by David Hair
Contents
Cover
Acknowledgements
Prologue: A recurring dream
A surprise dinner date
The legend of the Wooden Head
Parihaka
Missing person alert
Picking up the trail
On the prison ship
Nelson
South to Hanmer
In hot water
Milford
Warbird over Wanaka
Regrouping
The Wooden Head
Arrowtown
Interrogation
Fighting back
Confrontation
Death-wish
Goddess of Death
A public debate
The desire to live
Larnach Castle
Epilogue
Author’s note
Glossary
About the Author
The Aotearoa series
Copyright
Acknowledgements
First up, thank you to Arama for his always valuable and insightful input, and a big call out to his family, who shared the India experience with us. Kia ora and namaste!
Thanks also to Paul and Jacky for their company on our research trip into the south. And a big thank you to fellow Kiwi author Tania Roxborogh in Dunedin for her hospitality.
To Brendan and Melissa, my children, who aren’t so little any more, but growing up into fine young adults — I’m proud of you both!
Thanks, of course, to the good people at HarperCollins New Zealand for their continued support for this series. Special thanks to Vicki Marsdon, Liz, Olivia and everyone else who contributed.
And, as always, the biggest vote of thanks goes to my wonderful wife, Kerry, whose patience and judgement in reading, re-reading, editing, conscientious debating of every plot twist and turn, support, criticism and love is what makes these books possible. I cannot thank you enough, my love.
Prologue: A recurring dream
Hemi woke from the strangest dream, his hands gripping the wooden bedposts with all his strength because the wood was solid and real, when nothing else seemed to be.
‘Mother?’ he called, and then clapped a hand over his mouth. He’d spoken aloud in English, a language he’d never learnt in his waking life. Only in dreams.
No-one answered. He looked about the small wooden shed where his family had made their home. After their tribal lands had been taken by the Pakeha government and the tribe had no longer been able to grow enough off the tiny plot that they’d been left with, his whole family had come here, to Parihaka, where there was hope. His father and mother, and seven children. He was the youngest.
The single room smelt of smoke and sweat; most of the floor was covered with strewn blankets. The corner beside the chimney was covered by smashed flour pots and crockery. There were big cockroaches milling about the damp clumps of flour. All the other blankets were empty, lying tangled on bare mattresses. He’d been on the only bed, his parents’ bed, but they weren’t here. In his dream they’d all died, years ago, his whole family. He could barely remember their names.
He called again, but there was no reply, just distant thumps and someone singing — a karakia in his native Maori tongue. A song of sorrow and loss. He went to the window with its poorly made glass, which was thicker at the bottom than the top as if it was seeping downwards. The panel was cracked and smeared; a muddy handprint marked the outside of the glass. He thoughtfully put his hand to it: it was the same size as his own, and some part of him remembered putting it there, before he fell asleep. A decade or more ago. His reflection in the glass was distorted, but it told him enough. He was young again.
In my dream the soldiers came here and marched us all away. They shipped me and hundreds of others south, to work on the harbour in Dunedin. Many years later, I fell ill. I died in a cave … and woke up.
I woke up here. And it wasn’t the first time.
Outside, all he could see was another plain wooden shack, as temporary and dilapidated as his own. He glimpsed a face at the window. A young girl, eyes frightened. She vanished back into shadows, even as he shouted her name.
‘Huia!’
The sudden panic he felt sent a wave of dizziness through him. He clutched his skull. In my dream I died. Why am I here again? Then answers reared up like eels, snapping jaws of truths he shied from. He shouted aloud, a wordless rejection of all that had been. The distant karakia fell silent. He seized the door handle and turned it, just as in the distance brazen trumpets blared, and a drum roll sounded.
No! Not again! He dashed to the bed and pulled from under the mattress the flintlock pistol his father always hid there. He checked the priming before shoving it into the pocket of his overcoat and pulling the garment on. He wrenched open the door and stumbled out into the muddy grounds outside, the hard-packed earth turned to slush by the rain. There were no gardens here, no fences, just row upon row of shanty houses, but this was supposed to be just a temporary place, until the government relented and gave them back their lands.
