by Karen Healey
‘Hey!’ he called, and I turned. His hands were cupped together in front of his chest, dark water trickling from the gaps in his fingers. ‘You’re not meant to be here. But you’re all they’ve got. Don’t screw up, eh? And good luck.’ He dipped his head and drank before I could thank him.
The thing at the end of the cape solidified as I approached. It was a tree most often now, and I wasted a thought on whether it had chosen that form or I had. The woman before me climbed into the twisted branches and leapt gladly toward the setting sun.
But I knew that wasn’t my route. Between the exposed roots, sprawled like the legs of a sleeping woman, was a dark hole that stretched away into nothingness.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, cradling the mask in my arms. I could turn around right now; count on the people I’d left behind to defeat the patupaiarehe. This was the backup plan. There was no point in going if all the monsters were dead. I’d fail for nothing.
I curled my bare toes in the sandy soil and waited, a little curiously, to see if courage or fear would win.
The ground buckled under my feet. I threw myself backward, clutching at the matted grass with my free hand to keep myself from being flung into the air. In my double vision, the tail of the fish was twisting wildly. The air was filled with a high-pitched keening.
‘Oh no,’ I panted. ‘Oh no, oh no. Those bastards!’
I couldn’t stand on the writhing earth. Flat on my belly, clutching the mask awkwardly, I hauled myself to the entrance to the underworld, grass and sand scratching at my bare skin. I was hissing through my teeth, a low litany of curse words. They’d killed Mark, and my guests, and now they were going to kill my home.
But not unpunished.
I had neither courage nor fear left, only a violent urge to deprive them of their blood-won victory. ‘Hine-nui-te-p,’ I whispered, hanging half into the hole. ‘I’m coming.’ Then I kicked with my powerful legs and, for the third time, fell.
WON’T GIVE IN
THERE WAS BARE, wet rock underfoot, and the air smelled musty and dead. I waited a minute for my eyes to adjust to the blackness, then realised they wouldn’t. There was no light at all. Grimly, I fitted the mask against my face.
It hummed its content and sank easily into my skin again. Reka’s eyes cooperated more grudgingly, showing me the wide limestone tunnel as if it were lit by the moon – all deep shadows and rocky forms. There was no opening above me, and the only direction was forward.
I ran, revenge black and twisting in my heart.
The earth didn’t shake here. It wasn’t as formlessly terrifying as the mist – humans could walk here, it seemed, even living ones. I wondered if it was real for a moment, then dismissed the question. It was real enough to hurt my feet as I ran, real enough to score my shoulders and thighs as I banged against toothy stalactites dripping water and the stalagmites thrusting upward. They were the largest I’d ever seen.
A sharp piece of flint slashed the sole of my left foot, and I thought of Iris limping, bloodied. Mystical adventures seemed to involve a lot of minor aches and pains that didn’t make it into the stories. I wondered if Orpheus had ever stubbed his toe on the way to rescue Eurydice. Lopsided, I ran on, leaving my blood smeared on the pale rock floor.
My breath was coming in pants, nearly sobs. The patupaiarehe were going to live out the remainder of their long, pointless lives, and then they were going to die, and stay dead. I had the hardening ambition to help some of them get there a little sooner. Maybe Reka could help me, once I gave her back her eyes.
But first, I had to stop the fair-haired woman from completing her work. Find her, before she got to Hine-nui-te-p, and crawled between the legs of the sleeping guardian to bring her people the immortality they craved.
Lie in ambush, the mask suggested. Let her get one look at the mask, and then she will be ours. Tell her to beat her own brains out. Or we could order this goddess to kill her for us.
I stumbled to a halt. The mask could work its magic on the will of Hine-nui-te-p?
Certainly, it replied, full of confidence. It was very old, and very strong, especially with these mist-born eyes. And it loved me. Everyone should love me. All the Gods should love me and order the world to my desires. Did I want the pale boy back? I could have that too, if this guardian of the dead were mine.
Of course, she would have to love me forever. I couldn’t let one like that ever go free.
I braced against the worn cave wall, trembling. The mask shivered anxiously. Had it offended?
