Free Bring Larks and Heroes by Thomas Keneally

reproduce the range of her virtues.
    â€˜No, it’s fruitless, soldier,’ said the artist. ‘It is too much to ask of a stranger. Besides, it could put you in a bad light with your superiors.’
    â€˜That would be dangerous,’ Halloran glibly assented. In the next seconds, he was shown the benefits of having plenty of skin on your face. Ewers sucked grief in through the right side of his long, peculiarmouth. Then he let the upper lip overlap the lower; and in the end looked immensely more pitiful than a round-faced, tight-featured man ever could.
    None the less, he still had much to say.
    â€˜What I had intended was to find in you the person who would vindicate me when Sabian and Partridge published their work. I must have someone in Britain to speak out for me, to claim that the plates have been done from the work of a forgotten Scot and to demand that that Scot’s aunt should receive justice for her lost nephew’s work. If that someone in Britain is importunate enough, not only may the aunt receive a small fortune, but the nephew, grown mildly illustrious, will be pardoned, with an assured future and much to reward his champion with.’
    â€˜But you told me a pardon was useless,’ Halloran objected.
    â€˜I was being excessive.’
    Over the river and through the sun, three symbolically large and easeful crows went flapping. They made receding sounds of disbelief, rough as horse-hair, until they became motes in the north-west. Perhaps they were what Ewers merited. For Halloran could all but smell the unreliability of the man. Ewers’ grand scheme for his own ransom seemed very chancily put together. It might have occurred to him only in the flush of promise with which the day had begun, or as the result of his humiliation by Partridge.
    â€˜I realize now,’ the artist nodded, ‘that I was beforehand with my request. But perhaps it is not too much to say that you may some day be my champion.’
    â€˜I’m afraid it’s far too much to say. I’ve too much to champion as it is,’ said Halloran, smartening up the collar of his coat to show what a prosy boy he was, and how unfit for the job. The next time Partridge disciplined Ewers, and the artist exploded into a tantrum, Halloran didn’t want his name hurled like some kind of doom in the surgeon’s face. God knows, he wasn’t a doom. Not with his simple anguish and his simple plans.
    â€˜Urrugh!’ cried one of the rowers. Because they had come in sight of three open hills. By the standards of summer in the netherworld, they were very green hills. Up one climbed a small white town in column of two. At the top of the town stood a Government House whose thatch roof was being replaced by shingles of blackbutt. Transports moved in and out and about the hole in its distant roof with the effective indolence of maggots in a skull.
    There was a hawk above the town, skating the air currents. It hung taut with desire, its eye on minuscule prey in the grass on one of the hills. Halloran pointed to it.
    â€˜That’s one they’ll never get for their aviary,’ he said. ‘And while we’re on the aviary, the word is you’dget a ready ear and no mercy from Mrs Daker. The word is she’s viper.’
    But Ewers was looking over the side, deep in specious disappointment.

6
    Under the box-trees by the river, Halloran and his two Marines ate their bread. With it, they had their weekly quarter pound of cheese, and drank from their canteens a watered-down Tenerife wine, very laxative, one of Mr Blythe’s wise buys. It was perhaps one o’clock, and the shade was very deep.
    In sight stood Surgeon Daker’s long hospital, clapboard windows propped open, drinking the cool off the river. To Halloran, drowsing in the shade, some minute shift in the air would occasionally bring the thick, excremental smell of the place. The smell and the flies that rode it gave the three