by David Hair
Men with guns leapt aside, and trained their weapons, when suddenly they froze, and stared…and then they were gone, and Kelly cried in shock as the two BMWs vanished, replaced by a small row of constabulary with muskets and sabres, who dived aside as the RAV4 roared through them, and out onto the dirt road.
Wiri whooped joyously, as Kelly fought the wheel, and they roared down a darkened road toward the colonial city of mythic Auckland, and their enemies fell behind them, scattered across two worlds.
Mat smiled in satisfaction, and looked cautiously down at his hands. The left fell open, to reveal a scar that looked clean and already old, as though seared close by the heat of the energy that had flowed through it. He opened his right hand, and felt a momentary twinge of surprise.
He had expected it would have been the tiki he gripped, but it wasn’t. It was his koru knot. It looked dark and felt very cold, as if the blood has somehow seeped into it. He held it up and switched on the cab light to examine it and whistled softly. It was his koru knot, but it had changed.
It was no longer wood. It had become greenstone.
15
Ninety Mile Beach
What happened back there?’ asked Kelly, as she drove a winding dirt road through the hills west of Auckland. The city was well behind them, as was the panic they’d caused by blazing through the streets in a loud, monstrous gleaming metal vehicle. Mat vividly recalled glimpses of wide-mouthed faces, and panicked horses dragging carriages into collisions with market stalls and hitching rails and wagons. He hoped no one had been seriously hurt. At one point mounted men with pistols had galloped after them, but they’d been left far behind.
The downside of being on this side of the two worlds was that there was no harbour bridge. They had been forced to drive out west, and circle north, to travel around the inner edge of the Waitemata Harbour. The roads weren’t too bad, but they kept coming upon surprised travellers on carriages and horses who pulled aside in alarm and disbelief as they roared past. ‘Fortunately,’ commented Kelly at one point, ‘we’re in ‘mythville’, and they can’t radio ahead to set up road-blocks.’
Mat wondered whether Puarata could do something very like that. One thing was certain: Puarata could travel faster on the sealed roads of the real world than they could here, on the dirt roads of Aotearoa.
‘Mat,’ said Wiri next morning. ‘You still haven’t told us about last night. How did you move the whole vehicle from one world to the next?’
Mat lay back sleepily. They had driven for two hours before tiredness and poor roads had forced them to pull over and sleep. It wasn’t because the four-wheel-drive couldn’t handle the roads, but the signposting was so bad they kept getting lost, until Wiri suggested they try again in better light. Before they slept, Mat had told them he’d seen Timothy Spriggs and Manu, captive but alive, and tossed them the keys. This news had cheered them all up, though it was by no means certain their friends could have escaped. It was dawn now—he looked at his watch and saw that it had stopped some time earlier. He had no idea what day it was, and only a vague impression of time. The night’s sleep had been good, though. Even cramped into the backseat of the RAV4, Mat had slept like a log, he was so drained. He was hungry now, seriously hungry, as his dad would say. ‘If you feed me I’ll tell you,’ he said groggily.
Wiri laughed. ‘Fair enough—Kel, can you pull into the next farmhouse we see?’
Kelly looked at him, frowning. ‘Is that wise?’
‘Wiser than starving,’ replied Wiri.
Kelly nodded reluctantly. ‘OK. If you say so.’ A few minutes later, she pulled off, and took the car up a long driveway to a large wooden farmhouse.
Farm dogs came rushing out, barking furiously, as they purred into the yard. The horse hitched there rolled its eyes and shied away, and chickens scattered. The rough shed to the side of the house had so much machinery it spilled out into the yard—all of it looking like exhibits Mat had seen in museums, but none of it rusty and old like the museum pieces. Another reminder that the world they were travelling in wasn’t static, but fluid, and alive. He recognised a butter churn and a horse-drawn plough, both gleaming and new. Some sort of pre-electric washing machine was on the porch with pieces scattered about, as though they had interrupted its repair.
As they stepped from the vehicle, a voice rang out over the barking dogs. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move or I’ll shoot!’ The voice came from a man in rough cotton overalls, standing at the door. He cradled a musket in his hands. An array of young faces lined the windows, staring curiously.
