Calling the Gods

by Jack Lasenby

  One of the first times I saw them, the kids were playing with a cannon ball that seemed to have come out of the cliff where there’d been a bit of a slip. As soon as they disappeared, I looked for the one I’d buried in the cliff behind my cottage. The clay plug had hardened like china, so I smashed it with a crowbar, dug out the sand with a trowel. The cannon ball rolled out and lay inert and squat. “Just a lump of iron,” I said, rammed it back, and tamped the hole with clay again. “‘The nasty thing’.” I grinned, and thought of marigolds and a child’s sense of smell.

  Up till then, I thought I was seeing people from a past time, but the cannon ball in the cliff made me think. It’s easier to get a hold of the idea of something past, but something that hasn’t happened yet? Interesting, but odd. Threatening’s not the word for it … uncomfortable, that’s closer … the sort of thing that takes a bit of getting used to.

  In their future world, supposing that’s what it was, I’d seen next to nothing of my own time but the cannon ball and a few deciduous trees among the big old pohutukawas on the cliff. No sign of the concrete sea wall that had already been there twenty or thirty years when I bought the cottage. Waves were eroding it, and in time it would go. And I could see that a lot of metal things would decay all right, but the road and railway bridges down the harbour, their concrete abutments and piers, massive lumps that size — you wouldn’t think they’d disappear in a hurry.

  Was I seeing the inlet as it was going to look in a couple of hundred years, or a lot more? Were those the pohutukawas I’d planted on the cliff myself? In the strangers’ time, the hills across the other side and up the north end of the inlet were covered in what looked like heavy bush, big trees, so it must have been a fair way into the future. Two hundred years? It’d have to be a damn sight more to grow some of our native trees that big.

  As I thought that, I remembered Frank Sargeson’s uncle looking at the concentric growth rings on a big totara some young coot had felled about the nineteen-twenties. “He said the tree must have grown to quite a considerable size at the time when Abel Tasman was off the coast taking a look at New Zealand.”

  Seeing the size of the trees and thinking of how far that girl and her family were coming out of the future back into the present, gave me the same shocked sense of time as Sargeson’s wrenching sentence.

  I didn’t tell them about the visitors, but was talking with my friends Gordon and Betty next door about what’s happening to the inlet today: its natural filling in increased by the silt from new housing despite the lies of developers and the glib reassurances of city planners; the effect of car exhausts and runoff from the road around the harbour; the decrease in fish numbers and their replacement by paddle crabs and stingrays; the hectic green flush of sea lettuce on the sandbanks.

  For some reason Gordon said, “The faultline runs along the other side of the harbour, remember. One good shake, and the inlet could look very different.”

  “Yes?”

  “Across the other side, the shops, the main road, the railway: they’re all built on a sandspit that’ll turn to jelly in a big earthquake. A lot of buildings, even the bridges and their abutments, could disappear. A big enough shake and they wouldn’t just topple, they’d plunge out of sight.”

  Through his binoculars we looked up the inlet at the northern valley, at the clay scar left when the hillside shifted in the 1855 earthquake.

  The weekend after that, my daughter was home, and we took our two boats with Gordon’s wife, their kids and several others from along the beach, for a picnic up the harbour. We went up the valley, climbed the western side opposite the scar, and Gordon described what must have happened.

  “They talk of ‘oblique dextral strike-slip faults’.”

  “Strike a light,” I said.

  “It means the hillside moved to the right, as well as up and down, that’s all. But you wouldn’t want to have been standing across there.”

  “Nor here?”

  “You’d have been knocked off your feet over here, but across there you’d probably have disappeared. Mind you, there’d have been slips all over the place.”

  We looked at the parallel dog-legs in the creeks coming down the opposite side of the valley where half the ridge had shifted sideways, at the spooky clay scar, and returned to our picnic. Sailing home, I looked at my daughter and the kids in our two boats and wondered how they’d get on if all of us, the adults, were wiped out. Could they adjust quickly enough from their protracted childhood?

