Lieutenant (17 page)

Standing beside that rock today he could see that the cove was empty. No smoke rose from the mound of coals on the cleared space. The huts were still there, but empty.

He felt a hollowness within, as if he had mislaid something and might not find it again.

He sat down on the rock that was the boundary between his world and Tagaran’s. The sun had already left the deep fold of the cove. The water was black, the mangroves sombre, merging with their reflected copies.

The ridge on the other side of the cove was about to hide the sun. The earth was rolling on, carrying with it the speck of life that was Daniel Rooke. Whatever took place down here among the rocks and the trees, where human beings stumbled through their days in confusion of spirit, the earth continued to spin on itself and to draw its gigantic ellipse. Its urge to fly out into space was precisely balanced by the inward pull of the sun. Whether an individual could see it or not, the sun was always blazing, always pulling, and the earth was always held by its mighty hand.

The water shifted, two ducks crossed from one point to another. Somewhere on the far bank, a bird was making the same sound over and over—whik! whik! whik!—as steadily as a man counting sheep through a gate. Out in the centre of the dark bay, a circular ripple formed that multiplied out and out, ring after perfect ring.

All this was nothing but surface for him: surface without meaning. He could hear the bird, see the ripple. That was all. It was no further than a dog might understand.

In Portsmouth he knew—so well he had forgotten ever
learning it—that when the leaves of the plane trees became yellow and leathery it meant that the weather would soon be cold. When the moon was ringed with a luminous pearliness, the next day the sea would be hurling broken water against the shingle. The fact of the leaves or the moon connected to other facts, each linked in the vast web of nature’s logic.

In New South Wales, he could not see how things were connected to any larger meaning. It gave life here an oddly disjointed and tiring aspect, like moving through the world blind.

Tagaran knew the inner ligatures of this place in the way he knew those of Portsmouth. She would be blind there, he supposed, as he was here.

She had asked him one day to tell her about the place he was from.

‘A harbour, like this one,’ he said, and pointed to show her.

He had looked across the water towards the land of the
Cammeragal
and could see it as Portsmouth Harbour, looking over to Gosport.

‘A little way across from shore to shore, like this.’

She had listened solemnly and looked where he was pointing.

He remembered the boy he had been at her age, and all the afternoons he had spent on the stony beach under the Tower, chilled through and through but dreading the return to the Academy. That boy had dreamed of beginning all over again,
of a place where things could start from zero, not haunted by all those earlier failures. To be without words had been part of that dream. Now, on this wild point of land in this most distant of continents, that childish longing had come to pass. He had marvelled at it, a miraculous naked rebirth.

‘A good place,’ he told her.

Why had he said that, when it was not true? When you only had a few words to exchange, that was what happened. Truth needed hundreds of words, or none.

She had nodded. She thought she understood, but how could she? He had not tried to explain how it had really been, how it was to be lonely among your own people.

What was it like to be Tagaran? To walk about the woods barefoot and naked, as easy as he had been on Church Street?

He looked over his shoulder but he was alone on the hillside. The urge was irresistible, like hunger or thirst: to unbuckle his shoes, peel off the worn stockings, and stand barefoot on Tagaran’s earth. His feet were as white as those fat caterpillars that were found here among rotting wood: vulnerable, weak-looking. He took a few wary steps along the track, then he was jabbed in the heel by something sharp enough to make him gasp. When he looked he saw it was only a piece of twig half the size of a toothpick. Was that how little it took to prevent him from walking in Tagaran’s feet?

All his life he had liked his own company better than anyone else’s. But now he was full of unease, like being too hot or too
cold, or hungry or thirsty. It was none of those. It was that he was no longer sufficient to himself. There was one human, of all the humans on this spinning globe, whose company he longed for.

That was an education for a man who thought he knew most things.

He had been foolish, standing on his dignity as a soldier of His Majesty. He should simply have shot the damned thing off, and let her learn from it whatever she chose.

Back at the hut he got out the notebooks that contained their conversations. They were small enough that they could be covered by his hand. Shabby and insignificant, they were the most precious things he had ever owned.

He did not expect her to return. What was recorded on these pages was all he would ever have of her.

