Kokopu Dreams

by Baker Chris

  The woman watched the dogs racing like greyhounds through the thigh-high thistles growing out of the highway. She turned to the three friends. Sean and Hoheria were struggling to hold Kevin in the saddle, when suddenly he rolled his eyes up in his head and slumped sideways, every muscle peanut butter and all his awareness flown off like escaped birds.

  ‘You can’t come in here,’ the woman said, swinging the shotgun around so that Sean was staring down black barrels the length of a room away. ‘Last people that stopped left the flu. Killed two of us. Won’t happen again.’ She peered at Kevin. ‘What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Knife wound,’ said Sean. ‘And if we can’t stay here where can we go?’ He watched the woman looking at Kevin. She was about the right age to be his mother. Sean wondered what her story was.

  ‘Not a safe place between here and Geraldine,’ she said. ‘That flu took a lot of people. You can’t stop anywhere. You could carry on to the coast, or you could try going inland, Burkes Pass, the Mackenzie Country.’ Her voice trailed off, her face suddenly showing hopelessness, like she couldn’t be bothered feeling anything else. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Good luck wherever you’re going.’

  They stood silently looking at each other. The woman lowered her shotgun. Sean saw her eyes fill with tears, and he felt like crying himself till he looked across at Hoheria and saw a steely determination focused not only on the woman but on him too. Hoheria spoke so quietly they had to strain to hear.

  ‘Thanks for your help with the dogs. We’ll be right anyway, we’ll find somewhere.’ With a brief nod to Sean who had to move smartly to keep up, she slapped Kevin’s horse forward, holding him in the saddle with both hands and gripping her own horse with her knees.

  A kilometre down the road, both she and Sean struggling to hold Kevin upright, she spoke again.

  ‘Dances With Wolves. We need to make a travois.’

  Sean remembered a triangular frame, loaded up with gear and pulled behind a horse. He nodded, and started looking around. It was nearly five kilometres before they found a deserted barn that hadn’t been picked clean of everything useful. By the time they started lashing willow poles together, Kevin had regained and lost consciousness several times, and Sean’s worry about his young friend had grown almost to panic proportions.

  Hoheria reassured him. ‘We lost Clayton. We’re not going to lose Kevin too.’ Her tone made him sit up on Bojay and take a deep breath. ‘I mean it. I’ve lost everyone else and a big piece of me too. I’m not going to take it any more.’

  Sean looked at her. She seemed impossibly young. In her face was a frailty and delicacy that made him think of his daughter Rewa telling him of words that described the moon, like secret and glowing, while she did her homework at the kitchen table and he made a pot of tea.

  They finished the travois and tied it between Bojay and Hoheria’s horse, with Sofa on a long rope behind. The horse was agitated at the sight of Kevin while they bumped and scraped down the road, the young man at least comfortable on a rapidly woven net of baling twine. That night they camped by a stream. The next day they came to Geraldine, hoping for a busy market and people who might be able to help them. But the place was deserted. Empty stalls sat under bright awnings on the footpath in the centre of town. Everything was tidy and the market didn’t look abandoned, it just looked like nobody had turned up.

  ‘Somebody’ll get the sack for this,’ Sean joked, trying to dispel a cloud of despair brought on by the bare trestles and deserted street. He could see that the sight had hit Hoheria like a goods train. But she pulled herself together quickly enough, dismounting and giving Kevin a drink from a water bottle. Hamu sniffed and piddled.

  ‘I think we should try the coast,’ she said. ‘Easier country, not so cold at night.’

  But the Maeroero, it must have been them, had other ideas. Just outside town Hoheria and Sean found branches laid right across the road and an unmistakable arrow pointing to Fairlie. They looked at each other.

  ‘I sure don’t feel like arguing with those little buggers,’ Sean said shaking his head. He hoped the sign meant some sort of assistance, but he was afraid of more laughter, or worse. Hoheria looked puzzled so Sean told her about the Maeroero.

  ‘I don’t know what they’re capable of,’ he said. ‘For a start they caused the Fever.’ Hoheria didn’t blink.

  ‘Then we’d better do what we’re told,’ she said.

