When she crested the hill and saw the open sky, it was very welcome. Off in the distance she could see an airship with the Ngati Toa colors. It seemed strange that her iwi was so close, and yet perhaps not.
She turned and looked across the ridge and saw the musician standing against the horizon. He was only fifty feet away from where she stood, but the ticking of the clockwork in her ears could not take away from the beauty of him.
He was only about her own age, with a kiwi feather cloak over one shoulder, and a piupiu around his lean hips. The flax skirt was seldom worn by itself anymore. In this day and age most Maori had adopted some type of pakeha clothing, but this tall, dark skinned young man wore none of that. As he stood there, with the flute raised to his nose, playing the most haunting music she knew, it was like he had stepped out of another age.
For a long moment she quite forgot why she was there. She glanced over her shoulder and realized she was not imagining it; the Ngati Toa airship was getting closer, and she finally had confirmation that her iwi had something to do with this.
The player swayed slightly on the spot, but then his eyes locked on Aroha, and eventually he saw that she was not moved by the power of the flute. He lowered it from his lips.
“Aroha,” the man called to her over the wind, “I hope you know this was for you.”
Under her cloak, her hand closed on the shaft of her weapon. “Do I know you?” she asked, Maori feeling strange on her tongue after so long in the world of the Ministry.
“No,” came the mild reply, “but I know you. I am Ruru.”
It was the name of the owl in the dark, the one heard but seldom seen. It was very clever.
“And that,” she said, inching her way closer, “is the instrument of Tutanekai.” She had heard the stories, even though they were not ones of her tribe. Tutanekai had fallen in love with a beautiful maiden of another tribe, but they had been separated by a lake. When he had played the flute, the maiden Hinemoa had been so moved that she had dared the frigid waters of the lake to reach him.
Aroha swallowed as she heard the engines of the airship over the wind. “I thought it was a love story, but now it seems poor Hinemoa might not have had a choice. Where did you get it from?”
Ruru held the flute up, so she could see how small but intricately carved it was. “I found it,” he said simply.
The instrument of the most famous love story in all of Aoteroa’s history, and he held it like it was a weapon—which he had turned it into. Aroha suspected he must have found the burial site of the lovers. It did not belong to his iwi.
“That was made for love,” Aroha said, pointing to the flute. “It wasn’t meant for vengeance.”
Ruru glanced up, behind her, to where the airship was drawing close and closer. “It depends on how you play it.”
Aroha held out her hand towards him, trying to keep her voice unemotional. “Tutanekai’s love and yearning shouldn’t be used to kill. Let me return it to his people so it may be re-buried with him.”
Now the airship engines were very loud. Aroha didn’t know who was on it, but she understood that once it came close Ruru and the flute would disappear.
Ruru shook his head. “Utu was exacted for you, Aroha. Among others, but for you most of all. We have to use what we have, just as our people have always used what we have.” He pointed to the airship. “Your own tribe know that.”
Aroha could feel the tearing inside her; the two parts of her heritage pulling at her. What was left in the middle? Anything at all?
Both parts understand vengeance, but at the same time she remembered her role, the oath she had made to protect the people of this land from the strange, the unusual, the bizarre. Despite her own personal feelings, no one should have the power of Tutanekai.
“Give me the flute,” she said, pulling her taiaha. The short three-foot tube extended out with a hiss.
His eyes widened when he saw her innovation up close, as she spun it around and directed it at him. He met her first attack with a parry of the rifle he quickly snatched up from against the rock.
Her taiaha hissed with its internal power, jetting steam into his face, and he backed away blinded for a moment. When he regained his vision, Ruru actually looked upset. “You are attacking your own people? I am setting wrongs right!”
“It is a different age,” Aroha said, as she swung her taiaha for his legs. “You cannot be judge of all things. None of us can.”
A ladder unfurled from the airship above them. Ruru glanced up at it for just a moment, and Aroha knew that she had only that moment. Distracted as he was, she could have had the killing blow, but instead levelled a blow for his head, and when he jerked out of the way, she stepped in and snatched the flute from the waistband of his piupiu.
Their brown eyes locked as her fingers tightened around the delicate piece of bone. “You have had enough utu,” she shouted to him over the roar of the airship engines. “Tell my father, so has he. We are done.”
Ruru let out a laugh at that, and then turned and leapt for the ladder just as it pulled it away. His fingers locked on the rungs, and then he climbed up and away.
Aroha did not look up as the airship moved away. She had not seen her father in years, but he had his life in the clouds, and she had one on the ground. Just like Rangi and Papatunuku, the sky father and the earth mother. Somewhere in between was a place for her to stand, and she just had to find it.
It took Aroha a couple of weeks to return to Wellington and the district headquarters of the Ministry. It was the fault of a rather roundabout trip she took. She knew she was a mess of mud and stank sorely, but the idea that had begun worming its way into her head would not be put off.
Miss Tuppence let her into the Regional Director’s office, with only the slightest of winces at her appearance, so perhaps it was not that bad.
Anderson looked up from his desk, his bright blue eyes roaming over her condition. “Agent Murphy, I see things must be urgent with you. I take it your mission was successful?”
This was going to be the hard bit. “Yes, sir. It turned out that a Maori nose flute with unusual properties was being used to extract utu on some rather nasty people.”
He placed his pen carefully down on his desk and steepled his fingers. “And I take it you apprehended the suspect and got hold of this flute?”
She looked him directly in the eye. “Actually Regional Director, the perpetrator escaped, but I did manage to make sure he no longer had the flute in his possession.”
Anderson waited for her explanation in a way that was rather unnerving.
“Unfortunately,” she said with the steadiest of voices she could manage, “the artifact was smashed into pieces in the process.” She did not tell him that it had been returned to Tutanekai’s iwi, to be buried with honor. As far as his ancestor’s knew the flute was merely a tapu item, sacred but with no mysterious powers. She had not enlightened them on that, just as she was not enlightening her superior.
“Well, that is a shame,” the Regional Director said, picking up his pen.
Aroha did not move.
“Is there something else, Agent Murphy?”
She swallowed hard, thinking of her torment at taking such a sacred object, and how she was stuck between the worlds of her parents—but perhaps that could be put to advantage.