‘The Russians,’ she says, after a long moment of non-committal silence, ‘the Russians have discovered a form of photography that shows all living things to be sources of a strange and beautiful energy. Lights flare from finger tips. Leaves coruscate. All is living effulgence.’
He chuckles again.
‘I can always tell when you’re waxing poetic.’ Then he taps out the bowl of his pipe against the side of the bunk, and leans forward in a fatherly way.
‘My dear, if they have, and that’s a big if, what difference could that possibly make. Another form of energy? So what?’
‘Not just another form of energy,’ she says sombrely. ‘It makes for a whole new view of the world. If all things are repositories of related energy, then humanity is not alone ….’
‘Why this of solitariness, of being alone. Communication with other species, man is not alone, for God’s sake! One would think you’re becoming tired of us all!’
He’s joking.
She is getting very tired. She speaks tiredly.
‘It would mean that the things you think you are demonstrating in your paper ….’
‘Lecture.’
‘Work …. those things are totally irrelevant. That we may be on the bottom of the pile, not the top. It may be that other creatures are aware of their place and purpose in the world, have no need to delve and paw a meaning out. Justify themselves. That they accept all that happens, the beautiful, the terrible, the sickening, as part of the dance, as the joy or pain of the joke. Other species may somehow be equipped to know fully and consciously what truth is, whereas we humans must struggle, must struggle blindly to the end.’
He frowns, a concerned benevolent frown.
‘Listen dear, has this trip been too much. Are you feeling at the end of your tether, tell us truly? I know the boat is old, and not much of a sailer, but it’s the best I could do for the weekend. And I thought it would be a nice break for us, to get away from the university and home. Has there been too much work involved? The boat’s got an engine after all …. would you like me to start it and head back for the coast?’
She is shaking her head numbly.
He stands up and swallows what is left of his drink in one gulp.
‘It won’t take a minute to start the engine, and then I’ll set that pilot thing, and we’ll be back in sight of land before the morning. You’ll feel happier then.’
She grips the small table.
Don’t scream, she tells herself, don’t scream.
Diatoms of phantom light, stray single brilliances. A high burst of dolphin sonics. The school was returning. A muted rasp from shoalfish hurrying past. A thing that curled and coiled in a drifting aureole of green light. She slows, buoyant in the water.
Green light: it brings up the memories that are bone deep in her, written in her very cells. Green light of land.
She had once gone within yards of shore, without stranding. Curiosity had impelled her up a long narrow bay. She had edged carefully along, until her long flippers touched the rocky bottom. Sculling with her tail, she had slid forward a little further, and then lifted her head out of the water. The light was bent, the sounds that came to her were thin and distorted, but she could see colours known only from dreams and hear a music that was both alien and familiar.
(Christlookitthat!)
(Fuckinghellgetoutahereitscomingin)
The sound waves pooped and spattered through the air, and things scrambled away, as she moved herself back smoothly into deeper water.
A strange visit, but it enabled her to put images of her own to the calling dream. Follow the line to the hard and aching airswept land, lie upon solidity never before known until strained ribs collapse from weight of body never before felt. And then, the second beginning of joy ….
She dreams a moment, recalling other ends, other beginnings. And because of the web that streamed between all members of her kind, she was ready for the softly insistent pulsation that wound itself into her dreaming. Mourning for a male of the species, up in the cold southern seas where the greenbellied krill swarm in unending abundance. Where the killing ships of the harpooners lurk. A barb sliced through the air in an arc and embedded itself in the lungs, so the whale blew red in his threshing agony. Another that sunk into his flesh by the heart. Long minutes later, his slow exhalation of death. Then the gathering of light from all parts of the drifting corpse. It condensed, vanished … streamers of sound from the dolphins who shoot past her, somersaulting in their strange joy.
The long siren call urges her south. She begins to surge upward to the sweet night air.
She says, ‘I must go on deck for a minute.’
