that I couldn’t eat. One woman even laid a hand on my shoulder, offering support until I shrugged her off.

  ‘Will someone give Evensong?’ I said.

  The others gasped at the breach, and I took the opportunity to dispose of my bread and paste under some brush.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said John. ‘I forgot Evensong in tonight’s haste.’

  The Blacksmith cleared his throat and gave the observance. His face was obscured in shadow but his voice was deep and plain; he was not a pretentious man, and this time I found the ritual a comfort.

  ‘Amen,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  Then in the gloom John brought forth his map. From the day’s reconnaissance he’d learnt more about my brother’s operations, and now he sketched our route to Baillie’s Point, explaining just how long it would take us to row there tomorrow, and how the rowing work would be split. Bending towards the map I noted that again the tactics for the raid itself went unmentioned, the advice covering only our transport there and nothing beyond that, and I spurted with a fearful need to blurt ‘and then what?’, but didn’t, unwilling to expose further my difference, my ignorance of what others seemed to know implicitly.

  But they did not notice my disquiet. Like me they were drawn along by John’s voice, and they trusted it. John was an arrow of purpose. They would follow him off a precipice—even I would. I was not a brave man, but I was an opportunist, and I knew that, out here, John was my best chance.

  In what seemed a short time I woke in a deep blackness as the heavens opened, Mother God’s renewing rain thundering on the tent with sudden force. In a moment John was shouting through the dark, calling us from our beds. The rain would delay us; we must start immediately.

  In the soaking bush it was so dark that to return to the boat we moved in a line, each campaigner holding the shoulder of the next, our only illumination coming from a lantern that John guarded under a canvas shield at the front while the rain teemed down, plastering my hair against my head. No sooner had we reached the boat than John’s lantern was extinguished and we removed the camouflaging in the dark, clearing its hull by feel until John struck a second match.

  At last we had the boat lifted and were following John, but it was hopeless, as in the dark and rain we slid and crashed, one woman issuing a deliciously inventive curse. Finally we reached the creek of the night before and started down it. Already a lot of time had been lost, and John’s voice rang out remorseless through the bush, even as we slipped and slammed on the rocks, and it was a sodden and bruised company that emerged at the fiord’s edge.

  Now the Blacksmith produced four lengths of blanket fabric to muffle the rowlocks and again took the oars with the older brother, the younger one leaning out over the bow to search through the low cloud for danger, while at the stern John steered a course parallel to the shore. For the rest of us we could only hunker in the boat and fidget, watching the water while the rain plucked and dimpled it.

  All were nervous. Some murmured quietly in last-minute homage to the Mother, their lips moving in one more prayer for safety’s sake. As for me, my stomach was cramped with the same fear I’d felt when going out with my brother, long ago in Scotland, to thieve after dark. Hands knotted in my shirt, I closed my eyes and fancied I saw his outline ahead, leading me into a frightening dark.

  The rain eased and we came within sight of the sealers’ tents. It was dawn now and we were plainly visible, John having made no attempt to steer further out, and two of my brother’s men came running down to the shore to shout and gesticulate.

  ‘They’ve been left behind,’ said someone. ‘To guard the camp.’

  When we offered no response the pair began throwing stones, each splashing well short, merely disturbing the water betwee
n us, their voices carrying distant and blasphemic. They looked almost funny, those stickmen dancing on the shore, but the older DeMarinis pursed his lips and shook his head.

  ‘Violent men,’ he said.

  I snorted and his glare gave me real delight. It always restored me to laugh at a DeMarinis.

  Then John ordered a change at the oars and it was my turn to blister my hands in the rowers’ seats. My back soon ached from the rowing but I relished it. Urged on by John, I oared us towards Baillie’s Point, my back to our destination, suppressing the brother-dread that gnawed in my gut.

  *

  When our father drowned I’d been six, my brother nine. One whole night they’d not come back in Pa’s fishing boat, and in the morning I ran down to find them washed up. My father was dead on his back, staring up, my brother sitting in the opposite direction with his arms round his knees. Pa’s boat was nowhere, swallowed by Shetland’s furious coast.

  At first I couldn’t get my brother to speak. His teeth chattered and he brushed me off when I shook him by the shirt. Back at my father’s side I found Pa’s face sliding and cold to the touch.