‘We’ll stop the patupaiarehe,’ I whispered, and it subsided, satisfied, as I began to run again.
The tunnel widened gradually, until even Reka’s moon-sight could not show me the ceiling. I heard the slow sighing of the wind, like massive exhalations, echo through the caves. The final cavern was cathedral-huge, and ended in a collection of enormous shapes that almost covered the back wall – rocks, I guessed, piled three stories high.
I swallowed defeat, bitter in my dry mouth, and faltered to a slow walk. The rock fall barred my way, and even the mask couldn’t order it open.
The shadows moved. Wind gusted over me as Hine-nui-te-p exhaled.
My own breath stuck in my throat.
She was sleeping against the wall, her knees tucked firmly against her chest. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and coiled on the cavern floor in thick strands, gleaming like kelp. Her skin was the dark brown of sooty totara wood, her fingernails and toenails iridescent with the pink sheen of mussel shells. She was the largest living thing I’d ever seen, and so beautiful it made me ache.
Stones scattered behind me as the patupaiarehe woman leapt from her hiding place.
I wasn’t the only one who had considered ambush.
She was unarmed and as naked as I was, but her bony elbow came up in a hammering blow to my diaphragm. My lungs emptied, and I barely got a hand down to break my fall. The pain in my shoulder told me I’d sprained it as I rolled. A dainty foot crashed down where my face had been.
Make her stop, the mask said frantically. But I had no breath to shout orders, and only enough momentum to roll, and roll again, heedless of my bare flesh scraping on stone. I tumbled into something warm and unyielding, and could retreat no further. I was going to die at the feet of a goddess. A useless, desperate fury filled me as the patupaiarehe woman raised her clawed hand.
It wasn’t much of a shout; only a sputtering, wordless wheeze as I forced my rage into voice.
But it was enough.
Hine-nui-te-p, guardian of the dead, once Hine-titama, the maiden of the dawn, first woman born of woman, and the mother of humanity, opened her green–stone-dark eyes and roared.
The sheer force of her voice tossed me up and halfway across the cave. The mask ripped clear from my face as I fell, a house-height or more from the floor. Inconveniently, I recovered my breath just in time to scream.
She held up a massive hand and the wind of her will caught me, setting me none-too-gently on my bleeding feet. The mask clattered to the ground a few steps away, but there was no question of my diving for it. The goddess was speaking.
‘Women,’ she said, through a mouth filled with sharp obsidian teeth. ‘Why do you disturb me?’
It wasn’t English. I wasn’t sure it was Mori either, or any language ever spoken by human voices. But I understood it. This was the beginning tongue that created what it communicated, the language of conception.
I was incapable of response.
But the patupaiarehe was better prepared. Her voice was as beautiful as the rest of her and all the power of her people’s music was behind it.
I listened, dazed by the somnolent rhythm of the silver-haired woman’s chant. I didn’t understand the words, but I could easily guess at the meaning. She was pleading her case, pointing out the great wrongs done her people by Mui, the diminishment of her race with the coming of humans to the cloud-covered islands. Was it not unjust that they should pay for Mui’s crime? Was it not rig
ht that Hine-nui-te-p release the patupaiarehe from their grievous mortality?
The goddess’s eyes glazed as the woman’s voice went on, smooth eyelids drooping over her enormous eyes. Her knees relaxed, legs as long as kauri trunks spreading in her slumber. There was another cave between her thighs, filled with a second set of obsidian teeth.
The patupaiarehe woman sang her lullaby, sweet and soft, and walked easily toward that toothy opening.
In the backwash of that seduction, my own eyelids fluttered. I folded gently onto the floor, stretching my arms in the prelude to sleep.
The fingertips of one hand touched the mask.
The fog in my brain cleared at once, and was immediately replaced by an awareness of just how much I hurt. I felt like one huge, raw bruise as I yanked the mask onto my face and sat up.
