The Lost Tohunga (18 page)

She wrapped the gourds about her, and felt their buoyancy hold her up. New energy surged through her. She kicked out, ploughing her way freestyle towards Mokoia, the song of the flute ringing in her ears.

 

Cassandra walked Colleen O'Connor along the lakefront, on a day that had dawned bleak with a swirling wind. The waves were tipped white, and a light spray blended with the occasional showers that whipped Taupo. They both shivered inside their coats as they squelched beneath the willows.

At the old kauri, Cassandra led a sceptical Colleen around the tree anticlockwise — ‘going this way round is called widdershins, you know'—and they emerged into a similar day in Aotearoa. Colleen looked nervy, ready to flee at the slightest strangeness, but she let Cassandra hold her forearm and pull her along the muddy path to Jones's cottage.

A black-clad colonial trooper was sitting on the porch, and he rose to his feet slowly as the two women approached. He didn't give either much of a curious look, as if he had seen stranger sights, or maybe he couldn't tell a strangely dressed real-world woman from a normally dressed one anyway. ‘Wait here,' was all he said. They waited on the porch, and Cassandra examined the front door, which had been forced open — Mat had mentioned locking it.

A minute later, some kind of officer, if the braid on his shoulders was significant, came through the house. He had sideburns and a moustache, and a cap held respectfully
in his hands. ‘Ma'am, I'm Captain Blaise Duncan, Taupo Constabulary. With respect, what's your business here?'

He was looking at Colleen, but she seemed mute with fear and curiosity. Cassandra spoke up instead, introducing herself and resisting a sudden urge to curtsey. ‘We're friends of Mister Jones, sir. We've come to help.'

Captain Duncan looked somewhat awed. ‘Friends of Aethlyn Jones? Please, come on through.'

Colleen looked at Cassandra quizzically. Clearly she had been bracing for a curt dismissal. Being friends of Aethlyn Jones must carry a lot of weight. He probably thinks we're wizards or something, Cassandra realized with an internal smile.

There were no troopers inside the house, and her wiring and telephone gear were still on the table. Someone had been cleaning but there were blood traces, and she saw
R – O – T – O
written in blood on the side of a cupboard. Out the back, a bunch of soldiers was loading bodies onto a cart — bikers from the Roadhawks gang and tipua goblins by the look of it. The stench of dead flesh permeated the yard, making both women gag.

‘Widow Calder visited Jones yesterday, and found this mess,' Captain Duncan said. He indicated a grey-haired woman surveying the scene like a hawk watching over a road-kill possum. ‘There is no sign of Mister Jones. Do you have any idea what happened here?'

‘My son …' Colleen's voice trailed off.

‘Your son, ma'am?'

Cassandra stepped in. ‘This is Colleen O'Connor. Her son is Matiu Douglas.'

‘Jones's apprentice? Where is he?'

 

Cassandra replied. ‘He's okay. He went to Rotorua to seek the perpetrators of this attack.' She peered at Widow Calder, who was circling a piece of earth where all the grass had withered, and dark roots jutted from the ground. ‘What's she doing?'

‘I'm sure it's best not to ask,' muttered Captain Duncan. ‘Ladies, I have to oversee the body tagging; if you will excuse me.'

Colleen slowly walked towards Widow Calder, who was leaning on her nobbled walking stick, making hand gestures over the circle of earth and chanting softly. ‘Excuse me, ma'am?'

‘Shush, Colleen,' the widow responded. ‘I'm trying to find out what Aethlyn's gone and done this time.'

Colleen shuffled awkwardly. ‘How do you know my name?'

‘It's written all over you, child,' Widow Calder told her in a singsong voice. ‘Yours, too, my sharp little tack,' she added, glancing at Cassandra. ‘Hush. I'm sure he's here somewhere.'

Cassandra looked about her, trying to find some difference to the place she had seen last holidays. The only thing she could think of was … ‘What happened to the ivy?'

Widow Calder frowned. ‘He told me he'd cleared it.'

‘Tough stuff to get rid of, ivy,' Cassandra replied, not really sure where she was going with the thought.

