Sound (19 page)

The fish inched its way out of the grotto, snapped at a piece of crab and withdrew, stirring up plumes of silt to cloud the water. Billhook waited. The striations of stone and weed became clearer as the silt settled again. Sea lettuce lined the orange stone, a neat emerald line at the high tide mark. Billhook moved so the shark could not see him and crouched over the grotto, waiting.

When the shark emerged again, he threw and felt the barb go through its hide in one sure stroke. He held fast the rope as the shaft lolled about in the water and the shark thrashed. The stingray barbs held and he jumped down into the water, stumbling over the slippery underwater stones. He hauled at the stick and dragged the wobbegong from its grotto. The shaft of his spear took on a life of its own as the shark raged. Billhook couldn't see anything in the foaming, churned-up water.

Despite his bare feet in cold water, sweat ran down his temples as he tried to slow the shark and impale it against the sandy bottom. He felt a stabbing pain in his calf. Billhook swore, in English, and reefed his knife from his belt. He could see the whiskers of the shark curling against his leg and its mean little eyes watching him and blood from the creature and from him staining the water. He couldn't stab the fish without dragging its teeth further down his own flesh. The shark let go and he pushed the spear in further, dragged the fish onto the rocks and looked at it. Its gills undulated. For a moment it lay still, its patterns in mustard and deep browns failing already in the sun. A perfect seagrass creature, thought Billhook, almost invisible hovering there on the bottom waiting for fish to swim overhead. He stabbed the knife through its head and cut through cartilage. A black rush of blood. He turned over the fish. Woman. Her claspers lying white and useless now, against her belly.

He cleaned it, slicing through the tough skin, its gizzards falling through the hole of its gut and spilling onto the rock. Sea birds began to gather. He lay the fish on its side and cut away a slab of flesh, skinning it in the next sweep of his knife. He wrapped the meat in tight parcels of shark skin and paperbark and took his catch back to the cave and the hearth.

Moennan and Tama Hine came back to the cave. Wiremu was cooking a fish Moennan did not like to eat. He stood, his rough face gentled by the sliding down sun. He saw the grubs and the blue flowers in her hair and he laughed and laughed. He picked a grub from her hair and ate it. Then he picked out a blue flower from her hair and ate that too.

Moennan, Hine and Billhook had been at the inlet for two months when Billhook went diving one day, hungry for cray. He dived down a wall of stone near the inlet mouth, where the sea came in. Down past the swarms of little fish, down past a glossy kingfish. Down past towers of stone and kelp that rose as kauri pines to the mirrored surface.

His thoughts grew thinner and thinner, the deeper he dived. His thoughts were a string of singular things when he saw the crayfish, the twitching of its feelers in a hole, surrounded by silent, waving weed.

The water suddenly grew cold.

He grabbed the cray and struggled through the heavy water towards the sky, holding up the spiny creature, a strange, new fear of the deep making him kick his legs harder. The crayfish made its own wake in his hand, its waving legs collecting air and streaming it into his face.

A keel broke open the mirror skin of the sea.

Billhook burst into the world of air.

Moennan and Tama Hine. He saw them before the next wave in the channel crashed over his head. When he surfaced again, he saw the white sail of Jimmy the Nail's whaleboat and, closer, four faces in the little boat he'd stolen the night they escaped the island.

Samuel Bailey, Jimmy the Nail, Moennan and Tama Hine: the girls' dark faces thumb-smudged against a parchment sky.

For two days Billhook walked across the hills, following the blackfella roads. He saw no one. He gave himself up to the track, wondering whose it was, passing through cosy thickets of peppermint trees that smelled of rutting kangaroos and camphor chests.

He ate berries that stained his lips red. They'd grown on Breaksea Island, and on the Bass Strait's Robbins too, he remembered now. At the saddle between the two mountains he found a fresh track that headed through a hakea forest and then south to the sea. The prickly hakeas snagged at his vest and scratched his arms, their sharp nuts opened like hungry birds ready to peck at him.

He climbed down a stone gully stoppered occasionally with rock pools, to a tiny cove. Two fins sliced through the water ahead of him, oily and languid. He watched them, looking for the tail fins of the sharks before he saw that it was a mature porpoise and her pup. She was teaching the child to hunt along the shallows. Black periwinkle buttons dotted the rocks at the tide line. The little shellfish closed their doors to him but he prised them away with the tip of his blade and worked out the meat. Put it in his mouth. Shelly grit and salty meat the size of a fingernail, with a squirt of black iodine. He had to eat plenty to fill his belly.

He headed along the rocks of the beach and towards the next headland, where the scrub was lower and looked easier
going than the high ridges of the mountain with their red gum forests and hakea. He climbed up to a scarp of granite, watching the pearly clouds. Weather coming in. Crows saw off a swamp harrier, swooping and shouting at the hawk, noisy black scratches in the sky. The hawk dawdled in the crow country, insolent to the birds' territorial onslaught but moving away, moving away, until the crows were satisfied enough to return to their rooks.

And with all that sky gazing … a tiger snake flattened its head at him and refused to move, didn't disappear into the bush but flattened its head, lying right in the place where he would have stepped next with his face turned up to the sky, to those birds and clouds. A thrill coursed through his body and the soles of his feet tingled and sent him backwards three steps until he stumbled and landed on his backside. By the time he gathered himself the snake was gone.

No heads on sticks in this country. No impaled children to face off the invading wakas. No Te Rauparaha and his mob coursing the land like meat ants to slaughter for pounamu. Just snakes and prickles and thirst. And the kid thief Samuel Bailey.

