No heads on sticks in this country. No impaled children to face off the invading wakas. No Te Rauparaha and his mob coursing the land like meat ants to slaughter for pounamu. Just snakes and prickles and thirst. And the kid thief Samuel Bailey.
Some sort of summary justice must be meted by Jimmy the Nail for the theft of a woman and a boat, of that he was sure. He went over and over the confrontation he walked towards. He’d seen the things they could do. What to do. No man with Wiremu Heke’s history would grovel before the likes of Samuel Bailey.
He found another blackfella road and the regular beat of his wallaby skin shoes against the worn track with its roots and twigs helped him think clearly as he walked. He reckoned on another day of walking before he made it to King George Sound and by then his mind would be where it needed to be when he found Bailey.
No. No negotiation. He had to kill him. His crew would not bother him after that.
And Moennan. Moennan. Back at the island with all of them.
He should have killed him that day. A good part of that afternoon’s work stealing women and Bailey’s blood wasted, trying not to look at the man and knowing what he had done with the child. Who knew what crimes he had forced on Tama Hine by now? It had been eight hours since they sailed out of the inlet. Two days of walking and no boat to get to the islands and Bailey will have already done more damage. And sold her too.
That Bass Strait sealer, the Policeman; so he had a child bride. A black sprite with twig legs and no taller than Billhook’s waist. Called himself a lawman. Negotiator, mediator, diplomat, owner of a girl he’d stolen as a baby. No pregnancies: that was what Jimmy the Nail had said, wasn’t it? It’s better like that. Before they bleed they can fuck and work and work and fuck and not have babies. Billhook thought about Dancer’s words before her Devil Dance: babies getting grass stuffed in their mouths or given to missionaries in Launceston, taken as servants by settlers who then “set them free” in a foreign country when they got too difficult. If they were lucky, the children stayed alive on the island and worked catching muttonbird chicks for their upkeep. That island, Robbins, was seething with snakes. Snakes everywhere, going after the muttonbird eggs and chicks. Kids with their arms down muttonbird holes getting bitten. Getting whipped when they didn’t want to get bitten again. They gave the women gloves but the kids had to work barehanded.
He saw a plume of smoke blowing west from the next peak and wondered at the daily talking done with spires of smoke. As he walked and watched the smoke, he felt helpless and adrift amid his thoughts of the children. Those men on Michaelmas were not so subtle with the fire that ripped up the side of the island. Talking to their whanae any way they could. Smoke. Always smoke in this country. After Kelly and his men had been through his village, burned the marae and all the houses and sawn the canoes in half, Nga Rua had smoked the old men and the crying mothers of dead sons. What leaves did she use? It had smelled lovely and clean, that smoke. Black Simon said that the Indians did that too. Not that the man had ever seen a real Red Indian with smoke and arrows. The only Indian Black Simon had seen was aboard a whaler out of Nantucket. He’d been crimped as a child by the Quakers in the middle of the Indian wars, said Black Simon. Those men who preached against war and slavery had found a berth for both Indian, and Black Simon, whose hulking frame still bore the scars of his bondage. Folk from all nations and wars, all sitting on an island now with their different scar stories, different smoke stories, abandoned by their pirate scum, Boss Davidson, waiting, waiting for something to happen.
The country changed to burnt patches of bush making his travel easier. Fresh new shoots gleamed green against the blackened earth and crimson regrowth budded from burnt branches. Christmas tree flowers flared the colour of flames. The trail was still stark through the red gum forest and Billhook’s fur shoes quickly turned black with ash.
That night he set a small fire and lay down beside it on a flat face of rock. He could not remember the last time he’d lain down alone by a fire. He watched the sky darken beyond the nippled mountain, one eye level with a platoon of tiny ants cutting an ancient track across the granite. No breathing sighs, snores of fellow travellers, no shouts nor grunts or the whimpering dreams of dogs and men, no fireside songs of the women. The dusky bird melodies, the twitches and slithers seemed to conspire against him. The sea was miles away and its usually close comfort was a distant rhythm. Currawongs mocked him while alerting their mates to his presence. He heard the clicking of a possum. Red gums swished with treetop fights and romances and the ground thumped with wallabies. And somewhere, the mournful wooing of a ground frog.
