The Dream Swimmer, page 45
Go back, Tamatea.
She began to slash at me. Then I saw that she was not slashing at me at all, but was trying to slice her left foot away. She flailed the knife, the blood blossoming like a bracelet bejewelled with rubies.
I grabbed her knife hand. Raging, we began to fight each other as we fell. We were tumbling over and over. Tiana was trying to get free. I was trying to hold on to her.
The surface of the sea rushed up at us. Tiana saw it just in time, snapped her arms against her sides and knifed cleanly through the surface. But I landed badly, feeling every bone crack as I tumbled into the strange and turbulent sea of Tiana’s dreams and
I was falling.
The impact took my breath away. I cried out in pain and, oh my God, the force of my mother’s momentum pulled her away from me and her ankle slipped from my grasp. Freed of my weight Tiana continued her headlong momentum through the depths. Then, without a backward glance, Tiana began to paddle her feet, swimming ever downward, swirls of rainbow bubbles tracking after her.
Then she was gone.
For a moment terror overcame me. My rational mind told me that because I was in an ocean I should hold my breath. Soon, however, I ran out of air and, moaning and closing my eyes, I let myself drown. But when I opened my eyes I was still breathing.
That’s when terror struck again. The sea was the colour of pounamu, of greenstone. It stretched to the end of the universe, reaching higher than the highest heavens and lower than Ruaumoko’s domain. I was alone. Totally alone. I would never be able to find my way out. I was trapped for ever unless –
I set my face with determination and began to follow after my mother, kicking downward, ever downward, my arms stroking swiftly after Tiana.
All of a sudden I saw a speck, a thousand kilometres in front of me.
My heart leapt because I could see that it was Tiana. She seemed to be waiting for something.
I powered down toward her. She saw me coming and, with a snarl, launched herself at me and we were fighting again, tumbling among constellations, ripping apart nebulae, falling through the rings of Saturn.
You should not be here, Tamatea.
Suddenly, I felt a tremendous turbulence. The great river, the blinding hologram which Tiana called Time’s Tide, was coming. The tide was a million kilometres wide and the noise was like deafening thunder. My eyes were burnt by its fierce brightness and I put my arms up to protect myself.
In that moment, imprinted on my retina, was an after-image of Tiana slashing at me with both hands, knocking me unconscious. A lick of light curled around us, taking us into the tide. The currents were so strong that Tiana put me to her mouth, holding me as a cat does her newborn kitten, so that her arms would be free to stabilise us both. The tide buffeted and pulled us into its fearsome maelstrom of noise and thunder and
I was falling.
I moaned as I regained consciousness. Tiana was bending over me. She was smiling sadly. Then she lifted her face to the light. Her expression was eternal. She put a coin in my mouth and then began to tape my mouth so that I could not scream.
My eyes looked into hers. Please don’t do this, Tiana.
Swiftly, she roped my legs and arms. She employed the kinds of knots that are used by cattlemen when they are bringing steers down. The more I struggled the more the knots tightened. She stood me up.
OhmyGod.
We were standing on the rim of a huge cone. All around us the universe was ablaze with light. The rim was thin, like a razor, and we were balancing there. It stretched to either side of us, millions of kilometres in circumference.
Inside the cone was pitch blackness. Millions of kilometres of vertiginous blackness.
An angel of God cranks the primum mobile!
During the Renaissance, people believed in the Ptolemaic view of the solar system. This view, enshrined in Church doctrine, considered that the earth was the centre of the universe, unmoving, stationary, while the glorious sun and planets danced around it in joyous harmony. Heaven was fixed for the enjoyment of Man, and an angel of God cranked the primum mobile, God’s great winch system of the stars. Thus our Lord ensured that every twenty-four hours there was night and day, day and night, revolving around the earth in God’s celestial sphere of the heavens.
