There's a man walking in the dark, and he thinks he's alone.
He isn't. But he thinks he is, and that's most of the story right there. A man who spent his whole life thinking he was the only one out on the road, when the road was full the entire time. Full of them. Shoulder to shoulder, going his way. He just couldn't see in the dark yet. That comes later. That's what the walking is for.
It's half past midnight and his legs are gone. Not gone like tired. Gone like jelly, gone like the tide took the sand out from under them and left him standing on nothing, which is a feeling he knows better than most. Sixty kilometres two nights ago. Seven the night before. His feet are two raw things at the ends of him and he keeps going anyway, because stopping is where the other thing lives, the thing across the water. He learned it the hard way. The only way he ever learns anything. You don't stop for the wave. You walk through it. Boots on. One foot. Then the one after that.
The road is just a road. Gold Coast bitumen, streetlight, the hiss of a sprinkler on someone's lawn. But if you walk far enough into the dark, and you're the right kind of broken, the road stops being a road and becomes the thing underneath the road, which is older, and longer, and runs all the way down the spine of two islands to a place called Bluff, where the land finally gives up and hands you to the sea.
Motupōhue, the old people called it. He doesn't know that yet either. He's still learning his own words, one at a time, like a boy.
He walks. And the first of them comes up out of the dark beside him.
He knows the shape before he knows the man. Big through the shoulders, still, the way the men were where he came from, the way he's not sure men are anymore. Hands like tools. And Steve says it without stopping, because you don't stop.
"Grandad."
"Boy," says Oswald Te Āhuru Huntley, and keeps pace, easy, like he's got all the time there is, which he has, because he's been dead since 1998 and the dead are never in a hurry.
They walk a while. That's a thing about the men in Steve's family. They can walk a long way saying nothing and have it mean more than talk. The grandad smells of salt and old tobacco and the cold clean bottom of the sea.
"You dug me a good hole," the grandad says, finally.
And Steve's face does the thing it does now, the thing it never used to do, where the water just comes, no shame in it, walking and crying at the same time like the two were always meant to go together. Because he remembers. Fifty-litre keg of beer and the shovel and the ground at Waikawa Bay, and he was so thin then, so hollowed right out from the crack that his own uncles called him Dingo. Hey Dingo, give someone else a turn. And he said no. No. I'll dig it. Weak as a kitten, arms like string, and he would not give up the shovel. Dug it deep so Nan Doreen could go on top when her time came, keep the two of them together in the dark. Dug it and cried and wouldn't stop.
"I couldn't lift the dirt out at the end," Steve says. "It was that deep."
"I know," says the grandad. "I was watching. You think a man misses his own grave being dug? I saw the whole thing. I saw you let the others in only when your body gave out and not one second before." He looks at his grandson sideways. "That's the strongest I ever saw you, boy. Half dead and won't give up the shovel. You remember that next time you tell yourself you're weak."
Te Āhuru. The name means safe haven. Safe harbour. A place the sea can't reach you. He was named for a chief and he lived up to it. He took two great white sharks with a hand harpoon in his time. A six-metre and a four-metre. On his own, out of a little dinghy, one man and a spear against the biggest thing that eats men, and he came home sitting on the both of them. Steve carries that name down the line the way you carry a lit thing through the wind. Cupped. Careful. So it doesn't go out.
"Where are we walking to, Grandad?"
"Home," says Te Āhuru, like it's obvious. "Same place you're always walking. You've been walking home your whole life. You just kept pointing yourself the wrong way."
The road tips downhill toward water. It's not the Gold Coast anymore. Steve doesn't remember it changing but it's changed, the way things change in the part of the night where the walking takes you. The air's colder, wetter. There's a smell of kelp and diesel and something rendering, something being boiled down. The hills come up steep and green-black on both sides and pinch the water into a channel, and he knows this water. In his blood he knows it. This is the meanest stretch of sea in the world, or top five, his old man always told him, and his old man sailed round the world three times so he'd know. Raukawa. Cook Strait. The gap between the two islands, where the tide runs through like a river in the sea.
There's a man on the rocks.
He's young, this one. Rowing-strong, big across the back, maybe fifteen or sixteen, and he's climbing down slippery stone after a shag for the pot, and the sea is reaching for him. Three waves come in, one after another, the way they do, and the third takes his feet out and he goes down into the bull kelp, into the cold slop of it, grabbing hold, hanging on, and from up the rocks another voice roars into the wind:
"Hang on, Joe! There's another one coming!"
And Joe Timms hangs on. Orphan, whaler, sealer, not yet a soldier, not yet anybody's great-grandfather. Hangs on through the wave and the one after it, wet through and freezing, fingers locked in the weed, and hauls himself back up the rock a bit at a time until he's out of the water and lying on the stone with his heart going, alive, still alive, a fifteen-year-old who the sea reached for and missed.
