“Pai. I iwi humarire.”
“Pardon?’
“I said, ‘You look handsome.’ Like an old-time warrior.”
“I feel like I’ve been rolled up in a bearskin rug.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Are my friends going through the same rigmarole?”
“Yeah.”
“When can I see them?”
“Soon enough. There are some things you must know now that you’re a guest of the marae.”
She motioned for me to follow her out of the hut.
* * *
*1 Chief
Chapter Twenty-four
It took a while, but I eventually learned that Hart was lodged on the western edge of the marae. Pillow was kept isolated outside the compound in a hut by the river, watched over by a pair of Medusa’s harpies. She might as well have been on the moon. Because of his mother’s reputation and command of most things Maori, Craddock had the advantage of being the teacher’s pet. He asked and got Witako’s permission to pitch his nylon pup tent in a spot conveniently near the cannabis field. He also had free run of the place as long as he stayed away from the cavern.
As for me, I was reasonably comfortable in my wikiup, and the delightful Aronui proved to be a natural tour guide. During the next three days she showed me enough of the ways of tikanga Maori to fill four issues of National Geographic. More important, because of her willingness to answer my questions, it didn’t take long for me to understand which way the wind blew in this Down Under version of Oz.
Most of the 150 or so inhabitants were in their late teens or early twenties and had been enticed to the marae to escape their dreadful home environments. When not farming, fishing for trout, or stoking on joints laced with opium, they practiced martial arts, woodcraft, and other old-time skills.
Their paid instructors were well versed in tikanga disciplines. But while some appeared dedicated, I saw little evidence that the primary goal of the training was to rehabilitate troubled Maoris. The more I observed, in fact, the more I thought Professor Middleditch’s instincts were correct—the marae was nothing more than a Potemkin village established to fool the Inland Revenue and the Ministry for Maori Development, a ruse to grant Ivo Mackin full title to the land.
For one thing, I saw no evidence that the Ranginui cared a hoot as to what went on in the village. Aronui said that his whare was in an isolated grove a quarter mile outside the compound, where only a select few were allowed to see him. They apparently included Medusa, a few scouts to keep people at a distance, and, of course, Witako, who had been Ivo Mackin’s former chief operating officer at TransNational Metals, Ltd.
The former Terence Robertson ran the compound with an iron fist encased in a velvet glove. He encouraged access to opiates and sex as a means to controlling his young charges, but anyone asking too many questions or caught snooping around forbidden areas paid a harsh price at the hands of a dozen gangbangers hired to police the area. Aronui said they barracked in one of two concrete blockhouses a half mile past the village.
“Who stays in the other blockhouse?” I asked.
Her cheery face suddenly turned opaque. “Others,” she said, in a way that meant she would say no more for the time being.
* * *
It was raining on the morning that an eighteen-year-old kid named Koro brought Tane Craddock and me to the martial arts center. Inside were a dozen young bucks sitting on their haunches, waiting for their lesson to begin. Ngati, the scout who discovered us by the Waipara River, went to the front of the class.
He spoke in Maori, but with Craddock translating, I got the gist of the instruction.
“The taiaha!” Ngati exclaimed, holding up a long quarter staff. “It is everything—it is your protection, your genealogy, your bearing, your prayers and life force. It is the language of Tu, the war god, this taiaha!”
He dropped the weapon and picked up a short, flat paddlelike object made of stone.
“The patu,” Craddock explained quietly to me. “For use in close fighting. The taiaha wounds, but the patu delivers the kill.”
Ngati swung the short weapon expertly back and forth, forward and backward, in quick-footed feints and draws as his eyes bulged and his tongue extended to absurd lengths.
Soon the class was pairing off, going at each other like wolverines, thrusting and dodging with their weapons in mock but furious combat. They were so charged with adrenaline that even when the blows inadvertently connected with a limb or chest, the pain didn’t appear to register.
Twenty minutes of that was enough for me. Craddock stayed, but I slipped away before someone invited me to become target practice.
Aronui was waiting patiently for me outside.
* * *
“When do you plan to leave this place?” I asked, as we walked through the arch and toward the river.
She seemed bewildered by the question. “I don’t want to go back. This is my whanua. My family.”
“What ‘family’? I don’t see any kids, nor many old folks.”
At this, the first tiny crack appeared in her devotion to the cause. “Wouldn’t be right to have little ones,” she said. Her eyes avoided mine.
“Don’t you ever get tired of the isolation and all the rules?”
“Rules must be followed.”
“Tapu, for instance?”
“That’s only another word for self-respect. It is every person’s responsibility to maintain their own while respecting the dignity of others. But it can’t only be about human beings.”
I must have looked skeptical.
“The Ariki expects us to be spiritual,” she explained, taking my hand and leading me to where eels swam near the surface of the stream. “We all come from one source. See how even the water celebrates my image. My eyebrows are like the wingspan of birds, my forehead the crown of a great tree.”
“Oh, come off it, Aronui! You don’t really believe all that stuff. It makes you sound like a New Age hippie.”
