Falling into Rarohenga

by Steph Matuku

  Both of us know enough not to stick our hands in it; everyone knows someone who’s heard of someone who jumped into a hot pool in Rotorua and boiled themselves alive. But I can’t help thinking how nice it would be to peel off my clothes and soak for a little bit. With all that tripping over and running from giant birds and falling through Underworld dimensions onto the hard ground, my body feels wrecked. And who knows how much further this path is going to go on for?

  Just as I’m beginning to think we’re going to be in the bush forever, there’s the sound of rushing water through the trees, and the darkness lifts. We break into a little trot, both thinking, hoping, that that city of Ārohi-whatever-it-is is going to be there at the edge of the bush, waiting for us.

  It isn’t.

  We break out of the trees onto the bank of a river. There are no stars out here, just a swirling greyness far, far above, and the moon suspended low in the sky. The water slides by, shiny grey like liquid metal. I look left and right, but the river cuts into the dark, and I can’t see where it’s coming from or where it’s going. The path leads down the bank onto grey sand and stops at the water’s edge.

  ‘No way,’ Tui says in disgust. She scrambles down the bank onto the rough sand and dips her hand into the water. ‘It’s freezing! Are we supposed to swim across?’

  I know she’s not worried about the swim itself. We can both swim pretty well. Mum used to take us to swimming classes twice a week when we were kids – mostly when Dad was at home, now I think about it. I guess she wanted an excuse to get away from him even then. But swimming laps in a brightly lit pool is way different to swimming across a black river in the middle of the night. Who knows what’s in there?

  Just as I think this, there’s a crashing of waves from the middle of the river. We stare blindly into the dark but can’t see anything. A mighty rushing of water comes closer and closer, and a line of ripples and bubbles arrow toward us.

  ‘Get back!’ I shout, just as Tui scrambles away, back toward the bank, back to me.

  And then a massive twisting thing – a lizard, dinosaur, crocodile – launches out of the water to land with an earth-shaking thud on the sand, directly in front of Tui.

  TUIKAE

  I want to scream but nothing comes out. I’m frozen in place, heart yammering against my chest, stomach in free fall, mere dangling uselessly at my side. I wonder if I’m about to wet my pants. A lizard falling onto my shoulder is one thing, but this is a taniwha. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen before, and yet I know exactly what it is: part lizard, part eel, part wooden log, part stony rock, part flowing river. The sound of the ocean roars in my ears, and my throat is so dry I can barely swallow. The taniwha glares at me and I drop my gaze, not wanting to make eye contact in case it leaps on me and eats me up. It’s muscled, heavy, powerful, and those long fangs would go through me like a knife through mashed potato.

  It growls and I whimper, a reedy little husk of a sound that’s barely audible before it dies. The taniwha flares its nostrils, and it takes a deliberate step toward me, and then another. I should be running, sprinting, screaming my head off, but I can’t do anything. And surely it should have eaten me by now?

  ‘Don’t move,’ Kae hisses.

  I can’t even move to give him a withering look.

  The taniwha takes another step forward. It’s so close that if I wanted to, which I bloody well don’t, I could reach out and stroke its shoulder. Its scales are shiny and polished. Water droplets bead down its body and drip onto the sand. It leans in close without moving its legs, long neck stretching forward, until we stand face to face, barely two centimetres of space between us. I squeeze my eyes shut.

  It roars in my face, a horrible, ear-splitting bellow, and finally the scream I’ve been holding in bursts free. I scream and scream back at it and then turn and run, scrambling up the bank. My foot slips, and I slide down the bank in a clatter of dirt and gravel. The taniwha digs its talons into the sand, preparing to spring.

  ‘Hey! Over here!’ Kae shouts. He drops his ukulele, grabs a piece of driftwood and then (and I can’t believe how stupid and how brave this is) charges down the bank toward the taniwha, swinging the chunk of wood over his head.

  The taniwha merely glances at him, and turns its attention back to me.

  Kae swings the driftwood at the taniwha’s side and the stick breaks in half, leaving Kae holding his second broken stick. The taniwha whips around and snaps at Kae. Kae leaps back out of range, and then as the taniwha lunges for him again, he slips under its body and behind it.

