Flight of the Eagle

by Peter Watt

  Screaming taunts, the Kalkadoon warriors were on the troopers with lance-like spears to impale them to the red earth. With despairing screams for mercy, the troopers died under the blows of nullas and stone axes.

  Razor-sharp stone knives slit open the bellies of the dead troopers as the warriors eagerly sought the kidneys of the men. They would eat the covering fat as a gallant gesture to the fallen warriors.

  Wallarie turned his attention from the inspector at his feet to the last survivor – a trooper who stood alone and defiant, wielding his rifle like a club. The man had no chance, Wallarie thought, as a circle of Kalkadoon warriors taunted him with jeers.

  Peter knew he was going to die and that he could not expect mercy from the men they had hunted so ruthlessly in the past. But he also knew that he would die fighting.

  Had not his own father died as a fighting man in the rain-soaked hills of Burkesland those many years earlier? Had not his mother died from a bullet? Thus it was his fate to die like a man. His breath came in gasps as he sucked in the hot air to fill his lungs for his final act of defiance.

  An older warrior armed with a blood-stained spear stepped from the circle of Kalkadoon taunting him. From the many scars that adorned his body, Peter sensed that the older man who confronted him was an experienced fighter.

  Although Peter was prepared for death he hoped it would not be painful. He silently prayed to be brave when the spear pieced his body. In death he would show the Kalkadoon he was as good as any of their own warriors. Although Peter had learned to use the spear in close-quarter fighting the lance-like spear – and the way the Kalkadoons used it – was different to the ways he had been trained as a youth by the legendary kinsman Wallarie. The fierce tribesmen of the hills used the spear to stab rather than throw.

  Wallarie wanted the police tracker to look into his eyes before he died on the end of his spear and the defiant police tracker made eye contact.

  Tom, Wallarie thought in his confusion. He was gazing into Tom Duffy's eyes!

  He hesitated and Peter could see an unexpected confusion in the scarred warrior's movements. Had he not seen this man before in a dream, Peter thought. Or was the man a real part of his life? The name, almost forgotten, came as a hiss to his lips.

  ‘Wallarie!’

  Both men lowered their weapons as they stared at each other in mutual recognition. A decade of the white man's years had passed since he last set eyes on the young man who was the son of his white brother in life. The enigmatic message of the dream in the ancient cave of the Nerambura echoed in the grizzled warrior's head. He had come north to meet the last surviving blood of his people in the next generation.

  The Kalkadoon, who waited for the killing thrust of the strange Darambal man who had come to them from the south, muttered amongst themselves. Why had the Darambal man lowered his spear before the hated enemy?

  Wallarie lowered his spear and stepped forward to acknowledge his kinsman.

  TWO

  Patrick Duffy, Captain of Queen Victoria's Imperial Army, stood oblivious to the cold sleet that drizzled monotonously around him and stared at the Celtic cross which bore the inscribed name Molly O'Rourke. The grave was overgrown with flowers that had blossomed in the Irish spring and would return to bitter weeds in the winter.

  So this was the woman who, twenty-two years earlier, had delivered him into the care of his father's family in far-off Sydney, he brooded.

  He stood ramrod straight at the foot of the grave and reflected bitterly on Lady Enid Macintosh's – his maternal grandmother's – account of the circumstances surrounding his birth: of how the old Irish nanny she had once employed had rescued him from his mother who would have sent him to one of the infamous baby farms of Sydney to rid her life of him. But Molly had rescued him and with loving trust placed him in the arms of his Aunt Bridget and Uncle Frank at the Erin Hotel in Sydney.

  It had been a traumatic night, so Patrick had been told, as it was the night that the Duffys had learned of his father's death in the Maori Wars of New Zealand. A life taken a life given, Uncle Francis had pragmatically philosophised.

  Patrick was a tall and broad-shouldered young man and, except for his emerald green eyes, he was the living image of his father, Michael Duffy, in every way. His eyes were an inheritance from his beautiful mother, Fiona Macintosh.