Then, after a few moments of ominous creaking, a shotgun cracked through the night air. Billhook leapt to his feet and sparks exploded around his waist. He stood, bewildered for a moment, not understanding. Someone had shot at him. He dropped down, waited for the next shot.
Lying belly down on the rock, looking away from the fire to steel his night vision, he peered into the gloom of the bush. He heard a startled snake slither past him and into the grasses surrounding the stone. Felt that fright hammer at his breast again. Lizard, he consoled himself. Lizards’ legs make rustling noises. Serpents are silent.
Billhook turned back to the fire, a thing that he knew on this dark night. He nearly laughed out loud when he saw the heaved up stone and caved in coals. No gunshot that bang. No one had shot at him. No, it was the fire itself, cracking the stone with its heat, breaking open the stone like an egg.
Rattled and hungry, he lay awake long after the quarter moon sank behind the land. When he slept, his dreams were infested with cold-eyed sharks. Instead of the long-fingered naiads, toothy swathes of small reef sharks hunted him in packs as he dived down through granite towers to find the two brown girls. He couldn’t see Moennan and Tama Hine and he couldn’t form their names in his gluey mouth to call for them. He looked into caves and the flowering grottoes of crayfish homes. The sharks nipped and harried at him as he swam. The small, triangular punctures in his hands and feet gave him no pain or sensation. But the kelpy streams of his blood pouring up to the curve of the sea’s surface terrified him and still he could not see the girls proper, only their faces gauzy in the water like wraiths, and sharks wriggling, frenzied, through the red plumes of his blood.
40. ECLIPSE ISLAND 1826
Bailey lowered the child on a rope, down the southern cliffs pocked with wind and sea, down to where the water boiled, and deposited her in a cradle of granite. She threw the tracer heavy with lead and abalone bait into the groper hole. Mutton birds and terns wheeled about, nearly touching her body, excited by berley and bait. The rope chafed and cut at her armpits but she didn’t remove it, knowing it would save her from the sly surge of a rogue wave. She saw the big shark come out of the water below her, lift its head and watch her with one eye, slide past and return, checking her, as if she was a seal, just waiting for her to slip into the water. When she caught the groper, she knew, she saw the big blue fish eye off her crab berley and go for the chunk of abalone on the gang hook. A wash of whitewater hid the fish, slid away. She let the fish run until she felt the hook bite. She looked up to Bailey watching from high on the cliff. He put the line over his shoulder and hauled the fish out of the water. It slid over the barnacles gasping. The fish was as big as Tama Hine and deep, glossy blue with fat lips and milk teeth that looked like her own.
Bailey lurched up the hill with the groper struggling on the line behind him, laughing. He ignored the girl left alone at the bottom with the swell bashing about her feet and a rope around her chest. The blue fish slapped its tail against the top of the cliff and disappeared from sight.
She sat there for a long time. She wanted to climb but the stone was a straight face and it meant travelling along the sucking water’s edge, to where a thin crack streaked up through the granite that she could insert her fingers and toes into. Her feet tingled with fear, just looking at it. Her stomach began to growl, anxious and hungry.
Tama Hine wor
ked for Bailey now, since Jimmy the Nail and Randall left them on the island several days ago. She was a long way from Dancer and Sal. She couldn’t even see Breaksea Island from the peak of the island Bailey had taken them to. Just her and Moennan and Bailey. Bailey’s first move after the other sealers sailed away was to tie Moennan’s dog to a tree. A good hunter, that dog. A good birder too and warmth at night, but the first thing Bailey did was tie it up and kick it to death in front of Moennan and Tama Hine, so they could see what he could do.
Tama Hine sat for hours, thinking about the climb. When the sun began its descent to the west, Moennan’s shining face appeared over the ledge, her hair wild against the updraft, smiling with relief as she clenched the stray end of the rope. “Ah Hine!” she shouted in language. “Thought you were gone, girl!”
