Kokopu Dreams (14 page)

‘Horseshit,' said Kevin.

Hoheria looked shocked. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘Horseshit,' repeated Kevin. He nodded towards Bojay and the other horses.

‘These guys leave a trail a blind man could follow.' And there was the answer for an ambush.

‘Quickly,' Sean said. ‘Put those bigger logs in the road, just on this side of the corner. Kevin, you and Clayton fight together. Hoheria, you fight with me.' When the logs were in place, he checked everyone's weapons. Two firearms. Sticks. Knives. A tomahawk. The crossbow, good for one shot. He thought of Matapihi and the dog attack near Wellsford. This time the stakes felt a lot higher. Things had a far more deadly edge. He cocked the crossbow and checked the shells in his sawn-off. The motorbikes changed gear two or three kilometres away.

‘We've got the advantage,' he said. ‘Shock the shit out of them with our first attack. Get them when they come off their bikes.' He tried to sound confident, but he certainly wasn't feeling it. He passed the crossbow to Hoheria and made sure his knife was loose in its sheath. The feeling of the weapon sliding between the ribs of the rottie in that early attack flashed through his mind. Focus, he growled at himself. These guys are dangerous.

He could see Kevin, checking his weapons and stamping his feet with fear and impatience. Clayton had Kevin's tomahawk stuck in his belt. He was practising one-handed thrusts and swings with a hefty piece of driftwood. Hoheria was holding the crossbow, a knife in her belt and a solid branch on the ground at her feet. She looked grim, out for some serious revenge.

The roar of the motorbikes grew louder but somehow filtering through was a watery noise behind them. Sean whirled. There in the lake, close to where a stream was discharging, huge bubbles were rising. Hoheria saw them too and her jaw dropped.

The two front riders rounded the corner, hit the branches in the road and crashed with a spectacular shower of sparks and a screaming of metal on tarseal. Kevin ran forward. One rider was struggling to his feet, dazed from the crash, and Kevin knifed him under the ribcage. The other rider lay in the road, not moving. Kevin was just stepping back when the others arrived. They braked hard, swung wide, and one of them rode off the road towards the lake edge. None of the six came off. They each stopped their bikes and were dismounting in a leisurely manner. Sean fired his shotgun. One fell. Hoheria took careful aim at another with the crossbow, sending a steel bolt into his eye and protruding out the back of his skull. She dropped the crossbow and picked up her branch just as the remaining four attacked. Two of them had sawn-offs and one carried a machete.

Sean saw Clayton go down from a shotgun blast. Kevin shot their attacker before taking a machete cut in the arm. Suddenly Sean's sawn-off was knocked out of his hands and a tall wiry figure was all over him. The guy was punching, headbutting and biting. He was trying to stick Sean with a mean-looking knife that flashed in and out of his vision. It scored his ribs and sliced into an ear when he dodged a thrust to his good eye.

‘I've been waiting for this!' hissed a familiar voice. His attacker stepped back and glared crazily at him. ‘You can pay for everything now!'

Sean didn't even get time to draw his knife before Colin was on him again, stabbing and headbutting. Sean tried to pin Colin's arms, but had to let go when he felt teeth sink into his neck. A blow on the nose blinded him. Tears in his eye and knees like jelly, he grabbed at Colin. Locked together, the pair staggered across the grass verge. Sean thrust Colin away and tried to draw his knife. He could hear a shotgun blasting as he dodged and fended. Colin slashed Sean across the forehead. Blood ran into his eye. He heard a wild laugh. He grabbed for Colin again and pulled him close. Sean was losing the fight to keep off Colin's teeth and his stabbing blade, when they overbalanced and toppled into the water.

If Colin was unstoppable on land, he was a nightmare in the water. He twisted and writhed as they sank and somehow managed to get his hands around Sean's neck. Sean struggled for all he was worth, but Colin's grip tightened and he started to black out.