He opened one at random. There was that first, ebullient entry:
Marray—wet
. He could remember the triumph of it. He had been so satisfied with himself, he saw now, that he had even put a full stop.

He was chilled by the confidence of those entries. How misplaced had been his triumph, how wrong the dogmatism of that full stop.
Marray
. Yes, it might have meant
wet
. It might have meant
raindrop
, or
on your hand
. It might have meant
dirty
or
mud,
because the drops on his palm had made mud out of the dust that had been there. It might have meant
pink
, the colour of that palm, or
skin
, or
braided line of love, dearie
, the way the gypsy woman at Portsea Fair had once told him.

But written down like that, with its little full stop, the possibility of doubt was erased. The meaning would never be questioned again. What had felt like science was the worst kind of guesswork, the kind that forgets it is a guess.

And, of course, he knew now that
marray
did not mean
wet
, but was an augmentive, something like
very
.

When the boy ran off, that first day, Tagaran had said
yennarrabe
and he was sure it could only mean,
He is gone
. He could see now that he had wanted to understand too quickly. He took up his pen, dipped it in the ink and turned the full stop into a comma, adding:
the English of which is not yet certain
.

He turned to the long entry which Silk had read, and relived all its awkwardness.
Goredyu tagarin,
I more it (that is, I take more of
it) from cold. That is to take off the cold. At this time Tagaran was standing
by the fire naked, and I wished her to put on clothes, on which she said
Goredyu tagarin, the full meaning of which is, I will or do remain longer
naked in order to get warm sooner, as the fire is felt better without clothes
than if it had to penetrate through them
.

Ingenious as this interpretation of Tagaran’s words had been, it was not correct. He saw that, although
gore
was to warm,
goredyu
could very well be a different word altogether.

There was room between the lines for him to admit to his
error.
This is a mistake. Goredyu signifies something else. Gore, to
warm
.

He had thought himself superior to Silk, who was innocent and smug in his belief that there was a precise unambiguous equivalence between words, and that one could exchange them as one might trade a Spanish dollar for two shillings and five pence. Now he saw that he had done the same. He had made these lists of verbs, these alphabets, these pages stretched like a net:
other inflexions of the same verb
.

But learning the Sydney tongue was not like that. Both the language and the act of learning had burst out of the boundaries he had tried to put around them. Proof of that was what he had just done. The press of the unknown had made him invent a new language, even newer to him than the
Cadigal
tongue: the language of doubt, the language that was prepared to admit
I am not sure
.

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.

The names of things, if you truly wanted to understand them, were as much about the spaces between the words as they were about the words themselves. Learning a language was
not a matter of joining
any two points
with a line. It was a leap into the other.

To understand the movements of the celestial bodies, it was necessary to leave behind everything you thought you knew. Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.

In company with Tagaran he had glimpsed how everything found its place with everything else. He was afraid that was all he would ever have: a glimpse.

T
hen Brugden crept into the settlement with a foot and a half of spear sticking out of the side of his chest. Rooke heard of it when the boy from the regiment arrived gasping at his hut.

‘They got the gamekeeper, sir. He is done for.’

He could hardly speak for panting, but there was excitement in him too, the idea of being
done for
nothing more than words for this red-faced boy, the blood vivid in his cheeks.

Rooke received the news numbly. The only surprise was his lack of surprise. The emptiness he felt within himself, the gap where happiness had once been, was made concrete by this news. A bewitched time, an impossible time, had come to an end for his private self. Of course it should come to an end in a public way as well.

‘Major Wyatt says.’ The boy screwed his eyes up tight to get the message right. ‘He says will Lieutenant Rooke kindly attend at the barracks this evening at six o’clock, sir, with his compliments, that is.’

Rooke thought, I can feign illness, can tell the boy that
Lieutenant Rooke sends his compliments but is indisposed
.

But Major Wyatt was nobody’s fool.

‘Sir, to regard this as an order, he says,’ the boy went on, ‘and Lieutenant Rooke to consider himself under obligation to be present…’ The boy gaped, trying to remember the major’s words. ‘No matter what, sir, was the gist of it.’