Her cheeks flushed. “Maori tradition teaches that everything is connected. We aren’t supposed to believe in separation.”
“What about good and evil? Can they be one and the same?”
“Is there a good tree, an evil tree?”
“You’ve got me there.”
We passed a bush covered with long strands of shiny black berries that looked delicious. When I reached for a handful, Aronui slapped my hand away.
“The tutu berry,” she said. “Its seeds will freeze up your lungs.”
“So,” I said, “there are bad trees in this Arcadia of yours.”
She frowned at this, but soon had a rejoinder.
“The seeds protect the berry. But the juice makes a tasty jelly when boiled properly, and can even treat illness. Certainly nature can be dangerous, but there is sweetness as well.”
* * *
We moved silently into a pine forest, where Aronui again started spouting feel-good Maori philosophy in which bushes and whales were cousins, boulders and oceans brothers, birds the bearers of seeds that created mighty forests—all the claptrap one hears when justifying a traditional way of life long past its usefulness.
I was half expecting her to show me a unicorn when an A-frame house materialized as if out of nowhere in a clearing of the woods. Lavishly decorated with swirls, ferns, and weird creatures, it looked like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits.
In the center of the front wall, above a door you could drive a tank through, was the last thing I expected to see on the backside of a mountain in Maoriville—the giant anchor of an eighteenth-century sailing ship.
“Who lives there?”
“The Ranginui,” Aronui said, moving hurriedly past. “We’ve come too far. They may see us.”
“They?”
“The Mongrels. Or, worse, the Chinese fellas.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Aronui wouldn’t say more until we had retreated back to the river, but once there she opened up f
ull throttle.
“At any given time there are five or six who work in the cavern. They live in the other blockhouse. They are tapu to all but the girls chosen to service them.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. Once. But no more. I’d kill myself first.”
“Do you know what they do in the caves?”
She shook her head. “When the first group arrived they brought with them a lot of fancy tools and handheld machines with spiky antennas and such.
“None stay more than a few months. Then they’re replaced by a new crew brought up by Daig Kildare. They’re like walking skeletons by the time they leave. I don’t know how any of them survive the return over the mountains. Maybe they don’t.”
“It’s important I learn what they are doing here,” I pressed, when she had described all she knew. “Will you tell me when the next group is brought up?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Promise?”
Aronui touched the greenstone around my neck. “I promise.”
* * *
We returned to a grove outside the marae, where people were gathered for the midweek communal supper. While some stood patiently in line, others placed clay bowls of fruit and woven baskets of sweet potatoes and corn on long tables. Scattered behind the tables, people kneeled in front of charcoal fire pits, frying eels, fish, and small birds that were then scooped onto wooden plates.
If you disregarded the clothing, facial tats, and food implements harkening back to the Bronze Age, you might think you’d stumbled onto a Labor Day picnic in a small town of one of our western states, only without children scampering about.
I was piling soggy corn, squash, and some brownish slithery thing onto my wooden plate when I spotted Adrian Hart. He stood near a clump of trees, nose in the air as usual, despite looking ridiculous in a kilt that was too long for his short legs.
Alternating between bites of bread and smoking a huge ganja joint, he spoke earnestly with a muscle-bound brute straight out of central casting for the movie Once Were Warriors. The man’s arms were thicker than my thighs. His head was ghastly, with black eyes that shined like a cobra’s beneath a heavy unibrow. Long ringlets of curly hair framed a tattooed face that even in this übertraditional Maori setting seemed excessive. Ferns and scrolls ran alongside the flaring nostrils of his widespread nose. A pair of lizard mokos*1 were intertwined in some kind of mating dance around the wide, purplish lips.
But what made his markings truly unusual was that they seemed to have been chiseled on rather than punctured by a needle. His darkened skin was covered in grooves that must have taken months to heal.
The traditional dress code didn’t apply to him. He wore a pair of filthy, ragged jeans and hobnail boots. A black leather vest struggled to cover a bare chest the size of a Nevada dam.
“That ugly devil with my friend—is he a guest as well?”
Aronui shook her head. “Kahoura has been here over a year. He’s a Mongrel.”
“Why is he with Hart?”
“Your friend liked the looks of him.”
Witako suddenly appeared by our side. Aronui shyly acknowledged his presence, then slipped away.
“You’ve caught the attention of someone,” he warned, looking over my shoulder.
I turned to find Kahoura staring in my direction. Hart remained next to him, checking out the crowd as if at the Ascot Races. The Mongrel’s face was devoid of any light and his pitiless eyes exuded such malice that I dropped my gaze like a convent girl having witnessed her first exhibitionist. When I forced myself to look back, he snarled something and I felt my chest explode as if a wrecking ball had struck my solar plexus.
I stood stock-still for a moment, gasping for breath, a blinding pain ricocheting within my skull. Then the scene before me went topsy-turvy. I dropped to my knees, a quivering heap of disconnected molecules. Limbs numb. Throat burning. Senses approaching meltdown. Temporal lobe just a pile of undercooked spaghetti.
