Na Akua

by Clayton Smith

  “So you are the demigod,” Gray said.

  Polunu scraped his chair backward again, preparing to throw himself back on the ground.

  The old man clapped his hand over Polunu’s wrist and held it tight, pinning it to the table. “I’m a fisherman,” he said through gritted teeth. “Nothing more.”

  “But we were sent—” Polunu began.

  Maui held up his hand. “I’m sure you were. Gods are always sending mortals here, sending mortals there. Go do this, go do that! Go find Maui…have him slow down the sun! Go get Maui…have him fight the great sea monster! Go get Maui…have him rip apart the earth! But I’m not that Maui,” he said, turning his back on the cleanly healed burns on Gray’s shoulder. “All I do is fish.”

  “Pele’s sister’s been kidnapped,” Polunu blurted.

  Maui bared his teeth, and for an instant, Gray could see the fierce and noble young deity that Maui must have been, back when the islands were new. But the moment passed, wiped away by the old man’s scowl. “Which sister? Nāmaka? There’s one who can take care of herself,” he snorted. “The fools who did the kidnapping are the ones who deserve the pity.”

  “No…not Nāmaka,” Polunu replied. “Hi’iaka.”

  A cloud settled over Maui’s brow. “Figures. Pele doesn’t have the luck.” He spat toward the ocean. It didn’t quite make the railing, and it splashed down on the far end of the table instead. Gray blenched. “So. It’s the Little Egg who’s been taken.” He scratched at the tabletop with one thick, warped fingernail. “Too bad. She’s a pretty sweet kid.”

  “Pele has asked us to get her back,” Polunu said proudly.

  Maui exploded with laughter. The entire deck seemed to shake with the force of it. “You two are going to get her back? Well, best of luck, skin bags. What do you want for your last meal?”

  “This is not making me feel better about things,” Gray whispered across the table at Polunu.

  “Grandfather Maui—” the large man began.

  “Will you please stop calling me grandfather?”

  “I mean only the deepest respect,” Polunu said, bowing his head.

  “Oh, you’ve made that perfectly clear,” Maui grumbled. He crossed his arms and stared straight ahead, out toward the gently rolling waves of the horizon. “I don’t want your respect. I want to be left alone.”

  “Tūtū Pele sent us to you. She said you would help us.”

  “Well Tūtū Pele was wrong,” he said coarsely. “I bet she loved that, didn’t she? ‘Tūtū’ Pele. I bet she just ate that up.”

  Gray ran his hands through his hair. He liked having hair, and a scalp to attach it to, but those things would be molten skin and ash if they didn’t rescue Hi’iaka. Being stood up at the altar seemed like such a small and insignificant problem now.

  His broken honeymoon vacation sure had taken a turn.

  “Listen, Maui—” Gray started. Polunu kicked him under the table. “Ow! Sorry! Mister Maui. Grandfather Maui. Holiest of all holy Mauis. Hi’iaka has been taken by some pig-headed god-thing named Kombucha—”

  “Kamapua’a,” Polunu corrected him.

  “—and we only have until tomorrow night to find her. And it’s...it’s sort of my fault she was taken. If I hadn’t—” But he lost his words as he remembered the way she leaned against the railing on the hotel deck, laughing in the dizzying ocean air. “She should have kept running,” he finished, “and she didn’t, and now we have to get her back.” He paused as the weight of it sank into the surface of him, then said it again more firmly: “We have to.”

  Maui smirked. “You sweet on her, mainlander?”

  “What?!”

  “Hi’iaka. Kid’s a looker. Always has been. She snare you in her little web?”

  “I don’t—that is not—” Gray sputtered.

  “Yeah,” the old god grinned. “She sure got you, all right.”

  “None of that has anything to do with anything!” Gray exploded. He threw his hands in the air, but that didn’t quite seem emphatic enough, so he threw them up again, higher. “And if we don’t get her back, Pele’s gonna go all Mount Vesuvius on us, and I am not into that.”

  Maui sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Not my concern,” he said.

