Sound

by Sarah Drummond

  He avoided the fireplaces of others too, cutting wide arcs around sections of the river ahead when he saw wreaths of smoke curling through the trees. Once over the river he was roaming on Albert’s country and there was one man he did not want to meet.

  A pair of ospreys high on a gnarled limb were unworried by his presence, each gripping a flapping salmon trout in their talons, ripping out its flesh. Further along, he came across the crescent of spears stuck hard and angled into the loam, where Moennan’s family ambushed the big grey kangaroos, drove them onto the sharpened pikes. By then he could smell the rotting weed of the harbour and soon he began to see seagrass in the river. He nearly stepped on a snake. They each frightened the other, as the snake tried to climb a steep, lichened granite away from the man, failed, and landed unhappily at Billhook’s feet. He shrieked, shrieked like a woman, he cursed at himself; if he had been brave enough he would have clouted the creature right there, cut open its belly to check for a poisoned prey and eaten the snake. No, he just screamed, and leapt away. And as his cry fell away, he heard the gunshots.

  The shots came from the direction of the harbour. He hurried along the riverbank as it widened and spilled into Oyster Harbour. Tree carcasses, washed down from storms past, littered the mouth of the river. A cloud of plovers took off as he jogged towards them. He saw the boat out by the island. A boat. And men crawling over the gunwales onto the shores of the little dome of green that was the island.

  Pelicans swarmed the island, scattered into the steel-grey sky and flew as one flock over the water towards where Billhook stood. He stumbled along the rocky shore on the eastern side of the inlet. As he grew closer, he could see that the men wore shirts, hats and trousers, not the ragged skins and knitted caps of his own crewmates. New people. White-men visitors to the Sound. Men who did not know it was impossible to surprise a pelican long enough to shoot it.

  The men climbed over the island to the northern side, where Twertayan’s body lay. Billhook couldn’t see the black man’s corpse but he saw the men standing around the body, looking at it, discussing it and poking it with the barrels of their rifles.

  Billhook moved away from the shore, where he made too fine a silhouette against the dull estuarine sand, and worked his way along the tree line. Soon he was opposite the island. He crouched in the bush and watched.

  Four men. A British soldier, his red coat opened to expose a white shirt, wore a stiff-looking black soldier’s hat. Two men in white shirts and cotton trousers, and a fourth man whose jacket displayed his status as major. All four of them carried guns, although the soldier was the only man who leaned on his stock like one made for a life of carrying rifles. They stood by the body of Twertayan for a long time. Then they walked around the rocks to the little skiff on the east shore of the island. One of the men in white shirts unfurled the sail with a quick flick of the main sheet, while the other pushed off. They sailed towards the channel at Emu Point; past the shores where two moons before, the stolen blackfellas’ families stood screaming at Billhook and his crew.

  Billhook continued along the shore until he arrived at the little beach of bleached white sand at the channel. The skiff was most of the way across the Sound and heading for the channel into Princess Royal Harbour. The pressure from the approaching storm began building in his ears and he could see the line of clouds coming in over the hills. He wondered at what to do. The wind blew a warm nor’-westerly from the inland but it would change soon. What to do.

  At the Emu Point channel, Billhook made his choice. This was the arrival of the British that Randall had spoken of when he first smashed his way into the Breaksea Island camp. The British law that Jimmy the Nail had warned them about. They were here. The men in red coats with white crosses emblazoned across their chests. They gave Billhook a new hope of retrieving Moennan and Hine without being killed himself. It was a folly to think he could fight his way through the sealers for the women. He would go straight to the Englishmen and their soldiers.

  He took off his pants and his wallaby skin shoes and rolled anything else he was carrying into his swag, strapping it tightly. He stood on the shore of the channel, watching the water. The tide was going out and a strong current surged from the Oyster Harbour into King George Sound. It meant he would have to swim diagonally and then run with the tide, so as to not get tired and drown.

