Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Eyre, I’ve told you, I’m not the kind of man who can point a rifle at anybody, and what would I have done anyway—even if I had seen him take out his pistol? Shot him, in cold blood? Killed him?’

  Chatto came over and removed his hat. ‘I have to take this man back to Adelaide now, Mr Walker, and thence to New South Wales, where the magistrates will decide what sentence to impose on him. Now, I would be quite within my authority if I were to require you to come back with me, too, and face charges of harbouring a convict. But as I understand it, this is Captain Sturt’s expedition, and I have no desire to displease Captain Sturt. Therefore I will press the matter no further. But, if you and I should meet again, sir, under circumstances that are in any way similar; then, believe me, I will make sure that you pay the penalty for it. And that is as God is my saviour and judge.’

  Eyre said, ‘I should like to say a last word to Mr Mortlock, if I may.’

  Chatto replaced his hat, and gave a white-lipped smile. ‘Mortlock is not a “mister” now, sir; nor never will be, not again.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Eyre.

  Chatto stretched out a hand, to indicate to Eyre that he should do whatever he pleased.

  Arthur was staring at the front fetlocks of Mr Rose’s horse as if he had seen the animal dance, and did not want to miss it if it happened again, not for the world. When Eyre came up and laid a hand on his shoulder, he kept on staring; although a shudder went through his muscles like a man with a fatal chill. His shackles clanked dolefully, and Eyre could understand why men released from Botany Bay or Macquarie Harbour could never hear the sound of chain running upon chain without their teeth being set on edge.

  Eyre said, softly, ‘I fear that we’ve let you down.’

  ‘Not your fault, Mr Walker,’ Arthur replied. ‘One of those things. Fate, in her winged whatsit. You did your level best, didn’t you? Not your fault if Mr Willis doesn’t have the necessary bottle. Not his, neither, some men are made that way. No—I was always at risk of being collared, right from the start. I should have known better than to try to make meself a respectable living. I should have known better than to get meself born, come to mention it.’

  ‘As soon as we get back to Adelaide, I’ll ask Captain Sturt to make representations through Government House to have you freed,’ Eyre promised. ‘If the expedition turns out to be a success, which I’m sure it will, then there isn’t any doubt that they’ll let you go. We’ll be heroes.’

  ‘Ah, heroes,’ Arthur nodded. ‘Well, I shouldn’t bother yourself too desperate, Mr Walker. By the time you get back, if there’s anything left of you, there certainly won’t be anything left of me. Not worth saving, anyhow. This time, I think that this is me lot. Called to lower service, as it were.’

  He looked up at Eyre for the first time since he had been chained, and Eyre was shocked to see how drawn and grey his face had suddenly become, as if each link of each shackle had instantly aged him by another year. He could have been a man of seventy; or even older. There was the mark of pain on him already; the mark of a man who had been humbled to the ground, now facing the prospect of being humbled to the death. He knew what the prison authorities would do to him. How could he face it?

  Eyre took Arthur’s hand, and clasped it. In spite of the coolness of the morning, it was clammy with sweat.

  ‘God go with you, Arthur. I shall pray for you.’

  ‘Well, yes, sir, you might pray for me,’ said Arthur. Then, through scarcely opened lips, ‘But pray for yourself, besides. That Mr Chatto, he would have taken you today, too if he’d been able. He won’t forget what you did to him yesterday morning. I know his type. He’ll have you; even if he has to wait for the rest of his life.’

  Eyre glanced over his shoulder at Chatto and Rose, who were standing a few yards away from the camp fire, talking to one another confidentially. Weeip had put the pot on the fire now, and the water was beginning to simmer for their morning tea. Presumably Chatto and Rose were waiting to have a cup themselves before they left for Adelaide. They had, after all, been riding since midnight at a fast trot, over the dry and dusty Adelaide Plain; and it would take them another four or five hours to get back, in the full heat of the day.

  Eyre said to Arthur, ‘Would you like some breakfast before you go? Some bacon, and a glass of rum?’

  Arthur shrugged, and clanked his chains. ‘I don’t see that there’s any point in it, Mr Walker, to be quite frank. Whether I eat or not, what does that matter? I might just as well starve meself.’

  ‘Arthur, you’re going to need your strength.’