They had finished the quarrel, but still had not come together. He grunts, fondles his notes a last time, and rolls over in his sleeping bag, drawing the neck of it tightly close.
She says wistfully,
‘Goodnight then,’
and climbs the stairs heavily up to the hatchway.
‘You’re slightly offskew,’ she says to the Southern Cross, and feels the repressed tears begin to flow down her cheeks. The stars blur.
Have I changed so much?
Or is it this interminable deadening pregnancy?
But his stolid, sullen, stupidity!
He won’t see, he won’t see, he won’t see anything.
She walks to the bow, and settles herself down, uncomfortably aware of her protuberant belly, and begins to croon a song of comfort to herself.
And at that moment the humpback hit the ship, smashing through her old and weakened hull, collapsing the cabin, rending timbers. A mighty chaos ….
Somehow she found herself in the water, crying for him, swimming in a circle as though among the small debris she might find a floating sleeping bag. The stern of the ship is sinking, poised a moment a moment dark against the stars, and then it slides silently under.
She strikes out for a shape in the water, the liferaft? the dinghy?
And the shape moves.
The humpback, full of her dreams and her song, had beat blindly upward, and was shocked by the unexpected fouling. She lies, waiting on the water-top.
The woman stays where she is, motionless except for her paddling hands. She has no fear of the whale, but thinks, ‘It may not know I am here, may hit me accidentally as it goes down.’
She can see the whale more clearly now, an immense zeppelin shape, bigger by far than their flimsy craft had been, but it lies there, very still ….
She hopes it hasn’t been hurt by the impact, and chokes on the hope.
There is a long moaning call then, that reverberates through her. She is physically swept, shaken by an intensity of feeling, as though the whale has sensed her being and predicament, and has offered it all it can, a sorrowing compassion.
Again the whale makes the moaning noise, and the woman calls, as loudly as she can, ‘Thank you, thank you’ knowing that it is meaningless, and probably unheard. Tears stream down her face once more.
The whale sounded so gently she didn’t realise it was going at all.
‘I am now alone in the dark,’ she thinks, and the salt water laps round her mouth. ‘How strange, if this is to be the summation of my life.’
In her womb the child kicked. Buoyed by the sea, she feels the movement as something gentle and familiar, dear to her for the first time.
But she begins to laugh.
The sea is warm and confiding, and it is a long long way to shore.
(1986)
Submerged Histories
Maurice Shadbolt, from Season of the Jew
Morning brought no reprieve. In the wan light there were groaning wounded, and unwounded blaspheming with black fervour. Fairweather could not tell where his aches ended and despair began. Raw fronds of young fern made a barely digestible breakfast. Litters were fashioned for the disabled; the journey to the coast resumed among dripping trees; most of the landscape was under fine mist.
They had not marched a mile when they heard
shouts and horses. Kooti, perhaps. Kooti cutting off path to the sea.
Fairweather found purpose again. He nudged wounded to the rear and ordered others to take cover, kicking and cuffing men slow to move. Then, carbine loaded, he moved forward with Biggs.
Through trees they glimpsed the first horsemen. Shouts took an English tint; faces too. For footsore Poverty Bay colonists it was a sight to fatigue still more. The contingent from Hawke’s Bay was at hand, and distinctly looking for sport. All they lacked were dogs baying after a fox. Riding ahead, stout, red-faced, and resonant, was a figure as inauspicious as Kooti. Colonel George Whitmore, in faded imperial regalia, sword at his side, was cutting a martial dash through the colony again. Around him rode lusty pastoralists and their sons.
Biggs, Fairweather and others of Poverty Bay rose bedraggled from cover; Biggs called out. Whitmore steered toward them and reined in.
‘What in hell is going on here?’ he asked Biggs.
‘A disaster,’ Biggs pleaded.
‘I can see that, man. Speak up.’
‘Two dead. A dozen wounded. We tried to stop the prisoners.’
‘Damned if you did. On whose authority?’
‘Mine,’ Biggs admitted in puny voice.
