Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (16 page)

The elder chortled. “Not all of us signed that treaty of yours. We are not all like fish to the hook. We read both papers, the English
and
the Maori. We saw that they don’t say the same thing. I think there’s a word for that.”

Lachlan bit his lip. “We have not come here to dispute treaties. We are on the trail of a dangerous criminal, a thief, who has stolen something very important and valuable from the government. He fled this way. We have come to Ngai Tohai not as enemies but seeking your aid, as you are most certainly the ones who will know the area, and can maybe help us locate where he is hiding.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but it would serve well enough. “He ought not be hard to find. He is pakeha, like me, only younger and his hair is different, red with grey through it. So he will certainly have been noticed if he came this way.”

“His name,
e hoa
, what’s his name?”

“Frances Ascot, but he is known as Frankie, the rare times he is seen in the city.”

The old man stopped and turned back to Lachlan. “Frankie?” He grinned, a grin of secrets. “
Kapai
.” For the first time, he seemed to study Lachlan, up and down. “This is no way for a king to dress. Here, we make a trade,
ae?
” He gestured at the agent’s oilskin coat as he untied the feather cloak from his shoulders.

Lachlan wasn’t holding any cards, so if playing up to the old man’s eccentricity was what it was going to take to survive, then he’d go along with it. He shed his coat and assented to one of the warriors tying the feather cloak at his neck.

The old man slipped Lachlan’s coat on and held out his arms, apparently amused by how it felt on his thin shoulders. He caught Lachlan’s eye and nodded at the cloak. “This is a great honour, you know. Worthy of a king.”

“Can you help me find Frank?”

The elder turned and continued into the bush.

“This Frank must have stolen something very precious that the Queen would send two white men in a tractor after him. What was it?”

“It doesn’t matter. It was to be sent to London, and the Queen will be most displeased if it is not delivered to her.”

“Mister King, I think you think you know a lot about people, about
our
people, but I think you actually know very little. Do you know our legends? What do you know of Maui
?”

“Maui was a hero, one of the greatest—”

“Maui was a thief, Mister King.
And
a hero, but first a thief. Maui stole fire from the underworld, among other things. Do you understand?”

“I—” Lachlan was finding himself at a loss for words far too often today. Why could they not have sent an Æthnographer with him on this mission? “You may need to explain.”

His pride when he swallowed it was rather more bitter than expected.

The old man shrugged. “Maui wove ropes of flax to slow the sun as it raced across the sky. He carved a hook and with it he pulled this land from the sea. It was a fish,
Te Ika a Maui
. He and his brothers roamed across its mighty sides and cut it with their
patu
, carving rivers and lakes.”

“No man could bring in a fish as vast as this entire island,” Lachlan scoffed. “Even for a creation myth, that’s simply not logical. There wouldn’t be line enough, or strength enough, or a fishhook big enough...”

Then the bush opened up, revealing a lush river valley wreathed in mist. Lachlan forgot the conversation as his eyes turned up towards the bright lance of water that streamed from a hole in the cliff-face far above. It was high, higher than the cloud and the clinging mists, a wound in the ramparts of the mountain, upon slopes where the sun yet burned, up above the mist that rolled around them and the shadows between the trees, in a place where the river shone in the sky.

“In some places,” the elder said softly, “we can still see the fish bleed.”

Lachlan King was a practical man, but for a moment the sight of the mighty cataract overawed his habitual urge to scorn the myths of savages.

“Things are what they need to be,” the elder said. “Sometimes, men must be bigger than they know, to do what must be done. It is only the world’s rules which try to tell us otherwise. Maui had no care for such rules. Maui did not belong to this world.”

Then the old man stepped down into the mist, and was gone.

Barry Ferguson had long since given up on the prospect of making small talk with the Maori warriors guarding over him. He worked quickly and carefully, resting tools and pipes and valves and bolts and gaskets on the metal wheels and running boards as he went, careful not to let his equipment get too dirty. The rain had eased but the mud would be an issue for days.

Too much weight and not enough torque was the problem. Barry didn’t have the machinery on hand to rebuild the burnt-out gearbox, but he hoped he knew enough about basic physics to get around the pesky mechanics of gravity and friction. It was, he reflected, rather fortunate that those army boys insisted on hauling so much useless junk about the place with them in the lockers at the back of the tractor.

