Peachey fell backwards into a sodden bed of rot and shit, his ribs buzzing with pain. Exhaustion flowed through him. He was panting like he’d run a mile. His mouth was dry and he was desperately thirsty. The shit was warm on his thighs and his bare arse, the warmth and the cool in some strange, sweet equilibrium. He lay there, breathing heavy, bound to the earth, drifting into light sleep, shapes and voices and strange sounds weaving dreamlike in his head, slipping ever deeper into a netherworld, whereupon he felt himself shunted, brutally, his shoulders ploughing up the leafy rot.
He lifted his head and screamed. The black shape of the boar was between his legs. The snout shunted into his loins and the teeth tore at his private parts and ripped at the cheeks of his arse. He felt his flesh coming away, torn from his frame. He was on his elbows recoiling, kicking. The boar moved with him, the vast poundage forcing forward. Peachey screamed for help. He made to rise but the boar leapt forward and pinned him and tore at this throat.
Peachey was so cold now. There was no fight in him. He heard a voice, Harp’s voice, far off, ‘We’re comin’.’ He heard a woman’s voice, he saw her lips make words but no sound. He saw a hornless deer take flight, a hound give chase, the deer all pearly white, save one red ear. He felt the boar’s snout deep in his throat and the smell of his own shit rose into the back of his nose. He thought to say, ‘What a terrible mess I am,’ but he could not talk.
39
They buried the mutilated remains of Seamus Peachey in the morning. A shallow grave. They dragged the remnants of the rotten log onto the loose-packed earth and paused briefly.
Cuff was about to say a word, a forgiving word, but his thoughts turned to the missing boy, and to Dr Woody, and he decided he could not speak kindly of Seamus Peachey so he would not speak at all.
Back at Harp’s camp they drank some bush tea and readied to leave. Mackie’s departing words were sharp. ‘Do not mend this contraption.’
‘I got no worm,’ said Harp.
‘In that, count yourself lucky.’
‘Let’s hope you find your girl.’
‘Mind yourself, Harp. That boar, he’s sharp as a rat’s tooth,’ said Cuff.
‘I’ll shit with my pistol primed,’ said Harp.
They followed the creek upstream until it disappeared under a thick covering of prickly fern, and they crossed over the headwall and went down into a valley to a swamp that drained north to the Branch.
They skirted the swamp and climbed a steady grade and followed the forested ridge to a high point where they could see the stone country to the west, ever more angular and sheer. Serried bluffs folded like braids to the ragged horizon that met the sky far off.
Cuff studied the raw spectacle. ‘If there’s somethin’ on the other side of that devil’s waste I’ll never know, ’cause I ain’t goin’ there.’
‘Nor I,’ said Mackie.
The ridgeline they followed was serpentine, the drop-aways severe but the ground lightly timbered, thin cover, wattle and bottlebrush, and the going easier than climbing in and out of gullies so they kept to the contour until the pattern was broken by a descent to another swamp and a scramble up the far side. When they reached the top they could see the Branch, perhaps an hour’s walk from where they stood, the line of the river cutting ever deeper into the country beyond.
They made their way by ridge and gully until they met the river, the afternoon sun poised in the western sky. They trekked upstream keeping to narrow levees forested with she-oak and slender water gums, stopping occasionally to drop down and drink, or to rest on shaded sand, swatting at flies and plucking the odd leech off a leg and scratching at day old scabs.
They passed through a ceremonial ground where squares of bark were cut from old trees, and carvings were incised within the frame – the weathered shape of emus and fish and wombats and other creatures. Further along they came upon an awful assemblage: wasted black bodies, a woman on the ground, shot through, and two men hung by their necks from a single bough, their ears removed, their torsos riddled with shot.
‘The righteous vengeance of the military,’ said Cuff.
‘We’ve done worse,’ said Mackie.
‘Not for sport we haven’t.’
‘I picture our heroes in the mess, recapping the chase, the story slipping to fable.’
‘Mawkish tears, Thyne avenged, the world a better place.’