Wiri raised a hand, and smiled. ‘Kia-ora. May we stop here and buy some food?’
‘Not until you tell me what on earth that thing you’re riding in is,’ called the farmer.
‘It’s a four-wheel-drive,’ replied Wiri. ‘From Auckland.’
The farmer considered that a moment. ‘From Auckland, you say?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Ahhh…no telling what they’ll come up with next, is there?’
He lowered his gun, and studied them. ‘You look as if you’ve all been dragged backward through the blackberry. If someone had asked me, I’d have said you were up to no good.’
Wiri shrugged apologetically. ‘We’ve had a run in with some unpleasant people, and are now planning to leave them far behind. But we find ourselves without food or water. We would not expect to come inside, and we would pay well.’
‘Would you just? Well, this is a good place this, and we’re hospitable folk, but I’d need to know a bit about you before I let you into my house. Who are you, and where are you from?’
Wiri nodded. ‘That’s fair enough. My name is Wiri, of the Ngati Tautari of the Waikato.’
The farmer nodded. ‘Winston Bailey. From round here. I own pretty much all the flat land you can see.’
Mat glanced around. They were on a slight rise, and he could see a lot of countryside.
Wiri indicated Kelly and Mat. ‘This is Kelly, and Mat. They’re from the Hawke’s Bay, around Napier.’
Bailey’s eyes narrowed a little. ‘You’re a long way from home, all of you. What brings you up this way?’
‘We’re travelling north,’ replied Wiri.
‘North, is it? Tell me about these people who’re after you.’
Wiri told him briefly that they’d been attacked by thieves. The farmer might talk slowly, but he was no fool and asked a lot of questions, always seeking names, and nodding when he got one. Finally he leaned his gun against the door, and stepped down, offering a hand to Wiri.
‘So, you know Tim Spriggs, do you? Good man, that, for a Londoner. He was posted up here last year—made a pretty good impression. If you know Tim, that’s good enough for me. You can call me Win.’
A troop of children and young adults burst from the house to examine the newcomers and their strange vehicle. ‘Some new-fangled thing from Auckland,’ Win explained, and the elder ones nodded. It seemed that Auckland held some mythic place in their mind as a source of all things weird and wonderful.
Win’s wife appeared, took one look at Kelly, and practically dragged her inside.
‘Totally indecent,’ she declared. ‘Your petticoat is showing, dearie, and oh, look at that tear! And what on earth have they done to your hair?’
Mat began to laugh, until she looked at him. ‘And you, dear! What a mess. You can come too!’
They were washed, fed and darned back into a semblance of order, though Win’s wife, whose name was Clara, despaired of Kelly’s short-cropped ginger spikes.
‘That’s awful, dearie,’ she said. ‘Fancy them cutting your hair off. Probably to make some fancy wig for an Auckland belle,’ she sniffed, while Mat smirked at Kelly.
Kelly’s dress proved beyond repair, so she was offered a new one, but instead demanded men’s clothing, to Clara’s horror. Eventually she threw up her hands. ‘What young women want these days is beyond me!’ she declared, and flapped out, muttering.
The children—there were seven—climbed all over the
RAV4, and the dogs leapt all over it too, as though claiming it for themselves. Kelly looked sadly out the window, and Mat knew she was wondering where Fitzy was. It was still hard to think of the turehu as being other than the faithful dog who had befriended them. Either way, the little goblin was their friend, and part of their group.
A breakfast of eggs and bacon and fried onions, served with buttered griddle cakes and mugs of milk, filled their bellies. Win Bailey wouldn’t hear of being paid.
‘We’ve more than enough. You keep your money, and just remember to give my regards to Tim Spriggs when you see him.’
They drove away several hours later, waving cheery goodbyes, as the seven children stared after them. The dogs followed them to the gate, yelping happily. They saw Win Bailey wave from his porch, and then turn away, rubbing the back of his neck, his mind no doubt already switching to his tasks for the day. They drove north through some of the earliest European-settled land in Aotearoa. As such, it was initially more tamed than the Waikato, with large established wooden manors, stone fences and old churches. The roads were busy, and everyone stared as the RAV4 rolled past. Kelly took care to go slowly past the horses, so as not to panic them. Twice they were caught in the midst of herds of cattle being moved on the roads, herded by horsemen and yapping farm dogs. The cows watched their vehicle as placidly as they watched anything else.
