Kiwi Wars (13 page)

A weak winter sun shone on the day after this encounter. Potaka decided they would take a hill trail, which involved crossing chasms on fallen trees and fording wider and faster rivers than Jack had so far encountered. There were one or two rope bridges too, which had his heart fluttering in his chest. Potaka drove them at a mighty pace and once, while they were negotiating a six-inch-wide path on a slope of scree, Jack almost plunged to his death. Only a healthy right hand full of uncut fingernails saved him. He buried the hand into the scree thus arresting his slide down a steep slope to a ledge that went out into nothing but cool clear air. In those few seconds Potaka managed to get fingers on Jack’s collar, eventually hauling him to safety. Potaka berated Jack for his carelessness.

They spent the night in an abandoned hut, only to find themselves in the company of three Maori when they woke.

More questions followed, this time with a satisfactory outcome. Yes, the three men had seen a solitary soldier.

‘He is off his head,’ said a lean Maori with a pot belly and a tattooed skin that was a work of art worthy of wall-space in any London gallery. ‘No one bothers him because he is a witch man, who weaves evil magic in the night. He talks to the moon, even when it is not there.’

King had probably been gabbling at them about his work and would have been regarded as ‘speaking in tongues’ or something like. Madmen, Jack decided, got away with their lives while sane men would have been cut down where they stood. He found that in India, during the mutiny. Officers and soldiers had been discovered wandering, often naked and filthy, talking away to themselves. Even though many of the locals they encountered had been rebels, the madmen continued untouched. In many societies it was considered bad luck to harm a simpleton, a man whose reason had left him. Such a person drew sympathy and pity, rather than hate and hostility.

Jack asked, ‘Where did you see him last?’

He was amazed and delighted to learn that his sergeant was still alive. He honestly had not expected to find King with breath in his body. How had the man managed to feed himself, out in the wilderness? As a hunter he was absolutely useless. Indeed, Jack would not believe that King was still alive until he personally spoke to the man.

‘What have you got to offer?’ came the rejoinder.

Jack had indeed brought some money with him, some of which he distributed amongst the three Maori. They then led him and Potaka along a valley full of hot springs to a rock overhang. There they found a ragged Sergeant King fast asleep by the remains of a fire, his chin sprouting an unwholesome-looking stiff ginger beard. Jack picked up a pinch of the ashes, turning the dust over in his fingers. It was still warm. Jack was quite impressed by the campsite. There was no unpleasant smell of faeces, a shallow bowl in a rock had been filled with water from a nearby stream, and a fire had been lit, and obviously tended with great care. There were bird bones in a neat pile nearby. If King was off his head, he had retained all the habits of good army training. Indeed, here he was cuddling his rifle, ready to shoot any hostile beast or man who woke him.

Potaka’s iron grip closed on the weapon and held it there.

King woke with a start and after a moment tried to wrest the rifle from the Maori, failing. He sat up. His face had a lean, haunted, ravaged look and his clothes hung off his normally square frame. Bloodshot eyes regarded the people around him. Finally they rested on Jack, who was standing half-hidden behind the three Waikato Maori.

‘Oh, hello, sir,’ he croaked. ‘You found me then?’

Jack said, ‘Yes, I’ve found you. You look half-starved, Sergeant.’

King attempted a grin. ‘Half? More like nine-tenths.’

‘You should be dead, if not from Maori spears, from hunger.’

‘Ah, you’re speaking about my ability with a firearm,’ King replied. ‘Well, sir, that was a drawback, I admit. But there’s more than one way to kill a ptarmigan. You see, I’m pretty good at setting animal traps. I’ll wager you didn’t think of that, eh? Used to do it when a boy, out in the countryside. Used nets of willow twigs then, but of course, no willow here, so had to use another springy sort of tree wood. Only caught small birds, unfortunately, but they were better than nothing at all.’

‘King, you amaze me.’

‘I’m glad to do so, sir.’

‘But you’re supposed to be mad, you know.’

King looked genuinely surprised at this. ‘Am I? Who says so?’

