"Ki te kahore he whakakitenga ka ngaro te iwi"
(Without foresight or vision, the people will be lost)
- Tawhiao Potatau te Wherwhero, Maori King
(Note: Timestone is a prequel to the rest of the Fractime Saga)
RefPlane -22: 24 November 1859
Cutting through flat, deep-purple water, a taut line led the waka farther offshore. The bow piece, a simply carved tiki, stared at droplets running up the nano-braid only to quiver and fall back into the dark water. The line hissed softly as it flowed over the canoe's plain strakes.
The craft was not a waka taua, a great Maori-carved war canoe, but rather a common waka tētē, a coastal boat used for commerce and in this case fishing. A finely woven triangular flax sail flapped gently as the fish pulled them through the sea and air. Lars and Miri paddled steadily ahead trying to ease tension from the outgoing line. Miri’s father, Arapeta, the chief of the local tribe, struggled on the foremost thwart to keep the line from chafing too deeply into the canoe.
Matariki was nearing its apex, and the first great fish had not yet emerged from the northeastern waters of the northern island. Lars knew the chief considered this another potentially devastating omen, as food shortages grew more common with a British treaty now in effect for almost twenty years. But over six hours ago and just before noon, Arapeta had felt a nibble on one of the several deep trailing hooks baited with tuna. Speaking his ancestor’s dialect, he had coaxed the fish to swallow the bait, but now, as his hands bled, cut from the line, he cursed it in English peering down into the depths below them.
Miri looked to Lars as the line slackened slightly across the chief's back allowing them to rest briefly.
"Bro," Miri said resting his paddle across his knees, "it looks like that line will slice our waka in two before it breaks."
Misinterpreting his son's wit, his father cast a fierce look over his shoulder; his face, like Miri's, displayed the tribal patterns of their ancestors in black ink.
"That stainless hook should bend out before that line breaks," Lars whispered to his boyhood friend as the line again peeled over the strake into the depths demanding them both to resume paddling quickly.
Lars kept any concern for his adopted father to himself, but the line had already cut deeply into the chief's left hand when he had set the hook hours ago. Arapeta had tried to heal and wash the cuts by dragging his hand in the saltwater, but blood still trickled down his forearm as he continued to battle with the fish.
The chief shook feeling the summer seawater. "Too cold," he said in disgust.
Landing the fish would mean momentary prosperity for all the tribe.
Cured flesh should last all winter and would mean the end of bad luck that brought no billfish to shore so far that summer.
Miri blamed the whalers and the chief cursed Tangaroa, his god of the sea, but Lars hoped the hook and line from the future would bring the end of the tribe's misfortune.
The last glimpses of land as well as the sun were long gone when they caught a small tuna on a line trailing over the stern. They ate dark meat in silence as the fish below continued to tow them out to sea to where the stars of the Milky Way met a gradually brightening horizon.
At sunrise, the line was flatter signaling the fish was shallower. As the chief pleaded to Tangaroa for the great fish to jump to witness its magnificence, a gull landed on the bow piece. The chief spoke to the bird kindly but abruptly shooed it off the bow after it shit on the tiki.
"Father, wants the bird to tell the fish to fly as it does," Miri said while cutting on his paddle the last strips of tuna to share.
Lars saw the chief subtly wring his hands to push cramps away then curse to himself. The weakness would humiliate the chief, and Lars quickly looked aside as the line for the first time noticeably slackened.
"Pōteretere!" The chief shouted for Lars and Miri to back paddle as he cushioned the line along his back expecting renewed tension.
The two men frantically paddled backward as a school of flying fish emerged from the sea in front of the bow then scattered. Their wings humming, sent them in all directions, several landing at Lars' feet. The tiki dipped astern as the line slowly rose and the sea bulged ahead of the waka.
A dark sword swiftly pierced vertically through the air as the fish emerged. Water poured from its sides revealing a huge cobalt, blue head and back. Dark stripes flashed from its side as it leaped to its full-length.
Its bill of nearly two meters swirled in a slow circle before the great fish bent sideways then entered the sea smoothly with barely a splash. The blade of its tail followed, slicing into the water then with a quick slap sending salt spray on to the men's faces.
