Kiwi Wars (7 page)

The miracle turned up on two legs. He saw the figure coming, just a silhouette in the sheeting rain, like a dark phantom, and though he prayed it was one of his men, he knew from its build the figure was more powerful than any of his soldiers. It could have been Ta Moko of course, but it was not. It was the fellow who had stood over him while his companions had robbed Jack’s camp. The fellow who had struck him with a bladed weapon.

The man had on a sodden jacket now, no doubt to protect his bare torso against the cold. It remained unbuttoned and looked far too small for the big Maori. The temperature had dropped very low and Jack’s visitor was visibly shivering. Jack noticed the Maori was carrying the Tranter 5-shot revolver he had stolen.

‘Come back to finish me off?’ croaked the captain.

The Maori shook his head irritably. He tossed the Tranter down at Jack’s feet.

‘Came to give you this.’

Jack snatched the weapon up, but the Maori smiled grimly.

‘It’s empty. That’s why I’m giving it back. I can’t seem to get the bullets to fit it. Not the right calibre anyway.’

The revolver was indeed light enough to be out of ammunition. Jack tossed it aside. It made a splash on the muddy ground.

‘You’re not going to kill me?’ It was a matter-of-fact question.

Again, the Maori looked annoyed. ‘Why would I do that now?’

Jack admitted, ‘I don’t know.’

‘I tried to kill you back in the bush, but you have a head as hard as a steel pan.’

This was rather puzzling to the British officer.

‘You didn’t just try to knock me out cold?’

‘No – I tried to kill you. If you could see your wound now, you’d know I did. Your skull is split open. I can see the white bone.’

Jack shuddered at these words. Gingerly he reached up and touched his head with the tips of his fingers. There was indeed a crevice there, beneath the coagulated blood. His scalp had been hacked open with a less than sharp blade. Indeed there was a flap of skin with hair on it, hanging to one side. He tried to replace it, like a divot flung from a lawn by a pony’s hoof, but it fell to one side again. The knowledge of the wound made Jack’s brain swim and he almost swooned away. He felt an ocean swell of nausea roll through his stomach and he might have thrown up at the Maori’s feet if he had not lain back on the ground, with the rain forming a puddle around his supine body.

‘Quite frankly,’ said Jack, miserably, ‘I believe I would prefer it if I had died under the blow.’

The Maori laughed. ‘Is this the British humour?’

‘No, this is the British irony. I don’t think you would understand.’ Jack was still lying on his back, looking up at the sky. One or two stars were beginning to show in the heavens above. The clouds were obviously clearing and letting through their light. ‘I still don’t understand something myself – why was there no second blow? Why not finish me there and then?’

The Maori found a sodden log and sat on it, staring down at Jack.

‘In the old days, I would have done. If you had been a warrior from another tribe I would have caved your head in just like that. But the old ways are gone. We can kill them in battle. But we must – what is that word Bishop Selwyn uses?
Succour.
Yes, we must succour the wounded, not bash their brains in. That’s why I have come back. To give you your pistol.’

In his right hand the Maori had a wooden staff, flattened to a broad blade at one end. He changed this to his left hand so that he could reach inside his coat. He pulled out something wrapped in muslin.

‘I also bring you food and drink. Well, drink you have, from the rain. But here is some food. And I will patch your head for you, when the daylight comes.’

The Maoris, Jack realized, took the teachings of the Church literally. In the heat of battle, of course, a man would go down under such a blow and probably stay down. He would be a fool if he did not, for Jack was in no state to fight. This Maori had decided after he had struck him that the captain was out of it, and therefore entitled to live under these new articles of war preached by the clergy.

‘Can I know your name?’ asked Jack.

‘It is Potaka. And yours?’

‘Crossman. Jack Crossman.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

Potaka stuck out a hand and Jack reached up from his ridiculous lying position and shook it. Then went back to staring at the stars. He had decided he would not move until the morning. If his skull was fractured, as it might be, he knew he still might die. It was better he did not hasten this state of mortality. Limited time was better than no time at all. A man will do much for a few more seconds, even at the end.