  He waded into the water and pushed the swag in front of him, using the bundle as a float to push against. As he went deeper the fresh water beneath the salt stung in swathes of freezing fingers that grabbed at his toes and nipples and penis. By the time he was almost halfway across the channel, crabbing through the water using one hand to paddle and the other to hold the bundle, the swag became soaked and began to sink. Here the current was at its strongest, pushing Billhook into the Sound and dragging the swag along behind him. Over the waves that sprouted against the outgoing tide, he could see the opposite shore slide by and become further from him with every stroke. The swag, he held by one strap, but it was sinking and pulling him down until finally, he had to let all of his possessions slip into the steel-grey depths of the channel.

  Once his bedding, whalebone club, hat, flint and bedding had sunk away from him, it proved an easy swim ashore. He jogged along the long bay to warm himself again. He was naked now, except for his tattooed buttocks, the orca necklace and a sealskin jerkin. Despite his tired body and his hunger, he smiled as he jogged, to think of Albert again, his own attire so closely resembling that of the Australian. He felt light, lighter than he felt at sea, as unburdened as a child by the river with the girl.

  All burning thighs and heaving chest, he reached the rocks at the end of the bay. He was climbing the rocks around the point when he saw Jimmy the Nail’s whaleboat sliding over white waves, halfway across the Sound. Jimmy had let headsail out to port and the boat slewed down the swell, the nor’-westerly buffeting it towards the heads of the harbour. Billhook kept climbing, resolute. If British law were in the harbour, Billhook would be protected from the likes of Jimmy and Samuel Bailey, what with the tales he had to tell of murder and the theft of children.

  43. PRINCESS ROYAL HARBOUR 1827

  The wind began to turn to the south-west. Billhook reached the point where boulders nestled into paperbark trees, their creeping, fingering roots exposed by the onshore swell. Jimmy’s boat was close enough that he could see five figures, but not identify them. One of the sealers bailed rhythmically and Billhook remembered the groove wearing into the stern of the boat from its constant worrying by the bailer. Billhook always moved across rocks swiftly, and so he was standing on the sloping, barnacled Point King by the time Jimmy the Nail headed into the channel.

  He watched the wind rip dark blotches on the water as it raced across the harbour. Several shouts went up just before the squall hit the boat. Pigeon loosed the headsail and canvas flapped wildly about. Smidmore reefed it in but not before he copped a metal clew on the bad side of his face. Neddy kept bailing. Jimmy the Nail struggled to trim the main and control the tiller. It was Dancer who looked over to the lee shore to where the boat was being blown, staring fearfully at the barnacles and surging waves, and then raised her face and locked eyes with Billhook.

  She cried out at the same moment thunder rumbled around the hills of the harbour. In the chaos of the squall, no sealer heard her shout, “Billhook!” but he saw her mouth his name and her face break into a rare, luminous smile. Billhook held out his arm to Dancer in greeting. The air chilled suddenly and hailstones smacked onto the water around the boat, beading the surface. Billhook squatted as the force of hail hit him, and pulled his leather jerkin over his head.

  The crew bowed their heads and kept working. Smidmore pulled down the main and the canvas billowed into the water. Pigeon threw an anchor as far south as he could and started fitting the oars. Fork lightning worked steadily across the harbour, stabbing into the sea, and the thunder thumped closer and closer until it was cracking above them. Billhook could only dimly see the boat now. It wa
s cloaked in hail and spindrift and he knew that if he could see the boat clearly, they would have blown too close to the rocks to bear away.

  The lightning storm roared through the harbour and was sucked through the granite heads and out into the Sound. He felt as though he’d been squatting all day, battered by hailstones, but it probably wasn’t more than ten minutes. Shouts and curses bounced across the water. He couldn’t see the boat through the rain that tracked the hail.

  He would meet them again soon enough. Billhook’s stomach churned with nerves and hunger. Jimmy’s crew must be looking for supplies. It was many moons since they had tasted the Frenchmen’s biscuit. He hadn’t seen Bailey in the boat, Tama Hine, Moennan – where were they? He stepped around pockets of gleaming hailstones on the track, the cold cutting into his bare toes, making everything he touched sharper, harder. Prickly bushes scraped at his calves. He found a path running west, just above the reaches of granite, and jogged along.

