“Was that a lucky punch, too?” Tama says.
“You thought that was a punch?” Julian smirks. “No, Tama, that wasn’t a punch.”
Tama laughs.
Everyone else laughs, too. The tension in the pub abates.
But now Julian knows—his hands must always be out of his pockets when he is in Tama’s presence.
∞
A few nights later, when his arm feels better, though the tattoo still looks like a raw and nasty mess, Julian finally returns to the hot spring in the Yarrow’s cellar. After an hour in the blistering water, he is calmed and tired. Maybe Kiritopa is right. Maybe a year of this and he’d be as good as new. Yeah, sure, he thinks, as he gets out and turns toward his towel.
Between him and the towel stands Shae, lit by a lonely candle. She wears her night clothes, as if she’s about to turn in, a robe loosely held together by sashes. Her shoulder-length hair is down in a coming-apart braid. There is red paint on her lips, as if she’s decided to subjugate him.
A dripping and naked Julian stands across from her. He’s hot after being in the water so long. Steam rises from his skin into the cooler air. He pulls his wet hair back from his face and squeezes out the water. They stand for a few moments without speaking. He can’t tell what’s in her dilated eyes. She’s looking at his body, he knows that.
Another moment goes by.
He speaks first. “Can you get me my towel,” he says. “It’s behind you.”
Not taking her eyes off him, Shae hands it to him.
He presses the towel against his face, against his wet neck. He dries himself thoroughly before he wraps the towel around his waist. All the while she stands and watches.
“Did you come just to look,” Julian says, “or is there another reason?”
She blinks. “I didn’t come to look.”
“So there’s another reason?”
“I have a proposition for you.”
“I’m listening.” He sits on the edge of the grotto. She continues to stand.
“If you want it, you can have it,” she says.
Julian rocks his head from side to side. “Well, well, that is quite an offer.”
“Do you want to see what you’re getting?” She goes to untie her robe.
He stops her with a hand gesture. “I know what I’m getting,” he says. “How many times?”
“Once,” she replies. “Twice, if you really want. But my condition is, after you have it, you leave. You take your things, you don’t say a word to anyone, not Mother, not Kiritopa, you don’t say goodbye, you go away, and you never return. So you’ll have what you want. And then I will have what I want. Which is to stay here and be left alone by Mother and by you.”
Julian is quiet, pretending to think.
Oh, Shae. Don’t you remember how you once loved me. And how I once loved you.
He lowers his head.
Yeah. Me neither.
“Is that the bargain basement deal of the week you offered the other schmuck who came your way last year?” he asks. “Is that why he vanished, never to be seen again?”
“What if it was? What’s it to you?”
Julian shrugs. “Isn’t there a word for women who barter their sexual services to men they don’t like? I know it, wait a sec, it’ll come to me.”
“What do I care what you call me? I do what I have to do. If it gets you out of my life, so be it.”
“And what if it won’t?” Julian stands up. “What if once I take what I want, I’ll want more? What if I refuse to leave once I’ve had my fill of you?”
Shae backs away toward the door.
Julian steps closer. “And horror of horrors, what if,” he says, flinging the towel off his waist, “once I’ve had my fill of you, you’ll only want more? Did you think of that? That you’ll want more and more?” Blood rushes to his extremities.
“Get away from me.”
“I thought you wanted me close, Shae.” Julian grabs her hand. “I thought you wanted me real close.”
She gasps. There’s nowhere for her to go. She is pinned between his inflamed naked body and the door.
“Get away from me,” she breathes, trying to free her hand.
“As I suspected,” says Julian. “So what’s the point of us talking about what if, when you and I can’t even agree on what is?”
“Get away! That’s what is. That’s all I want—you to get away from me.”
“Come to me, get away from me. I’m getting mixed signals from you, Shae. Make up your mind.” Julian steps away. “Oh, and tempting though your offer is, my answer is no. I mean—no, thank you.”
“You’ll be sorry,” Shae says in a trembling voice as she opens the door. “Mark my words. You’ll be gone from me for good, one way or another.”
“Clearly,” says Julian, “it will have to be another.”
∞
And then the Terra Nova gets stuck in the polar ice.
