Part 2 (1/2)

Each day at noon during the months at sea, the commodore and Captain Barton, with Rooke following respectfully behind in his capacity as astronomer, made their way together down the ladders. In the belly of the s.h.i.+p was a cabin guarded night and day by a sentinel. As the men approached, the sentinel moved aside to let them enter the only place in this crowded s.h.i.+p that was not full of bags and barrels and things folded and bound. On a table screwed to the floor of this empty cabin, in a box screwed to the table, snug between two red silk cus.h.i.+ons, lay the timekeeper made by Mr Kendall.

It was a package of Greenwich time that would travel with them, inviolate as a pea in a pod, all the way around the globe. When it was darkest night in New South Wales, the timekeeper would still be striking noon at Greenwich.

In its inner workings Mr Kendall's timekeeper was the descendant of the bra.s.s insect slowly beating its wings that Dr Vickery had shown Rooke as a boy, but in shape this one was like any pocket watch, except that it was the size of a soup plate. It was a nice bit of wit on the part of the watchmaker, Rooke thought, to have made this gigantic thing as if it could be hung from some colossal waistcoat pocket.

With Barton and Rooke standing close by in case the s.h.i.+p lurched, the commodore lifted the timekeeper out of its nest and removed the pair-case, revealing the busy secretive mechanism within, the wheels twitching time forward tooth by tooth. He took the winding key from its slot in the box, inserted it into the hole in the back of the workings, and turned it. Then he replaced the case and slipped the thing back between its cus.h.i.+ons.

As the regulation stipulated, the sentinel was called in and each of the men told him in turn: The timekeeper has been wound. When the sentinel had heard the words from each of them-and only then-he moved aside from the door and allowed them to leave.

The rigmarole was wonderfully droll, Rooke thought. If he had seen it, Silk would have had the mess highly entertained, imitating the way Rooke solemnly mouthed: The timekeeper has been wound to the wooden-faced sentinel who had already been told it twice.

There was another thing about the ritual of the winding. Rooke was the lowliest sort of officer, a man of no importance. But during those few minutes in the cabin, rank was nothing. For that time, the astronomer Rooke was the equal of the commodore himself.

In fine weather, the whole business was redundant. But when s.e.xtants could not find the sun or moon in cloud, or the s.h.i.+p pitched too wildly to fix a sighting, the timekeeper, still faithfully telling the time in Greenwich even after months at sea, might be all that protected them from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of New South Wales.

Botany Bay proved itself immediately impossible as a place of settlement, so the commodore directed the fleet a few miles further north. It had taken nearly nine months to arrive at New South Wales: what could such a short distance further matter?

From the sea it looked as though the commodore had made a mistake. Rooke and Gardiner leaned on the rail watching as Sirius skewed to port and led the fleet towards what seemed no more than a notch in a high yellow cliff. They heard the sheets rattle in the blocks as the sails were slanted and Sirius headed for the maelstrom of white water at its base.

But the commodore had not been mistaken. Beyond the cliff an enormous body of quiet water curved away to the west. Sirius glided past bays lined with crescents of yellow sand and headlands of dense forest. There was something about this vast hidden harbour-bay after perfect bay, headland after shapely headland-that put Rooke in a trance. He felt he could have travelled along it forever into the heart of this unknown land. It was the going forward that was the point, not the arriving, the water creaming away under the bow, drawn so deeply along this crack in the continent that there might never be any need to stop.

As Sirius rounded a rocky island, Rooke saw men running along the sh.o.r.e, shaking spears. He could hear them on the wind calling the same word over and over: Warra! Warra! He did not think that they were calling Welcome! Welcome! He suspected a polite translation might be something like Go to the Devil!

With a rumbling rattle and splash the anchor was let go. When Rooke looked again, the men had gone.

They were anch.o.r.ed at the mouth of a small cove, sheltered by high ridges on either side. At the head of the bay was a slip of sand where a stream flowed into the cove. Behind it a shallow wooded valley ran back into the country.

The sailors readied the cutter for the sh.o.r.e party. A sergeant and four armed privates climbed down, then the commodore and Captain Barton. Surgeon Weymark, with an ease surprising in such a big man, followed. Rooke did not wait to be invited, but climbed down after him. He did not want to miss the chance of being among the first to step onto this place, that might have been Saturn for all anyone knew of it.

On the sand at the head of the cove Rooke felt the ground tilt under him. He snuffed up lungfuls of the air: dry, clean, astringent, sweet and sour both at once, warm and complicatedly organic after all those many weeks of nothing but the blank wind of the sea.

Weymark took a step that the ground rose up to meet and laughed so his belly shook. He was just starting to say something when they saw five native men step out of the bushes fringing the sand. From behind him in the boat, Rooke heard a series of small sounds that he knew were made by muskets being put up to shoulders.

'Steady, steady now,' he heard the sergeant say, his voice tight.

