Dancer stayed, thinking about all this, the men, where they were. Her sister stayed because Dancer stayed. They pressed themselves into the warm wall of stone, backs against the land, looked out to see and tried not to be seen.
Dancer smelt him first. He smelled like tree fruit when the little flies came around. He rounded the corner, head down like a sniffing dog and stopped short when he saw the girls.
“Whoa!” spurted from his bristled mouth.
He reached for a strand of Dancer’s sister’s shells and she shrank away. He reached out again and she turned her head. Dancer could hear them all breathing above the ocean’s roar. She saw that he was curious and shocked, like she’d found him squatting over a hole in the ground, that she was the one to surprise him. Hair straggled out from beneath his woollen hat and despite the heat, he wore a jerkin of seal fur and long trousers. His nose was red and deeply pocked. He breathed sourly over her. Dirt cracked in his fingers. He bared mossy teeth at her and reached for her neck.
Then Dancer’s sister screamed and jumped sideways away from the stone. Her scream brought the answering calls of the women but they sounded far away now, beyond the dunes of the necklace beach. The scream brought more men from around the stone. They did not look at the sisters’ faces but straight to their breasts and thighs. Some of them laughed. One man clawed at her sister’s neck and pinned her to the stone. Another grabbed Dancer’s arm. The burn of his skin on her flesh reminded her of her angry father when she’d run away from her new husband the first time. He’d grabbed her like that too.
She pulled against the man’s grip. She knew that her indecision, her stupid moment of stillness, could cost them both their lives. There were stories of these men raping women and cutting open their bellies, spilling their insides over the sides of the boats.
The sea surged into the crevice below. Her sister gurgled and tried to breathe against the man’s hand. There were six of them now. Dancer knew the men would take them. She’d wished illness and unhappiness on her own sister for her lucky betrothal to the beautiful man and now their throats were fingered by a cloud of ugly Ghosts. They were still Ghosts, even though their skins were red, underneath they were white like Ghosts. They were bloodless. All windburn and sun and underneath there was no blood.
The shells dug into the back of her neck and then clattered onto the rock. The man stood with his gang around him, her necklace in one fist. He lurched forward and took her body and lifted her onto his shoulder. She saw sky, then laughing faces, then the rock, then his back. It was the first time she ever felt her nakedness. Her head hung down. He wrapped his arms about her knees. When she hit back with her fists, another man grabbed them and tied them together with her broken necklace.
She could smell the rancid oil on the back of his shirt. Blood rushed to her face. He was carrying her across the rocks, her body flopping uselessly with every step. Someone laughed and slapped her bare skin, a stinging sound sharp in the air. They were on the beach now. Coarse grains of sand travelled through her vision. Shells. Dark, leathery coils of kelp.
A hard thump against the boat. Like stone, this wood. Dancer hurt already. Her sister landed beside her, her arms tied, her skin feeling cold despite the sun. They squirmed together in the bottom of the boat as men tied their legs together, their flesh pricked all over with salt and pain and fear.
The man who took her that day, his name was Johnny. The man who took Dancer’s sister was called Cooper. They lived on different islands and Dancer never saw her sister again. After Cooper killed her sister with the gun, Johnny gave Dancer to Cooper and she had to go and live with him.
Thousands of sea miles from where Dancer was stolen, in the corner of a bay, Dancer and Weed sat still and quiet. Any language the child had learned was from Dancer’s songs as she worked but Weed understood enough of what had happened from Dancer’s lilting words, her movements and drawings in the white sand. The little girl crawled into Dancer’s lap and Dancer held her and nodded, singing to her a long, quiet song.
Weed’s skin prickled with sun shadow. Samuel Bailey was standing behind them, over them, looking down at the collection of treasures.
“Where’d you get that knife?” he asked, though he’d seen Dancer using it on the seals before.
Dancer didn’t answer. Suddenly hunched and scarred, she packed away her kit carefully, in the reverse order as she’d revealed it.