  The weather cleared and only the metallic scent of warm, wet rocks and a tingling buzz remained of the lightning storm. Steam rose from the track and hailstones melted. Around the next corner, he saw the ship, a twin-masted brig, her spars wrapped in sail, swinging on her anchor a few hundred yards from the shore. A small boat moved away from the ship.

  Billhook hurried along. He wanted to get to the shore camp before Jimmy the Nail. He felt his nakedness and flushed at the memory of scratchy seagrass against his skin that morning at Two Peoples Bay. If he knew there were no white women at the shore camp to shriek at his naked heathen self emerging from the forest, he would feel more at ease. A soldier bent on avenging a sweetheart’s modesty by way of his gun. A Vandiemonian lag ready to mete out authority on any man lower than himself. A lieutenant with brass buttons and jingling handcuffs. Just no white women.

  At the peak of his worrying at his lack of dress he saw the trousers draped across a large boulder on the beach, as though their inhabitant had lain down for a sleep in the sun, and disappeared into his own dreams. Billhook scurried down the path and looked around. No footprints, only the white sand scoured by hail and rain. He trudged across the beach to the single boulder and picked up the wet canvas. They were torn about the waist, perhaps even cut with a knife. Dark stains of blood flowered around the jagged edges of the cloth. Billhook tore away the trousers’ cuffs to make a crude belt, shook out the sand and then donned the wet, bloodied pants.

  He ran along the beach and over the next outcrop of rocks until he could see the tender boat land. The boat bit into the sand and two men leapt out, carrying long sticks. They hauled two sheep from the boat and untied their legs, using the sticks to fend them along the shore. The beach smelled the same, the fuggy smell of low tide and rotting weed, the wind full of rain that swept over the blinding white of the sand dunes on the hills opposite the harbour. Everything else had changed from the last time he had been in this place. Two cannons crouched just above the beach, their barrels pointing to sea, and a flagstaff lofted a fluttering rag of the British Empire. The shouts of the herders floated along the beach towards him, then the thwack of their sticks against wool, a grunt from one of the sheep.

  Billhook headed for the lone man tying off the boat to a craggy paperbark tree on the shore. He looked up, surprised, when Billhook greeted him, and brushed the tree’s flowers from his hair.

  “Well, you’re a sight then,” the man straightened to just over five foot, looked closer at Billhook. “What heathen hole did you spring from? Not a blackfella, are you then?”

  “Billhook,” he shocked himself by saying his name out loud. He had not heard his own voice in several days. Images of the times he had introduced himself on a beach filled his mind. Albert. Moennan. “My name is Billhook.”

  “Pleased, I’m sure Mister Hook. I’m Mister Jimmy McCone, pilot of this establishment.” He mistook Billhook’s questioning look. “That is, I look after the boat side of affairs.”

  “What is the … establishment?” Billhook tried out the word. “English?” He scratched at his groin where his sandy new trousers chafed.

  “We just took New Holland for the King,” McCone said, his shoulders squaring and pride gleaming in his blue eyes. Then he checked Billhook’s scratching and his eyes widened, until Billhook could see his reddened veins streaking from his lashes, and his pride fell away to dismay. He stepped back. “Christ, lad! What kind of cannibal wears the pants of a man speared by blackfellas?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Where did you get those trousers?”

  Billhook, bewildered by his offending pants, said. “On the beach … I had no clothes.”

  “They cut them away from the blacksmith Dineen only yesterday, Mr Hook. To be sure.”

  “What happened?”

  “Them navvies went out to one of the islands and took four blackfellas off who reckoned they been stuck there. They got off the boat wanting to kill a white man. Any white man. The blacksmith were the first one who didn’t have no shooter. Stuck three spears into him.” McCone warmed to his subject, speaking faster as he became excited. “Before they was rescued, the blackfellas around here were happy and talking. The Major gave them some axes and shook their hands. Then he had to send out Festing to get those ones off the island and sweetness all turned to shit. Those blackfellas they rescued off the island were pretty angry. They didn’t care who they struck, see. The Major wouldn’t even let the regiment answer with their rifles. ‘No retribution!’ he said. ‘But keep at least one barrel loaded at all times, to be sure.’ ”

  McCone lowered his voice. “The attackers buggered off and the Major couldn’t find what it was they were angry about. Dineen was carted back to the doctor in a wheelbarrow, all white and shaking he was, with broken off spears still sticking out of him. But one of the soldiers who went out with the Major this morning told me they saw a dead blackfella on another island. Said his legs and arms was dried up in the sun like jerky. The Major is saying that sealers have done some bad work in these parts.”

