Only Killers and Thieves(75)
“Yellow little bastard,” Locke said, laughing. “You won’t last the first pass.”
Tommy clambered to his feet, gathered his things, and went to Beau, who watched him warily while he packed. A horse always knows. Tommy checked his rifle and slung it on his shoulder, then stood there waiting, idly rubbing Beau’s neck. In the east the sky was a sloughy mix of gray and blue, a red sun threatening, the light barely touching the plains. The crater was out there. They were likely all still asleep. Women and children and old folk and infants. He had seen them. Seen them laughing, dancing, singing around the fire . . .
The men were mounting up. Tommy had barely the strength to make the saddle but he did. He saw Sullivan vomit a dribble of green puke, wipe his mouth on his sleeve, then climb up. Locke spoke to him. Sullivan laughed and spat. Tommy turned Beau around and stood him beside Annie; Billy looked him up and down. Billy was trembling. He gripped the reins in his fists but his whole body shook. He eyed Tommy’s rifle, then reached into his waistband for the two revolvers he now had tucked there. He handed one across. Tommy took the pistol by its grip. Six shots, loaded and capped.
“John gave me another,” Billy said, shrugging. “Don’t want you going short.”
Tommy cradled the revolver loosely in his lap. He didn’t speak. He was way down inside himself, or many miles distant, watching all this from afar. Him holding the revolver and Billy trembling and the horses stepping uneasily and Jarrah’s waddy blade humming as he tested it on the air. Locke grinding his tobacco; Pope sitting still as an owl, his sunken eyes scouring the land. The faraway sun inching into the sky and behind them the water still dripping from the rocks, Kala lying among them, her wrists and ankles roped.
“You got any of them lollies left?” Billy said. “For after, maybe?”
Tommy only looked at him. Billy was smiling but seemed on the edge of tears, the smile clinging uncertainly to his face as Noone brought his horse around to address the group front on.
“Stay together for the first pass,” he told them. “Then unleash hell. Don’t let me see none of you waste a single bloody shot.”
And then they were riding, full gallop across the plain, Tommy jerking out of himself and stowing the revolver in his waistband and clinging to Beau as they rode, watching for the crater far ahead, watching, watching . . . and for a long time it was not there, then suddenly it was, the crater’s edge looming upon them like the earth had fissured, like the edge of the entire world. None of the horses slowed for it. They cleared the crest as one. Nine riders sweeping down the crater wall in a tumble of mud and dirt that set the dogs away barking below. Descending on the camp like a flood, the dogs yapping wildly, and here and there Kurrong heads turned. Those early risen or woken by the noise. Then came screaming. At first a single shout ringing in the dawn, then a chorus of shouting and Noone began shouting also, his voice deep and otherworldly, drawn from long ago. He roared and the others roared and despite himself Tommy roared too. The camp below now an ant nest of people fleeing and running madly back and forth, men assembling loosely in a line directly in the horses’ path. The first desperate spear was thrown. It landed short of the riders and Jarrah plucked it quivering from the ground. Other spears fizzed past them but none found their mark, and soon the spears were spent. Only their waddies left: the gathered men raised their clubs while their bare feet inched backward through the dirt. A jittering, doubtful stance. Jarrah launched the spear. It carved through the air and skewered one of the men and he went down. A Kurrong boy beside him fled. The others dared to hold their ground. They readied their waddies anew. Noone called for rifles and all rifles except Tommy’s were raised, and they were holding, holding, holding while they rode . . . at twenty yards Noone gave the order, and in a thunderclap of gunshot, they fired.
Every man before them fell.
The horses trampled their bodies and swept into the camp.
28
They slaughtered them. Save a few women kept as bounty, they slaughtered them all.
29
Daylight peeled open the crater. A slow-moving crescent of shadow drawn west to east by the sunrise. The sodden ground steamed. A churned and bloody stew. Crimson soil, crimson wet. The steam whispered through the scrub and over the bodies and parts of bodies sunken there. Some still moved: inching through the slurry, dragging themselves along, raising a supplicant hand. A chorus of low moans underpinned the irregular popping of waddy and rifle butt, as the posse roamed the crater, finishing off its task. Pop, pop, pop. Not unlike the sound of a wheat field, ripening in the sun.
Tommy lost amid the chaos, rifle held before him, turning circles on his horse. Aiming nowhere, at no one, while around him the bodies fell. To rifle shot and pistol shot and the swing of waddy blade: Jarrah lopped the head off a kneeling Kurrong like a flower from its stem; Rabbit cleaved a path through the crowd, whipping side to side with the ease of splitting wood.
When the last of them was finished, when the moaning had finally ceased, the bodies were collected and heaped into a pile. A heavy slog with heavy cargo through the turgid mud. The few Kurrong who had made it as far as the crater walls could be rolled or tossed to the floor, but then needed dragging like the rest. The pile grew. A bonfire of torsos and limbs. Some were missing ears or scalps or teeth, fingers, heads, breasts: trophies taken, then discarded, for the taking had been all. They littered the soupy ground, were kicked and trampled underfoot. The kind of relics which in years to come might be unearthed and thought queer. What’s this finger buried here? This jaw, this piece of skull? Why a single forearm bone?