Steve stops. This once, he stops.
"That's you," he says. "You're Joe."
The boy looks up at the man standing on the road above him. A big man, checked shirt, no teeth, tears on his face. And he grins the grin of somebody who's just been let off by the sea and knows it.
"That's me," says Joe Timms. "And that'll be you, further up the line. The sea reached for me on these rocks and I held the kelp. It reached for you on the Warrior, up on watch, boat pointed dead at the beach and you asleep at the wheel of the whole thing." He wrings the water out of his shirt. "You held on too. Turned the wheel slow and quiet so nobody'd know. We all hold on, boy. That's the family trade. It's not the fishing. The fishing's just what we did with our hands. Holding on is the actual work."
Steve says, "Nobody ever told me that."
"I'm telling you now," says Joe. He stands, and falls in beside him, dripping, and now there are three of them on the road. The great-grandfather, the grandfather, and the man. Walking down toward the reddening water, and Steve's chest is so full he can hardly get the air in.
Joe tamed a penguin once, on an island seven hundred kilometres south of everything. A king penguin, wild as the weather, and Joe made a friend of it, fed it, and when the whalers finally left the island not one of those hard men could stand to leave the bird behind, so they carried it off in the boat and settled it somewhere safe. And years and years on, at the far tail of his life, the same soul was down the back of his place in the Sounds feeding giant tuna, eels the length of your leg, tame as dogs, and there was a little boy crouched beside him watching. A little boy named Steve, who'd remember it his whole life without knowing why it mattered. The man who made gentle friends of wild things, start to finish. It's in the blood. It's the same thing that's got Steve, half a century later, talking soft to the wild broken thing inside himself, trying to tame it, feed it right, not kill it. Ride the wave, ride the wave. The oldest instinct in his line, coming out the only way it can.
The water's going red.
Not sunset-red. Blood-red, from underneath, a red that comes up through the black water like something enormous is bleeding out down there, and the current runs it in ribbons through the strait, and Steve knows the name for this without being taught it, the way you know a thing that's yours:
Kura-te-au. The reddened current.
"Ah," says a new voice, from the water. "You've come to the fight."
There's a waka in the strait. One man in it, ancient beyond ancient, and the sea around him is boiling. Because out in the deep of the channel something is turning. Something with arms. Something the size of the dark itself. And the old navigator in the waka is hunting it. Has been hunting it across the whole ocean, from Hawaiki, all the way down the world to here.
Kupe. The first of them. The one who found the land.
"That thing." Steve's voice comes out small, because he knows this thing too. Has known it his whole life. Has fed it and served it and nearly died under it. "What is that thing?"
"Te Wheke-a-Muturangi," says Kupe, not taking his eyes off the water. "The great octopus. It followed the fishing grounds and it robbed us blind, took everything, left nothing, so I chased it. All the way here. To your waters." He hefts something in his hand. A gourd, a hollow thing, a decoy. "You want to know how you kill a thing like this? You can't out-muscle it. Look at the size of it. You give it something to wrap its arms around. Something hollow. And while it's busy strangling the empty thing, thinking it's winning, thinking it's got you..."
He throws the gourd. The great wheke seizes it. Wraps every arm around the hollow decoy, crushing, triumphant, sure it's finally killing the thing that hunted it.
And Kupe strikes it dead.
The water goes red from the deep. Kura-te-au. The reddened current, that runs through Tory Channel to this day and will run there forever, named for the death of the thing that took everything.
"You understand me, mokopuna?" Kupe turns in the waka and looks straight at Steve, and his eyes are the two rocks out in the strait, Ngā Whatu, the Eyes of Kupe, the ones the old people cover their faces from when they cross. "The thing that's been eating you. The thing across the water you keep walking away from. It is the same thing. It has always been the same thing. It wraps its arms around whatever's hollow in you and it squeezes, and the whole time it thinks it's winning." He points a finger at Steve's chest. "I killed it in these waters before your blood was even a rumour. It's in you to do the same. You come from the man who ran it down across the entire ocean and did not stop. Do not tell me you don't know how to keep going."
And then Kupe is gone, and the giant bay behind him is called Whekenui, the great octopus, named for the fight. And it is the exact bay, the very shore, where a little orphan called Joe Timms was raised. Steve looks at Joe. Joe nods. Everything in this family happens in the same water. It always has.
They climb away from the strait, up into hill country, and the land changes again. Kūmara ground now, terraced. There's a pā up ahead and men with torches hunting through it, hunting for someone, and Steve feels the fear come off the ground like heat.
