Sound (6 page)

“This is a good place,” said Sal, looking around. “Plenty fish. Trees. Water.” She pointed to the green seam of reeds running through the bush down to the beach.

“Let us get this Noah in, hey,” said Bailey. “Before all his mates come to the funeral.”

As they hauled the fish towards the shore, Billhook saw it was still alive. “We should have tied off its tail and towed it dead,” he said. The shark was tired and close to death anyway. It rolled lazily on the beach, twisting the rope around its body, the sand covering its glossy grey skin.

“Must be twelve foot,” said Smidmore. “But look how fat! Nearly as round as the bastard is long.” He whacked an oar against its nose and the fish slumped, stunned. “That smell …”

The stench of the dying shark was terrible. When they cut open its belly, the smell became intolerable. Even Jimmy the Nail turned away, his hand over his mouth in a failed effort to staunch his vomit.

With the gaff, Billhook delved into the shark's stomach and reefed out a young seal, bitten in two, a native's broken spear still sticking out of her greasy pelt.

“What fate brought you west?” Smidmore asked Billhook one night.

“The
Sophia
,” he answered. “I was looking for the ship,” and said no more, for he did not know whose ears were pricked for their mate Captain Kelly.

The sealer William Tucker had washed up on Otakau shores one year before the massacre. Wiremu Heke must have been eleven, a boy, yes, when the Australian whaler Tucker managed to ingratiate himself with Chief Korako and taken a local wife. It was Tucker who one year later led negotiations between the ruddy captain of the
Sophia
and the Chief. Suddenly the Chief suspected Tucker's translation as devious and the deal went awry in the meeting house. Whisperings in the room turned to a rising murmur, then the angry hum of a disturbed hive.

The boy Wiremu remembered Tucker and the day that he was no longer an honorary Otakau. He saw him on the beach screaming, “Captain Kelly! Please! For pity's sake, don't leave me!” as the New South Wales crew and the captain fled to their ship, fighting off the toa, the furious young warriors consigned to battle. Wiremu later saw Tucker hatchetted, and his pieces carried away.

Overnight, the still water shone with the moonlight and the
Sophia
remained at anchor in a dearth of wind to get away, her rigging and ramparts holding men with guns. All night, shots echoed against the sides of the inlet.

At daylight the Australians stormed back through the village armed with guns and crosscut saws. Chief Korako, dead from a bullet through the neck during one of the night's many failed ambushes, was not there to see forty-two of Wiremu's father's boats sawn in half. Even as Kelly's men laboured over the cross saws, covered by guards, their countryman Tucker was being thrown in pieces into an earth oven several hundred metres away.

The crew of the
Sophia
took flaming torches to the end of the village where the warm nor'-easter blew in, and razed the houses. Within an hour scarcely a single dwelling was left standing. Wiremu's father was suddenly smaller, older amidst the screams of the women. He lay on the beach badly injured, his power as master artisan leaching from him, shuddering and bleeding.

Gunpowder won that war, like so many others. Eight days later, fifty warriors washed onto the beaches from the
Sophia
battle. The bodies caught in the brothy corners of the harbour, snagged on trees, bloated in that strange manner of drowned men. Knees bent, legs and arms spread, their bodies plump with water and gases, bullet wounds and cutlass splits marring the faultless etchings on their warrior skins.

No one fished the waters of Aramoana or Whareakeake for a long time. His mother repeated the mantra of tapu waters to Wiremu, weeks later when he was hungry and asked her why they'd not yet harvested the eels.

“He kete kai nga moana katoa.”

All the oceans are a food basket.

“Na reira I te wā ke mate tatou, e tika ana kia hoki atu o tatou Tinana ki a Papatuanuku.”

We are all born of Rangi and Papa, the Sky Father and the Earth Mother. When we die it is right that our bodies return to Papa
.

It was a thin year.

Captain Kelly and his ship were marked. Any ship under his name entering the quiet stretches beyond Aramoana, past the sand spit where the octopus traps lay in shallow waters, did so knowing the grievance, knowing the risk. The Ngāi Otakau knew that Kelly grew fat in New South Wales on the proceeds of his trade, and that he did not feel any pressing need to return.

For the boy, Kelly's blood spilled would have renewed the honour of his broken father but the captain never returned. In late life, his father sat on the marae, watching the young men prepare their waka for this war or that battle. There was anxious talk of the Ngāti Toa coming down from the north after pounamu and power but that was yet to pass. Wiremu's sisters grew into beautiful young women and, with their friends, married or cooked for the tide of sealers and whalers who sailed into their town. Wiremu, the son of a master boatbuilder, he wanted to go to sea and his father knew his hankering.

“You don't say much, do yer?” Samuel Bailey picked at his teeth, threw the twig in the fire and looked curiously at Billhook. Behind Sal, the big dog sighed in its sleep.

Billhook and Samuel Bailey took the boat to the mainland to set fishing nets from the shore. It was early but already the wind had freshened. They rowed towards the rocks, crossing into a windward slop. Bailey stood and steadied himself against the waves. He pointed for the shore and Billhook took his oar. Bailey started flicking directions at Billhook with his fingers, directing Billhook to the place where he wanted to drop the net but Billhook was having none of it. He didn't need navigating. He knew where to go. He worked the boat along a bit until he got to the crevice where water was sucked and spat out again. Closer to where the paperbark trees grew almost to the water. The morning sun turned them a naked-white-man pink. Billhook rowed forward to the north-east, then went astern to the southeast and backed the boat right into the shore. Bailey fiddled with the nets, sorting through the stone anchor and corks.

Their wake arrived after them, swishing into shore. Billhook heard the cawing of the crows and the thump and crack of waves further along the beach. The nets smelt mushroomy as he rowed away, and Bailey played them over the side, the little floats bumping over the gunwales and spilling into the sea.

