Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences

by Pip Ballantine

  Thumping the propane pedal, he cranked the ignitor. With a geyser’s hiss, a white flame burst from the overhead pipes, billowing hot air into the bladder’s mouth.

  Barry figured that these warriors must have seen Army airships during one of the three attempts that British forces had made to invade the Ngai Tohai stronghold in the eastern North Island, but Barry, on pumping the pedal to coax more heat from the burner, was gambling they would be sceptical that a makeshift balloon would ever lift the tractor high enough to get it free of the mud. Not even the detritus of metal plates and bolts and other junk strewn beside the track could possibly make the critical difference. Surely not.

  “Come on, girl,” he urged the extremely unlikely dirigible, “you can do it.”

  Others’ scepticism was why Barry Ferguson preferred to work alone. While his wardens japed at his folly, Barry watched the balloon swell and lift. His fingers grazed the lever by his seat as his eyes glanced down at the iron plates he had slipped inside his coat. Another gamble, but they would have to be protection enough if the snipers were still paying close attention.

  Because when it happened, it was going to be a very close thing indeed.

  By the time Lachlan crested the incline, he was sweating like he hadn’t in years. Several hundred feet above the river, here was an alpine lake, a sheet of glass set afire by the dropping sun. The mist glowed like embers in the sun’s dying rays, swirling up from some unseen place where the lake escaped through a hole in the mountainside. Rainbows arced above the valley, sparkling like lost jewels.

  But Lachlan had no time to appreciate the view, as the tohunga’s bodyguards hustled him into the lakeshore village past smoking cooking pits and flax-roofed whare.

  “Remember.” The tohunga winked, glancing over his shoulder. “Remember Maui. Remember that we’re all just fish, snapping at dark things that move in the water and hoping the next thing we bite into isn’t a hook.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Lachlan grimaced. “I needed to be reminded of that.” He had bitten quite enough hooks already for one day.

  They passed the wharenui, a looming structure that Lachlan knew to be the tribe’s meeting house, bedecked in twisting carvings of red-faced warriors thrusting out their piercing black tongues. Lachlan met their fierce paua-shell gazes, convinced for a moment before he entered the adjacent eating house that those eyes were somehow staring back at him.

  Inside, several long low tables stacked with food ran across the room, while people moved about or sat and ate and talked. The smell of hot pork, kumara and rewa bread hit Lachlan, making his mouth water and his head...dizzy? In the aftermath of their climb, he suddenly became aware of how long ago he’d eaten lunch, and how hungry he was.

  But food was just bait on the hook. He was among enemies, he had to remember. Better hungry than dead.

  All eyes were turning his way as the Ngai Tohai realised there was a white man in their midst, the rising hubbub overlaid with a note of confusion: who was this pakeha who walked among them, he led by the tribe’s wise elder, and wearing a cloak befitting a man of mana?

  Lachlan was being led to a table near the top of the room where a warrior wearing his own fine cloak of feathers watched them approach, his jaw set in a hard line. From the moko tattooed in kohl on his face, Lachlan guessed that this was the rangatira, the tribal chief.

  Then his eyes snapped to the man sitting beside the chief, his grey-flecked red hair completely out of place here among the Ngai Tohai. An urge to dive across the table swept through Lachlan but he quashed that desire, remaining stock still. The bushman was handing a piece of polished greenstone large as a man’s forearm and carved in the shape of a fishhook to the rangatira. From it dangled a length of flax rope. Frankie Ascot smirked at Lachlan, the face of a man who knew he was guilty yet untouchable.

  Bait, Lachlan thought again. Don’t be baited. He wouldn’t allow himself to become a fish on a line.

  The tohunga addressed the men at the table in his rolling tongue, gesturing at Lachlan and finally ushering him forward. “Rangatira Kahanui will speak with you now, honoured king,” he smiled, thoroughly enjoying his little joke.

  The warrior-chief glowered at Lachlan, cradling the hook to his chest. “Te Korunga tells me that you are a king of the Pakeha, and were he not tapu I would call him a liar. The kings of our people are warriors, as were yours, in days past. You look to me like neither warrior nor king. You come for this,” he raised the hook, “yet you have no claim to it. Do you even know what it is? What it means to us? Korero mai. Speak.”