The fabulous Galileo Galilei changed all that by daring to prove that the earth orbited the sun and not vice versa. Such a view, supporting the earlier theories of Copernicus, threatened the literal interpretation of the Bible and the Church’s beliefs in the nature of God’s creation. Galileo’s masterpiece, Dialogue on The Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632. Galileo was brought before the Inquisition and ultimately ordered to recant and accept that the earth was stationary. Not until 1992 was Galileo pardoned.
Much earlier than this, Galileo had also dared to attempt to answer a question that had engaged Florentine academicians for over a hundred years. In their discussions of Dante’s Inferno, one enigma had always eluded them – the location, shape and dimensions of Hell and the size of Lucifer.
Let us imagine Galileo, as a man of science, stepping forward to begin his analysis.
‘Dante’s Hell,’ he says, ‘is shaped like a cone one-twelfth the total mass of earth. Its vortex is where Lucifer lives. He stands locked in ice halfway up his gigantic chest, and his stomach forms the very centre of the earth. From Lucifer, sectoral lines extend to Jerusalem on the earth’s surface and eastward to some point unknown.
‘Inferno itself is an amphitheatre so vast that it is divided into eight levels. The fifth level is inhabited by the swamp called Styx and the Wicked City of Dis, where heretics suffer in the presence of Lucifer, the Devil, himself.
‘Mathematically,’ Galileo continues, ‘there is a relation between the size of Dante and the giant Nimrod who dwells in the pit of Hell, and in turn between Nimrod and Lucifer’s arm. Therefore, if we know Dante’s size and Nimrod’s size, we can deduce the size of Lucifer.’
The court of academicians murmurs, half afraid.
‘The divine Dante has himself written that Nimrod’s face was about as long and as wide as Saint Peter’s dome in Rome. Thus it is five armlengths and a half. Since men are usually eight heads tall, the giant’s face is eight times as large. He is, therefore, forty-four armlengths tall.
‘Dante himself,’ Galileo proceeds, ‘is to Nimrod as three is to forty-four. The relation of the giant to the arm of Lucifer is the same as the man is to the giant. The formula therefore must be: Three is to forty-four as forty-four is to x. Therefore, the arm of Lucifer is six hundred and forty-five metres in length.
‘Since the length of an arm is generally one-third of the entire height of a man, we can say that Lucifer’s height will be some two thousand arm-lengths. This is the size of Lucifer and from this can be deduced the size of Hell –’
Alleluia! Alleluia! Glory to God!
If you can’t be mine, you can be nobody else’s, Tiana said. If I let you go, you will only try to kill me. If you do that the Furies will damn you for ever, my son.
Tiana picked me up in her arms.
Goodbye, Tamatea.
She threw me in and
I was falling.
As I was tumbling I saw birds coming out of a blood-red sun, thousands of birds. But as they came closer I saw that they were half man, half avian, like winged ponaturi. The birds plummeted down after me.
Then I saw that other people were tumbling from the razored rim into that same blackness. The ponaturi swooped upon that mass of falling men and women, catching their ankles and soaring with them to some aerie to feed their young. Three ponaturi, wings folded, were pursuing me, and with mounting terror I felt their ravenous beaks flailing at my feet. I must have fallen for three thousand years, a thousand years for each level of descent.
At the fourth level I saw the face of Lucifer. He opened his mouth and
I was falling.
Through a cone of utter blackness I fell. I fell another thousand years and, below, something began to sparkle.
Black ice.
I thought, If I make it to the ice I will be safe.
And while I was falling I was trying to free myself from Tiana’s knots.
I saw that the ice was so thick in places that many men and women cracked open like eggshells on impact. And where the ice was thin, I could see others, looking up from beneath the ice with fearful eyes. When they could no longer hold their breath they broke through the surface. There, hovering ponaturi picked them up by their throats, gave one sharp shake to snap their necks, and carried them upward into the blood-red sun. The sea was blood red with the sun, blood red with blood.
I crashed through the ice, bulleting among the men and women below. The collision tore the tape from my mouth and loosened the knots that bound my legs and arms and
I was falling.
Tiana’s ropes came loose and I was free.
