Sound (23 page)

Billhook expected cries of anger or outrage from the old women, or even a warrior stance from the young men. But they seemed disinterested in Bailey and were either entranced by the Major's theatre of British justice or, as Billhook was, more intent on seeing who came next.

The Major carried her. She cried out as he shifted her body in his arms. As they came closer, the kui woman shouted
what sounded like a lament and then “Moennan!” Her young countrymen began to weep first, tears streaming down their faces, their hands making graceless, angry gestures. The face of the older man, possibly her husband, hardened, his jaw clenched. The Major put her down and stepped back. A shocked hush fell over the entire congregation as they saw what Samuel Bailey had done.

Ae, my mother, my mother, you are right. I am one of them. All I wanted was the woman … and I delivered her to this.

She stood alone with the crowd of people circled around her. Her hair was matted, not with dirt or salt, but blood. One eye was swollen shut. Moennan's legs were covered in grazes. The deeper cuts looked like knife wounds. Some wounds were festering. She held her left arm against her cloak as though it were broken.

The old woman was the first to move, helped by her sisters to stand before Moennan. She wept as she gently touched Moennan's face with her big hands. She spoke to her quickly and softly and Moennan too began to cry. Gradually others came to her side, even the boys who were at first too awed by the sight of her to come near.

Billhook stood well away, held his hand to his mouth.

The Major, who had flogged a man only days before, whispered to the surgeon, “Never before have I seen a person so ill-used by another.”

Small fingers tugged at Billhook's. He looked down.

Hine. Tama Hine.

“Ae, Hine!” He went to grasp the child, to swing her up and into his arms but felt her flinch away just before he touched her waist and so he tugged back at her fingers instead.

“Tama Hine, my child. Hine.”

He squatted down to see her proper. Around her neck lay
the gleaming string of shells that Dancer had made for her. She looked uncertainly at Billhook and grasped his hand tighter.

“Did he hurt you? Are you hurt, Tama Hine?”

She still wore the bloodied pants of the drowned American boy and her fur cloak. Her hair had grown,
she
had grown, since he last saw her sailing out through the inlet mouth with Bailey and Jimmy the Nail. She nodded and her lips trembled before they squared and tears leaked silently from her closed eyes.

For several minutes the young Māori and the child stayed where they were, holding hands, eyes closed and weeping soundless tears. He could never make it right again. Not ever, not since the moment he saw Bailey rushing through the scrub with her wriggling under one arm. His tears were not for the child but his knowing what he had done, enough that she stood here now and told him that she was hurt. Leaving his home Otakau on a grand mission of vengeance, to right a man's wrong that happened years before and here he was helping the wrong man along. As he was happy to see Tama Hine alive, he also felt broken with shame and could not muster the anger he needed to rebuild himself again.

The Lieutenant's man who had carried her ashore stepped between them. “I'll take her to her family now, Mr Hook.”

“No.”

“They are waiting for her,” the ensign pointed to Moennan's family who were clustered about her. They were still sobbing and one of the old women wailed in what sounded like one of Billhook's family laments. A funereal, yet strangely celebratory, wailing.

“No. That is not her family.”

“Mr Hook, it is not for you to instruct me.”

Billhook released the child and smiled at her through bleary
eyes. The ensign took her hand and led her over to the tight, noisy knot of Moennan's family. The Major and the surgeon went with him and together, the three men presented Tama Hine to them.

The wailing stopped as they considered the child. The old women looked at her curiously. The young men had seen her with the sealers before. They muttered to the old women. She belonged with the sealers.

“Hine! Tama Hine!” said Moennan. She spoke to the young men in language and then looked beyond them. She saw Billhook.

He could see, despite her broken face and closed eye, the same look she'd given him when she'd been surprised in the forest clearing. Startled, defiant, beautiful, but now something new, a knowing coolness. He shivered with that cool glance and then flushed hot.

Moennan nodded to Billhook and he nodded back. But she was indicating him to her family, not greeting him. She spoke to them and nodded his way again. One of the older men spoke in language to the Major, shaking his head at Hine and pointing to Billhook. The Major, in a moment of bewilderment, called on Pigeon to translate. Pigeon, although he knew no local language, was happy to make himself useful in a transaction that seemed quite obvious to everyone.

“The child, she not with these people, Boss. They say Billhook. Billhook looks after her.”

The surgeon gave a blanket to Moennan. She sniffed at it warily and offered it to the old woman. He began to inspect her wounds, applying salve and bandages. She shrieked when he touched her broken arm. He spoke to her gently as he treated her. Finally, with Moennan trussed in white bandages around her head and her arm, the surgeon handed the old woman a
small calico bag of ship's biscuit and indicated that they were for Moennan.

There was an odd, formal moment, spoken in two languages from opposite ends of the world, between the surgeon, the Major and Moennan's family. When they had finished talking Moennan left the garrison, one of the older men walking close and guarded beside her as though in a marriage ceremony, the old women and children following behind them. They stepped through the reeds and purple flowers, around a perfectly round granite boulder, and into the red gum forest where the sea eagles nested. Billhook saw a flash of her stark, white bandages, and then he never saw her again.

The Māori left on the ship with the little girl and Moennan did not see Wiremu Heke nor Tama Hine again. Six moons later she birthed a child, a fine, strong boy and she named him after the surgeon who had cared for her when she returned from the island. The surgeon continued to give extra food to her and her boy, and he was the only white man the other women would talk to, for a long time.