  The taniwha looks this way and that, and then, apparently losing interest now that it can’t see Kae anymore, moves back toward me.

  I try to stand, but the gravel is loose under my feet and I skitter and skate, trying to keep my balance. I land flat on my bum, and the taniwha sticks its face right up to mine. Its eyes are big and oddly beautiful, with swirling iridescent patterns that remind me of pāua shell, a multitude of colours folding in on each other like a kaleidoscope. I gaze at those strange eyes, and I can feel myself being drawn into them, as though my brain is being lifted out of my head and into that of the taniwha. All at once I’m looking outward from those pāua-coloured eyes. I can see myself in a strange, sepia-toned light, sprawled on the rocks. My hair is everywhere, my clothes are ripped and dirty and I’m basically a total mess.

  Just as I register all this, I’m being thrust outward again. My mind is my own and my eyes are my own and Kae is behind the taniwha with a rock in each hand, ready to throw.

  ‘Stop!’ I shout, ‘Wait!’

  Kae turns to me, distracted, and in that moment, the taniwha turns and swoops like a piece of ribbon folding in on itself. Kae is pinned to the ground, the forefeet of the taniwha pressing against his shoulders, pushing him into the sand. Kae thrashes his head from side to side, yelling, his feet drumming uselessly against the ground.

  I run toward them, and the taniwha twists its neck to study me. I stop and then, as it does nothing but glare, I approach more slowly, my hands out as if to placate it. I can hear myself saying, ‘there, there, it’s okay, it’s okay’, as if the taniwha is the one that needs soothing, and I know Kae thinks I’m completely nuts. I get to Kae and drop to my knees beside him.

  The taniwha looks at me and I look at Kae and Kae looks at the taniwha and then looks at me and finally explodes. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Just relax.’

  ‘Relax?’ Kae says through gritted teeth. ‘There’s a ten-tonne taniwha standing on me and you want me to relax?’

  The taniwha leans down toward Kae and gently presses one of its wide nostrils to Kae’s nose, just briefly, like a hongi. It withdraws slightly. Kae’s face is an agony of bewilderment.

  ‘Pooh,’ he chokes out. ‘Fish breath!’

  I want to laugh, but I reach out and push at one of the legs of the taniwha. Its skin is smooth and damp, but not at all slimy like I expected. It gives me a surprised look. It lifts one foot off Kae and then the other but doesn’t move away. Finally Kae makes eye contact with it. His own eyes take on a pāua-coloured light, the brown swirling into a mixture of greens and reds and blues and golds.

  It lasts only for a moment, and then Kae’s eyes become their usual soft brown again. The taniwha shuffles back a few steps, turning its back on both of us as though it doesn’t care anymore.

  Kae levers up onto his elbows, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘What the bloody hell was that?’ he says.

  I’m not quite sure, but I suspect it was saying hello.

  TUIKAE

  My arms and chest are bruised where the taniwha landed on me. I give my muscles a rub and a stretch and go back to picking out a tune. It helps me not to feel so pissed off. I mean, it’s cool meeting a taniwha and everything, but did it have to be so bloody rough? And now it’s totally ignoring me and focusing on Tui, and she’s staring back at it without blinking, like she’s a lizard as well.

  ‘Hold on tight …’ I murmur, trying to
remember the end of that last verse. I have no memory for lyrics. I have to write the words down or I just end up humming the chorus over and over again. I’ve got tons of notebooks, all packed with songs I’ve written and songs I’ve mashed up from other songs. But they’re special kinds of notebooks. Not music ones, with the staff lines and everything. I’m still learning how to write music. It’s like a foreign language, but I’m getting better. I like blank notebooks so I can draw all over the pages without those pre-drawn lines getting in the way. It has to have a spiral wire edge so it’s easy to rip pages out, and so I can bend it back on itself and make it lie flat. And it has to have a bendy cardboard cover and be small enough to slip in my back pocket. Mum knows the exact ones I like. Every now and then she comes home from work with about ten of them and leaves them on my bed as a surprise.