As the line raced across the chief's back leaving a bloody trail, the fish resumed its escape out to sea. Miri and Lars began paddling forward again to relieve the chief's agony as he prayed for the continued lack of sharks and then chanted about past battles against papura takeketonga, the blue marlin.
Lars knew the possible death of such a great creature would deeply saddened Arapeta, but the chief's determination also to kill it was plain.
The hours floated by as clouds grew high above the horizon to which the great fish was dragging them. Miri predicted bad weather would come soon adding to the constant concern of the line breaking. Lars grew weary of watching it come to breaking point repeatedly only for the chief expertly to release then reassert the correct tension. Nearing exhaustion, they ate a few of the flying fish in the silence of the calm sea as they journeyed towards Pleiades rising.
They woke at daybreak to jerking of the waka as the great fish jumped suicidally, filling its swim bladders with air and denying itself another deep escape.
As the fish dove and the line tightened, it cut deeply into the chief's hands again. His blood dripped into the sea as the fish began to circle the
waka allowing the chief to gain line. The occasional flash of its side betrayed the outlines of numerous remoras accompanying it.
"Rāti!" The chief shouted at Miri who then handed his father the harpoon from the bottom of the waka. The chief's grip on the weapon was not strong enough to ensure a clean kill. He proudly handed the bloody harpoon back to his eldest son but the fish was now out of the weapon's reach.
Watching the line circle the waka, they quickly ate the last of the flying fish waiting for the marlin to swim near. Miri spat the last bite of fish into the sea then stood on the nearest thwart as he raised the rāti watching the great fish come closer.
Lars watched the marlin rolled onto its side to eye the weapon just as Miri heaved the harpoon deep into the fish just in front of its dorsal fin.
The fish convulsed then disappeared into the depths, but Arapeta was ready and gave it line. Within seconds, the line went slack as the fish ascended to break the sea's last hold on it in a final leap that nearly overturned the waka.
As it lie motionless, floating next to the rocking waka the chief said,
"Maté," then softly chanted a brief prayer to Tangaroa.
Lars stared at the great fish. He reckoned it weighed at least 1000
kilos. Its eventual death made him shutter not for the loss of such a great creature but in apprehension of something much worse seemingly close.
Exactly what, remained just beneath his consciousness and such doom episodes were becoming increasingly stronger. He dipped his hand in the cold Pacific water and flung several handfuls over his shoulders in hopes of cleansing his thoughts with the ancient Maori ritual.
"Now that's a fish, eh Bro," Miri said admiring the specimen.
As Lars had no family, he had the luxury to adopt the time and people he needed. The Maori boy, Miri, and his tribe had taken him in as a young man that just walked out of the bush alone one day. It was not long after his first successful test of his multiverse-translation device that
he disguised as a pocket watch of the period. Although he was pākehā, an outsider, the chief treated him as his own son. Lars loved them and the pacific island his tribe called Aotearoa.
He had learned difficult lessons in his travels and kept such long-term intrusions to the distant past where any future effects should be negligible. However, even now in the mid-nineteenth century, he was getting uncomfortable as the British colony was now firmly established.
"We still have to get it back," Lars said as he saw a tip of a fin break the water a few meters away.
"Mangō bastards!" the chief shouted at the shark while pulling his bloody hands out of the sea. "Danger still follows you both," he added with sharp glance to his sons.
Lars took a deep breath at another of the chief's prophesies agreeing with his own sense of impending disaster.
Several more fins emerged then vanished into the depths just as quickly as they had appeared.
Lars and Miri began to paddle toward the setting sun and back to shore. The chief removed the harpoon then secured the great fish to a flax line to drag the carcass through the sea.
Arapeta dozed as the young men paddled, the flax sail providing a comforting boost to their progress. They used the setting sun and then the stars to ensure a correct course.
By midmorning the next day, Lars' shoulders and arms burned.
Vague outlines of distant blue-gray hills announced their impending arrival back to the tribe's beach, but a subtle lurch of the canoe turned Lars away from his pain.