‘The worst of what we are, dressed up as virtue.’
‘As ever, the redemptive ending.’
‘As it must be.’
‘The tyranny of the musts, yet again.’
Cuff was staring at the back of his hand, his thumb bunching up the skin. ‘It’s because we’re the first.’
‘First what?’
‘It’s the first settlers do the brutal work. Them that come later, they get to sport about in polished boots and frockcoats, kidskin gloves . . . revel in polite conversation, deplore the folly of ill-manners, forget the past, invent some bullshit fable. Same as what happened in America. You want to see men at their worst, you follow the frontier.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
Cuff surveyed the dead. ‘Damn right I’m right.’
They walked on the rest of the day, pushing through thick swamp heath and flood-wrack and wading through the shallows, skirting the tumbledown stone, keeping to the levees where they could.
They slept that night on the sand, beneath the canopy of a broken old red gum deeply rooted in the stone, the shattered limbs calloused with tumourous growths.
Twice Mackie woke Cuff with his coughing, his frame convulsing as he raised himself on one arm and turned away to clear his chest, spitting on the sand.
‘You ought get up, cough it out good and proper,’ said Cuff. He could hear Mackie’s quick, sucking breaths.
The chill predawn found them further along the river, stepping from sand to shallows to sand again and otherwise picking their way along the bank through dense stands of fern and she-oak, patches of hare’s foot rooted in the crevices of broken stone, the pendant pale green blossoms of the fuchsia, scrub wren and tiny finches winging swift across the water.
By the afternoon they felt the quickening flow against their shins, the gradient sharper now, the river carving its infinite way out of the stone country, the forest dense and cramping, the waterway strewn with boulders and the cataracts somewhat more forceful.
They checked their lower parts for leeches and pressed on. They found a game track on a contour above the flood line. They took to the track and followed it for some miles, ducking and weaving through needlebush and wattle. They had long ceased talking and each man was ready for a rest when Cuff put out his arm and signed for hush.
They squatted down, Mackie onto one knee. Cuff pointed upriver where a savage lay upon his back on a pillar of stone. A cloth covered his face, a lace cloth as fine as woven wind, and there were teeth and feathers gummed into his long hair. His arms were by his side, his palms lay open, cupped in a sacrificial pose, and upon the puckered scars on his chest was a spread of entrails from the gut of a fish.
The sweat on his frame; his skin shone like the richest amber set in glass.
Cuff looked to the sky and saw an eagle, circling. It lifted on a gust and rose into the sky and circled some more.
They watched. The eagle banked and spiraled down once again. The great bird landed close, perched in a tree, watching the deathly still form upon the pillar of stone.
‘No,’ said Mackie.
‘Pssh,’ said Cuff.
The eagle spread its wings and flew off a way and swept around and coasted back, skimming the water before it banked and lifted, landing by the prone form.
The great wings folded away. The creature did not move, nor the savage. The creature, emboldened, hopped forward. It picked at the viscera. It picked again, the head bobbing, its beak skyward as it swallowed.
The open palm snapped at the eagle’s legs, seized them and tipped the bird as the great wings spread wide and
the bird shrieked and the other hand seized the neck and snapped it with a most violent turn of the wrist.
‘You see that?’ said Cuff in a whisper.
The lace cloth was on the breeze, wafting to the sand like a feather. The savage was on his feet, the great bird hung upside down in his fist, the claws like some primeval bouquet.
They heard him chuckle. He threw the bird upon the sand below and leapt from the pillar and landed much as the eagle might have landed on some previous occasion: lithe, sprung, weightless upon impact. He picked up the bird and the lace cloth and jogged off, upstream, and twice he spun about, scouting the rear, before he disappeared into the cover at the far end of the reach.
The white men stood and stared after him. They saw the footprints in the sand, proof, assuredly, of the spectacle they had witnessed.
‘You seen him before?’ said Cuff.
‘Yes,’ said Mackie.
‘That’s Daniel, that’s Mr Catley’s man.’