  Arthur lowered his head, and then he said, ‘You’ve been good to me, Mr Walker, that’s all I can say. In twenty years you’re the first man I ever met who had any time for me at all; the first man who wasn’t a thief, or a convict, or a street beggar. The brewery sent for the peelers, as soon as I beat that foreman; and the peelers took me to the magistrate; and the magistrate sent me for transportation. I spoke up for meself; I told them that I was provoked. I told them that I wasn’t the kind of man who broke the law heedless-like. But they sent me to Botany Bay, and from Botany Bay to Macquarie Harbour, and now they have me again, after all these years but. And out of the whole lot of them, you’re the only man who helped me, and the only man who ever spoke up in my defence.’

  Eyre was moved by what Arthur had said, and touched his arm. ‘You’re a man, Arthur, that’s all; and every man is entitled to justice. That’s what my father used to say.’

  ‘Justice,’ said Arthur. ‘They’ll kill me now. This is me lot, you wait and see.’

  Weeip had made tea for Chatto and Rose, although he seemed disinclined to cook them any Scotch pancakes. Eyre went over to the fire, and said, ‘Weeip—feed these gentlemen as they require. And make some pancakes for Mr Mortlock.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Wahkasah,’ said Weeip, and laid a flat iron sheet on top of the fire so that he could begin to cook their breakfast.

  Chatto said to Eyre, as he drank his tea, and bit into his batter pancake, ‘You surprise me, Mr Walker. You’re not the man I thought you to be not when I first met you.’

  ‘Oh?’ Eyre asked him.

  ‘You’re more romantic; less practical. I don’t know what you’re doing on this expedition. I had imagined you to be harder; but you’re not. You should sitffen up, you know. Mr Walker, if you intend to survive what you have ahead of you.’

  The sun was beginning to penetrate the mist, and the camp glowed with a supernatural light, yellow-silvery but still quite cold.

  Eyre said, ‘I have plenty of determination, if that’s what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Chatto, wiping butter away from his mouth with a crumpled, blood-stained handkerchief. That’s as may be. But determination and stamina, well, they’re not the same thing. Never have been. To think you can do something; and to be able to do it—they’re poles apart. I’ve found that out for myself.’

  Eyre said to him, ‘Where were you born, Mr Chatto?’

  Chatto looked at him with suspicion. ‘Is it anything to you, Mr Walker?’

  Eyre shrugged. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Well,’ said Chatto, ‘I was born in Sydney, of exclusive stock.’

  ‘Not an emancipist, then?’

  Chatto said, with undisguised dislike, They should have kept them away. Not just by manners, but by law. Given them farms of their own, right out in the bush; anywhere to keep them separate from decent folk.’

  ‘Are you trying to explain something to me?’ asked Eyre.

  ‘Explain something? What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. You appear to be so angry.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be angry, if your sister had been attacked and killed by convicts?’

  For almost a minute, neither of them said anything. The fire popped and crackled, and Weeip turned over his Scotch pancakes, and the sun at last was bright enough to past shadows across the ground; the pale, complicated shadows of pack-horses, and tents, and eight men, in various
postures of fear and resignation. The shadow of Rose’s rifle, too, as he kept Arthur casually covered.

  Chatto said, ‘My sister Audrey was caught one day in a side-alley off George Street. They assaulted her and strangled her and left her for dead. I was a clerk, Mr Walker, just like you; why do you think I decided to take up bounty-hunting? For Audrey’s sake, God bless her, that’s why I do it. To give her the satisfaction, as she sits there in Heaven Above, of knowing that every convict who escapes from New South Wales is always at risk. I became a bounty-hunter so that Audrey would smile, that’s why. My dear and delicate Audrey. She has had her revenge, you know; but she will have more. She will have every convict who ever tried to escape his punishment. Every absconder; every ticket-of-leave man.’

  He cracked his knuckles, one after the other; and then turned to Arthur, and said, ‘Have you breakfasted? Mortlock?’

  Eyre reached out and caught Chatto’s sleeve. ‘Mr Chatto, I appeal to you. Let this man go free. Tell them you found him dead. He can give you his rings to prove it.’

  ‘Audrey begged for mercy,’ said Chatto, sourly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Eyre. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know because she was still begging for mercy when they found her; and she was still begging for mercy when I saw her in the hospital. She begged for mercy until she was dead, and that’s the whole of it.’

