Witi Ihimaera - Sky Dancer

“Hey, ref!” one of the patrons called. “Foul play!”

“And here I was thinking you were a lady,” Arnie said.

Amid whistles, Arnie recovered. He forced Joe’s arm down to the bar. Closer. Closer. Almost there. He could see the sweat popping on Joe’s forehead as she tried to force his arm back.

“You may be strong for a woman,” Arnie said, “but you’re still just a pussy.”

That’s when Skylark kicked him. Hard.

“What the heck!” Startled, Arnie lost his concentration — and Joe took the advantage. With a loud grunt, she flipped Arnie’s arm down and won the bout. Immediately, there were cheers and the pounding of fists on the bar as the lucky punters jostled for their winnings.

Arnie glared at Skylark. “What did you do that for?”

“Two reasons,” Skylark answered. “The first is that you are a chauvinist pig. The second is —” she showed him her dollars — “I had a lot riding on you to lose, and I wanted to win my bet.”

“Thank you, Skylark, for your vote of confidence.”

“But the real reason is that we needed Joe to win so that she would be okay about helping us.”

“Helping you?” Joe asked, looking at Arnie. “Nobody’s helping anybody until they apologise to my barman.”

That’s when Skylark stepped in. “He’ll apologise,” she said to Joe. “Then you can tell me what’s in the Apocrypha.”

It was as easy as that. Joe’s eyes searched Skylark’s face and then probed into her.

“Apology accepted,” Joe said. She shook Arnie’s hand, and the bar patrons gave good-natured cheers. Then she turned back to Skylark. “You’ll both have to come home with me, which means you’ll have to stay the night. Meantime, you look like you could do with some food. How about some steak and eggs with a side salad. It’s on the house.” She slapped Arnie on the back. “That okay with you, Corporal?”

To be truthful, it was great to get some hot food. Afterwards, Skylark found herself ambushed by some raucous Maori women who rushed her off to the poker machines. From the corner of her eye she saw Arnie heading off with some of the younger blokes for a game of pool. He came over to her:

“Is that okay with you?” he asked.

“Sure,” Skylark nodded, “Go ahead.”

When closing time came, Baldy threw everybody out. Skylark and Arnie waited outside for Joe.

“Shall we follow you in our ute?” Arnie asked when she arrived.

Joe laughed. “Not unless it floats.” She pointed across the sea. Far in the distance, they could just make out the dark shape of an island. Above it, the Southern Cross. “That’s my home,” Joe continued. “Let’s vamoose.” She led the way along the jetty, and soon they were sliding across the dark ocean in Joe’s dinghy, aiming for the pointer star in the Cross’s constellation. The outboard motor churned a phosphorescent wake, put-putting a regular rhythm.

Joe ran the dinghy up a sheltered beach. She led Skylark and Arnie along a path, past a barn to a small house. Skylark was almost dead on her feet.

“Let’s get some shut-eye, shall we?” Joe said. “Leave the talk for the morning.” Her eyes twinkled. “But what’s the sleeping arrangements? I’ve got two spare bedrooms, but if you two are together you could have my double bed —”

Skylark cut her short. “That won’t be necessary, and I hope you don’t need me to elucidate.”

“Oops,” Joe said. “My mistake.”

Arnie blushed a deep and interesting shade of red.

The next morning, the sound of the telephone invaded Skylark’s dreams. It rang and rang, and Joe didn’t answer, so Skylark got out of bed, found the phone in the sitting room, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

It was too late. The caller — Hoki — put the telephone down. Kawanatanga and his cohorts, she knew, must be well on their way by now. They would have stopped over for the night at some cliff-face eyrie near Kaikoura. In the morning, with the whales spouting out to sea, they would have woken, fed and continued their mission. Already they were crossing Cook Strait, skimming the waves, their eyes flaring red with the dawn. Kaa. Kaa.

“How can I alert Skylark to the danger?” Hoki wailed.

Meantime, Skylark wandered into Joe’s empty kitchen. She opened the refrigerator. “Yecch,” she groaned. As she suspected, stock full with rabbit food, bunches of carrots, muscle-building stuff, energy drinks and not a carbohydrate or chocolate bar in sight.

Skylark helped herself to orange juice, looked out the kitchen window and saw Joe returning from the barn. Joe wore a T-shirt and track pants and was wiping her face with a towel. She smiled and waved. “Good morning,” she said. “Feel like breakfast?”

“Yes, thanks. Do you know where Arnie is?”

“Missing him already?” Joe winked. “We’ve been working out together. But he wanted to do some extra crunches and work on his abs, so I left him in the barn. It’s set up as my personal gym.”

Joe began to busy herself in the kitchen, preparing bacon and eggs. “So you’re the one we’ve all been waiting for.”

“I wish people wouldn’t keep saying that,” Skylark said. “When they do it’s like the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey comes booming out of stereo loudspeakers. I don’t know if I am or not.”

“You’d better be!” Joe smiled. “Or maybe you’re an egg a cuckoo has sneaked into the nest? Though I can see that Hoki gave you the claw. Did Birdy give you the feather?”

“This sounds like a shopping list,” Skylark groaned.

“Well,” Joe answered, “let’s see what is here to give you.” She went into the sitting room and opened the glass cabinet. Inside was a box, from which she took out a leather-bound book. “This is the Apocrypha,” she said. Her voice was hushed and awed. “I asked Birdy if I could borrow it because, as you know, all of us were waiting for you to appear, and I’m just new at this game and didn’t know how to prepare for it.”

“New?”

“It was my Auntie Ruth who was really the guardian of the birds in this area. This was her island.”

“That explains it,” Skylark answered. “I was wondering why you were so young and, well, different from Hoki, Bella and Birdy.”

Joe leafed through the Apocrypha. “Let’s see … you’ve got the claw and the feather and now … Ah! Here we are.” She traced some lines with her finger:

And the Lord Tane said unto Te Arikinui Kotuku:

“And the chick shall seek and be given claw, feather and beak, and these shall be given unto her by wise guardians of that time to come that I have earlier spoken of …”

Skylark tried not to sound grumpy. “You mean I’ve come all this way just to pick up a claw, feather and a beak?”

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Joe said, wagging a finger. “A claw is not just a claw. A feather is not just a feather. A beak is not just a beak. You diminish a thing’s mana, its prestige, when you consider it as such. It is connected to other things and, of itself, it represents a larger thing. Take a leaf of a tree, for instance: it represents the tree. Take a scale of a fish: it represents the fish. So too with a claw, feather and beak; they represent the birds that these things come from. But that is not where it stops. The bird represents a colony. It has a history and a place where it has been born, and where it lives and will die. It is connected to all that exists on the earth and in the universe. In the small thing is the genetic imprint of the larger thing. From it can be made a whole bird. You must revere the small things as well as the larger things. You must learn to see not just with your eyes but with your heart and intelligence.”