Both Sides of the Moon

by Duff, Alan

  There was the day Tekapo gave to Moonlight a beetle, inviting him to inspect it closer than he had anything — even a beautiful woman! Tekapo was not without humour. So Moonlight took the beetle and gave it inspection.

  But he could see nothing other than striking patterns formed upon its shell that were more intricate and detailed than any carvings or tattoos he had seen. He told Tekapo of this. But Tekapo only smiled and said that was not what he had noticed and looked glad at Moonlight’s findings. Look closer, Moonlight, he said.

  He looked and looked until his eyes began to water. About to ask again of what mystery was this, when he thought he saw movement. Tiniest, tiniest movement beneath the beetle’s belly.

  Never had he held an object so still. And soon the movement grew form, so minuscule it could have been a speck of dust on his eye. Then it seemed to enlarge and Moonlight grew a little afraid. At the unknown, rather than this creature and whatever it was bothering him lodged on its stomach.

  He held it to the sun at a different angle so that light filtered along the stomach side; there were hairs finer than those in a man’s ears; and the legs had construction immediately clever and barbed and speared like fish hooks and sharp killing points.

  And then there was this other shape, unto itself, moving ever so slowly. He asked, is this the creature’s baby, Tekapo?

  What I had thought. But see its shape: they are no relation. You and I are more related than they.

  Moonlight affirmed that. Studied it under slightest adjustment to the light. His mind was stirred. Memories and associations and times he had hardly been aware of from the warrior days when he had been contemplative, sated of blood lust after battle, and sat around in a quieter state of thinking, now they all flooded in like moonlight broken from cloud.

  He saw a picture. But it was of a fish and the location was seashore and the day was a shellfish-gathering expedition of many of the village to a bed of pipi, tuangi and, in water just deep enough to mean diving, fattest mussels attached to a stretch of rocks below. He had been heading the guarding of the gatherers from life’s fixed threat of attack from enemy tribes, but he had wanted to try this diving beneath the sea surface, especially since the divers had told him and the senior warriors of how fat the mussels were. He gave command over to another, perhaps it was to Te Matai, if his recall was true.

  It had hurt his eyes trying to see in that briny water. But he could at least see with blurred vision enough to pluck some of the shellfish himself. He dived as deep as he dared and grabbed many of the largest kuku from their hairy holds on the rock, making the advised nostril hold-and-blow of the experienced divers that provided him a relief rather profound. Though he did not understand what of nature’s laws could be at work here.

  It was on this day that a young girl with a fishing line had hauled in a small shark. Everyone was as excited for her as at the shark. For it had delectable meat and dried well and smoked even better. Attached to the shark was a comparatively tiny fish with lips on its back. The tohunga had said the larger creature was the host. And that it repaid life attached to a more formidable living body by certain tasks that the gods had not yet explained to the tohunga. All he could say was that the fish with lips upon its back is the guest of the shark’s living form.

  Which must be what Moonlight was now looking at in so much smaller form. A tiny guest.

  Though the association gave him excitement in the finding, he managed to cover over his joy by saying in most casual voice to Tekapo: The beetle does be host to another creature. He has permanent dwelling room upon his stomach. I would know not what the guest does to show his gratitude. And then he looked up and Tekapo was beaming at him. And saying, Yes. Oh yes, Moonlight.

  Tekapo said, Perhaps it is not gratitude as like two in a marriage, Moonlight. With each to offer and no need to measure it?

  Moonlight said, My thoughts were not like that, not of union between man and woman, or what gratitude I might owe anyone or any god. I am amused and happily confounded it is a mere beetle and its guest telling me of life larger and with wider scope. So I am with gratitude to you, Tekapo. And I think your people do suffer greatest loss for turning you out of their midst.

  One day the brilliant-minded Tekapo returned from one of his observation watches on the white people, who Moonlight had grown more curious to see for himself and intended asking Tekapo if he could accompany him. Tekapo had acquired most strange objects, which were each many many in thin number and layers, each covered on both sides in tiniest black symbols, and held together by some mysterious process, which yet allowed flickering or lingering access to them, without surrendering what they were.

  And the strangeness continued, for Tekapo said there was nothing to be gained of understanding in them, they were a white man’s object, hardly a tool, of some meaning substantial to the white people who were spreading over this land, which was never this group’s in the first place, or not from when they were shunned and banished by and from their own and so they did not call them demons as tribe people did. Yet each of these objects was passed around with the suggestion that a person observed, felt, what he or she would of them.

  So with Moonlight it was feeling the thin layers flicker off his thumb like playing idly on strands of cut grass. The jumble of symbols he had sought out for smaller meanings like the creature the beetle hosts. But they had a kind of regularity about them like re-occurring marks and symbols in a carving. But no meaning offered. He felt tempted to tear the thing apart to understand how all that number of symbol-blackened layers held together by the outside and somehow at its back the inside. But everyone was asked that they not destroy or soil as little as possible these things. And not one person, to Moonlight’s knowledge, questioned why the suggestion to consider the unfathomable. It was like being asked to tell what was beneath a deep sea.

