by David Hair
‘We can still save you. Just lie there, let us bring help.’ He knew it was too late, but he really just wanted her to stop talking. She was one of the few links to the old days, one of the few people who knew all the things he’d been forced to do in Puarata’s service.
You can tell yourself until you are blue in the face that you were as much a victim as those you harmed, but you never quite believe that.
He was ashamed to realize that, vindicated or not by the past few minutes, he still wanted her dead, because, just maybe, her passing would take away the last vestige of those awful years.
‘We’ve been through a lot together, Wiremu,’ Donna whispered, her face softening a fraction. ‘I always knew it would end like this, though.’ She twisted her hand and gripped his, her fingers mere bones. Her expression became disoriented, then her mouth twisted.
‘Watch out for my daughter,’ she hissed. ‘She’s just like me.’
Then her head fell back, and her eyes emptied.
She’s just like me.
Her mother’s dying whisper echoed in Evie’s mind. She’s wrong, she told herself. I’m nothing like her. But her inner mantra rang hollow. She could see it in the way that Wiri looked at her, as though she were an unpredictable, venomous snake, or a dog with suspected rabies.
There was blood on her hands — she wiped them on her thighs, the slick fluid smearing her denims. Her mother’s blood. And it should be on my hands — I brought her here, to die. She crawled away from the cooling body and buried her face. Her nose was throbbing, and hurt to touch. More blood was smeared on her face, like war-paint.
Something nuzzled her, shocking her so much she almost leapt. It was Fitzy, who wasn’t a labrador at all, she now knew. But what mattered was the concern in his canine eyes. She wrapped her arms around him and let his furry warmth comfort her.
Wiri pulled the staff from her mother’s body and broke it, then walked into the Mana Whenua display, as though he needed to be alone. He came back a few minutes later, limping still, his left shoulder hunched over awkwardly. His face was troubled. ‘Do you know why Kiki came here?’
She shook her head. ‘The cards indicated some kind of prize, and the Jack of Diamonds and the King of Clubs fell together — that represented you and him, so I knew he’d be wherever you were. I don’t know any specifics.’ Evie’s voice sounded atonal and lifeless to her ears. Her confidence in her powers was shaky just now — she felt both betrayed and vindicated by what had happened. She genuinely had not known what cards were coming to her hands for a moment, and that almost never happened. But they’d ended up being the right ones.
Though not enough to save my mother.
‘There is something missing from a display case,’ Wiri reported, brandishing a label he’d found. ‘This says it was a flute carved from bone, found in Hataitai.’
‘Where’s Hataitai?’
‘Not far away — it’s a Wellington suburb.’
‘What are we going to do?’ She clung to Fitzy, wishing she’d not seen a glimpse of what he really was, wishing he was just an ordinary dog giving unconditional love. But it meant a lot that he was comforting her despite who she was.
Wiri shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Mike and Sos … Tupu killed them both. I couldn’t stop him. I never could.’ He hung his head. ‘Even less so now.’ He sighed, then pocketed the tiki halves in separate pockets. ‘I’ll burn these later.’
‘What time is it?’ Evie asked dully.
‘Eleven.’ Wiri straightened, peering out the shattered windows. The window that Donna had broken was in the lee of the storm, but the wind still whistled over the jagged glass. There was no light, none at all, in the whole of the night outside, and still the storm raged over the harbour. ‘I hope no-one is out there. It was in such a storm that the interisland ferry Wahine sank in the harbour, back in 1968.’
She’d not even been born then. ‘Were you there?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I’ve only heard stories. Ancient history. We must learn what is happening now. What is Kiki planning?’
‘I don’t know: but that flute must be involved,’ she said, struggling to think when her mother — her mother — lay dead beside her. But their fate might depend on coming up with some clue. She went on hesitantly. ‘When Kiki had me trapped, he said that he …’ — and I — ‘ … “would ride the taniwha out of the chaos”.’
Wiri stared, his eyes intent. ‘Ride the taniwha out of the chaos …’ He bit his lip. ‘It must mean something.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘I should know!’