Widow Calder smiled at her suddenly, and walked back to the house. She dropped to her knees and nosed around until she found a single strand of ivy that rose from the ground, and beckoned Cassandra over. ‘Look, girly,' she said in a sandpaper voice. The sprig of ivy was twined about some piling beneath
the veranda, coiling upwards and then … vanishing. It wasn't cut and it didn't end — it simply stopped. She tugged on it experimentally, and more appeared, as if she were pulling it through a hole in the air. ‘Ahhh. He told me he had an idea about this.' She lifted her voice slightly, humming wordlessly, and then gave a smile of satisfaction.

The soldiers gave a collective gasp as a shadow fell across the yard. A tall, spiky shape formed, gradually solidifying into a spiny tree of a type Cassandra didn't recognize, which was wrapped in ivy. She looked up, and sucked in her breath.

Aethlyn Jones hung in the branches, his clothes torn, wrapped in ivy which held him up aloft and pierced his skin. The ivy was pulsing like a heartbeat.

‘Omigod, is he—?' Colleen gasped.

Widow Calder raised a hand for silence again. ‘Ahhh, I see. He's created a safeguard system for himself if he was injured in this place. He cleared the ivy, but has set up a mechanism for the memory of the ivy to return at his command, and take him away.'

Cassandra looked at her blankly. She wasn't the only one. ‘Huh? Memory of ivy?'

The widow was examining the ivy. ‘This is Aotearoa, a place built on memories. Because the ivy was here, in Aotearoa it has the potential to be here at any time. Jones as an Adept can cause it to return — he can shape Aotearoa. He must have been wounded, and to escape being finished off he has sent himself to another part of Aotearoa, where he had set up this ivy and tree as a kind of organic medical emergency aid.'

Colleen and the soldiers looked utterly at sea, but Cassandra could kind of get what the widow was saying. ‘Earlier this year,
in Wairoa, we were at the Aotearoa pa site, and then Jones did something that took us to a semi-modern Wairoa, so we could visit the bakery.'

Widow Calder nodded. ‘Yes, you understand. Aotearoa remembers all these things. An Adept can influence which one comes to prominence.'

‘So it isn't time travel — it's place travel.' Cassandra nibbled her lower lip. ‘Aotearoa has linear chronology, but it is physically mutable.'

The widow smiled sideways at her. ‘Aren't you the clever one?'

Cassandra preened slightly. Then Jones moaned softly, and all attention returned to him. ‘Do we get him down?'

‘Oh, yes!' Widow Calder turned to Captain Duncan. ‘This is going to be very difficult, Captain. We must remove him without endangering him, and get him into proper care. All he has done is put himself into a limited stasis. He will still die unless we can get proper medical care.'

Friday morning

H
ine-manu!'
Riki shouted desperately.

She froze. ‘What did you call me?'

‘Hine-manu,' he panted. ‘Hine-manu — The Queen of Birds.'

Some of the fury left her eyes, but she still looked like a monster from some kind of Dali-esque nightmare. ‘Hine-manu?' She seemed to be testing the name on her lips, her eyes struggling. ‘Hine-manu?' She looked at Riki with doubt-clouded eyes. ‘Are you
sure?
Where did you hear that name?'

‘My granddad … um … he said Hine-manu was Queen of the Birds, all the birds, and daughter of the forest god, I think, back when the world was formed, and she was, um …'

‘Yes?' she asked with menace, her talons flexing.

‘… beautiful!
Really
beautiful, with a feather cloak like the night sky, and a voice like a song, and the most lovely goddess of all … ah, goddesses …' he tailed off, flogging his brain for inspiration.

She paused, her talons just itching to rend him, but the rest of her waiting, ears cocked and listening, mind striving to recall.

Did she seem softer, somehow?

An eternity passed, as a sweat bead ran down his spine.

‘Go on,' she breathed. Her eyes softly glowed as they faded from red through orange and yellow to white and violet and blue, a deep blue like water in the winter on a clear day. ‘Go on. Tell me more about me. Remind me …'

Oh, shit.

He took a very deep breath.

