Both Sides of the Moon (22 page)

He turned then. He would have struck her. Except she had her beautiful side angled at him, and it was in innocent response of
question
asked and awaiting answer. He frowned. Can I not have lingered pride in what pain I endured and not permitted but one sound for?

No, she said. For to gain them it is assumed you give much excruciating pain to others; you take away their husbands, children’s
fathers, someone’s love. It is not your tattoo mana I am with tender feelings for, Moonlight. It is the disavowed warrior I thought you were becoming. I hope this is not so.

He knew threat uttered better than any. No, he said more quickly given out than he might. No, he said again, to assure this face starting to turn ugly side to him. He feared that sneer. He admitted right then to himself, he did fear it. Or perhaps it was the disapproval, and what it said coming from this woman he feared. Perhaps he feared truth.

This reflecting object and the others with the symbol-covered white layers were but the first of other-worldly experience. As was Moonlight’s love for the whole woman of whole beauty to his eyes. He witnessed man exchanging kiss with another and saw them
moving
off to do the obvious in private. He was invited part of discussion on this, even though his entire life’s conceptions contained not even thought of such union.

But the agreement by all except himself was that it is no man or woman’s affair what people do in private. Or there should be demand and command over thought itself, one of the men lovers had argued.

Moonlight had argued that men was bad enough, but as to women loving with one another, surely this was the greatest affront to any tribe’s fundamental value? Not so, Wild Hair had encouraged a woman like that to have her say. A person is what she is. As she is born with certain physical attributes or flaws, as she is born with certain intelligence or less of it, so she is born with her sexual
preference
. And though being childless does lose her continuance to the people, surely such choice must earn more respect for what a woman must have to accept of her life, that the strain dies with her. And to be so in these times when such types are summarily executed by their own, surely that is courage of decision to be true to what one is?

So Moonlight was won over on this. Just as he was on nearly every matter that he ran up against in his lifetime of thinking. He made public joke that he was like a dog learning to swim with the fishes. One of them said seriously back, it is better than being caught between here and the moon.

One day Wild Hair and Tekapo invited all to a serious discussion; it was on where they go, where take they their differently thinking minds since there was marauder warrior by the name of Te Rauparaha who was sweeping this land like a deadly broom, sparing no tribe not his ally. And hardly would he spare the lives of people his opposite.

At the same time the white men were settling, his complicated dwellings were springing up everywhere, it was said there were entire plains built and being built of them, as it was known that they had weaponry that hurled hard projectiles at speed faster than an eye could see and killed or greatly wounded a man in an instant. He was more organised than seemed humanly possible and he had systems of thinking in place that enabled his strengths to grow. Tekapo believed that those strange objects of symbol-covered, thin layers of material, like beaten weaving material, were the door to
understanding
the white man. Though he could not be sure from but brief forays into this arrival’s claimed territories.

This mighty new arrival was said to be claiming dominion over all this land. He was claiming the inconceivable of reign over every great warring tribe and yet has not this very notion been discussed here amongst this materially dispossessed but intellectually most possessed of all this land’s original inhabitants? It was time, the two modest leaders said, to look into another tomorrow and see what future lay there. It was time to go and meet these people. And he prayed that they did not worship Tu, the God of War. They all prayed that.

She was watching her child drowning in a swollen river of these people’s despicable, lowly ways, and unable to call out even his name.

She remembered Kapi (poor Kapi — where are you? Or have you taken your descended life one step more to your own taken death? Oh Kapi!) telling of his troubled witness of that drowning enemy child and its mother. How he had dreamt of the child and the child had told him things of himself that he had not known nor had contemplated. He told of the mother in her disciplined training not calling out the child’s name even as he drowned before her eyes. Tangiwai saw now the same, she could not call out her child’s name for fear that it would give away her position of how her thoughts were.

This other child, of Kapi’s image, she had kept close to her, and he was anyway too young yet to be caught in the torrent. As she had kept of herself, her bodily gift, to Hakere and made violent refusal to any other who tried to own her in that way. She did it by her natural-born strength of will and an unusual physical strength for a woman, and by sly innuendo that she belonged only to their giant leader. Even though he had made no such sole claim to her, and took whoever he wished, including in public witness young boys as if they were women. Somehow she had kept a belief going that she was Hakere’s favourite and only piece of sexual meat.

Kapi’s son was two now. He had his father’s prominent brow, and would surely be tall and strong like him. She wished he could have known him, for even though a warrior more terrible than any, he had always had a more tender side. And before all this destiny fell down upon them he had begun to show signs of wishing to converse more with her. Indeed, those troubled nights of his over the drowning enemy child, he had spoken words to her of such vulnerable intimacy
she knew the people would consider it heresy, sacrilege of the worst kind. For his dreams had questioned his right to take enemy child’s innocence. It had questioned him in his mind for the first time: what of the children? When in a warrior culture what of the children was only of how they grew up to be the same as their parents, parents upon parent upon same parents before them.

As for innocence, no enemy can be innocent. Or ceases to be enemy and becomes, instead, a people or person to be considered. Which is madness since an enemy is asking, inviting to be murdered.

This was the answer he gave himself, finally, after all those sleepless and then turmoiled sleeping nights, and those frowning days of inner question and image of drowning child taunting him. Finally his culture, the way of his people and how they had always been, won. Claimed back their own.

He had come to her dwelling with grin of a child. Tangiwai, he said: I am returned. I am returned of my old self, my former true warrior self is back. And he had come to her and loved her with
terrible
but beautiful strength of true man that he had resumed believing he was.