“Jimmy the Nail reckons on getting to King George Sound by dawn,” said Bailey. He nodded over to the boat, where Everett was stowing a barrel. Neddy threw in some banksia cones for firewood. Along the beach further, Billhook was walking with the net over one shoulder again, now gleaming with a sprinkle of struggling fish. Bailey nodded to the dead cockatoos scattered in the sand around Weed. “We’ll cook up aboard tonight.”
20. BAIE DES DEUX PEUPLES 1826
They sailed along the coast by the light of the quarter moon, watching out for the white sprays lacing the reefs and islands. They passed a small island beside another long, white bay and then another craggy granite rock set into the sea. Dancer gutted the birds, split open their carcasses and laid them flesh downwards in the try-pot full of coals. The smell of roasting meat mingled with that of burning feathers and winter flowers breezing off the land.
Embers still glowed in the try-pot as the skies lightened into day. A breeze made the water black as it riffled across the water towards them, snapped taut the main and brightened the coals.
They passed through the narrow channel between Bald Island and streaked sheets of stone lying stoic to the coast’s battering. As they rounded the headland and tacked to the west, the rising sun lit up a mountain scattered with massive rocks. Atop the mountain and all along the ridge, the rocks stood like silent sentinels.
“Reminds me of Salisbury,” said Bailey. The sun glittered on the stones, matted over the hills of deep green and glittered again on the sea. “Like those heathen cathedrals.”
Billhook strained to see across the waves. “There be safe harbour in there! Where the mountain comes down.”
“Not heading into those windward rocks to find out,” grunted Jimmy the Nail.
But Billhook took a bearing for himself as they sailed past the place where the hills slid down to meet its dark and secretive crevice.
The sun had only climbed a notch or so when Jimmy said, “We’ll put in over there,” pointing to a little cove.
“King George Sound!” shouted Neddy.
“Nah mate. Another half-day. That big bay just to the west of us is the Bay of Two Peoples.”
“To the west. Bay of Two People,” parroted Weed. Dancer chuckled at her, despite her dark face lined and grey from the night sail.
“Bay of Two Peoples. Two People’s Place. A Yank and a Frenchman got on the grog here one night, twenty odd years ago.”
At the cove they headed for, ochre stones crouched around the white sands and above the rocks, the hill glowed magenta and green with the rising sun. They reefed in the sail and rowed towards the shore. Sal stood at the bow pointing out the submerged rocks, dark, submarine shapes on the turquoise bottom, flat circles of sea above them. Jimmy steered using the sweep oar. “Hang back! Go astern! Wait for this wave,” on the outside of the breakers, watching the whitewater roll in ahead of them, then, “Pull! Pull!” and the rowers pulled hard at the oars until the keel bit the sand and Sal pitched forward from her perch and tumbled into the sea.
By the time she’d found her feet and pushed to the surface, the men were in the water with her, holding the boat straight with the waves and running it into shore. Still aboard, the lurcher never took his worried eyes off his mistress. Dancer sat in state on the pile of skins with the child on her lap, both looking straight ahead to the land. The men pulled the boat in the sand until she was hard and fast and they could pull no further. Jimmy said, “It’s high tide anyway. We’ll just tie her off here.”
Billhook stood in the lacy wash and looked around him. A small flock of white birds w
orked a school of fish. A sea eagle, its uptilted wings a familiar silhouette against the fat clouds, cruised high above the mob, watching. Bay of Two Peoples was now obscured from his view but beyond the headland of the cove towered a grey-green conical hill scattered with stones. Towards the peak, from one cluster of boulders, a thin line of smoke stitched itself into the sky. Their arrival had been noted.
“Have a look at this,” shouted Smidmore from the rocks. He was carrying his sleeping skins, intent on finding a spot out of the sun to lie down and rest after the night’s sail. He stood holding the roll of skins against his chest, looking strangely childlike for such a rough-head. He pointed to the dark hole in the hill.
