Motuhara

Chapter One: Before Dawn

Rewa Tua woke in the dark the way other people wake to an alarm — all at once, with the whole night still ahead of her.

She lay still for a moment on the thin mattress under the window, listening. The tin roof of her grandfather's house ticked as it cooled. Out beyond the coconut palms the reef was breathing, that long slow suck-and-crash she had heard every night of her fourteen years, and by the sound of it the swell had swung around to the southeast during the night. Bigger, too. She could hear it in the pause between the breaks.

Good, she thought. Good swell for reading.

She slid out from under the sheet and crossed the room barefoot, avoiding the third board from the wall because it groaned. In the front room her grandfather Hemi slept in his chair with his chin on his chest, the way he did most nights now, because lying flat made his lungs feel like a flooded canoe. His carving knife had slipped out of his hand onto the floor. Rewa picked it up, set it on the table beside a coil of coconut-fibre cord, and stood a second watching his chest rise.

It rose. She let out her breath and went outside.

The air was warm and wet and smelled of frangipani and low-tide coral. Above her, the sky was so crowded with stars that it looked crowded — not the polite scatter of stars people on the mainland talked about in their radio programmes, but a jammed, glittering, layered thing that went all the way down to the horizon on every side. Rewa found her bearings in three heartbeats. That was the first thing Hemi had taught her, before knots, before paddling, before anything.

"You never look for where you are," he had said, when she was six years old and sitting on his knee on the sand. "You look for where the houses are."

The houses. The star compass. Thirty-two of them ringing the horizon, each one a doorway that certain stars rose out of and certain stars set into, always the same, year after year, generation after generation. She turned slowly. There was Tautoru, the three bright stars in a row, already leaning west. There was the Fish-Hook, hanging over the pass in the reef. There, low and reddish, was the star her grandfather called the Old Man, rising out of the house he called Tonga-ma-uru, and if you took the Old Man on your right shoulder and held him there you could sail from Motuhara to the atoll of Rangipō in two nights, in the time when people still did such things.

Nobody did such things anymore. That was the law.

Rewa walked down to the beach where her outrigger lay above the tide line, a slim four-metre hull she had patched so many times it was more patch than hull. She dragged it into the shallows, feeling the warm water climb her shins, and pushed off.

The lagoon at three in the morning was black glass. Her paddle stirred pale sparks in the water — tiny animals lighting up when she disturbed them, thousands of them, so that her wake trailed away behind her like a smeared handful of stars. Phosphorescence. Hemi had a hundred words for what light did in water and Rewa knew them all. She knew the difference between the sparkle you got from a paddle stroke and the deep flat glow that sometimes lay under the surface far out, and she knew about te lapa, the streaks of underwater lightning that flickered along the direction of land, which nobody on the mainland believed in and which she had seen with her own eyes twice.

She paddled for the pass.

Officially, she was allowed to be here. Officially, Chief Tamati Ruha's rule said that no vessel from Motuhara was to pass beyond the outer reef marker except a powered boat, in daylight, with two adults aboard and a radio. Officially, Rewa Tua was inside the lagoon.

Unofficially, she went out through the pass on the last of the ebb, and by the time the reef break was behind her she was in open ocean.

The change was immediate and she loved it the way some people love a song. Inside the lagoon the water was a floor. Out here it was alive, and it lifted her, and it had layers. She stopped paddling and let the outrigger sit, and she closed her eyes.

Count, Hemi said in her head. Don't look. Feel.

The big one came from the southeast, long-backed and unhurried, born from some storm a thousand kilometres away — that was the old swell, the reliable one, the one you could steer by for days at a time even under cloud. Under it, at an angle, a shorter chop from the east, local wind. And under that — she had to hold herself very still for this one — a slow, deep push out of the north. A whisper of a swell. Something enormous had happened a long way up there, days ago, and this was the far end of it arriving.

Three swells. She fixed the angle where they crossed under her hull, opened her eyes, and checked herself against the Fish-Hook. She was within a hand's width of where she thought she was.

"Ha," she said out loud, to nobody.

She fished for an hour with a hand line, drifting, letting the sky wheel over her. She caught nothing. That was the part she didn't like to think about too hard.

Two years ago, at this spot, on this tide, she could have filled the bottom of the outrigger with a dozen good fish before the sky began to grey. Last year it took twice as long. This year she sat with a line in the black water and felt nothing tug at all, and when she finally hauled up she found the hook stripped bare and a single small crab clinging to it, which she flicked off with her thumbnail.

The reef was thinning. Everyone on Motuhara knew it and everyone had a reason for it. Too many nets. The hot water two summers back that had bleached the coral on the north side white as bone. Bad luck. The fish had simply moved and would simply move back.

Hemi said none of those things. Hemi said the ocean was sick in its deep places, and when you have been sick in a deep place, the outside of you shows it last.

She turned for home when the eastern sky went the colour of watered ink. This was the hour she liked least and could not stop herself doing: paddling in along the reef edge past the lagoon mouth, slowing, looking in.

There had been a time — she remembered it, she was not making it up — when this lagoon filled with whales. Every year, in the cool season, the humpbacks came up out of the south to calve in the warm shallow water and Motuhara woke to the sound of them. Spouts going off like distant gunshots. Mothers lying on their sides with a calf tucked under a flipper. Once, when she was seven, a whale had come so close to the wharf that her father had lifted her up and she had looked straight down into an eye the size of a dinner plate, and the eye had looked back.

That was five years and one month before this morning. Her father, Wiremu Tua, had been gone for five years all but a month.

The whales had not come for two seasons. Not one.

Rewa held the outrigger just off the pass and looked into the flat empty water of the lagoon while the sky turned pink, and she did not cry, because she had trained herself out of that, mostly. Then she put her paddle in and went home.

The village was waking. Somebody's rooster was making an idiot of itself behind the store. Old Ngaio was already dragging his net down to the flats and he raised a hand to her without asking where she'd been, which was Ngaio's whole personality in one gesture.

But Aunt Whetu, sweeping the concrete apron in front of the clinic, straightened up and put her hands on her hips.

"Rewa."

"Morning, Aunty."

"That boat's wet."

"It's a boat."

"Don't be smart with me at six in the morning, I haven't got the strength for it." Whetu came down off the concrete. She was not really Rewa's aunt, but on Motuhara that distinction did not survive contact with reality. "You went out the pass."

"I went out the pass."

"Tamati will hear about it."

"Tamati hears about everything. He's still going to sign that ship's paper." Rewa hauled the outrigger up the sand and reached in for her line. "Anyway, if he takes my boat off me I'll build another one. I know how."

Whetu's face did something complicated. On Motuhara there were two kinds of adults: the ones who thought Rewa Tua was a nuisance who was going to drown herself exactly like her father, and the ones who watched her go out through the pass at night and felt something old and unhappy stir in them, a homesickness for a place they had never left.

"Your grandfather's coughing again," Whetu said at last, which was as close to a blessing as Rewa was going to get. "Mere Wai went up before dawn."

Rewa was already running.