  Eyre said, ‘Your own personal pain is no reason for taking this man back to Botany Bay. You know as well as I do that he will die there. At least give him this one chance to get away. He is doing nothing more heinous than helping us to track, and to put up tents, and to dig for water, when we need to.’

  Chatto stared at Eyre with a face as grey as the front page of the Southern Australian.

  ‘There is no question of it, Mr Walker.’

  He raised his scarf over his face, and reached behind him to tighten the knot. And it was while he was standing in this position, with his elbows raised, that Eyre heard a sharp, vicious crack, off to his right; and saw Chatto’s head blown noisily in half, right in front of his eyes, leaving nothing but one wildly staring eye, and a skull like a bloody soup-bowl. Chatto made no sound at all, but pitched backwards on to the dust, his arms still raised. Blood was sprayed for ten yards across the camp-site, in blobs and squiggles and exclamation marks.

  Rose, alarmed, raised his rifle. But almost immediately there was another crack, and he cried, ’Ooff!’ and dropped backwards as if somebody has struck him in the chest with a ten-pound hammer. His right hand fell into the fire, and for a few moments it twitched and jumped like a redback spider.

  Arthur said, ‘Heads down!’ and cautiously, bewildered, one by one, they sank on to their knees, and looked around with anxious faces to see who had been shooting at them. But whoever it was, he didn’t seem to be intending to shoot any more; because a silence fell over the scrub; and there was no movement from any direction.

  Christopher said, ‘Dead as mutton, both of them.’

  Eyre looked back at Chatto’s awkwardly tangled body. ‘Whoever he is, he’s a marksman. And he has a heavy rifle, too.’

  ‘Bush-rangers, do you think?’ asked Christopher. There’s a lot of expensive tools and supplies on those horses; not to mention the food and the water.’

  Eyre lifted his head a little, and strained his eyes in the direction from which he thought the two shots had come. ’I don’t know. It seems odd that he should shoot only Chatto and Rose, and leave the rest of us unharmed.’

  Just then, as if he had materialised out of a sudden whirl of wind-blown dust, a man appeared, walking towards them, only about two hundred yards away. He wore a dusty bush hat, and a worn blue shirt, and brown leather boots. He whistled as he came, and as he did so, a horse suddenly rose up from behind the bushes, where it must have been lying down on its side. Christopher looked at Eyre and made a face.

  Even before he could see the man clearly, Eyre knew who it was. He stood up, and waited for him with his arms folded, the wind blowing through his hair. Hesitantly, Christopher stood up, too; and Joolonga and Midgegooroo and Weeip came out from behind the packs of supplies. Joolonga said something to Midgegooroo, and the Aborigine mute dragged Rose’s body away from the fire. The smell of charring flesh was beginning to grow unpleasantly strong, and Rose’s hand had already been reduced to a small blackened claw.

  The man whistled to his horse again, and the horse trotted over so that he could take its reins. Then he walked up to Eyre, and slung his rifle on to his back, and held out his hand.

  ‘Hallo, Dogger,’ said Eyre.

  ‘Hallo yourself.’

  Dogger looked down at Chatto and Rose, and then lifted an eyebrow. ‘Not bad shooting, what do you think? Must have been all of three hundred yards.’

  ‘You realise you’ve murdered them,’ said Eyre.

  Dogger smiled. ‘I’ve brought along some brandy. It’s French, none of your home-made hotch. Mr Abbott gave it to me, at the Queen’s Head. What you might call a going-away present.’

  ‘Dogger, this is no joke,’ Eyre protested. These two men had papers from the Governor of New South Wales, not to mention the full authority of Colonel Gawler. If they don’t come back, then the troopers are going to come looking for them. And they’ll find them, too, if they have trackers as good as Joolonga.’

  Christopher stood with his hands on his hips, staring at Eyre and Dogger in despair. ‘What on earth made you shoot them?’ he asked, almost petulantly. ‘You could have come up behind them and made them lay down their weapons. You could have—well, I don’t know, you could have hit them on the head, couldn’t you? Good God, man, now we’ll be wanted for murder, as well as aiding and abetting an escaped convict.’

  ‘Old hand, I’d prefer, if you don’t mind, Mr Willis,’ said Arthur.

