The Wind City (34 page)

He had never known what love was until the first time he held a taiaha.

He’d hefted it in his hand, felt its weight, felt the intent of it; in that moment he knew everything it was, in awe, and was known in return.

The first time he held a taiaha, he fell into the ancient forms, the quick-stepped parry and dance of it, and he performed every step perfectly, every single motion. Beyond perfectly. He was the taiaha and it was him, an extension of his limbs, his hand curved sure and sweet around it as he spun and stabbed and
sung
. It was a singing it was a weaving, it was dance, it was fight, it was everything, it was bloody and brutal and cleanly, elegantly perfect.

He practiced, even though he had no need to.

He found that he could dance with a patu too; he knew the motions of it, the swing and snap, he could crack bones clean as anything then reverse it to slash a delicate line in the flesh. He was deadly with a patu and deadlier with a mere and deadly with a knife and always, always with a taiaha, but, really, he was deadly with anything. He was a warrior born. He knew it deep down, in the way that trees know to grow towards the sky and children know to shout.

He fought, for the joy of it, for blood spilled onto the earth, for fame within his hapū;
Ariki
they called him, half-mocking as all call-names were, but there was truth in it, there was respect raw and bloody and that was just how he liked it. When everything narrowed down to him and an opponent and the weight of a weapon in his hand – that was the most beautiful thing in the world, that was truth, that was
living
.

He could never dance like that again. Not properly. Not truly. Never again make the music of a weapon moving through air and his body moving in perfect time with it. It was lost forever, like his hapū, like his everything.

Ariki clenched his ruined hands, and sang. Knelt there drenched with blood, and wordless sung a song of sorrow. Wove it round with karakia and all the word-magic he knew. Wove it strong.

He sung and sung and sung, ululating and wild. It was a mournful song, that one. It was a lament.

It was a summons.

This was one more insult than he could stand. A warrior had his pride, and this went beyond pride, even, into the ancient codes and cycles of revenge. So he sung. And he summoned. And it worked.

It shouldn’t have, but it did.

…Pay attention. From here on things get a little complicated.

See, nothing is one thing only, cities most of all. They’re made of people, and people are made of contradictions, beautiful ugly contradictions clashing and blending and blurring. So cities are made of contradictions as well. They’re a mess of noise, laughing and talking and yelling and music and the subtler music made of the movements of cars. (And buses and bicycles and trains, and where people go, and when. There is rhythm to all these things.) And sometimes, rarely, most often in the early mornings, there are those small moments of perfect silence, when there is
no one
there but you. No one in the world. Cities are kind and they are cruel, they are perfectly filthy and gloriously drab; they force many, many people together, and so they are made of stories, and they are the things of which stories are made.

Wellington plays at being the capital, but everyone knows that that’s Auckland, really, the super-city to the north, sprawling comfortably across its land, home to so many, the beating heart of the populace. Wellington is made of hills and sharp edges and steep places; it’s made of steps and sweet-spicy scents and brightly coloured houses perched on the hillsides. It’s the capital of art, maybe, the capital of creativity, of crafted things, of theatre, of song. But most of all, more than anything else, it is the capital of wind.

Wind is breath is spirit.

Singing is a raw expression of that – it’s the most direct form of music, it’s breathing your soul straight into the notes.

The wind caught the warrior’s song, and carried it to those of his people who were waiting, still, forever waiting these days, huddled into hollows and forest-scraps and wherever they could find, and they heard the summons, and they some of them answered:
Yes
.

And they left their mist and mountains and shreds of safety, to come when they were called.

And mistfae walked the streets of the wind city.

The burning of the Hikurangi was taken in many different ways. Some thought it was the beginning of a war. Others took it as a sign that the city had at last become too dangerous to live in. However, its main effect was that atua activity became more prominent and noticeable, rather than less.

Patupaiarehe walked the streets of Wellington. Some marvelled at its wonders, and some detested it for the same things – the bright of the sky and the smell of the air and the
people
, there were so, so many people and the patupaiarehe would have been overwhelmed were it not for Ariki, telling them of outrages the humans had done, calling them to fight.

The tipua in the Bucket Fountain brooded, chin on her hands and rainbows in her hair. The buckets, blue and yellow and red, slowly tipped, pouring water into each other, some of it spilling onto the street. “What do radios even have to do with anything,” she said, too quiet to hear, and then louder, much louder, she called her friends to arms.

In the south, in the mountains, a star who had the power to cure blindness fell where there was no one to see him.

In some city, in some town – any city, any town – a woman sat at her table. Her eyes were on the rubbish bin in the kitchen. The baby had come early, too early, a sad little thing dead before it had any chance of living. She wrapped it in plastic bags and put it in the bin and cried and she couldn’t tell anyone, she
couldn’t
. She choked on the words and choked on her misery. But that night she could’ve sworn she woke up with a child’s tiny fingers clutching at her throat. So now she sat at her table, and she stared, and as she watched the rubbish bin rattled, a little, as though something inside it was angry.