  But she was Fiona White, wife of Granville White, the man who part controlled the powerful Macintosh financial enterprises, a commercial empire which ranged from vast property holdings in England and Australia to shipping and merchandise enterprises in the Pacific, Asia and India. A financial conglomerate with its roots in England – and its tentacles snaking across the globe to the far reaches of the British Empire of Queen Victoria.

  The young man's eyes glazed for just a moment as he reflected on Granville White. Ahh, but he would not dwell on the man who his grandmother swore was responsible for the murder of the uncle he never knew. For now he was on leave from his regiment to visit the village from where the Duffy family had fled – a mere six hours ahead of the warrant for the arrest of his paternal grandfather, or so he had been told by Aunt Bridget when he was a young boy growing up in the Erin Hotel.

  Patrick sighed and pulled the collar of his coat against the bitter wind. An old woman with a tattered shawl leaned on her cane and intently watched the well-dressed young man who stood silently at the foot of Molly's grave. ‘Twas Patrick Duffy himself who had returned to his village, she wondered with superstitious awe as she watched the replica of another man from another time.

  When she was a very young woman Mary Casey had known Molly and together they had baited the hated English soldiers occupying their country. And together they had vigorously pursued the handsome and wild Patrick Duffy for his attentions.

  But the Protestant daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner had caught the young rebel's eye and taken him to her bed. It was around that same time that the magistrate had sent his lackeys to arrest Molly for her rebellious acts and she had been transported as a fourteen-year-old girl to the fatal shores of New South Wales.

  Mary Casey lived at the village presbytery as the housekeeper for the young priest, Father Eamon O'Brien, who was newly ordained and had come to replace Father Clancy. But Father O'Brien was not of the county born and was suspicious in his foreign ways. He was English educated and spent an unhealthy length of time visiting the ancient sites where the bloody practices of the Celtic priests, the Druids, were once performed. It was known that he even discussed the development of the True Faith in Ireland as some sort of integration with the ancient beliefs.

  Mary shuddered. The ancient ways indeed! ‘Twas a blasphemy! Her shudder however was not from the cold but a superstitious recollection of meeting the young man who had introduced himself politely as Patrick Duffy and had inquired of her where he might find Molly's grave. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ she had uttered in her fear and crossed herself to ward off ghosts. He himself had come back from the dead from that savage dry land across the sea!

  Patrick had been startled by her reaction to his inquiry. But he was not to know that he was the image of his paternal grandfather and that the old woman's fear rose from the root of her deep-seated Celtic superstitions. Without another word she had hobbled to the grave and pointed with her cane at the stone cross.

  A wind flurry from the grey Irish Sea swept the cold sleet in swirls around Patrick's legs. He was not used to the cold. Years of soldiering in the far-flung campaigns of Queen Victoria's army in north Africa seemed to have thinned his blood.

  Soldiering was not an occupation Lady Enid Macintosh had approved of for her only grandson after he had opted out of his studies at Oxford. She had vigorously resisted his desire to take a commission in the army but had reluctantly relented and agreed to his commissioning into a Highland regiment.

  The life Patrick had yearned for was not that of a scholar but one which would satisfy his strange and inexplicable desire to travel and search for himself in the desolate places
of the world. He had also been motivated by a desire to avoid returning to Australia and hence was forced to choose between two heritages. A decision either way would alienate him from one half of his blood.

  As a young lieutenant he had seen his first action at Tel-el-Kibir in Egypt. The campaign to protect the strategically important Suez Canal held by rebel Egyptian forces had been fought three years earlier and the echoes of the savage fighting still haunted Patrick's dreams.

  The Egyptians had dug a huge trench across the expected path of advance by British forces under the supreme command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley and for seventeen blistering days Lieutenant Patrick Duffy had marched with his Highland infantry across the vast expanse of Egyptian desert until they faced the massive earthworks of their enemy. Cloaked by the desert's chill darkness, Lieutenant Duffy had led his kilted Highlanders under a canopy of crystal stars towards the enemy. As he had trudged beside his men his thoughts had drifted to what lay ahead – and what lay behind – in his life.

