Ministry Protocol: Thrilling Tales of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Page 31

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  By the time Lachlan crested the incline, he was sweating like he hadn’t in years. Several hundred feet above the river, here was an alpine lake, a sheet of glass set afire by the dropping sun. The mist glowed like embers in the sun’s dying rays, swirling up from some unseen place where the lake escaped through a hole in the mountainside. Rainbows arced above the valley, sparkling like lost jewels.

  But Lachlan had no time to appreciate the view, as the tohunga’s bodyguards hustled him into the lakeshore village past smoking cooking pits and flax-roofed whare.

  “Remember.” The tohunga winked, glancing over his shoulder. “Remember Maui. Remember that we’re all just fish, snapping at dark things that move in the water and hoping the next thing we bite into isn’t a hook.”

  “Thank you kindly,” Lachlan grimaced. “I needed to be reminded of that.” He had bitten quite enough hooks already for one day.

  They passed the wharenui, a looming structure that Lachlan knew to be the tribe’s meeting house, bedecked in twisting carvings of red-faced warriors thrusting out their piercing black tongues. Lachlan met their fierce paua-shell gazes, convinced for a moment before he entered the adjacent eating house that those eyes were somehow staring back at him.

  Inside, several long low tables stacked with food ran across the room, while people moved about or sat and ate and talked. The smell of hot pork, kumara and rewa bread hit Lachlan, making his mouth water and his head...dizzy? In the aftermath of their climb, he suddenly became aware of how long ago he’d eaten lunch, and how hungry he was.

  But food was just bait on the hook. He was among enemies, he had to remember. Better hungry than dead.

  All eyes were turning his way as the Ngai Tohai realised there was a white man in their midst, the rising hubbub overlaid with a note of confusion: who was this pakeha who walked among them, he led by the tribe’s wise elder, and wearing a cloak befitting a man of mana?

  Lachlan was being led to a table near the top of the room where a warrior wearing his own fine cloak of feathers watched them approach, his jaw set in a hard line. From the moko tattooed in kohl on his face, Lachlan guessed that this was the rangatira, the tribal chief.

  Then his eyes snapped to the man sitting beside the chief, his grey-flecked red hair completely out of place here among the Ngai Tohai. An urge to dive across the table swept through Lachlan but he quashed that desire, remaining stock still. The bushman was handing a piece of polished greenstone large as a man’s forearm and carved in the shape of a fishhook to the rangatira. From it dangled a length of flax rope. Frankie Ascot smirked at Lachlan, the face of a man who knew he was guilty yet untouchable.

  Bait, Lachlan thought again. Don’t be baited. He wouldn’t allow himself to become a fish on a line.

  The tohunga addressed the men at the table in his rolling tongue, gesturing at Lachlan and finally ushering him forward. “Rangatira Kahanui will speak with you now, honoured king,” he smiled, thoroughly enjoying his little joke.

  The warrior-chief glowered at Lachlan, cradling the hook to his chest. “Te Korunga tells me that you are a king of the Pakeha, and were he not tapu I would call him a liar. The kings of our people are warriors, as were yours, in days past. You look to me like neither warrior nor king. You come for this,” he raised the hook, “yet you have no claim to it. Do you even know what it is? What it means to us? Korero mai. Speak.”

  Lachlan swallowed hard, looking from the rangatira to the pounamu hook, to Ascot, and back to the hook. Torchlight shivered across its dark green surface, shadows flickering within its carved whorls. For something so big—something only meant to be an ornament, for how could any man ever throw such a hook or haul anything it might catch?—its point sported a sinister sharpness, its shape elegant and simplistic, rolling like waves. In the world Lachlan knew, a place of airships, telegraphs, and battle-tractors, he had never known a thing of such terrible and unexpected beauty. Suddenly all his arguments seemed fleeting and pointless. He claimed to be chasing a thief, an insidious deceiver who had crept among his own kind and betrayed them for the sake of pleasing his savage masters, yet nothing of such fine craftsmanship could possibly have sprung from the mills and factories of Old Blighty. Nothing so wondrous could belong to the British Empire.

