The Playmaker

by Thomas Keneally

  “Car-rah-dy,” boomed the native.

  “Ca-bahn,” said Davy. “Car-rah-dy Ca-bahn! Diam o Ca-bahn?”

  The native began to weep in front of their eyes and made a keening noise like an elongated e. “They weep easily for each other,” murmured Davy to no one in particular. In an effort to be heard over the keening, he had to shout at the native. He began to ask for the weeping man’s name. It was believed that if an Indian gave you that, you stood less chance of being impaled.

  Davy asked again, and the native ceased his wailing and pointed to Davy less aggressively with the club. “I am Collins,” said Davy, with a smile which Ralph thought of as taking some of the sting out of the two-barbed spear, the horrifying acuteness of the shark bone. “I am Collins. And I think you may know me, sir.”

  The native began to rehearse Davy’s name, the way Arabanoo had rehearsed names on the beach on the day of his capture. “Bennilung!” the native offered suddenly as his own name. He pounded his heart to indicate the sincerity of the offering. “Bennilung!”

  “Diam o Ca-bahn?” asked Davy, his hands spread wide.

  At last the native half turned and, with an open hand, pointed north. Tears still sat glinting on the layers of fish oil that caked his face. Davy moved toward him as if they were about to become fellow travellers. But the native turned again full face and, holding the shafts of the spears horizontally across his own chest, pushed Davy back. So they were to follow, but at a distance.

  Ralph was astonished the Indian was willing to pay them any service at all. This race was too compliant, Ralph thought. They did not have that crucial talent for malice which had arrived so abundantly here on the convict transports.

  The native ran ahead. He led them through further lagoons and across hilltops where the sound and sight of the ocean were immensely and noisily present. He would wait for them at difficult places—rock outcrops or fenny ground. He never let them get much closer than, say, fifty paces before he was gone again, loping among the tall verticals of trees blackened from the fires of the past summer.

  He did not permit a stop, and therefore neither did Davy. Ralph could hear the suppressed grumblings of the Marines and convicts behind him.

  At last the native led them up to a plateau covered in small, strange olive-green shrubs, all cuffed back and trimmed by the prevailing wind. Here, by words to Davy and by signs, he told them to wait. It was now midafternoon. The Marines and convicts pitched themselves down on boulders round about. The heat of the sun was sweetly cached in the rocks. The men flung themselves gratefully across them and regained their breath. After further words with Davy, the native Bennilung vanished.

  “He has gone to fetch Ca-bahn?” Ralph asked.

  “More likely to ask for an audience.” Davy smiled.

  Back in the clearing in Sydney Cove, Ralph knew, they would be mining the comic lode of Acts Four and Five under Henry Kable’s direction. Last night, Mary Brenham—with her diminishing bruises—would have slept at Reverend Johnson’s place.

  The soldiers had lit their clay pipes, and Ralph saw one of them moving companionably from group to group. It was Private Joseph Hunt, a young man of weather-beaten but regular face, who had broken the key in the storehouse lock and by this maladroitness been forced to turn King’s Evidence. His six accomplices were buried in a communal grave behind the Marine camp. Private Handy Baker rose from that closeness only to inflict a stroke on Harry. Whereas Hunt meandered on a hill above the sea, the sun on his face. Ralph pointed him out to Davy.

  “It don’t seem to have marred his friendships,” murmured Ralph.

  “It never does,” said Davy. “The people take a philosophic attitude to those who betray them. As much as they honour those who don’t betray others, they are not particularly perturbed by those who do. It’s the luck of the catch. On the one hand, the women have avoided Ketch Freeman since he is our hangman. Yet they do not fight shy of Private Hunt. So far from it that in the women’s camp the other evening, I saw him sitting and smoking with Turner the Perjurer, can you imagine? Nancy Turner’s lover Dukes lies in that grave in the promiscuous embrace of Askey and Baker and the others. While Turner, who perjured herself for him, sits at evening with the one who put him to death more truly.”

  “Turner?” asked Ralph. For he had thought that if anyone might darkly store up a vengeance it was Nancy. Perhaps she intended, like Judith with Holofernes, to bed down with him and decapitate him as he slept.