Redistributing the gas lines would be easy enough, but he was not looking forward to stitching all that tent canvas together. He hated sewing.

Lachlan edged forward, finding in the fog a surface of timber beneath his feet, and taut ropes in his hands, stretching out to either side of the narrow swing-bridge hidden in the waterfall’s spray. Lachlan stepped onto the bridge as it swayed slick beneath him, the flax ropes’ smooth weave slippery in his grasp.

He considered what he had established so far which was, he deduced, that the old man knew Frank Ascot—knew him well indeed—and that the elder had either guessed or already knew exactly what the navy deserter had taken from the safety of Auckland’s Bankhouse, and that he was quite pleased with how things were developing. Ascot was a bushman, a British Navy deserter who had fled his vessel for the forests and
kainga
of the Maori, adopting the culture of any tribe willing to take him in. In return for this sanctuary, a pakeha among the Maori might sometimes return to the city streets where he could blend in, do things and go places that the Maori could not; though why anyone would want to live like this, in the cold and the damp and the mud, not a teapot in sight, was quite beyond Lachlan King.

It stood to reason, then, that the tohunga would be Ascot’s ally in the Bankhouse theft, and would be unwilling to give him up. Lachlan’s options were running thin, and demanded another tactic. If the old man wished to play games, then Lachlan could play games too. He had been playing them for a long time.

Yet, despite himself, Lachlan could not help but feel a grudging and somewhat ironic respect for his quarry. Ascot had found a place where he could fit in. A place where he was respected. Lachlan had run too, long ago, but had never found that place where he could simply be, could just
belong
. He may have fled his father’s rod, but Lachlan was a man like any other, made of little more than blood and fog, and was not so difficult to bend with words, be they threats or orders. Frances Ascot was a free man, in ways Lachlan King had never been,
could
never be.

Across the river and its mists the tohunga waited, an unfathomable, secret smile on his lips. “
Haere mai
. Best we don’t keep the rangatira waiting all day.”

The track began to climb steeply up the side of the cliff and they ascended, up and up, as the waterfall came down, the mists embracing them as Papatuanuku would take her powerful children into her arms.

Dusk was settling over the riverbank by the time Barry had everything in place. It was by no means perfect; in fact it was downright rough, but with any luck it ought to work. Maybe not well, but hopefully well enough.

The warriors milled about, keeping a safe distance from “
te pakeha porangi
” —the crazy pakeha—as he had heard some of them mutter. Clambering over discarded metal plates and pipes, he pulled himself into the gunner’s seat, which now hung over the control gears, the driver’s seat tossed aside. The machine-cannons swung behind him on the denuded platform that had once been their hansom. To either side pipes bent upwards past his shoulders from the air-and gas-tanks bolted underneath, thrusting into the mouth of a huge canvas bladder which looked suspiciously like several army-issue field tents all sewn together with thick hemp. Four tent-poles held the bladder’s mouth aloft while its remaining bulk lay spread out across the mud, draped up on the scrubby
manuka
bushes alongside the track.

“Righto,” Barry muttered. “Time to kick it in the guts.”

Thumping the propane pedal, he cranked the ignitor. With a geyser’s hiss, a white flame burst from the overhead pipes, billowing hot air into the bladder’s mouth.

Barry figured that these warriors must have seen Army airships during one of the three attempts that British forces had made to invade the Ngai Tohai stronghold in the eastern North Island, but Barry, on pumping the pedal to coax more heat from the burner, was gambling they would be sceptical that a makeshift balloon would ever lift the tractor high enough to get it free of the mud. Not even the detritus of metal plates and bolts and other junk strewn beside the track could possibly make the critical difference. Surely not.

“Come on, girl,” he urged the extremely unlikely dirigible, “you can do it.”

Others’ scepticism was why Barry Ferguson preferred to work alone. While his wardens japed at his folly, Barry watched the balloon swell and lift. His fingers grazed the lever by his seat as his eyes glanced down at the iron plates he had slipped inside his coat. Another gamble, but they would have to be protection enough if the snipers were still paying close attention.

Because when it happened, it was going to be a very close thing indeed.