  Frankie Ascot had not stolen the fishhook. The bushman had simply honoured its legacy, in the manner of its maker. Frankie Ascot had stolen it back from those who had stolen it from the Maori.

  “The piece,” Lachlan began, his voice faltering, though whether from the anxiety or the hunger or the sudden flood of self-loathing, he wasn’t certain, “was gifted to the New Zealand Government by the Ngati Hareke people—”

  “Hei Matau a Maui was not Ngati Hareke’s to give!” Kahanui snapped, slamming a fist on the table top. The hook floated, dark and deadly, in his other hand.

  Lachlan imagined that tip lashing out, tearing his throat open in a single fine shred. Whether it was the fear or the sun casting its final rays through the thin gaps in the walls, Lachlan thought he saw the hook shift, as if it pulsed or breathed, and in that moment things became clear, snapping into focus in ways they had not been since he had entered this land of rain and mud and mist.

  In this place the hard edges of the world blurred, where ropes of flax might stretch out and drag down an errant sun that sleeks too swiftly across the sky, where a hook carved of stone and blood and magic might pull forth a fish from the sea so vast it becomes a land all its own. A place where the rules became misty, where a man might be bigger than he ever knew.

  Had the Governor thought they could retrieve the artefact by brute force alone he would have sent constables and militia, but he had not. He had sent Lachlan King and Barry Ferguson, investigators of the peculiar and the inexplicable, because this place defied reason, its people the children of the mist, shadows against the hills, ghosts and giants.

  “Got anything else to say, Guv’nor?” Frankie Ascot jeered. “Or shall we just get on with making an example of you?”

  Lachlan eased his arms out from under the feather cloak and raised them in what may have been a command for silence, or a gesture of surrender. “Rangatira Kahanui,” he intoned, blood pounding in his temples, “in the name of the Queen, I wish nothing but goodwill to you and your iwi,” he nodded at the gathered tribe. “I would be a fool to disbelieve that it is too late for such words, and that it is too late for me. I know your mana is worth more than my meagre life, and that allowing me to live through my transgression of your honour would be insufferable. I come from a long line of knights. I understand honour, even among thieves which, it appears, I must now consider myself, in your eyes at least. For a long time, Hei Matau a Maui was but a few streets away from where I worked, and though I knew its legend never did I take the time to look upon it because I, for one, believe it merely a trinket, however beautiful; a token, a symbol, nothing more. It is like so much in life, these things of beauty which we do not appreciate until they are taken from us. I have come a long way to find this treasure, this taonga you hold. Would that I might hold it, and know what it is for which I shall die?”

  Kahanui snatched the hook away. “It is tapu!”

  Lachlan nodded. “Of course, it is sacred, and precious. That is why you would risk another invasion to keep it out of British hands. But I am an old man, surrounded by your finest warriors. What harm can I possibly do? Surely, you know our tradition of the dying man’s last request?”

  The rangatira flicked a glance at the tohunga, and though Lachlan dared not follow his gaze, he was relieved when Kahanui reluctantly passed him the sleek pounamu.

  It was heavier than he had anticipated, for it came with the weight of expectation, the promise of mortality. Lachlan King felt its weight in his bones, in his aging joints, felt it drag against his tired muscles. He felt it resist him, dare him, just as the old man had dared him, baited him.

  But Doctor Sound had sent very explicit orders that Hei Matau a Maui be
returned to London so that rumours of its mysterious powers could be investigated fully. Lachlan King wasn’t here to philosophise on what it meant to be a thief among thieves, or to cast judgements on his distant masters’ colonial politics. He was a pawn, sent to do their bidding.

  A fish on a hook.

  Yet somehow Lachlan King knew that, right at this moment, holding Hei Matau, he was more than he had ever been. His father had not lived up to his knightly blood. Lachlan would not make the same mistake. He would prove, if only to himself, that he was indeed a king among men; that the sun would shine through him and cast his shadow like a giant upon the mist.

  For Queen and Country, he thought ruefully, in the same instant as he wrapped the rope around his hand, took a deep breath, and whirled the hook over his head.