Sea swells had increased with the coming change in weather, but Lars felt something was wrong. A look to Miri affirmed his suspicions.
Miri nudged his sleeping father with his barefoot.
"Father, a taniwha comes," Miri said as a thick, black fin came into view next to the waka then vanished silently beneath the gray waters.
The chief reached for the bloody harpoon at his son's mention of the mythical devil as Miri and Lars began to pull the great, dead fish closer to the waka.
A fin rose in front of them soaring nearly two meters, as high as the flax sail, and then slowly sank below the waka.
"Maki!" Miri shouted while pointing to port at two more black fins.
"Not a taniwha, but bad enough," Lars said grasping his father's shoulder while instantly recognizing the fins of Orca. He now knew why fishing had been poor that summer.
"He Kōtua," the chief said gravely turning to Lars.
Lars stiffened then nodded, agreeing with the chief's interpretation of the pod's arrival as a bad omen. In fact, an ominous feeling had overwhelmed him at the sight of the Orca.
The large bull's white, belly skin flashed as its teeth tore for the first time at the marlin's tail. Another fin rose up out of the water to starboard as another circled the carcass.
Miri took a swing with his paddle at a large calf as it swam alongside, but a cow behind it pushed it away then rammed the waka nearly toppling the men into the sea.
The chief launched the harpoon into the cow's blowhole as the bull thrashed, tearing another bite from their catch.
As another black shape passed alongside, Lars swung his paddle, but it broke off at the neck against the hard, leather skin of the creature. He tried in vain to stab another Orca with the paddle's jagged end.
The pod was devouring the fish in front of their eyes as the cow frantically dragged the waka closer to shore. As a thin ribbon of sand came into view below gray hills, Miri just had time to untie the harpoon's cord from the gunwale before the Orca could swamp the canoe plowing through growing swells.
Lars could now see wakas coming to aid them as quiet descended on the red sea around them. All that remained of the marlin was its head.
Lars looked away from the fish's huge, lifeless eye staring at him, to the beach before them. He could not help but scan the beach for her, looking for her to run through the surf as she had done countless times he returned from fishing.
The chief found her, an outsider, like Lars, on the beach near death.
Abandoned or shipwrecked, her arrival was a mystery but the tribe adopted the young woman despite the local missionary's stern disapproval. She had no memory of her past except her name- Helen.
When the taniwha took her and Miri's sister, Tui, from atop nearby Tara Tara Mountain, his heart broke, and he vowed to find and destroy the evil that had taken them.
Lars jumped into the surf to help the others pull the canoe ashore.
On the beach, his tribe marveled at the remains of the fish. They would stew its head for a feast in a ceremony to mark the end of their bad luck, but first the chief cut off the great fish's sword. He then drove it into the sand next to him. It was a tribal treasure, a taonga, to accompany the incredible fish tale throughout future generations.
The chief grasped Lars and Miri by their aching shoulders and turned them to face the tribe.
"We have won a great battle," he proclaimed to his people on the beach, "not with a lonely fish but with ourselves."
He pulled a carved whalebone pendant on a thin, flax cord from around his neck and over his head. He had carved it decades ago into the form of an Orca's tale and now slipped it over Miri's head.
"For the Traveler," the chief told Lars removing another pendant, green and wedge-shaped from around his neck.
"It is no longer safe in Aotearoa," the chief whispered placing the stone around Lars' neck, "and it is fitting the stone goes with a true traveler."
"My sons," he said proudly so the elders approaching them could hear, "you have shown great strength at sea," He grasped both carvings
around their necks before other elders could see the tribe's treasures. "You both must now leave this world," he said sadly while turning them away from the elders. "Like the marlin, extreme dangers trail you both," he added in a whisper before turning to greet the elders.
"I know," Lars said looking to Miri. "I feel the future is about to change," he added watching several warriors pull the Orca cow's carcass onto the beach.
"In a good way?" Miri asked in a whisper.
Lars looked his friend in the eyes then shook his head.
Miri nodded. "It is time then," he said returning the stare.
"Past time," Lars added solemnly, grasping his friends shoulder.