  “But you are akua,” Polunu said, his face falling. “You are Maui.”

  “I am Maui,” the old man said sourly. “So what?”

  Polunu looked as if he might cry. “So you’re one of the good ones. You help people.” He wrung his great ham-hock hands. “Don’t you?”

  “No, son; I fish,” Maui said. “I run a restaurant. I take people’s orders. I keep my head down, and I mind my own business. You boys should have done the same.”

  “How can you say that?” Polunu said. “You are Maui!”

  “You keep saying that, but it doesn’t mean what you think it does.” He spat again, and this time the glob made it over the railing. Gray sighed with relief. “You know what happens when you meddle in the petty bickering of nā akua?”

  “You get lava burn,” Gray grumped, “and a hole in your favorite t-shirt.”

  Maui nodded and stubbed his finger on the tabletop. “At best. The gods get their hackles up, and bloody chaos reigns until they’ve battered each other into the ground. People get killed, homes get destroyed, whole villages drown, and the earth falls apart. For what? For family squabbles. Wounded pride. Battles over territory that was never theirs to begin with. Kamapua’a gets captured by an evil chicken, and eight hundred men get slaughtered when he’s set free. Pele sleeps with Nāmaka’s husband, and Hawai’i’s volcanoes get doused to cold dust. Kanaloa teaches a few kids magic, and all hell breaks loose. The world isn’t a better place because of nā akua,” he said. “It’s a better place because we’ve all been forgotten.”

  Gray shifted in his seat and gazed out over the ocean. The old man’s words rang with truth; every mythology was filled to overflowing with insignificant arguments among the gods that resulted in havoc and death for the people who worshipped them. History knew no limit of the stories that ended in tragedy for the mortals who got trampled under the feet of the immortals.

  But those weren’t the only stories.

  “The gods have done plenty of good things, though,” he said. Then, remembering his severely limited experience with Polynesian mythos, he added, “I assume.”

  “Yes,” Polunu nodded. “The gods have done good things. You have done good things!”

  “Ancient history,” the old man growled.

  “You are Maui, who fished the islands of Hawai’i up from the ocean floor!”

  “A mistake.”

  “You are Maui, who pushed up the skies to make room for humans to live!”

  “A bigger mistake.”

  “You are MAUI,” Polunu said, shouting now, as he pushed his seat back and stood up, towering above the old god, “who roped the sun while it slept and harnessed it so you could drag it back and slow its movement across the sky so we could have longer days to grow our food and live in light! You have done more to help Hawai’ians than almost anybody! And there’s a Hawai’ian who needs your help right now!” And then, just to be clear, he added, “That Hawai’ian is me.”

  “And what was my reward for doing all that?” the grizzled old god said, his face darkening. “A pat on the head and a list of patronizing titles: Maui the Trickster; Maui the Half-God; Maui the World’s Worst Fisherman. But even the jeering was better than their apathy, boy. Yes, I raised the sky on my shoulders. Yes, I fished up the islands. Yes, I dragged down the sun. I killed the eight-eyed bat, and I brought the humans their fire, and a thousand other feats besides. Yet the people of Hawai’i moved on without nā akua…they left us here to wither in the sun.”

  “But you just said they were better off wi
thout you,” Gray said.

  “They are better off!” Maui exploded, slamming a fist down on the table. “And good for them! They turned their backs so readily, and everything’s working out for them like sunshine and blossoms. I don’t need their love. I don’t need their thanks. I turn my back on them, too, and all of us are better for it. You understand? The people do what the people will. I fish, and I run my restaurant, and I do not get involved.”

  An uneasy silence fell over the table. Gray found himself looking at his hands, shamed by the old god’s words, though he personally hadn’t forgotten Maui. He never even knew about him in the first place.

  He felt that might be even worse.

  But regardless of Maui’s feelings, Gray and Polunu had a job to do.

  “You don’t have to get involved,” Gray said quietly, still lost in the important intricacies of his own fingers. “We just need to borrow your hook.”