He looked up as the trumpets sounded again. He put a hand to his heart when he saw that the distant slopes above this place were lined with soldiers in black uniforms, like rows of beetles gleaming in the dawn light.
‘Aiieee!’A woman’s voice cried from somewhere in the distance. ‘Aiieee! They have come again.’
Hemi clenched his fists. He looked left and right, contemplated flight, but it seemed to him that he’d tried that before. And failed.
They caught me and beat me. Then they took me south anyway. But the internal wounds were worse than anyone thought. I bled to death when we got there … and woke up here again …
Other men of his tribe appeared, walking like sleepwalkers. Like corpses. There were so few of them. He called to one he recognized, but the man, grey and battered-looking, showed no sign of having heard him. He just tramped slowly through the mud towards the gates. The drums began to rattle, and the soldiers marched down the slope towards the village.
Hemi threw his head from side to side, seeking someone, anyone, who might be in charge. Someone who might know how to escape this nightmare.
‘Hemi?’ said a small voice.
He spun, to find Huia at the door of her hut. She was fifteen, and wore a European smock dress that had been old and patched before she’d ever been given it. She wore a white flower in her hair and held another clutch of them in her left hand. There was a tragic beauty to her that caught at his throat. ‘Huia? Go back inside. Hide. The soldiers are coming!’
Though he spoke in English, Huia understood. Perhaps she, too, had been learning in her dreams. Except they aren’t dreams.
‘I’ve tried that. It only makes it worse when they find me,’ she said in a hollow voice. Her eyes met his. Ancient, ravaged eyes. ‘It’s better to go and meet them, as we did that first day. It is better not to resist.’
Oh, Huia …
‘We could run,’ he suggested, casting his eyes about. ‘You and I. Maybe this time we’d get outside.’
‘There is no outside,’ she replied sadly. ‘Not for us. There is only this.’ She took his big hand in her tiny one. ‘Will you come with me? I’m scared.’
He looked down at her, remembering. Once we did try to hide together, Huia. Do you recall? They caught us anyway. They smashed my kneecap with a cudgel, just for fun. They still took me south and worked me to death. I can’t think what happened to you … and we still woke up here again next time …
‘I’m scared too,’ he told her, with utmost sincerity.
She gripped his hand and pulled him towards the gates. Other people began to appear, shuffling to their doom with empty eyes. The harsh trumpets set his teeth on edge. He tried to blank t
hem out.
‘Do you remember that first time?’ Huia asked him in a small voice, talking to give herself courage. ‘The Prophet said they were coming, and that we must not fight, that to resist was the excuse they would use to see us as savages and kill us all. They said we must be greater than them. That we must resist without force. That we must welcome them.’ Her voice broke into a small sob. ‘We met them with flowers,’ she said, waving her posie. ‘And they took us all away.’
Hemi remembered it all too well. His father had been a warrior in the Taranaki Wars, and could fight with musket and taiaha. But the wars were over before Hemi had been born, and the punishments had begun. Land stripped from the tribes that had resisted the settlers. Successive governments that spoke of justice but stole nevertheless. I am of the Ngati Ruanui. I am a warrior. But I was born into the surrender. They’d settled Parihaka, land claimed by the military. A protest. An occupation. Te Whiti and Tohu had shown them a way to resist without armed struggle. War had failed: the Pakeha were too many, too well armed. The only way to retain land and dignity was to protest peacefully, their leaders preached. Highlight the evil of the aggressor and so discredit them, until the Pakeha repent their crimes. The settlement had grown to 2000 souls, and the government had begun to negotiate with them. They had thought there was hope.
Then on 5 November 1881 the Native Minister, John Bryce, surrounded the village with more than 1500 soldiers, and marched in. Though the villagers offered no resistance, they were expelled, the women turned out to fend for themselves and the men taken away to do penal labour all over the country. Hemi, like many, had been shipped south to Dunedin. He’d died there, eight years later, living like most of the others in a damp and filthy cave beside the harbour until tuberculosis took him. Except that he woke from that seeming death to find himself back in Parihaka, with soldiers at the gate. Exactly like today.