It was chill inside the cave. It smelt earthy and damp but the floor was white beach sand and dry. Chambers like the hallways of the hotel Billhook had ventured into in Hobart Town meandered into darkness. He could hear a steady drip coming from one of the chambers echo around the walls. Smidmore brought in some reedy kindle and struck a light. As the fire flared, the walls glowed orange. Small circles and dots of yellow and red ochre were pasted on the walls. They looked like the canvas map Everett kept tucked in his belt. Billhook fingered one of the daubings and it crumbled under his hand and sprinkled to the floor. Other pictures were flaking away naturally as the granite shed its skin.
Neddy dragged bigger sticks and driftwood into the cave and set them upon the flames. The room filled with smoke and stung their eyes but nobody cared. It was warm now, and dry. After a wet night out on the water, their skin stretched tight with salt and fatigue, this was a “good place”, as Sal had said of the Doubtfuls. Smidmore lay down his skins and settled into them. One by one, the others did the same, until the cave was ripe with the sounds of their breathing, their snores, the water dripping into a hidden, dark pool and the ever-present suck and boom of the unplumbed sea.
Billhook was awoken by Sal muttering at her dog. He rolled over to see it nudging her, a bush rat struggling between its teeth and dampened with saliva and blood. Sal tried to slap the dog away, groggy with sleep. The child sat, copying the wall’s circles into the sand, humming to herself.
He climbed the stone steps out of the cave and scrambled down to the beach. Jimmy the Nail stood at the shore, silhouetted against the reddening eastern sky.
“Smoke,” he said, when he heard Billhook beside him. “Yonder.” He pointed to the hill where Billhook had seen the smoke when they arrived.
“Blackfellas,” verified Billhook, nodding. He pointed to the headland closest to the cave where another fire burned. “That fire was not burning this morn.” He looked around to the north. “Nor that one.”
Everett sighed. “Ahh well, Billhook. We’ll not be murdered in the night.”
“No?”
“Scared of the dark.”
“The Vandiemonians, yes. This mob?”
“All the same. You know the story in Van Diemen’s Land? The night and day war. Lags would take a flogging rather than go into the forest during the day to cut wood. They were terrified of the blacks. Take a flogging instead, they would. Reckoned it hurt less than a spear through the guts or a waddy cracking their skull. Poor bastards; them and the shepherds. No guns and watching all day for things that moved – or didn’t move. It’s the ones you don’t see that get ya. White folk get killed in the day time, killed or worse.”
Jimmy shaded his eyes against the sky to see the northernmost smoke better. “Then the sun sets and the game changes. That’s when you find whole villages of blacks huddled around their fires or sleeping in their little huts. The only way to go hunting blacks is at night. It was said to be good pickings, really good, before they got dogs. The dogs bark and wake the village up; shame.”
Billhook tried to ignore the hunger stirring in his belly. “Did you …?”
Jimmy laughed. “Getting wrecked and working the islands means I’ve not ventured to Van Diemen’s Land to consort with soldiers and lags, Billhook. But I heard stories. Plenty. Kangaroo Island now. How do you reckon Randall got Sal?”
Billhook pictured Sal’s easy smile, then was reminded of Te Rauparaha about to raid his country. “Sal does not look like a woman whose whanau is dead.”
“They’re still around, most of them anyway but they didn’t have much choice about us taking her that night. I wouldn’t be hanging around her country in the middle of the day though. No way. I’d be a pile of bones on the dunes by now.”
The beach grew dark as the sun slid behind the hill.
“If we leave for the Sound tonight …” said Billhook, “… there are some islands, yes?” He hoped that Jimmy would not take his suggestion as disorderly, was happy if Jimmy claimed it as his own.
“Oh yes. There are islands … I say we go tonight. The wind looks good.” He looked up at the long streaks of cloud that covered the first stars on the horizon. “Might be a bit different in the morn.”
“Ae!” Billhook turned and shouted towards the cave. “Ae! Wake up!”
Bearded faces and then the round, berry face of Sal, appeared at the mouth of the cave.
“We’re leaving tonight for King George Sound!” yelled Jimmy the Nail.
21. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826
The moon had set by the time the sealers sailed around the outside of Michaelmas Island and sighted another island lying behind it.
“That’s it. That’s Breaksea,” said Jimmy the Nail.
Currents between the two islands surged and swayed but the sails sagged in dirty wind then cracked taut again as Smidmore tacked.
