The Bone People (53 page)

If I was an honest uncompromising soul, if I wasn't riddled by this disease called hope, I'd climb into the

middle of my pyre and light a phoenixfire from there--

The dandelions look luminous in the evening. Many of the aureoles are wide open, as though the sun still

shone.

On the other hand, my cardinal virtue is hope. Forlorn hope, hope in extremity. Not Christian hope, but an

innate rebellion against the inevitable dooms of suffering, death, and despair. A senseless hope--

The great pile of wood waits darkly.

Pale moths are flitting all around, hordes of them like insect ghosts, flicking in and out of her vision. Time--

She lights the torch. It smokes blackly, then bursts into flame.

She flings it and it travels like a comet into the waiting wood.

The pile explodes, fire jetting, soaring, enfolding wood with eager flowers of flame. They rush and roar up in

a tall soaring column.

If I hadn't my hope, I might have lasted ten seconds there... the air is all gone from round it... splendid

dragon... the" glory of the salamander--

It burns down to a bed of embers ten feet across. Even then the dying fire is enough to light the side of the

struck-down Tower. O dandelions, you must have known what was coming--

The moths are back after the firestorm: they fleet and tumble round her head and hands as she shifts the

embers into a pile with a shovel. When it's complete, she digs the shovel into the ground, leaving it there.

One more thing to do--

She takes a silk handkerchief from her pocket, and with her bare hands, scoops up soil, enough to fill the

hollow of her palm. She secretes handkerchief and earth back in her pocket.

Wherever I go, however I go, I carry this earth for memory. And should I die in a strange land, there is a little

more than just my flesh to make a friend and sanctuary of alien ground.

Kerewin picked up her cases, and walked away into the night.

IV

Feldapart Sinews, Breaken Bones

10

The Kaumatua And The Broken Man

"HERE?" says the bus driver incredulously. "Here?"

"Here," says Joe.

"But it's in the middle of bloody nowhere!"

"That doesn't matter. I can walk to where I'm going."

The bus pulled away in a rising whine of gears. The late afternoon sun glinted on the back window until it

turned a corner. The noise faded.

It began to rain, a thick drizzle that clung to his clothes without really wetting them. He shifted off the road

and started walking through the scrub towards the sea. It wasn't hard going: there was little gorse and less

blackberry, mainly acre upon acre of manuka, stands of bracken, the occasional coprosma, no tall trees. But

the scrub was high enough to prevent him seeing where he was going.

The bus driver had said,

"Well, you might meet old Jack in there. He comes out to the turnoff sometimes to collect his sack of flour

and tea and tobacco. They call him the last of the cannibals, but I don't think he really is," and he'd laughed.

The sentence joggled in his mind.

"I don't think he's really the last of the cannibals," or "I don't think he's really a cannibal, but you never know-

-"

He could never imagine his great-grandfather, who had taken part in several feasts of people, as a cannibal.

He remembered the old man only as a picture of a silver-haired fiercely dignified chief. He'd always

imagined cannibals to be little wizened people, with pointy teeth.

"We're meat, same as anything else," his grandmother had said.

He shivered.

The manukas were blackened with blight and there was a pervading stink of swampwater throughout the

bush. Even the concrete rooms and corridoring with their discreet bars and locks seemed more pleasant now.

He shoved his way onward, his pack catching and smashing branches, and all at once stopped.

He was on the edge of a bluff: below him, a scoured stone beach, with driftwood in tangled piles along the

tideline. It was thirty shadowed feet to the bottom.

The kaumatua:

I have watched the river and the sea for a lifetime. I have seen rivers rob soil from the roots of trees until the

giants came foundering down. I have watched shores slip and perish, the channels silt and change; what was

beach become a swamp and a headland tumble into the sea. An island has eroded in silent pain since my

boyhood, and reefs have become islands. Yet the old people used to say, People pass away, but not the land.

It remains forever.