  Lachlan swallowed hard, looking from the rangatira to the pounamu hook, to Ascot, and back to the hook. Torchlight shivered across its dark green surface, shadows flickering within its carved whorls. For something so big—something only meant to be an ornament, for how could any man ever throw such a hook or haul anything it might catch?—its point sported a sinister sharpness, its shape elegant and simplistic, rolling like waves. In the world Lachlan knew, a place of airships, telegraphs, and battle-tractors, he had never known a thing of such terrible and unexpected beauty. Suddenly all his arguments seemed fleeting and pointless. He claimed to be chasing a thief, an insidious deceiver who had crept among his own kind and betrayed them for the sake of pleasing his savage masters, yet nothing of such fine craftsmanship could possibly have sprung from the mills and factories of Old Blighty. Nothing so wondrous could belong to the British Empire.

  Frankie Ascot had not stolen the fishhook. The bushman had simply honoured its legacy, in the manner of its maker. Frankie Ascot had stolen it back from those who had stolen it from the Maori.

  “The piece,” Lachlan began, his voice faltering, though whether from the anxiety or the hunger or the sudden flood of self-loathing, he wasn’t certain, “was gifted to the New Zealand Government by the Ngati Hareke people—”

  “Hei Matau a Maui was not Ngati Hareke’s to give!” Kahanui snapped, slamming a fist on the table top. The hook floated, dark and deadly, in his other hand.

  Lachlan imagined that tip lashing out, tearing his throat open in a single fine shred. Whether it was the fear or the sun casting its final rays through the thin gaps in the walls, Lachlan thought he saw the hook shift, as if it pulsed or breathed, and in that moment things became clear, snapping into focus in ways they had not been since he had entered this land of rain and mud and mist.

  In this place the hard edges of the world blurred, where ropes of flax might stretch out and drag down an errant sun that sleeks too swiftly across the sky, where a hook carved of stone and blood and magic might pull forth a fish from the sea so vast it becomes a land all its own. A place where the rules became misty, where a man might be bigger than he ever knew.

  Had the Governor thought they could retrieve the artefact by brute force alone he would have sent constables and militia, but he had not. He had sent Lachlan King and Barry Ferguson, investigators of the peculiar and the inexplicable, because this place defied reason, its people the children of the mist, shadows against the hills, ghosts and giants.

  “Got anything else to say, Guv’nor?” Frankie Ascot jeered. “Or shall we just get on with making an example of you?”

  Lachlan eased his arms out from under the feather cloak and raised them in what may have been a command for silence, or a gesture of surrender. “Rangatira Kahanui,” he intoned, blood pounding in his temples, “in the name of the Queen, I wish nothing but goodwill to you and your iwi,” he nodded at the gathered tribe. “I would be a fool to disbelieve that it is too late for such words, and that it is too late for me. I know your mana is worth more than my meagre life, and that allowing me to live through my transgression of your honour would be insufferable. I come from a long line of knights. I understand honour, even among thieves which, it appears, I must now consider myself, in your eyes at least. For a long time, Hei Matau a Maui was but a few streets away from where I worked, and though I knew its legend never did I take the time to look upon it because I, for one, believe it merely a
trinket, however beautiful; a token, a symbol, nothing more. It is like so much in life, these things of beauty which we do not appreciate until they are taken from us. I have come a long way to find this treasure, this taonga you hold. Would that I might hold it, and know what it is for which I shall die?”

  Kahanui snatched the hook away. “It is tapu!”

  Lachlan nodded. “Of course, it is sacred, and precious. That is why you would risk another invasion to keep it out of British hands. But I am an old man, surrounded by your finest warriors. What harm can I possibly do? Surely, you know our tradition of the dying man’s last request?”

  The rangatira flicked a glance at the tohunga, and though Lachlan dared not follow his gaze, he was relieved when Kahanui reluctantly passed him the sleek pounamu.

  It was heavier than he had anticipated, for it came with the weight of expectation, the promise of mortality. Lachlan King felt its weight in his bones, in his aging joints, felt it drag against his tired muscles. He felt it resist him, dare him, just as the old man had dared him, baited him.

