Preservation

by Jock Serong

  ‘Mmm. Mr Figge mentioned that you were unimpressed with them.’

  ‘There wasn’t a great deal to be impressed with. Hospitable enough, but I saw no evidence of modern society among them. They could be subdued without incident, I believe, in the course of opening the land. They seemed to gravitate towards the lascars, which I think tells you all you need to know.’

  Grayling dwelled a moment on that comment. He felt that its obvious meaning was not the intended one. ‘Did they not respect you, Mr Clark?’

  Clark regarded him sullenly. ‘Insofar as they were capable of any intercourse with us, lieutenant, they directed it to the boy’s father, the serang.’

  ‘And Mr Figge encouraged them in that practice?’

  ‘Mr Figge does not abide authority, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Was he undermining you?’

  ‘What sort of question is that? We were trying to survive, lieutenant.’

  Grayling waited. He had annoyed Clark, raised his blood. That was no bad thing.

  ‘Can I ask you one more thing, while I am making a nuisance of myself? Then I will return to listening quietly to your tale.’ He didn’t wait for Clark’s response. ‘On the island, on Preservation I mean, what measures did you see Mr Figge take to secure his cargo?’

  ‘The tea, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a tea merchant—what did he do about the tea?’

  ‘I—I don’t remember.’ Clark seemed puzzled. ‘None, I don’t suppose. Some of it was jettisoned when we were trying to lighten the ship. At the end, you know. And once we were established on the island Captain Hamilton ordered the crew to unload as much of it as they could manage. Mr Figge seemed content with that, as far as I recall.’

  ‘Did he request that it be taken over to the other island, to Rum Island, so that it was out of the way?’

  ‘I would be fairly sure he did not. People don’t gorge themselves on tea, you know. What are you trying to establish, lieutenant?’

  ‘Oh, nothing at all, sir.’ Grayling laughed, looking to retreat as gently as he could. ‘Sometimes I become preoccupied with foolish details. Now let me get you going with the story again. There is this excerpt I hoped you might elaborate upon:

  ‘April 2nd.—Travelled 8 miles this forenoon. In the mid-morning we were most agreeably surprised by meeting five of the natives, our old friends, who received us in a very amicable manner, and kindly treated us with some shellfish, which formed a very acceptable meal, as our small pittance of rice was nearly expended. After this little repast we proceeded 6 miles further and halted.

  ‘So these “old friends” were the Kurnai?’

  ‘No, these were the Thaua. We had the shellfish. The ear-shells, you know them? Spiral, like a flat snail, very tough flesh. Gurun, they called it. And they had killed a whale and we had eaten some of that with them, though the men found the flesh hard to keep down.’

  ‘They killed a whale? Do they have boats?’

  ‘No.’ Clark shrugged. ‘There was…’ He appeared to change his mind about something. ‘They just speared it on the beach.’

  ‘Remarkable.’ Grayling wrote this detail down, scratching a hard asterisk into the page to remind him to come back. ‘Then there was this, the following day:

  ‘3rd.—Had a fatiguing march over very high bluffs, sharp rocks…interspersed with stumps of trees and other sharp substances, by which our feet were so much bruised and wounded that some of the party remained lame for some time afterwards; and to aggravate our sufferings we were now living upon a quarter of a pint of dry rice per diem. As we got out of this harassing thicket we missed two of our unhappy fellow-travellers. At 4 p.m. we provided ourselves a lodging for the night, having walked, or rather crawled, 10 miles, over the ground above described.

  ‘What do you mean you “missed” them, sir?’

  ‘They just…it was Thompson and Kennedy. They got themselves lost because they sat down to tend to their feet and we moved off, not realising they weren’t with us. An easy mistake to make.’

  ‘4th.—Waited for our missing companions until 12 o’clock, when, to our great joy, they made their appearance; we then proceeded on our journey…

  ‘A full night and morning you say they were gone. That seems…surprising.’

