‘The keys.’ Krüger held up his shackled wrists.

She frowned. ‘Where you go?’

‘Together we go.’

‘No buyin’ nothin’ no money.’

‘The keys.’ He dropped his hands into his lap.

‘Listen,’ Josephine said. She pointed at the obia again with her pipe. ‘You hear it.’

Krüger closed his eyes, the lids heavy as chains.

‘Listen tell it.’

‘No!’

Josephine reached over and put her hand to Krüger’s forehead. Her hand was soft and cool.

‘Listen tell it, man.’

He breathed in the smell of her palm. The touch of her skin, her fingertips. Tears pooled in his eyes. She whispered something in a language he couldn’t understand.

‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave me.’

‘No,’ she said, but reluctantly. Then she stayed like that beside him and smoked her pipe until he fell asleep.

NGĀTI KURI

Blown violently off course by a storm in the Tasman Sea, the New Bedford was driven south of the Manawatawhi islands, ripped and raked across the living ocean. Fury surged tremendous flanks of dark water and crashing waves and men were washed away from the deck like tiny crabs. She struck the reef just after midnight: five hundred and seventy-nine barrels of whale oil to the bottom, twenty-nine men, the captain and his log, every hull rivet, ship timber and mast, the sails long lost to the gales that had torn and snapped them away to the horizon.

Seven survivors, including Claus von Rolt, washed ashore onto a rocky, coarse-sanded beach.

Over the stormed hours of that night, they dragged themselves out of the heavy water one by one, brine lung’d, salt-bleached, the bitter burn of the sea in the backs of their throats. Prostrate, grateful, pummelled, penitent, they fisted the cold sand and thanked Almighty God.

All except Rolt, who thanked only the warrior’s shrunken head, still hanging by the cord around his neck.

They waited for dawn, shivering. In the morning, the beach was strewn with broken timbers and debris from the smashed ship. Bodies of the drowned began to wash up too, waxen and blue, draped in sashes of green-black kelp. The Ngāti Kuri tribesmen came as they were struggling to bury the dead in the hard-packed, shell-crusted ground.

The Ngāti Kuri wielded their patu paraoa and clubbed each man to death, the first blow knocking the half-drowned men senseless, the second and third to oblivion. Claus von Rolt was last, his tattooed killer pausing to laugh at the head Rolt wore around his neck. The man reached out and snapped the cord off with one pull, held the shrunken head up to his companions, who each turned and either laughed or smiled, or were deeply offended by what they saw and spoke angrily.

Had this white man come to conquer them with such pathetic powers and such disrespect?