  ‘Well, whatever you like,’ Christopher replied. ‘But what you call yourself doesn’t mean much, not when it comes to the law. You can call hanging a judicial termination of life by means of glottal suspension from entwined hemp; but that doesn’t make it any less unpleasant. I saw Michael Magee hung. That was two years ago—the first man they ever hung in South Australia, and believe me I never want to see another. He was choking and gurgling and crying out, and the hangman was swinging from his legs to try and finish him off. I don’t want to see that happen again, and I very particularly don’t want it to happen to me.’

  Joolonga came forward, chewing a large wodge of tobacco. ‘Excuse me, Mr Walker-sir, I think we can hide this killing.’

  ‘Hide it?’ asked Eyre. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We can cut the bodies, Mr Walker-sir, so that it will look as if they have been killed by tribesmen. Some bad Murray River blackfellows passed this way not long ago, causing some damage. The troopers will believe it was them.’

  Dogger lifted his rifle off his shoulder, and propped it carefully up against one of their supply packs. ‘He’s right, you know. That’s the best way to do it. I was going to suggest it myself, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ said Eyre caustically, ‘the fact remains that you killed them.’

  Dogger sniffed, and walked around his horse to find his bottle of brandy. ’You would have shot them, too, if you’d had the chance. It’s a question of staying alive, that’s all. And if you have to kill the other bastard to protect your own life; well, that’s what you do. There isn’t any room for fellows with too much religion; not beyond the black stump.’

  He found the bottle, and pulled the cork out with his teeth. ‘You can call on the Lord Almighty as often as you wish when you’re out here, all alone; and there are plenty of times when you get the feeling that the Lord Almighty is listening to you. Even answering back, bless Him. But when you’re out of water and out of luck, then there’s only you. You and you and you alone; and sometimes not even a shadow to talk to.’

  Eyre rubbed his eyes. The grey sand-flies were already swarming over Chatto’s broken skull, and crawling like a living grey wais
tcoat over Rose’s chest.

  ‘All right,’ Eyre said to Joolonga. ‘Do what you have to.’

  Nineteen

  They saw the last of the ocean at Kurdnatta, on the third day out from Adelaide. They stopped to rest there at midday, under an extraordinary dark sky the colour of dark-grey mussel shells. Weeip and Midgegooroo went down to the beach to collect Goolwa cockles from the rocks; which they baked in a charcoal pit in the sand. The wind from the Gulf of St Vincent whipped the charcoal smoke through the grassy dimes, and blew a stray cinder into Weeip’s eye.

  Eyre sat back on a blanket staring out to sea. The waves sparkled in the sunlight like a dazzling treasure-chest filled with shining coins; and against their dazzle the naked figures of Weeip and Midgegooroo darkly danced, gathering treasure of their own. Flocks of muttonbirds, which had just begun to migrate fom the north in large numbers, fluttered and wheeled in the sky. Weeip kept his eyes open for exhausted birds which had fallen into the sea, and might be washed ashore.

  Joolonga was silently sitting a few yards away on a sand-dune, his midshipman’s hat perched on his head. He seemed to have been in an oddly subdued and uncommunicative mood since Chatto and Rose had been shot. He had cut off the remains of Chatto’s head with a sharpened stone knife, and slashed Rose’s plump white chest into bloodless ribbons, so that it would be impossible for anyone to tell that he had been hit by a rifle ball. Then he had broken the bones of both bodies with a wooden club, and burned them. The fire had still been blazing fiercely when they rode out of camp; and as they had ridden northwards the oily black smoke that had risen from it had reminded them for miles and miles of what they had done.

  It was only when Arthur had begun to sing,

  ‘The miller, the dusty old miller

  He carries his flour in a sack …

  ‘one of his ribald songs from the East End markets, that the mood of the expedition had begun to lighten. Only Joolonga had remained silent.

  ‘Yοu shouldn’t talk to a blackfellow if he’s sulking,’ Dogger had advised Eyre. ‘He’s probably thinking about one of his legends; some story from the dreamtime. What he had to do back there, burning those bodies, he probably thinks it was all told in a legend, hundreds and hundreds of years ago; and that he’s going to have to pay for it, somehow. But don’t worry. He’ll get over it.’