Help me, I pleaded and the mask, exultant, poured power into me like a waterfall into a paper cup. My skin wasn’t enough to hold it all, I thought dimly, and waited to tear under the force of it. But I expanded instead, to the limits of myself and beyond, until I trembled on the brink of losing everything I was in the glory of that flow. It was Reka’s eyes that stabbed me, strong and fierce, with the knowledge of my task and the will to perform it.
It had taken seconds. Still singing, the patupaiarehe was just ducking her head to crawl between the thighs of Hine-nui-te-p.
‘Hey,’ I said, my voice cracked and small.
The woman whirled, her hair flaring around her like Christmas tinsel, her mouth open to unleash some withering curse.
‘Love me,’ I told her, and felt the stony strength of her will crumble like a clump of dry dirt. ‘Stop singing.’
Her dissolution was terrible to watch, the more so because I knew she hated me. Her eyes alive with silent adoration, she sank to her knees, clawed hands lolling against the walls of the goddess’s thighs.
The last echo of the lullaby faded. Hine-nui-te-p opened her eyes to stare, horrified, at the woman between her legs. Lips twisting over those nightmarish teeth, she smashed her knees together three times.
The patupaiarehe must have died in the first crushing blow. By the third, all of her beauty and power were stinking red and purple smears.
She had looked at me while she died. Loved me, and I’d used that love to bring her death.
Legs pulled tight against her chest, Hine-nui-te-p took a deep breath.
Now, the mask decided. Tell the goddess she loved me before the winds came again. Make her love me forever. Hardly a violation, to save myself.
I clawed the mask off and flung it at the ground.
Bile swelling in my throat, I crouched, hiding my face in my hands, and spoke between my fingers, gabbling without consideration of the words. ‘I can’t. I can’t do it, not even for this. Aren’t you sick of lies and betrayals? I am. I’m so tired.’
There was silence while I waited to die, then: ‘Yes,’ said Hine-nui-te-p. ‘I am very tired of lies.’
I uncurled slowly, because I was sore, not because I was being cautious. There wasn’t any point. Even if I could bring myself to put it on again, the mask lay metres away. The goddess was looking at me. It was hard to read complex emotions on a face so dizzyingly large, but I thought she seemed curious.
‘Hello,’ I said, and discovered that even in the awe of this moment, there was room for embarrassment at my own inanity.
‘They still tell my story,’ she said, sounding satisfied.
‘Yes. My friend – Mark Nolan. Mark told me. But they tell all the Mui stories.’
Her straight eyebrows drew together in anger. ‘Mui’s story! Mui the thief, Mui the rapist, Mui that men call hero!’ She shifted her legs and I caught a glimpse of the great teeth grinding against each other as she moved. ‘This is my story.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘Now you will tell me yours,’ she declared, and settled back against the rocky wall of the cave. ‘Where are you from?’
I was so exhausted that I would have preferred to have gone to sleep and never woken up, but goddesses didn’t have to bow to the whims of mortal girls. I started at the beginning, from bumping into Mark at the gates, to preventing the silver-haired patupaiarehe from crawling into the goddess. ‘And then you woke up,’ I concluded, and rotated my shoulders. Every muscle was aching. Rolling on the stone floor had given me scratches to replaces the ones La Gribaldi had healed.
Hine-nui-te-p smiled, which was probably supposed to look friendlier than it did. ‘So, you aided me. I will not be obliged to you. What do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ I said, surprised. ‘I wanted to stop the patupaiarehe winning everything, that’s all.’ I felt my face twist.
‘They sank the North Island. I wanted them to pay.’ I hadn’t expected that it would leave me feeling so empty.
She looked at me blankly, ‘But Te Ika a Mui is not yet dead.’
I staggered to my feet. ‘What?’
She gestured downwards, grimacing. ‘This one – you forced her hand. She made her attempt too soon. He wakes, he writhes – but he has not died.’
‘Can you stop them?’ I said. ‘On the surface, can you stop them? I want that!’
‘I will not enter the world of the living,’ she said flatly, and I felt it like a kick to the gut. ‘But it is his death dive that will destroy your people, and he is half-dead already.