  Mihinui, his woman taken as wife within their looser meaning of marriage, was his other greatest learning. And joy. He could not bear much movement of the sun to go past without putting eyes on her, to hear her voice, or just see her — either side of her physical countenance.

  She loved him well, of that there was no question. Now she did. At first he had denied his own feelings and teased her that she only replaced her beloved father with him, with his reminding tattoos and warrior strength. But she laughed at his vanity and dared to ask if he had considered that her father had been much more handsome, of finer, more-ennobled tattoo etchings, and of greater strength.

  In disbelief he would have laughed back except to see that she had turned her bad side of face to him and the drooped mouth was sneering at him.

  He asked why her contempt when he had thought — Thought what? For the words ceased on him. They dried up. She asked again: Thought you what?

  Rather than see her sneer worsen, he gave up his denial and said to her the classical way of terming love: Why stars, when I have the light of the largest star, the sun, in my face? But with not much embarrassment.

  And so she had turned her other side to him. And it was with glowing smile like the sun itself. And she told him back words in exact echo. And then they had loved. Under the shadow of a large rock she hurried him somewhere to. No love had he experienced as well as this. No anything. (Not even you, Tangiwai. Not even you.)

  One of them came back from an acquiring raid on the white invaders with a shiny piece of smoothest, hard material, which gave most frightening images back at whosoever gazed upon the shiny part, and had men and women reeling in confoundment. Till Tekapo informed it must be a means of taking stillest water and putting this hard, transparent material over it so to contain permanent reflection of whatever stood before or was caught by it.

  But many were in denial for they said that is not me! It cannot be! And yet each in turn was with laughter at the other, and some were quite mirthful over it in telling that it was indeed a water reflection that was indeed the truth.

  Moonlight returned to being Kapi for a too-tempting moment. For he had seen hi
mself in pool reflections but never as clear as what it was throwing back at its self-beholding subjects. Nor did he have memory of what he looked like. Not clearly. He wanted most to see his tattoos, since no water he had gazed into was still or clear enough to see the fine pattern indentation so familiar to his touch. He thought he knew them by heart, like words, a long and complicated chant learned.

  But he was brutish in pushing others aside, and Mihi’s voice chided him and demanded that he step back from this object and let others take their turn. He waited in a state between anger at her for daring chide him publicly — at all — like that, and a certain shame that he had been without dignity.

  When he finally gazed upon himself he was without recognition. Only everyone’s laughter told him it was, alas, the same truth for him. For he had a most prominent brow, as if with much scarring. And one of his eyes was not quite aligned, which he remembered hurting in a battle — and killing the man, of course he had killed him. He had all his life felt considerably more handsome than this.

  As for the tattoos, though, they were quite beyond his greatest expectations. So much so he cried out in joy. Till again Mihi’s voice behind him was with chiding. She said to his back, to his still-astonished self-contemplating rear, what had he done to deserve these markings he was so proud of?

  He turned then. He would have struck her. Except she had her beautiful side angled at him, and it was in innocent response of question asked and awaiting answer. He frowned. Can I not have lingered pride in what pain I endured and not permitted but one sound for?

  No, she said. For to gain them it is assumed you give much excruciating pain to others; you take away their husbands, children’s fathers, someone’s love. It is not your tattoo mana I am with tender feelings for, Moonlight. It is the disavowed warrior I thought you were becoming. I hope this is not so.

  He knew threat uttered better than any. No, he said more quickly given out than he might. No, he said again, to assure this face starting to turn ugly side to him. He feared that sneer. He admitted right then to himself, he did fear it. Or perhaps it was the disapproval, and what it said coming from this woman he feared. Perhaps he feared truth.

  This reflecting object and the others with the symbol-covered white layers were but the first of other-worldly experience. As was Moonlight’s love for the whole woman of whole beauty to his eyes. He witnessed man exchanging kiss with another and saw them moving off to do the obvious in private. He was invited part of discussion on this, even though his entire life’s conceptions contained not even thought of such union.

  But the agreement by all except himself was that it is no man or woman’s affair what people do in private. Or there should be demand and command over thought itself, one of the men lovers had argued.

  Moonlight had argued that men was bad enough, but as to women loving with one another, surely this was the greatest affront to any tribe’s fundamental value? Not so, Wild Hair had encouraged a woman like that to have her say. A person is what she is. As she is born with certain physical attributes or flaws, as she is born with certain intelligence or less of it, so she is born with her sexual preference. And though being childless does lose her continuance to the people, surely such choice must earn more respect for what a woman must have to accept of her life, that the strain dies with her. And to be so in these times when such types are summarily executed by their own, surely that is courage of decision to be true to what one is?

  So Moonlight was won over on this. Just as he was on nearly every matter that he ran up against in his lifetime of thinking. He made public joke that he was like a dog learning to swim with the fishes. One of them said seriously back, it is better than being caught between here and the moon.

