Sound (20 page)

Bailey lowered the child on a rope, down the southern cliffs pocked with wind and sea, down to where the water boiled, and deposited her in a cradle of granite. She threw the tracer heavy with lead and abalone bait into the groper hole. Mutton birds and terns wheeled about, nearly touching her body, excited by berley and bait. The rope chafed and cut at her armpits but she didn't remove it, knowing it would save her from the sly surge of a rogue wave. She saw the big shark come out of the water below her, lift its head and watch her with one eye, slide past and return, checking her, as if she was a seal, just waiting for her to slip into the water. When she caught the groper, she knew, she saw the big blue fish eye off her crab berley and go for the chunk of abalone on the gang hook. A wash of whitewater hid the fish, slid away. She let the fish run until she felt the hook bite. She looked up to Bailey watching from high on the cliff. He put the line over his shoulder and hauled the fish out of the water. It slid over the barnacles gasping. The fish was as big as Tama Hine and deep, glossy blue with fat lips and milk teeth that looked like her own.

Bailey lurched up the hill with the groper struggling on the line behind him, laughing. He ignored the girl left alone at the bottom with the swell bashing about her feet and a rope around her chest. The blue fish slapped its tail against the top of the cliff and disappeared from sight.

She sat there for a long time. She wanted to climb but the
stone was a straight face and it meant travelling along the sucking water's edge, to where a thin crack streaked up through the granite that she could insert her fingers and toes into. Her feet tingled with fear, just looking at it. Her stomach began to growl, anxious and hungry.

Tama Hine worked for Bailey now, since Jimmy the Nail and Randall left them on the island several days ago. She was a long way from Dancer and Sal. She couldn't even see Breaksea Island from the peak of the island Bailey had taken them to. Just her and Moennan and Bailey. Bailey's first move after the other sealers sailed away was to tie Moennan's dog to a tree. A good hunter, that dog. A good birder too and warmth at night, but the first thing Bailey did was tie it up and kick it to death in front of Moennan and Tama Hine, so they could see what he could do.

Tama Hine sat for hours, thinking about the climb. When the sun began its descent to the west, Moennan's shining face appeared over the ledge, her hair wild against the updraft, smiling with relief as she clenched the stray end of the rope. “Ah Hine!” she shouted in language. “Thought you were gone, girl!”

That night, Bailey wiped his hands over the little girl's face while she lay like a corpse, cold and still. He could. He could do whatever he wanted. Tama Hine knew that. He put his hand on her bare, flat chest and felt her galloping heart. He could do whatever he wanted. Sparing her life was his only kindness.

Moennan watched Bailey with the child. He tied up Moennan every night, bound her arms with rope and kept her tied all night, so she lay hard on her side with her arms behind her. He swept back Tama Hine's hair from her face as she lay, frozen. He whispered things to her.

“You want to go home, little Elizabeth? I'll take you home. I'll get you home, Elizabeth. Give me a little kiss and I'll take you home.”

Tama Hine could see the whites of Moennan's eyes in the fire's light. She nodded at Bailey. Bailey's beard scraped her face and his hot, fetid tongue was in her mouth and she felt his teeth. Then Bailey crawled across the skins to Moennan and her watching eyes became obscured by Bailey's body. The sounds of the dark sea became second to that of the grunts and moans from his chest and the fleshy thuds from his fists.

In the morning Moennan's face was bleeding and her nose was swollen. Tama Hine stared at her and went down to the north side rocks to wash herself. She scooped fresh water from the spring that seeped from under the granite and brought handfuls to her mouth.

Bailey roamed the island during the day, carrying with him a large stick, a knife and a bladder of the Frenchman's brandy, leaving Moennan and Hine to get his food. He started drinking more when the swell came up and they could not go out for seal. They caught muttonbird chicks, or lizards. Bailey roamed the island, not working, shouting sometimes into the wind, came back for some food. Bailey was not so frightening when he drank all day from his flask. It was easier to avoid him and when they could not, his blows failed to find purchase. Bailey did not sleep though, when he drank the brandy. The nights were long and Tama Hine and Moennan huddled together to keep away the screaming, ceaseless wind and the restless pacing of their captor. They listened to him curse and rant, stumbling over rocks in the dark, his body slump into a nearby hollow, branches cracking, and his muttering.

When Bailey was straight, he frightened Tama Hine. He'd look right through her with bleak, blue eyes, as if something else was running through his mind. Stared straight through
her, always thinking what game to play.

“You're the quick one, Weed. You are clever. A herring queen, you are. Not like that dozy wench, cryin' all the time.”

Tama Hine nodded quickly.

“Help me get this wood in, girl.” He beckoned her down to the block where he kept his axe.

“Go on. Hold the wood for me, Weed. Don't be afraid. Hold it like this.”

He placed her hands around a lump of wood with his red, freckled fingers.

She held the wood and he swung the axe. She moved both thumbs and watched the axe bite into where her thumbs were a moment before. The log cleaved in two and spilled with startled ants.

“You a brave girl, Weed. Brave.” He nodded at her in approval and stumped up the hill, swinging his axe and whistling.

She was the brave one, and the lucky one too. Moennan, maybe ten summers older than she, was the one he bit and hit at night, who squirmed underneath him, a pinned skink under the skins. He didn't bite Tama Hine. Bailey bit Moennan. Touches for Moennan were not stroking or pats. Touches had to hurt her.

