Free A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley Page B

it.’
    â€˜No.’ Boyd was mopping his fat sweating face.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜God fuck Ireland,’ Boyd said simply. ‘I said, no. And no again. I’ve had enough.’
    â€˜You’ll do what you’re bloody told.’
    Boyd smiled. His fat was of the genial kind, but his eyes were sharp. ‘I’m not going to watch you,’ he said flatly, ‘butcher those poor devils. I don’t know why I came except to see fair play. And watch self-righteousness in action.’
    â€˜Well,go to buggery!’ Buckmaster roared.
    â€˜Thank you,’ Mr Boyd said, ‘I will’—turning his horse on the word to trot it away into the trees to the north.
    â€˜Oh, my God!’ Buckmaster cried, appealing to Barney Sweetman. ‘Are we ready, then?’
    The others were dismounted, their rifles cocked. Over all the faces was a sheen of appetite for something. They had a foxish look under the moving tree light.
    â€˜Fan out!’ young Buckmaster cried. And the men worked themselves into a straggling line about the base to begin working their way up the slope, their feet constantly slipping and crunching on stone and gravel, their lumbering bodies bent forward with the effort of it, sixty degrees in spots once they had cleared the scrub; but their steady climb took them slowly upward towards the flattened altar of Mandarana.
    Fred Buckmaster kept his glinting eyes on possibilities slipping brownly away at the crest, and once, stupidly, he aimed and fired at what he thought was a straggler while his impulse released something in all the men who began blasting away at tree and rock.
    â€˜Hold it!’ canny Sweetman roared down the line. ‘Oh, hold it now!’
    They crawled up another two hundred feet and it seemed they had the mountain to themselves under this hot sun. The light was dry and brilliant. Nothingness was scarred by crow-cry, distant and sad. Only rock, scrub and the long line of fox-faced men moving in towards a massacre. They were only ten yards apart now as the cone of the mountain narrowed and could hear one another’s snorting breaths and the clink of boot on rock.
    Just before the ground began to level out, there came a shower of spears and stones, a poor volley that would have had Mr Boyd in tears for the poverty of its protest. The men ducked, lay on the baking earth, and reloaded.
    â€˜Fire!’ Freddie Buckmaster ordered his troops, and the uselessshot whined up over the crest while the rattle of the rifles died away as they still lay there a minute before scrambling on.
    When they came over the lip, the ground stretched flat for several hundred yards to end in a random-slung boulder heap guarding the cliff edge on the western face. And nowhere was there any movement.
    The men edged in towards one another, their eyes scanning the summit.
    â€˜They’re in those rocks,’ Fred Buckmaster stated. He was categoric. ‘As sure as God made little apples. All we’ve got to do is flush them out.’
    They advanced slowly, still keeping to their line formation.
    There were stupendous views out towards the sea behind them and in across the flats to far ranges. They ignored all these splendid airy spaces.
    â€˜Now!’ Fred Buckmaster cried. And they broke into a run, whooping as they went towards a cleft in the boulders.
    The world, the stupendous views, narrowed to a horror of shots and shouts and screams as they burst in upon the score of blacks herded into the inner circle of rocks. One spear caught Roy Armitage in the shoulder, but the others flew wide as the natives, awed by the bullet, became only a huddle of terrified flesh. They cringed against rocky shields. One old man made a break for the side of the rock circle, but Benjy Wilson brought him down with a bullet neatly placed in the centre of his spine. He lay moaning and twitching.
    It was truly time to make arrests, but Buckmaster had lost control of his men who went