Bring Larks and Heroes by Thomas Keneally Page A

called a rest and poured water for the transports from the small cask in the stern. They gaped carefully, shipping their oars, which were of local timber and scarcely floated. One at a time, they drank lingeringly, nose in the mug. Halloran saw Ewers staring at a purple swelling on the shoulder blade of the man diagonally across from him.
    â€˜I have something for that,’ said the artist.
    He leant over backwards to locate his paint-chest. It was under the tarpaulin with shirts, coats, four Phrygian forage caps, which he took upon himself to distribute by the way, three muskets and cartridge pouches. He lifted the box gently out of this alien mess and sat it on his knees. From it, he took a pear-shaped bottle that seemed to be full of claret.
    â€˜This, my friend,’ he said to the transport with the swelling, ‘is the juice of the berry of a spiky shrub very much like the broom. It grows all around the town. It seems that it’s a valuable antiscorbutic.’
    â€˜A what-is-it?’
    â€˜It stops you from getting scurvy.’
    â€˜If it stops you from getting,’ the transport told him, baring his doughy gums for two solid seconds, ‘it’s a bit late to be dosing me on it.’
    The other one started snickering. His mouth wasn’t much better. One day soon, the two of them would wake up without the strength to swat themselves.
    â€˜You’ll poison him, Mr Painter,’ the other one said. ‘He’s had it so long, it’s in him. He was bred on it and does a bit of breeding on it himself. His father was a sailor with a terrible hate for lime-juice. You could say, he is scurvy.’
    â€˜Don’t talk rubbish,’ Halloran told them.
    They laughed together, brother oarsmen. Their peccant gums took too exorbitant a part in it for Halloran to join in.
    â€˜You don’t want it?’ Ewers asked.
    â€˜No,’ said the man who was scurvy. ‘Mr Painter, darling, you only come close to being what I want.’
    Halloran felt on his face their moist laughter.
    â€˜Take no notice,’ he told Ewers. He stood up, beckoning to the two Marines. ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to row Mr Ewers. I know it’s bad for an artist, but we’ll never get there if you don’t you see.’
    Halloran soon found however, that they’d never get there if Ewers did. The artist’s style with an oar was to dig it feet-deep into the river. The boat would slewupon itself, the oar would come close to being lost or pulling him off his seat or pushing him flat.
    â€˜Send him back to his anti-score-what’s-it, Corporal,’ one of the scurvy oarsmen begged Halloran humourlessly, as if Ewers by his clumsiness were bringing their day of collapse forward; which, beyond doubt, he was.
    Boating was hard work by ten o’clock. The river held them in a cleft amongst rocks, away from the wind. At each bend the woods applied the weight of their numbers and brought within hearing the dementia of summer insects.
    Then, on the northern side of the river, stood a beached long-boat. There were five men near it, waist-deep in the river, dabbling after mud-oysters. Four Marines were busy at the boat itself, taking pains to store something, under the supervision of two others. One of these two others was in shirtsleeves, and the second wore an improbably spruce parade uniform of an officer of Marines. A voice from the beach hailed the jolly-boat and ordered it into shore, saying that an officer wanted a letter taken to the Crescent.
    Halloran found his coat in the muddle in the stern, and joined battle with it. The sleeves seemed to have melted into one piece with the heat; he mumbled and grabbed for a cartridge belt.
    â€˜It’s that young Rowley fellow,’ he muttered tothe artist. ‘Look at the silly bugger, ornamental in the wilderness.’
    The officer waited for them, dressed like a recruiter, molten at the throat where his gorget took