‘You are an honourable enemy, Potaka.’

‘I hope so. I try to be. Most of us try to be. There are a few sly ones among us, but I’m sure you find the same.’

Jack thought of Wynter. ‘Indeed.’

Potaka took off his coat and rolled it up, placing it under Jack’s neck.

‘You will be more comfortable that way.’

‘Thank you.’

Potaka nodded at Jack’s empty wrist.

Jack said, ‘In another war.’

‘Ah, my brother has only one leg – also another war. Does it bother you still? My brother’s lost leg still hurts him. He keeps looking for it, in the place where it was chopped off, hoping to find it and tend to it, so the pain will go away. He thinks his enemy ate it.’

‘Ah, the old ghost limb. Not me,’ admitted Jack. ‘I used to feel it still there, but there was no pain.’ Jack paused for a moment, finding a more comfortable position for his head, then added, ‘And nobody would have eaten it, unless they like minced meat.’

‘You have many battle scars on your face, soldier.’

‘Who can tell with you? The tattoos hide everything but your eyes.’

Potaka laughed. ‘Better to get some sleep now.’

‘I think you’re right.’

In fact sleep came very easily.

The following morning Jack woke to the sound of crackling wood. Potaka had lit a fire and was cooking something. After a while he came to Jack with a piece of flat wood and started to spoon a substance out of its shell.

‘Breadfruit,’ explained Potaka. ‘You will like the flavour.’

‘Not bad,’ said Jack. ‘What’s that stick you carry with you all the time? Do you need something to support you?’

‘This?’ Potaka held up the six-foot-long staff. ‘This is a
taiaha,
a fighting stick. But it was this that I hit you with.’ He showed Jack a carved-greenstone bladed club hanging from his waist by a cord. ‘My
patu
.’

‘And don’t I know it,’ said Jack, whose head was still very sore and ached all the way down to the roots of his neck. ‘That stick – our people used to fight with staves once, but that was long ago. As a boy I liked to play single-stick with my brother, but just for fun. I got quite good at whacking him around the legs.’

‘The
taiaha
takes many years to master – it is no ordinary fighting stick. My whole childhood was taken up with learning the art.’

‘Oh,’ replied Jack, feeling he was being taken to task for bragging.

Once he was fed and watered, Potaka washed the wound on his head, which was a painful business, then inspected it.

‘I think the skull is not broken right through, just dented a little,’ muttered the Maori. ‘I am going to put the piece of skin back and tie it down with a strip of cloth. It should take. I have no needle to sew it, so you must keep it still for a few days until it grows back on.’

‘Grafting. We call it grafting.’

The business was soon done with a strip of Jack’s shirt serving as the bandage.

‘Now,’ Potaka said, ‘we must look at the ankle. Do you think it is broken?’

‘No, I think I’ve torn something.’

‘Good. Better than a broken bone. Ankles are terrible things to heal, if they’re broken. Can you stand on it?’

Jack tried but went down like a felled tree. Potaka did nothing to stop him from crashing to the ground. He simply stood there with his hands on hips and said, ‘No, you cannot walk on it.’

Jack muttered, ‘I think I’ve hurt my head again,’ and started to put his hand up to feel the wound, but Potaka arrested it, saying, ‘You just jolted it. It has started bleeding again, but you must leave it alone. I do not want to have to change the dressing yet.’

Jack allowed himself to be ministered to. He felt he was in the hands of some capable female nurse, like Mary Seacole who tended him in the Crimea. Yet the man who tended to his wounds was a heavy-set warrior who could have broken Jack’s back in two halves if he had a mind to. The situation was very strange: the man who had wounded him was the man who now seemed intent on keeping him alive. Jack guessed it was a matter of work pride. On the one hand Potaka had tried to kill him and had failed, but now he had decided to doctor a patient, he was determined Jack would survive. It would be a job well done, to wipe out the stain of the botched killing.

Jack did believe, however, that the Maoris now took Christian ethics very seriously. Whatever their religion before now, they seemed even more fervently Christian than the arriving white settlers. The bishops, who frequently took the side of the Maoris in land disputes, had something to do with that, but there was something else going on too.