‘These three men. It’s why they allowed you to live. It seems it’s unlucky to kill madmen.’

King stared at the three Waikato Maori.

‘These might be they who I tried to recruit, to hold my survey poles. I cut some poles and marked them up for measuring. I was going to use the secant method, you know, sir?’ Clearly his visitors were not going to get away without an explanation, and after a quick sip of water from his rock bowl, King continued. ‘You can calculate distances north or south from a straight surveyed line. Then one corrects the straight line, using set mathematical formulas, to a legitimate curve. The position of latitude can be checked by astronomical observations. Of course, one can always approximate how the curved line should run, but one likes to be as accurate as one can be in the circumstances.’

‘See!’ cried the pot-bellied Maori, dramatically pointing with his
patu
at the sergeant. ‘This is how he spoke with us. These incantations such as the church priests use, but –’ he waved a finger in Jack’s face – ‘these are not Christian words! And there were magic spells and potions. This man is an unholy witch. He does things in the night, making offerings to the stars with his bowls of strange liquid. We have seen his magical instruments. Yes, yes, it is true. I have seen it. I have watched him boil his potions on the fire, then stir those potions with a glass wand which he then holds up to the light to test the strength of his devious sorcery . . .’

King said, ‘Strange liquid? Oh, yes . . .’ He croaked a laugh. ‘My bowl of mercury, which serves as an artificial horizon – I use the reflecting surface to measure the altitude of the stars I need to observe. Yes, and the boiling of liquid? Simply water which I test with my thermometer to check elevation. The lower the water’s boiling point, the higher the altitude. This is not magic, gentlemen, it is
science.
’

‘Arrrggh!
Science!
’ cried another of the Maoris, stepping back. ‘The very word does not sound Christian.’

‘I shall take this man back to the army,’ Jack told the Waikato Maori gravely, ‘where he will be put on trial for witchcraft.’

Potaka snorted. ‘This man is no witch. This man is a
surveyor.
These things you speak of, they are the tools which help him survey the land.’ He looked at Jack. ‘They know what he is. They’re not fools, Captain. Better to have it all out in the open, now.’

There was an uneasy silence amongst the Waikato Maori on hearing these words. There was a tightening of grips on weapons. Despite his explanation, Jack felt he had been betrayed by Potaka, the one Maori present he had trusted. Surveyors were regarded as only slightly less evil than the devil himself, assisting, as they did, the hated European land-grabbers. Jack’s good hand edged towards the revolver, stuck in his belt. The silence was broken by an indignant Sergeant King, who climbed unsteadily to his feet and glared at Potaka.

‘Surveyor?’ he said, contemptuously.
‘Surveyor?
I, sir, am a map-maker.’ King stooped and reached down for his long pad, almost toppling over in the effort. He lifted it up with effort, for the pad was quite a heavy object for a man in his condition. He untied the ribbons that held it closed and opened the leather cover with reverence, then held up the latest map he had drawn for all to see. ‘This is an accurate map of this valley, not a common
survey
chart. The two may not be spoken of in the same breath, if you please.’

Clearly this show of great indignation impressed Potaka, who immediately apologized to King for his error. The other Maoris, too, were affected by King’s rhetoric. They crowded round the coloured map of the valley and pointed out various aspects, such as the contours of the surrounding hills, and the grid lines, and the course of the stream down below the rock hang. One by one they nodded and said, having seen other charts, that this was indeed a proper map. This picture was for finding a path through the wilderness of bush country, not for establishing the best place for farmhouses and farmlands. They asked King how long it took to be trained to make such maps, and whether he thought they were capable of learning such
science.

King told them that of course they had the ability to do such work. He himself had been but a lowly son of a blacksmith in his own country, and his own intellect was not of an astonishing level. All it took was training and practice, he informed them. Any one of those present, probably even the British officer, was capable of learning the skills necessary to make maps, given the time and patience necessary.