He and Shae learn this the next time they are in Bluff. They’ve been spending a lot of time in Bluff lately because the Civic Theatre got flooded when the normally shallow Waihopai inexplicably overflowed, and they had to shut down the rehearsals of Three Sisters until a new stage could be built. They hear that one of the local whaleships saw the Terra Nova boxed in about five hundred miles south, below Campbell Island, heaving and hissing, her engines on, attempting to power through the floes. She is still a long way from her destination in the Antarctic Great Barrier ice shelf, where she absolutely must be by the middle of October, because Robert Scott’s polar teams are departing for the South Pole November 1, and Edgar Evans, who’s not supposed to be on the Terra Nova at all but at Cape Evans with the rest of the group, must be with them.
Since Julian knows Edgar Evans does indeed depart with Scott on their historic voyage, he is only superficially interested in the fate of the Terra Nova and is not sure why Shae gets so animated when she hears the news. He watches her from a distance having energetic but hush-hush conversations with her fishermen friends, gesticulating to the roiling ocean.
On the train back to Invercargill, Shae explains things without Julian even having to ask. They’re almost having a conversation. One of the Bluff whaleships is considering sailing out to the pack ice to sell the Terra Nova some coal, some blubber and some moonshine. It’s a way to make quick money without doing very much. Julian listens but doesn’t understand why Shae should be excited about what some whaleship may or may not do.
He understands better when they return to the Yarrow and Shae speaks to her mother. Shae has gotten an idea. She won’t be outdone. Her mother has plans? Well, now Shae’s got some, too. “I want to sail out with Tama and Niko to meet the Terra Nova,” Shae says to her mother. “I want to say goodbye to Edgar Evans.”
Agnes says no, as any sensible mother would, and Kiritopa also thinks it’s a bad idea, but Shae proceeds to enthusiastically yet dispassionately argue her case. If she is going to New York with him (to whom she does not refer by name), then she’s not going to see Edgar again.
“You’re not going to see him again no matter what, Shae,” Kiritopa says. “How close do you think Niko can get to the Terra Nova? What are you going to do, walk across the ice to him?”
Shae says she will if she has to. “Niko will sell them fifty casks of blubber and twenty barrels of moonshine. We’ll bring them sleeping bags, skins. Kiritopa, you will give me a bottle of whisky to give to Edgar as a gift. I’ll say my goodbyes, and after we return, I will do as you wish, Mother. No more arguments, no more tears. I promise. I will even travel to New York on Godward’s ship, if you want.”
“Not if I want. It’s for you. It’s for your life.”
“If that’s what you want,” Shae stubbornly repeats. “I’ll go. With him. I’ll even marry him, if I have to.”
Julian rolls his eyes. A gem of a woman.
Agnes exchanges a glance with Julian, a glance with Kiritopa.
“Don’t look at me,” Kiritopa says.
&nbs
p; “Don’t look at me,” Julian says.
Traveling a 100 to a 150 nautical miles a day, it will take the whaleship four to five days to reach the Terra Nova. “Niko says he can get us close,” Shae says. “A day to walk our supplies to them across the ice, and five days to return. Two weeks tops. We’ll be back before the end of September, in plenty of time before Godward sails.”
They look to Julian. He shrugs. He’s got no opinion. He doesn’t know what day he came, what day it is, what day it ends. He thinks he came around mid-August because Kiritopa told him it was nearing the end of a very cold winter. Black is white, day is night, summer is winter, love is hate, and his woman is not his.
“He is not ready to go out to sea, Mother,” Kiritopa says.
Agnes turns to Julian. “Have you ever been out to sea?”
That perks Julian up. “What does this have to do with me? I’m not going, am I?”
“Of course you are,” says Agnes.
“Of course you are,” says Shae!
It’s astonishing how little Julian is concerned with these days. Going out on a whaleship for a thousand-mile voyage into the Southern Ocean? It gets barely a shrug from the man who used to worry about riding horses in the glen with his beloved.
You love taking the scenic route and ending up where you’re not supposed to be, Ashton said.
I wind up on Antrobus Street not Antarctica! said Julian.