‘Do you have a particular god you worshipped, before we came?’ asked Jack later, as they huddled round a campfire together. ‘I’m interested in your beliefs before.’

Potaka gave Jack a hard look. ‘We knew how to give mercy, if that is what you mean.’

‘But what about these old gods of yours? Where did they come from?’

The Maori shrugged. ‘They were born, like you and me. There was Tangaroa, god of the ocean . . .’

Over the next hour Jack was given a whole pantheon, few of which he would remember. Two characters however seemed vastly more important than the rest. Tiki, the divine ancestor of these people, who always sat at the head of a canoe, and Maui, a wonderful trickster god. The powers of the gods were many and various. Some were just small gods, like Rongo-ma-tane, god of the sweet potato. Others had far more exotic positions in the pantheon, such as Hine-nui-te-po, goddess of the night, darkness and death. What was clear to Jack, though, was that the Maori had a complex culture of myth and folklore which belied the simplicity of their everyday lives. An intricate, multi-meshed culture, as tightly connected and webbed as a fishing net.

‘We used to eat long pig, of course,’ finished Potaka, ‘which Jesus would not have liked. So we stopped all that.’

‘For which I am eternally grateful, being quite attached to my thighs and liver.’

Potaka stared, licked and smacked his lips – then openly grinned with malicious pleasure. ‘Just joking.’

‘So, how did you find these great islands?’ asked Jack. ‘I mean, how did you discover them? You have no great sailing ships, like the British. Was it an accident? A fishing canoe blown off-course? Something like that?’

‘There was a man called Kupe,’ Potaka began explaining in a storytelling voice, ‘who lived on an island far away. The name of the island was Raiatea. One day Kupe was out fishing when an octopus stole his bait. He was angry and set out in pursuit of the thief, which led him to these islands. In those days we could not write, so everyone had very good memories. Kupe remembered everything about his voyage, from the colour of the waves, to the direction of the swell, to small islands on the way. I am told by your navigators that Raiatea is 2,500 miles away, but Kupe described how to get to the Land-of-the-Long-White-Cloud by sailing to the left of the setting sun in November.’

Potaka paused for effect, then said, ‘So we came. We brought our dogs and pigs, our taro, sweetbreads, sweet potatoes, and other seeds and plants. We did not mean to bring the rats, but they came with us anyway, as rats always do. When we arrived there were only birds. Many, many birds. There was a big one called a moa, twelve feet high, but we killed all the moas before you came here.’

Jack was impressed. ‘That’s quite a story. How many people in each canoe?’

‘Perhaps a hundred or more. They navigated by the star paths and sea and land birds. There were blind navigators, feelers-of-the-sea we called them, who knew which part of the ocean we were in by its temperature. Some were just nature’s tricks. Did you know if you throw a pig into the water it will always swim towards the nearest land, even when that land is out of sight?’

‘Something to do with the scent of the soil on the wind, I expect. I must remember, next time I am lost at sea and have a pig handy.’

Potaka stiffened and stopped poking the fire with a stick. ‘You are making fun of me.’

‘Only a little. Actually, I have a great admiration for a people who travelled thousands of miles over open ocean, while my own nation were still coast-hugging in far more seaworthy ships.’

‘Your navigators are good now though, with their charts and brass instruments. Captain Cook was such a man.’

‘I have heard of one of yours whose ancestor was Speaker for the 7th Canoe.’

‘He is my cousin,’ said Potaka, proudly. He grinned again. ‘But then, most Maori people are my cousins.’

Following this conversation, Jack was allowed to rest. Potaka showed no signs of leaving him to his fate. The Maori made a camp, collected wood for the fire, cooked Jack’s meal and changed his dressing. Their exchanges were not always as pleasant as their talk about migration. At times the festering anger which many Maoris felt regarding the influx of strangers in their land burst through and Jack was subject to a tirade. Why had the white men come here? They had not been invited. Why did they keep coming? When would it stop? When they had taken all the land there was to be had?