  But Doctor Sound had sent very explicit orders that Hei Matau a Maui be returned to London so that rumours of its mysterious powers could be investigated fully. Lachlan King wasn’t here to philosophise on what it meant to be a thief among thieves, or to cast judgements on his distant masters’ colonial politics. He was a pawn, sent to do their bidding.

  A fish on a hook.

  Yet somehow Lachlan King knew that, right at this moment, holding Hei Matau, he was more than he had ever been. His father had not lived up to his knightly blood. Lachlan would not make the same mistake. He would prove, if only to himself, that he was indeed a king among men; that the sun would shine through him and cast his shadow like a giant upon the mist.

  For Queen and Country, he thought ruefully, in the same instant as he wrapped the rope around his hand, took a deep breath, and whirled the hook over his head.

  The balloon, now fully inflated, struggled to take flight. Barry’s bodyguards watched, chortling amongst themselves, while the tractor remained firmly settled in the mud.

  “Here we go,” Barry muttered, then jammed the lever forward.

  Dozens of wires, roughly arc-welded to bolts buried in the mud, tore free, whipping dangerously around the tractor. Barry’s armoured balloon leapt skyward, taking only what was needed: the gunner’s chair, the cannons, the propane and air tanks and their respective lines and the tractor radiator, all bolted or hastily welded to the underside of the hansom.

  And, of course, Barry Ferguson.

  Ignoring the flurry of shouts from below, Barry swung the cannons and fired several rounds into the trees to cover his escape. With his feet driving the gas and air pedals, he released a jet of air over the radiator fan-blades, spinning them with a banshee’s wail and propelling the impromptu airborne gun-platform away in a mad arc amidst the crack of musket-fire.

  After a few moments of acclimating to the dirigible—far different to steer than an all-terrain hansom—Barry yawed towards the glow of firelight in the ranges, where he was fairly sure he would find Mister King.

  See, he would say when he arrived, I really did have it under control, sir. Shame about poor Mister Massey’s tractor, mind you.

  Lachlan King wasn’t sure at what point the real world fell away and what could only possibly be a waking hallucination born of exhaustion and terror settled upon him. A guttural roar plucked from some dark and hungry creature of the mists erupted from him. He imagined the rope in his hand growing longer, the pounamu lighter, perhaps even sharper. This allowed him to swing the short rope with its sharp, heavy load harder, faster, sending bodies both unmarred and sliced open by his emerald blade scrambling around him. The walls and roof of the wharekai ripped open, sending shreds of timber and thatch in all directions. Through this maelstrom of madness, Lachlan knew the power of Hei Matau, the hook that had pulled a nation from the sea, a tool fashioned of the same ancient magics that Maui had used to weave ropes to slow the very sun in its race across the sky.

  In that moment he was, he knew, quite lost in a safe and convenient insanity wherein the rules of the world no longer applied, lost where myth and legend replaced the rational and the real. The hook dipped, carving a line in the dirt floor as it howled about its deadly arc, and Lachlan wondered in passing if he spied thin liquid, bright red and bubbling, seeping up from the flesh-pale gouge it left in the earth.

  Then he was running, the hook still whirling overhead, his voice a harsh cry echoing off the mountainside as he pelted past the furious eyes of the tekoteko that overlooked the wharenui, legs pounding as he reached the lake shore.

  A quick look over his shoulder told him that he was not alone. Pulling himself from the wreckage, Frank Ascot was hot on his heels, his face a livid mask of blood.

  Lachlan ran. The mist hung thick in the air where the waterfall spilled free, near the few small trees that clung to the cliff-edge. Lachlan envisioned himself swinging the hook on its rope, wrapping around one of those stunted trees, and swinging through hundreds of feet of shadow, his fine feather cloak spread out behind him like the wings of some nightbird, like the great eagle Hokioi in his rage. With a quick tug he would shear through his anchor tree, reel the hook back to himself, and ride the Pacific winds all the way back to England.

  He was Maui, a legend of flesh who could break the rules of the world, the laws of the Empire, spit in his father’s face.