  My strumming fingers falter, and I slap my hand against the wooden body of the ukulele. The clap is sharp against the silence of the night and the rushing of the river, but neither Tui nor the taniwha turns around. They’re too engrossed in each other. Tui’s eyes are swirling like pāua shell, and it looks so weird. I wish I had my phone so I could take a picture. She looks like she’s got an app filter on.

  I go back to playing, and then I notice, way, way above, that the lady on the moon is dancing. She’s still holding onto her tree, but she’s swaying her hips and waving her sack thing back and forth in time with the music. It makes me feel better, this audience of one, and for a little while I play just for her. It must be sooo boring, being stuck on the moon.

  But then even that gets a bit stink after a while, and I stop.

  ‘Hello?’ I say to Tui. ‘Can you hurry up? We have to get moving.’

  Tui blinks, and I can see her mentally shaking off whatever hold the taniwha has on her as her eyes return to their normal brown. The taniwha sinks back onto its haunches and flexes its long neck, swivelling its head around to stare at me. I’m careful not to look back. I try to ignore it.

  ‘I was just telling him about us. He thinks our world is gross. I showed him one of our rivers and he was disgusted. All the pollution. And he showed me what it was like in his day, and the rivers were full of fish and so, so clear. Like swimming through emeralds.’

  ‘Does it come from where we live? Is it our taniwha?’ I perk up a bit. Meeting our own guardian taniwha from our own river would be cool. Would that make it our cousin or something?

  ‘I don’t think so. I think he just knows all the waterways.’

  To be honest, I’m not really interested in the life story of the taniwha. I’m more concerned with finding Mum and seeing Dad again. Time’s ticking. And there’s another thing too.

  ‘I’m getting hungry.’ I take an experimental sniff in the direction of the taniwha. ‘Feel like fish and chips now.’

  The taniwha growls, showing its fangs. It thumps its tail, sending up little puffs of sand.

  I draw back. ‘Alright, alright! Jeez. Touchy.’

  ‘He was about to tell me about himself. Come and listen.’

  ‘Nah, I don’t want to.’ I rotate my shoulders and grimace. I’m sore as.

  Tui’s eyes widen. ‘Don’t be so rude! He just sat through my story. Come on.’ She pats the ground next to her. ‘He’s got two eyes. We’ll take one each.’

  ‘Will that even work?’ I inch over the sand and flop down next to her, arranging myself in a position that tells the taniwha that I’m here, but I don’t really want to be. For some reason, I have a hard time trusting it. I know they’re supposed to be guardians or whatever, but if it’s not from our river, then it’s not my guardian. And how can you trust something that belongs to someone else?

  TUIKAE

  I love this taniwha. He’s so beautiful. His skin is shiny and polished like a gemstone, but warm and soft too. And when he moves, his scales reflect the light from the moon and the path, and they come alight like there’s a fire burning just beneath them. His triangular head and big eyes are just like the carvings I’ve seen at marae. And he’s real. He’s real. His breath is warm against my cheek, and his eyes are so profound and so wise. They see through me. They see me. The real me. It feels so good to be seen for once.

  I explain to him where we come from. As I begin, I feel sure that he’s going to be surprised and maybe even hurt that we’ve treated our country so badly, polluting the waterways where he once lived, vandalising his home, treating it with such disrespect. But surprisingly, he doesn’t appear shocked at all, just resigned, as though he knew all along that we couldn’t be trusted with preserving his environment. I think he thinks of us – people, I mean – like we’re toddlers: small children who don’t understand the harm we do when we take our crayons and scribble on the wallpaper. But I can feel, and he knows, that our punishment is coming. Some day.

  He shows me glimpses of a time long before colonisation, when the gods and taniwha and tūrehu and all the rest lived there, before they got shunted out by progress and technology and machines and religions and beliefs that didn’t allow them freedom to grow. The trees were everywhere!

  But he only shows me snatches of that time, and they’re tinged with sadness. So I show him all the good things about our world: the music and the aeroplanes and computers and everything. But he doesn’t seem impressed at all.

  Kae thumps down beside me, and I can tell he’s in that ugly mood he gets in when he’s hungry. And I don’t want to admit it, but I’m getting a little bit hungry too.