  Maui looked at him. Then he looked at Polunu. Then he looked back at Gray.

  “I imagine you’re joking, son. But your punch line needs work.”

  “I’m not joking,” Gray said, shaking his head. He still didn’t chance a look in Maui’s direction. “If we can borrow the hook, we can go and leave you to your fish.”

  “You want to borrow Manaiakalani,” Maui said, bewildered. “You want to just...borrow it.”

  Polunu shrugged. “We’ll bring it right back.” Maui gave him a look. “I mean, if we don’t die.”

  Maui snorted. “There’s the trick of it,” he said.

  “Tūtū Pele sent us to you to ask for your blessing. She said you might lend us Manaiakalani to defeat Kamapua’a.”

  “Neither my blessing nor my hook is hers to give,” Maui shot back.

  “That’s why we came, grandfa—um, Maui. Tūtū Pele said you are our best chance. That you are our only chance. I beg you to open your heart to us and grant us your favor.” He lowered his eyes. “I’d really like to see my pineapple stand again.”

  “You want to wield my ancestral hook as a weapon against the demigod pig-man? Do you boys even know what Manaiakalani would do to a creature like Kamapua’a?” Maui asked.

  Gray raised an eyebrow at Polunu.

  Polunu shrugged. “Well…not really,” he admitted.

  “Of course not,” Maui scoffed. “Pele wants you to hook Kamapua’a right in the chest, and then Pele wants you to yank the hook back out, because Pele knows that when you do, you’ll draw out the divine soul of him, leaving him mortal and vulnerable. Which is exactly what Pele wants, because Pele would like to never deal with that wretch ever again, and Pele works her little web, doesn’t she? Oh, yes, she does. She just can’t keep her fingers out of every basket, no matter who has to pay the price.” Maui clenched his jaw against some old memory that threatened to bubble to the surface. “What Pele wants, Pele seems to get.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Finally, Gray cleared his throat. “I see what you’re saying here,” he said slowly, “and you seem to not really be into the whole ‘do Pele’s bidding’ thing. But...I mean, the whole part about draining his divinity sounds like it would work pretty well...right?”

  Maui grunted. “Sure. It’d work just fine, if you could manage it.”

  “Okay. So Pele may be selfish, but she’s also not wrong. If this is the only way we can face King Pig, we at least have to try.” Then he added softly, “We can’t just abandon Hi’iaka.”

  Maui shook his head and sighed. “Draining his immortality sounds great and all. But son, do you think Kamapua’a wants to become mortal?”

  Gray considered that. “No,” he decided, “I don’t suppose he does.” Being immortal and omnipotent sounded like a pretty good gig.

  “So do you think he’s very likely to allow that to happen?”

  “Look, I don’t expect him to be thrilled about it,” Gray said, suddenly feeling very tired. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes. “But we don’t have a whole lot of choices here. Either we do it and we save her, or we die trying, or we die from not trying. Those are our options. I don’t like any of them, and I should have stayed at the hotel this morning and sent Pele her message in the mail and let all you akua work out your own stupid problems, but I didn’t, because I’m an idiot, and because she smelled like coconut, and the sand crabs really weirded me out, and now here we are, and can we please borrow your fish hook to save Hi’iaka from a deranged half-pig god thing?!”

  Polunu gasped, horrified at the way Gray had spoken to the revered god of Polynesia and father of Hawai’i. But Maui, for his part, only gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into the table wood, lost in thought. Finally he said, “If you can retrieve it, you can use it to save the Little Egg, or die trying. But mark my words, mainlander: if it’s not returned to me in pristine condition, Pele’s lake of fire will look like the pleasant option.”

  Polunu smiled with relief. He pressed his hands together and bobbed his head in gratitude. “Mahalo, Maui. Mahalo nui loa!”

  “Wait, wait, wait—back up a second,” Gray said, holding up his hand. “If we can retrieve it?”

  Maui flashed a grin. “We’ll see how bad you want to save your Hi’iaka, haole.”