Evie wished that Cassandra was here, with all her research skills. But the power is out and cellular reception has gone — her precious internet wouldn’t be talking to her. Then another thought struck her. ‘Kiki also went into my head — I think he knows about the Treaty.’
Wiri’s face hardened. He turned to Fitzy. ‘Find Tama and Colleen, and stay with them. Try the Government Buildings first, then home.’ Fitzy made a reluctant, protective growl that encompassed them both, then startled Evie by looking up at Wiri and speaking.
‘I’ll find them. Be strong, toa.’ He turned to Evie. ‘And you, matakite: have courage. You are the person your mother should have been.’ With a blur of movement, he became a large bird that shot through the broken window like an arrow, leaving Evie staring after him, open-mouthed.
Wiri went on as though nothing odd had happened. ‘We’re spread to the four winds. Mat and Riki are gone; Tama and Colleen are with the pollies; and Kelly’s at home alone …’
‘You should go to her,’ she told him. ‘Kiki might hurt her, to pay us back for being thwarted here.’
Except we didn’t thwart him — he got exactly what he wanted. Why a flute, of all things? And why that one?
Wiri’s face was sick with concern. ‘I can’t leave you alone. Kiki might come back at any moment. And this place’ — he spread his hands to encompass Donna’s body, the wrecked windows, and the two dead men on the lower floor — ‘it’s a mess. I don’t know how we’ll explain it.’
‘If we don’t stop Kiki that might not be an issue. We need information, but the internet is down. How can we find anything out?’
Wiri laughed bitterly. ‘You’re definitely Generation Y or Z or whatever, aren’t you? It’s called a library, and one of the biggest in the country is five minutes away, in Civic Square.’
She blushed. ‘Oh yeah, those. Well,’ she said, climbing to her feet, ‘that’s where I have to go.’ Then she stopped, looking down at the body of her mother. Donna looked almost peaceful, in death. But those words kept echoing in her head: She’s just like me.
I’m not, I swear I’m not …
‘We can’t just leave her like that,’ she blurted.
Wiri nodded. ‘Nor Mike and Sosefo.’ He cast about him, then looked back at her. ‘You go on to the library, and I’ll look after this. I’ll do right by her, I promise. But you need to run. Everything may depend on what you can learn.’
Cloudland
‘So what can we expect, bro?’
Mat glanced back at Riki. The two of them had been struggling through the rain forest, their tops removed and sweat running down their backs. They had a cloud of midges about them, and that in turn had attracted what Riki called ‘the fan club’: a swarm of fantails swooping into the midges and gobbling them down. It had been about three hours since they left the ledge, the sun was intermittently gleaming between the sun-showers, and the day was sticky hot. They’d found no paths, and the undergrowth was mostly made up of thin, vine-like plants that looked familiar, but neither were botanists and they had little idea what they were hacking through. Riki had brought a machete, and for that alone Mat grudgingly admitted that it was good to have him along, quite apart from the reassurance of his company.
Mat cast his mind back to what he’d read about Tawhaki. ‘Well, after Tawhaki lost his fairy-wife, he goes up into the clouds hunting for her. He meets his grandmother who is kind of a blind goddess, and helps her reg
ain her sight. Then he climbs like Jack and the Beanstalk up into the sky and comes across these demigods, living in the cloudlands. There’s this whole subplot about him secretly completing a waka they’re working on, because he’s a master-carver and they don’t know what they’re doing. And he makes himself look old so that no-one takes any notice of him, allowing him to sneak into their village. Apart from that, it’s kind of vague. Probably our journey will be different.’
‘What about you-know-who?’
‘Byron? I don’t know. I didn’t see him on the vine, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t make it. Maybe there were others. Maybe that was his campfire we saw from the ledge. I don’t know.’
‘We’ve got to be ready for anything, bro. If he comes at us, we’ve got to take him down.’
There was a kind of truce between them, an understanding that Riki had chosen his fate, and they could only make the best of it from here. Mat was still furious with him, but there was no going back now. ‘Ngatoro called it a “spirit quest”. That’s a kind of journey for self-knowledge.’
