Fires of Change (The Fire Blossom Saga)

by Sarah Lark

  ALSO BY SARAH LARK

  The Fire Blossom Saga

  The Fire Blossom

  In the Land of the Long White Cloud Saga

  In the Land of the Long White Cloud

  Song of the Spirits

  Call of the Kiwi

  The Caribbean Islands Saga

  Island of a Thousand Springs

  Island of the Red Mangroves

  The Sea of Freedom Trilogy

  Toward the Sea of Freedom

  Beneath the Kauri Tree

  Flight of a Maori Goddess

  Other Titles

  A Hope at the End of the World

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Sarah Lark

  Translation copyright © 2020 by Kate Northrop

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as Der Klang des Muschelhorns by Bastei Lübbe in Germany in 2016. Translated from German by Kate Northrop. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2020.

  Published by Amazon Crossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Crossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542092425

  ISBN-10: 1542092426

  Cover design by Faceout Studio, Amanda Hudson

  First edition

  Contents

  Start Reading

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part 2

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part 3

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 4

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part 5

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Part 6

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Part 7

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Part 8

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Translator

  E rere kau mai te awa nui nei

  Mai i te kahui maunga ki Tangaroa.

  Ko au te awa

  Ko te awa ko au.

  The river flows

  From the mountains to the sea

  I am the river

  The river is me

  Song of the Whanganui Maori tribe

  (freely translated)

  Part 1

  MISSION

  RUSSELL, NEW ZEALAND (THE NORTH ISLAND)

  ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA

  1863

  Chapter 1

  “Are we there yet?”

  Mara Jensch was in a bad mood, and she was bored. The journey to the Ngati Hine village seemed to be taking forever, and even though the landscape was beautiful and the weather was good, Mara had seen enough manuka, rimu, and koromiko trees. She’d had enough of rain forests and fern jungles. She wanted to go home, back to the South Island, back to Rata Station.

  “Just a few more miles,” Father O’Toole replied. He was a Catholic priest and missionary who spoke good Maori and was taking part in the expedition as an interpreter.

  “Don’t whine,” Mara’s mother, Ida, reprimanded. She glanced disapprovingly at her daughter as she guided her small brown mare next to Mara’s gray one. “You sound like a spoiled child.”

  Mara began to pout. She knew she was annoying her parents. She’d been in a bad mood for weeks. She hadn’t enjoyed the journey to the North Island at all. She shared neither her mother’s enthusiasm for wide beaches and warm climates nor her father’s interest in mediation between Maori tribes and English settlers. Mara saw no need for mediation. After all, she was in love with a chieftain’s son.

  For a while the girl drifted off into daydreams, wandering over the endless grasslands of the Canterbury Plains with her beau, Eru. Mara held his hand and smiled at him. Before her departure, they’d even exchanged tentative kisses. Suddenly, a cry of surprise shook Mara out of her fantasy.

  “What was that?” Kennard Johnson, the representative of the governor who’d hired Mara’s father for this mission, listened fearfully, his eyes on the woods. “Could they be spying on us?”

  Mr. Johnson, a short, rotund man who seemed to be having difficulties with the many hours of riding, turned nervously to his two English soldiers. Mara and her father, Karl, had privately laughed at the man for bringing bodyguards. If the Maori tribe they were going to visit was inclined to kill Mr. Johnson, it’d take an entire regiment of redcoats to keep them from doing so.

  Father O’Toole shook his head. “Must have been an animal,” he said reassuringly. “You would neither see nor hear a Maori warrior. But we’re quite close to their village now. Of course we are being observed.”

  Mr. Johnson turned white as a sheet, and Mara’s parents exchanged knowing looks. For Ida and Karl Jensch, visiting Maori tribes was nothing unusual. If the two of them were afraid of anything, it was the possibility that the English settlers would panic. The Maori called them pakeha. Mara’s parents knew that violence between the Maori and the pakeha was seldom initiated by the tribes. It was much more likely for the Englishmen’s fear of the tattooed “savages” to result in a foolishly fired shot that would have terrible consequences.

  “Above all, stay calm,” Karl Jensch advised.

  Aside from Johnson and his soldiers, they were accompanied by the two farmers who had made complaints against the Ngati Hine in the first place. Mara regarded them with all the resentful eyes of a young woman whose romantic plans had been thwarted. Without these two idiots, s
he would have been home long ago. Her father had wanted to be back at Rata Station for the shearing, and he’d already booked the sea crossing. But at the last moment, the governor’s request had arrived, asking Karl to help resolve the conflict between the two farmers and the Ngati Hine as quickly as possible. It should simply be a matter of comparing a few maps. Karl had done the surveying himself when Chieftain Maihi Paraone Kawiti had sold the land several years ago.

