Where The Flag Floats (9 page)

Day (10
^th
)

I was captured in a nightmare world where bloated faces floated towards me, sodden and swollen fingers reached for me while giant fish with mouths full of teeth swam around me. I could not escape even though I thrashed around. Hands held me down while soft words spoke but I wanted to break free. Even to die would be better than endure the terrors that haunted my dark dreams. Eventually I sank into a bleak dreamless world, and I thought I had died at last.

I woke to find myself inside a rough hut made of reeds. A woman knelt beside me. Her face was dark and her hair curly and she had tattoo marks on her chin. Maori. The sailors at the docks had told awful tales of Maoris and I cried out in fright. I tried to get up but my limbs would not obey me. The woman shouted out as she held me down and a man entered. His face was full of tattoos and his expression fierce. I could not even countenance what he had destined for me. I sobbed, frustrated by the weakness in my body that made it impossible for me to resist the woman and get away from the man.

The man disappeared, I imagined to get a knife to kill me. I had used up precious energy by now and could do nothing more than lie there under the woman’s grip while I waited for the man to return.

It was not a man who entered the hut, however, but a boy a little older than me. He had no tattoos and he smiled as he came in. The woman spoke to him quickly and he nodded to show he understood.

“We mean you no harm,” the boy said as he approached. Something in my eyes must have revealed my fear for he took the place of the woman and placed his hand gently on my chest. “Do you understand?”

I nodded slowly. My head ached and my mouth was dry.

“We found you on the beach. Where are you from?”

I tried to speak but no words came. The boy reached behind my head and leant forward with a shell which I found to be filled with water. I drank.

“The ship,” I said.

The boy frowned. “The ship that was caught in Tamamainuku’s net?”

“Whose net?” I asked.

“That’s what we call that sea between the two lands, as it has caught boats before as it caught yours. Are you a sailor?”

“Yes … no, I wasn’t meant to be there.”

“There have been bodies found on the beach. We thought you were one too. We almost buried you,” he said, and laughed. “Then you made a noise and we knew you lived, though you were closer to death than life.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days now. There are many dead and there is great sorrow in Tamaki Makaurau.”

“Where?”

“You pakeha call it Auckland.”

“I have to go there,” I said. As weak as I was, all could think about then was finding my father’s watch. To do that I would have to find out who lived, and if Lieutenant Amphlett was amongst them.

“You are going nowhere,” the boy declared. “You do not have the strength.”

He was right. Just this short conversation had exhausted me and my eyelids were heavy. I closed them and could feel myself sliding back into the blackness

“My name is Maki,” the boy said. “But the priest called me Mark.”

“Sam,” I said before sinking into a deep dreamless sleep.

I sat with Maki on the beach, warming myself in the late afternoon sun. I had needed his help to get there but now it was pleasant to sit on the warm sand and look out to the sea that had almost claimed my life. I dug my fingers into the sand – strange, black sand that I had not seen before. The village lay behind us, nestled in the fold of the valley. There were rocky headlands protruding out into the sea and a huge rock formation in the middle of the beach that reminded me of a crouching beast.

“I have to go to Auckland,” I said as I let the warm sand flow through my fingers again. “I have to find one of the men, a lieutenant, who has something precious to me.”

“When you are stronger,” Maki said. “It will take us some time to get there and you are not yet well.”

“I cannot wait,” I said. “I must have it back.”

“How do you know that he lives?”

“The steamer was towing his boat, and I have to believe that he made it to the shore. There was another lieutenant, Lieutenant Hill, who was in the boat with him, and later that lieutenant was in the rescue boats, at the tiller. If he survived then surely the other lieutenant did as well.”

“There are important men in Auckland, waiting for a ship to take them away. Perhaps your lieutenants are among them.”

“If I cannot find the lieutenant then I need to find a seaman called Fred Butler.”

Maki shook his head. “I do not know that name.”

“He tried to save me,” I said. “He tried to save us all, but it was not enough. He was too late. The ship was on the wrong course. We were all doomed.”

“We knew a bad thing was sure to happen when the pakeha cut down Te Pu-rakau,” Maki said into the silence. “You pakeha understand so little of our land and our ways. What we value so highly, you hold in contempt. But this time, the lesson was learnt.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the harbour, the one that you wished to enter, is an island. We call it Motu-O-Hiaroa but it has been known as Puketutu Island. On it, on the western end was a puriri tree which we called Te Purakau. It was very special to the people around here, particularly the women who wanted to have children. It was tapu.”

“Tapu?”

“Sacred, like your god is to you. But a man, a pakeha, cut it down for fence posts. It was a bad thing to do. We knew something bad would happen, and it did.”