Maybe that is so. The land changes. The land continues. The sea changes. The sea remains.

Since I came here, I have left this land only twice. I walked the streets of towns the first time, and was

ignored. The second time, people laughed behind their hands at my stilted speech, and stared at my face.

"Keerist, what an antique," said one. So I quickly learnt the results of my desertion. I am tied irrevocably to this land.

And so. For this past life, I have kept watch, from dawn till star-pierced night. For this past life, I have

waited, from the sun's dying until the bright midday. Watching over, watching for awakening: waiting for the

sign. There is not long left for me to watch or wait, and still the stranger does not come. The digger has not

delved. The broken man has not been found and healed.

Yet those were the ones you instructed me to watch and wait for.

Was it all illusion? Were your eyes blinded in the moments before your death? Have I cast aside the pleasures

of life to endure only this pointless watch?

He stood sweating, looking down at the beach for a long time. A shag flew past in the twilight, and gulls

wheeled and keened above his head. It could be Moerangi, four hundred miles south; it could be Moerangi,

and nothing has happened, and along the beach in a firelit bach, they wait for him--

He shook his head, and stumbled back.

As though in a dream, he began to run. Somewhere near, he could hear a river that he hadn't heard before.

You learned not to hear too much in prison. The manukas slashed at him as he blundered through, ears full of

the river. The packstraps ate into his shoulders. You grew flabby and soft in prison, playing at working,

ignoring the talk, enduring the time.

He stopped, breathing heavily, and shrugged the pack off. He listened carefully. The bush is filled with the

sound of the river but he can't tell which way it is. Something moves and grunts nearby, and he turns sharply,

his fists clenched.

The grunts stop. His heart settles again.

It grows very dark as he stands there. At last, he sighs and sits down beside the pack. He doesn't feel like

eating, wanting only deep, dreamless sleep. He fumbles through the pack, sorting out the bivsac, and sets it

up. The pencil torch is blindingly useless. It is better to work in the dark, even though he bangs into stones

and bushes. He grows more and more tired.

Prop the pack against a stunted manuka: turn the boots upside down beside it: wriggle into sleeping bag, and

again into the bivsac, and wait for sleep.

The ground is surprisingly springy except for a branch buried under his shoulders. And an evil little breeze

drives straight into his face. It is bitingly cold, and the drizzle slides in with it. He puts his head inside his

sleeping bag, and moisture from his breath builds up and wets the area by his face. His feet are numb.

He cannot recall falling asleep, but the wetness and the cold wake him. There's a thin whining of insects. In

the chill gloom, all else is silent. Slatebodied midges begin crawling in every gap, hordes of them, slow but

thorough biters, driving him to get up.

In the grey half-light, he discovers he has gone to sleep in a bog. A small bog, crawling with every kind of

biting life. Midges and daylight mosquitos of all varieties. They whine joyfully.

He stands, incomparably miserable, the soles of his socks wet and growing wetter, letting the creatures bite

their fill.

Ngakau, wake up. Look, the sky is lightening. Make a tea. Dry out your gear. Pull yourself together, man.

Two kinds of manuka, he thinks, consciously observing as he spreads the bivsac and sleepingbag. One with

white flowers and fat leaf lobes, and that one has smaller diamond leaves and pinkish flowers. Wonder which

one she made the sedative from? Or was it both? He notices sundews, some vivid red, some tall with a dozen

green sticky heads per stem. Kerewin would love 'em, eh, she had a mind for the macabre. Probably spend

hours watching until some poor bastard of a fly got snared. Fern curls, bracken, pollen-like dust round the

rims of puddles. Cracked white rocks edging out of the soil. An odd bleak place, but better than the concrete

desert.

As he lit the spirit-cooker, a seagull flew overhead and made a raucous noise. He was reminded of the boy

imitating the mollymawk, and the minding made him smile. You learnt to remember the sweet things and

squash down the bad ones. It works until sleep comes.