At one point Kelly fiddled with the stereo, and to their utter amazement, picked up a radio broadcast. It was Aunt Daisy, a famous radio personality Mat could remember his father talking about, who’d been big in the fifties. So they listened to good-natured discussions of household tips, bargains and recipes for an hour or so, before the hills closed in and they lost reception.
‘This place is weird,’ commented Mat. ‘One moment we’re in a village from pre-European times, then we’re in 1860s Auckland, then somewhere in the early 1900s, and now we’ve got radio. Freaky as.’
Wiri shrugged. ‘This is a land of myth—recent legends as well as ancient—you have to be ready for anything!’
Their only concern was petrol. The tank had been just over half-full leaving Auckland, and by midday it was nearly empty. Kelly wondered out loud where they could get more. Wiri turned back to Mat.
‘Which brings us back to the question of how we got here in the first place. You ready to tell us yet, brother?’
Mat scratched his cheek. ‘OK. I’m just not sure, that’s all. It’s hard to describe. I tried to use my imagination to kind of tune in to this jeep thing in the same way I get you in and out of the tiki, and when I did that controlling stuff on you at the marae. That’s what I did to Donna, using some of her fingernail clippings I found in the bathroom.’
‘I remember reading about witchcraft during my brief goth phase,’ said Kelly. ‘They reckon witches use hair and nail clippings to do magic.’
‘Guess it must be true, then,’ Mat said. ‘Anyway, when we got to the RAV, I realised we were going to be trapped, unless we got back to Aotearoa, so I thought if I tried to…ummm…tune into the jeep, then push it into Aotearoa, we’d go with it, and end up with an advantage.’ He spread his hands. ‘And we did.’
Wiri and Kelly looked at each other and shook their heads. ‘You’re way out there, Mat,’ said Kelly. ‘You scare me.’
Wiri looked at him thoughtfully.
‘Hey, I’m still me,’ said Mat. ‘It was just an idea that worked.’
Wiri looked at him for a long time, so long that Mat felt uncomfortable, then winked. ‘Well done. You surprise us, all the time. Do you think you can do it again?’
‘Yeah. I mean, I think so. It just kind of knocks me out, that’s all. I feel really zonked afterwards.’
‘Well, if we want more petrol, we’re going to have to get back to the real world soon,’ commented Kelly.
They drove in silence a while.
‘I hope Fitzy is OK,’ Mat said finally. ‘And Manu, and the Captain.’
Wiri let out a slow breath. ‘So do I. Manu has a knack for getting out of scrapes. And I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything serious to the Captain. Too hard to cover up.’ He put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder. ‘And I’m sure Fitzy is OK. That little fella is harder to kill than a cockroach.’
She leant her cheek on his hand momentarily, but didn’t reply.
The second transition, back to the ‘real world’ (though one seemed as real as the other now), was no easier for Mat. In fact, it took longer, and was more difficult, as he struggled to visualise his own world. Finally, it was the koru knot itself that triggered the change—he pictured it slowly changing from greenstone to wood—and when he opened his eyes, dizzy from the loss of vitality that performing this ‘magic’ demanded, he was dazed but unsurprised to be looking at a tarseal road. The road was empty, and the paddocks alongside, though in farther fields he could see flocks of dirty white sheep. He looked down at the koru knot. It was still greenstone, despite the change in worlds. He remembered that pounamu was considered powerful by Maori, and felt a tremor inside.
A nearby signpost proclaimed they were 12 kilometres south of Wellsford. They found a service station on the south side of the town. Wiri, in his eye-catching feather cloak, was left in the RAV4 as Mat poured the petrol, while Kelly bought a pile of biscuits, chips, Coke and chocolate. Mat managed the shift back to Aotearoa, but two such shifts proved too much and he fell asleep almost immediately.
When he woke, it was night time. The sun was down, and the only light was the dashboard. He had woken to the sound of sobbing, and opened his eyes, blinking. Wiri and Kelly were holding each other, the girl’s head and shoulders shaking. Wiri was murmuring something. Mat contemplated going back to sleep, but his stomach was rumbling. So he yawned loudly, and stretched instead. The two young people pulled slowly apart. Kelly didn’t look back, but rummaged for tissues in the glovebox.