The water was thick with black blood. Men, women and children were holding their breath, looking upward through the glass surface of the ice at the waiting, hovering, glittering ponaturi.
Oh, and that is why I began to propel myself downwards. Blindly. Following the ice caverns and channels that swirled around the gigantic chest of Lucifer. Through the ice I could see into other corridors, where schools of mermen ponaturi were swimming upwards. Their eyes were like paua and their teeth were razor sharp. Many of the men and women at the ice surface were unaware that death lay waiting from below as well as above. The mermen ponaturi struck, tearing at the mass of men and women in a feeding frenzy. They grabbed at their ankles and pulled them down, down into a dark sparkling abyss. Some of the swimmers were still alive, bubbles of air leaking from their lips.
All around me, the fish-tailed ponaturi were feeding.
There was a sharp nip at my ankles. A beak, like that of a squid, closed over my ankles and I knew that I had been caught by the mermen ponaturi. But I kicked, came free and
I was falling.
I plunged downwards. I found myself in a huge cavern filled with air. All around the walls of the cavern flared with volcanic fires, and I realised I was at the fifth level. All around me, ponaturi were landing on ledges in the walls, pulling their carcasses in. The air was filled with thick clouds of ponaturi, chittering and chattering, wings clacking, wheeling in the blood-red sky. I waited for death to come with a beak tearing at my heart or teeth tearing my throat out.
Then, glittering below, I saw a huge phantasmogoric city. It had spires, minarets, ziggurats and needles of immense evil. The streets were crowded with screaming men and women, trying to escape from that place. But every street in the city led to the same street that they had left. Some had been running for a hundred years. Others for a thousand. More for tens of thousands of years, crying out, ‘Forgive us’ and
I was falling.
I joined the teeming throng of men and women running around and around in circles. There was no way out. In that city of the dead, there were no exits.
Exhausted, I closed my eyes and
I fell, spiralling down.
A thousand years.
When I opened my eyes I thought it had all been a dream.
I was in a small room with four walls and a door. There was a chair in the room. A mirror was on one of the walls. I looked at my watch. I got up from the chair and looked in the mirror.
I was dressed in a dark suit. I had on a white shirt and tie. I found a comb in the fob pocket of the jacket. I took the comb out. Combed my hair. Inspected my teeth. Looked at my watch again. Saw that it was time.
Walked to the door. Turned the knob. Opened the door.
Went through and closed the door behind me.
Before me was a carved wharenui in a Daliesque landscape, a never-ending plain. A white horse came thrumming across the plain and entered the house. I followed it inside. The meeting house was inlaid with thousands of human eyes like paua. It was lit by red lava veining the blackness and by illuminations of blue underwater lightning strikes. All of a sudden, all the eyes blinked. The white horse disappeared.
I heard weeping. The sound assailed me with a tremendous tidal wave of sadness, a grieving of such emotional force that I was struck down by it.
I walked into the wharenui.
The meeting house was lined with carved figures.
All the carvings were crying.
When I took a closer look I saw embalmed within each carving a man or woman, and they were still alive. And I knew them all.
The elder of the paepae, spiders falling around him, whimpering, Help me, oh, please help me.
Toroa, hands around his neck, I am your brother, Tamatea.
My dear, sweet cousin Raina, trailing hypodermic needles like arrows, The mate is upon me, Cousin.
Uncle Alexis, with holes where his eyes should have been, Shoot me dead, Nephew, have mercy on me.
I backed away from them all. But I could not escape. Other carvings called out to me.
Inside one was Awhina, mother of Toroa, who should have been Te Ariki’s wife. She beckoned me forward to hongi. Tamatea, you should have been mine.
I reeled away.
Next to her was my Aunt Circe. You would have been given everything and we would have been left with nothing.
Tepora was there, too, and I wondered why. And Hamiora beside her. Like a fallen angel his accusation rang through the wharenui. You did this to us, Tamatea. You –
I saw Grandfather Ihaka. You always hated me, Grandson. Could there not have been any peace between us?