Though she did afterward lie back and compare with the loving man of the troubled time, and she thought that was the better man: more tender and yet unpredictable. A man who lasted longer and sought her heights out first. And did so by means few men know, of talk the sweetest form of love. And giving her laughter.

Now this man who was mounted upon her and driving with his usual brute power and body-stenching closeness that
foul-breathed
face to hers, he made with glad cry at what she did, the response she gave him; made him slam into her harder. But then he stopped.

She felt his muscles stiffen in suspicion. He said, Why give you back thrusts like this after many times laying there in quiet
submission
? Think you that you fool me, woman? What are you up to?

I, Hakere? I am up to nothing but here beneath you. Except that for some time I have thought, if I am in the forest, then why not hunt?

But still he was a poised muscle tenseness of suspicion. He said: Hunt what?

And she answered: Hunt for the same joys as you are with, like many snared birds slung over your shoulders.

He made smile less suspicious and started to thrust again. And she gave back, using muscles down there also that nature had gifted her as strongly as it had her other muscular parts unusual for a woman.

He roared then in her ear, I have caught a moa, biggest of them all!

She spoke back. But the moa is long extinct. Surely it is large white heron you catch, giant man? Giving more squeeze down there, and rapidly, like kissing him with her cunt.

No, it is moa! Taller than a man that responds in my hunting forest and is now on my snare — you are moa, Tangiwai! Not kotuku any longer — moa!

And with that his great body stiffened. So she gave back same cry as if she was hunter gained of the giant bird now in fable. He looked at her in some surprise, told her that he had known few women who ventured into places same as man like that.

She only smiled. I came here with good hunting skills, Hakere. And whenever you desire, even in those bleeding times, I shall go hunt with you.

But he grew suspicious again. Why this change, bitch woman? When I am only comfortable with the definition I find — and this is not how I defined you. This is not the meaning I gave your person. You would not be trying to marry me would you?

I would not. Though if I had grant to call myself woman only of you, then I would give back much of what you just tasted in return. That is all I ask.

His cold, lizard eyes gazed on her for long long moments. He said: I would rip your child’s head off and chop it into chunks and make you eat them raw if you are with dark plan and this is use of me …

And you know how much I love my child, how I lament for my other so quickly taken of your tribe’s ways.

We are not tribe. We are gang. Meaning collection of the angry. Born or made, it does not matter. Your love for this child not yet joined of us, he will not last long. Then would your unusual
lovings cease or turn to the danger I suspect them anyway? Tell me now or I will kill your child on the spot.

And he grabbed her by the throat and his grip was as powerful as if rocks were pressing against her breathing means. But she still felt his penis was risen again against her inner thigh. Knowing that power excites him.

Enter you me now and let my response be my secret
confession
. Go on, enter me and know. Then you may kill my child and me. Or be of belief.

So he entered her. And though the way was already slickened, she gave tightened muscle down there as if reduced to a young woman. And he groaned and they were glad groans, and she rose and returned to him as if they were dancing.

And long after, when he made sounds of sleeping, she stroked him down there, pestering him like a frustrated woman, but no blood engorged him there, he just blew rotting teeth smell into the cave air.

Outside was with moonlight, though Tangiwai could not see the source itself. It lit the ground and sleeping forms by dying fires in greenish-white light. She got up and quietly, ever so quietly, uplifted her sleeping child so he would not be covered in this surely infected bad blood sleeping at her feet.

She placed the child outside and made to enjoy the night of stars, the full moon up there. Except it was signal for her small band of warriors and strong women that it would be soon. Then she returned to the leader’s cave. Not bothering with the moon out there, nor with the sleeping forms everywhere under it. And she lay again beside him and stroked again his penis, over and over. But he responded not.

Then she felt for the weapon beside her, she took it in her hand, and she made slowest lift so not to make sound of even arm too quick through air. And she held it there for a moment, and
measured
its aim by the moonlight spillover. Then she struck. And heard the crack of the centre of his forehead, the slosh of his brain being informed that he had been told a loving lie in the name of
righteousness
and right — this woman’s right. To her dignity. To her dream.

His eyes flew open. But she did not think they had sight remaining. Not even of her.

In the moonlight, under the full chosen moon, with a
flicker-over
of dying campfire, she roared a call to the compound of sleeping filth and those readied few of her own who were with arms they had secreted away: Hakere is dead!

And they were awake in an instant, even though the more extreme ones of deranged mind woke and ran off like confused animals into the night. Unless they had waited all this time for that release call. The most were like kicked dogs.

I have killed him! As I — we! — she pointed at her men who were few in number but even in the dark huge in poised violent resolve. We shall kill any who challenges us! You are a people more depraved than any of worst imagining. But as this people you are weak and now weaker without your leader.

I am of no wish under this full moonlight, nor any of tomorrow’s suns, to be a moment longer in your despicable company. I am taking certain selected of those of mine away with me. Then she called to Ratanui: My son, my dearest first-born, come you to your mother. Several times she called this. My child, are you so quickly fogotten of your mother? But a voice called in reply, I have no need of a mother. It was then that Tangiwai truly felt the meaning of her name: waters weeping.

So she clutched her baby closer to her and called out other names to shapes crouched in the dark but wearing the soft greenwhite cloak of moonlight, to those with whom she had remained attached by unbroken will and same shared dream. And she denied, in
bellowing
, refusing voice those who called out that they were still one of hers. For she knew who was and was not. Of anyone, Tangiwai Kotuku knew.

Soon, they were hurrying away into a night that was not quite night, not with the light above all speckled and pocked and line marked and sketched with its own scars of whatever life is out there in a different space. A tiny band of human life moving to better place, where hope still dwells. Such fullness of moon circle lighted down upon them.