  ‘And you, lieutenant, seem hell-bent on cross-examining me. Once you are lost in that country, the situation compounds itself every passing minute. The way you should go looks like the way you’ve already been. The surface is rock, as I wrote, so you don’t leave footprints.’

  ‘Couldn’t they merely have called out?’

  ‘Nobody was much spirited for calling by this point.’

  I can hear this lieutenant closing in on you, Mr Clark. He will come to the truths I cannot speak, and I pray only that he reaches them before anyone else is harmed. Our missing companions! I wish I had known how you would slant this tale in the journal—I would have left when I had the chance.

  Yes, they had sat down to rest their feet—not that their feet were any worse than anyone else’s.

  What kept them, at first, was the girl. We had all seen her, though she tried to avoid our eyes. She was naked, just some strings and such about her, and although she might have been younger than me, she was grown as a woman.

  The last finger of her left hand was gone: something I had noticed before, and only on the girls. I remember my eyes fell on the back of her thighs, the most perfect thing I had ever seen. The sun on them, the long curve of a soft surface, taut when she moved: hard muscle under skin that glowed. I was drawn to her, but at least I fought myself. When she looked back over her shoulder in our direction I saw the face of a girl, not a woman, and I felt shamed by my own body. Her eyes were kind and so pretty, and I fancied she was on an errand—for her mother maybe—though I had no good reason to think it. She stood on the rock shelf above the water, looking into the rock pools. And those pig-men, Mr Kennedy and Mr Thompson: they stared at her, hungry.

  The girl dived in. She was gone a long time beneath the surface, then she came out with her hair laid down wet and her hands full of the gurun shells. She did it again and again. The times she stood full out of the water, the drips spilling and running over her breasts and her belly: still now my body pulls tight at the memory of it.

  You were right—we did get up to move off. It seemed the wise thing to do, with all the men now looking at her. If she had noticed us, she did not show it. But those two vultures, they moved straight towards her. And I watched you, Mr Clark, and I saw the decision you made as you watched the thirteen of us: our fury at what was about to happen. You drew out the short sword. Raised it in challenge—not to them but to us—and ordered us to move on.

  As you pushed me forward I looked back once. The girl had seen them now; there was fear in her kind eyes. A warning she’d been given now turning to truth.

  The last I heard as I dragged my feet up the hill and into the bush was her scream, and then the splash. And I tried to believe as I walked on that the splash was her escape: her refuge in the arms of the sea.

  You walked us as far as we could stand, Mr Clark, and we collapsed many miles from where we had left those men to their deed. The same as always: the hope of cover under dead branches and leaves, the turning and aching on the hard ground. But when the sun rose and we opened our weary eyes, a party of Thaua men stood there. In the early weeks we’d posted a watch, before the marching overtook us, but even had we kept up our watches, these men would not have been seen. They were not there: and then they were. They carried their weapons. Not raised, but there to see. No one needed to ask why they had come. Mr Kennedy and Mr Thompson were with them, eyes on the ground. The word you used later: hostages, though no one had a hand on them.

  You started talking, Mr Clark, as though the matter was yours to control. Now listen here, good fellows. Which of you is in charge? Again, as before, they ignored you, and they spoke to my father. Fast and sharp, razor-words in flakes like the heads on the cannadiul
spears. You gave up when you saw they would not listen to you. Besides, the time for you to seek respect had passed back at the rock pool.

  Six hours it took us, begging and apologising for those wicked men. The loss of all the calico we had left, and the short sword and two of the knives. And when they finally handed the pig-men back to us unharmed, the Thaua’s faces showed us only disgust. The shared feast was in the past now. Their guiding down secret ways, their shelter and their trust—ashes.

  Nobody could bear to ask what the men had done, nor learn the state of the girl. At some stage it became clear Mr Figge had formed a view. At a moment during the afternoon’s walk he took Mr Kennedy by the neck without a word and dragged him to the ground. He screamed for mercy but none was shown. No one moved to protect him; no one felt any kinship for him at all as Mr Figge drove his fists into that mean old head again and again until the blood was no longer coming from wounds you could see, but the face itself was one broken fruit and still he was hitting him. And each blow brought a small grunt of effort from Mr Figge, f lecks of splattered blood getting in his eyes, but other than that he was silent and calm as a man chopping wood.