He hit Tama Hine when she lost the groper rig. He hauled up the rope, her head banging against the rocks on the way back up the wall. But she deserved that. She turned as the fish sped off with the line trailing along its body and looked up the rocks to see Bailey's furious face and felt the rope around her armpits tighten. He hauled her up as he would a big fish, struggling against the line. Her head hit the rocks and she tried to keep her body away from the jagged maw of stone. When she was at the top of the cliff, Bailey held the rope tight and struck her hard again and again across her face until her jaw
hurt so much she couldn't open her mouth and she fell in the scrubby dirt bewildered and sobbing.

“Where are those leaves?” she asked Moennan one day after her beating.

The wind began to rise against the granite cliffs, whistling through the reeds, blowing them flat against the stone like wafting smells. “Where is the plant? We gotta be rid of this here Bailey.”

Moennan knew which leaves. She'd showed them to Tama Hine when they were with Wiremu Heke at the inlet. The leaves, shaped like a woman's bosom crushed together. Three would kill a man. Tama Hine wanted to pack it into the guts of a fish and feed it to Bailey after dark, wrap the fish in bark, take out its guts and fill it with the bosom-shaped leaves. Poison him and that poisoned Bailey would kill all the big grey sharks that fed from his body.

Whenever Bailey went off on his wanderings, Tama Hine and Moennan talked about the leaves and the fish and the boat that was coming for them. They talked about what they would tell Randall and Jimmy the Nail. They began to plan their escape from the island.

On the second day of his journeying to King George Sound, Billhook found the cave on the beach where the crew had stopped to sleep. He lit a swatch of reeds and went inside. The child's drawings were still there, pressed into the hard, sandy floor. Billhook squatted, his thighs tingling from the day's walk, and touched the etching. Granules of sand tumbled into Tama Hine's marks.

Ae, Hine. You were here.

He stood and climbed back through the hole of the cave into the orange light of the evening. Crows cawed from the top of the hill and the honey birds harassed their neighbours over flowers or chicks. At the peak he saw the Bay of Two Peoples stretched into a long, white sickle, dotted with mounds of seagrass. He could walk at night on that beach, no matter the dark, and he would be closer then, by the morning.

Hunger harried him as he walked. His skin shoes squeaked in the soft sand, above the high tide mark, and he began marching to his breath and the thoughts tumbling through his head. Walking on the sloping soft sand was hard work after crashing through prickly hakea thickets all day. It was several hours before he reached the end of the bay.

A mushroomy scent and croaking frogs. The cool loom of paperbarks. There was no way he would venture into that tiger-snake swamp. Not in the dark. Billhook's travelsome spirit made him one who thought oceans ahead but this night he ached
for his Otakau home: a place where he could creep through a swamp hunting all night and never see a serpent. A warm fire and his whānau, a woman to get him grains and lizards and always plenty of good meat to eat.

He sat on the beach and looked across the bay, chewing on the edge of his sealskin until it was loosened enough for him to suck some sustenance. No wind and the water glassed off, the moon far enough west now to let the stars shine. Beyond the mountain that pressed dark against the sky, the mountain he climbed around, there was the inlet where they had lived.

Tama Hine, Moennan and me, Wiremu Heke. Over there. That was where we lived.

He awoke before dawn, before a delicious dream was ended by the birds yelling and brightness behind his eyelids. Hungry. He rolled over on the seagrass, his swollen cock springing away from his belly. He lay looking at the brightening sky, stroked himself. Gently at first, until warmth seeped into the base of his shaft and then he chafed at himself with calloused fingers, trying to capture that smoky dream woman, she with the seashelly scent and a dirty laugh. Dream woman morphed into Dancer, oiled and gleaming by the fire, into Sal and her long hair sweeping between his thighs, into the white woman he had in Hobart Town with her muddied skirts and button eyes.

Moennan.

The rush fired from his loins, his chest and from the soles of his feet. He lay feeling his heart slow its galloping beat. Seagrass prickled against his cheek.

The sun rose and shone orange on the speckled mountain. In his mind, he asked his mother what he should do. He already knew what she would say: How dare you? She hissed at him. You just wanted the woman. Thought you could take her away for yourself. She would have been better off if you'd left her on a
beach somewhere for her to go home to her people, his mother said. You saved her from no one.
No one!
You only made it worse. You are one of them. One of them, Wiremu, my son. You are no better than that Bailey.

Billhook rolled his whalebone club into his skins and slung the swag's strap over his shoulder. He turned his back on the mountain and on the Bay of Two Peoples and headed south for King George Sound.

At the French River, he followed a trail through towering red gums. Drinking from the river at one point, he tasted salt, where the waters met. He stepped across a fish trap and stared down at the young bream idling in the murky water inside the stones. The tide was too high for them to be trapped yet. But it was a triumph and a solace to his troubled stomach when a freshwater crayfish backed into the reedy snare he'd hastily woven. He ate the muddy tail raw, wary of creating smoke, and chewed the juice from its blue-black claws.

He avoided the fireplaces of others too, cutting wide arcs around sections of the river ahead when he saw wreaths of smoke curling through the trees. Once over the river he was roaming on Albert's country and there was one man he did not want to meet.

A pair of ospreys high on a gnarled limb were unworried by his presence, each gripping a flapping salmon trout in their talons, ripping out its flesh. Further along, he came across the crescent of spears stuck hard and angled into the loam, where Moennan's family ambushed the big grey kangaroos, drove them onto the sharpened pikes. By then he could smell the rotting weed of the harbour and soon he began to see seagrass in the river. He nearly stepped on a snake. They each frightened the other, as the snake tried to climb a steep, lichened granite away from the man, failed, and landed unhappily at Billhook's feet. He shrieked, shrieked like a woman, he cursed at himself; if he
had been brave enough he would have clouted the creature right there, cut open its belly to check for a poisoned prey and eaten the snake. No, he just screamed, and leapt away. And as his cry fell away, he heard the gunshots.