  Davy seemed very nearly to have dozed off. With his eyes closed, he said, “They are, in their way, as strange to us as are the Indians. Though they speak the same language as us, honour the same monarch, and have recourse to the same common law.”

  Ralph used the time while waiting for the native to appear again in imagining how it was possible for Davy therefore to spend his evenings with the prisoner Ann Yates. One evening was no mystery, or two. But how did he occupy lengths of time with her if she were such a different race? Ralph would have liked particularly to have asked him in view of the similarity between Ann Yates and Mary Brenham. Yates was also one of the less outrageous of the she-lags, and like Brenham she had a child, a baby son, the product of an alliance, in the strict sense of the word, the enlistment of an ally, from among the crew of the Lady Penrhyn. Ralph considered constructing an honest question on the subject of maintaining a convict at the core of your household. But it took an effort of framing as well as courage. And before Ralph could manage either, the native reappeared. He seemed quite alone. He and Davy had more conversation as the Marines and the few lags began to tap out their pipes.

  They followed him now down into a small, steep valley which sat between two fine sandstone headlands. Between them ran a sweet little crescent of beach, a robust surf breaking on it, and on exposed rocks at the northern end many native women and children digging and gouging for shellfish.

  As they got lower into the valley, this view was cut off by tall palm trees. “Remarkable!” murmured Davy, the true journalist. “I’ve not seen such palm trees anywhere else in this region.”

  But as they emerged into a broader view of the beach, any botanical interest the gully might have evinced was quickly quashed by the sight of some sixty or seventy native males, all wearing patterns of white and red, all as heavily armed as Bennilung. They were grouped in front of a shallow sandstone cave and it was obvious their purpose was to prevent another abduction. As they saw Davy and Ralph and the Marines, they set up the loud hooting Ralph had heard earlier in the day from Bennilung. “Holy Jesus help us!” said a Marine behind Ralph. Expectation that the native had led them into some sort of ambush was like a shameful redolence in the valley, on the edge of the small beach.

  Davy was conversing with Bennilung quite coolly, his voice raised only so he could be heard above the noise. “Diam o Ca-bahn?” Davy kept asking, and sallying into more complex statements which Ralph hoped would not, through some misinterpretation, bring on a storm of spears.

  Davy turned to his Marines only to tell them to do nothing. Ralph was pleased for the primed small arm he himself carried in his sword belt.

  Davy discussed Ca-bahn with Bennilung for at least three minutes before—at no signal Ralph could be sure of—the hooting instantly stopped, leaving the eora word Davy was shouting comically adrift in the silence. Some of the Marines laughed at this. But Davy went on asking for the wizard.

  There was a sort of swarming among the warriors, a coalescing. This melee produced an instant apparition—a small man, not as old as Ralph would have expected, was all at once standing in front of the army. It was as if their massed fervour had somehow manufactured him. He was a startling sight—his face white, his hair spiky, glossed with a luminous blue mud and decorated with the teeth of dogs or kangaroos. Davy showed no doubt that this was Ca-bahn. He took one step and began to make a respectful submission. He explained that Arabanoo was afflicted with gal-gal-la. “Yen-nang-allea o Arabanoo!” Davy suggested. Let us go to Arabanoo.

 
The priest with the blue hair made a speech to Davy. Sometimes the inflections rose playfully, sometimes the man’s glaring white face took on an ironic but not malicious smile. He spoke for an extraordinary time. The Marines began to shuffle. Two of the convicts sat down. The warriors remained immobile. The wind changed as the priest spoke—white caps appeared out to sea, the horizon grew jagged. The Indians might think the white-faced sorcerer had the wind at his disposal. A cold blast struck the women who had been oyster-gathering on the tidal rocks and sent them shrilling up the beach and into the woods.

  Davy looked at Ralph as the priest’s speech ground on. It was clear Davy would have liked to have communicated in some way, except that the warriors might be offended by any interruption to their priest’s flow.