  One day Wild Hair and Tekapo invited all to a serious discussion; it was on where they go, where take they their differently thinking minds since there was marauder warrior by the name of Te Rauparaha who was sweeping this land like a deadly broom, sparing no tribe not his ally. And hardly would he spare the lives of people his opposite.

  At the same time the white men were settling, his complicated dwellings were springing up everywhere, it was said there were entire plains built and being built of them, as it was known that they had weaponry that hurled hard projectiles at speed faster than an eye could see and killed or greatly wounded a man in an instant. He was more organised than seemed humanly possible and he had systems of thinking in place that enabled his strengths to grow. Tekapo believed that those strange objects of symbol-covered, thin layers of material, like beaten weaving material, were the door to understanding the white man. Though he could not be sure from but brief forays into this arrival’s claimed territories.

  This mighty new arrival was said to be claiming dominion over all this land. He was claiming the inconceivable of reign over every great warring tribe and yet has not this very notion been discussed here amongst this materially dispossessed but intellectually most possessed of all this land’s original inhabitants? It was time, the two modest leaders said, to look into another tomorrow and see what future lay there. It was time to go and meet these people. And he prayed that they did not worship Tu, the God of War. They all prayed that.

  29

  She was watching her child drowning in a swollen river of these people’s despicable, lowly ways, and unable to call out even his name.

  She remembered Kapi (poor Kapi — where are you? Or have you taken your descended life one step more to your own taken death? Oh Kapi!) telling of his troubled witness of that drowning enemy child and its mother. How he had dreamt of the child and the child had told him things of himself that he had not known nor had contemplated. He told of the mother in her disciplined training not calling out the child’s name even as he drowned before her eyes. Tangiwai saw now the same, she could not call out her child’s name for fear that it would give away her position of how her thoughts were.

  This other child, of Kapi’s image, she had kept close to her, and he was anyway too young yet to be caught in the torrent. As she had kept of herself, her bodily gift, to Hakere and made violent refusal to any other who tried to own her in that way. She did it by her natural-born strength of will and an unusual physical strength for a woman, and by sly innuendo that she belonged only to their giant leader. Even though he had made no such sole claim to her, and took whoever he wished, including in public witness young boys as if they were women. Somehow she had kept a belief going that she was Hakere’s favourite and only piece of sexual meat.

  Kapi’s son was two now. He had his father’s prominent brow, and would surely be tall and strong like him. She wished he could have known him, for even though a warrior more terrible than any, he had always had a more tender side. And before all this destiny fell down upon them he had begun to show signs of wishing to converse more with her. Indeed, those troubled nights of his over the drowning enemy child, he had spoken words to her of such vulnerable intimacy she knew the people would consider it heresy, sacrilege of the worst kind. For his dreams had questioned his right to take enemy child’s innocence. It had questioned him in his mind for the first time: what of the children? When in a warrior culture what of the children was only of how they grew up to be the same as their parents, parents upon parent upon same parents before them.

  As for innocence, no enemy can be innocent. Or ceases to be enemy and becomes, instead, a people or person to be considered. Which is madness since an enemy is asking, inviting to be murdered.

  This was the answer he gave himself, finally, after all those sleepless and then turmoiled sleeping nights, and those frowning days of inner question and image of drowning child taunting him. Finally his culture, the way of his people and how they had always been, won. Claimed back their own.

  He had come to her dwelling with grin of a child. Tangiwai, he said: I am returned. I am returned of my old self, my former true warrior self is back. And he had come to her and loved her with terrible but beautiful strength of true man that he had resumed believing he was.
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br />   Though she did afterward lie back and compare with the loving man of the troubled time, and she thought that was the better man: more tender and yet unpredictable. A man who lasted longer and sought her heights out first. And did so by means few men know, of talk the sweetest form of love. And giving her laughter.

  Now this man who was mounted upon her and driving with his usual brute power and body-stenching closeness that foul-breathed face to hers, he made with glad cry at what she did, the response she gave him; made him slam into her harder. But then he stopped.

  She felt his muscles stiffen in suspicion. He said, Why give you back thrusts like this after many times laying there in quiet submission? Think you that you fool me, woman? What are you up to?

  I, Hakere? I am up to nothing but here beneath you. Except that for some time I have thought, if I am in the forest, then why not hunt?

  But still he was a poised muscle tenseness of suspicion. He said: Hunt what?

  And she answered: Hunt for the same joys as you are with, like many snared birds slung over your shoulders.

  He made smile less suspicious and started to thrust again. And she gave back, using muscles down there also that nature had gifted her as strongly as it had her other muscular parts unusual for a woman.

  He roared then in her ear, I have caught a moa, biggest of them all!

  She spoke back. But the moa is long extinct. Surely it is large white heron you catch, giant man? Giving more squeeze down there, and rapidly, like kissing him with her cunt.

  No, it is moa! Taller than a man that responds in my hunting forest and is now on my snare — you are moa, Tangiwai! Not kotuku any longer — moa!