‘Moowut’tin?’
‘Yes . . . The earth their bed, the heavens their canopy . . . they are something else.’
They stood there, silent, for a time.
‘Don’t ever tell me we know what we’re doin’ out here Alister,’ said Cuff.
‘I’ll not do that,’ said Mackie.
They walked on until the footprints in the sand disappeared. Late in the afternoon they sighted a cave in a tributary gully where elkhorn and fern flourished under a dense canopy of coachwoods and turpentines. In the forecourt, they found bones and tools, digging sticks and tattered basketry on the sandy floor. Further in they found withered corpses in tortured poses, sallowed black skin sunk onto bone, riddled with the puckered scarring of the small pox and preyed upon by quolls and lizards and lesser things.
They returned to the river as the light began to fade. Hurried along in the rain. They found shelter further on, beneath a ponderous forehead of rock some twenty feet or so above the floodwater mark. A smoke-blackened overhang, the floor thick with the grit of ages. The residue of an old fire in a shallow pit, animal droppings and a little pile of grassy vomit, the vomit covered in a faint blue membrane. They settled there behind a forest of tall trunks, the bark curling and shedding like burnt skin.
Parrots were massing in the canopy, a shrill, manic disharmony, the prelude to a collective subsidence.
‘Worse than cats in a box,’ said Mackie.
‘You’d think they’d learn,’ said Cuff.
‘Learn what?’
‘You’d think one of them would say why do we squawk and squabble every night, it always gets settled, why don’t we just . . . discuss this, calmly, save a lot of aggravation, save aggravating those two poor, lost gentlemen in the cave yonder. Why don’t one of them say that?’
‘It seems so obvious when you say it,’ said Mackie.
They both chuckled.
‘We’re not lost, moreover,’ said Mackie.
‘I’d have said we’re not gentlemen, notwithstanding the ambition of one amongst us,’ said Cuff. He had gathered some wisps of dry grass and rotten touchwood, kindling for a fire so they could have some tea.
They ate some corn biscuit, saving their cut of smoked meat for days to come, and they sat for a while listening to the calls of night birds and scrutinising the cliffs on the far side of the river until the dark snuffed out all things in sight save the patchwork of the canopy against the night sky and the lithe black shapes that moved through it.
On a cold breeze came the faint sound of rapids upstream. Cuff set the quart pot on the flame. ‘Why are you here?’ he said, his comment on ambition fresh in his mind.
Mackie pondered the question. ‘Why?’
‘Are you here for the girl . . . and what if you manage to snatch her from Griffin Pinney’s claws, what then?’
‘We are here to find Thomas’s boy, to collar the villains, the more so if they’ve hurt that boy, and we are here for the girl, for Joe’s sake.’
‘You wanted her off your hands, gone, and Joe came along all needy, his ailments heaven sent, for you that is. Might be you care more for your reputation than your own blood.’
‘She is not my blood.’
‘There’s every chance that is a masterly deception of your own self.’
Mackie scratched at his neck. He took a burnt stick from the fire pit and drew a line in the sand. ‘I expect there’s a warrant for that girl, inbound. She has escaped a transport. She’s lived wild with the sealers, who knows what else.’
‘So why didn’t you give her up, send her off to Parramatta?’
‘I had my reasons.’
‘You got her well placed instead, well placed and well away, at Joe’s.’
‘I did.’
‘You got her well clear of you, the least you could do to the most advantage – to you that is.’
‘She was safe with Joe.’
‘And you are cunning as a rat in a barn.’
‘What would you have me do with her?’
‘If she was mine I’d keep her close and her questionable past closer still, and to hell with the gossip.’
‘That’s your loins talking, as usual.’
‘Well your loins may well have done some talkin’ too, Alister, there’s no way that girl’s a full blood Romany. And there’s that black spot upon her iris.’
‘A fact so random as to be thoroughly hollow.’