  They turned right and followed the road through country that got steadily steeper. Boxthorn hedges and weedy pasture, with the usual flattened fences, gave way to patches of native forest in the gullies. Here and there an ancient gum tree with a mottled trunk and peeling bark stood on a ridge amidst a litter of fallen branches.

  Sean first heard it when they rode through a cutting. They travelled another two kilometres with the noise getting louder and clearer, until they stood at the bottom of a drive lined with stone statues like Tolkein’s Púkel-men. Somebody was playing ‘Down By The Riverside’ on a trombone.

  ‘Up there,’ Sean said to Hoheria, and they wheeled, following the trombone notes between the statues and the bush that thickened as they climbed. The music grew louder till they came around a corner and there in the middle of the track, legs spread and head thrown back, was the trombonist himself. He wore a kilt, a black bush singlet and a sporran made from a bull’s scrotum. His feet were bare, his brown hair unruly and his beard reached his waist.

  ‘So it’s you,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’ He turned and walked away from them up the drive, the trombone in one hand and his kilt swishing as he stepped briskly forward. Sean and Hoheria stood wide-eyed and motionless, Kevin lay unconscious on the travois between them.

  Sean was miles away. The unusual musician, the native trees and winding track had wafted him away to the last annual Wekaweka Trolley Derby, when members of the local hippie tribes had hurled themselves drunk, stoned and generally hilarious, down three kilometres of steep, winding and rain-soaked south Hokianga clay road. Snail, who came second, wore leather shorts, a tattered parka and a carved wooden helmet adorned with gigantic curving cow horns. He’d made a Flintstones wooden motorbike with no steering so that at every bend people had to pull him out of blackberry clumps and the swampy headwaters of streams.

  Hoheria was the first to recover. Sean dragged himself back into the present when she waved her hand in front of his face and called, ‘Hello!’

  ‘What does he mean, "So it’s you"?’ Hoheria was saying.

  Sean glanced down at Kevin and across at her. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Guess we’ll find out.’

  They rode on through bush and bird sound. Their guide gave a skip, and there around a corner stood the most unusual dwelling either had ever seen. It was two-storeyed, maybe three. It had turrets and gables, added on like a Lego hallucination. Part of the roof was corrugated iron, some of it was shingled and some was thatched. One weatherboard wall was visible and they could see one wall covered with what looked like old printing plates, layered like fish scales. A dragon had been painted on them, bedecked with jewels, its fiery breath wrapped around an open door. A car door with the window wound down had been worked into the dragon’s armpit and several stone statues stood on the wooden verandah. Some were like the Púkel-men that Sean had seen down the drive. Two of them were Maeroero.

  Sean and Hoheria dismounted and were lifting Kevin between them, his skin burning and his head lolling, when they were joined by a woman, her flaxen hair in a long plait, and a young girl with a pixie face clutching her skirt.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, pulling Kevin’s arm across her shoulder, ‘I’m Marianne. That’s Roger. The bed’s all ready.’

  They laid Kevin in clean fresh sheets. Sean stood aside while the two women undressed the young man. They helped him sit upright while he drank a frothy green concoction that smelled of hay and wildflowers. Kevin was asleep in seconds and didn’t stir when they cleaned his wound and applied a poultice.

  Marianne turned to Sean. ‘
I think we were in time. We’ll know by tomorrow morning.’ He looked at Hoheria, making herself comfortable in an armchair by the bed. ‘Go on,’ Marianne said. ‘Nothing for you to do here. And you need some cleaning-up yourself from the look of your clothes.’ Sean glanced down at himself. His swanny was slashed and blood-spattered. He could feel the cuts from Colin’s knife when he breathed, little splashes of pain as his chest rose and fell.

  ‘Unless you want to get into bed now, we can patch you up in the kitchen and tell you what’s been happening here,’ Marianne said, straightening from pulling the bedspread around Kevin.

  ‘Kitchen’s fine. Thanks.’

  ‘Roger’s been dreaming about you,’ she said. ‘Riding south to meet somebody.’

  In the kitchen there were cups of limeflower tea and manuka honey. Sean winced and gasped while Marianne washed his wounds with a clear liquid. The same mixture calmed him considerably when Roger poured him a belt and toasted timely meetings.