  “The Ngati Hine mean us no harm,” Karl told the men. “Remember, they invited us to come. The chieftain is just as interested as we are in a peaceful solution. There’s no reason to be afraid—”

  “I’m not afraid of them!” declared one of the farmers. “They should be afraid of us!”

  “They probably have fifty armed men,” Mara’s mother remarked dryly. “Perhaps armed only with spears or clubs, but they know how to use them. You would be wise not to provoke them, Mr. Simson.”

  Mara sighed. During the five-hour ride, she’d had to listen to three or four similar exchanges. At first, the two farmers had been noticeably more aggressive. They seemed to think that this expedition had more to do with punishing the natives than finding a solution. Now, drawing near to the village, the farmers seemed tenser, more subdued. That didn’t change as the marae came into view.

  For Mara, the colorful totem poles framing the village gate were familiar. But seeing them for the first time could be intimidating. Kennard Johnson and his men had certainly never been in a marae before.

  “They mean us no harm?” the government official repeated nervously. “They look anything but friendly.” He pointed agitatedly at the warlike welcoming committee that was now approaching the riders.

  Mara was surprised, and her parents looked alarmed. In a Maori marae, one would usually see children playing and men and women calmly going about their daily work. But here, they were greeted by the chieftain himself, flanked by a proud phalanx of warriors. His bare chest and his face were tattooed, and the richly decorated loincloth made of dried flax leaves made his muscular body look even more imposing. A war club hung on his belt, and he held a spear in his hand.

  “They won’t attack us, will they?” asked one of the English militiamen.

  “Don’t worry,” Father O’Toole replied. The priest, a gaunt, aging man, calmly got off his horse. “It’s simply a show of strength.”

  As the white men came closer, Maihi Paraone Kawiti, ariki of the Ngati Hine, raised his spear. His warriors began to stamp rhythmically with their feet planted wide, moving back and forth and swinging their weapons. Then they raised their voices in a powerful chant that grew stronger and louder the faster they danced.

  Johnson and the farmers ducked behind the bodyguards, who reached for their weapons.

  Mara’s father guided his horse between the soldiers and the warriors. “For goodness’ sake, don’t draw your weapons!” he ordered the Englishmen. “Just wait.”

  One warrior after another stepped forward, pounding spears on the ground, grimacing and shouting at the “enemies.”

  Mara, the only member of the expedition who understood every bit of the war dance and songs, rolled her eyes. These North Island Maori were so old-fashioned! The Ngai Tahu tribe she’d grown up near had long since given up such displays at every confrontation. Since Eru’s pakeha mother, Jane, had married the chieftain, the Ngai Tahu greeted their guests with a simple handshake. This greatly simplified their dealings with visitors and trading partners. Eru’s mother and his father, Te Haitara, had founded a successful sheep-breeding business, which had helped make the tribe wealthy.

  “According to the ritual, we should now, hmm, sing something,” Father O’Toole said quietly, as the warriors completed their dance. “That’s part of the exchange, as it were. Of course, the people here know that pakeha don’t usually do such things. These tribal rituals look very savage, but actually the people are quite civilized. Heavens, I baptized the chieftain myself.”

  His words were intended to be comforting, but it sounded as though O’Toole was surprised, and not a little worried about Paraone Kawiti’s backslide to the old tribal rituals.

  Mara perked up. If the ritual could be finished quickly, perhaps she could ride back to Russell that evening and take a ship to the South Island the next morning. But if there was an argument, and if the men had to discuss the next steps at length, she could be stuck here for ages.

  Mara dismounted her horse, handed the reins to Karl, and pushed back her hip-length dark hair. She had worn it loose, the way the Maori women traditionally did. She stepped forward confidently.

  “I can sing something,” she offered, and pulled her favorite musical instrument, a little koauau, out of a bag.

  The pakeha looked just as startled as the warriors, who had been snarling and baring their teeth. Mara raised the flute to her nose in the traditional way and played a short melody. Then she began to sing. It was a lovely and strikingly simple song, nothing like the warriors’ dramatic cries, about the Canterbury Plains on the South Island. She described the endless swathes of swaying grass, the rivers bordered with thickets of raupo, and the snow-covered mountains that hid glass-clear lakes full of fish. The song was intended for a powhiri, the formal greeting ritual in which an arriving tribe would introduce themselves to their hosts by describing their home, and served to join the hosts and their guests into one group. Mara sang with calm self-assurance. She had a pure, alto voice, and both Ngai Tahu musicians and her English tutor back home had been pleased with her performances.