Then ‘Shut your eye!' came a shocking compulsion. Something like a huge and muscular eel brushed up against him and the hands vanished from around his neck.

‘Hold your breath! Swim up!' Something pushed him from beneath and next thing his head was breaking the surface and he was gulping air.

He trod water, a few metres from the bank. What happened? A body floated to the surface next to him. A body without a head. Blood spread outwards in a widening crimson pool. Aghast, Sean flailed and splashed out of the water. He collapsed on the bank, where he sobbed and heaved up a pint or two of lake water.

He was still lying there when he heard Hoheria's wail of naked anguish. He pushed himself onto his hands and knees and looked across the grass. There were bodies everywhere, torn and bloodied. Hoheria held Clayton in her arms. Her cry echoed across the lake. Kevin stood beside her holding his arm, staring at Sean and the body in the lake.

Kevin helped Sean to his feet, gasping with pain at the effort. He fell back clutching himself, a growing stain in the front of his swanny.

‘How bad is that?' Sean said, pointing to Kevin's chest.

‘Don't know,' he said, wincing as he lifted the front of his swanny, revealing only a blood-soaked and slashed shirt. ‘I think I'm okay anyway. You'd better see to Hoheria. They got Clayton.'

A shotgun blast in the chest had killed Clayton instantly. Hoheria cradled her man's head, her tears falling on his face, her cries sounding in the hills. Sean didn't know what to do. He approached her with the words that carried a universe of meaning but changed nothing.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. The words left him feeling completely powerless. They seemed feeble, inadequate. Hoheria looked up and her tear-streaked face broke Sean's heart.

‘He was so beautiful,' she said. ‘Why did it have to be him? Why not me?'

Sean moved without thinking, put his arms around her, stroked her hair. Tears sprang from his good eye. His grief felt as old as the lake and just as deep. He and Hoheria, Clayton between them, clasped each other, rocking and weeping.

Eventually Sean moved, looking up as if he'd been dreaming and was seeing his surroundings for the first time. Hoheria still clung to him and gently he disengaged her arms. Stiff and sore from what felt like a million cuts and bruises, he turned to where he heard a branch being broken. Kevin had managed to light a fire and was poking sticks under the billy, one-handed. His other arm hung useless at his side. He saw Sean looking, and nodded towards Colin's headless corpse, bobbing in the shallows.

‘What happened to him?' he asked.

Sean thought for a few seconds. The truth would have to do.

‘A taniwha bit his head off.' Kevin looked disbelieving. ‘Sure.'

Sean looked again at the lake. He thought of Frank and Kurangaituku.

‘No shit,' he said. ‘Remember the dream I told you about? Remember Cally's taniwha?' Sean watched Kevin trying to get his head around a story and a painting turning real. He could see the young man wanted to believe.

‘Neither of us were kidding,' he said. ‘That taniwha's real. His name's Tinirau. A lot of people know about him too.' He pulled the manaia from beneath his swanny and showed it to Kevin. ‘That's who this is. He's looking after us.'

15

SEAN HARDLY KNEW where to start, until he took a closer look at Kevin. The young man had a machete slash in his arm but more worrying a stab wound in the chest. Sean suspected a lung had been damaged. Kevin winced every time he breathed. Hoheria bathed the wound with hot water, and applied some of the antiseptic cream they found in a medical kit carried in one of the motorcycle panniers.

‘I'm worried about him,' Sean said to Hoheria when they were out of earshot. ‘He needs more than we can give him.'

‘For sure,' she said, Clayton in her eyes, but Kevin's troubles in her voice. ‘He needs complete rest. We have to find somewhere, and soon.'

They made Kevin as comfortable as they could, a cup of tea and a blanket by the fire. After they bandaged his wounds Sean insisted he remain still.

‘You stay there, cuz, you've done enough. We're lucky to be alive.'

