Kiwi Wars

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Garry Douglas Kilworth was born in York into a military family. He spent seventeen years in the RAF before embarking on a dual career working for an international telecommunications firm and writing and now is the author of some fifty novels. He has won the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize and twice shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal.

  Other titles in this series by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Soldiers in the Mist

  The Winter Soldiers

  Attack on the Redan

  Brothers of the Blade

  Rogue Officer

  Kiwi Wars

  Kiwi Wars

  A Fancy Jack Crossman Adventure

  Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in Great Britain and the USA by Severn House Publishers Ltd, 2008

  This edition published in the UK by Constable,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2013

  Copyright © Garry Douglas Kilworth, 2008

  The right of Garry Douglas Kilworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-924-8 (ebook)

  Cover design by JoeRoberts.co.uk

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel is for my good friend Major John Spiers, who was at the time of the work’s conception the curator of the Light Infantry Museum in Winchester. (He is now Rifles’ Secretary, Property and Heritage.) His name has often appeared in my acknowledgements for the research material he has provided. He also suggested that the Maori Wars might make for a different, and interesting, Crossman novel.

  John also supplied much of the historical material, but is in no way responsible for any errors in this work. I like to think I can get things wrong without any expert assistance.

  One

  1851, Australia

  Three sailors slipped over the side of the moored British man-o’-war into a stolen skiff to sail across the bay to the harbour of the small Australian port of Melbourne. They had contrived to serve watch together in the early hours, to provide themselves with this opportunity of jumping ship. The officer of the watch, a Lieutenant Urquart, was standing fast asleep with his head on the rail of the quarterdeck. Urquart was famous for his catnapping. By the time he lifted that sorry head of his, he would be in the deepest trouble of his so-far short life.

  ‘Watch the prow,’ whispered Danny, urgently.

  He was too late, the stolen skiff’s front end bumped against the ship’s hull, not loudly, but with a definite thump.

  ‘What?’ called the officer above, obviously waking from his doze. ‘Who’s there?’

  The three men in the skiff swiftly manoeuvred the boat around and under the stern of the man-o’-war. There they waited with hearts beating fast, knowing that directly above them was the captain’s cabin. They could hear that very man snoring like a pig with a blocked snout. Urquart’s footsteps sounded on the deck. The three sailors followed them with their ears, knowing he had walked to the port side. There he would be searching the surface of the sea, looking for a log or whatever he imagined had made the noise. If they were caught the least they could expect was a term in the brig. Most likely it would be a flogging.

  For the next few minutes all that could be heard was the lapping of wavelets against the hull of the great ship. Then the footsteps travelled again, probably to the quarterdeck, where the lieutenant would again rest his head on the rail. Urquart was nothing if not consistent in his habits.

  ‘What now?’ hissed Striker.

  Abe said, ‘Wait.’

  They stayed where they were, holding on to the anchor chain for the next quarter of an hour.

  ‘All right,’ Abe murmured. ‘He’ll be off again now.’

  They pushed off, out into the bay. All three looked anxiously at the man-o’-war for the next few minutes, as they slid across the quiet waters, but it seemed Urquart had indeed returned to his slumber. There was another seaman with him, a sailor by the name of Longfield, but he too had no doubt succumbed to the invitation of the sandman.

  The dawn came up over the waters of the huge natural harbour which curved like a giant fish hook around the small skiff. To the east were green hills, to the further west a flatter drier landscape. Ahead though, was the welcoming mouth of the Yarrow River. It was towards this stretch of fresh water the three sailors were heading. They did not intend to touch land, but, tacking through the other quiet ships which littered the harbour, they were desirous of sailing upriver towards gold country. It was a source of bitter disappointment to them that they could not go directly to the goldfields, where daily fortunes were being made, since they had no money. They did have a stolen ship’s mainsail, which would stake them once they were there, but they had no provisions for the journey. They needed a horse or donkey to carry the canvas, since they could not sail all the way to Ballarat, their eventual goal.

  They passed rather too close to a frigate where the officer of the watch was far more alert than Lieutenant Urquart. Striker gave the officer a friendly wave, relieved to see that it was a visiting American vessel and not a British ship. The officer, hands locked behind his back, merely returned Abe a hard stare.

  ‘Bloody gentry,’ muttered Striker, ‘same everywhere.’

  ‘They don’t have no gentry in the United States,’ stated Danny in his thick Irish brogue. ‘They’re a republic.’

  ‘Oh, they have gentry all right,’ Abe said, getting in on the conversation. ‘They just don’t call ’em lords and ladies. It’s a fact of human nature to have your high brows and your low. That one there, he comes from a family that don’t speak civil to Chinamen, you can be sure of that. He’ll have servants in the kitchen, same as our lot.’

  ‘Was you in service, when you was a landlubber?’ asked Danny of the leader of the group.

  ‘Me?’ cried Abe in a shocked voice. ‘I never served no one nothin’. I’ve got my pride. I was a lengthsman, me. Since I was fourteen.’