  Running back to my brother I pulled his arm and shrieked. ‘Help!’ I was six years old.

  Again he shook me off.

  I ran to my father, tried to roll him on his side and couldn’t, beat his chest instead, then collapsed next to him and cried.

  After a time my brother was standing above me. ‘What did you expect?’ he said. ‘He can’t fish, can he? He can’t pilot a boat.’

  I stared up—his face so fierce.

  ‘He’s drowned, isn’t he?’ he said. ‘What did you expect?’

  Then he kicked his bare foot as I held it, and when I wouldn’t let go, dragged me a short way up the rocks. Finally he kicked me free and scowled up the beach.

  He’d long been in battle with my father. Pa had been a Minister of the Kirk until our mother’s death, when, growing wild in his widower grief, he rejected that faith and made a new God of seabirds and rocks and the scything wind that Shetlanders hated. Thus he lost his Minister’s post and with it his income and our comfort. Wild in his grief he took to his fishing boat to survive, driving his eldest son to accompany his hopeless ventures for fish, leaving me in the house with no company and little to eat.

  To this new change in my father, my brother adapted by hating and resisting him. I could not. I cowered round my father’s heels, and now at his death was overtaken by fear. It was my brother who provided food in those first few months. In a village that refused us charity, so beyond the pale had we been cast by our father’s heretic faith, my brother was resourceful, learning all the trades that take place after dark, and soon he had us a stowaway berth to Aberdeen.

  There we learned more of the ragged business of surviving on cold streets—or he did, while I scuffed along in his wake. Through years of discomfort I followed him through the Aberdeen nights and then Edinburgh. In Glasgow we quickly found boys of my brother’s new stripe. Though I knew how to run along with him, how to survive under his protection, I was not the boy my brother was, not as tough. I yearned for a proper bed, for the feel of warm soap. And thus one day, independently of my brother I walked to an Orderist charity house and knocked on the door and entered, the Order being famously open to the unwashed. In its nature-worship it was kin to our father’s old mad faith, but for the price of laundered bedding and hot food, I was willing to accept that.

  My brother found me the next night. Now expert at stealing into the shops and houses of tradesmen and merchants, he scowled at the front gate of the Order house, somehow prevented from entering its precincts. Warily I came down the path. At my new clothes and ungrimy skin he sneered and spat.

  ‘Back with the Kirk,’ he said. ‘Cuddling up.’

  ‘You could come in,’ I said. ‘There’s beds and food.’

  ‘Milksop,’ he said. ‘Mother’s milk.’

  ‘There’s a school here. It’s safe. The food.’

  ‘Sop.’

  Soon I could say nothing in the face of his hate.

  ‘Sop,’ he said. ‘Sop.’

  I began to cry. I felt the eyes of the other charity children; like some animal my brother smelt this on me too, sensed my cowardice. He sprang at me and punched my lip against my teeth. When I fell he drove his bare foot into my groin, then against my arm and face. ‘Sop,’ he repeated. ‘Snot.’

  Whimpering, I endured his kicks in a pitiful shape, curled against the gate for protection until at last he left off and I hunched away up the path, his taunts horrid at my back.

  For two whole weeks he appeared at the charity house gate, a silent and loyal menace, and then he was gone and I could step outside again, grow up warm and cosseted in the Order’s schools and the faith I adopted readily enough. Literate and obedient, I was promised clerical work in the Order’s headquarters following my service, this destiny placing me among a fortunate elect. All that was required of me in return for this secure, educated life was my term of service.

  On my nineteenth birthday I learned it was to New Zealand that I would be sent. I would work two years in the vegetable plots with the prophets and the other novices, and serve one campaign, at least. Then I could return to Glasgow to take up my work at headquarters. This was the arrangement. Thanks to the brain I’d inherited from my father and my own innate craft, I was destined for an easier life than many other initiates.

  It was only on the ship out to New Zealand that I learned of my brother’s new life, of his predations on that southern coast. He was a sealers’ captain, one of those the Bluff Orderists campaigned most militantly against, and so he was one of those I would combat.