  On this day, too, her listeners were impressed. Not only did the chieftain and his men lower their weapons, but a stirring came from the decoratively carved wooden houses ringing the meeting ground. An old woman stepped out of the wharenui, the communal house, followed by a group of girls Mara’s age. They purposefully led their sheep past the warriors and returned her song with their own. The girls sang of the beauty of the North Island, the endless white beaches, the thousand colors of the sea, and the spirits of the holy kauri trees that protected the open expanses of green hills.

  Mara smiled and hoped that the Ngati Hine wouldn’t take it as an invitation to begin an entire powhiri. That could last for hours. But the old woman, obviously the tribal elder, kept the greeting brief. She approached the two pakeha women. Ida tipped her face to offer hongi, the traditional greeting. The farmers, Johnson, and the soldiers looked on mistrustfully as the women touched noses and foreheads.

  Karl and Father O’Toole looked relieved. Mara, too, breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

  “I brought gifts,” Ida said. “My daughter and I would like to visit with the tribe while these men clear up a misunderstanding. Of course, only if that’s all right with you. We don’t know how serious the disagreement about the land is.”

  Mara interpreted happily, and the woman nodded and welcomed them.

  Then Karl spoke with the chieftain as O’Toole interpreted. Maihi scowled at the farmers but seemed open to Karl’s suggestion to examine the maps to determine ownership of the disputed piece of land.

  The elder who had initiated the temporary truce quickly returned to one of the houses. She came back immediately with a copy of the contract and the maps that the tribe had received when they sold the land. The documents had obviously been well taken care of, preserved as though they were sacred.

  Mara watched with moderate interest as Karl carefully unfolded the papers and laid his own documents next to theirs.

  “May I ask which parcels are being contested, Mr. Simson, Mr. Carter?” he said, turning to the farmers. “That would save us some time. Then we won’t have to ride the entire perimeter.”

  Peter Carter indicated an area directly on the border of the Maori land. “I bought this here for my sheep to graze on. Then I discovered that the Maori women had planted a field there. When I drove my sheep over anyway, warriors with spears and muskets appeared, defending ‘their’ land.”

  “Fine,” Karl said. “We’ll go the
re. Ariki, will you accompany us? And what about your land, Mr. Simson?”

  The square-built, red-faced farmer pushed to the front of the group but couldn’t make heads or tails of the map.

  The old Maori woman pointed to the paper. “Here. Land belong not him, not us,” she explained in English. “Belongs gods. Spirits live there. He not destroy.”

  “There, you heard it!” Simson shouted. “She said herself that the land doesn’t belong to them. That means—”

  “It’s documented as Maori land,” Karl said sharply. “See the little mark on the map? She means that place. We’ll have to go look at that too. Please come, ariki. The sooner we go, the sooner we’ll have this sorted out. Mr. Johnson, please inform Mr. Simson and Mr. Carter that they’ll have to accept our decision, whatever it may be.” He shot them an annoyed look.

  Karl walked back to his horse, and Ida and Mara followed to get their gifts for the Maori women out of their saddlebags. They were just small things—colorful scarves, costume jewelry, and a few sacks of seeds. They hadn’t been able to transport more practical gifts like blankets or pots and pans. But Mara could tell that it wasn’t necessary. The women and children were already wearing mostly pakeha clothing, which provided more protection against the cool climate than the traditional flax garments of the Maori. Many of them also wore little wooden crosses on leather bands around their necks, in place of the traditional god figurines carved from pounamu jade. Several of the women approached Father O’Toole trustfully, spoke with him, and allowed themselves to be blessed.

  “We all Christians,” a young woman declared to Ida, and proudly touched her cross. “Baptized. Mission Kororareka.”

  “Our mission in Russell was founded in 1838,” Father O’Toole added. “It was started by French Dominican priests and Marist priests and nuns.”

  “Are they . . . Catholic?” Ida asked. She herself had grown up in a strict community of Lutherans where Papists had been viewed as the enemy rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

  For her part, Mara had never differentiated very much between different types of Christianity. There was no church near Rata Station, so attending regular services was impossible. Ida led the family in prayer when she was home, but if she was accompanying her husband on his travels as a surveyor, Mara and her sisters were left in the care of Cat Rata. Ida’s best friend and the girls’ second mother didn’t pray to the Christian god. She had grown up with a Maori tribe and was more interested in teaching the girls about native gods and spirits. Their religious education was further complicated by a touch of Anglicanism from their tutor, Miss Foggerty. She had taught Sunday school lessons with great fervor, but without much success. The children hadn’t been able to stand the strict, humorless woman. Mara would much rather commune with Maori spirits than Miss Foggerty’s god. In fact, Mara and Eru had tried asking them to send Miss Foggerty back to England. It hadn’t been a successful experiment, though. Mara couldn’t remember one prayer that had ever been answered, by any god.