Riki gave him a knowing look. ‘Aroha: her name means love, bro. But English uses “love” to cover too many meanings. Aroha is love, but it’s also like a state of enlightenment, where love for everything about you has been attained. Aroha is more than just flirting, or liking someone. It’s deep.’
Is that what she expects of me? A deep love, even though I barely know her?
‘So you have to reach Aroha, both literally — finding the girl — and also spiritually,’ Riki went on. ‘She didn’t choose that name by accident, I’m thinking.’
‘Yeah, I don’t think she does anything by accident. I just wish I’d had more time to get to know her as a person, before all this.’
‘Yeah, well she wasn’t the sort of chick you take out on a date, from what you’ve told me. A bit too “thunder and lightning, very very frightening”, eh?’
Mat chuckled dourly. ‘Yeah, that’s her.’
‘Hot, though?’
Mat recalled a face of almost flawless perfection, dark skin, rosy lips and flowing hair, a body a model would murder for, and the grace of a wild animal, a deer in full flight, or a bird on the wing. ‘Yeah. I suppose. Not my type.’
‘Plenty of guys would go for that, and not give a toss whether they actually liked her,’ Riki said.
Mat grimaced. ‘I’m not like that. A woman is not just a face and a body — she’s so much more. It’s demeaning to even think of them like that.’
‘Yeah, sure, I’m with you, bro. She won’t be hard to fall for, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘You think? She uproots people and plays games with their lives, putting her needs before anyone else’s. There’s not much to love in that.’
‘But she’s doing it for everyone else, right? Her child will renew the land, and it’s got to come from the right man, or things get worse, not better, right? That’s what you’ve told me. So it’s not her fault. She’s sacrificing as much or more as anyone else. She’s risking just as much. How’s she gonna feel if Byron rocks up, with your head in a bag as a wedding present?’
Mat hung his head. ‘Yeah, I know. I get it. It’s just …’ He gripped the trunk of the totara they had stopped beneath. ‘I wish it were different, that’s all. That we could just go out to a movie, hold hands on the way home, walk to the door, maybe kiss goodnight … take it slow.’
‘You old romantic, you,’ Riki snickered. ‘World don’ run that way anymore, man. That’s old-school. You wanna check into the Love Shack these days, you swap numbers, text, twitter, hook up at a party, check each other out on the dance floor, and then wait and see whether her girlfriends think you’re good enough for her. It’s like the X Factor, an’ you can get voted off an’ never know why.’
Mat pulled a face. ‘You’re making the priesthood sound preferable.’
Riki laughed. ‘Anyways, Cass used to tell me most folk meet their future partner at work, in their mid-twenties. That’s statistics, man. She didn’t ever take what we had seriously, said we were both too young for commitment. She said we was just having a fling.’
Mat looked at him sympathetically. ‘I think she felt it deeper than that. When you were kidnapped back in June, she wasn’t thinking like that. She wanted you back badly.’
‘That was friendship and loyalty, man. But she … I don’t know, it’s like her inner geek won’t let her fall into anything deeper. She kept pulling back. It always felt like her head was someplace else. It used to do me in.’
‘Well, maybe this journey is your spirit quest, too?’
Riki cocked his head. ‘Yeah, maybe that. Guess I’ll come out of this knowing more about myself, too.’ He straightened his shoulders. ‘I’m ready for that. Let’s keep moving, eh?’
All day they made their way through the dense forest, their arms scratched by twigs and branches as they squeezed through gaps, their boots soaked from splashing through streams. They saw no animals at all, but there were birds everywhere: tui and fantails in the trees, herons wading in the streams, pukeko in the marshlands, and many more they didn’t know. Few were colourful — the primeval New Zealand forests seemed more attuned to dour greens and browns. Sometimes they also saw larger, stranger breeds: a distant group of moa stalked the far side of one gully, each one taller than a man. Massive eagles circled above at times, reminding Mat of the Haast eagle he’d encountered in June in the South Island. And as darkness fell and they made camp, they glimpsed kiwi and other ground birds nosing through the undergrowth, beaks gouging at the loose ground. Glow-worms lit up banks of the stream beside where they laid their sleeping bags.