When he'd thrown over the last float and stone, Bailey looked around and lined up where the island folded into the last saddle of the land, got a bearing on the net's position. Then they rowed the boat back to the shore to wait while the fish meshed.

They found a crescent of stones built facing the sea. Billhook removed a tattered piece of canvas sail that must have been a roof for the shelter, stuffed it into the wall of black basalt, redlichened rocks and brown granite.

“Whalers,” said Bailey, kicking at a glass bottle. “Whalers bloody everywhere.”

Billhook sat on the flat stone in the centre of the lookout and thought how in the winter the wind would be at his back and in the spring the water and skies would be clear and bright, not hazy with smoke and dust like it was now in late summer. When the south-westerly would blow at his back, a man could sit here for weeks watching for whales.

Bailey muttered, “Having a look around,” and Billhook watched his figure wade through the dense shrubs of fading blue fan-flowers and balls of bright pink against the grey-green bush. Waves curled into the rocks and nudged the boat against the rocks. The breeze blew light spumes of spray and arcs of rainbow across the water. He slapped at a stinging fly, saw the massive sand slips on the hills opposite the bay, rolling fields of stark white dunes. The clouds parted to let the sun in. At his feet lay a midden of paua shell. Ahh.

Once he was out of his pants, he tied off the legs to make a bag, crept along wet rocks until he was able to glide out into the sea with a knife between his teeth. It had been weeks since he'd dived for paua, for anything. The cold hit his chest. He struck out for where the lump under the waves made a flat footprint on the surface. Dived down, spilling his hair behind him, found the rock. He could feel the mossy mounds under waving fronds. He knew how to find paua, or muttonfish as the sealers called them. He made his way over the rock, sliding back and forth
over the weed with the surge, levering away the shellfish with his blade against stone and felt the sure suck away from the stone. Then he could see the clean oval shape where the fish had been clamped.

Up, gasp, two deep breaths and back down to that rock, thanking the Mother as he levered more paua away from their home and stuffed his trouser legs full of clicking, oozing meat with the smell of a woman on them. He climbed out of the water, dragging his catch along behind him, blinking the salt from his eyes to see Bailey stumbling down the hill towards him.

Bailey's face looked strange, set and hard. He was scanning for the quickest way to the boat. He was carrying something; an animal. It wriggled under his arm.

“Get the boat. Get it.”

Then the naked, struggling child kicked at him and he almost dropped her.

Billhook did as Samuel Bailey told him. He swam to the boat and rowed it to the rocks, backed it in so that Bailey could climb in, dragging the child after him. The girl was whining and grunting with fear and Bailey put his face close to hers until her running nose nearly touched his. He just growled at her. Nothing else. He growled at her like a dog and she was silent.

“Better get that net up, Billhook.” Bailey looked behind him to the shore. Smoke rose in a thin, vertical line from behind the hill, blowing off with the sea winds.

Billhook hauled up the net, silver sickles of herring and yellow-eyed mullet flashing and writhing in their cotton bonds, into the deck of the boat, pulling the boat away from the rocks.

Lean black men ran down to the shore, shouting. They began throwing spears into the water but their reach would not answer. The boat was too far away and the spears slid into the water.

“A kid, Bailey. Why a kid?” Billhook's voice sounded vague
and thin. He struggled to give it more strength when he spoke again. “What do you need a kid for?”

“Prefer a woman myself,” said Bailey. “But she didn't wanna come.”

Bailey's trousers were bloodied and wet. There were flecks of flesh on his bare feet. Billhook looked at the little girl. She didn't seem to be injured. From under Bailey's arm she stared at Billhook's nakedness with flared eyes. She stared at the inky spirals that the tattooist had carved into his buttocks before he left for New Holland. Her fleshy, hairless cleave and her staring eyes made his tattoos, his very flesh, dirtied and, quite strangely, dishonourable.

Billhook knew when he saw the blood on Bailey's trouser cuffs that he should never have obeyed him. That he should have gone back to the Doubtfuls and left Bailey to the blackfellas and their spears. But too late.

“You done well, Billhook,” said Bailey, as Billhook dumped the anchor and the last of the net into the boat and collected his oars, the spears well out of range now. “I owe you.”

Billhook rowed against the wind once they moved out of the sheltered bay. Bailey sat in front of him, holding the girl. She stared at Billhook, terrified. He tried to say something gentle but his words came out as a grunt and he gave up, taking a bead on the smoke rising from behind the hill to keep his course straight. They moved closer to the island.

Jimmy the Nail met them in the shore of the cove. Billhook threw him the rope. Jimmy whistled low when he saw the child.

“Whatcher got there, Bailey? Dinner? What the hell did yer think yer doing?”

Bailey repeated something of what he'd said to Billhook and picked up the girl, trying to climb over the side and hang on to her at the same time. She shrank away from Jimmy standing in
the water, her arms flailing, her legs pushing against the planks.

“Get one of the Worthies,” said Bailey.

Sal was already coming down the hill, then Dancer followed her, her wild halo of hair bobbing as she walked. They stared at Billhook's tattooed nakedness and then they saw the girl. Dancer stood in the water and became quite still. Sal's face crumpled. She shook her head and wailed, “No, no, no,” and broke into her own language.

Jimmy the Nail cuffed her. “Talk her out Sal, or she'll go over the side.” To Bailey, he said, “Though she'd be better off in the drink than with you, you fucking kiddy crimper.”

The women hauled the girl into the water. Dancer picked her up and piggybacked her to the shore. They stepped out of the water and walked along the beach until they reached the damp corner where the spring came out of the hill.