Sound

by Sarah Drummond

  “Are you alright?” Billhook asked her. “Where is Weed?”

  “We alright,” said Sal. “Child ran away when Randall came. She lucky. She was gone over the hill before I woke up to that Randall beating me.”

  “Over the hill?”

  “She been hiding. Hiding for two days now. I saw her watching from the bush in the morning when Hobson buy that girl and take her away.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes, Billhook.”

  Mary rolled towards them in her bed. “She’s up near that big eagle nest in the forest.” She’d been listening. She rolled over and turned her back on Billhook.

  Mary probably didn’t know that the eagle nest had been burnt in the fire. He waded through waist-high scrub, fell down muttonbird burrows and made his way towards the forested island valley, sharpening his eyes for a sight of the child. The jagged stump of the nest tree was on the outer reaches surrounded in soft, waving grasses.

  There was little reason in crashing through the forest looking for her if she didn’t want to be found. He called out a few times “Tama Hine! Weed!” and then sat next to the stump of the tree and waited. He lay down and stretched through the grass, wiping curious ants from his arms. He crooked one arm across his eyes to blot out the sun and soon he was asleep.

  Billhook woke to see the little girl’s face peering into his bleary eyes, the sun boring in from one side of her fuzzy head. It was a strange awakening; her peeling back his eyelids to see if he were alive. He started and she did too, leaping back and sitting in the grass, watching him warily.

  “Weedchild,” he said softly, once he’d recovered himself.

  She dropped her head and stabbed a sharpened digging stick into a clump of grasses. “No Weedchild. Tama Hine,” she said.

  She didn’t have her fur cape on, only her trousers, stained with spots of dark brown.

  “Where is your cloak?” he asked. “Have you been sleeping in the bush with no blanket or fire, Hine?”

  She shook her head. There were many questions but he said simply, “I came to find you.”

  “The men came,” she said. “Mister Bailey, he woke me before they came up the hill.”

  Billhook felt a cold, deadening in his stomach. “What did Bailey say?”

  “He say … he say, ‘Come with me, Weed. We being attacked. Come with me.’ ”

  Billhook stumbled through the scrub, unable to get his dark visions of the child and Bailey out of his mind.

  When he reached the cairn on the plate of stone at the highest point on the island, he stood before it, dizzy with fury, and punched into the manmade pile of rocks. It didn’t hurt enough. He hit them again and again until his fists were a mess of blood and gristle.

  He took her in blood. He cut her with his knife so he could take her. He took her in blood.

  Billhook grabbed a stone from the top of the cairn and smashed it against the sheet of granite. Sparks flew and the stone rolled, clattering down the steep, southern face of the island. He could not see it when it crashed into the sea. He threw another and another until the cairn was just a small pile of litter. Then he grabbed the green glass bottle that had been nested inside and dashed it on the rocks.

  He could see the camp from where he stood amid a mess of broken glass. Figures moved about the fireplace and the shelters. One man lolled like a seal beside the fire and Billhook guessed it was Bailey, drinking his proceeds.

  An ancient manorial right.

  Ae! He would kill him! Blood dripped from his hands and splashed crimson into a ring of green lichen.

  Samuel Bailey had woken before anyone else the night that Randall and his men arrived. Samuel Bailey did not seem to sleep at all or if he did, he slept like a dog with one ear cocked. He was the first man alert to the wind change at Investigator Island and the only man to take advantage of Randall’s chaos. Samuel Bailey had been waiting for his chance. He took the child away and raped her in the bush because Billhook and the women were busy getting bashed with oars and waddies. As the sky lightened in the east, Samuel Bailey finished with the girl. He told her to stay in the bush or he would take her again. Then he scrambled away, striking his head with a stick to make himself bleed, for effect.

  Billhook crouched amongst the glass, held his fists to his face and wept. He was there for a long time until the knowledge of what he must do became clear.

  Then he made his way back to talk to the child.

  Tommy North held the Frenchman’s compass and tipped it from side to side. “It’s a shitty old piece. You been gammoned if you paid anything for that.”