The news had gone around the settlement like a dark flood and in the barracks the mood was ugly. Brugden had been allowed the authority that belonged to a soldier even though he was not even a free man. No one around the table had liked that, or liked the man himself. But everyone knew that nothing could be the same now, because Brugden was the governor’s own man.

Silk was the centre of attention. It seemed that he was already master of the story.

‘The gamekeepers went to the place near Botany Bay that they call Kangaroo Ground,’ he said. ‘They saw some natives creeping towards them with spears in their hands and the
others were alarmed. “Don’t be afraid,” Brugden said, “I know them.”’

The room was silent, every man watching Silk as if seeing the picture he was so vividly drawing. But, Rooke thought, how did Silk know it had been like that?

‘He laid down his gun and spoke to them in their own tongue, of which he evidently knew a few words, as some of us do. But one of them jumped on a fallen tree and, without the least warning, launched his spear, which lodged in Brugden’s side. Where it remains.’

He looked around as if expecting applause.

‘And…’ Willstead did not quite know what words to use.

‘Oh he lives yet. The weapon penetrated his ribs but did not kill him outright.’

There was a stirring around the table, relief or anticlimax, was there even disappointment? Violence had an enlivening effect. As long as someone else was the victim it made the blood pump, gave the world an edge of glamour.

Rooke was surprised at the harshness of his judgment.

Silk had not finished.

‘Yes, he lives still.’

His voice was almost casual, so the men had to lean forward.

‘He will die, of course. But only by inches.’

‘That poor devil,’ Timpson murmured to Rooke. ‘It could have been you or me, Rooke. Mark my words, there
will be no going back from this.’

But Silk raised his voice over the hubbub.

‘One of the natives was brought to the hospital. He told us that, if any attempt were made to extract the spear, death would instantly follow.’

A silence fell around the table. Rooke felt a dragging within him, deep and private and inescapable, the way he imagined the spear inside Brugden. You would long to rip it out. That would be the worst, knowing that you could not. You would die with it next to your heart, an enemy closer than any lover.

Gamekeeper
. He wondered whether that word had killed Brugden.

‘Warungin examined the spear,’ Silk continued, ‘and without the slightest hesitation pronounced the assailant to be one Carangaray, of the Botany Bay tribe.’

Rooke had heard Warungin speak of Carangaray. The man might even have been one of those who arrived now and then at Rooke’s hut, to be entertained by Warungin’s mimicry of Major Wyatt.

The anger in the room was like a draught against Rooke’s skin or a smell in the air. He shrank into his corner at the end of the long table. He wished he were in his hut, the candle casting its friendly light, wished it yesterday, wished Brugden swaggering about as before, with no spear between his ribs.

Something had ended and something else was beginning.
He wanted nothing to end, nothing to begin.

‘The gun is the only language the buggers will understand,’ Lennox said. ‘Mark my words, a few deaths and we would be shot of them for good. Forget all that flummery about amity and kindness.’

At the head of the table, Major Wyatt gazed into space, hearing nothing.

Silk took it on himself to be the diplomat. ‘As we speak, His Excellency is considering the best course of action,’ he said. ‘He went so far as to condescend to ask my opinion of various alternatives. I assure you, gentlemen, he has it well in hand, and will act in the interests of every one of us.’

Rooke caught the eye of Willstead, sitting opposite, who rolled his eyes.

‘But when, that is the question,’ he muttered to Rooke behind his hand. ‘How long will they go unpunished, how long before the governor does what he should have done months ago?’

Major Wyatt decided to acknowledge this and thundered from the end of the table. ‘Lieutenant Willstead, I will thank you to have a care, if you please, let us hear no more of this!’

Lennox had continued to think about what a musket might do. ‘Simple enough matter to round up some of the ones here among us,’ he said. ‘Make an example. Would soon get back to the rest. They are all in league with each other, you know.’

‘They none of them can be trusted,’ Willstead said. ‘They
have never been known to attack in fair fight. They lurk and they skulk and they smile, and attack a man only when he is unarmed. I believe, in fact, that they do not even have a word for treachery in their vocabulary.’

On the word
vocabulary
Silk glanced down the table at Rooke, but said nothing.

Rooke had no idea whether the natives had a word for treachery. His conversations with Tagaran had never travelled in that direction.