Sean and Hoheria gathered rocks in the last of the fading light and built a cairn for Clayton, high on the bank overlooking the lake and planted about with heather and yarrow. They were very wary about approaching the lake edge for water.

‘It isn't much but as long as I'm alive you'll be remembered,' Hoheria said. The tears streaked her face and splashed on the stones. Sean was weeping too as she turned to him.

‘Excuse me if I sit here with Clayton for the rest of the night. You'd better look after Kevin anyway.' She stopped crying and Sean watched her wrap herself in what was left of her friend before turning her gaze back on the people left alive.

How did she do it? She looked across to Kevin, propped against his saddle and trying to drink a cup of tea. ‘He's going to need all the help he can get.'

Sean sat with him for most of that night watching his young friend get steadily worse. By first light Kevin was having a lot of trouble breathing. He barely had the strength to spit out the blood that collected in his mouth while he wheezed and rattled and winced with pain. As the sun rose, Sean and Hoheria hoisted him onto his horse and rode on either side, steadying him as he swayed.

They took all morning to make their way across slips on a narrow winding road down to the Rakaia River. The old concrete bridge was still standing, the tarseal deck lifting above the swirling torrent far below. For the next two nights they camped beside dried-up riverbeds eating wild turkey and self-seeded potatoes, taking turns trying to get food and drink into Kevin. The young man ate little. Sean could see he was running on the strength of his youth and a sort of residual fitness. It was only a matter of time before infection and illness really got a grip on him. Hoheria fussed around him, making sure his wound was clean and he was warm during the nights that were already growing colder.

‘Try this,' she'd say, holding out a spoonful of food. ‘If you can't do it for yourself then eat it for me.' Kevin would make a huge effort. He'd focus on Hoheria and grin, he'd even try to laugh but the mirth quickly degenerated into a coughing fit and a spray of pink-tinged froth. By the time they got to Mayfield, infection and delirium were taking hold.

A nasty surprise met them at Mayfield. Six large and leaping dogs attacked, Dobermann crosses and something that looked like a Dalmatian with a shark's head. Sean shot three of the beasts while Hoheria buried her hatchet in the skull of a fourth. The other two fled when a woman appeared outside a roadside building, discharged a shotgun into the air and yelled ‘Fuck off!' in a voice that made Sean think of a blowtorch blistering paint.

The woman watched the dogs racing like greyhounds through the thigh-high thistles growing out of the highway. She turned to the three friends. Sean and Hoheria were struggling to hold Kevin in the saddle, when suddenly he rolled his eyes up in his head and slumped sideways, every muscle peanut butter and all his awareness flown off like escaped birds.

‘You can't come in here,' the woman said, swinging the shotgun around so that Sean was staring down black barrels the length of a room away. ‘Last people that stopped left the flu. Killed two of us. Won't happen again.' She peered at Kevin. ‘What's the matter with him?'

‘Knife wound,' said Sean. ‘And if we can't stay here where can we go?' He watched the woman looking at Kevin. She was about the right age to be his mother. Sean wondered what her story was.

‘Not a safe place between here and Geraldine,' she said. ‘That flu took a lot of people. You can't stop anywhere. You could carry on to the coast, or you could try going inland, Burkes Pass, the Mackenzie Country.' Her voice trailed off, her face suddenly showing hopelessness, like she couldn't be bothered feeling anything else. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘Good luck wherever you're going.'

They stood silently looking at each other. The woman lowered her shotgun. Sean saw her eyes fill with tears, and he felt like crying himself till he looked across at Hoheria and saw a steely determination focused not only on the woman but on him too. Hoheria spoke so quietly they had to strain to hear.

‘Thanks for your help with the dogs. We'll be right anyway, we'll find somewhere.' With a brief nod to Sean who had to move smartly to keep up, she slapped Kevin's horse forward, holding him in the saddle with both hands and gripping her own horse with her knees.

A kilometre down the road, both she and Sean struggling to hold Kevin upright, she spoke again.