There's a man hidden in a pit.
A kūmara pit, dark, cramped, dug into the earth. A great chief is folded down into it while his enemies stalk the ground above, close enough to touch. And over the mouth of the pit sits a woman, Te Rangikoaea, her whole body and her mana laid over the hole like a lid the hunters cannot see through. The chief in the pit is not breathing. The chief in the pit is already counting himself among the dead.
And then the torches move off. And the hunters pass. And the woman shifts, and the light comes down into the pit, and the man who was as good as dead climbs up out of the earth into the sun. And what comes out of him then is not a scream and it is not a sob. It's a chant. It comes up out of the ground and out of his chest all at once:
Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!
It is death, it is death! It is life, it is life!
Te Rauparaha. Up out of the pit. Up out of his own grave, into the light, alive when every law of the world said he should be dead.
He stands there in the sun, this feared and famous man, this survivor, and he looks at Steve. At the tears, the missing teeth, the raw feet, the twenty-eight days, the whole hard mile of him. And there is nothing in his face but recognition. One survivor clocking another.
"You know this one," Te Rauparaha says. It isn't a question. "You've sung it at the footy your whole life and never once heard what it was saying." He comes closer. "It's not a war cry, mokopuna. Everyone thinks it's a war cry. It's the sound a man makes when he climbs out of the pit he was buried in and finds out he's still alive. It is death, it is life. You go down into the dark, into the hole, into the crack, into the worst of it. And the day comes when the light opens up over your head and you climb out, and you are so shocked to be alive that the only thing your body can do is chant it. Ka ora. Ka ora. It is life. It is life."
He puts his hand flat on Steve's chest, over the heart.
"You have died a thousand times," says Te Rauparaha. "I have watched you do it. And here you are, out of the pit again, walking in the sun that I fetched down. You are my kin. We come from the same fire out of Kāwhia. My people are your people. Do not ever again let me hear you say you came from nothing."
There are women on the road now too.
He didn't see them arrive. They're just there, the way the women in his family have always just been there, doing the holding while everyone watched the men. Kura, out of Kaikōura, Ngāi Tahu, who married the whaler and made the family. And here is the strange and beautiful thing, the thing that makes Steve stop again. Kura's people were the people Te Rauparaha raided. The conquered. And Te Rauparaha's people were the conquerors. And they are both walking this same road, both his, both in his one body. The raider and the raided, met and married and made peace inside the blood of a man walking a highway at one in the morning with jelly legs and a full heart. The whole story of the country, the whole terrible and beautiful thing, healed down into one man because it had nowhere else to go.
"You carry both of us," Kura says. "That's not a wound, boy. That's a bridge."
And there's Doreen, his nan, sixty-odd years married, buried on top of the grandad at Waikawa the way the deep hole was dug for her to be. And there is...
He stops dead.
There is his sister.
Pluck. Odette. Walking on the road like she never left it, like 2018 never happened. Steve makes a sound that isn't a word, and she just smiles at him, the way she used to, and falls into step, and takes his hand. The way she and their mother, Karen, once boxed his car in on a black highway so he couldn't run. Nose to tail. Not a trap but a catch. Love with its arms out to stop him hurting himself. And she squeezes his hand once and says nothing, because there's nothing that needs saying between them. There never was.
"You're all here," Steve says. His voice is wrecked. "You've been here the whole time."
"The whole time," says Pluck. "You just kept walking like you were on your own."
There's a sound now that doesn't belong to these islands. A drone under everything, wild and keening, coming down off high ground. And the hills on the far side of the road aren't the Sounds anymore. They're bare and grey and cold in a different way, heather and stone, and the water between is a loch, and the sound is a pipe. Bagpipes, out on the brae, playing something that grieves and threatens at the same time.
Because Steve's blood didn't come the one way. It came from two ends of the earth and met in him.
There's a man crossing the loch-side toward him, red-headed, wild, a broadsword on his back and a price on his head. An outlaw, a rustler, a man the law wanted and the people hid, because the people always hide the ones the law wants when the law is wrong. Rob Roy. The MacGregor. The name they tried to erase off the whole of Scotland, made it a crime just to say it. And the people kept saying it anyway, in the dark, the way you keep a lit thing cupped against the wind.
And walking near him, quieter, is another one. Charles Huntley, out of Edinburgh, who crossed the entire world in a wooden ship to the bottom of the South Pacific and put his name into the Māori side of the family, into Steve's grandad, into Steve. A man who once stood in a courtroom on the far side of the planet charged with a killing, and walked out of it. Charge dismissed. A free man carrying a name south into a new country.