I wanted to run to him, to say, I’m sorry, Grandfather.
Then, there was Grandmother Riripeti. Her eyes were tender and when she smiled she brought glorious luminescence to the darkness.
The pearls in her hair made of her a radiant madonna.
I ran toward Riripeti but the closer I got to her the further away she became.
All of a sudden the wharenui began to shake apart. Light started to come through the sides of the house. The carved figures began to turn to stone.
The roof collapsed. Thousands of ponaturi were waiting to tear my heart out and shred it to pieces. They descended out of the sun, chittering and chattering, flailing closer and closer, and I knew the time had come for my death. Then:
No, Tiana cried.
Above me, wheeling in the blood-red sky, my mother came riding. She had called for Hine Te Ariki. She came plummeting through clouds of screaming ponaturi, slashing them away with her knife. She fought her way upon my ancient ancestress through that death-filled expanse. Descending the abyss, she struck through the door of the glittering wharenui.
Her eyes were shining as she reined Hine Te Ariki.
She offered me her arms, Come, Tamatea.
Hikurangi, there and mark.
Thus it was that I ascended from the sea of Tiana’s dreams.
And my mother must have had other business to attend to, because when I went into her bedroom she was still sleeping.
I reached down and placed my hands over Tiana’s feet. She moaned, trying to remain in her dreams.
I pressed her toes firmly to stop.
Tiana became still. Then with a sigh she began to reach up through the sea, her eyes looking at me from beneath the surface.
Te torino whakahaere, whakamuri.
No matter where the spiral started or ended, Tiana.
The water streamed away from her as she surfaced. She brushed seaweed from her hair.
‘I could not leave you there,’ she said.
I stood up. I began to walk away.
‘Tamatea,’ Tiana called.
Had my mother not called me, I would have kept on walking up into the light. I was Orpheus ascending, and I knew if I looked back I would destroy my mother for ever. But she was pitiless. She called again.
‘Hear me, Tamatea,’ Tiana said. ‘There was a time when I hated Riripeti. But believe me, in the end we came to respect one another and to neutralise the conflict between us.’
I turned, and at that moment banished her to Hades for ever.
‘Whatever you say, I do not believe you. You are the cause of the mate, and while you live the mate lives.’
All the grief and sorrow for my grandmother spilled over the brim of my soul.
‘I loved her,’ I said to Tiana.
My mother looked up at me. She has a habit of lifting her face to the light that makes her look almost beautiful. Her face became remote and still.
‘My only crime,’ Tiana answered, ‘was that I loved you. If love is a crime, then I stand upon mine act and I confess it. For you, my son, I gladly forgot all my other children. Yes, I fought Riripeti for you, she whom you loved, but I have never been the cause of that which you accuse me of.
‘I will await my judgement before God,’ she said.
Eretra
Forty-three
Numi, pieta del mio soffrir.
Speme non v’ha pel mio dolor … Oh Gods, have pity on my suffering. There is no hope for my sorrow. Fatal love, terrible love, break my heart, make me die. Oh, Gods, pity me.
I couldn’t stay at home with Tiana. I had to get out of the house. I went to Aunt Hiraina’s, expecting to stay there the night. I had just turned into the driveway when Aunt Hiraina came rushing out.
‘Leave the motor running,’ she called. ‘While we were at Rongopai, those bastards took Raina again. It must have happened about two hours ago. They’ve taken her up to the Rastafarian headquarters on the Coast.’
‘Where’s Uncle Hepi and Sammy?’
‘Still at the marae.’
I did not hesitate. I took a quick look in the back and saw that the rifle was there.
‘Get in.’
We roared through the night. Gisborne city was at peace, the main street deserted.
‘Have we got enough petrol?’ Aunt Hiraina asked.
‘Yes,’ I nodded. ‘And even if we didn’t, where would we get it at this time of night?’
Just then we roared past an all-night petrol station.
‘Hmmn,’ Aunt Hiraina said.