  It seemed so perfect, so unpredictable.

  Then he saw it; a great, looming brown eye with its pupil of blazing white as it swelled up from the glowing fog.

  “Away with you, taniwha!” he barked, a mad sound, and swung the hook out and over his head. “Fear me!”

  “Sir? Is that you?” came an uncertain call from the fog.

  Reality slammed home, but already it was too late. The hook flew true and deadly, slicing a thin tear in Barry’s bizarre construct and wrapping itself around the poles that held his would-be escape vessel aloft.

  Hot air shrieked from the balloon, sending the dirigible spiralling out over the void. It was all Lachlan could do to wrap both hands around the rope before he was lifted from his feet and pulled over the cliff face, leaving Ascot’s furious screams behind as momentum and gravity whipped him around in dizzying circles. Above him, Lachlan could hear Barry swearing over the hissing and whining of the slap-dash airship.

  “Hold on sir,” Barry yelled. “I’ll have this sorted in a two shakes of a dog’s hind leg.”

  Lachlan couldn’t answer. It was taking all his strength just to hold on as they plunged from the hole in the world where the river shone, down into the well of shadows.

  “Sir, I’m going to put her down, nice and easy,” Barry called with impossible optimism, as the craft fell sideways in sickening arcs across the sky.

  The bush-clad valley spiralled nearer. When they hit the ground and the propane tank sheared open in a flurry of sparks, it would all be over, and for nothing. Lachlan looked up to where the gash in the canvas fluttered and snapped.

  Sometimes, we must be bigger than we really are.

  They dropped into the mists.

  Summoning what was left of his flagging strength, Lachlan reached over his head and stretched, pulling himself up the rope one aching foot at a time, feathers billowing behind him like dark wings. The rope was wrapped right around the balloon’s metal poles, pinching it in the middle so that it appeared like a bloated figure-of-eight. The hook dangled in a loop of its own making an arm’s reach from the tear. His focus intent on the artefact, Lachlan climbed past the tractor cab, refusing to contemplate the empty space below him. Wrapping a leg hard around the nearest pole, daring to let go of the rope with one raw, blistered hand, Lachlan lunged out and grabbed the hook’s smooth edge.

  Maui did not care for the rules of the world. Maui had cast a rope to catch te Ra, the sun; had thrown a hook which pulled a land of plenty from the sea. Lachlan King was not Maui, was not made of the same stuff as that ancie
nt hero, but he was the son of knights long dead, and he could be more than his father had ever dreamed he might be.

  Lachlan tugged the hook towards him and began to haul in the rope, drawing its length through its own loops, his eyes straying to the high glow of sunlight that slid, breath by breath, towards darkness.

  Perhaps a little insanity lingered. Time for te Ra to catch itself a fish.

  Lachlan hooked the coil over his shoulder and slid down the pole, ignoring the pain in his palms, hitting the hansom platform with a grunt. The roar of water was loud in his ears now, the mist shadow-shrouded except for the propane’s glow. The unseen earth rushed ever closer.

  Lachlan lashed a hasty knot through the base of the cannon-armature, wrapped one arm around a gun-barrel and hurled the rope up and out, towards the disappearing sun. He braced himself and hoped that, in this modern world, there was still room for the making of legends.

  “Sir?” Barry’s concerned voice seemed very distant, lost in the mist, as the rope flew away from him.

  The dirigible jerked suddenly and snapped backwards, nearly tossing both agents into the mists as its descent was violently interrupted. Both men clutched onto the gun platform for dear life as it swung pendulously to and fro. Between the roar of the waterfall and the swallowing mists, Lachlan and Barry were blind and deaf, bobbing in the fog, hanging with no visible means of support, the propane flame illuminating nothing but white all around.

  “For goodness’ sake lad, turn off that light before they find us,” Lachlan chided.

  “Sir, what just happened?” Barry asked, struggling to secure a foothold.

  Lachlan closed his eyes and let a smile wrinkle his exhausted features. “I believe that we just caught the sun.”

  Barry squinted over his head. “Are you sure? Because I think that looks like some sort of swing-bridge up there. I don’t suspect it’s likely to hold this weight for long.”