  Whatever happened between our time, and the time of the youngsters who’d turned up in the two shabby boats, it must have been something big. An earthquake — maybe several. Tsunamis — most of us still called them tidal waves then. Throw in a war or two, and epidemics: we’re an over-populated species living on borrowed time.

  But the inlet was still there in that future when those strange kids were going to live. It hadn’t filled up as it was doing in the twentieth century. With the return of dense bush cover on the surrounding hills, maybe the entry had opened up, deepened, shifted the sandbanks out to sea. I thought of that, but for some reason didn’t look for the evidence on those first visits from the future. Perhaps a tsunami had opened a second channel through the sandspit for a century or two. That could have scoured the harbour. If I was seeing a future inlet several hundred years away, it hadn’t changed all that much. What was missing was the human evidence. There was the cannon ball, so the cliff behind my place hadn’t altered a lot, though the trickle of fresh water didn’t exist in my time.

  Something made it hard to think about, an emotional rather than an intellectual block, and that’s when I decided to write it down, so I could look at it in black and white. Seeing and hearing bits and pieces of those youngsters and their lives, and trying to understand what was going on was like trying to put together the first bits of a giant jigsaw. Perhaps I shouldn’t call them youngsters: they had that strange maturity about them, as I said, acting way beyond their ages. I thought of the grim old Greek goddess Anangke.

  I re-read Alice in Wonderland again, and remembered reading my sister’s copy when I was just a kid myself: Alice falling down the rabbit hole into her dream. It must have been the first time I’d come across the idea of a time slip into a secondary world, and it left me uncomfortable, scared yet curious.

  I’ve always been a bit uncertain about C.S. Lewis’s cupboard as the device for getting into another world, much prefer the subtlety of Philippa Pearce’s grandfather clock striking thirteen in Tom’s Midnight Garden — convincing, believable as E. Nesbit’s translations in time and place. In fact, I realised Nesbit must have known something of Einstein’s relativity theory before he published it, but then she was pretty well-informed, from what I’ve read of her. Like Eliot — he must have known something about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle before he wrote the Four Quartets, and I think a lot of his stuff about time in those poems has more to do with physics than rose gardens.

  Anyway, I taught myself just to accept the strangers’ random appearances, to enjoy watching people who felt unobserved, and to feel all right about doing so.

  That older girl, she was called Selene, and I knew where that came from all right. She was persistent, intelligent, and beautiful, but something else marked her: leadership, the ability to give the others a sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than themselves. Selene was the older sister to Tobik, the quieter of the two bigger boys, and that lively young Peck. I mentioned before that physical quality, of litheness. She moved like a dancer, that might be a better way of putting it.

  The other older girl, the one I picked early for a troublemaker, was called Larish, her brother Ansik, and her little sister Lorne. There was something amiss between the three of them. And the other older boy, the one who’d been lost, was Jenek, and young Ruka was his brother; they were what was left of a third family.

  The names went with the sound of their speech somehow. Their parents were all dead, and they’d lost variou
s brothers and sisters. Some horror drove them here from the place they called Hornish. Surviving it and getting here under Selene’s leadership gave them the shared experience to bind them together — except for Larish. Something wasn’t quite right there.

  I’m getting on now, and it’s odd the way the mind works, what it comes up with, what it won’t bring back; how memory becomes a stranger to itself, paired with a different sense of time, unreliable and filled with surprises, fascinating, even dangerous.

  Story’s our way of understanding ourselves and explaining the bewildering world. I started writing it down, as I said, a way of explaining to myself the strangers and their time.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Under the Wooden Map

  Peck drew a house with a chimney and a door, and stuffed sand down Ruka’s neck; Lorne drew something she said was a house; Ansik thought and picked up a stick.

  I had watched him before, picturing a problem in his mind. Jenek and Tobik just went ahead and made things we needed, but they could draw a picture of what they were going to make: I knew because I asked them, curious about the way their minds worked; they had something I lacked.