“A light! There is light!” Sal whispered. “Someone is on the island.”
Indeed, a cooking fire burned, an orange glow on the darkened, north-facing side. Now Billhook could smell the smoke mingling with the pungent scent that he recognised as the white heath flowers.
“Blackfellas? On the island?”
“Nah,” said Bailey.
They pulled down the sails, quickly trying to stifle the sound of flapping canvas. It was past midnight and whoever was on the island would no doubt be sleeping but Jimmy wanted to keep his advantage. Each man took an oar and fitted them to the rowlocks. They rowed towards the rocks, their oars dripping with shining blue phosphorescence.
Once they’d reached the island, Jimmy ordered them to row along the rocks quietly, looking for boats, ropes or gear that would identify the island’s occupants. They rowed for a short while, steering clear of the sucky holes between the rocks, listening to the crying penguins. They rounded a smooth curve of streaked stone and when Billhook looked up, all he could see was the stone sweeping up to the sky full of stars.
A gunshot boomed over the water and echoed against the sheer wall of Michaelmas Island.
“Jesus!”
The boatload of women, men, children and dog, shocked from their midnight reverie, scrambled to find shelter behind the gunwales. A minute or so later, another shot cracked into the night air and pellets sprayed the water on their port side.
“Four o’clock to starboard, Jimmy,” chorused Billhook and Bailey at once, when they saw the second flash of gunpowder amongst a dark jumble of boulders. The shooter had watched them pass before taking a shot. Billhook heard the clasp of his powder horn snap shut. Smidmore wriggled his fowler from its oilskin cover and loaded the gun in the dark. When he fired towards the rocks, the powder fizzed in the frizzon with a green spark and sulphur smoke and then went out. A flash in the pan. He cursed and started reloading.
“Just made us all a fucking nice target, Smidmore,” muttered Jimmy.
“Who goes?” a voice from the rocks shouted across the breeze.
“Crew of the Gov’nor Brisbane,” shouted Jimmy.
For a moment the man with the gun was silent.
Smidmore tamped another wad down and withdrew the ramrod with a steely flourish.
“Jimmy the Nail?” said the shooter.
“That’d be me.”
“It’s Hobby here. Hobson.”
Jimmy laughed and turned the tiller
back to where the shooter was spotted. “Hobson! Stop trying to kill us, you merry-begotten bastard.”
Dark ghoulish shapes, attracted by gunfire, stumbled down the hill from the little cooking fire to the sea. They stood on the rocks beside Hobson. Billhook saw the outline of Mary’s fuzzy halo, her plump body encased in skins; and the black jacks Simon and Hamilton standing behind her. The others, he couldn’t make out in the night.
Dancer called to Mary using her native name and Mary replied in language. Hobson directed Jimmy back to the cove they had just rowed past, where the surge was at its weakest. Soon the keel of the boat bumped against submerged stones and the islanders waded out to grapple at the gunwales and hold it steady. Dancer was the first over the side, slipping on the slimy rocks and stumbling through the water to Mary, sobbing and singing a greeting and holding her old friend. The third shot, when Smidmore discharged his loaded rifle towards Michaelmas, made them both scream and clutch each other even tighter.
It was only then that Billhook noticed the two other clinkers and a jolly-boat nestled into the rocks like flotsam. Once they’d pulled their own boat out of the water and tied her off, the newcomers followed their fellow crew up the winding bird track to the camp.
Hobson’s crew had followed in Jimmy’s wake from the Archipelago. He said that at Investigator Island, judging by the state of the seal carcasses that lay all over the island, he must have only been ten days behind Jimmy. They’d stashed the skins – the skins they’d gleaned from the bay of islands where Boss had left them – in a rock shelter atop Investigator and kept heading west. Once Hobson had seen the carnage at Investigator, he’d decided to bypass the Doubtfuls and move straight on to King George Sound to wait for Boss Davidson and his schooner. It was a waxing quarter moon, Hobson said, when they arrived at Breaksea, and another one since, so they’d been here two months and taken four score skins.
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