“When was the tree cut down?” I asked.

Maki stared out to sea. “The day before your ship was caught in the net.”

It was another two days before I could persuade Maki to take me to Auckland. His mother, the one who had tended to me after my rescue, said I was not well enough, but I was determined to go. I was thankful to the Maori for taking care of me but I knew that my destiny did not lie with them. I had to find my own kind and then my place within them.

We left with packs filled with fresh water from the stream and food wrapped in leaves, and Maki’s mother put a cloak over my bare shoulders for I had lost my shirt in the sea. The whole village stood at the bottom of the steep hills and bade us goodbye. The women broke out in a song, the words of which I could not understand.

“What are they singing?” I asked Maki.

“They are singing of the fish that came out of the sea and turned into a boy.”

“Who’s that?”

“That’s you! You are kupae, the sprat that came from the sea and became a boy. That is our name for you – Kupae.” And he laughed. “You look like a fish now, Kupae, with your mouth open like that of a landed fish.”

We were only halfway up the hill and I was already panting. It was going to be a long, hard walk to the town of Auckland.

I could see no path in the forest through which Maki took me. There were no markers, no tracks, nothing that I could see to guide us, yet Maki strode forward with confidence. I lagged behind, struggling to keep up as my limbs easily wearied, and at times my feet became heavy so I had difficulty lifting them up. The forest canopy was thick with birds who called to each other as they fluttered through the branches. Maki gave them names but the only one I could remember was the tui, whose distinctive call could be heard above the others in the cool of the evening.

The vegetation was strange too, like none I had ever seen before. The tall, branchless trees that stretched up into the sky, Maki called kauri, and there were tall ferns that were almost like trees in their appearance, so unlike the tall gum trees that surrounded Sydney. The soil, too, was vastly different. This was black and stuck to my bare feet, so unlike the red, dry earth I was used to. And the sound of the cicadas deafened us in the heat of the day while the crickets sang a lullaby in the evening. We filled our gourds at the many streams that we crossed and supplemented our food with what Maki found in the forest.

I marvelled at this new and strange place, uneasy in the damp closeness of it and yet secure as long as I did not lose sight of Maki. I did that once; he rounded a bend when I was stumbling along and when I looked up he was gone. For a moment my heart pounded in my chest and my breathing became ragged. Then he appeared, looking back for me and calling out, “Come on, Kupae, we shall never get there if you just stand around.”

I ran after him.

As we walked along the ridge, I saw a mass of inland water on both my left and my right and wondered how that could be. We mounted a high point and I could see for miles, both east and west, and what were plainly two seas on either side. Maki stood beside me and pointed to the east.

“Waitemata,” he said, before he turned and pointed to the west. “Manukau.”

“Two harbours?” I asked.

“Yes, but the pakeha prefer to use the one in the east as the passage ashore is easier.”

“I wonder why the
Orpheus
didn’t take it.”

Maki shrugged and raced ahead, forcing me to pant along after him.

The forest gradually gave way to gentler land cleared for the farms but we did not see many people, and those that we did see watched us suspiciously as we passed. Mothers drew their children inside while farmers hoisted their axes or tools in a silent warning. I guessed the threat of war with the Maori had made the farmers cautious.

Our pace was slow, for I could not walk too far without resting, but that did not seem to matter to Maki who would wait while I regained the wherewithal to carry on. He found food in places I would never know to look and was always feeding me, like a mother bird feeds her chick. I think he knew that I needed to eat often to build up my strength.

On the fourth day we reached a furrowed track. This, Maki told me, would lead us to the town of Auckland. My steps slowed as my head filled with questions and anxieties. How would I find the survivors of the shipwreck, if any were to be found? And how would I find Lieutenant Amphlett and recover the watch? Even if I did, how would I find my aunt? If, indeed, I actually wanted to find my aunt. My mother’s dying words rang in my ears. She had to have been right, to know where my aunt was after all these years, and yet I wondered why it was my mother had never spoken of her while I was growing up. It would have comforted me to know that I had relatives somewhere in the world, even if I did not know them. As we settled for the night on our flax mats behind a barn, I wondered what the next few days would bring.

The farmer’s dogs found us the next morning and he chased us off his land. We ran away, laughing. With the physical activity and the food Maki fed me, I had regained some of the strength I had lost during the shipwreck. My goal was ahead of me: I could see it each time we topped a hill before descending into another valley. It grew tantalizingly close. The town of Auckland, Maki told me, was only another day’s walk away.