  Danny, being Irish, did not know what a lengthsman was and requested more information.

  ‘Why,’ said Abe, loosening the sheet and letting out more sail as the wind dropped, ‘it’s a workman for the council who looks after a length of greensward and ditching. I had five miles on it, ‘tween Rochford and Hockley, in the county of Essex. Scythe and spade was the tools of my trade. I cut the verges with one and kept the ditches clear with the other. That and help the sexton dig his graves. I’ve shovelled earth on many a gentry’s corpse, I can tell you. I s’pose that’s servin’ ’em in a manner of speakin’, but all I’ve done for ’em direct is throw the dirt of county on their dead faces. All I ever intend doin’ for ’em, what’s more.’

  Abe was tall and lean, with a huge scar that ran from the corner of his right eye down to the tip of his chin. The scar came from a knife fight with a Lascar seaman in a Liverpool tavern. H
e wore it proudly, as if it proclaimed him to be a man to be reckoned with. Privately his shipmates said they would be more afraid of the man who gave it to him. Still, it looked gruesome and worried them enough that they gave him a wide berth when he was in a temper.

  The three made it upriver for five miles before they abandoned the skiff. Striker wanted to sell it to get money for provisions, but such a sale would have attracted too much attention, and they could not afford to be detained while their non-existent credentials were checked by the purchaser. Instead they lugged the mainsail, and the sail from the skiff, a further mile along the bank and hid them in some bushes. Then Danny led them to a tree-fellers’ camp he had been told about by some Victorian sailors. Here they joined a self-employed gang of men who cut and sold eucalyptus wood for the boilers of the paddle steamers that plied their trade up and down the Yarrow.

  ‘See them gum trees down by the water’s edge, them’s river reds,’ explained one of the gang to the three sailors. ‘Them others, further back on the drier parts, them’s black box. River reds burn to charcoal, but black box goes down to dust. They wants both types of wood, see – they needs a mix. And a warnin’ on the river reds—’

  At that moment an explosion occurred on a paddle steamer that was about quarter of a mile downriver. A look of satisfaction spread over the faces of the cutting gang. They nodded to each other in grim fashion as they saw that the steamer’s paddles had come to a halt and the boat was drifting on the current.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Abe. ‘What’s happened there?’

  ‘Captain of that there vessel,’ said the same man who had been explaining about the types of wood, ‘went off without payin’ us our dues.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And so we packed some gunpowder in a hollow log.’

  Abe laughed. ‘I like that. They threw it in the furnace without knowin’ its content?’

  The rest of the gang smiled. ‘Just so,’ said the second man. ‘It’ll remind the captain of his debt. They won’t not pay us again. That engine’ll cost a tidy penny to get put right. Now, as I was sayin’, don’t stand at rest under the river reds. They call ’em widow-makers here. Boughs break and drop without a warnin’. Here watch.’

  The sawyer hefted a log into the water and it sank quickly to the bottom of the Yarrow.

  ‘Heavy enough to defy nature,’ said the man. ‘Imagine that coming down on your back.’

  The three sailors only stayed with the cutting gang long enough to earn money for provisions. Then they struck inland for a short way to hire a beast of burden. They found a man willing to let go of an old camel called Bessie. Bessie was brought, not without protest for dromedaries are belligerent beasts at the best of times, to the spot where they had hidden the sails. They loaded her up and then set out for Ballarat, the town that served the goldfields.

  It was about six o’clock in the evening as three sailors and a camel entered the Victorian town. The camel was thirsty and so were the men. They tied the beast to a tree by a long piece of ship’s rope and left it to drink from the town’s lake. They themselves entered an eating house and ordered steaks and beer. The fare was eye-wateringly expensive. The cutting gang had warned them of the prices on the goldfields, most of them having tried their luck themselves before deciding that a steady job was more lucrative.

  ‘I could buy the whole damn cow for that money,’ grum-bled Abe, ‘let alone this bit of gristle and bone.’

  But there was nothing they could do about it. Demand exceeded supply. While they were eating, a man shambled in and asked if anyone wanted to buy a cheap digging licence. Abe signalled to the fellow, who was in rags and said he had not eaten for three days.

  ‘No luck, eh?’ said Danny, who was beginning to realize that you could not pick up gold nuggets from the ground like pebbles as they had been told by a visitor to their ship. ‘Giving up.’

  ‘Giving up and going home,’ said the man, who was a well-spoken and clearly educated gentleman. ‘You can dig in a thousand holes and find nothing. That’s what I’ve found, absolutely nothing. Look at these hands.’ He showed them his palms. They were raw and bleeding with split skin. ‘I’ve had it up to here.’ He drew a line across his throat.

  ‘Need some grub in your belly first, eh?’ Abe said. ‘Well, we could come to an arrangement . . . ;

  And so the licence to mine on the goldfields was purchased.