  After a time, he dropped Mr Kennedy to the ground and stood tall again, a little out of breath, and he frowned at one fist and pulled a tooth from his knuckle and flicked it at the man’s face. Then he lifted him by his throat and examined his eyes a moment. Once satisfied he was still alive, he dropped him to the earth. Mr Thompson watched all of this in silence, for if one thing could be said for certain, it was that his time would come, too. It was the dark genius of Mr Figge that none could tell when.

  It wasn’t long after that—the fifth of April, you said—that we came upon the wide, sandy bay: four miles of it, a river at its southern end and another to its north. The southern one we knew we could ford easy enough. We had no way of knowing this river meant we would leave the Guyangal, or the ones who called themselves Thaua, but there was a change of some kind. Their men came to see us off—I would say to farewell us, but there was no fondness in it.

  They examined Mr Kennedy’s beaten face and nodded. One of them took hold of Mr Thompson with a look that said why is this one unmarked? They were calm, careful. They took my father’s hands and pointed across the river, told him that what lay there was Djirringanji. Once again, I did not know if this Djirringanji was a people or a place, or if there was no difference for our hosts. They were still using that word, Yuin, like it was a great nation of some kind, and these other words for people like Thaua and Djirringanji lived within it somehow, as we Bengalis were Indians too. My father listened patiently, and muttered his thanks.

  We made to gather our things and ford the river, but the men bade us wait and stepped into the shallows with their spears up. Two of them walked easy, eyes on the shadows of the trees. One who had waded deeper coiled himself like a spring and let fly at the surface. The spear stuck, then moved away upright as if walking off. The man darted after it, taking hold of the shaft as a strong tail whipped the water. He grabbed hold of the tail and pulled it behind him as he walked out of the river and onto the shallow slope of the sandbank. Then he lifted out a fine shark, about four feet long. It thrashed its head at the spear and at the arm that held it but the tip had gone deep.

  How had this beast had been patrolling around us as we stood knee deep, without us ever being aware of it? We are blind men here.

  A fire was made. We sat, and the shark was sliced clean along its frame into belts of pearl-coloured flesh. The Thaua men roasted these on sticks and handed each to the Bengali men. Taking their food at the hands of the Bengalis did nothing for the mood of the gentlemen.

  I remember the sorrow of that meal, Mr Clark. The shame of it. We saw your shame that day, even if you hide it now from the lieutenant. The offering of the shark meat said never come back here.

  Grayling wanted to give Clark more room, allow him to expand his tale. He was about to resume his questioning when the faintest of sounds caught his attention. A mere brush, the squeak of one floorboard beyond the door.

  The boy. He placed the observation to one side, focused on Clark.

  ‘You say the Guyangal country—or this, you said, Thaua country—ended at a river, Mr Clark? That seems to be the way your journal has it.’

  ‘A river, yes. Shallow enough; and we were fortunate to catch a shark in the shallows. We’d eaten that, so we were well fortified. Let me see…a short rocky headland on the far side of the river and we found ourselves out in the sunshine on this bonny curve of beach, dolphins in great numbers just beyond the breakers. The going was better along the beach. You can imagine, lieutenant: warm sun, the sand flat and hard and the wind soft. You feel as though you could walk forever. The only one struggling was Mr Kennedy, who was at that time quite unwell and had to be assisted along his way.

  ‘The second river crossing, the one at the northern end of the bay, gave us more trouble, and Mr Kennedy being indisposed, we resolved to go inland in preference to building another of our rafts. The walk took us over hills covered in yellow daisies, and though the river frustrated us, we’d eaten well and were moving over good ground. Much like the haughs, you remember?