* * *
Kahoura had disappeared by the time I awoke on my back, my lips flapping like a landed carp mouthing for air. A grim-faced Witako knelt beside me, chanting, “Kaitoa! I tahuna mai ahaou kit e ahi whakeane Ki mate te wairua!”
As he spouted this gibberish in my ear, Aronui was busily cutting a green lizard into pieces with a pounamu blade and tossing the bits into a charcoal fire.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but as soon as I heard the sound of that sizzling reptile the agony vanished. It left me as limp as week-old lettuce, but only the ribs I’d busted during the fall on the mountain hurt.
“What just happened?” I asked, practically weeping with relief.
“Kahoura sent the lizard,” Aronui replied. “The moko kakariki.”
“The lizard bit me?”
“No, and even if it did it isn’t poisonous. But kotipu is an evil omen.”
“You had an experience not many would survive,” Witako told me. “Only by performing the whakautuutu rite were we able to banish the curse. You should rest this afternoon, perhaps take a bath in one of the hot springs.
“I’m sure,” he added, as he helped me to my feet, “that the soothing waters will have you feeling like the king’s own rooster.”
After thanking the Ariki, I asked why Kahoura would want to harm a guest of the marae.
Witako didn’t answer. By the look on his face, I’m not sure that he knew. But he did say something that got my attention.
“Perhaps it is time for you to meet the Ranginui. If all is well, I’ll make arrangements for you to see him this evening.”
* * *
*1 tattoos
Chapter Twenty-six
That afternoon I took Witako’s advice and went to soak in one of the hot springs near the center of the valley. I wanted privacy, not only to restore body and soul, but to go over what I’d say to Ivo Mackin. After all, calling on someone who considers himself a god requires some thoughtful preparation. But there was no getting rid of Aronui, who skipped after me like a frisky puppy as soon as she saw me leave the hut. After eliciting a promise that there would be no hanky-panky, I allowed her to lead me to a bubbling spring next to a waterfall straight out of Rivendell.
It was just past four P.M. and the sun had dipped behind the western peaks, covering that part of the valley in a deep purple glow.
I should have known the hussy had no intention of following orders when she slipped out of her kiwi feathers to settle, naked as a jaybird, into the pool. Sitting upright against the side, her brown breasts gleaming in the moonlight and the tip of her pink tongue sliding ever so slowly above that tattooed chin, Aronui was enough to make a eunuch’s mouth water.
Muttering the Lord’s Prayer, I primly shed my cloak—but not my kilt—and climbed into the bubbling cauldron a few feet opposite her. Although hellishly hot, it was remarkably soothing, too. I was just beginning to relax when I felt her toes tickle my nether region.
“Hey!” I yelped, nearly levitating out of the water. “Enough of that!”
“Don’t you find me attractive?” She pouted as the steam engulfed us.
I felt like Adam prior to bashing the leather with Eve, but remembering how that turned out—not to mention what happened to Abelard—I willed myself to remain chaste.
“Of course I do, but if you recall our agreement…”
Aronui answered with the other foot, confirming that she was not only a liar, but ambidextrous as well.
“Whoa! That’s not fair. Stop it now!”
She flew at me then, wrapping her legs around my waist like a monkey on a stick, sobbing endearments, nibbling at my ear, and begging for a platinum-grade lesson in what Canadian ruggers call “a Chesterfield scrum.”
Mind you, I’ve been locked in enough randy embraces to know that, despite one’s purest intentions, there comes a point when old Nebuchadnezzar won’t return to the barn.
And yet.
This time.
Somehow.
He did.
* * *
Counting the cold shoulder she got the first time we met in the hut, Aronui was batting 0 for 2 in the series. She wasn’t used to it and didn’t like it one bit. I can’t say I did, either, but I realized that if I hoped to succeed in finding the third journal—let alone prove my faithfulness to Josie—sexual abstinence was the one virtue that must be heeded.
But just try to explain that to a feisty siren who misinterprets prudence for rejection.
After she’d called me every nasty Maori word learned at her uncle’s scabrous knee, she pulled on her clothes and stomped back to the compound.
* * *
Alone at last, my thoughts drifted to home and to my conversation with Josie Majansik the night before I left for New Zealand.
I forget what our quarrel was about. Ever since her return from Wyoming, we’d been peeved with each other most of the time. Touchy and argumentative. Maybe that’s because when I’m right on some issue she disagrees with, I get angry. Josie gets angry when she is wrong.
“You have three main topics of interest,” she said later, as we got ready for bed. “Books, rugby, and Michael Bevan. It gets rather old.”
“You forgot sex.”
“Wisecrack all you want, Mike. You know the lyrics to every song, the punch line to every joke, but you lack the courage to follow through on anything. You’d rather ruin it before someone or something else can do it to you first.”
I’m not sure what brought this sudden condemnation on—it might have been due to Feklar having rejected the new litter box—but Josie was right. My inability to stay the course in the law, my marriage, fatherhood, and a hundred other things was self-inflicted.
I kept my pajama bottoms on as I crawled under the covers. So did she.
“Is there anything you do like about me?”
Left Turn at Paradise Page 15