"Chiefs on the one side," says Rob Roy, in a burr Steve half understands the way you half understand a thing you've never been taught but somehow know, "and outlaws on the other. That's you, laddie. Rangatira and rebel. The ones who led and the ones the law couldn't hold." He grins, all teeth and trouble. "You spent your life thinking the outlaw blood was your curse. The running, the wildness, the trouble you couldn't stay out of. It was never the curse. It's just untamed. Same as the chief blood's just responsibility with nowhere to go. You put the two together and point them at the right thing and you've got a man who leads and won't be held down. You've got a man who walks the length of a country nobody gave him permission to." He nods, once, soldier to soldier. "Take the wildness with you. Just quit letting it drive."
And they fall in too. The piper's drone going with them now, threaded under the sound of the sea. The Highlands and the Sounds walking the same road because they meet in one man's chest and nowhere else. And the crowd on the road is bigger than ever, two bloodlines deep, and Steve walks in the middle of all of it like the point of an arrow.
The land goes flat and vast and old, older than all of it, and there's a man out on the tussock with a digging stick. A kō. And he's opening the earth, and where he digs the water wells up and fills and shines, and Steve understands he is watching the lakes of the South Island being made. One by one. Dug by hand. By a man off the very first waka, the Uruao.
Rakaihautu. Of the Waitaha.
The oldest name in the whole line. The one whose people gave Steve the word he carries around without even knowing he carries it. The name he signs things with. The number after it meaningless, the word before it everything. Waitaha. Water of the Waitaha. He's had it in his pocket like a stone the whole way and never once turned it over to read it.
Rakaihautu straightens up from his digging and leans on the kō, and he looks at Steve, and he looks at the shovel. Because Steve is holding a shovel now. Has been the whole time, the one from the grave, and never noticed. And the two of them stand there, the man who dug the lakes and the man who dug his grandfather's grave and wouldn't give it up. Two diggers, a thousand years apart, holding the same tool.
"We are a people who dig, mokopuna," says Rakaihautu. "That's what we do. When the world is too big and too hard, we put the tool in the ground and we open it up and we make something that holds water, something that holds life, something that's still there a thousand years after our hands are gone." He nods at Steve's shovel. "You dug your grandfather into the ground with your own hands, half dead, and would not stop. You've been digging ever since. Every kilometre you walk, every word you put in that notebook, you're digging. Opening the ground. Making something that'll hold water long after you. Your kids will drink from it. Their kids. That's the oldest work there is, and it's yours, and you were doing it before you knew its name."
And then it's just the road again.
Bitumen. Streetlight. The sprinkler's stopped. It's maybe two in the morning and his phone says he's done another eight kilometres and his legs are absolutely gone, and the Gold Coast is exactly the Gold Coast, and there's no waka in any strait and no chief out of any pit and no sister on the road.
But they were there. He knows they were there. That's the thing about the dark and the walking. It lets you see, for a stretch, what's true all the time and just usually too bright out to notice. That a man is never the last of his line walking alone. He's the front of it. The whole procession is behind him and around him, all of them. The whaler and the shark-hunter and the navigator and the chief out of the pit and the man who dug the lakes and the women who did the holding and the sister who took his hand. All of them walking the length of two islands with him, the whole way down to where the land ends and the sea begins, because that's where they all come from and that's where he's finally, after everything, pointed.
He thought he came from nothing.
He comes from Kupe, who found the land. He comes from Rakaihautu, who dug the water out of it. He comes from Te Rauparaha, who climbed out of his grave singing. He comes from Joe, who held the kelp, and Kura, who was the bridge, and Te Āhuru, the safe harbour, who took two great whites by hand and alone out of a dinghy and whose name he carries lit and cupped against the wind. He comes from Rob Roy the outlaw and Charles Huntley who crossed the whole world with his name. Chiefs on the one side and rebels on the other, and both of them in his blood, leading and refusing to be held. He comes from a boy at a funeral who remembered only how loved the man was. He comes from four generations the sea reached for and could not finish.
And the water down there, at the far bottom of the country, at the far bottom of the walk. If he ever gets there, and he will, one foot then the one after that, all the way to Motupōhue. That water will be running red. Kura-te-au. The reddened current. The place his tupuna killed the thing that eats men, in his own waters, before his blood was even a rumour.
It is death, it is life.
He's still walking. His legs are gone and he's still walking, and he's not crying anymore. Or he is, but it's the other kind now. And up ahead the black is going the faintest grey at its edge, the way it does, the way it always does if you just outlast the one wave you're in and don't stop for it.
And the sun that a chief once fetched down comes up over the beast who walks, and lights the whole road home, and every single one of them on it.
Ka mate, ka ora. He died a thousand times, and he lived.
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