That night, Bailey wiped his hands over the little girl’s face while she lay like a corpse, cold and still. He could. He could do whatever he wanted. Tama Hine knew that. He put his hand on her bare, flat chest and felt her galloping heart. He could do whatever he wanted. Sparing her life was his only kindness.
Moennan watched Bailey with the child. He tied up Moennan every night, bound her arms with rope and kept her tied all night, so she lay hard on her side with her arms behind her. He swept back Tama Hine’s hair from her face as she lay, frozen. He whispered things to her.
“You want to go home, little Elizabeth? I’ll take you home. I’ll get you home, Elizabeth. Give me a little kiss and I’ll take you home.”
Tama Hine could see the whites of Moennan’s eyes in the fire’s light. She nodded at Bailey. Bailey’s beard scraped her face and his hot, fetid tongue was in her mouth and she felt his teeth. Then Bailey crawled across the skins to Moennan and her watching eyes became obscured by Bailey’s body. The sounds of the dark sea became second to that of the grunts and moans from his chest and the fleshy thuds from his fists.
In the morning Moennan’s face was bleeding and her nose was swollen. Tama Hine stared at her and went down to the north side rocks to wash herself. She scooped fresh water from the spring that seeped from under the granite and brought handfuls to her mouth.
Bailey roamed the island during the day, carrying with him a large stick, a knife and a bladder of the Frenchman’s brandy, leaving Moennan and Hine to get his food. He started drinking more when the swell came up and they could not go out for seal. They caught muttonbird chicks, or lizards. Bailey roamed the island, not working, shouting sometimes into the wind, came back for some food. Bailey was not so frightening when he drank all day from his flask. It was easier to avoid him and when they could not, his blows failed to find purchase. Bailey did not sleep though, when he drank the brandy. The nights were long and Tama Hine and Moennan huddled together to keep away the screaming, ceaseless wind and the restless pacing of their captor. They listened to him curse and rant, stumbling over rocks in the dark, his body slump into a nearby hollow, branches cracking, and his muttering.
When Bailey was straight, he frightened Tama Hine. He’d look right through her with bleak, blue eyes, as if something else was running through his mind. Stared straight through her, always thinking what game to play.
“You’re the quick one, Weed. You are clever. A herring queen, you are. Not like that dozy wench, cryin’ all the time.”
Tama Hine nodded quickly.
“Help me get this wood in, girl.” He beckoned her down to the block where he kept his axe.
“Go on. Hold the wood for me, Weed. Don’t be afraid. Hold it like this.”
He placed her hands around a lump of wood with his red, freckled fingers.
She held the wood and he swung the axe. She moved both thumbs and watched the axe bite into where her thumbs were a moment before. The log cleaved in two and spilled with startled ants.
“You a brave girl, Weed. Brave.” He nodded at her in approval and stumped up the hill, swinging his axe and whistling.
She was the brave one, and the lucky one too. Moennan, maybe ten summers older than she, was the one he bit and hit at night, who squirmed underneath him, a pinned skink under the skins. He didn’t bite Tama Hine. Bailey bit Moennan. Touches for Moennan were not stroking or pats. Touches had to hurt her.
He hit Tama Hine when she lost the groper rig. He hauled up the rope, her head banging against the rocks on the way back up the wall. But she deserved that. She turned as the fish sped off with the line trailing along its body and looked up the rocks to see Bailey’s furious face and felt the rope around her armpits tighten. He hauled her up as he would a big fish, struggling against the line. Her head hit the rocks and she tried to keep her body away from the jagged maw of stone. When she was at the top of the cliff, Bailey held the rope tight and struck her hard again and again across her face until her jaw hurt so much she couldn’t open her mouth and she fell in the scrubby dirt bewildered and sobbing.
“Where are those leaves?” she asked Moennan one day after her beating.
The wind began to rise against the granite cliffs, whistling through the reeds, blowing them flat against the stone like wafting smells. “Where is the plant? We gotta be rid of this here Bailey.”