  Billhook wouldn’t commit to the jibe but nodded over to the hut, where Moennan sat lashed to one of the beams. “It’s for the girl. I want her tonight.”

  Tommy looked at Bailey who was still lying by the fire, drinking from a crock.

  “You haven’t had a go at her yet?”

  “I like to take my time.”

  “She be well poxed by now. A right fireship.”

  Billhook was silent.

  “As it be,” said Tommy Tasman, looking curiously at Billhook. “Tonight then.”

  36. WAYCHINICUP 1826

  Hobson’s little jolly-boat fidgeted against the barnacles. Billhook held the rope and waited. When Bailey was finally paralysed by liquor and the rest of the men asleep, Tama Hine crept into the camp, untied Moennan’s bonds and coaxed her away.

  “You brave, Tama Hine, bravest I ever seen,” Billhook whispered to her when she arrived on the rocks with Moennan and the dingo. Moennan’s eyes were wide and both of the girls were very frightened. He could smell the fear in their sweat.

  All four of them were spooked by the silent arrival of Dancer. Billhook hadn’t mentioned the night flight to the Tyreelore, not wanting to implicate them.

  “I’m taking them away safe, Dancer,” he said.

  “So you do good work,” said Dancer in perfect English. “At last Billhook, you do the good thing.” And then she did something else quite out of character. She took Billhook’s bandaged hands in hers and looked straight into his eyes. “You be good to those girls now.”

  They sailed all night to the east. The flames of burning Michaelmas Island became smaller behind them until they rounded the pocked monolith of Rock Dunder. Tama Hine clung to the gunwale, terrified by the dark sea. He could not get her to sit trim. She clutched that stone of grey pumice. It was the shape of her heel, something else he had seen her hold when she was too scared to run.

  Moennan watched ahead. She held the child’s hand sometimes, or she ran her hands through the coarse hackles of her dog, ran her hand against his grain, ruffled up his spine and hugged him close to her.

  The sky was lightening by the time he found the inlet, marked by the two stony mountains. They surfed a rush of tide through the stone-bound channel and into quiet, breathing waters, ringed with granite, flowering with orange lichen. They spread skins in the belly of a huge cave that curved into the mountain, and slept.

  In the gloom of the cave, Billhook woke, wretched and sore, confused, with dark dreams still soaking his body. Being in the lee of the mountain meant no warning of the squall that ripped across the sky, rubbing out the sun. That brave yellow dingo whimpered and crept closer to the side of the cave with every bright flash or thump of thunder. The stone on which they lay began to run with water. Muttonbirds kept up their crying and the fairy penguins sounded like babies that would not thrive.

  He looked out of the cave to the mountain above, where huge rivers rushed down the stone gullies. He knew that Bailey would find them. He peered past Moennan’s matted hair, looking for the quicksilver splash of oars. He listened for the grind of a keel against granite. Then he rolled over and sought warmth in the furry bundle of Moennan, her dog and Tama Hine.

  We shall live like oystercatchers, he thought. Red-eyed gamblers watching the tide surge, chancing our lives every day.

  37. WAYCHINICUP 1826

  There was a big moon and then another, her belly swell
ing. All the time they lived on the quiet water Moennan did not question the Māori’s lack of kindness for keeping her from her people. She was glad for the peace, and frightened too, for what would happen to her on her return. Something terrible had happened to the child. Moennan saw her eyes as she saw her own and they both knew. All that time on the inlet Tama Hine was her precious baby and her friend and her sister.

  At night, they fished.

  She was the tallest girl, the tallest thing on the whole inlet and above her the sky blazed and the black emu stretched out her wings. Quarter moon glowed the water. She forgot her sadness, her loss and the angry tingling of her diseased sex when the little boat swished over the seagrass and she spread her toes over the nets and used the stick to push the boat into clear water again. Wiremu forced a stick into the soft sand of the shallows, moving it in a circle to ease it in, looped the cork line around the wood. The boat lurched with his weight and Moennan spooled out a ragged net while he rowed. Later, they went back to his stick.

