Calling the Gods
Page 20
“I’ve been seeing things, Jim.”
“Yes?”
“For some time now. A bunch of youngsters living here. In another time. Like one of those big old families that were around when I was a nipper, with umpteen children and a few ring-ins, maybe a widowed sister with a couple of kids, or some cousin’s orphans. That’s what this lot remind me of, only there’s no grown-ups, just an older girl. She’s in some trouble or other, I can’t make out just what.
“They’re living here, but the place is different. It must have happened in the past some time, like before the Great War, but it doesn’t look the nineteenth century. Sometimes I get the feeling they’re living in the future.”
“Have you tried talking to them?”
“They can’t hear me, yet I can hear them clear enough. I thought,” said Mac, and he coughed, “I thought maybe they were the same lot I’ve seen you watching.”
I looked at him.
“It’s okay, I kept it to myself.”
“I thought you knew something, but couldn’t tell how much.”
“I was awake to something going on for the past few years.” Mac coughed. “I saw you any number of times, looking at something I couldn’t make out, or listening to it. Then this family started appearing to me, and they’re living here where we are now, only just about everything’s different.”
“What I’ve been seeing is in the future, as much as a few hundred years, going by the size of the trees. Native stuff, rimu and totara that’d take that long to grow.”
“It’d explain a lot.” Mac coughed and had difficulty getting his breath this time. “I’ll have to …” He couldn’t finish it. I helped him inside and on to his bed. He closed his eyes, and I drew up the old, red-striped army blanket, only a bit greyer than his face.
“I’ll wait here till you’ve gone to sleep, then nick along later,” I said. “Make you a cup of tea, and see if you feel like something to eat.”
We talked about the family a couple of times after that, but Mac was increasingly unable to say much without the coughing and his trouble breathing. He died a couple of weeks later, and I never heard the rest of what he’d seen.
And then I saw the village again. Nothing hazy this time; it looked like one of those overdone colour photos with everything just a bit too bright. There was a rank stink of ash and worse. The Great House burnt to the ground. Jenek like a young god, dead amongst the ashes; Teg at his feet grimacing in his last agony. The gardens sacked. The storehouses wasted. The goats and sheep and pigs gone, their yards and fences torn down. And other bodies: strangers, grown men, five of them killed by arrows and spears, and disfigured by the ripping bites of dogs. Jenek and Teg had put up a fair sort of fight.
And then her, last of all, lying on her back at the edge of the rising tide, legs lifting, moving with the little waves. Gazing up blind-eyed into the blazing sky. All coarseness gone from her face. Beautiful in death as she had never been in life. Both hands gripping an arrow through her throat. Larish.
Of Selene and the rest, nothing. I could make out what had happened, or it seemed clear enough, but I read over my notes to be sure. Larish must have got in touch with the strangers and led them in attacking Selene’s village, perhaps a boatload from Pity Island as Ruka had said. That’s what all the smoke from the north end of Table Island would have been about.
Of Petra and their baby, Tara, I saw nothing. Hard to believe Petra would attack the village, after what Selene did for him. The stench and sights of the sacked village, the over-stated colours, it stayed with me a while, then began to recede like a dream you remember occasionally until you begin to wonder if it really happened.
Some time after Mac died, I was thinning spinach seedlings in my garden when I heard voices that sounded familiar and closed my eyes. I opened them and found myself on a beach at the foot of a lake between high mountains. To my right a group were loading a couple of rafts at the mouth of the river that drained the lake. They wore shabby tunics. Katerin, Enna, Ruka and Peck, and several others, probably some of the survivors of Pyke.
The wall of scrub opened, and somebody appeared. Selene. Then Tobik and Jedda. As they passed close by, I saw they were scratched all over their cheeks, arms, and legs from pushing through the tea-tree. Trying to see what lay downstream, I guessed.
Half of them on each raft, they shoved off and poled out into the current. I’d say the river was a good thirty metres across, fast, smooth water; clear and deep.
There was something heavy about Selene’s movements, though she still had that lithe grace to everything she did, enough to make me gasp, old fool that I am. She drew up her pole, looked back for a moment then ahead as they disappeared around the first bend, and the river was empty.
Chapter Thirty-One
If I Am
We were behind when Tobik waved his pole and pointed at something ahead. I saw the dark hole of his mouth open but could not hear for a sudden roar as his raft tipped and slid.
Mist towered, swayed, and boiled towards us, but we had just enough time to leap off our raft on to a shingle bank. When we found a way down to the foot of the falls, we found the bodies of Katerin’s baby, one of the boys from Pyke, and enough left of the two rafts for us to lash together a new one. Cautiously, we felt our way down the gorge below the falls, seeing no other sign, and the last hills fell away about us.
This morning Ruka and Peck shouted, “The sea, the sea,” and I remembered that other morning when we reached the inlet. Now Ansik and Jedda are propping up a shelter of driftwood, Ruka and Peck collecting mussels, and Enna is helping me light a fire from the smouldering bracket fungus we carried in a kitful of soil. There is wild spinach and chard to eat with the mussels. Our gear is drying in the first sun in days. Somehow, the ancient knife of Selene has survived. Tonight it will listen as we tell their stories to our dead.
Six of us.
Backed by sandhills and mercy trees, this shallow beach is at the head of a deep harbour, as if the gods had prepared it. Herrings leap ahead of karfish and kingies at the mouth of the river; reefs and tree-covered islands lie further out. Ruka and Peck shout and point at something in the sand, probably pig tracks.
Tomorrow we will look for a spot lying into the north and protected from the south. Water, firewood, flax, and soil for a garden. A place for Jedda to give birth to the child she has carried all this way.
Seven. And if I am, eight.
Enna helps me blow on the fungus till the dry grass flames, catches the dead fern, the splinters of dry wood, and smoke lifts. Her lips move, and I know what she is whispering to the fire, to the sea.
“Without the whale, the tree would fall. Without the tree, the Great House would fall: without the Selene to sing them home, the gods would lose their way: without the gods, the world would fall past the moon and into space.”
Acknowledgements
The following works are referred to, or quoted from, in Calling the Gods: James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period, vol 1 (Government Printer, 1922) — Chapter 18; Frank Sargeson, Once is Enough (Reed, 1973) — Chapter 18; W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children” — Chapter 23; T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” from Four Quartets — Chapter 26; A.R.D. Fairburn, “Dominion”, Dominion (Caxton, 1938) — Chapter 26; Allen Curnow, “Spectacular Blossom”, Collected Poems (Reed, 1973) — Chapter 26; Claude Lévis-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Antheneum, 1975) — Chapter 23; W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium” — Chapter 30; Maurice Duggan, “Riley’s Handbook”, O’Leary’s Orchard & Other Stories (Caxton, 1970) — Chapter 30.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jack Lasenby is an award-winning writer who has been writing books for children and young adults for over 35 years. His latest books, Old Drumble and The Haystack, were, respectively, winner of and finalist for the NZ Post Junior Fiction Award.
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
First published 2011
This edition published in 2011
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sp; HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
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Copyright © Jack Lasenby 2011
Jack Lasenby asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.
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National Library of New Zealand Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Lasenby, Jack.
Calling the gods / Jack Lasenby.
ISBN 978-1-869509-48-4(pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-74309-535-5 (epub)
[1. Quests (Expeditions) — Fiction. 2. Supernatural — Fiction. 3. Fantasy.] I. Title.
NZ823.2 — dc 22
ISBN: 978 1 86950 948 4
Cover images: sperm whale by Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures; clouds by shutterstock.com