‘My writ runs here now,’ Whitmore announced. ‘Plainly not before time. You’re a bloody madman. Half trained soldiers. An untested enemy. And this wretched country. What possessed you?’
‘We thought to nobble Kooti,’ Biggs confessed.
‘Kooti?’
‘Their leader. A difficult fellow.’
‘Plainly,’ Whitmore said with humour. He took note of Fairweather nearby. ‘I have seen you before.’
‘When General Cameron prevailed upon me not to complicate my departure from the 65th,’ Fairweather said.
‘The infamous Lieutenant Fairweather? I remember telling you to make more of yourself in this colony.’
‘You remember right, sir.’
‘You make less of yourself with these Poverty Bay louts.’
‘That might currently appear the case,’ Fairweather agreed.
‘Looking for trouble again, were you?’
‘To put it perversely.’
‘You seem to have been one with their lunacy.’
‘Mr Fairweather became as my right arm,’ Biggs explained. ‘I regret I did not listen to his advice earlier. He urged that I leave the prisoners alone.’
‘And wait for me?’
‘Just to let them alone. Let them be.’
‘There was a case to be made for the prisoners,’ Fairweather argued. ‘Not least for their leader.’
‘Was?’ Whitmore said.
‘There is now an even better case for letting this fizzle out in the mountains. It is winter. Kooti and his companions will have warmth to think about. Food. Survival. The pursuits of peace. They will finish by eating the horses they stole. Devotion to the God of Israel should soon dim.’
‘You deny me enlightenment, Fairweather. Israel?’
‘Kooti seems persuaded that he and his fellows are fleeing bondage to Egypt and battling home into the land of Canaan.’
‘Jews?’
‘In brief.’
‘What excuse will they find for themselves next?’
‘Meanwhile there is more the smell of vendetta than war. Kooti does not much care for Major Biggs, nor Major Biggs for Kooti. It might be desirable to let matters cool.’
‘They have set themselves against lawful authority.’
‘As the Pharaoh might once have been so seen.’
‘Come, man. We don’t have to indulge native extravagance.’
‘Nor to mock it, sir. It may help to think as men from captivity might.’
‘There are now colonial dead.’
‘My point entirely.’
‘Let a mad Maori leader run riot and we could have half the colony in uproar again. The issue has been joined with the gun. It hardly matters what Kooti thinks he is; it is what he might mean. He is best trampled now in tried and true way.’
‘There is another tried and true way, sir. Leave him alone for a year or two to ripen for a Queen’s pardon. Perhaps even for a native seat in Parliament, where he can orate in his dotage. His past could be seen as picturesque.’
‘Are you telling me, Fairweather, you wish to wash your hands of the whole thing?’
‘Consider them scrubbed, sir.’
‘You suffer misapprehension,’ Whitmore said icily. ‘You are now under my command. You. Biggs. Everyone. Martial law is proclaimed and I administer it. You hear me, Biggs?’
‘Indeed, sir,’ Biggs said wearily.
‘Fairweather? I daresay you are concerned about your standing with this force.’
‘Not noticeably,’ Fairweather said.
‘How does Captain Fairweather sound? The posting can be made official later.’
‘To what end, sir?’
‘To press this Kooti. Run him to ground and put an end to his humbug.’
A muddy group of Poverty Bay men, some carrying wounded in litters, had crept from cover to form an abject half circle before Whitmore. Behind Whitmore the gallants of the Hawke’s Bay militia lounged, still dapper, with clipped moustaches and tidy beards; they lit cheroots, laughed, and looked upon the shaken and saturated colonists of Poverty Bay with indifference. The Hawke’s Bay men groomed their horses and passed silver whisky flasks around among themselves. There was a picnic atmosphere, though parasols were lacking. To their rear, a large group of hireling Hawke’s Bay Maoris observed the proceedings with vacant faces. A light drizzle fell as Whitmore began to boom.
