Sound

by Sarah Drummond

  Randall sat, knapping dulled flint with a little hammer. It was a black art, he said, a job best left to a man with teetotaller hands and a lucky streak. He wrapped fine pieces of roo hide around the readied flints and clamped them into the cocks.

  Purpose dogged the other men. Jimmy the Nail, Bailey and Pigeon stalked around the camp, their ears pricked like hungry dogs. They moved with short, urgent actions; stowing chunks of cooked roo meat, skins of water and cutlasses about their bodies. Randall sat, working on his flints and measuring out heavy shot.

  “Need rope for a roo hunt,” said Samuel Bailey.

  Jimmy looked at Bailey. Billhook saw a glint of new respect in his slatey eyes when he smiled.

  “Keep the boat stowed but ready,” he said to Neddy and Billhook.

  The day stretched away from Neddy and Billhook waiting on the beach. There was no easterly; strange, for the season was changing fast. Water glossed silver between the little beach and the island. The sun reached midday when Billhook saw the plume of smoke pour into the sky from the island, bright orange from green fuel. He could not see Albert or the other men, only their message. He walked along the beach to the channel and looked out to Breaksea Island. Hunting muttonbirds sheared the water with their wingtips, looking for sardines.

  He heard the women before he saw them, a strange crying of words in a rolling water lilt filtering through the marri trees. Neddy looked at Billhook, panicked. They heard Randall’s laugh, someone grunted and the woman’s voice stopped.

  It was her: the woman in the clearing. Her body was not gleaming now but covered in grey dust. Grey streaks of dirt and tears marked her face. French rope bound her arms to those of her sister. They were both wracked with shivers. Billhook had seen that terrible tremor of shock before. A yellow dingo clung to their legs, his ears back, tail sagging.

  Billhook met her eyes. This last year of nights when he’d thrashed awake in his bed, dreaming up the velvety skin, the breathing womb of Woman … he’d danced them into his greasy bedding, against the cool damp of harbour-side sandstone, tethered them to a tree. She saw them all. He bowed his head in hot shame.

  Bailey came out of the trees with two more women, their arms also bound, their eyes flat with fear. He had a job holding the ropes and keeping a grip on his shooter. He yanked on the rope around their necks. He raised the butt of the gun to see their bodies flinch, and laughed. He dragged them over to the boat, where water eddied around the stringers. Bailey was proud, brought his catch home to gloat. It was only the second time Billhook had seen him laugh or smile.

  “Billhook! One each!” Bailey nodded to the rest of the hunting party.

  Billhook did not want to ship out to the island. Dread coursed through his body. He wanted to be back in that clearing, with dappled sunlight warming his face and the beautiful girl staring at him. A strange heat filled the air. He saw the sisters look at him again.

  “Wiremu,” Billhook pointed to himself. “My name is Wiremu Heke.”

  A mad thing to do. She stared. She was scared but angry too. She clutched her sister’s free hand. “Moennan.”

  “Don’t fucking talk to the merchandise.” The muzzle of Bailey’s gun pressed against Billhook’s neck so hard he could feel it under his tongue. “I’ll break your fucking neck you black bastard if you even cast an eye on my doxy.” His canvas shirt ran with fishy sweat. Billhook didn’t know if Bailey’s gun was packed when he pushed Billhook to the ground with the muzzle, so that he fell all wrong and was pinned to the ground like an underling dog.

  Neddy cried, “He alright, Bailey!”

  Billhook could not see the sisters but he felt something move through the air, an imperative, a silent order. He saw Pigeon holding the sisters now that Bailey had him held down. Jimmy was struggling to get the other two women into the boat. Pigeon, he could not see Pigeon anymore. Jimmy was cursing. The women started screaming and hurling themselves against Jimmy. A splash as Jimmy floundered in the warm shallows. Bailey let the pressure off Billhook’s throat.

  Then Jimmy’s women hurtled past his head, their feet thudding dark against the white sand. He saw her toenail, pink. They ran with their arms tied together, touching. Jimmy patted for his powder flask. He packed and tamped the flintlock with dried bark before the girls reached the marris. The sisters screamed to their two running countrywomen. They kept yelling, urging them on, despite Randall swinging the butt of his gun into one of their chins. Jimmy’s hammer fell but the powder only fizzed and the marri trees folded around the escapees.