The men were dark and naked, their faces shadowed in the sunlight. Natives, Rooke thought, I am face to face with natives!

They were strange and ordinary at once: men, like himself in essence, the same shoulders and knees and private parts, although theirs were not private. A muscular grey-bearded man stood at the head of the group, the others behind him, each holding a wooden s.h.i.+eld and spear. They watched, densely black in the sunlight.

'The trinkets, sergeant, where are the trinkets?'

The commodore turned back to the boat, reaching impatiently for the bag the sergeant handed him. He shook a string of beads so it caught the sun.

'Come, my friends,' he called. 'Look, I wager you have never seen this before!'

Even his pinched face was creased with excitement. For the first time, Rooke could see the eager boy he must once have been.

Weymark went one better, made a looking-gla.s.s flash.

'Look, sir,' he cried. 'I will let you have it for your very own, if only you will come close enough to take it! By Jove they are cautious, Barton, look at them like a cat that wants the cream but fears the milkmaid!'

He laughed his tremendous laugh, and Rooke thought that made the men braver. The grey-haired one took a step forward.

'Yes, that's the way, Mister Darkie, come, come!'

The surgeon did a ponderous little jig and the man took a fresh grip on his spears.

In front of his sailors Barton could not caper the way Weymark was doing, but he had a string of beads too and was twirling it.

'Rooke, lad, get yourself some trinkets and try your luck!' he called.

Rooke picked out a looking-gla.s.s and walked a few steps towards the nearest native, a man perhaps his own age, whose eyes darted from Rooke to Barton and back again, as flighty as a greyhound.

Rooke held up a hand.

'Good afternoon!'

It was like tossing a stone into a bush and wondering what bird would fly out.

This man was well made, his chest sculpted with muscle, his bearing very straight. His chest was marked with a neat pattern of raised scars, the skin decorated like a garment.

He glanced at Rooke, his mouth ajar as if to speak, the whites of his eyes stark in the blackness of his skin. In one quick movement he stepped forward, took the looking-gla.s.s and stepped back. He showed it to the man beside him and they murmured over it.

Then they lost interest. The man dropped the looking-gla.s.s on the sand, as casually as a boy in Portsmouth might let go the core of an apple. They all moved a few steps backwards and seemed to wait.

For some better gift? Some other gesture?

Weymark decided the next move. Perhaps he thought of it as entertainment, of a piece with the looking-gla.s.ses and the beads. He went boldly to the eldest of the men, a wiry grey-haired fellow, took his s.h.i.+eld-just to borrow, he tried to explain by signs-and propped it up in the sand. He loaded his pistol, aimed from a short distance, c.o.c.ked the hammer and fired. The native men jumped back from the explosion.

The smoke floated away. A smell of gunpowder filled the air.

The s.h.i.+eld was a solid thing, a slab of wood two feet long and a good inch thick, but the ball had gone clean through it and left a ragged hole and a long split top to bottom. The old man picked it up. In his hands it fell into two pieces and he fitted them back together and touched with long fingers at where the ball had burst through the wood. He held the s.h.i.+eld up against his belly and gestured, would it do the same thing to him?

'Oh my very word, yes, my black friend,' Weymark cried encouragingly. 'Split you from skull to a.r.s.ehole, by G.o.d!'

Weymark thought it a fine joke, and so did Captain Barton, and by a kind of contagion Rooke laughed too.

The black men were not entertained. They frowned and spoke to each other urgently.

'Upon my word, Weymark,' the commodore called. 'You have frightened them now, what were you thinking?'

But the surgeon was untroubled. 'Well, sir, if they do not care for my exhibition of sharp-shooting, perhaps they would prefer a little music, they will find I am a man of mult.i.tudinous talents.'

Pursing up his lips, he began to whistle. Only the surgeon, Rooke thought, could be so casual with the commodore, but when a man had palpated your side day after day you would perhaps allow him a certain liberty.

It seemed that the natives did not like the surgeon's music any more than they had enjoyed his performance with the pistol. Their faces were stony. After a minute they took the two pieces of s.h.i.+eld and disappeared into the woods.

The small bay soon had a name: Sydney Cove. It seemed made according to a different logic from the world Rooke knew. There were trees, as there were in other places, but each was stranger than the last. Some were mops, with a bare pole for a trunk and a bush of foliage twenty feet above the ground. Gnarled pink monsters twisted arthritic fingers into the sky. The squat white trees growing by the stream were padded with bark that flaked in soft sheets like paper.

Red parrots sidled along branches, chattering and whistling. Could they be taught to talk, he wondered, or learn a tune, like the one old Captain Veare had in his parlour in Portsmouth? Catching one would be the first difficulty. The birds watched him sideways, cannily. Birdlime, or a net. He had no birdlime, no net. And he could whistle a tune for himself, although he had to admit that there was something about these woods of New South Wales that made a man fall silent.