  ‘My concern as we lay down that night was to keep the party together: there were rumblings among the lascars that I neither understood nor cared to investigate. It is the way of their people that something is always the matter: on shipboard they are known to be malcontents, which is why a good captain always keeps them occupied.

  ‘Of course they’d suffered, lieutenant. We’d all suffered; there was no room for special sympathies.

  ‘Mr Figge was developing an infection in the back of his hand which was limiting his ability to assist with the ordinary tasks like preparing food. Though I shouldn’t say that: he never did anyway. He usually ate by himself, ripping away at small animals he’d captured along the walk, apparently indifferent to their size or shape. Nothing about the food seemed to trouble him: he would devour it noisily and lick it from his hands, whether raw or cooked; untroubled by any distinction between meat and offal. You will see, he’s retained the most weight of all of us. I watched him eating this way one particular night: he had a medium-sized animal a little like a cat, but spotted. I watched him cracking small bones in his jaw and pulling gristle from his teeth and I wondered, had his manners dropped away so sharp in just a few weeks? If he’d always been this way, there must have been consternation when he dined with the tea people.

  ‘A certain wariness grew in us, for we had gone three days by now without seeing a native. The last lot, the Thaua; they were friendly enough but I saw no reason to be confident that would continue. They were capricious. There was no doubt that our greatest peril lay in the whims of these people. The lascars havered away and gave these people new names every time we crossed a major river, but their essential nature never changed. No more than it does here, I dare say. We were in discord about how to deal with them, lieutenant. Let me be blunt with you. We’d tried ingratiating ourselves, giving out trinkets, and it had won us some favour. But we were low on all of our supplies now, almost bereft of functioning weapons.’

  ‘There was no immediate threat posed, was there?’

  ‘We’d had no trouble up to this point, I grant you. But the case remained for constant vigilance. Some of them were in favour of just going along as we were—the trinkets, the acting as though we were a circus sideshow: all the touching and laughing and poking and pulling they engaged in. I’m a Scotsman, lieutenant, like you, and frankly it’s tiresome to be prodded by savages.

  ‘Thompson and Kennedy wanted to meet them with force, which was just preposterous. We knew there were hordes of them out there. We didn’t even know if our guns worked, and we would’ve perished in an instant if we’d relied on the blade or two we had left. The natives had spears. They had throwing sticks, tomahawks. We were exhausted anyway. Not Figge, of course.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He kept his health, as I said. Pr
obably the only one who could’ve put up a fight.’

  Grayling’s face creased in confusion. He opened the battered book on his lap and turned carefully through the pages until he found the passage he wanted. Clark watched this calmly, knowing what Grayling sought.

  ‘Mr Clark, you say in your journal that a couple of days after this—you were still inland, I believe—you did indeed come into some sort of conflict? I, err, I’m referring to this:

  ‘8th.—Bent our way towards the beach this morning, and travelled along about 9 miles, when we were stopped by our old impediment, a river, at which we were obliged to wait until low water before we could cross. We had scarcely surmounted this difficulty when a greater danger stared us in the face, for here we were met by about fifty armed natives. Having never before seen so large a body collected, it is natural to conclude that we were much alarmed. However, we resolved to put the best appearance on the matter, and to betray no symptoms of fear. In consequence of the steps we took, and after some preliminary signs and gestures on both sides, we came to some understanding, and the natives were apparently amicable in their designs. We presented them with a few yards of calico, for they would not be satisfied with small stripes, and, indeed, we were glad to get rid of them at any expence, for their looks and demeanour were not such as to invite greater intimacy.

  Clark had listened with a hand over his chin, reflecting on the words he had written in extremity, read back to him now in the safety of a quiet room.

  ‘I am not easily frightened, lieutenant. But these savages are quick between moods.’

  Go on, tell them, Mr Clark. Tell them what the matter was. That these people, the Djirringanji, had learnt through their own means about the type of men we had brought among them. That they were not going to allow you and Mr Figge and the other two passage without bond of their good conduct.