He gripped Huia’s hand tight to fight the panic that was rising inside him. I can’t go through this again, he thought. Though he could remember now that he had … at least twenty times.
‘Please stay with me,’ Huia whispered, as they gathered before the open gates, staring through the portal at the ranks of soldiers coming towards them. ‘I don’t want to be on my own.’
On a white horse at the head of the soldiers rode a squat white man with a balding scalp and bushy beard. He wore a heavy brown coat and a face like thunder. As he entered the gates he glared about him. ‘Where are the rest of you?’ he shouted at the silent gathering of Maori that had come to meet him. ‘If any are hiding, it will go ill for you!’
‘It is Bryce kohuru,’ Huia squeaked. ‘Bryce the murderer. They say he is a tohunga makutu now, that he can kill with a word.’
I know. I’ve seen him do it. Hemi looked about him. There were fewer than two hundred men here. When I last woke, there were still hundreds of us. There should still be more of us here.
An aide hurried to Bryce’s side, his boots squelching in the mud. ‘Mister Bryce, coming here more than once a year may be a mistake. The take is always poor, like milking a cow too often,’ he panted anxiously.
Bryce scowled. ‘I need everyone we can lay hands on,’ he snapped. ‘Tell the troops to round them all up. Women and children too. We’re going to take the lot this time.’
The aide looked anxious. ‘But master, we don’t know what that will do! What if next time—?’
‘Button up!’ Bryce interrupted brusquely. ‘We’re at war, Mister Peters. I will not be left undermanned.’ He looked about him, then focused on Hemi suddenly. ‘You, boy. Come here!’
Hemi looked left and right as those about him shrank back. Only Huia stayed with him. ‘Sir?’
‘Why are there so few men here, boy? Where are your people hiding? Answer me!’
Huia shrank against him. But Hemi found the courage to look up and meet the man’s eyes. The sensation was almost over whelming. Doubt. Fear. Madness. A warped kind of rectitude, as if the man recognized that all his beliefs were false but he would not — could not — renege on them. It was both pitiable and frightening.
Hemi found his voice with difficulty. ‘No-one is hiding, Mister Bryce,’ he managed to say aloud in a quavering voice. ‘All those who are left are here, I am sure. We are at your mercy.’
Bryce’s mouth twisted. ‘Mercy,’ he spat. ‘The time for such weakness has long passed. The Treaty is stolen. War is coming.’
Hemi blinked in confusion. What treaty? What war? We’ve had so many …
Bryce looked past him, at the young girl whose hand he held. He gave a slow smile of recognition. ‘Huia, isn’t it? You will come with me.’
The girl shrank behind Hemi, who understood instantly. He balled his fists and his muscles clenched. ‘No!’ he blurted, shielding the girl with his body as the soldiers spilled through the gates and fanned out.
Bryce looked down at him irritably, as if he were no more significant than a horse tick. ‘Boy, you know better than that.’
Yes, I do … But I have to try, for her sake.
He wrenched his pistol from his pocket, pulled back the hammer, then pulled the trigger in one motion. He saw Bryce’s face swell in sudden alarm, and the intake of breath from every person present. The gun jolted and spat flame, its sharp retort bouncing about them.
The lead ball stopped a foot from Bryce, hanging in the air like a tiny moon trapped in orbit. The Pakeha makutu’s eyes bulged, as if he’d just exerted himself painfully. He hid his effort with a gloating laugh. ‘Fool! Now I’ll have to make an example of you.’ He opened his mouth to speak, and it seemed to Hemi, who was staring at that impossibly suspended pistol ball with disbelieving eyes, that fire and darkness balled inside the man’s mouth, waiting to be exhaled.
Then Bryce spoke one word, a word Hemi both knew and did not. ‘Die.’