The sun is out: the bivsac is drying, and the wet patches at the mouth of the sleepingbag have dried. His sad

fey mood begins to pass.

Midges in the tea... he scoops them out, frowning... what was that childhood horror? Ah yes, Kohua-ora,

meaning "Cooked alive

in an earthoven." Refers, the book has said, to an ancient event near Papatoetoe. He had stumbled across the

reference in one of the useful books his grandmother gave him, and it brought him nightmares for months.

You have plenty of time to think when you're sick and helpless, when you're cooped up and made to feel

useless.

Had it been deliberate, the slow cooking of a hated rival? Or someone laid in the hole, who though thought

dead, was still alive and showed it? She told him what a noble fighter the old Maori was, and the school texts

repeated it whenever they mentioned the Maori at all... God, what lies we get taught. Exemplify the

honourable incidents, and conceal the children who got the chop, the women and old men stampeded over

cliffs, the bloody endless feuding... yet the gallantry according to the code was there, the wit in the face of

inevitable death... besides, he grins to himself, as a race, we like fighting. We're not too far from the old

people, Kerewin and me... but Kohua-ora? Thinking about old horrors somehow lessens the impact of the

new ones.

As he flicks away the last waterlogged midge, the sun shines more brightly, and his heart lightens with the

morning.

The kaumatua:

plaited a kete.

He put in it: cold potatoes; fresh cress; old corn; and the last piece of fried bread. He filled the battered

thermos with strong sugared milkless tea.

"That is all there is, for now."

There was half an ounce of tobacco left in his tin. He put it, and a dozen wax matches and a strip of coarse

sandpaper, into the kete too.

"This person, they may smoke."

There is a person, digger or stranger or broken man.

Last night, a huhu beetle tapped on the window.

He sat wrapped in the blanket from his bed, candle glimmering on the floor beside him, and watched it knock

and walk over the pane for an hour.

He did not let it in.

Then he dreamed, although he did not think he fell asleep. And his grandmother, whom he had last seen as

oiled ochred bones, spoke to him.

"I wasn't feebleminded, I did not speak of illusions before I died," she said acidly. "It was the way things had to be done. The waiting was as much for your good as for that which you watch over. It is finished now."

The candle had sunk and died. The huhu had gone. He had sat, shivering, waiting for the dawn.

Even though I have had a long life; even though I have been taught and prepared for this time, I am not ready

for it.

Are all people so wary of their death?

He took off his pack, lay down, and looked over the face of the

bluff. A grey blue clay-like material, slippery-looking; no handhold visible,

no purchase for feet.

"Ah, screw it." He sat up, leaning against the pack.

It had begun to drizzle again an hour ago. He had tramped two miles looking for the river, and hadn't found

it. Wet branches smacked into him viciously, his shoulders still ached from the packstraps, and he was

beginning to feel sick and faint.

He had last eaten yesterday afternoon, when the bus had stopped at a tearooms. Cardboardy sandwiches with

limp tomato insides. This morning's tea had used all his water, and the freeze-dried food he carried needed

water for cooking it.

He had turned for the beach, and the bluff still confronted him.

On the beach I'd have water. And there might be some decent food, there will be... pipi, karengo, kina,

something... but I'm not a bloody bird.

He gestured over the bluff with his thumb, and then snarled at himself... you're going round the twist,

Ngakau--

There was a quart flask of rum in the pack, and three of Kerewin's cigars left in their case. Might stimulate

some useful thinking. Some thinking, eh. And dear Lord, it'd make me feel warmer.

Despite his parka, he was cold, even while he had been walking. Now the cold had pierced bone deep

He pours the cap full of rum and swallows. Fills it again, and tosses that down too. The stinging warmth

sweeps down his gullet, and his skin contracts and tingles; his stomach opens wide. He fills the cap again,

and balances it carefully: it holds three nips, and it is a long time since he had a drink.

"That is better," and his voice sounds cheerful and confident.