It was good that Bailey and Heke and even Hine were gone, for they brought only chaos with them, and no law. But she still thought of them. When she remembered those terrible days on the island and the fear and the shame, she made a picture of the inlet again. That night on the water, when she was the tallest, moving that boat across the water with her big stick. How powerful she was. How quiet they were. Only the drips falling from her stick into a sea flashing with light and colour. And Wiremu Heke whispering to the child, “Fire in the water, Tama Hine. There. Hine. There. Fire in the water.”

The brig is a pig. The brig is a pig
, was Bailey's song as the
Amity
rolled with a following wind, sloughing and wallowing into the troughs.
She's a nasty little pig, this shit of a brig.
His hands grasped at me whenever I passed the crate he was locked within. At night, as we tried to sleep in the swinging hammocks under deck and Tama Hine shut her eyes tight and pretended to sleep, I heard him singing his grievous, shambling versions of a sea shanty.
Give me truth and give me clemency, Darky Hook, for I did not shoot the blackfella
.

I knew Bailey's crimes and I wanted him to swing. I wanted to drive a splicing pike through one of his eyes and throw his body to the monsters that dogged our wake. But there was just one man to be tried for murder upon this ship borne east and it was not to be me.

“Where, Wiremu? Where we go?” Tama Hine asked me as we stood at the bow, sailing through the heads of Princess Royal Harbour and into the Sound. She scratched at her new clothes. Before we left, the surgeon had taken her fur cloak and her trousers and thrown them on a fire, shaking his head at the bloodstains. He dressed her in a sackcloth frock and a cap made of spun wool.

We passed between Breaksea and Michaelmas, the channel ringing with barking dogs on the island.

“Who will look after Splinter?” Hine asked.

I told her that the lurcher would feast on fish and berries and
birds, and grow fat and old on the island with his friends. “We go to Sydney town, Tama Hine. Long way.”

“Can I go home, Wiremu?” She knew her way home, that sprite, for she had travelled these waters several times now.

“I will talk to the Lieutenant,” I told her. It was all I could do, for our lives no longer belonged to us but were mapped by the Major's scrawls upon sheafs of paper.

The child is to be taken to Sydney on the
Amity
for the disposal of the Governor.

I was to testify to the sergeant there, the Major had told me. I was to tell the lawman the story of the Green Island killing and that the prisoner Samuel Bailey did this crime. My statement was locked in Lieutenant Festing's safe, to be presented in Sydney. “There is no recourse to law here yet,” the Major told me. “Samuel Bailey is not a convict but a free man and not subject to arbitrary punishment. He must go to Sydney to face British justice.”

I do not understand the white man's law. I do not understand why they must send the child away to the other side of her world. I do not understand why Pigeon, Jimmy the Nail and Smidmore were accepted into the fledgling settlement and given rations for their skills alone, for they too had done terrible things, and why Tama Hine must leave. Mary and Dancer came in from the island with Tommy North and Neddy and were given rations too. The islanders were shunned by the soldiers, who held no power over them, and by the convicts for the same reason. Smidmore, Everett and Pigeon, even the Vandiemonian Worthies, they treated the land people with contempt. They carried their own mana, for they had seen things that land people never saw. And yet Hine had to leave.

“We are close now, Wiremu,” said Hine after three days at sea, and sure enough the Doubtful Islands appeared on the horizon:
misty, grey mounds squatting in the sea just off the red cliffs.

I spoke to the ship's captain, Hansen. He squinted at the hazed horizon and called over the Lieutenant.

“Mr Hook is requesting that we take the child back to her people who live near here, sir. But we shall soon have to beat out to sea by the looks of those clouds.”

“Then let's beat out,” said Festing. “The Major's instructions are that I take the child to Sydney.”

The Lieutenant would not move from his orders. Tama Hine sat with me on the bridge and we watched her country slide away. The hazy clouds on the horizon brought on the weather and the captain screamed to the men on the spars as he turned the ship into the wind. “Harden them up, yer bastards. Harden up!”

Three days and three nights with no sight of land. Tama Hine pretended to sleep in her hammock and when I looked over during Bailey's fruity ramblings, she quickly shut her eyes. Bailey stayed in his cramped little cage and every morning a ship's mate took away his bedpan that had lain pitching and stinking all the night. The hold smelled of vomit and the leftover scents of animals and people from its last voyage.

The Lieutenant ordered the captain to bring the ship in close to Israelite Bay, to rescue Jack and Tommy. It was nearly a year since they were abandoned there by our Boss Davidson. We lowered a little boat into the sea. The Lieutenant, two of the mates and I rowed towards the blinding white shores of the cove. We circled the island, part of what the Lieutenant called The Eastern Group, searching the sky for smoke and the craggy, stone edges of the island for people or huts, but saw nothing, only clouds of terns rising from the island.

The boat grunted onto the rocks. We climbed out and waded
through the water. “Up here,” I told the Lieutenant. “This is where Boss told them to camp.” Over the reddening succulents and the reeds and into the grove of peppermints, we found the hut made from bent saplings and branches. It was cool and green in the forest and vines grew through the hut and over its doorway. Jack and Tommy had not been there for a long time.

“Their water cask is not here,” I said to the Lieutenant.

The men threw half a dozen rolled and salted sealskins into the boat. We took the short journey to the beach and split up to search for the brothers. It is a lonely thing to search for men, to not know where to look and what you may find. The Lieutenant and I walked along the shore to the western end of the beach. Neither of us spoke but listened instead to the squeaks of our feet in the sand.