  I smiled drily when I learned of it. Of all the Order’s outposts round the globe—Newfoundland, Brazil, Ceylon—I’d been chosen for New Zealand, the one frontier where my brother now lurked. It was the trick I’d always known lay in wait for me, the test. I’d accepted comfort. This was the revenge the world would exact. If I could face this, could endure the service, I could leave Bluff again, return to Glasgow for my clerical post. This was the price of that future life. Meekly I accepted it.

  *

  Excitement ran round the boat. My fellow campaigners pointed and hushed. We were near Baillie’s Point. I turned from my rowing and saw the huge bluffs, saw a whaleboat moored just off. By now my back and shoulders and backside ached—I’d never rowed so long in my life—but I returned to my task while John steered us towards the rocks. DeMarinis took a mooring rope and leapt for the land, then I shipped the oars and we all leapt up, only the Blacksmith remaining in the boat.

  On the rocks, John gave his orders in a crouch. ‘Edward, DeMarinis, I want you close at my shoulder. The rest of you take the bluff-side flank. Blacksmith, row to their boat and scour it for weapons.’

  I watched where he pointed, watched his white face.

  ‘Run over shouting,’ he said. ‘Spook the creatures into the sea. With luck, they’ve not been rushed yet. If we’re too late, do what you can. If you are struck down, do not resist, and if this is the end for you, give thanks. Your work is Holy—remember that.’

  ‘Come on,’ said DeMarinis. ‘There’s no time.’

  ‘In the name of the Mother,’ said John. ‘For the Order.’

  ‘Amen,’ we all said.

  Then John was up and running, the others close behind. I gave chase. Out of the corner of my eye I saw our boat pressing forward, the Blacksmith moving towards the other boat to secure it. The others crested the ridge and ran over, shouting. Then I was there, and it opened up below me—the rookery. It was narrower and less flat than I’d imagined from the maps and stories, an angled ledge of rock buttressed by bluffs on one side and the sea. But it certainly had the fabled population of seals. Brownly they heaved everywhere in their hundreds. At our sudden arrival they grunted and turned their heads. So many seals. John’s intelligence had been right. Somehow this rookery had been spared the sealers’ attention until this point.

  �
�We’re in time!’ shrieked the younger DeMarinis, running past me. ‘They’re not rushed yet.’

  But we were not alone there. In a row fifty yards downwind half a dozen men stood at the far corner of the rock ledge, clubs and lances in their hands. These were the clubmen. To surprise the seals they’d lowered down on ropes that still hung from the bluffs, and more men were coming down now, hand over hand. In another few minutes all these would have been poised to attack. On the seaward side a further row of men were ready to rush the seals up from the ledge, preventing their escape to the sea, rushing them to the clubmen and their deaths.

  But now, seeing us, the clubmen started. Even as others were still on the ropes, even before the rushers could come, they ran to the nearest seals with their clubs and bludgeoned whatever was nearest—cows, bulls, helpless calves. At the same time, the rushers ran up from the seaward side with ragged shouts.

  But they were too late. Already we were in between, scattering the seals with our shrieks, our arms waving danger.

  Everywhere noise broke out. Cows barked and lumbered, and calves mewed and were crushed. The clubmen cursed and lunged after the seals as they made for the sea, the entire shelf a brown moving mass punctuated with rising clubs and sprays of blood. Soon the seals were in a slow, panicked stampede. Such was their oncoming mass that one of the rushers went down, then another was barged as the cows plunged over the rock-edge for the sea.

  I was barking and waving at the seals. ‘Rah! Rah!’ My campaign training had come back. A barking noise was best to scare seals, rapid arm movements. ‘Rah!’

  They were escaping. I whooped. Through the confusion I saw one of the rushers punching out ferociously, swinging precisely at the heads and throats of seals. He had a knife in his hand, and he swung it not to stab but to slice, scything it across seals’ necks. Two rushers had gone down. He had not. It was my brother. It was Cameron. I recognised him, his tight, venomous movements. For a long time I stared. He was a miracle of vicious movement, a dervish of perfected violence.

  Then a sound pulled me back. Beside me, the clubmen were closing in, pounding their cudgels on the heads of cows who’d not escaped yet. One by one, the too-slow cows sank, blood spurting up from their skulls. Their calves mewed pathetically, ignored by the sealers while they pursued the more valuable cows and bulls.