I marvelled at this new land on which I had stumbled. Everything was so green. Back in Sydney the dry summer winds turned everything to dust, which settled wherever it could. Here the land was gentle and fresh, with crops growing in the occasional fields around the town. As we walked, the isolated farms gave way to clusters of houses, with defined streets boasting the occasional general store.

People watched us go past but we did not stop or offer explanation. With my ragged trousers and my Maori cloak I guess I must have looked as much a Maori as Maki; my skin had darkened with the sun while on the sea and like Maki, I had no shoes on my feet. We must have looked like a pair of native beggars.

As we settled for the night beneath a large tree that towered into the sky, Maki told me we would be in the town in the morning.

Maki was wrong. It was the afternoon before we reached the town. He had overestimated my ability to walk up and down the valleys.

We descended another deep valley, climbed the other side and, as we reached the top, the town of Auckland was before me, the buildings stretching down a long hill to the harbour at the bottom where I could see the ships at anchor. The street was lined with houses and shops at the bottom, close to the wharf, with many people about and carriages in the roadway. In some ways it reminded me of Sydney, but less crowded.

There was land on the other side of the harbour water and a few houses situated around the base of two conical hills. Out to the east, as if protecting the harbour, was a larger conical hill, rising out of the water and, so it seemed to me, blocking the way to the open sea.

“This is Auckland?” I asked.

“This is Tamaki Makaurau – Auckland,” Maki said with a nod. “We shall find your friends.”

I wanted to say that Lieutenant Amphlett was no friend of mine, but I held my tongue. Maybe I would have to be a friend to get my watch back, or maybe just a pickpocket …

“Where should we go?” I asked him. Although the town was smaller than Sydney, I still had a lot of area to search if I was to find either Lieutenant Amphlett or Fred.

“We should go to the fort near the water,” Maki said. “That is where the men in uniform go when they come off the boats. Some go to that hill,” he said, pointing to his right where I could see buildings and tents on a grassy slope. “But I think the sailors go to the fort.”

“Come on then,” I said and began to make my way down the hill with Maki following me. People avoided us, the ladies picking up their skirts as we passed and the men glaring at us, but we walked on without taking much notice of them.

We continued down the hill until we reached the harbour and I looked around for the fort. It was on a point that extended out into the sea, an area of double-storied buildings with a stone wall on the town side. On the seaward side, there was an earth embankment into which holes had been cut for the cannons that faced out towards the sea. We had to climb a steep hill to reach the entrance and I was breathless when we arrived.

“Halt!” the sentry called out as I approached. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Is Fred Butler here?” I gasped, struggling to regain my breath

“What’s it to you?”

“He’s a friend of mine.”

The sentry looked me up and down and said, “I doubt that.”

I decided that it was best to be honest. “I was on the
Orpheus
with him. He saved my life.”

The sentry laughed. “I’ve heard them all but I haven’t heard that one yet. Get away with you!” He swung the rifle at me like a club and I stepped back. “If I could have a penny for every child that has come down here and told some or other story of the
Orpheus
, I’d be a rich man and not standing here, listening to yet more tales.”

“But, sir …” I stopped, for now the man pointed his rifle at me. I didn’t know if it was loaded but I was not in a hurry to find out.

It was wise to back away. I ran back to Maki who had retreated as soon as the sentry had started swinging the rifle.

“What do we do now?” I said. “How am I going to be able to find anyone?”

“I think I know,” he said as he turned away and looked down the hill up which we had just come. “We can ask the priest. He will know. And he will give us food as well.”

“A priest? What will he know?”

“He knows everything,” Maki said with a smile. “Come, it’s this way.”

He led me back down the hill down and up the other side, crossing over the main street to reach a church building on the opposite side. We went down the side of the church towards a house. I was nervous but Maki marched up boldly and knocked on the door.

I hung back, ready to run if someone should come out of the door swinging a weapon of some kind. Instead, a minister opened up the door and smiled when he saw Maki on the doorstep.

“Mark!” he cried. “How are you? Are you still teaching English to the rest of your tribe?”

“I try, Father, but you know, the older ones just don’t want to learn.”

“Come inside, you must want some food after your long journey.”

“I brought someone with me, Father.” He stood aside so that the priest could see me.

“Well, who’s this then?”

I stepped forward. “My name is Sam Galloway and I was shipwrecked with the
Orpheus
.”

“Really?” the man enquired politely, suspicion in his eyes.

“Yes, Father, really,” Maki said. “We found him on the beach. We named him Kupae, the little fish that came out from the sea.”

The father’s eyebrows lifted. Then he opened the door more widely. “You’d better come in then, lad, and tell me your story.”