went in to swim, finding the water much warmer in the rain than it was in the sun. Finished, he donned his canvas trowsers together with his shoes, slung his shirt around his shoulders and turned to see if there was any place he might shelter to watch the sea, getting up.
Stephen Donovan had had the same idea; Richard found him in the lee of an outcrop on Point Hunter, where few pines grew, looking down the length of the reef toward the distant out-thrust of Point Ross in the west.
“Did you ever see anything so beautiful?” Stephen asked.
Richard put his shirt on the rock as a cushion and sat with his arms linked about his knees. The rain had cleared for the moment and the wind had veered northward. A great surf thundered in upon the reef, its waves curling over like satin candy rolled around a stick before exploding into walls of white foam. And the wind, blowing briskly in the counter direction, caught the spume and sent it flying backward across the waves in trailing plumes and veils.
“Nay, I do not think I ever have,” he said.
“I keep watching to see Aphrodite born.”
The sky cleared in the south and west just enough to let the sinking sun turn those drifts of spume to gold, then the rain fell again, but gently.
“I am ravished by this place,” said Stephen, sighing.
“Whereas I have spent my time in the bottom of the sawpit with a saw across my knees,” said Richard wryly. “How goes it with you?”
“As superintendent of convict labor, ye mean?”
“Aye.”
“ ’Tis not a wonderful job, Richard. D’ye remember Len Dyer?”
“How could I forget that weasel?”
“He brought things to a head three days ago when he informed me that he was not about to take orders from a shirt-lifting Rome mort turd pusher, and that when he took over the island I would be the first man he would kill. Next to go would be my fancy blond doll, Miss Molly Livingstone. He likes the sound of ‘Rome mort’ best, it seems- he used it more often than he did ‘Miss Molly.’ ”
“He is a Londoner, ’tis the phrase they use most.” Richard turned to stare at him, but Donovan gazed straight ahead. “What happened next, Mr. Donovan?”
“Oh, I wish ye’d call me Stephen! The only one who does is Johnny.” The shoulders lifted, his head hunched into them. “I ordered forty-eight lashes and made Private Heritage lay it on. Luckily for me, Dyer had not endeared himself to Heritage either, so he laid it on hard with the meanest cat. There were mutters from Francis, Peck, Pickett and a few others, but after they saw Dyer’s back they shut up.” His eyes finally slewed to look at Richard, their expression hard. “Ye’d think they would realize a man’s preferring his own gender does not indicate that he is soft or timid, would ye not? But no! Well, I have survived over fifteen years at sea and gained respect, so I am not about to take cheek from the likes of a Len Dyer. As he now understands.”
“I would watch my back if I were you,” said Richard. “The pity of it is that I scarcely know what is going on among those not concerned with the sawpit, but Golden Grove told me that there was something ominous in the air. Just what, I do not know. Nothing was said or done in my vicinity, since I’d kicked them in the cods. Perhaps Dyer was testing the temperature of the water in your vicinity when he spoke insolently. If that was the case, then he now has ye down in his book as”-Richard grinned-“no simpering Rome mort. Sincerely, watch your back.”
Stephen rose to his feet. “Dinner time,” he said, extending a hand to pull Richard up. “If ye hear anything at all, tell me.”
The carpenters were busy building a shelter for the sawpit the next morning, so as soon as he had eaten his leftover bread and a few mouthfuls of cress, Richard set off up Arthur’s Vale, keeping to the north side of the stream. Close to where Lieutenant King had indicated that he intended to build a large barn, a group of convicts were beginning to dig a new sawpit long enough to take a thirty-foot log. All the malcontents were on the job save the temporarily ruined Dyer, Stephen supervising-with two of the new marines off Golden Grove as guards, Richard was pleased to see.
Stephen does not wish more ardently than I do that I could call him by his name, Richard thought as he gave Donovan a wave. But I am a felon and he a free man. It is not fitting.
He continued around the north bluff to where the brook gushed down that slope where King wanted a dam. Standing on top of the rise, he could see why the Commandant considered a dam feasible, for there was indeed a big depression in the ground before the vale widened yet again.
Clearing of the trees had progressed some distance farther on and was creeping up the lower slopes of the hills, quite as steep as those along the back of Sydney Town. When he saw the plantains he recognized them for what they were from drawings in his books, and marveled at their height and maturity-such growth in a mere eight months? No, that was not possible. King had gotten into the vale only recently, which meant that the plantain grew in Norfolk Island naturally. A gift from God: the long bunches of a little green banana were already formed, so in months to come there would be fruit to eat-filling fruit at that.
As the vale narrowed again the clearing stopped abruptly, though a track continued into the forest alongside the stream, which here was some feet deep in places and so clear that Richard could see tiny, almost transparent shrimp swimming in it. Around the dinner camp-fire they had talked of large eels, but these he did not glimpse.
Brilliant green parrots flashed overhead and a weeny fantail fluttered twittering only inches from his face, as if trying to tell him something; it kept him company for at least a hundred yards, still trying to communicate. He thought he saw a quail, and then stumbled upon the most beautiful dove in the world, soft pink-brown and iridescent emerald green. So tame! It simply glanced at him and waddled off, head bobbing, quite indifferently. There were other birds too, one of which looked to be a blackbird save that its head was grey. The air was full of song unlike any he had heard in Port Jackson. Melodic except for the parrots, which screeched.
At no time since his arrival had he been able to stand back and take in the sight of a Norfolk pine, for the simplest of reasons: a lone Norfolk pine did not exist, and King’s clearing technique so far was to denude an area of every tree rather than to leave an odd one standing. He had discovered that the tails carpeting the floor of his hut were the leaves of the pine, if leaves they could be called. On either side of the track was the forest, an impenetrable wilderness he was not tempted to enter, though it bore no resemblance to what his reading had led him to believe was a jungle. Small plants did not exist, starved out by the pines, which grew very close together and must surely produce but few young; some were fifteen and more feet in diameter, most were about the size of the logs he had been sharpening the saws to cut, and a very few only were slender. Their roughish bark was brown with purple in it and they grew amazingly tall before they gave out branches. Occasional leafy green trees were sprinkled among them, but most of the space was taken up by a climbing vine the like of no vine anywhere. Its major trunks were as thick as a man’s thigh, and twisted, turned, ran back upon themselves, soared upward in gnarled humps and knees, were entangled in the thinner parts of the vine’s chaotic randomness. When it encountered a tree small enough to throttle, it did so, or else bent the hapless thing sideways and compelled it to continue its upward course feet from the place where its trunk left the ground.
The valley broadened a little to reveal more plantains having bunches of green fruit and showed him yet another bizarre tree which, like the plantains, confined itself to the watercourse area. This new plant had a round trunk a little like a palm’s-they were there too, with stiff, erect fronds rather than graceful ones-but plated with sharp-ended knobs; at the very top spread a canopy of what could only be fern leaves. A giant fern! A fern that grew as a forty-foot tree!
More birds arrived, among them a small kingfisher in cream, brown and a brilliant, iridescent blue-green exactly the color of the lagoon. The most mysterious bird he did not see until it moved, for it looked like a continuation of the mossy stump upon which it perched. The movement was sudden and startling: Richard jumped involuntarily. The thing was an enormous parrot.
“Hello,” he said. “How are you today?”
It cocked its head to one side and stalked toward him, but he had the wisdom not to hold his hand out; that huge, wicked black beak was powerful enough to take a finger off. Then, it seemed deciding that he was beneath contempt, it disappeared into the ferny or broad-leafed undergrowth along the banks of the brook.
On the way back he noticed a shrub which seemed able to compete with the forest giants, its trunk very