  He had left Sydney at the age of eleven with his maternal grandmother, the formidable Lady Enid Macintosh, to live at the Macintosh London home. His entrustment to her patronage had been as the result of a pact formed between her and his guardian – Daniel Duffy – which had been forged years earlier in Sydney.

  The young Catholic Patrick Duffy had been entrusted to the staunchly Protestant Lady Enid Macintosh with the seeming intention that he be educated at England's best schools. Her motive, however, was primarily ruthless; she intended to groom him to eventually take his place as the legitimate head of the Macintosh financial empire. He had Macintosh blood through his grandmother's side and would act as a counter to Granville White – and even his own mother, Fiona White nee Macintosh.

  But Lady Macintosh would never tolerate a Papist as head of the fiercely proud Protestant clan. It was her expressed view that, given time and exposure to an English education, her grandson would see the rationale underlying her beliefs.

  Daniel Duffy had scoffed at the idea that Patrick would inevitably choose her religion. Patrick had been baptised a Catholic and a Catholic he would remain until death.

  Enid had not counted on the young boy's natural charm and her own repressed grand-maternal feelings. Over time she had grown to love Patrick as closely as any mother could. He had filled the vacuum created by the death of her own beloved son David. Such was her fear of losing Patrick from her lonely life that she had not pressed his choice between his Irish Catholic and Scots Protestant world. One day the choice must be made if he were to take his rightful place at the head of the Macintosh empire. At least his time in the army of Queen Victoria would allow him to satisfy his wild Irish blood in the heat of battle.

  As he marched with his men into battle Patrick knew that he had the love of Lady Enid on one hand and his Irish family's love on the other. Before him was the enviable opportunity to inherit one of the great wealths of the Empire – and the probable loss of the acceptance of Daniel and his family. For now, he grimly reminded himself, all that lay ahead of him was the chance of his own death or mutilation. At that moment his thoughts of past and future were devoured by the present fear as the Highlanders drew closer to the enemy.

  Would he suddenly experience the fear of the coward and run? Would he freeze in the face of the terror and fail in his duty as an officer? Would he …

  The horizon flared as if the sun were rising early and the soldiers marched in silence, wondering at the miscalculation of their officers in placing them so far out from the enemy positions before dawn.

  Sir Garnet Wolseley had also wondered at the unexpectedly early dawn. But it had been pointed out to him that the astronomical anomaly was, in fact, the glow from the tail of a comet passing below the horizon.

  Just before dawn sporadic firing from sentries forward of the Egyptian trenches snapped Patrick from his thoughts. Then the air was suddenly rent by the deafening roar of rifles flashing a wall of spitting fire in the dark. Wolseley launched his army against the unsuspecting rebel Egyptians. The flashes of rifles along the Egyptian parapet were point blank and the British bugles sounded the charge.

  Patrick remembered later how the fusillade had come as a welcome relief from the accumulation of almost overwhelming fear. Jolted from the first seconds of frozen fear, the young officer's thoughts were of the task ahead.

  He had roared for his men to follow him – and follow they did. With bayonets fixed and kilts swirling around bronzed legs, Lieutenant Patrick Duffy and his Highlanders swept forward with savage Highland screams of defiance.

  In the savage melee of the hand-to-hand fighting Patrick had lost his pistol but quickly retrieved a fallen Highlander's Martini Henry rifle. In the next fifty minutes of fighting he carved a bloody swathe through the Queen's enemies.

  Attack … counter attack. Screamed and garbled curses of friend and foe locked in life and death struggles; cries of men for mothers in many languages as they faced the inevitability of mortal wounds; a black face with teeth bared looming in the dark; savage killing fury … thrust with the long bayonet and the agonised grunt as the bayonet found flesh. The Nubian clawing frantically at Patrick's face, feeling nothing but the savage exhilaration of killing lust. More faces and bodies until his red jacket was stiff with blood. He had roared the slogans of his savage Highlander ancestors and in the killing frenzy many had died on the point of his bayonet.

  When it was all over Lieutenant Duffy was generously mentioned in Wolseley's dispatches for his leadership and personal courage. Brevet captain's rank was his eventual reward for the campaign to save the Suez canal.

