Read Lieutenant for Free Online Page B

back into the country.
    The sailors readied the cutter for the shore party. A sergeant and four armed privates climbed down, then the commodoreand Captain Barton. Surgeon Weymark, with an ease surprising in such a big man, followed. Rooke did not wait to be invited, but climbed down after him. He did not want to miss the chance of being among the first to step onto this place, that might have been Saturn for all anyone knew of it.
    On the sand at the head of the cove Rooke felt the ground tilt under him. He snuffed up lungfuls of the air: dry, clean, astringent, sweet and sour both at once, warm and complicatedly organic after all those many weeks of nothing but the blank wind of the sea.
    Weymark took a step that the ground rose up to meet and laughed so his belly shook. He was just starting to say something when they saw five native men step out of the bushes fringing the sand. From behind him in the boat, Rooke heard a series of small sounds that he knew were made by muskets being put up to shoulders.
    ‘Steady, steady now,’ he heard the sergeant say, his voice tight.
    The men were dark and naked, their faces shadowed in the sunlight. Natives , Rooke thought, I am face to face with natives!
    They were strange and ordinary at once: men, like himself in essence, the same shoulders and knees and private parts, although theirs were not private. A muscular grey-bearded man stood at the head of the group, the others behind him, each holding a wooden shield and spear. They watched, densely black in the sunlight.
    ‘The trinkets, sergeant, where are the trinkets?’
    The commodore turned back to the boat, reaching impatiently for the bag the sergeant handed him. He shook a string of beads so it caught the sun.
    ‘Come, my friends,’ he called. ‘Look, I wager you have never seen this before!’
    Even his pinched face was creased with excitement. For the first time, Rooke could see the eager boy he must once have been.
    Weymark went one better, made a looking-glass flash.
    ‘Look, sir,’ he cried. ‘I will let you have it for your very own, if only you will come close enough to take it! By Jove they are cautious, Barton, look at them like a cat that wants the cream but fears the milkmaid!’
    He laughed his tremendous laugh, and Rooke thought that made the men braver. The grey-haired one took a step forward.
    ‘Yes, that’s the way, Mister Darkie, come, come!’
    The surgeon did a ponderous little jig and the man took a fresh grip on his spears.
    In front of his sailors Barton could not caper the way Weymark was doing, but he had a string of beads too and was twirling it.
    ‘Rooke, lad, get yourself some trinkets and try your luck!’ he called.
    Rooke picked out a looking-glass and walked a few stepstowards the nearest native, a man perhaps his own age, whose eyes darted from Rooke to Barton and back again, as flighty as a greyhound.
    Rooke held up a hand.
    ‘Good afternoon!’
    It was like tossing a stone into a bush and wondering what bird would fly out.
    This man was well made, his chest sculpted with muscle, his bearing very straight. His chest was marked with a neat pattern of raised scars, the skin decorated like a garment.
    He glanced at Rooke, his mouth ajar as if to speak, the whites of his eyes stark in the blackness of his skin. In one quick movement he stepped forward, took the looking-glass and stepped back. He showed it to the man beside him and they murmured over it.
    Then they lost interest. The man dropped the looking-glass on the sand, as casually as a boy in Portsmouth might let go the core of an apple. They all moved a few steps backwards and seemed to wait.
    For some better gift? Some other gesture?
    Weymark decided the next move. Perhaps he thought of it as entertainment, of a piece with the looking-glasses and the beads. He went boldly to the eldest of the men, a wiry grey-haired fellow, took his shield— just to borrow , he tried to explain by signs—and propped it up in the sand. He loaded