‘Hey, brother. You OK?’
‘Sure. Just hungry. Where are we?’
‘Good question. I’ll show you on the map, after we’ve had something to eat.’ He handed backward some Coke, and a packet of chips.
They all ate, then turned on the cab light, and Wiri pulled a road map from the glovebox.
‘We’re just south of Kaitaia,’ he said, pointing at the map. ‘Look, just here. From Kaitaia north, the land becomes very narrow, only a few kilometres wide, and only one road north. It’s narrow and winding, even on the real world side. Here, in Aotearoa, it is very difficult. We can do it better than most, in this vehicle, but a simple road-block could stop us. One way would be to just drive up openly, in the real world, and trust that Puarata can’t touch us in front of witnesses.’
Mat shifted nervously.
‘But,’ continued Wiri, ‘if he really wants to stop us, witnesses won’t put him off. He can escape into Aotearoa as easily as we can. And he might even have asked for police assistance, claiming that the so-called missing boy from Napier has been spotted. By the time the police have slowed us down, he could arrive and take over the situation.’
Kelly rubbed her eyes. ‘So, what do we do?’
Wiri smiled at them. ‘Well, there is a highway that’s used every day, that bypasses the main road, for most of the journey. Here!’ He jabbed his finger at the map. ‘Ninety Mile Beach. It goes all the way along the west side of the narrows, all the way to here, opposite to Te Kao. If we go that way, we can cut inward, and hit the road again—hopefully behind Puarata’s watchers.’
They stared at the map.
‘That’ll take us to about twenty kilometres south of the cape, won’t it?’ asked Kelly.
‘Yes,’ replied Wiri.
‘Which side should we be on?’ Mat asked. He could still feel the draining effect of the last two shifts, and the thought of doing another one…
‘We’ll stay on this side for now. Until we can get closer to the cape, and see what’s waiting for us.’
What’s waiting for us, thought Mat weakly. It wasn’t an encouraging thought. He leant back.
; ‘Get some more sleep, brother. We’re going to drive some more, try and get through Kaitaia about midnight. That way, we’ll avoid any watchers picking which road we take from there.’
Mat nodded. Despite the food and drink, he felt weak, as if he were recovering from a dose of flu. He stroked the cool greenstone of the koru knot, and let his mind wander. His mother’s face drifted past his eyes, murmuring encouragement. His father too, united in concern for him. ‘Be brave, son,’ they said together. He took the thought down into sleep.
He awoke at dawn, jolted by the movement of the RAV4 as it left the road.
‘Ahipara,’ said Wiri. ‘We’re at Ahipara, where the tourists can access the beach. And now, we’ve only eighty-eight kilometres, or fifty-five miles, of sand and we’ll be nearly there.’
‘Fifty-five? I thought it was ninety—as in “Ninety Mile Beach”?’ said Kelly.
Wiri chuckled. ‘That’s Pakeha counting for you. Ninety Mile Beach is only eighty-eight kilometres long, which is actually fifty-five miles in the old imperial measurement.’
They were at the bottom of a gentle northward curve, and the sun was rising into a cloudless sky. The air was warm, and the shadows on the beach lifted with each passing second, revealing a golden expanse that disappeared into a haze to the north. The beach was wide, with the sand close to the edge of the ocean firmly packed. When Mat set out, he’d been looking at the Pacific Ocean from Hawke Bay in the east, and now here he was, just a few days later, hundreds of kilometres to the north, and looking westward at the Tasman Sea. Kelly pushed her foot down, and the RAV4 surged down to the water line. The beach was clear and unspoiled, and empty as far as the eye could see. Wiri whooped as they picked up speed, and Mat felt an urge to yell. Only Kelly looked grim, her mind no doubt where it always seemed to be—looking ahead with dread to the moment when Wiri’s spirit was thrown from this life into whatever lay beyond. Wiri tried to involve her, to make her laugh, and often did, but she always lapsed into an ever-more painful silence. But she drove them on, and after a while Mat realised it was just about the bravest thing he’d ever seen.