  “Look,” said Lorne. Ansik had drawn a tree with its roots in the air. “The upside-down tree. Are we going to build a Great House?”

  “Yes.” Ruka and Peck stopped scuffling. “A Great House.”

  “So the gods will look after us,” Ansik said. “We heard you singing in the boat at night, Selene, all the way from Rabbit Island. We knew you were talking to them.”

  Tobik looked at Jenek, both their faces showed excitement.

  “We can rig up a tree.” Jenek grinned till his grey eyes danced. “We’ve got the blocks and tackle, all the rope we need. We’d have to build a ramp, of course. The thing is to find the right tree.”

  “Thatch a round roof, finishing well out so the rain drips clear.”

  Jenek nodded at Tobik. “Birds will nest in thatch, but it’s easy to fix if it leaks. It’ll have to be steep, so make it high and give room to store dried food. Pity we haven’t got whale meat and herrings.” He looked at me.

  “The other side of the sandspit is shallow a long way out, just like the beach at Hornish.” I did not want to sound too confident, not until the gods gave us a sign. “And the herrings could school in the bay in autumn.”

  “How high?” asked Lorne.

  “Depends on the tree.” Jenek looked at Tobik. “About halfway up the cliff?”

  “About that.”

  “Maybe a bit higher.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Bury the end of it?”

  “Of course. The one at Hornish stood on the back of the whale at the middle of the world: that’s what old Kelak said, remember? The beams out to the walls will strengthen it.”

  “And the rafters.”

  They seemed to see the details as they spoke.

  Jenek looked at the posts we’d collected.

  “We were just thinking of a hut.”

  “I can see that.” Jenek shouldered Tobik. “We’re going to need heavier ones. We’ll search the coast for the tree. Once we’ve got the Great House finished, we can think about huts.”

  Tobik nodded back with his quiet smile. Jenek’s enthusiasm always got him going, too.

  I was delighted: they weren’t just picturing a Great House, they understood we were starting on a village. We had to do better than just survive.

  “Supplejack?”

  “Ruka and Peck say there’s plenty in the bush up the back.”

  “Flax?”

  “Lots of big stuff up the top of the inlet,” I told Jenek. “And all the reeds we want. We can get the boats up there.”

  On a fine brisk morning, we grounded off the creek mouth at the head of the inlet. All day, we cut and bundled reeds. Tobik and Jenek cut a lot of the taller flax leaves and spread them on bare clay behind the salt-marsh.

  Crabs ran for their holes as the returning tide, edged by a line of brown froth, lipped and spread across the flats, carrying cockle shells, surrounding and lifting the boats till they rocked, righted themselves, and floated as we stowed the bundles aboard. The hulls vanished under their tottering loads, the wind died, and we led the boats out, clambering on, shoving and poling. Ruka and Peck fell in several times.

  By the time we paddled into the channel behind the peninsula, the tide had turned and it carried us around the point. Long after dark, we anchored off our beach, unloaded, raked back the turf and ashes, and ate the mussel stew left in the cooking pot.

  “Like you said about lighting a fire,” Jenek grinned in the morning, looking at the huge stacks of reeds, “easier if you’ve got everything ready, so you don’t have to stop halfway through and look for something.”

  I turned to smile back and caught Larish staring with a look so strange, I just nodded at Jenek.

  “Remember old Patrik the thatcher? He wouldn’t start till everything was ready, and he was forever telling everyone about it.”

  This time I laughed, and Larish was annoyed but smiled quickly when Jenek looked at her.

  Ruka and Peck led us along the peninsula, through grassy clearings and past a pond to where a couple of big taw trees had fallen years ago, and thickets of rickers had shot up out of their decaying trunks. Jenek thought they would be ideal for purls to lash across the rafters and hold up the thatch.

  “Taw gets stronger as it dries out,” he said, as we shot the slender poles down to the boats.

  Getting posts for the walls was harder because Jenek wanted them so big, but once skidded down into the water they were as good as home. Ansik, Ruka, Peck, and Lorne towed them with the tide, balancing, splashing, yelling. They did not seem to notice the cold water, but Larish got out whenever she could. We had been lucky, I thought, to get here before winter set in.