  He elbows me. ‘You know we’ve got to get going.’

  ‘If we’re nice to it, maybe it’ll help us across the river.’

  Kae huffs a bit, but I know he gets it. So he sits back, legs out in front, leaning back on his hands, cocking his head sideways like he’s really, really bored, and stares up at the unblinking eyes of the taniwha.

  I dive into those swirling pāua patterns with ease. I see myself sitting next to Kae – me eager, Kae resigned – and then the view shifts and I go deeper into the mind of the taniwha. At first, the pictures – his memories – are tangled and knotted up like a ball of string, but then one end unravels and I can see what he wants me to see. It unrolls in my head, like a movie.

  We’re skimming down a river. When our head is above the water, breathing in air that’s so fresh and clean it cuts like ice, the world is tinged that faded brown colour of old photographs. But as soon as our head dips under, the river comes alive with sparkling jewel-like tones, as though we’re sliding through a spectrum of blue and green and silver. We can see for miles ahead: every bend, every curve, every dip in the river, rocks and fish and broken logs whipping past as we swim and swim and swim.

  We slow as we come to our village. Our people already have nets at the ready to hunt down the schools of silvery fish travelling upstream behind us. We make our way slowly to the riverside, and they throw greetings at us. Two small children, a boy and a girl, wade into the water giggling and pat our head.

  ‘Ka pai, taniwha,’ says the girl, and the boy holds out a small wriggling fish. We take it from his chubby little fingers as carefully as we can and throw it up into the air, because that is part of the game. And when we snap at the little fish and swallow it down, the little boy laughs and claps his hands, and presses his face close to hongi us.

  This breath that we share is young and so full of life.

  Someone hails us from the shore and points toward the deeper water. There are ripples there and the occasional splash of a silver-finned body. We sink beneath the surface. The fish are drawing closer. We slide into the depths and circle around, to better drive them toward the net and make the hunting easier.

  The fish flit and flash through the water, as though they’re tiny pieces of sunshine that have dropped into the river and come alive. Some of them see us. They panic and try to dart away, but they’re simple-minded and easy to herd. We only need to flick our tail to get them moving smoothly in the same direction again.

  And then … and then …

  We feel it be
fore we see it: the sudden change in water pressure, the movement of something barrelling hard and fast from downstream, behind the fish. Someone else has been herding too; someone who does not belong here.

  With a growl, we leap out of the water just as the other taniwha does. We collide in mid-air, his teeth at our throat, our tail winding around his, dragging him off us. He is bigger than us, and stronger too, but this is our river and these are our people and he cannot, will not, be allowed here. We clash again underwater and then leap together, teeth bared. The villagers shout and scatter as our fight and the current drag us closer to shore. He has his fangs deep in our shoulder now. His bite is like fire and it burns, it burns, and the cool water is not enough to dampen it. Desperately, we rake our claws down his flank, and our tail winds around his neck, choking him.

  We twist and writhe together, round and round, in a whirlpool of water, the same whirlpool that leads to Rarohenga, the whirlpool of death. Bubbles stream past yellow fangs, and his pāua-coloured eyes are looking at us, looking through us.

  We try to scream, and the soft blue water fades to black.

  That’s when we’re pretty sure we’re dead.

  When we open our eyes again, he’s floating away downriver in a haze of blood. We wearily raise our head and our people are shouting, crying, and they are all in the water, diving, swimming.

  We dive too, skimming through water that has suddenly become very thick. It’s hard to swim, hard to hold our breath, but we do, and we search the riverbed and then we see them.

  A boy and a girl, tangled in a net, holding hands, their faces pale.

  They were so young. So full of life.

  TUIKAE

  I blink and slide out of the taniwha’s mind, back into my own. I rub my shoulder, just to check that my own skin is there, intact. I can’t take it all in. My mind is still heaving with that fight and the burning sensation, and swimming underwater and everything, even though I know it wasn’t real. It was like being on a simulation ride, where your chair tilts this way and that and you can almost trick yourself that you’re actually there in the moment, speeding on a jetboat through the Kimiākau, but in your heart you know you’re really not. It’s just a trick.