  But months of campaigning in the deserts and exposure to the Nile's swamps had left him racked with malaria. It was still with him as he stood at the foot of Molly O'Rourke's grave. His military bearing crumbled and he swayed uncertainly.

  Mary Casey hobbled forward to help and found herself transfixed by a strange power behind the eyes that tried to smile off the fever.

  They were the eyes of the Devil himself, she thought. Eyes that could steal the heart and maidenhead of a nun!

  Patrick tried to shake off Mary's insistence that he go with her to the presbytery for a plate of hot soup but eventually acquiesced to her no-nonsense persuasion and followed her to the small stone annexe of the church where she ushered him inside and called to Father O'Brien.

  Hearing her call for help, the priest quickened the mandatory prayers of his office and closed his missal to hurry to the tiny kitchen where he was confronted by the sight of a giant of a young man leaning on his frail housekeeper as she hustled him onto a well-worn wooden chair at the table.

  ‘Father Eamon O'Brien,’ the young priest said, as he thrust out his hand to Patrick, who he sensed was someone of importance given his bearing and expensive suit. When Patrick introduced himself the priest detected the accent of an educated man.

  Mary Casey made herself busy warming soup – a thin gruel of stale vegetables and barley with a thin trace of lamb for flavour – in an old fashioned pot blackened by fires that could be traced back a century or more.

  Patrick felt the warmth of the kitchen flood his body like the sun rising over the deserts of the Nile in the early morning. It was the warm feeling and ambience about the priest's kitchen that brought fleeting memories of a hotel kitchen in Sydney's Irish quarter. A place he had spent the first half of his life with his Aunt Bridget, Uncle Francis and Daniel's family.

  ‘You are not from the village, Mister Duffy,’ Father O'Brien stated as a matter of fact. ‘You have an Irish name well known here, but an English accent?’

  Patrick smiled at the observation by the young priest who also did not sound as Irish as he might have thought. In fact, he did not even look like a priest, but one who might have been at home in the hallowed halls of Oxford or Cambridge.

  Eamon was thin and dark and wore spectacles. He had an intelligent and eager face that seemed to be questioning – even when his lips were still. ‘No, Father, I'm not from here,’ Pa
trick replied with a weak smile. ‘And I may have an English accent, as you say, but I'm an Australian.’

  ‘Australian! I did not know such a creature existed,’ the priest said with a wry grin. ‘But that might explain why an Irishman with an English accent would defend his identity in a land hostile to the occupation of these sainted shores.’

  ‘My family came from this village back in the fifties. Patrick and Elizabeth Duffy were my grandparents on my father's side,’ Patrick replied with some pride as he knew from the stories told in the Erin Hotel that his grandfather was a legend of sorts in his birthplace.

  At the same time, as a soldier in Her Majesty's Army, he felt a little guilty at such pride. The rebellious Irish were a constant scourge of the Imperial forces. Their foolish thoughts of independence tied up valuable military resources.

  ‘Ah, but you're not Patrick Duffy himself,’ Mary Casey interjected with mumbled superstitious relief as she still harboured a slight fear that the man had come home to haunt the familiar places of his youth. ‘God be thanked for that!’

  Both priest and soldier cast puzzled glances at her strange statement.

  Father O'Brien noticed Patrick's mystified expression and stepped in to extricate him from his confusion. He had a better understanding of the peculiar ways of his parishioners. ‘So it would be a visit you would be making us, Mister Duffy,’ he said. ‘A pilgrimage, one could say.’

  ‘I suppose that is probably the best description of why I am here.’

  ‘I have heard of your grandfather,’ Eamon continued. ‘They say he fought the British army with Peter Lalor at the Eureka Stockade and was killed by the wild black people in Australia.’

  Patrick wiped his face with his hand to rub away the sweat. The fever was not as bad as he feared it might be. ‘Yes, that's true,’ he replied. ‘He was one of the rebel miners who stood with the Yankee Californian Revolver Brigade at Ballarat.’