  “Feel this,” he handed her the rope. She took the wet, muddy cork in her hand. She felt fish hitting the net; a sharp tug on the rope, a lighter hit from the smaller fish, a flutter as they struggled. He wriggled a big silver fish out of the net. “Hauture,” said he in his countryman’s language. “Skipjack of the sealers.”

  “Madawick,” said she.

  She woke early when the air was still and cold. The wind had stopped. She left her skins to squat a little way from the cave, drove a neat hole into the gritty sand with her stream. She watched the dark loom of the Māori.

  “Get up Tama Hine,” he shook the little girl. “See this … something in the water.” He stood right on the lacy edge of the beach and strange blue lights shot out of his toes. He waded in further and hot blue bullets fired away from his legs. She heard the girl breathe in quick. “Fire in the water, Tama Hine.”

  Each step in the sea as they pushed out the boat made the fire sprites flare. Every stroke of the oars made a sparkling rush of sun-diamond water in the inky inlet and then the dripping airborne oars traced arcs of wild colour in the water beside the boat. Shrimp became brilliant drawings, stars falling through the sea. Fish flew away from them leaving a comet tail of blue fire in their wake. The Māori rowed and rowed straight past the stick that held fast his net and none of the dreaming three even noticed until they were well into the centre of the inlet.

  “There be no fish tonight,” he said. “Net is lit up like a Chinaman’s party.”

  Moennan could see every mesh of the net illuminated shining blue, soaring up towards Wiremu’s grappling fingers. They caught a few fish, yes, some gleaming fat madawick. But the sky was pinkening and all the blue fire creatures melted back to be secrets of the inlet.

  After they ate a feast, Hine and Moennan walked over the mountain to the women’s place, to show Tama Hine for when she was older and betrothed. But there was a fire burning inside the great stones and so they didn’t go inside. On their way back to the inlet they broke touchwood from a rotten tree and found some good grubs. She showed the child how to carry the grubs in her hair and how to peel a stick from the tree and push it into the ground nearby, so the people whose tree it was did not get angry with them.

  Billhook waited above the carpet shark’s stone grotto, throwing in the crushed pieces of crab, bits of their bright yellow bodies and black claws. He ate the claw meat raw, broke them against the rocks or crunched the shells open with his teeth and then threw in the rest, carapaces floating to the surface, the meat and guts trailing down through the water.

  The wobbegong waited beneath a ledge. Billhook could see whiskers and the snout of the shark poking out. He threw in the last crab. Waited. He saw his reflection looming over the pool, his wild hair waving against the blue and the clouds. He saw himself as a shark would see him, looking up through the skin of the water to a waving sea urchin creature waiting, a wild predator, his spear a black line in the sky.

  The fish inched its way out of the grotto, snapped at a piece of crab and withdrew, stirring up plumes of silt to cloud the water. Billhook waited. The striations of stone and weed became clearer as the silt settled again. Sea lettuce lined the orange stone, a neat emerald line at the high tide mark. Billhook moved so the shark could not see him and crouched over the grotto, waiting.

  When the shark emerged again, he threw and felt the barb go through its hide in one sure stroke. He held fast the rope as the shaft lolled about in the water and the shark thrashed. The stingray barbs held and he jumped down into the water, stumbling over the slippery underwater stones. He hauled at the stick and dragged the wobbegong from its grotto. The shaft of his spear took on a life of its own as the shark raged. Billhook couldn’t see anything in the foaming, churned-up water.

  Despite his bare feet in cold water, sweat ran down his temples as he tried to slow the shark and impale it against the sandy bottom. He felt a stabbing pain in his calf. Billhook swore, in English, and reefed his knife from his belt. He could see the whiskers of the shark curling against his leg and its mean little eyes watching him and blood from the creature and from him staining the water. He couldn’t stab the fish without dragging its teeth further down his own flesh. The shark let go and he pushed the spear in further, dragged the fish onto the rocks and looked at it. Its gills undulated. For a moment it lay still, its patterns in mustard and deep browns failing already in the sun. A perfect seagrass creature, thought Billhook, almost invisible hovering there on the bottom waiting for fish to swim overhead. He stabbed the knife through its head and cut through cartilage. A black rush of blood. He turned over the fish. Woman. Her claspers lying white and useless now, against her belly.