  Billhook sniffed the salt sand. Jimmy the Nail walked around in a circle, swinging his rifle, head down. When Neddy had packed the boat with their sleeping skins, Pigeon and Bailey bundled the two women in and sat them atop the skins.

  “Wait,” said Bailey, as Jimmy started to push out the boat. “I’m sure we’re long established that this titter has been owed me since Doubtful Island.” He pointed to Moennan and looked meaningfully at Billhook and Jimmy the Nail. “But you should draw cuts for that one,” he pointed to her sister, “before you get to Breaksea. Fair’s fair. A day’s work.”

  Jimmy and Randall nodded. “Neddy.”

  Neddy broke three twigs in the gathering dark. One for Jimmy, one for Randall and one for Pigeon. One woman. He broke two shorter. The women whimpered, lashed tight to the mainstay. Neddy made the sticks flush against the wrinkled curve of his thumb. He held them out to the men.

  31. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826

  On their return to Breaksea Island, Jimmy the Nail ripped down the sea eagle’s nest and the skeleton tree it straddled on the highest point of the island, for firewood.

  Tommy Tasman played treasurer, preparing measuring cups of American rum and French brandy and guarded the coin stash as trade for Bailey and Randall’s women.

  Tommy North and Hobson presented the dressed, stuffed carcasses of a mating pair of possums for dinner.

  The Breaksea Islanders readied for a spree.

  32. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826

  So. So this is where the serpents lived.

  They hated her, they hated her to do this to her.

  Dark faces beyond the fire watched her, orange light tracing the lines of their scowls. Is this the way of the Ghosts, Moennan wondered. The taste of their fingers in her mouth, crunchy hair and red skin, holes pocking their noses, and a blue-eyed bleakness deep behind their angry jubilance. She was forced to her knees over and over by stinking hands grabbing at her hair. Stones cut her skin, grit in her teeth. No softness in this world, only sharp, hard stuff and hate. Some men laughed the whole while they raped her, some were silent and angry. One Ghost took her away from the others, pinched her again and again trying to make her scream. When she stayed silent, he did worse things to her, enough to make her cry out in pain, enough so that their laughing echoed from the camp.

  Her body stopped hurting after a while. Her mind turned away, she closed myself away from the world of men. It was not the fear of a spear through her thigh for betrayal of her betrothed. It was not her shame. She sank into the feeling of the river when she was a little girl. She was in the river, just up from the stone traps where the black water pooled deep. She fell through the water and her legs and arms tangled in the gloomy embrace of a drowned tree. It was the same painful squeezing of her chest. The same honey swim, the sound of bubbles. Strange voices shouting. Then cold and numb and still she breathed not water nor air.

  She wanted her skin-warm mother but not to look into her eyes. She wanted to know the little girl was not watching. This was no dream. She knew what was happening. She was drowning.

  33. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826

  Dawn. Billhook awoke fighting away visions of the sisters.

  He saw the woman crawl between the sleeping bodies, down the scrubby hill, avoiding the sandy muttonbird burrows, trying to find a place without barnacles to bathe. He watched Dancer creep out of the bushes from where she’d been hiding, to follow her.

  They sat, looking at the snarling suck and bre
ath of froth over the rocks. Dancer reached to put her own softened cloak over the woman’s bruised shoulders. The dingo sat next to them. The three made a dark row against the low sun, looking across the channel to the magenta glow of the sister island.

  The woman, Dancer and the dog. Billhook watched as the woman spoke to Dancer. He could see it was a story from the way her arm stretched out, Dancer listening intently, the woman fanning the cloak and her long fingers pointing out a story, a journey all around the Sound. He didn’t even know if she had a name for the country she lived in.

