Lands of Red and Gold #0: Prologue
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Lands of Red and Gold #0: Prologue February 1310 Tasman Sea, offshore from Kiama, Australia Blue sky above, blue water below, in seemingly endless expanse. Dots of white clouds appeared on occasions, but they quickly faded into the distance. Only one double-hulled canoe with rippling sail cut a path through the blue emptiness. So it had gone on, day after day, seemingly without end. Kawiti of the Tangata [People] would very much have preferred not to be here. The four other men on the canoe were reliable enough travelling companions, so far as such things went. Yet being cramped on even the largest canoe made for too much frustration, and this was far from the largest of canoes. Only a fool would send out a large canoe without first exploring the path with a smaller vessel to find out what land could be discovered. Of course, only a fool would want to send out exploration canoes at all, so far as he could tell. The arts of long-distance navigation were fading back on Te Ika a Maui [North Island, New Zealand]. That was all to the good, so far as Kawiti was concerned. Why risk death on long sea voyages to find some new fly-speck of an island, when they had already discovered something much greater? Te Ika a Maui was a land a thousand or more times the size of their forefathers’ home on Hawaiki, and further south lay an island even greater in size. Their new lands were vast in expanse, and teemed with life on the earth, in the skies above, and in the encircling seas. Still, here Kawiti was, on a long voyage like his grandfather had spoken about. He had learned the old skills, and now he had been made to use them, whether he wished it or not. He would much rather be hunting moa in the endless forests than chasing ghosts in this endless water. “Remind me why I’m out here,” he said, to the air around him. His cousin Nene took the statement seriously. “Because Rahiri wants us to be out here, and so here we are.” “If there’s exploring to be done, the Big Man should do it himself,” Kawiti muttered. “That’s the point to being the Big Man; you get to tell others what to do, instead of doing it yourself,” Nene said. Since that was manifestly true, Kawiti changed the subject instead. “No matter what Rahiri wants, we can’t keep exploring much further in this wind.” As any sensible navigator would do, Kawiti had steered his canoe into the wind for this exploration. That would make it safer to run for home if they needed to, rather than risk being becalmed until they died of thirst. “We have enough water to explore for another sunrise, maybe two,” Nene said. “If-” He never finished that sentence, since Kawiti pointed to the skies instead. “Gulls!” That brought exclamations from all of the men on the canoe. A half dozen or so white-and-silver gulls circled in the skies to the south-west. Kawiti took hold of the steering oar and turned the canoe in that direction. Sure enough, when they got closer, they saw that the gulls were just like those which crowded the shores of Te Ika a Maui and flocked like so many winged thieves to the site of any moa kill. Gulls meant land nearby, of course, as any child knew, yet what kind of land? As the canoe swept south-west, Kawiti looked for the build-up of cloud which was often associated with islands. He saw no low-lying clouds, just the same occasional high white puffs which had been their only company for days. Yet the sky to the west did look different, somehow. It had turned into a kind of blue-gray haze, instead of the usual blue. Strange indeed. When they went a little further west, Kawiti realised that he could smell something. A striking, tangy odour unlike anything he had ever inhaled. Piercing, somewhat sharp, not entirely unpleasant but most definitely unfamiliar. Land had to be near, but what could produce such as a sharp smell to carry it over the horizon? Soon enough, he had his answer. The azure expanse of sea was replaced by an endless stretch of brown-green land in the distance. It covered the entire western horizon, as they drew near. Not a small island, then, rather something worth discovering. Another new land, surely not as large as Te Ika a Maui, but worth visiting. Trees grew near to the shore along this entire coast, it seemed, but Kawiti steered the canoe toward an open expanse of sand. The canoe landed easily enough on the beach, as it was designed to do, and the men quickly dragged it up beyond the high-water mark. No telling how long they would be here, and they could scarcely risk losing their only way home. “Another island of forests,” Nene said. “And smell those trees!” Kawiti could only nod. Those strange white-barked trees were the source of the odour which they had smelled even out of sight of land. They looked tall, but they were more widely-spaced than he would have expected of a forest. The ground between the trees was suspiciously empty, too. A few shrubs grew here and there, with grass elsewhere. Why hadn’t those bushes grown to cover all the ground between the big whitebarks? There was light enough for them to grow, surely. “We need to find water,” he said. No stream or spring was obvious, but there had to be something. There was always water somewhere. “And somewhere to camp. And then-” A strange man seemed to step out of the ground, making Kawiti forget his instructions. A man with skin black as night itself, who had somehow concealed himself well enough that neither Kawiti nor anyone else in his crew had noticed him. The man held a spear in his hand, although he pointed it at the ground rather than Kawiti and his fellow Tangata. The black man rattled off a few words in a speech which made no sense whatsoever. Kawiti held his right hand, face up, to show that it was empty of a weapon, then said, “We mean no harm.” The words would probably mean nothing, but at least his tone should sound peaceful. The black man flicked his head upward, as if biting at his own earlobe. A gesture of frustration, or something else? No way to know, not in this strange land. The black man wore some sort of woven cloth around his waist which went halfway to his knees, and had a head-dress of gray-brown feathers covering black, curly hair. The black man spoke again, more loudly, in words which sounded slightly different to his previous speech, but just as meaningless. Softly, Kawiti said, “No-one raise any spears. There’s five of us, and only one of him.” “Two of them, at least,” Nene said. “I’m sure I saw someone else back there behind the trees.” The black man looked from one of them to the other, then thumped the butt of his spear on the ground. More black men appeared from behind trees or stood up from behind bushes which by rights were too small to conceal anyone. The other strange men came to stand beside their fellow, moving quickly but not running. They all had spears of some kind or another, and the same night- coloured skin, but there the similarities ended. Each of the men was dressed differently. One had a feathered cloak wrapped around him, another wore the hardened leather skin of some animal about his chest in what had to be some kind of armour. One man, apparently the leader of the black men, had a round shield attached to his left arm. Not made from wood, as a few of the Tangata used, but some kind of strange substance that was yellowish-brown, and which gleamed. It looked harder than any wood, but obviously lighter than stone, from the way the black man held that shield. Belatedly, Kawiti realised that each of the black men’s spears were tipped with heads not of stone, but of the same yellow-brown substance. Those heads did not have the same shine on them, but they still looked strong. Who were these strange men? * * * August 1619 Western Coast of Australia Commander Frederik de Houtman stood on the deck of the Dordrecht, beneath stars which always struck him as unfamiliar. Even though he had named some of these southern constellations himself, in his voyages of half a lifetime ago, he still found them strange to this day. In the moonlight, the coastline was only a murky shadow on the eastern horizon, but its shape filled his thoughts. For several days he had watched the shore here. It appeared so inviting, yet he had been unable to land. The roughness of the seas meant that he did not dare to let the ships go closer, not even to launch boats - if any boats would survive that treacherous surf. If his ships had not been so heavily laden with goods due in Batavia, he might have risked venturing closer. As it was, he could only wait, and consider. He did not wish to delay for much longer, but he was intrigued, and more than intrigued. The southern route to Batavia had only been in use for nine years, since Hendrik Brouwer discovered the strong winds in the southern latitudes, and reduced the sailing time by two-thirds.