  Suddenly, without any tonal signal to say he might, Ca-bahn stopped talking. When Davy stepped forward again, with the request that Ca-bahn come with him to Arabanoo, all the warriors began hooting once more and—in less than an instant—had spears fitted to their throwing sticks, all pointed at Davy’s body. Ralph had a second’s horrifying image of the porcupine-like obscenity his friend could so easily become in the next few moments. Davy himself seemed not to be much plagued with such an eventuality. “Do nothing,” he told the Marines in a sing-song voice. “He won’t come back with us,” he murmured unnecessarily to Ralph.

  Ca-bahn now took from somewhere on his body what Ralph had first thought was a stone, and hurled it lightly the twenty or so paces between himself and Davy. It landed at Davy’s feet. It was a pouch woven of stringy grass. Clearly it was meant to be a salutary amulet for Arabanoo, but when Davy tried to open it and look inside, the hooting reached such a pitch he closed it. Someone—it was done so quickly there was no telling who it was—unleashed one spear, which bit into the sand to Davy’s left. “We are intended to go,” Davy announced solemnly to Ralph. He gave the order to the Marines, telling them to load their firepieces as they walked crab-wise up the beach.

  Soon they were all back among the grove of palms, Ralph walking backwards as if gliding, unaware of his legs or the terrain, for movement in extreme fear was like movement in a dream.

  As the Marines climbed out of the little palm grove, Davy had a chance to open the pouch and look at what lay inside. He showed it to Ralph. All Ralph could see was a strange, powdery wad of brown matter.

  “I think it is human shit,” said Davy. “Though of a considerable age.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Curse or Cure

  Carrying Ca-bahn’s charm, they were back at the beach soon after dark. The meal prepared by the few convicts and Marines they had left behind on the beach was eaten quickly. They needed to cross the harbour that night, in case the arrival of Ca-bahn’s amulet might help Arabanoo survive the night.

  It was cold on the water, but with what clarity did Scorpio in the south-east and the Southern Cross, to which the Cornish witch Dabby Bryant had travelled with Arabanoo, among whose splendours she had met the Mother and the Son, glitter above the harbour entrance. The convicts and the Marines chattered away; they were going home to their women.

  The Mother in Dabby Bryant’s journey had warned Arabanoo over his congress with the pink spirits. “What if the pouch is some final curse?” Ralph asked Davy.

  “The boy is dying anyhow,” said Davy, a little airily. “Would they send him a curse? You were there the day he was taken, Ralph. According to your account the Indians were demented to see him caught.”

  “But by now,” Ralph insisted, “they may have written him off. As if he is somehow tainted.”

  “Whom should we ask? Who would know whether Arabanoo would consider the thing benign or not?”

  The question was meant to stump Ralph, for Davy was tired, did not want an argument, and still had to write up his journal for this extraordinary day.

  “There is a lag who knows him well.”

  “Bradbury I suppose. Bradbury is a happy fool!”

  “Not Bradbury. The she-lag Dabby Bryant.”

  “You want us to get that Cornish woman in to judge the pouch for us? Has the play affected your mind?”

  “Everything affects my mind, David,” said Ralph, tired himself. “There is no need to talk to me as if I were a corporal.”

  Davy emitted a groan towards the glittering sky. “So she’s done the savage a favour, eh?”

  The question shook Ralph. Davy understood that Dabby Bryant performed ministrations. This must mean she had done something for Davy too, something for which he now used the ungracious word favour. He wondered what demon Dabby Bryant had spotted on the shoulder of this man. Ralph had never thought of Davy as prey to any particular fear.

  “The native will certainly die,” said Davy, “unless we present him with this pouch. He will probably die in any case. How could we explain to H. E. the grounds on which we would introduce such a woman as a receptacle of special knowledge on the matter?”

  They rounded the harbour’s Middle Cape. There was a small fire on the rock called Pinchgut, the Capri of H. E.’s empire, where some wretch waited for the Sirius or the Supply to take him to Norfolk Island forever. From abeam this isle, the lights of the women’s camp could be seen and an expectation of hearths and she-lags rose pungently—so it seemed to Ralph—in the boat he and Davy shared.

  They moored at H.E.’s landing and sent the Marines marching back over the stream to their side of things. Would Private Hunt go and speak with Nancy Turner the Perjurer tonight?