  “What does that mean?” Gray’s heart sank. “Where exactly is this magical hook?”

  Maui’s grin stretched even wider. “I hope you’re not afraid of sharks.”

  Chapter 10

  “I hate everyone, and I hate everything, and I am never coming back to Hawai’i,” Gray muttered.

  “Relax, brah,” Polunu said. “It’s just a day at the beach. You white people come to Hawai’i for the ocean, right?” He gestured out over the water. “Here it is.”

  They stood at the end of the old pier, its heavy wooden planks stained dark by water and slimy with algae. Maui stood on the deck of his restaurant a few hundred feet up the beach, nodding at them encouragingly…or maybe he was being patronizing. It was hard to tell at that distance.

  Gray peered over the edge of the dock. There it was: the legendary Manaiakalani, the great Hook of Maui that had dredged up the islands of Hawai’i from the ocean floor all those millennia ago. It was so unassuming, lying there in the sand beneath the lazy waters, and not nearly as big as Gray expected—only about two feet long from handle to curve. Covered in sand and barnacles, it was little more than a shadowy outline of bone at the bottom of the ocean, but it was unmistakable. All that stood between Gray and Maui’s hook was about four feet of water.

  Four feet of water, and a tangle of primeval half-shark sea monsters.

  “What are those things?” Gray asked, disgusted. There must have been two dozen of them writhing around in the water. They looked like sharks, with gray skin, lolling eyes, razor-sharp teeth, and short, triangular fins...but they also had rough scales, and arms wriggling out from behind their heads, and each arm had three webbed fingers with long, black nails. Their tailfins were fixed with curved six-inch barbs. They struggled over each other, clawing their way around in knots, swinging their tails and snapping their jaws any time they got tangled among one another.

  “Protectors. Guardians of Manaiakalani. Not the shark god’s little demons, I don’t think,” Polunu said, frowning down at the water. “Something different. Something new.” He straightened up to his full height and gave Gray a shrug. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I thought you were supposed to know everything. I thought you could feel it in your heart,” Gray snapped, stabbing a finger into Polunu’s chest. “What happened to your heart, Polunu?!”

  “My heart is full of love for nā akua,” he replied, scratching his arm. “But I don’t know what these things are.”

  “Thanks. Great. Very helpful.”

  “Just go in quick,” he said encouragingly, putting his arm around Gray’s shoulder as the smaller man struggled to st
and under the weight of it. “Like stealing a pineapple.”

  Gray blinked up at the big Hawai’ian. “How is this at all like stealing a pineapple?” he demanded.

  “You ain’t never stolen a pineapple before?”

  “No!”

  “Well that’s good. ’Cause stealing is wrong. But we have a saying in my neighborhood: ‘You gonna steal a pineapple, you better move like a lizard.’”

  Gray shook his head and sighed. “I can’t even begin to guess what that means.”

  “It means pineapples are very important to the farmer, and he watches them close, you know? So you want to steal one, you better move like a lizard—blend in, be quick, stay low to the ground. Otherwise, the farmer, he catch you and stab you with a stick.”

  Gray just stood and stared.

  “It’s a very sharp stick,” Polunu explained.

  “I bet.”

  “So you gonna get Manaiakalani, you gotta be quick, like a lizard. Otherwise, you get the farmer’s stick.” He tilted his head back out over the water and curled his lips at the creatures below. “In this case, it’s the shark’s mouth, I guess.”

  “I got it. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, I’d avoid the tail, too,” Polunu continued. He pointed down into the water. “Some of those spikes look like they got black on them, see? That might be poison. Probably not so good for you.”

  “How can sharks have arms?” Gray said. He was glad he hadn’t eaten any fish up at Maui’s; it would all be coming back up right about now.

  “They ain’t sharks, braddah. Might’ve started out that way, but they ain’t that way anymore. They got dark magic inside.”

  “Why can’t anything be easy?” Gray sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “What’d you think it’d be like?” Polunu asked, shooting him that wide, lopsided grin. “I thought you said you teach mythology.”