‘I’ve not seen that on another living soul save you. She’s cut out like you, long and lean. As to her earlobes, you look at ’em. Everyone knows earlobes are passed on, my own earlobes for example: identical to my dear pappy’s. And I’ll tell you something else.’
‘Spare me!’
‘My second toe on my right foot is longer than my thumb toe and my papa’s second toe on his right foot the same, so don’t tell me.’ Mackie threw his arms in the air, gesturing to the heavens for urgent assistance. But he made no reply so Cuff went on. ‘This much I can tell you about jizzum: if it’s not a slave to precise replication, it is a servant to the tiniest particulars.’
‘Well, you’d know about that particular fluid would you not?’
‘I would that, I’ve spread enough of it about.’ Cuff was chuckling at the thought for it made him happy to contemplate his busy life in that regard.
‘There’s more to life than skirts and quim.’
‘I’ll grant you that’s true, but it’s a poor heart that never rejoiceth, and a sad life that finds joy in nothing but the practice of virtue.’
‘And grief it is that walks upon the heels of pleasure.’
‘Yes, and talking to you a man might think pleasure was a poison brewed in the sink of the bowels.’
‘You have a poor opinion of me.’
‘You’re a sad case,’ said Cuff. He was pouring the tea into the mug.
Mackie shook his head. ‘I have not the pliability to reform myself as you require.’ He stared up at the projecting mass of rock above the forecourt of the shelter, a formidable tonnage.
Cuff noticed. ‘Yes, and if that drops on your head you won’t have any more worries.’
Mackie failed to repress a smile. He looked down at the line in the sand. ‘I’ve done what I can.’
‘Done is the operative word. You’re done with her save for the off chance a load of seal fur comes your way, then she’s altogether handy.’
‘You think me a wicked schemer?’
‘I think you fashion a way such as to serve yourself when you think you’re serving others. It’s an art form peculiar to the overlords of this world, them you seem to envy and despise.’
‘I seem to rank low in your estimation.’
‘On this matter yes, mighty low, and one thing more.’
‘Say it and be done.’
‘The blood you have, the blood you share, you ought count precious while you can. There’s faith, hope and charity, and there’s love, and the greatest of that bunch is love, that’s in the Bible, I know that much.’
‘And I kn
ow the meek do not inherit the earth, nor the indigents nor the layabouts. I know the Lord does not temper the wind to the shorn lamb, Thaddeus.’
‘What I know is life is short, and all too quick it’s too damn late. Commerce might fill your pockets but it will not fill your heart.’
‘The heart is a perilous guide in this world.’
‘Well, a rudderless heart has its perils too.’
The wind was up and catching in the trees. The black phantom shape of bats arced through the darkness, the sound of the river eddying about the cave.
‘I wonder how we’ll find them in this damn fastness,’ said Cuff.
‘We stick to the Branch.’
‘That is our elaborate plan?’
‘Yes.’
Cuff took another sip of the tea and handed the mug to Mackie. He heaped more wood on the fire and sat contemplating the flames. Mackie sipped on the tea. The rain was easing. Neither was inclined to talk. Cuff pulled his jacket tight and made a pillow of his haversack and closed his eyes. Mackie stared into the blackness for a while, sipping at his tea. He buttoned his coat to the neck. He pulled his blanket tight around his shoulders. It was cold in the cave, cold but dry.
Next morning Cuff made his way up a gully through a tangle of ferns and a forest of coachwood and wattle to the heathland above, a vantage colonised by dwarf gums and bottlebrush rooted in ancient sands and stone. Small birds skittered from the heath to the cover of the woodlands on the slopes below. Far off, the morning light on the ridges, the dark folds of shadow in the valleys.
‘Weather looks promising,’ he said upon his return to the shelter.
They followed the river all that day, and the next, the meander shifting ever more to the north until late in the afternoon they halted at a creek that snaked its way down to them through more of the same, thick scrub and stone. They rested there, studying the scene upriver, a gathering of she-oaks, the towering cliffs of the gorge beyond.
The Making of Martin Sparrow Page 23