 

Who was that Arabian Nights chick? Scheherazade or something? Hadn't she had to come up with a thousand stories to postpone her execution? Riki had never really appreciated what she had gone through — but now he did. Right through the morning he talked as though his life depended on it, because it probably did.

In truth he knew nothing at all about the Queen of Birds but the name. Grandad had mentioned her
once
, in passing. There were no tales. She was a goddess no-one remembered any more.

That must hurt her. I bet that would drive her insane …

But just because he didn't know any stories about her didn't mean he wasn't going to talk her hind legs off if it meant he would live long enough to see Mat come through the door with fire and musket and break him out.

So he told her the War of the Birds story, but he put her in it as a beloved peacemaker. He involved half the heavens and spun it out for almost an hour. Then he did Ruakapanga and the Moa, and had her bringing vengeance on Ruakapanga for killing the first moa. She seemed to like that one, and fed him water. His throat and mouth were as dry as, well, the bottom
of a bird cage. He sucked the water down gratefully.

‘More,' she told him. Or asked; it was hard to say.

So he gave her Pou-rangahua and the Flying Moa, only this time the moa that Pou rode was really her, and they were lovers and parted tragically, in circumstances no student of Maori folklore would have recognized because it was utterly made up from movies he had seen. She cried at the end of that one, while he sagged against the bars, mind whirling.

By this stage he had almost forgotten that he was talking for his life, he was so caught up in the performance.
Did Scheherazade feel that way, too, after a while?
He told her about Maui and the Goddess of Death, but in his version she was the little wagtail who prevented Maui from defeating Death, because in her wisdom she knew that immortality would be too much for humans to deal with. She was nodding in agreement after that one. ‘It is so,' she murmured thoughtfully, in a voice that was younger and softer.

He stole a look at her, sitting side-on, hair curtaining her face. Her hair had turned black-green like tui feathers, and the skin on her shoulders was not leathery any more. Her face was lost in a curtain of hair. Was she smaller?

By midday he was desperately shoe-horning her into every story he could think of, from a bird-style
Romeo and Juliet
involving warring bird flocks to a weird concoction that owed most of its plot to
Watership Down
. Anywhere he could put a sympathetic
merciful
bird-goddess, he did.

His voice broke around three o'clock, and the water was all gone.

He stared as she slowly turned her face towards him. Her visage had changed utterly. Her eyes were like opals in the
twilit room, her skin golden and clear as that of a young girl, and she was small and delicate. There were tears on her cheeks. ‘You cannot know what it is like to be forgotten,' she whispered. ‘You cannot know what it is to slowly go mad, as your powers fade, and your memories, too. The tohunga no longer chants your name. Offerings are no longer left. New gods take your place, and you fade into bitter shadows. You forget what you once were.'

‘You're not forgotten, Hine-manu,' he told her.

Her eyes flashed. ‘Liar!' She flexed her right hand, and it sprouted six-inch claws. ‘Do you think I do not know my own history, poai? Barely a word you have spoken today has been true.'

He went totally still.
Oh no …

She laughed. ‘You're a liar — but an entertaining liar, Riki. Very entertaining. I have not had such a pleasurable afternoon since … hmm …' Her voice trailed away as her voice drifted into silence. Then her face knotted into the face of Kurangaituku, lean and beaky and ugly. ‘I am hungry,' she told him, while she could still talk.

She stood, scattering the bones of her past victims, and outside it seemed every bird in creation shrieked — then went silent.

 

Kelly put her hands on her belly to feel her child kicking furiously. She winced at the dull pain, and wondered if she was going to carry to term. She was due in twenty days. It didn't seem long. Not when the child had already turned, and was this active. ‘You stay in there, little fella,' she whispered.
‘We're too busy for you right now.'

She gazed out the hotel window at Rotorua, deep in thought. ‘Where are you, Matty-Mat-Mat?' She murmured aloud, nibbling at her lower lip. ‘And you, Fitzy? Where have you gone? Are you with him?'

Her cellphone rang. It was Wiri. ‘Kel, we've got some news. There's been a shooting over at a motel on the east side of the lake. Tim's taking me over there. We're sending a car for you. See you soon, love.'