  He cleaned it, slicing through the tough skin, its gizzards falling through the hole of its gut and spilling onto the rock. Sea birds began to gather. He lay the fish on its side and cut away a slab of flesh, skinning it in the next sweep of his knife. He wrapped the meat in tight parcels of shark skin and paperbark and took his catch back to the cave and the hearth.

  Moennan and Tama Hine came back to the cave. Wiremu was cooking a fish Moennan did not like to eat. He stood, his rough face gentled by the sliding down sun. He saw the grubs and the blue flowers in her hair and he laughed and laughed. He picked a grub from her hair and ate it. Then he picked out a blue flower from her hair and ate that too.

  38. WAYCHINICUP 1826

  Moennan, Hine and Billhook had been at the inlet for two months when Billhook went diving one day, hungry for cray. He dived down a wall of stone near the inlet mouth, where the sea came in. Down past the swarms of little fish, down past a glossy kingfish. Down past towers of stone and kelp that rose as kauri pines to the mirrored surface.

  His thoughts grew thinner and thinner, the deeper he dived. His thoughts were a string of singular things when he saw the crayfish, the twitching of its feelers in a hole, surrounded by silent, waving weed.

  The water suddenly grew cold.

  He grabbed the cray and struggled through the heavy water towards the sky, holding up the spiny creature, a strange, new fear of the deep making him kick his legs harder. The crayfish made its own wake in his hand, its waving legs collecting air and streaming it into his face.

  A keel broke open the mirror skin of the sea.

  Billhook burst into the world of air.

  Moennan and Tama Hine. He saw them before the next wave in the channel crashed over his head. When he surfaced again, he saw the white sail of Jimmy the Nail’s whaleboat and, closer, four faces in the little boat he’d stolen the night they escaped the island.

  Samuel Bailey, Jimmy the Nail, Moennan and Tama Hine: the girls’ dark faces thumb-smudged against a parchment sky.

  39. WAYCHINICUP 1826

  For two days Billhook walked across the hills, following the blackfella roads. He saw no one. He gave himself up to the track, wondering whose it was, passing through cosy thickets of peppermint trees that smelled of rutting kangaroos and camphor chests.

  He ate berri
es that stained his lips red. They’d grown on Breaksea Island, and on the Bass Strait’s Robbins too, he remembered now. At the saddle between the two mountains he found a fresh track that headed through a hakea forest and then south to the sea. The prickly hakeas snagged at his vest and scratched his arms, their sharp nuts opened like hungry birds ready to peck at him.

  He climbed down a stone gully stoppered occasionally with rock pools, to a tiny cove. Two fins sliced through the water ahead of him, oily and languid. He watched them, looking for the tail fins of the sharks before he saw that it was a mature porpoise and her pup. She was teaching the child to hunt along the shallows. Black periwinkle buttons dotted the rocks at the tide line. The little shellfish closed their doors to him but he prised them away with the tip of his blade and worked out the meat. Put it in his mouth. Shelly grit and salty meat the size of a fingernail, with a squirt of black iodine. He had to eat plenty to fill his belly.

  He headed along the rocks of the beach and towards the next headland, where the scrub was lower and looked easier going than the high ridges of the mountain with their red gum forests and hakea. He climbed up to a scarp of granite, watching the pearly clouds. Weather coming in. Crows saw off a swamp harrier, swooping and shouting at the hawk, noisy black scratches in the sky. The hawk dawdled in the crow country, insolent to the birds’ territorial onslaught but moving away, moving away, until the crows were satisfied enough to return to their rooks.

  And with all that sky gazing … a tiger snake flattened its head at him and refused to move, didn’t disappear into the bush but flattened its head, lying right in the place where he would have stepped next with his face turned up to the sky, to those birds and clouds. A thrill coursed through his body and the soles of his feet tingled and sent him backwards three steps until he stumbled and landed on his backside. By the time he gathered himself the snake was gone.