And yet here Julian is, winding up in Antarctica, not Antrobus Street. He can’t wait to tell Ashton all about it someday.
Kiritopa shakes his head.
“What are you shaking your head for, old man?” Agnes says. “You’re going, too.”
Kiritopa hates the open sea. He says he’s not going.
“You must,” Agnes says to her Maori partner. “He must go to protect her, but who’s going to protect him? You have to go, Kiritopa.”
For some reason, Shae is adamant that this doesn’t happen. She cajoles and wheedles. She brings up Kiritopa’s sea sickness, his age, his work around the Yarrow, his shopping, his cooking. Mother can’t be without him. “Please, Mama,” Shae says lovingly, putting her arms around her mother’s and Kiritopa’s shoulders. “Kiritopa should stay with you. There’s absolutely no need for him to go. The whiteman will be fine. He’ll be with me. He’ll be among my friends.”
It’s the first time anyone has heard Shae call Agnes anything but Mother. It’s like a fire alarm. They all sit up, take notice. Kiritopa’s shoulders turn in. “Fine,” he says to Agnes. “Your daughter’s made it clear—I must go.” He studies Shae’s impassive face. “Who else is going?”
“Niko’s crew. Tama’s crew. Tia, of course. Hula says she wants to come, too, on a sea adventure.”
Agnes groans.
Julian manages to keep from smiling.
Kiritopa presses further. “I understand Niko is letting you and his granddaughter on the boat. But is he letting him on his boat?”
“Of course. Tama vouched for him.” She pats Kiritopa to reassure him. “He got inked the Maori way and he drank Tama’s moonshine and didn’t pass out. Plus he’s got a mere. He’s one of us.” Shae smiles a dazzling Ziegfeld girl smile.
It’s the first time Julian has seen her smile.
Why does it unsettle him so much?
45
Hinewai
“THINK OF ALL THE WAYS ONE CAN DIE ON A SHIP. THERE’S scurvy or fever. There’s fire at sea. A collision with another ship. A shipwreck. A drowning. A tidal wave. The ship can be struck by lightning, or just you. You could fall from a masthead. Your monkey belt can break. You could be hanged after a mutiny or thrown out on a floe, without a spear to catch your food. You could starve to death. You could be crushed by ice. There could be a storm. Or an angry whale. You could encounter hostile natives who nurse malice toward you and decide to slaughter you as part of their tribal rituals.”
“The death sermon is over, Tama,” says Kiritopa. “You’ve had enough moonshine for one night.”
“Do you think so? Because I feel as if I haven’t had enough.” A dozen men and three women sit around the fire on the deck of the Hinewai after the sun has gone down.
“Pace yourself, son of Kahurangi,” Kiritopa says. “This is only the beginning. We got two more weeks at sea. If you start here, where will you end?”
“Tell me, O son of Cruz,” Tama says, addressing Julian, who sits close to the fire, hugging his knees, trying to stay warm, “where will this end?”
“What?” Julian says. “Sorry, Tama, repeat what you just said. Start from the top. I wasn’t listening.”
∞
Hinewai means fair maiden. Like a Valkyrie, a siren, a chooser of the slain.
The Hinewai is a 100-foot three-mast whaleship with a 350-horsepower steam engine. She’s reinforced from bow to stern with five feet of oak and steel to protect her from the Antarctic ice. “She can crush and grind her way through some mighty glaciers, which is how we’ll get close to the Terra Nova,” says Niko Hunapo, the captain, a curt and mirthless man. He’s not afraid of a little ice. He is over eighty; he’s seen it all. He is tall and skeletal, wrinkled like a famished mastiff, and his skin is blistered by continual exposure to the wind and sun. The ridged intricate tattoos on his jaw have faded.
“Grandfather only looks mean,” Hula tells Julian. “On the inside, he’s a gentle soul. Like Kiritopa.”
Kiritopa, Julian wants to say, doesn’t look quite so mean.
There’s room on the ship for 24 men, with a minimum crew of 16, but only 14 men and three women sail to bring fuel and light to the ice-locked Terra Nova.
The women: Shae, Hula, and Tama’s 16-year-old sister Tia.