A man with clenched fists and an angry heart was playing rugby on a field that could be any field – squelch of mud beneath the grass, goalposts against the grey sky. His friends jeered at him when he stopped, stood alertly as though listening to something. He went by the name of Tū. He, at least, knew there was no war. Not yet, at least. Not yet.

A train spirit hid his face behind a newspaper, his body made of shiny glass like the blackness of a tunnel, reflective. Spirits of transportation had a lot of power because of all the people that used them and that prayed without even knowing:
five minutes earlier, oh god please don’t let me be late, I have a meeting, please let it not be raining, please let him be out when I come back I can’t take any more of this
–

And others, countless others, most too small to see – if you couldn’t count the grains of sand on the beach or the stars in the sky, you couldn’t count these atua either. Very much like sand and stars; as small, and as giant.

And a taniwha walked her streets with a mist warrior by her side, and a scholar learned all he could, and the ghost of what had once been a mighty trickster was torn by the winds, and a man yet to be broken walked – strutted, swaggered – towards the end.

12

It was pretty easy to find him, easier than Tony had expected. She just followed the smell of burning.

Hinewai stalked beside her, leggy and intent, her hands making odd motions; it was raining, raining around Tony and Hinewai particularly, like a curtain between them and the rest of the world, hiding them from view. They found Saint leaning against a wall in the shadows beside the skateboard ramp in Waitangi Park, breathing out a thin plume of smoke; he heard them approaching and turned to look, and stubbed the cigarette out under his heel, his eyes fixing on Tony. She could only assume that she looked the bigger threat to him, all hulking muscle and spikes and teeth – which was odd, considering how terrified he’d seemed of patupaiarehe, before.

In all fairness, Hinewai
was
pretty terrifying, but right now there was no one Tony would rather have by her side than her. She was terrifying in useful ways. The trick was just in finding them.

Tony had to be like that too, now, just for now: had to be cruel, had to be strong. This was no place for the cheerful girl who just wanted to make people happy. So she let herself feel all the hurt and hate that had been building up these last few days as people she loved died – in
her
territory, on
her
watch – let it build up and boil inside her, and moved steadily onward. Her tail lashed at the night air and her tongue flickered out to taste it. She reared back so she stood taller than he did and bared her teeth in threat and he took an involuntary step back, for all his swagger and suavity he was
scared
of her.

Good. He should be.

She pounced at him and he dived aside and panted, “As dragons go you’re rather a bad one – are you even trying?” and flicked his wrists and sent fire at her.

She recoiled instinctively because she hated fire a lot more in this form. She was of ocean. Water and fire didn’t mix.

Now
there
was an idea.

She lashed out lightning-quick with a claw and he cursed, distracted into glancing down at where she’d drawn blood, and in that instant she swung her tail and swept his legs out from under him. He landed and she flowed smoothly past him, over a sandy path and onto a wooden boardwalk lined with tussock, heading for the water.

“I mean, come on – you don’t even have
wings
,” he shouted after her, and then, as expected, he leapt to his feet and followed.

“What are you doing?” Hinewai said, running beside her.

“What are
you
doing? I thought you’d have tried to dismember him by now or something.”

Hinewai shook her head. “This is your fight, not mine,” she said. “I’m lending aid as I promised, but I won’t intervene unless you seem in danger of losing, which won’t happen. And thus.” She shrugged. “It’s better not to kill people than it is to kill them. You taught me that.”

“Well, not in this case,” Tony said, her voice a growl. “I’m going to drown the bastard and put an end to this,” fierce with determination and trying not to think about it too hard. She could do this. She was strong.

She chanted that inside her head as they ran, to keep herself focused, to keep herself from quailing at these extreme measures:
I’m strong
, she chanted to herself as she reached the waterfront and turned to face him,
I’m strong, I’m strong
. He grinned all cocky and made some quip or other and punched out flame, which hit her and burned at her flesh, but it didn’t matter because she was
ancient
, she was a child of Tangaroa. And he had angered her.

She called to the ocean, and it came. A great salty wave surged up behind her, towering, and then crashed down, knocking both of them off their feet and flooding across the asphalt.

Tony moved through the floodwaters easily, half swim, half undulating walk, and hooked the flailing spluttering man with one claw. She let the wave, retreating, tug them over the wall and into the cold sea.

He waved his arms around madly, and then, showing surprising presence of mind, started boiling the water so it hissed and bubbled around them. Which was alarming, but it stopped after she’d held him under for a while, one claw resting against his head to keep it down. It was easy; he was heavy in his soaked coat, and not strong enough to pull free even when he wasn’t half-drowned. The water was shallow here, but water didn’t need to be deep for this sort of work.

His frantic thrashing started to slow. Then it stopped.

Good. She was a child of Tangaroa, she was a guardian, she –

What was she
doing
?

Dismayed, Tony pulled him to the surface and tilted his head so he could breathe. She coiled herself around him anxiously, and sagged in relief when he started coughing.

Weak
, said some part of her, but it wasn’t true. She was strong, and she always had been; she was the kind of strong that came with being gentle, being kind even when people didn’t deserve it because if she wasn’t kind to them then who would be?