Some sort of summary justice must be meted by Jimmy the Nail for the theft of a woman and a boat, of that he was sure. He went over and over the confrontation he walked towards. He'd seen the things they could do. What to do. No man with Wiremu Heke's history would grovel before the likes of Samuel Bailey.

He found another blackfella road and the regular beat of his wallaby skin shoes against the worn track with its roots and twigs helped him think clearly as he walked. He reckoned on another day of walking before he made it to King George
Sound and by then his mind would be where it needed to be when he found Bailey.

No. No negotiation. He had to kill him. His crew would not bother him after that.

And Moennan. Moennan. Back at the island with all of them.

He should have killed him that day. A good part of that afternoon's work stealing women and Bailey's blood wasted, trying not to look at the man and knowing what he had done with the child. Who knew what crimes he had forced on Tama Hine by now? It had been eight hours since they sailed out of the inlet. Two days of walking and no boat to get to the islands and Bailey will have already done more damage. And sold her too.

That Bass Strait sealer, the Policeman; so he had a child bride. A black sprite with twig legs and no taller than Billhook's waist. Called himself a lawman. Negotiator, mediator, diplomat, owner of a girl he'd stolen as a baby. No pregnancies: that was what Jimmy the Nail had said, wasn't it? It's better like that. Before they bleed they can fuck and work and work and fuck and not have babies. Billhook thought about Dancer's words before her Devil Dance: babies getting grass stuffed in their mouths or given to missionaries in Launceston, taken as servants by settlers who then “set them free” in a foreign country when they got too difficult. If they were lucky, the children stayed alive on the island and worked catching muttonbird chicks for their upkeep. That island, Robbins, was seething with snakes. Snakes everywhere, going after the muttonbird eggs and chicks. Kids with their arms down muttonbird holes getting bitten. Getting whipped when they didn't want to get bitten again. They gave the women gloves but the kids had to work barehanded.

He saw a plume of smoke blowing west from the next peak and wondered at the daily talking done with spires of smoke. As he walked and watched the smoke, he felt helpless and adrift
amid his thoughts of the children. Those men on Michaelmas were not so subtle with the fire that ripped up the side of the island. Talking to their whanae any way they could. Smoke. Always smoke in this country. After Kelly and his men had been through his village, burned the marae and all the houses and sawn the canoes in half, Nga Rua had smoked the old men and the crying mothers of dead sons. What leaves did she use? It had smelled lovely and clean, that smoke. Black Simon said that the Indians did that too. Not that the man had ever seen a real Red Indian with smoke and arrows. The only Indian Black Simon had seen was aboard a whaler out of Nantucket. He'd been crimped as a child by the Quakers in the middle of the Indian wars, said Black Simon. Those men who preached against war and slavery had found a berth for both Indian, and Black Simon, whose hulking frame still bore the scars of his bondage. Folk from all nations and wars, all sitting on an island now with their different scar stories, different smoke stories, abandoned by their pirate scum, Boss Davidson, waiting, waiting for something to happen.

The country changed to burnt patches of bush making his travel easier. Fresh new shoots gleamed green against the blackened earth and crimson regrowth budded from burnt branches. Christmas tree flowers flared the colour of flames. The trail was still stark through the red gum forest and Billhook's fur shoes quickly turned black with ash.

That night he set a small fire and lay down beside it on a flat face of rock. He could not remember the last time he'd lain down alone by a fire. He watched the sky darken beyond the nippled mountain, one eye level with a platoon of tiny ants cutting an ancient track across the granite. No breathing sighs, snores of fellow travellers, no shouts nor grunts or the whimpering dreams of dogs and men, no fireside songs of the women. The dusky bird melodies, the twitches and slithers seemed to conspire against
him. The sea was miles away and its usually close comfort was a distant rhythm. Currawongs mocked him while alerting their mates to his presence. He heard the clicking of a possum. Red gums swished with treetop fights and romances and the ground thumped with wallabies. And somewhere, the mournful wooing of a ground frog.

Then, after a few moments of ominous creaking, a shotgun cracked through the night air. Billhook leapt to his feet and sparks exploded around his waist. He stood, bewildered for a moment, not understanding. Someone had shot at him. He dropped down, waited for the next shot.

Lying belly down on the rock, looking away from the fire to steel his night vision, he peered into the gloom of the bush. He heard a startled snake slither past him and into the grasses surrounding the stone. Felt that fright hammer at his breast again. Lizard, he consoled himself. Lizards' legs make rustling noises. Serpents are silent.

Billhook turned back to the fire, a thing that he knew on this dark night. He nearly laughed out loud when he saw the heaved up stone and caved in coals. No gunshot that bang. No one had shot at him. No, it was the fire itself, cracking the stone with its heat, breaking open the stone like an egg.

Rattled and hungry, he lay awake long after the quarter moon sank behind the land. When he slept, his dreams were infested with cold-eyed sharks. Instead of the long-fingered naiads, toothy swathes of small reef sharks hunted him in packs as he dived down through granite towers to find the two brown girls. He couldn't see Moennan and Tama Hine and he couldn't form their names in his gluey mouth to call for them. He looked into caves and the flowering grottoes of crayfish homes. The sharks nipped and harried at him as he swam. The small, triangular punctures in his hands and feet gave him no pain or sensation.
But the kelpy streams of his blood pouring up to the curve of the sea's surface terrified him and still he could not see the girls proper, only their faces gauzy in the water like wraiths, and sharks wriggling, frenzied, through the red plumes of his blood.