From Rose Hill, Silk sent Rooke messages to the effect that the breadbasket of the colony was even quieter and stupider than he had feared, and that all he had to show for those weeks was an understanding of clod moulding, information he would just as soon have gone to his grave without. If the governor did not soon send for him, he wrote, he would be forced to come down with some painless but disabling ailment in order to rejoin the human race in Sydney Cove.
In Silk’s hands, even the complete absence of material in itself became material. Rooke read his notes and wondered if Silk had made a copy for his narrative. Or would he expect Rooke to keep his correspondence?
He had just dismissed the messenger when another arrived to summon him to the parade ground. A prisoner had been caught digging up potatoes in the government garden and secreting them under his coat. He was to be flogged.
Rooke knew that the settlement could not tolerate the theft of food. No one could argue with that. But hunger was beginning to dominate everyone’s days. The prisoner women had scoured the shoreline around the bays, picking off every limpet and winkle, but were still pale and scrawny, their eyes dull. The only person in the settlement that Rooke had seen still looking robust was the gamekeeper, Brugden. Out in the woods, who was watching if the hunter ate what he shot rather than bring it back for the communal pot?
As for this poor devil who had taken the potatoes, well, man was an organism that demanded food. To take food when it was available was—purely in scientific terms—a correct response to hunger.
The hard-faced judgment that called the action theft and demanded punishment was another matter.
As a servant of His Majesty it was justice Rooke was obliged to obey, but he wished the prisoner had not stolen the potatoes. Had not tried to hide them under his coat. Above all, that he had not been caught.
The man was very fair, his curly hair shining like wire in the sun, the skin of his back so white as to be almost luminous. And gleaming: the poor wretch was sweating. His body knew what was coming.
All the marines were obliged to be present, and most of the prisoners. What was the point of punishment if no one saw it? Warungin was there too, standing beside the governor and glancing about. Rooke supposed this must be part of his education. There was British civilisation, in the form of china plates and toasts to the king, and there was British justice.
Warungin was unconcerned, only interested. Unlike everyone else present, he did not know what he was about to see.
A thought occurred to Rooke. He slid his eyes around while keeping his head at the regulation angle. With the intensity of prayer he hoped that he would not see Tagaran watching from behind the trees, wondering at this unusual gathering of the Berewalgal.
And if she were? If he caught sight of her, peeping out from behind a tree with that look she had, avid for knowledge? Would he break ranks, go over to her—somehow make her understand that she must leave, cover her eyes, block her ears—while the ranks of other redcoats looked on?
He stood at attention with his musket at the slope. He was already sweating in his jacket, his heart was thudding, and the thing had not yet started.
He was close enough to hear the governor explaining to Warungin, pointing towards the thief lashed to the triangle in the bright empty space where the ground beat back the light.
‘A bad man. Stole food.’
Warungin watched the words form on the governor’s lips.
‘This man took food that did not belong to him.’
Warungin nodded, whether with real understanding Rooke could not say.
‘So we punish.’ The governor was determined to be clear. ‘Every man is the same. If he steals, he is punished.’
It was interesting to hear that magnificent idea—the product of hundreds of years of British civilisation—spelled out so plain.
Then the flogger came out onto the patch of sandy ground. He shook out the cat, separating the tails, thwacked the butt into his palm once or twice.
Even the birds seemed to have fallen silent.
Rooke set himself to thinking of the muscles in his back. How ingenious was the mechanism of the spine, that could hold the body upright no matter what was going on in its head. He thought of his feet. Such small balancing points, and yet they knew how to stop him toppling. He imagined a carved replica of himself, complete with musket, jacket and wooden face, standing on a base as narrow as his feet. Would it fall over? He thought of the way the ground was pressing up against the soles of his shoes. Or rather the way his feet were pressing down into the ground. That was gravity. It was the tremendous hand that kept the cosmos in its place. Kepler had got close to understanding, Newton had snared it in words. Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle.
Rooke was performing a species of magic, or trying to. He was removing himself from the place and time he occupied, while leaving his body there staring into the middle distance, musket at the correct angle.
At the first sickening crack of the knots against the skin, the prisoner cried out, but so did someone else. Rooke saw Warungin trying to rush forward, shouting at the flogger, his face distorted. He strained against the governor holding him back and looked wildly around at the marines in their ranks. He met Rooke’s eyes and shouted to him, some word over and over. Across the space between them it was one man begging another.
Lieutenant Rooke looked away. He stiffened his neck further back into his collar, gripped the butt of his musket more tightly. He could feel the sweat slimy on the wood. His collar was choking him, his cap was squeezing his head, his jacket seemed made of iron. Stop, stop, stop, was the only word his brain could produce. Stop, to Warungin, to make him not go on calling to him. Stop, to the flogger, to drop the whip, walk away. Stop, to the governor, to take pity on all of them.
He clenched his hand around the gun, squeezed up his toes in his shoes. He was a stone, a piece of wood, a replica of a man.
Wyatt and Weymark on either side had got hold of Warungin’s arms. Between the inhuman noises the prisoner made at each stroke, Rooke could hear the governor continuing to work away at explanation.
‘Bad,’ Rooke heard. ‘Bad man. Thief.’
The governor’s face pinched up, trying to make Warungin understand.
‘Took food. Stole food that was not his food.’
Warungin had stopped struggling but his face was turned away from where a man’s back was methodically being reduced to red pulp. Rooke could see the powerful tendons in his neck straining. At each stroke and each cry from the prisoner, Warungin flinched.
This was justice: impartial, blind, noble. The horror of the punishment was the proof of its impartiality. If it did not hurt, it was not justice. That was what the governor was trying to convey, but the noble concepts evaporated in the light.
Rooke heard the shocking wet slap of the cat landing on split flesh, twenty times, thirty times, fifty times. At each stroke, the man’s body convulsed against the ropes that held him to the triangle. The flogger had to stop and comb his fingers through the tails of the whip after each lash to clear the flesh that clogged them.
The prisoner endured seventy-four lashes before his body sagged from the ropes. It was Surgeon Weymark’s job to judge whether the wretch had taken all he could on this occasion. He barely touched the man’s wrist in a gesture of taking his pulse before nodding that, yes, he had had enough, cut him down.
A hundred and twenty-six lashes left for next time. Rooke thought that the idea of that waiting for you might be worse than the present pain.
Even when the man was cut down and dragged off, Warungin’s mouth was still a peculiar strained shape. There was a grey overlay, like a dusting of ash, to the brown skin of his face. He was staring down. Rooke thought he might be about to vomit.
The governor touched his arm.
‘It is over, my friend,’ Rooke heard him begin.
But at his touch Warungin flung up his arm as if the governor’s hand were red-hot.
‘Let us return to my house, I will give you something to eat,’ the governor said.
Warungin did not reply, did not look at the governor or any of the other assembled Berewalgal. He did not even glance at Rooke. As soon as Wyatt released him he turned his back and walked away. Rooke watched him go, this man with whom he had sat cross-legged on the ground.
Warungin was not thinking punishment, justice, impartial. All he could see was that the Berewalgal had gathered in their best clothes to inflict pain beyond imagining on one of their own. Seen through his eyes, this ceremony was not an unfortunate but necessary part of the grand machine of civilisation. It looked like a choice. When those fine abstractions fell away, all that remained was cruelty.
And Rooke had been part of it. He had not cried out with horror or rushed forward to put an end to it. He had looked away when Warungin called to him.
Chosen to look away. No one had held him there. He had made that choice, because he was a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Marine Force.
There it was, in the very words. Force was his job. If he was a soldier, he was as much a part of that cruelty as the man who had wielded the whip.