He felt a dreadful clenching in his chest and a roaring in his skull. His limbs seemed to fail, his knees and spine to unlock, and he simply folded over in the mud, gasping and clutching his heart. Behind him Huia screamed, dropping to her knees.
‘Damned waste of time,’ he heard Bryce whine bitterly, as the world seemed to blacken and fade. ‘Let’s round up the rest and get them in irons.’ The words faded. Only Huia’s wailing cries reached him and kept him here. That and the hatred of this man, who’d killed him in half of his twenty post-death lives.
Next time, Bryce, he thought, as the world folded into shadow and became a dream … from which he woke, gripping the wooden bedposts with all his strength. Because the wood was solid and real, when nothing else seemed to be …
A surprise dinner date
Matiu Douglas blew his nose miserably, balled the tissue and lobbed it in the general direction of the rubbish bin in the corner of his bedroom. His success rate was less than fifty per cent, not the sort of accuracy that would excite a basketball coach. He rubbed his eyes and tried to decide if he could be bothered getting up at all. Not much of the day was left — it was five o’clock in the evening and he’d spent most of the day asleep. Outside one of those midwinter southerlies that came direct from the South Pole was howling around the eaves as another squall hit Napier. He huddled a little deeper beneath the duvet to escape the icy air that was overpowering his little heater.
His dad had installed a heat pump in the lounge, but that was downstairs. Mat had been sick for three days and the rest of the week wasn’t looking promising. School books were strewn about the floor from desultory attempts to try to at least make his wakeful time useful, but his concentration was shot to bits. His head was clogged, his nose raw from blowing it, and he was bored witless. This head cold had been doing the rounds at Napier Boys’ High School that winter, and had unfortunately chosen that week to descend on Mat like a ton of snot. That it coincided with the Maori Studies field trip made it all the worse. After years of resisting taking up Maori Studies before this year, it was cruelly ironic that he was missing the annual trip to a historic marae. This year it was to Parihaka, where the Maori
passive resistance to the land seizures of the 1870s had been broken by the Hall government and the Native Minister, John Bryce.
Thinking about Bryce opened up a whole new train of thought. Mat had met the man, and nearly been killed by him. That had been more than a year and a half ago, at Lake Waikaremoana. Not the lake that the tourists and locals knew, but its Aotearoa manifestation. For Mat was one of the few who could travel between the two worlds of New Zealand and Aotearoa. New Zealand meant the modern ‘real’ world with its cars and smartphones and all the other trappings of the here and now. Aotearoa was utterly different: they called it a Ghost World — a place where the land remembered and retained all that had once been, where long-dead people and mythic beings coexisted in uneasy peace and sporadic conflict. A place where you could come across taniwha and goblins and the ghosts of the long-dead, all made of solid flesh. A perilous land, but beautiful too, as only a world conjured by the collective consciousness of centuries of human memories and dreams could be. A place where the sheer scent of a flower could beguile, and the glow of a sunrise make you weep. A place of danger and wonder.
Mat had been younger and much less experienced when he first met John Bryce. He had only just come to realize that he had unique skills — the powers of the tohunga of legend. Bryce had posed as a tutor Mat had been expecting to meet. He’d manipulated Mat into a deadly situation to exploit Mat’s skills unknowingly, and it had nearly worked. But Mat had realized his error in time and escaped Bryce’s clutches.
It was not the original John Bryce he’d met, of course, but his ghost. After his death in the ‘real’ world, Bryce became a vengeful ghost in Aotearoa, and was recruited by Puarata, a deadly tohunga makutu. Puarata gave Bryce the sparsely populated South Island of Aotearoa as his fiefdom, and it was to there that Bryce fled. He was now the last of Puarata’s inner circle still at large. Mat strongly believed that he and Bryce would face each other again, one day soon.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes again. I should get up. I’m starving and Dad’s not here, so no-one else is going to feed me. He groaned and snuffled, but pulled himself up and lurched to his feet. He paused to stare at a bunch of newspaper clippings on his wall, as he did every day — reminders of what he had to do this year.