  The totes floated, no trouble, but several kikes were sinkers, too heavy for the children to handle, so Ansik and I lashed them between dry totes, and towed them bumping through the shallows. Even with blocks and tackle, and everybody pulling ropes and levering with poles, they took some shifting up to the site.

  “If we can shift green kikes this size, we’ll have no trouble with a big dry tote,” said Jenek.

  During a quiet spell, we sailed out to Table Island, and put ashore Tobik, Jenek, and Larish to scavenge the old settlement. The rest of us fished in a deep hole off the south end of the island, and caught two gropers so big we had to hoist them aboard with a halyard around their tails.

  Ansik stood off with the children in the other boat, while I backed ours in. Tobik, Larish, and Jenek waded out with young fruit trees and vines they’d dug up, baskets of vegetables, leather pouches of seeds, three more iron cooking pots, the axe Jedek had found and fitted with a handle, two rusted knives, and a couple of other old axe heads. Lastly, Jenek and Tobik carried out a section of the whale backbone. I felt much safer once we got it aboard and pulled out to Ansik. Only then, I caressed the white drum of bone and smiled at Jenek.

  “A good sign. Maybe the one we are looking for.”

  Tobik climbed into the other boat and shouted at the huge grey fish. “Groper, Jenek. Look at their heads.”

  The wind still light, we explored the coast south on the way home. driftwood piled high against the cliffs, but nothing we wanted. We coasted north off the surf beach, now calm, exploring the rocky channels under the cliffs before our bay. There above a shingle cove we found a wall of logs, tossed up in north-west gales. Most were old, bleached white; a few had roots, but nothing big enough.

  The boys clambered over the enormous interlocking structure while Lorne and I filled a basket with pars that studded the rock pools, slipping our knives under before they clamped tight. We heard yells and found the boys in a deep rock cleft, standing along the body of a great tree rubbed of its bark. Where the branches had begun, its head was snapped off. The other end was a circular tangle of enormous roots draped with curtains of seaweed and brown kelp.

  “A big tote c
arried in on the last tide. That’s why the roots are all there.” Jenek looked at me. “You said the whale bone was a sign.”

  “What happened to the other end?”

  “Came down across another log or a rock. The head and all its branches would have snapped off.” Jenek was stepping out its length, counting his paces aloud.

  “We can tow it, no trouble.” Tobik slapped its side. “What if we lash poles around the roots? There’s plenty of flax up the cliff.”

  “And work skids under the trunk.” Jenek thought. “The tides are still making. We should manage it.”

  “It is going to be fine again tomorrow.” I heard the excitement in my own voice. “Look at the sky; not a sign of wind.”

  “Lucky it came in here,” Tobik said. “Thrown up on top of the others in a storm, we’d have had trouble shifting it.”

  “Maybe the gods towed it in.” Jenek was talking half to himself. “There won’t be much of a current either side of high tide. Get it around the headland tonight, and home tomorrow.”

  “We will make a camp around the point,” I told him, “while you go ahead with your framework.”

  “There’s a moon tonight.” Jenek laughed at Tobik’s sober face.

  Ruka and Peck scampered over the rocks and came back with the axe from our boat, and the old one Jenek had found on the island. They wanted to stay, but there was little room to work in the rocky cleft, besides, they would wander off.

  “Come with us. We need you both, with all we have to do.”

  We took a last look at the prone wooden column with its crown of roots, picked up a light air, and wafted around the headland. Above a little beach inside the point, we lit a fire against a rock wall and built a driftwood shelter to catch the reflected heat. The boys scoured the old iron pots with sand, found fresh water, and cut and dragged springy scrub, mingiming, enough for a bed, while I made a rich soup of the par guts, smacked the meat with a stone, and fried it and thick groper steaks. Lorne and Ansik found chard growing, and we added it to the soup. Last of all, we boiled the groper heads.