Even in English, treachery was a word with a broader reach than it was entitled to. What it boiled down to was that the men in this hut had been taught to fight by certain rules. Not fighting in accordance with those rules was treachery.

There might be another way of looking at what the natives did, Rooke thought. He imagined Warungin explaining. Uninvited guests had arrived in his home. They had been pleasant, offered small gifts. But then they had stayed, longer than visitors should, and rearranged the place to suit themselves.

His grandmother had had a saying for it.
There are two things
that stink after three days
, she would say.
Fish and visitors
.

Late the next day Rooke heard footsteps outside. He leaped up from the table, in his haste knocking over the chair. He almost fell across the room to the doorway. But it was not Tagaran.

For once Silk was grave-faced. He came into the hut, taking a seat in front of the fire without waiting to be asked.

‘Well, Rooke,’ he said. ‘It seems that we are to be sent out on a task of considerable significance.’

Rooke busied himself filling their cups with sweet-tea.

Silk answered the question Rooke had not asked. ‘To Botany Bay,’ he said. ‘Where they got Brugden. The governor summoned me this afternoon. A punitive expedition is to be mounted, which I have the honour of leading.’

Rooke saw a shine in his eye and something about the corners of his mouth that was at odds with his solemn manner.

‘Well done,’ Rooke said, and raised his cup.

‘Thank you, Rooke! It is gratifying, I own, to have the governor’s notice in this matter.’

‘Carangaray. That is the name, I think. Of the man?’

Rooke’s voice was flat but he noticed with interest that his heart was beating fast. Silk took the raised cup as a toast, clinked his own against Rooke’s.

‘Carangaray is indeed the name, and my instructions are simple. We are to bring in six of those natives who reside near the head of Botany Bay.’

‘Six of the natives? Not Carangaray alone?’

‘Actually, Rooke, between you and me, the governor had wished to bring in ten men. I suggested that six would serve the purpose as well, and he was kind enough to agree with my view.’

‘Ten men,’ Rooke said. ‘I see.’

But Silk was not concerned with arithmetic.

‘When the governor asked which men I wished to make up the party, naturally yours was the first name I mentioned. You and Willstead and myself. Two days, thirty privates, double rations.’

Rooke smoothed with a finger at his cup, where a crack made a line down one side. He tried to picture it: the string of men walking through the woods, thirty men and the officers, double rations bouncing along in the packs on their backs, a musket hanging from its strap over every man’s shoulder.

He could see the picture, could hear the clanking of their kettles as they marched, the snapping of the twigs. But he could not see himself. Could not put himself in that line of men, the compass in his hand, the gun over his own shoulder.

Being reminded that he was a soldier, a man who had sworn to serve and obey, was like forcing open a rusted hinge.

‘No,’ he said without thinking. Once uttered, it seemed right. ‘I think not. No.’

The wind flung itself in spurts against the hut, rattling the flap of the door, making the canvas of the observatory dome thrum and snap.

Silk fingered the whitewashed planks of the wall beside his shoulder. A speck of white drifted down, passing brilliantly, as if showing off, through a beam of sunset that streamed in where the mud between the planks had fallen away.

It was as if he had not heard Rooke speak.

‘The governor asked me, which officers would I take? I named them. Rooke and Willstead.’

He licked his finger and used the spit to glue back some loose flakes of whitewash.

‘See? He has your name, Rooke.’

The stripe of sun fell on his scarlet shoulder, putting his face in shadow.

‘I think no is not an answer.’

Thirty men walking through the woods, each man watching his feet and the back of the man in front. And behind trees and in the high places of rocks, the natives watching. Seeing kamara, friend of Tagaran, a person in whose mouth their language was beginning to take shape, marching with the others, his musket over his shoulder.

He could not think of the words that would turn Silk away.

‘Do you know, Silk,’ he exclaimed, hearing his voice a little wild, ‘I have found that they use the dual plural, like Greek. Dual pronouns too, I think, though am not sure, but have collected some examples…
You and me, or all of us
, or
me and these others but
not you
, all embedded in the pronoun! While English makes only the crudest of distinctions! Imagine, Silk, a race of people using a language as supple as that of Sophocles and Homer!’