‘Dances With Wolves
. We need to make a travois.'

Sean remembered a triangular frame, loaded up with gear and pulled behind a horse. He nodded, and started looking around. It was nearly five kilometres before they found a deserted barn that hadn't been picked clean of everything useful. By the time they started lashing willow poles together, Kevin had regained and lost consciousness several times, and Sean's worry about his young friend had grown almost to panic proportions.

Hoheria reassured him. ‘We lost Clayton. We're not going to lose Kevin too.' Her tone made him sit up on Bojay and take a deep breath. ‘I mean it. I've lost everyone else and a big piece of me too. I'm not going to take it any more.'

Sean looked at her. She seemed impossibly young. In her face was a frailty and delicacy that made him think of his daughter Rewa telling him of words that described the moon, like secret and glowing, while she did her homework at the kitchen table and he made a pot of tea.

They finished the travois and tied it between Bojay and Hoheria's horse, with Sofa on a long rope behind. The horse was agitated at the sight of Kevin while they bumped and scraped down the road, the young man at least comfortable on a rapidly woven net of baling twine. That night they camped by a stream. The next day they came to Geraldine, hoping for a busy market and people who might be able to help them. But the place was deserted. Empty stalls sat under bright awnings on the footpath in the centre of town. Everything was tidy and the market didn't look abandoned, it just looked like nobody had turned up.

‘Somebody'll get the sack for this,' Sean joked, trying to dispel a cloud of despair brought on by the bare trestles and deserted street. He could see that the sight had hit Hoheria like a goods train. But she pulled herself together quickly enough, dismounting and giving Kevin a drink from a water bottle. Hamu sniffed and piddled.

‘I think we should try the coast,' she said. ‘Easier country, not so cold at night.'

But the Maeroero, it must have been them, had other ideas. Just outside town Hoheria and Sean found branches laid right across the road and an unmistakable arrow pointing to Fairlie. They looked at each other.

‘I sure don't feel like arguing with those little buggers,' Sean said shaking his head. He hoped the sign meant some sort of assistance, but he was afraid of more laughter, or worse. Hoheria looked puzzled so Sean told her about the Maeroero.

‘I don't know what they're capable of,' he said. ‘For a start they caused the Fever.' Hoheria didn't blink.

‘Then we'd better do what we're told,' she said.

They turned right and followed the road through country that got steadily steeper. Boxthorn hedges and weedy pasture, with the usual flattened fences, gave way to patches of native forest in the gullies. Here and there an ancient gum tree with a mottled trunk and peeling bark stood on a ridge amidst a litter of fallen branches.

Sean first heard it when they rode through a cutting. They travelled another two kilometres with the noise getting louder and clearer, until they stood at the bottom of a drive lined with stone statues like Tolkein's Púkel-men. Somebody was playing ‘Down By The Riverside' on a trombone.

‘Up there,' Sean said to Hoheria, and they wheeled, following the trombone notes between the statues and the bush that thickened as they climbed. The music grew louder till they came around a corner and there in the middle of the track, legs spread and head thrown back, was the trombonist himself. He wore a kilt, a black bush singlet and a sporran made from a bull's scrotum. His feet were bare, his brown hair unruly and his beard reached his waist.

‘So it's you,' he said. ‘Follow me.' He turned and walked away from them up the drive, the trombone in one hand and his kilt swishing as he stepped briskly forward. Sean and Hoheria stood wide-eyed and motionless, Kevin lay unconscious on the travois between them.

Sean was miles away. The unusual musician, the native trees and winding track had wafted him away to the last annual Wekaweka Trolley Derby, when members of the local hippie tribes had hurled themselves drunk, stoned and generally hilarious, down three kilometres of steep, winding and rain-soaked south Hokianga clay road. Snail, who came second, wore leather shorts, a tattered parka and a carved wooden helmet adorned with gigantic curving cow horns. He'd made a Flintstones wooden motorbike with no steering so that at every bend people had to pull him out of blackberry clumps and the swampy headwaters of streams.