  “I must speak with the Major about the dead man,” said Billhook. “Is he ashore?”

  A soldier stumped over the grassy knoll, sighted Billhook talking to McCone and fixed his gun.

  “Convict McCone! You be afforded the pleasure of a decent flogging if you stand about. Get those stores up to the hut.”

  His prestige as pilot shattered, McCone shrugged at Billhook and used what he had. “I have encountered a heathen, Corporal Shore. Mr Hook swears he has news of the dead man. He wants to speak with the Major.”

  “Fine irony that, a Galway thief calling other men heathens.” The soldier looked closely at Billhook. “Though I’d wager, Mr Hook, that you have the stink of a sealer about you. Come this way. You shall have your audience with the Major as soon as he is finished his work. McCone – that flour keg – and quick about it.”

  The foot soldier led Billhook past the cannon and the flagstaff, up through the beach reeds where a thin track had already been trampled by sheep, pigs and men. McCone laboured over the keg behind them, muttering that Britons didn’t know their County Mayo from their Galway. They walked into a clearing where the place was changed from the last time Billhook was there, by two huts of wood, bark and thatched with reeds, several white canvas tents and rough yards for the stock. The two sheep had already been hobbled.

  A convict stood with his arms tied around the warty trunk of a gum tree. In a strange embrace, his cheek was pressed to the peeling bark as though the tree were his lover. Two steps away, the Major had stripped away his jacket as his efforts in flogging the man was making him hot. Sweat ran from his forehead, through his sideburns and dripped from his florid jowls. Beside him, the surgeon checked for broken skin and counted out the strokes on slim fingers, a small smile on his pinched face.

  “No man would flog Ryan: not soldier, navvy nor convict. Private Dickens said no. He’ll be sent away for that,” whispered McCone to Billhook, as he rolled his barrel alongside. “So the Major said he’d do ’im himself.”<
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  “What did the man do?”

  “Started trouble about the meat rations. See, there is only food in the settlement for one month.”

  Billhook grunted and smiled, thinking about red berries, seal meat, fish and muttonbirds, and of the island pelicans who flew away from futile English rifles. He watched the Major shake out his lash for another go at the man.

  Thwack. “Sixteen, sir,” said the surgeon.

  It was a dull kind of beating, thought Billhook. The soldiers were trying to ignore it, stifling yawns. The convicts were forced by the overseers to stand in a row behind the heaving shoulders of the Major and not turn away their heads. Only the surgeon watched with any interest. Billhook wondered at the bone-hard form of this white man’s punishment, this banal exercise of power and demonstration, so different from the chaotic bloodspilling that happened in his own world of islands and boats.

  “Twenty-five, sir.”

  “I trust you will cease questioning my authority, John Ryan,” said the Major to the convict’s welted, reddened back as he threw down the lash. He nodded to the overseer. “You are hereby on half flour and beef for a week. Back on full rations in seven days, pending your good behaviour.” He looked disgusted with his work but he did not spit.

  The overseer untied the convict from the tree, who shook the tension out of his arms, turned around and flicked shanks of black hair from his face. “You are most welcome, Major,” he said in an American accent, and looked his flogger straight in the eyes. The Major held his stare.

  McCone sucked breath in through pursed lips. “He’d not want to make trouble for us all, that John Ryan.” Billhook looked at him. “I have been on Maria Island in my recent past and this place is a heaven compared.”

  Clouds cleared away from the sun and the damp earth steamed. The garrison relaxed their shoulders after standing to attention during the flogging and began to move about. Prisoners wandered away to their work. Someone called for dinner. Corporal Shore spoke to the Major, who was shrugging into his coat, and nodded towards Billhook. As the Major raised his eyes to the sealer, another man in naval costume walked over the knoll from the sea and called the Major aside.