Jack gave his sergeant a wry smile and said they needed to be on their way. King was given a little mashed breadfruit – not too much, for his stomach had shrunk – and once he felt ready they were escorted by the Maori to the edge of their territory. There they all shook hands and said it would be good if they met in battle sometime. It would do well to prove that letting an enemy return to his people was not a sign of weakness and that it was not for lack of courage that this act had been performed.

Potaka took Jack and his sergeant back to where his men were still holding Private Wynter captive.

‘Thank God you’ve come, sir,’ said Wynter, as they entered the camp. The private seemed to have made himself completely at home. ‘This lot ’ave bin lickin’ their lips and looking at me like I was dinner.’ Wynter grinned: a grotesque-looking expression these days, with his scarred face and blind milky eye. ‘I feared for my liver.’

Jack thanked Potaka and said he would now take the sergeant back to New Plymouth, to get him hospitalized.

‘Why did you betray us, back there? Personally, I thought the Waikatos were convinced that Sergeant King was a witch?’

‘Because it was not the truth,’ explained Potaka, bluntly. ‘I do not like to walk around with a lie on my back.’

‘We might have got ourselves into a fight – unnecessarily.’

‘So be it,’ said the Maori man with a shrug. ‘But we would have died with the truth on our lips.’

Deviousness was obviously an abhorrent trait to this man and Jack felt he understood a little. But he himself would rather not have tested the Waikato Maori. He and King were in the business of being devious. They were by trade, skulkers and dealers in mendacity. It was only King’s professional pride that had saved them from attack. If King had not puffed himself up with indignation at the idea that he was a common surveyor they might all be lying dead in that valley. It was a sobering thought. One different word, or inference, or emphasis, might have sealed their deaths.

Eight

J
ack had just about enough time to hospitalize Sergeant King, when he learned that there was to be yet another attack on another
pa
. The commanders never seemed to learn. There were seemingly endless assaults on these Maori forts, which came to nothing. Men were being killed on both sides, but the war appeared to be bogged down by real mud and by politics. Both were as messy and sticky as each other. Jack disliked the thought of soldiers’ lives going to waste, simply so that commanders could be seen to be doing something. If it was not constructive, not a positive move to bring about an end, then why perpetrate it?
Pas
were extremely difficult to penetrate, they were expendable to Maori, and these interminable attacks could go on for ever without any advancement of any sort on either side.

Jack’s mind was also on the woman he had met. He found it difficult to dismiss Amiri from his mind. She was athletically lovely in the strong-looking way of many of the Maori women. It was a new experience for him, to be struck by the beauty of a woman other than his wife Jane. He found himself waking in the middle of the night, not with an image of an English rose, but a Maori flame-tree blossom.

It was not a picture he tried to dismiss from his thoughts.

He was in the officers’ mess, enquiring about mail from England, when he saw a man enter the room with a great flourish. The officer wore knee-length highly polished boots, black breeches, a black silk shirt open at the neck, and a forage cap perched on long black locks. On his face was a magnificent bushy moustache. A sabre hung low at his left side. There were thin leather straps crossing over his chest that accentuated its proportions. He was indeed a broad-shouldered fine figure of a man, who moved with all the arrogance, panache and élan of a French cavalry officer. He did not simply speak – he announced. Every sentence was delivered with dramatic effect.

‘Major Von Tempsky,’ boomed the man, hand on sword hilt, bowing smartly to the officers at the bar. ‘At your service, gentlemen. Who among you brave fellows will buy a soldier a drink? I have just come from an encounter with the so-called Maori kingmaker, Wiremu Tamihana. Unfortunately, this eel slipped through my fingers this time, but our future encounter – for there will be one, gentlemen, have no doubt on that score – will be different. He is mine, and mine alone.’

With that the gallant major swept towards the bar, where a number of officers were already reaching for their pockets. There was no doubt Von Tempsky was popular amongst them, but he was a little too colourful for Jack’s grey-grim Scottish Presbyterian upbringing. Jack always distrusted flamboyance, which he knew was stiff and awkward of him, but could do nothing to change. He watched in amusement, as the drinks flowed and the toasts were made, to the Queen, to the American President, to the Forest Rangers, to every regiment represented in the room – but he could not take part.