Hoheria was the first to recover. Sean dragged himself back into the present when she waved her hand in front of his face and called, ‘Hello!'

‘What does he mean, "So it's you"?' Hoheria was saying.

Sean glanced down at Kevin and across at her. ‘Don't know,' he said. ‘Guess we'll find out.'

They rode on through bush and bird sound. Their guide gave a skip, and there around a corner stood the most unusual dwelling either had ever seen. It was two-storeyed, maybe three. It had turrets and gables, added on like a Lego hallucination. Part of the roof was corrugated iron, some of it was shingled and some was thatched. One weatherboard wall was visible and they could see one wall covered with what looked like old printing plates, layered like fish scales. A dragon had been painted on them, bedecked with jewels, its fiery breath wrapped around an open door. A car door with the window wound down had been worked into the dragon's armpit and several stone statues stood on the wooden verandah. Some were like the Púkel-men that Sean had seen down the drive. Two of them were Maeroero.

Sean and Hoheria dismounted and were lifting Kevin between them, his skin burning and his head lolling, when they were joined by a woman, her flaxen hair in a long plait, and a young girl with a pixie face clutching her skirt.

‘Hi,' she said, pulling Kevin's arm across her shoulder, ‘I'm Marianne. That's Roger. The bed's all ready.'

They laid Kevin in clean fresh sheets. Sean stood aside while the two women undressed the young man. They helped him sit upright while he drank a frothy green concoction that smelled of hay and wildflowers. Kevin was asleep in seconds and didn't stir when they cleaned his wound and applied a poultice.

Marianne turned to Sean. ‘I think we were in time. We'll know by tomorrow morning.' He looked at Hoheria, making herself comfortable in an armchair by the bed. ‘Go on,' Marianne said. ‘Nothing for you to do here. And you need some cleaning-up yourself from the look of your clothes.' Sean glanced down at himself. His swanny was slashed and blood-spattered. He could feel the cuts from Colin's knife when he breathed, little splashes of pain as his chest rose and fell.

‘Unless you want to get into bed now, we can patch you up in the kitchen and tell you what's been happening here,' Marianne said, straightening from pulling the bedspread around Kevin.

‘Kitchen's fine. Thanks.'

‘Roger's been dreaming about you,' she said. ‘Riding south to meet somebody.'

In the kitchen there were cups of limeflower tea and manuka honey. Sean winced and gasped while Marianne washed his wounds with a clear liquid. The same mixture calmed him considerably when Roger poured him a belt and toasted timely meetings.

‘Glad you're here,' he said. ‘We've been waiting for three weeks.' Sean looked at him. He wondered what had been in the dreams. What had the Maeroero to do with them? He couldn't think of anything to say so he raised an eyebrow. The one under his eyepatch. Roger continued.

‘You have to go on and leave your friends here. That's one thing I understood from the Maeroero. They're really looking forward to spending some time with you.'

Sean felt a stab of fear. He suspected the little creatures meant him no serious harm, but he was alarmed at the prospect of their mischief.

‘Stay for a week and then you'd better get moving,' Roger said. ‘Your friends'll be safe here. They can catch up later.' Sean was still digesting this when Marianne spoke.

‘In case you're wondering, the dragon's a taniwha from Lake Tekapo. Lots of them live there. He didn't mind about the flames either. He just laughed.'

Sean had a memory of something large, slithery and incredibly muscular. He tried to picture Cally's painted taniwha head on it, alive with teeth and jewellery. Quickly he put the image out of his mind.

‘They used to be really annoyed at people taking water for the dams. The Maeroero are still upset.' Sean looked puzzled. ‘They come around all the time now.'

‘We've been learning to talk with them,' Roger said. He made a noise like a tin shed collapsing. ‘Just saying gidday wrecks my throat. They like the trombone though. Pity I can't play it better.'