  ‘Glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘We’ve been waiting for three weeks.’ Sean looked at him. He wondered what had been in the dreams. What had the Maeroero to do with them? He couldn’t think of anything to say so he raised an eyebrow. The one under his eyepatch. Roger continued.

  ‘You have to go on and leave your friends here. That’s one thing I understood from the Maeroero. They’re really looking forward to spending some time with you.’

  Sean felt a stab of fear. He suspected the little creatures meant him no serious harm, but he was alarmed at the prospect of their mischief.

  ‘Stay for a week and then you’d better get moving,’ Roger said. ‘Your friends’ll be safe here. They can catch up later.’ Sean was still digesting this when Marianne spoke.

  ‘In case you’re wondering, the dragon’s a taniwha from Lake Tekapo. Lots of them live there. He didn’t mind about the flames either. He just laughed.’

  Sean had a memory of something large, slithery and incredibly muscular. He tried to picture Cally’s painted taniwha head on it, alive with teeth and jewellery. Quickly he put the image out of his mind.

  ‘They used to be really annoyed at people taking water for the dams. The Maeroero are still upset.’ Sean looked puzzled. ‘They come around all the time now.’

  ‘We’ve been learning to talk with them,’ Roger said. He made a noise like a tin shed collapsing. ‘Just saying gidday wrecks my throat. They like the trombone though. Pity I can’t play it better.’

  Roger had gathered his little family in one afternoon. He’d recovered from the Fever and nearly gone crazy after a solitary week. So he’d mounted a bicycle and gone searching, armed with the trombone on which he’d learned to play two notes. He’d stopped at every farmhouse he saw to blow an experimental blast. At the fourth hedged-in, red-roofed cottage, he’d alerted Marianne, sitting alone after burying a husband and starting to think about whether or not she wanted to go on living. Roger’s trump was the sweetest sound she’d ever heard, she said, and the two of them carried on. First they found ten-year-old Myfanwy and then teenaged Lucy, a dark and intense young woman whose Gothic fantasies had no trouble accommodating the Fever.

  Roger and Marianne were both artists, painters and carvers, and at first they pursued their interests with vigour and enthusiasm. But they soon found the demands of their new life left very little time and energy for any activities not directly connected with survival.

  ‘Pity you’re not staying,’ Roger said to Sean. ‘We could use an extra pair of hands over the winter.’ He turned on his chair to look at the door. ‘But your friends’ll be a big help anyway.’ Sean pictured Kevin asleep, Hoheria beside him in the armchair, and he was almost overwhelmed by a rush of love and affection for the pair. With it came the realisation that he didn’t want to be parted from either, that they were now his family.

  ‘I don’t really like the idea of moving on without them,’ he said. ‘We’ve come a long way together.’

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Roger replied. ‘But I don’t think you’ve got a lot of choice in the matter. I get the idea those little guys run the show now, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to upset them.’

  Sean thought back to Uncle Morepork’s warning. ‘Don’t get on the wrong side of them. You won’t know another moment’s peace.’ He wondered what the Maeroero had done to make Roger so wary of them.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. Roger looked at Marianne. She shuddered.

  ‘They didn’t hurt us,’ he said. ‘But they scared the crap out of us.’

  Marianne placed her hand on top of Roger’s. Sean could see she her face tensing. She took up the story.

  ‘We used to see them sometimes,’ she said. ‘At first we thought we might have been doing something wrong and they were angry with us, but we finally figured it was just the way they sounded. You know, like possums on the roof. And then we started to work out what they were saying, that we all had to pitch in together and look after each other.’ She poured more tea and picked up her cup. Her hand was shaking. Roger continued.

  ‘It started when we tried to get the tractor going. They didn’t like that. They don’t like machinery.’ He looked around nervously. ‘We just wanted to plough up a bit of ground for potatoes and turnips, so I got working on a tractor in the shed. They were okay till I started it up for the first time. As soon as they heard it they went ballistic.’

  Outside the sun was lowering and the room darkened. Marianne lit a lamp, a flickering light that threw leaping shadows, silhouettes that grew stronger as the darkness deepened.