  They all saw Hobson drag Moennan’s sister down to the rocks. She was crying. He carried a gun. They slid together, down the steep sandy hill. Moennan’s sister grabbed a bush, the one with red berries. The plant ripped out of the hill and stayed in her hand. They both went down, the roots of the bush spraying sand. Billhook saw the sister’s mouth open. She was far away and her cry drifted slowly in the sharp dawn air. They stumbled together to the boat that lay on the rocks. Hobson picked up the girl with her thin legs still running and threw her aboard, so that her head flopped strangely over the thwart and her hair followed like kelp in the surge.

  Moennan sat slumped. Dancer looked away.

  34. OYSTER HARBOUR 1826

  Hobson had gone, taken the girl east to Bald Island. His crew now looked to Jimmy the Nail and Randall for leadership. Randall and Jimmy fell straight into the partnership they’d enjoyed on Kangaroo Island and set about organising their next moves.

  “There’s a water run to do.”

  “And get those blacks off the island before they swim back.”

  “They don’t swim,” said Bailey.

  Billhook was standing beside Bailey. He looked at the wound on the side of his head, where Bailey’s gingery hair was thinning. He must be a fast healer, thought Billhook. It was now barely more than a scratch, like he’d snagged himself on a peppermint tree.

  “They may not swim but they could build a raft. We’ll get them right out of the way,” said Randall.

  After watering at Catshark Bay, the crew caught the easterly and tacked across the Sound to Oyster Harbour. They reached the wind shadow in the channel, pulled down the sails and rowed the rest of the way to Green Island.

  The black men were waiting for them, spears shipped to their sticks. Jimmy gripped his gun. “Don’t give them any reach,” he said. “Stand off.”

  “Show them the shooters,” said Randall.

  Neddy lurched against the gunwale as the keel hit a rock and the surging tide swung the boat around. Twertayan, Albert and the others began running over the rocks and into the water towards the boat, shouting. Bailey tamped his rifle and then raised it to his shoulder.

  “If they mob us I’m shooting.”

  As a boy, Billhook had seen an invading chief try to walk Otakau land, bristling with feathers and power. They did that when they wanted to take over. The smell of Billhook’s own Chief Korako’s anger: a sweet, strange smell, like death shivering out of his body, his eyes turned orange, his face packed with fury for his enemy’s insolence. Twertayan was a man like Korako in his prime. Billhook wanted his cool anger on his side, not facing him on a stony island rattling his spears.

  Twertayan and his men rushed the boat. The crew fought them off with gaff hooks, oars and cutlasses. Billhook’s oar thudded against Albert’s waddy. They stared at each other over their weapons. His eyes, bloodshot and wide, were rimmed with dark, long lashes. Albert smelt of fish oil, his face whitened with ash.

  “Manilyan! Moennan!” he spat at Billhook. Albert’s betrothed had been taken to Bald Island that very morning. They must have watched the previous evening’s scene on the beach. Twisted grasses sprouting perky bunches of emu feathers bound his wiry arms. There was something of the emu about Albert, his height, his heavy brow and his glare.

  Neddy screamed as Twertayan’s rock hit him. He dropped his gaff, crimson seeping through the fingers over his forehead.

  A shot blasted. The air still, contracted.

  Jimmy the Nail reloaded with buckshot and extra powder.

  Twertayan was lighter than Randall and Randall pushed him off the gunwale with his oar. He stumbled back in the water, found his balance and went straight into his deadly stance, his spearing stand.

  A second shot.

  “Got yer,” said Smidmore.

  The shot spun Twertayan around. He fell forward into the water, facing the island. Blood clouded over the shining darkness of his still body and bloomed in the green water. His countrymen cried out and stood together, shocked.

  Neddy pushed away from the rocks, shaking blood from his eyes.

  They got the boat beyond the reach of spears, watching the current to make sure they didn’t drift back in. Smidmore cleared his rifle and turned to Randall, “Well whose fucking idea was that?”

  “We’ve gotta get them off,” said Randall. “Otherwise it won’t be long before one of you useless bastards get three spears put in you, next time you go to the watering point.”

  They went back to the island again an hour or so later. Albert and his men had pulled Twertayan’s body from the water and laid it amongst the pink mallow flowers, his ruined chest open to the sky and surrounded with spears driven into the ground.