After some debate they lit a fire, and Mat brought out a bag of dehydrated vegetables and nut-meat in gravy, from the stock of meals he’d got from a camping store. He’d anticipated some outdoor travel in this quest, and packed accordingly. They made sure the fire was well-shielded and burned low. All through the night the bird noises never quite ceased. Mat took comfort from that as he slowly fell asleep.
Next morning, they woke somewhat stiff, but reasonably refreshed. There had been nothing threatening in the night sounds, nothing that could draw their subconscious up from their dreams. Mat woke first, and seeing Riki’s peaceful face, oblivious in his sleeping bag, it was tempting to leave him there and go on alone. Perhaps that would spare his friend from whatever Fate might have in store. But it would also be a betrayal of friendship. So he re-kindled the fire, added stream water to some milk powder and mixed it with oatmeal for breakfast. The smoke and the gloop of the boiling porridge woke Riki, who first groaned, then sat up and wriggled into a sitting position.
‘Good morning, Jeeves,’ he said in a put-on voice. ‘I’ll have two eggs, poached, with some bacon and onion rings.’
Mat smiled. ‘Sounds good. All we need are the eggs. And the bacon. Oh, and an onion.’
‘Huh. Crap hotel you run, bro.’
Mat pulled out a small sealed plastic bag: ‘I do have some brown sugar, however, so all is not lost.’
‘Mate …!’
They ate their porridge — with brown sugar — then went on, following the stream which seemed to be broadly going their way. It was about mid-morning that they found the first sign of other travellers. It was a burnt-out cooking fire, sited in a good camping position, on a dry, elevated spot near the stream. It had been carelessly covered, and still smoked a little, as it had not been properly doused. There were treads in the mud, the soles of what might have been basketball shoes, expensive brand ones.
‘They won’t be waterproof,’ Riki grinned. Not that their boots were either.
Mat was watching the forest about the glade. ‘But where is he?’ There was a silence here that they’d not found elsewhere, a sense of watchfulness, and the birdsong was all distant. They looked about warily. Nothing moved though, in the long, slow moments as they waited and watched.
Then the birdsong seemed to pick up again, and the tension which had been building evaporated. Riki lo
oked questioningly at Mat. ‘You think we’re clear?’ he whispered.
‘Maybe. I reckon we need a secure campsite tonight, though. Something elevated with a tricky approach.’ He looked about, toward some higher ground edging the narrow valley. ‘That ridge, maybe?’
They struggled on all day, and Mat was increasingly thankful of Riki’s cheery companionship, despite his fears for his friend, as he contemplated what was to come. The day brought no further sign of anyone else. The going on the ridgeline was much harder than following the stream, and after returning to it for water several times, they decided to stay in the lower ground, and see where it led them, despite the greater risk of meeting others.
The stream itself grew slowly wider as it wound onwards, and time seemed to move in a strange way. Mat could have sworn they had been going for hours and hours, yet after reaching its zenith the sun did not seem to move on, but shone dimly through the mists above, not really warming them at all. The woods teemed with birdlife, and the forest floor was alive with insects and lizards, so many thousands of millions it was hard to contemplate. It made Mat think about the sheer quantity of life, and how so many creatures could share such a small place. What struck him was the struggle: each creature was frantically trying to out-hunt, out-feed and out-breed the others. Their tactics differed, from the big and aggressive birds to the ants pouring out soldier after soldier, each a tiny part of the nest, the whole significant but the parts almost meaningless. It made him reconsider what he and Byron were doing; competing for the right to populate the future. It gave him no answers, though.
Finally evening came, by which time they had reached a lake with an island set in the middle, not dissimilar to Mokoia Island in Lake Rotorua. This island had a high peak that might be volcanic, as white mist obscured the summit. Some of the pools on the lakeshore were steaming from fissures in the lake-floor. One nearby was a perfect bath after a long day. They soaked in it and watched the sun go down, then cooked a meal, speculating on what might be to come. As it seemed possible that other people might come this way, they decided to keep watch that night. Mat took the first turn, waking Riki sometime after midnight before plunging into a dreamless sleep.