If it is your wish, I can take Te Ika a Mui faster, now. His body will remain surface-bound, hooked to the sea and sky. Your people will live.’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Please!’
‘You are certain?’
‘Of course!’
She looked at me for a long moment, her eyes unreadable, then she raised her hand and twisted it. Something spun itself out of the air and wove around her fingers; something that smelled sharply of salt and sweetly of green things after rain, something replete with the sound of dolphins squeaking and the melodic song of the tui bird, something that remembered tall, flightless moa stalking through the dense bush and the huge hawks that had eaten them, and the taniwha in the rivers and the patupaiarehe ghosting through the forests and along the shore. Mui’s fish had lain under the tortured sun for eons in unimaginable agony, and had still given endlessly of himself to the tiny, chattering creatures that clambered over his surface and dug for shellfish at his edges and crawled through his caverns to watch glowworms spreading tiny galaxies over underground lakes.
He came to the goddess gladly, and Hine-nui-te-p waited until the last of his spirit was gathered in her hand, glowing like a dark moon. Then she twisted her fingers, and he vanished, pain ended.
I was crying, huge drops dripping down my face to splatter on my stomach and thighs.
‘It is done,’ she said, and sighed. ‘I must care for my children. There are many waiting. Go, and take your other face with you.’
I picked up the mask, and it trembled in my hands like a dog frightened of a beating. I knew then that it had been overconfident in its power. It was strong and old, but it was nothing to Hine-nui-te-p. I could never have made her love me and I had been right in more than one way to reject the possibility. ‘How do I get back?’ I asked hesitantly.
‘My obligation is paid. Make your own path from here,’ she said, and closed her eyes.
I waited in case she had any less-cryptic advice, but she was silent and sleeping. Still, I stayed. The wind of her breath gusted evenly for long minutes, until, aching, I crept out of the cave of the guardian of the dead.
The network of tunnels were gone as if they had never been. I stood instead beneath a dim sky in which no sun or moon shone, at the bottom of the high bank beside a grey river. White herons stalked in the shallows, mincing through the mud on their skinny legs.
I could hear singing over the hill, too ordinary to be patupaiarehe song. Hunger gnawed at me, and I turned to climb up the slope.
Mark was sitting on a rock. ‘Hey, Spencer,’ he said.
His face was restored, grave and beautiful. But underneath th
e high cheekbones and clean, straight hair, I saw the gore-smeared skull patupaiarehe clubs had broken.
‘This isn’t fair,’ I whispered. How much pain could anyone bear? ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Bird watching.’
Well, it had been a stupid question anyway. ‘This isn’t even real,’ I said.
His shoulders lifted. ‘Yes and no. I’m really here. It’s really me.’
I bit my lip, hands twisting.
He waved at the hill. ‘I was trying to psych myself up for my first meal. But now I’m glad I’ve got a chance to say sorry.’
‘First meal? Is this some sort of Persephone deal?’
He laughed. ‘There are some interesting parallels. You should read up on this stuff.’
‘I will.’
He cocked his head. ‘In books.’
‘Smartarse,’ I said, and let the tears come. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and held on while I shook into him, kissing my wet cheeks and the corners of my eyes. It felt so good to touch him again, after so long. He felt real. I wasn’t even embarrassed about my nudity. What did it matter now?
‘I’m so sorry, Ellie,’ he said, when I recovered enough to pull away a little and look into his face. ‘Please believe me. I meant to tell you. Right after this all went down, if I survived.’ ‘I believe you,’ I said absently. ‘I think I knew you weren’t lying about that. But I was in danger of loving you, and you knew it. I bet that was tempting.’
Something was nagging at me under the grief; something someone had told me about stories. I chased the memory until I held it firmly, a new but growing hope.
In my mead-happy daze, Professor Gribaldi had said that the stories in your head changed the world. Mark had said that too, or something like it, sitting on the banks of the Avon. And he was really here.
‘Stories I believe,’ I muttered. ‘Not Persephone. Orpheus.’
Mark was still holding my bruised shoulders. ‘Can you forgive me?’
I gently disengaged from his grip. ‘Not yet.’
He flinched.