‘Every fit man is to turn back with me,’ he announced.
‘And who the hell would you be?’ drawled Yorkshireman Dodds.
‘Colonel Whitmore. Further questions?’
‘Well, Mr Colonel Whitmore,’ said Dodds, ‘maybe you’re who you say you are, and maybe you’re not. It’s no odds to me. I’m on my way home.’
‘You’re defending your home, man.’
‘What would you bloody know?’ Dodds challenged. ‘I never seen you before.’
‘In which case,’ Whitmore said, ‘brace yourself to see much more of me.’
‘That’s what you think.’
Newman spat eloquently towards Whitmore’s feet.
Young Mulhooly found courage to whine, ‘I got nothing against this Kooti. I never heard of him. I only been here a year. I’m going home too.’
Whitmore turned to Biggs. ‘I suggest, Major, that you call your rabble to order. I have urged upon the government the need to settle outlying districts only with colonists of some mettle and breeding. The point is now proved.’
‘We have not had the land to attract desirable colonists,’ Biggs protested.
‘And at this rate you’ll never have it. Where are your friendly Maoris?’
‘Fled,’ Biggs said miserably.
‘And these oafs are the best Poverty Bay can provide?’
‘They have had several difficult days,’ Biggs pleaded.
‘They are embarked upon an even more difficult one. There is a word for this.
Mutiny.’
‘Use any word you like, Mr Colonel Whitmore,’ Dodds said. ‘We got wives. We got families. We’re still going home.’
‘I didn’t put no prisoners on the Chathams,’ Newman said. ‘Nor let none loose.’
Other Poverty Bay men mumbled more colourful sentiments.
‘I could arrange a firing squad,’ Whitmore mused.
‘Try it,’ Dodds said, and lifted his rifle.
Men of the Hawke’s Bay militia were ensuring that their own firearms were near to hand; hilarity was in check.
‘Major Biggs,’ Whitmore ruled, ‘your men are now one minute from a court martial. I suggest you inform them accordingly.’
Biggs was confusion.
‘With respect, sir,’ Fairweather intervened, ‘I am under the impression that you are here to give fight to Kooti. Not the colonists of Poverty
Bay.’
Whitmore was incredulous. ‘You take their side? You?’
‘Some have just acquitted themselves well. Others have had an unholy nightmare, and are not of a mind for another. They have neither eaten nor slept much for two days. There are no horses, and wounded to be borne out.’
‘Perhaps I can shoot just one of them,’ Whitmore proposed. His stare suggested he had Dodds most in mind.
‘Again with respect, sir, a clash between two contingents of colonial militia is no way to begin a campaign. Not the most ingenious report on the affray could make it explicable.’
There was silence while Whitmore performed mental calculations. The sum of these calculations, it seemed, was that he needed Fairweather, or might.
‘I put it to you, Fairweather,’ he said, ‘that Major Biggs no longer appears to enjoy the confidence of his men. You do your worst. Give them an order.’
‘Then I order them home. To eat, see wives, and sleep. With full bellies and emptied loins they may have more enthusiasm.’
‘Is this war,’ Whitmore asked, ‘or is it not?’
‘Desirably not. But I shall not belabour the point.’
‘Do these men have land and lives at risk or do they not?’
‘That is best asked of Kooti. I was of the belief that his intention was mostly pacific; that he was striking a decorative stance with scriptural trimmings. I am less sure now that shot has been fired. Certainly Major Biggs cannot be called safe.’
Biggs looked even more uncomfortable in his soiled skin.
‘We have ridden scores of miles,’ Whitmore said. ‘All of us damnably inconvenienced. Now we find these wretches unwilling to help themselves.’
‘They are only human.’
‘You protest too much, Fairweather. They go far to convince that this fellow Darwin might have it right. Some breeds of human might best be classified with apes. Poverty Bay seems a stud.’
There was laughter among Hawke’s Bay men.
‘You are not endearing yourself,’ Fairweather observed.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 102