Moennan knew which leaves. She’d showed them to Tama Hine when they were with Wiremu Heke at the inlet. The leaves, shaped like a woman’s bosom crushed together. Three would kill a man. Tama Hine wanted to pack it into the guts of a fish and feed it to Bailey after dark, wrap the fish in bark, take out its guts and fill it with the bosom-shaped leaves. Poison him and that poisoned Bailey would kill all the big grey sharks that fed from his body.
Whenever Bailey went off on his wanderings, Tama Hine and Moennan talked about the leaves and the fish and the boat that was coming for them. They talked about what they would tell Randall and Jimmy the Nail. They began to plan their escape from the island.
41. BAIE DES DEUX PEUPLES 1827
On the second day of his journeying to King George Sound, Billhook found the cave on the beach where the crew had stopped to sleep. He lit a swatch of reeds and went inside. The child’s drawings were still there, pressed into the hard, sandy floor. Billhook squatted, his thighs tingling from the day’s walk, and touched the etching. Granules of sand tumbled into Tama Hine’s marks.
Ae, Hine. You were here.
He stood and climbed back through the hole of the cave into the orange light of the evening. Crows cawed from the top of the hill and the honey birds harassed their neighbours over flowers or chicks. At the peak he saw the Bay of Two Peoples stretched into a long, white sickle, dotted with mounds of seagrass. He could walk at night on that beach, no matter the dark, and he would be closer then, by the morning.
Hunger harried him as he walked. His skin shoes squeaked in the soft sand, above the high tide mark, and he began marching to his breath and the thoughts tumbling through his head. Walking on the sloping soft sand was hard work after crashing through prickly hakea thickets all day. It was several hours before he reached the end of the bay.
A mushroomy scent and croaking frogs. The cool loom of paperbarks. There was no way he would venture into that tiger-snake swamp. Not in the dark. Billhook’s travelsome spirit made him one who thought oceans ahead but this night he ached for his Otakau home: a place where he could creep through a swamp hunting all night and never see a serpent. A warm fire and his whānau, a woman to get him grains and lizards and always plenty of good meat to eat.
He sat on the beach and looked across the bay, chewing on the edge of his sealskin until it was loosened enough for him to suck some sustenance. No wind and the water glassed off, the moon far enough west now to let the stars shine. Beyond the mountain that pressed dark against the sky, the mountain he climbed around, there was the inlet where they had lived.
Tama Hine, Moennan and me, Wiremu Heke. Over there. That was where we lived.
He awoke before dawn, before a delicious dream was ended by the birds yelling and brightness behind his eyelids. Hungry. He rolled over on the seagrass, his swollen cock springing away from his bel
ly. He lay looking at the brightening sky, stroked himself. Gently at first, until warmth seeped into the base of his shaft and then he chafed at himself with calloused fingers, trying to capture that smoky dream woman, she with the seashelly scent and a dirty laugh. Dream woman morphed into Dancer, oiled and gleaming by the fire, into Sal and her long hair sweeping between his thighs, into the white woman he had in Hobart Town with her muddied skirts and button eyes.
Moennan.
The rush fired from his loins, his chest and from the soles of his feet. He lay feeling his heart slow its galloping beat. Seagrass prickled against his cheek.
The sun rose and shone orange on the speckled mountain. In his mind, he asked his mother what he should do. He already knew what she would say: How dare you? She hissed at him. You just wanted the woman. Thought you could take her away for yourself. She would have been better off if you’d left her on a beach somewhere for her to go home to her people, his mother said. You saved her from no one. No one! You only made it worse. You are one of them. One of them, Wiremu, my son. You are no better than that Bailey.
Billhook rolled his whalebone club into his skins and slung the swag’s strap over his shoulder. He turned his back on the mountain and on the Bay of Two Peoples and headed south for King George Sound.
42. OYSTER HARBOUR 1827
At the French River, he followed a trail through towering red gums. Drinking from the river at one point, he tasted salt, where the waters met. He stepped across a fish trap and stared down at the young bream idling in the murky water inside the stones. The tide was too high for them to be trapped yet. But it was a triumph and a solace to his troubled stomach when a freshwater crayfish backed into the reedy snare he’d hastily woven. He ate the muddy tail raw, wary of creating smoke, and chewed the juice from its blue-black claws.
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