  They were squatted, crying over his body but got to their feet as the boat approached.

  Smidmore, Bailey and Jimmy stood with their rifles raised. “Don’t hit any rocks this time,” Jimmy said with a grin. “Tell them to get in, Neddy. You speak blackfella dontcha?”

  Neddy shook his head but waved the men towards the boat and shouted in English, “No shoot! No shoot! We’ll take you back!”

  The men crept forwards without their spears, across the stones, and climbed into the boat. Why was it so easy? Billhook wondered. Then he saw the state of the men. Their hair, clean and daubed with red ochre on their way to the island, was now matted with grief. Two men had cutlass wounds to their throats, the bleeding staunched with mud. Even if they didn’t swim, there was no wood or bark on the island to build a raft.

  Neddy pushed off.

  No man said a word. Jimmy the Nail raised a sail and they gathered some wind and made for the channel, towards King George Sound.

  People began gathering on the wet, white sand of the mainland by the channel. Their shadows lengthened into the sea. More people came. The shadows grew until there were three dozen or more. Women, whose long, decorated breasts told their age and their rank, stood by old men with dusty knees and elbows, shining children, and young men trembling their spears. Their shadows made a deep mark of black against the white sand, standing on the tideline, their feet toeing the water. They stood absolutely still once they had reached that tideline but still more were coming from the forest to join them.

  Billhook felt fear thicken the air, and the heat of the four black men. They sweated over the knives held against their bleeding throats and eyed the barrels of the rifles pointed at their families. The sealers sailed so close in that narrow channel that Billhook could see the raised flecks of flesh on the arms of the women and the lines cut straight and neat across the muscled chests of the men. Then he saw the missing tooth behind the incisor of every single woman as she opened her mouth.

  It was a shattering holler, a noise that came from deep within, gathered and clotted together to make a whole sound. The sound of all those women together could put a hole in the sky, as they sang for the return of their women and men. The children began wailing.

  The noise surrounded the little boat like a sea wraith. It crept into every crack and sprung every caulked leak. It stiffened the hair of every man and itched every skin. Billhook smelt that sound and saw it; a swarm of black bugs trying to feed off him.

  Since the day now nine years ago when the bodies washed up in Otakau, Billhook had wanted the murderer Captain Kelly’s fingers in a bag around his neck. He thought that he would find him working the Southern Ocean, but here he was in King George Sound helping the white man kill the black man
. His need for revenge on Kelly had turned him into a man he could not like. Those screaming wahine told him, somewhere in their deafening cloud of sound, that he had to get Weed away from Samuel Bailey before he sold her.

  And Billhook wanted the woman.

  They made it through the channel with no spear in their sides but every sealer was wiping themselves, scratching their hair and trying to plug their ears against that terrible sound. They would all dream their demons that night.

  35. BREAKSEA ISLAND 1826

  “There’ll be telling no bastard about shooting the blackfella,” Randall spoke to the men on the rocks of Breaksea Island before they joined the rest of the sealing crews. He looked around at the bloodied men before him. Smidmore glowered back at him. “It’s one thing to carry off a couple of girls, another to shoot a man dead. You think there is no law here? You think it is only blackfella law and us? There be an Englishman with the law and a noose here soon, you mark my words. Won’t be long before one of you swings for some fool bashing his gums and so we’ll say no more about it.”

  Albert and his men were pushed out of the boat on the southern side of Michaelmas Island and left to flounder ashore. Billhook could see their dark forms from where he stood on Breaksea, which also meant that the sealers’ camp could be observed by the black men. Within an hour of them being on Michaelmas Island, they started a fire that took off up the green slope.

  In all the wreckage of the last few days, Billhook had not seen the child. From the boats he walked along the rocks and up a track to the women’s camp to seek her out. Sal looked up, startled. It was the first time Billhook had come into their domain. Mary slept in the shade of their bark shelter. Sal sat on a bed of dried grasses next to Dancer and was applying some marri resin mixture to a deep wound on Dancer’s thigh. “That Pigeon,” she said. “He no good.”