Dead Americans by Ben Peek Read Free Book Online Page B

will always be remembered, if not understood.”
    Twain gazed at the inn, and watched as one of the black armoured men stepped out of the front door, pistols held in his hands. Alone, a dark, iron-covered beast torn by emotions and a lifetime of injustice, he strode down the stairs, firing into the Police.
    Unable to watch him fall, Mark Twain accepted his descent.
1797.
    Toongagal [3] had been turned into simple sprawl of ugly, poorly built English buildings parted by a muddy stretch of road and surrounded by dirty bush land.
    Pemulwy emerged from the muddy scrub, followed by the lean shadows of twenty warriors. Each man was armed with only a knife, but also carried sticks and cloth across their backs; they held nothing that would hinder their speed or their use of the land and the cloudy night sky as cover, for their goal tonight was one that relied upon stealth.
    Silently, Pemulwy lead the warriors along the edge of the muddy road, leading them around the town, aiming for the isolated outpost at the opposite end.
    In the years of his war, the Eora warrior had become a fearsome figure in the minds of the English and his fellow tribesman, but he was not pleased with the progress he had made. Burning crops, stealing food, killing farmers on the edge of the townships: these were not stopping the arrival of Englishmen and women and their convicts. If anything, it only dug the farmers on the outskirts deeper into the land. And, as each year progressed, Pemulwy became increasingly aware that he was not winning the war.
    To complicate matters, he was also coming to the realization that it was not the English and their weapons that he was losing too, but rather their clothing, food, and luxuries, such as tobacco pipes.
    And rum.
    Rum was the enemy that Pemulwy could not fight.
    It was the currency of the land, spreading not only through the Eora and tribes inland, but the free farmers and convicts who worked for the English. It was indiscriminate, and endless, a dark, intoxicating river that weaved around everyone, and which flowed out of the hands of the English authorities.
    He had learned of that only recently, when fellow tribesmen moved into the towns, lured by rum and tobacco that they received for erecting buildings, ploughing the land, and hunting. Tasks that tribesmen had done for their tribes, but now did for the English Redcoats.
    Having followed the wayward Eora to threaten and force them back to the tribes, Pemulwy had instead decided upon a frontal attack on the English. The idea had come to him suddenly, a gift from the Spirits that was accompanied by the Elder’s warning nine years ago, about his foretold death. Being a warrior, he pushed aside the doubt, and focused on acquiring English weapons. He would need them.
    The outpost was a long, squat building that resembled a giant wooden goanna baking in the sun, or, in this case, the night. There were no lanterns inside it, but on the veranda, on a wooden chair, slept the white body of an Englishman.
    Pemulwy motioned for the warriors behind him to wait, and he then slipped up to the veranda. The mud around the barracks pushed coolly through his toes, and clung to his feet, leaving muddy prints along the railing that he climbed, and the porch he stalked along before his strong fingers clamped over the Englishman’s nose and mouth and his dagger sliced into the man’s neck.
    The muddy prints multiplied as the Eora warriors joined him, and they pushed through the door, into the dark, half empty barracks and circled the beds that held men. There, nothing more than a concentration of mud marked the struggle and the death that took place in the beds.
    At the back of the outpost, behind a poorly made wooden door, the fading prints ended at the weapons of the English: thirty gunmetal black rifles and fifteen pistols, each with wooden stocks; a dozen sabres; one cat-o-nine-tails; chains and manacles; a dozen daggers; a small cannon on wooden wheels; and bags of powder and