  Striker kept a keen eye out through the open doorway. The load carried by the camel was very precious and the sailors did not want it stolen. They were aware that marines from their vessel Comet were searching for them in the brothels of Melbourne, but it was doubtful they would reach as far as Ballarat since the ship was due to sail. By the morning the Comet would be on its way to Sydney and the three deserters would be relatively safe. They believed themselves safe now and drank to that fact, laughing and joking, and cursing their old captain and his officers for pigs and pi-dogs, saying they were well out of it.

  All three had spent time in the brig and one of them, Abe, had felt the lash on a number of occasions. Punishment did not greatly bother Abe for very long. Oh, he got mad all right, spitting mad, and cussed and swore at the man wielding the cat, but his body seemed to absorb the hurt and pain. Abe had eyes like chips of flint. There were few who liked him as a person, but they respected his eyes.

  Danny and Striker were typical seamen of low birth. As young men they had been press-ganged into the Royal Navy, and like many shanghaied sailors they subsequently made it their living. Yet they had never taken to it in the way a gentleman does who makes it his career. A young lad of a high family who becomes a midshipman, lieutenant or captain will speak of the sea reverently and of his ship as if it were the Ark of the Covenant. To sailors like Danny and Striker the sea was a wasteland of water and the ship ‘a bloody old lime barrel’. They did not hate the ocean or vessel: they were indifferent to them.

  ‘Well, here we are, lads,’ said Abe, looking up from his steak. ‘Down under and off to be as rich.’

  Danny, the small elderly Irishman, said, ‘I’m eager to be slopin’ off to the diggings, lads, that I am.’

  ‘Well,’ replied Striker, a willowy Cornishman who had previously been a tin miner and knew what hard work lay ahead, ‘you can be at it soon enough, an’ we’ll stand and watch.’

  Danny made a face, but he was full of humour tonight. Not far away, just a bit of a walk, were the goldfields of Sovereign Hill, where the three of them expected to make their fortune. The fact that thousands of others also expected the same, and there was only so much gold in the ground, did not dim their enthusiasm. They had the glint in their eyes, the fever as men called it, and it would take many months of hacking through clay to diminish it. They had read the reports in The Buninyong Gazette and Mining Journal of wild riches being found, and they believed every word. This was one chance in a lifetime and these three chancers were not going to miss it.

  They finished their meal, paid for it with the last of their coin, and collected Bessie with her load. On Bessie’s hump was their stake. The spare mainsail from the Comet and the sail from the skiff. Canvas was at a premium in the goldfields, having its uses as tents, shaft covers, buckets and roofing for cabins. They could sell the canvas, keeping a little for their own use, and live comfortably for a good while as they set about mining. Hopefully there would be enough to purchase a shaft. There was a great deal of canvas in the mainsail of a man-o’-war.

  When they reached the goldfields they were dog-tired and the sight of so many lamps dispirited them. Lights were scattered on the hillsides like fallen stars. There were shafts and winches; as many as trees in a forest. The whole landscape looked like a battlefield, with piles of earth and slag every few yards. Up on the main hill were shacks and false-fronted buildings. One of these was an alehouse which the three sailors entered, not to buy more food and beer, but to sell some of their canvas. As expected they had more buyers than canvas to sell, and very soon their pockets were lined wi
th money. One man even sold them an old shaft he had worked for enough canvas to cover his current shaft and winch. He did not tell the sailors it had been worked down to a layer of clay beyond which gold had never been found.

  ‘Look at the likes of this humanity,’ Danny said, wonder-ingly, as they stared around them. ‘Every shade of people.’

  There was indeed every type of person the world had to offer on the goldfields, from Chinese to African, from British aristocracy to beggars in rags, from hatchet-faced women to hussies in flounce. What amazed Danny, Abe and Striker, though, were the would-be prospectors straight out of the schoolroom. Dozens of boys still wearing school uniforms had dropped their books and headed for the glory holes of Ballarat, hoping to strike it rich. The street and surrounding landscape were seething with prospectors, all with hope in their hearts. As they left the saloon, the three sailors found the smells were ripe too, and awful, for sanitation was primitive here. And these were men who had lived in the closest proximity with humanity on shipboard.

  ‘I an’t goin’ to be able to sleep tonight,’ said Abe. ‘Who’s for going to our claim and tryin’ our luck right now?’

  The other two men agreed.

  So they found the shaft Abe had purchased and Striker winched Danny and Abe down the narrow hole to the bottom. There they lit candles and placed them carefully on the earth shelves that had been cut for the purpose. They found themselves ankle deep in water and soft mud. Striker lowered the canvas bucket and before long they had removed most of the water. Abe began clawing at the mud with his bare hands, slopping it into the bucket. Within a few inches they hit dense clay, which required more than fingernails to shift.

  Striker sent them down two small shovels. Not knowing any different, for they were complete novices at the gold-digging game, Abe and Danny began to cut through the clay, slicing it with their shovels and taking out pieces as if it were a cake of marzipan. Any seasoned prospector on the fields would have stopped right there and left the mine to nature, as the previous owner had intended before he had been confronted by three gullible sailors straight off the ship. But they were ignorant of the lack of possibilities and so dug away.