The knock on the door came even as she put down the phone. She got awkwardly to her feet, and waddled to the door. A young and eager-looking constable peered in uncertainly. ‘Good afternoon, ma'am. I'm Constable Benham, Rotorua Police. Are you Kelly? Wiri's wife?'

‘No, that's the other pink-haired pregnant woman in the next room,' she answered tiredly. ‘Yeah, I'm her. Let's get going, shall we?'

 

They arrived to find ambulances and police cars and the press jostling for position around a wide perimeter that extended several hundred metres around a small motel on the Te Ngae Road. The sun was nearing midday, and the lake gleamed red in its reflected glow. There were Armed Offenders Squad officers present again. Benham's car was waved through by an unflustered policewoman at the roadblock, and they entered a quiet stretch of highway. Horns sounded in the distance as traffic backed up.

Tim Spriggs was arguing with a senior-looking policeman with grey hair and an impatient manner. For once, Tim's
gentlemanly charm didn't seem to be making headway. Kelly sidled up.

‘I fully understand, Dennis old man, I really do,' Tim was saying. ‘And I certainly am not … er, “muscling in” on your jurisdiction at all. We just need to have a quick look around. Really.'

The policeman's eyes flickered over Kelly, and he took in the huge belly and pink hair with a determined lack of reaction. Wiri put a hand on her shoulder and introduced her. ‘My wife, Kelly. Kels, this is Commander Dennis Robson.'

Robson frowned, nodded irritably, and turned back to Tim Spriggs. ‘I want Forensics in there first; there will be fingerprints. Evan Tomoana is still missing, and he's armed. You cannot — I repeat, YOU CANNOT — go in there.'

Wiri whispered in her ear. ‘They've found one of the other men who attacked Mat on Sunday — John Makurangi, alias “Brutal”. He's been shot dead, according to a witness. Another man, a guest who tried to intervene, was wounded. They've got a witness, a friend of Hine Horatai called Ko Symes, and she says Brutal was shot by Evan Tomoana. In other words: Parukau.'

She looked up at him and squeezed his arm. ‘Is Matty here?'

‘No, but Hine Horatai was.' He dropped his voice. ‘A cop has gone missing, too. Tu Hollis, the guy who let us go last night.'

Kelly bit her lip, gazing towards the lake, as something in her subconscious shifted. ‘Hine isn't here?'

‘No. Apparently when Tomoana shot Brutal, this Hine and Ko took Ko's kids and ran. Then Hine yelled out “Tutanekai” several times, and sprinted towards the lake. Tomoana chased
after her, and that's the last time either of them was seen.'

‘Tutanekai? As in Hinemoa and Tutanekai?'

‘Yep. Tutanekai was this lovelorn kid who lived on Mokoia Island. He heard about this lovely chick called Hinemoa, and used to play love songs on his flute to her that carried across the waters. One night, to escape a man she didn't want to marry, she swam out to the island, met Tutanekai, fell in love, and they lived happily ever after.' He half-smiled. ‘Aotearoa's own Romeo and Juliet. Apart from us, of course.'

‘You sweet-talker, you,' she smiled distractedly, staring at the dim bulk of Mokoia Island.

Benham, who had been listening quietly beside her, suddenly leant in. ‘Did you say she called out “Tutanekai”?' he asked, in a subdued voice.

‘Yeah,' said Wiri, noticing him for the first time. ‘Just like in the story.'

The police constable's face twisted slightly. ‘Funny. That's Tu Hollis's full name.' He stared across the lake. ‘His mother named him for that story. He goes walking by the lake every morning. He loves the lake.' His eyes were drawn to the island. ‘He even had a girlfriend called Hinemoa, long time ago. She drowned while diving in Lake Taupo. Eighteen years ago, it was.' He shrugged. ‘Weird, huh?'

Kelly looked at him wordlessly, thinking:
Hine Horatai is eighteen …

Dennis Robson stomped away. Tim sighed. ‘Sorry about this, chaps. Seems the old 1850s charm is having an off-day today.'

‘That's okay,' said Kelly. ‘I think I know where Hine is.'