  Davy and Ralph marched alone to H.E.’s place. Their disagreement over Dabby Bryant did not encourage any homecoming conversation. As they reached the gate in front of the viceregal house, they saw Robbie Ross and Jemmy Campbell emerging, gusted along by accustomed pique. Both Davy and Ralph paused to let them pass. “And here they are,” Robbie said gratingly. “Military men in their prime, sent forth to fetch back some wee magic for a savage. Work of moment, that, wouldn’t you say, Jemmy?”

  Robbie’s spleen restored Davy. “And I wish the divinest of just slumbers to you, Major!” he called after Robbie.

  When they knocked at the door, it was Johnny White the surgeon who answered. He led them through to the parlour, where H.E. slept under his naval cape on a sofa in the corner. A decanter of brandy stood on the table, and a half-filled glass which was clearly Johnny White’s. Johnny motioned them to sit down around the table. He asked them how their journey had been, but he wore a frown. There was great petulance in the air. Perhaps Robbie and Jemmy had left it behind.

  “What foxes me about these men like H.E., these scholars …” said Johnny, taking a gulp of brandy before finishing the sentence, “is that they would not tolerate the use of charms by Brazilian or English peasants, but they send out expeditions to find them for sick Indians.”

  “You have been speaking to Robbie,” said Ralph, laughing quietly, aiming to put some good fraternal feeling into the house.

  “I thought you might return with another savage,” said Johnny. “H.E. was hoping so.”

  “They mistrust us too much after the capture of the one we have,” said Ralph. “I have to say I do not find their wariness unfair.”

  “Well,” said Johnny, “you aren’t to fret yourselves. For the native’s fever has abated. That’s the one reason you find H.E. asleep.”

  Arabanoo’s fever had broken during the afternoon—Ralph and Davy surmised it was around the time they had met Ca-bahn, though they did not necessarily ascribe any cross-country magical influence to the native priest. Davy passed the pouch to Johnny, who pulled a candle closer to inspect it. “Why this is human waste.” Johnny laughed. “Though of great age.”

  “I said so to Ralph.” Davy yawned.

  Johnny’s fingers probed the pouch—what Ralph thought of as a surgeon’s recklessness of movement was there. “There is something else in here,” he announced. He extracted a button. “Where did this come from?” he asked. It was the sort of button gentlemen of good families wore on their jackets. A coat of arms was embossed on
it. “My God,” said Johnny White, “I know whose button this is. I am related through my mother to the family whose crest is here.”

  He held it close to the candle and invited Ralph and Davy to examine it. “See the lettering. Nigra sum sed formosa. I am black but beautiful. Holy Christ knows what the real significance of the phrase is—it is from the Song of Solomon. But it is the crest of the Banks family.” He began to laugh. “This button and this dung both belong to Sir Joseph Banks.”

  Davy laughed madly too, suppressing it all at once so that H.E. could sleep on. There was a strong image of the great naturalist on the shores of Botany Bay nineteen years past, when the first European ship to visit this coast had been in that shallow and over-praised haven called Botany Bay. Taken short, Sir Joseph rushes in among the paperbarks, wrenches his breeches open and squats. One of his heavily used buttons falls to the ground. When he is finished and has gone, perhaps cursing the missing button but unable to find it, the people ab origine move in and inspect these droppings and the button. They are perhaps gauged by synods of native priests and tested for potency, malign or benign. In the course of normal trade between one doctor-priest and another, they move across the harbour and finish up to the north with Ca-bahn.

  “But are they a curse?” asked Ralph. “Or are they a cure?”

  “It can no longer matter,” said Johnny. “For the native is now sleeping well. He has beaten the disease.”

  “Then there is no need to show him the pouch,” said Ralph. “It would seem to me that shit is a bad omen in any man’s language.”

  “On the contrary.” Davy yawned again. “I have, in the days before the outbreak of the smallpox among them, seen a native singing languorously over a heap of ordure left there by some woman he desires. They have a child’s innocence about these matters.”

  “I think,” Johnny White murmured, “we can leave to H.E. the decision about what to do with this curious little package. No one loves the native more than he does.”