  ‘They nearly killed Roger,’ she said. ‘I was just taking him out a cup of tea when he started the engine, and all hell broke loose. Two of them appeared out of nowhere like they always did. One minute nothing, next thing they’re standing next to me. And they made the shed vanish. We found it later. It was a heap of corrugated iron and timber where we were going to put the garden.’

  ‘What about you?’ Sean asked Roger. What on earth could the little creatures have done? Roger shook his head.

  ‘It was horrible,’ he said. ‘One minute I’m in a shed working on a tractor ... next thing I’m in an open paddock ... wrestling with a giant eel. And you couldn’t imagine how slippery and slimy it was.’

  ‘Well actually ...’ Sean started to say, but Marianne spoke again.

  ‘I didn’t see an eel. I just saw Roger suddenly start fighting with the tractor.’

  But the fight hadn’t lasted long. She’d dropped the two mugs and started towards Roger when the tractor rose about ten metres into the air, spun around several times and fell with a shattering crash right beside Roger.

  ‘It was just like something threw it,’ she said. ‘It smashed the whole thing to pieces. And it was all so loud. There was this noise like rolling thunder. It started when the Maeroero first appeared ... it got so loud. I wanted to throw myself on the ground with my hands over my ears.’

  ‘The tractor’s still out there in pieces,’ Roger said. ‘I tried to put it back together once, but the Maeroero appeared again and the thunder noise started up, only this time it sounded like growling.’

  ‘They come around most days now,’ said Marianne. ‘They just watch, but it’s like they’re keeping an eye on us. And they’re such ugly little beggars, with their horrible noises and warty skins. Where on earth did they come from?’

  ‘They caused the Fever,’ Sean said. He tried to explain, thinking of Uncle Morepork’s words about a whole lot of mischievous Luddites guarding the mauri of the land.

  ‘I can believe that no trouble,’ said Marianne. ‘Reject fairies too. How come they never got into any storybooks?’

  ‘They did. Rumpelstiltskin must have been a cuzzie. And all those critters like kobolds and hobgoblins that turned milk sour and scattered flocks of sheep. I think they’ve always had a bad press.’ He thought of Cally’s paintings and the misshapen little creatures lurking in the undergrowth.

  ‘Kati ra, kati ra!’ he hissed.

  ‘That’s them!’ cr
ied Roger. ‘What does that mean, anyway?’

  ‘Something like "that’s enough, that’s enough".’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Roger said. ‘No wonder they were pissed off about the tractor. Today one piece of machinery, tomorrow agribusiness.’ He looked relieved, then he grew thoughtful again.

  ‘But what about the dreams? Can they just get into my head like that?’

  ‘They can do what they like,’ Sean said. ‘Nothing to stop them now. And what about the dreams anyway?’

  ‘You’re in them,’ Roger said. ‘I saw the three of you coming here. I’ve seen you crossing a high pass in the snow, and riding with a beautiful red-haired woman.’ Marianne gave him a look. ‘Not my type,’ he added hastily. ‘I much prefer blondes.’

  Sean laughed, then grew silent himself as he thought back to times with Te Rina and her dark-haired beauty. He was suddenly struck with envy for Kevin — no longer alone, with Hoheria in the armchair beside his bed and caring for the young man in a way that made him ache with loneliness. Sean pushed his chair back and rose just as Marianne stood up.

  ‘We’d better check on Kevin,’ he said. Marianne was already making up another poultice. The three of them tiptoed into the room where Kevin was breathing raspily in his sleep and Hoheria was invisible in the shadowed armchair.

  Kevin stayed asleep all night, Hoheria refusing to leave her armchair. She was snoring gently when Sean and Marianne looked in the next morning. She was still there when Kevin awoke the following evening with panic in his eyes and wild questions on his whereabouts.

  ‘You’re safe here,’ Marianne told him. ‘And you’d better stay in bed for at least a week. You nearly died.’ Her voice softened. ‘I suppose it wasn’t the first time either.’ Kevin managed a weak smile. Hoheria looked proprietary.

  Sean felt the feeling of family grow even stronger. He remembered Hoheria’s words about clinging to what she had in the face of everything she’d lost, and he realised he was no different. He’d lost a great deal. Te Rina, the children, his life in the Old Times. Where was he going? Why? What did the Maeroero want? Hoheria watched him drift away. Her voice was gentle when she spoke.