The men: Niko; Tama, the first mate; Rangi, the second mate; Aata, the third mate; the cook; seven forehands; Kiritopa.
And Julian.
Niko sleeps in the captain’s quarters and gives the second-best cabin to his guest Kiritopa as a sign of respect, and Kiritopa gives it to Julian, himself taking the third best. The three girls, Shae, Hula, and Tia, bunk together in the steerage mid-ship, next to the cook, and the rest of the crew are in the forecastle, the triangle in the bow, sleeping in the bunks that line the walls.
Niko often takes his meals alone, but everyone else, the girls, the crew, the mates, and Julian, eat communally on deck, near the two-cauldron furnace called the tryworks where the seal and whale blubber is cooked, if a seal or a whale were to be caught. But this isn’t a hunting trip, it’s a merchant trip, which is why there are relatively few men and why the cauldrons called the trypots boil water only, and sometimes fish soup. All the men double up on their duties. Everyone pitches in with everything. The men shovel coal into the furnace and unfurl the sails and polish the metal. Shae, Hula, and Tia are the stewards, the half-deck girls, and the deck cleaners. Kiritopa is the cook’s helper.
There is no cooper, the guy who makes and maintains the wooden barrels, no blacksmith, the guy who cleans and sharpens the steel—and no doctor.
“Why do we need a doctor, it’s ten days,” Niko says. “If you can’t stay healthy for ten days, you deserve to die.”
∞
The weather on the ocean is unpredictable. It behaves like weather. One day the wind blows hard, and the sails are up, and they need no coal as the Hinewai leaves a formidable wake racing through the sea at ten knots. The next day, the men sweat soot as they shovel coal bricks into the furnace, and she barely moves at three knots. In the early mornings, before the women are up, the men dive naked into the subarctic water to wash themselves with cold-soap, though no matter how hard Julian scrubs, he can’t seem to get the soot out of his pores. Blubber grease works better than cold-soap, though it smells much worse.
In the early mornings, it’s below freezing. It warms up when the sun is out; the temperature rises into the fifties and dips again at sunset. Julian’s cabin is close to the furnace, and when there’s no wind and the furnace has been on all day, his room is so oppressively hot that one night, he sle
eps out on deck near one of the masts, rolled up in an elk bag, until Kiritopa finds him and shakes him awake. “Are you feeble-minded? Do you have no memory of the things I told you? I don’t care if you cook to death from the heat. You sleep behind locked doors. Say you understand. Sometimes I think I’m not speaking English.”
∞
Hula Hunapo is a naked sorceress. Technically, she’s not naked, but she might as well be. She acts naked. Some people act fully clothed even when naked. Hula has the opposite problem, and therefore the opposite effect on men. All men, including Julian.
Hula’s father was a great warrior, but since he died two years ago in a boating accident (there seem to be a lot of those, as Tama has helpfully pointed out), Hula has been in a bit of a struggle to find herself a husband. Apparently, the Maoris have no problem with their unmarried daughters making themselves available during their search. It is only after marriage that fidelity is strictly enforced. Before the nuptials, open sexuality is not only allowed but encouraged, though to be fair, Hula Hoop needs little encouragement in that department. Sometimes Julian thinks that Hula and Tama might have a thing, but it’s hard to tell because she’s a temptress with everyone. Hula is a flirtatious igniter of men.
You know who is not a sorceress?
You know who does not act naked?
You know who is not a flirtatious igniter of men?
Julian’s moody and irritable Valkyrie.
Only Hula says to him, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
Hula is a sexy girl.
But Hula is not the one.
The ocean was clear aqua when they left the wharfs near Bluff, but ten miles out the water turned a foreboding dark jade and ten miles after that, the color of bark. The farther out they sail, the more the world begins to look black and white, except for the china blue of the sky, like the eye color of someone Julian once knew.
Every night the aurora australis lights up the world in a phantasmagoria of intense pink and brightest green. Julian has never seen anything like it, except that once, in the mountains with Josephine. The lights flutter, flare, float. They look like windswept lilac bands. They never disappear, not after a minute, not after an hour. Even the Maori, accustomed to the southern light shows, tell Julian they’ve never seen the aurora so sustained, so vivid, so massive across the sky.
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