The Star Path

The rot came to Hakau'iki in the season of the long rains, and by the time the rains stopped it was everywhere.

Mara saw it first. Not first of anybody, perhaps, but first of her own family, on a morning when the sky was washed clean and the lagoon was so still that the canoes on the beach seemed to float on their own reflections. Mara went up to the gardens behind the village with a digging stick to help Grandmother Ula, the way Mara did every morning, and stopped at the edge of the taro patch, and stared.

The taro leaves, which should have stood up tall and green and shining, each as big as a shield, were lying down. They had black spots on them, wet black spots with yellow edges, as if somebody had flicked hot ash across the whole garden. Some of the spots had grown together into great dark wet patches, and those leaves had folded and collapsed and hung down from their stalks like old cloth. And there was a smell, faint and sweet and wrong, like fruit left too long in the sun.

Grandmother Ula came up behind Mara, and stood, and did not say anything for a long time.

Then she knelt down, slowly, because her knees were bad, and dug with her fingers at the base of one of the fallen plants, and pulled. The corm came up out of the wet earth. It was soft. It was brown inside. When Grandmother squeezed it, it oozed between her fingers.

"Ah," she said quietly. Just that. "Ah."

By the next new moon, the rot was in every garden on Hakau'iki. It jumped from patch to patch, from family to family, no matter what anyone did. They burned the sick plants and dug new gardens, and nothing worked. The breadfruit trees, as if they had caught the sadness of the taro, dropped their fruit half grown. And Hakau'iki, which was a small island, a low green island on the very edge of Ha'apai, a day's sail from anywhere, with three hundred people living on it, began to be afraid.

"Niuatoa," said Grandmother Ula, one night, by the fire.

Everybody near enough turned to look at her, because she was the oldest woman on the island, and she did not say things for no reason.

"When I was a girl," she said, "a canoe came from Niuatoa, which is many nights to the north and east, a high island, with mountains and rivers. And they brought taro with them, to trade. A red taro. With purple stalks. My grandfather said that on Niuatoa they have a taro that never takes the rot. He said the rot came to them once, long ago, and killed everything, except that one kind, and from that one kind they grew all their gardens again." She looked into the fire. "If somebody went to Niuatoa. If somebody brought back shoots of that taro, alive."

Nobody said anything. Everybody on Hakau'iki knew what that meant. Many nights across open ocean, out of sight of any land. Nobody on Hakau'iki had made a voyage like that in thirty years. Nobody knew the way.

Except that, eleven days later, Tavake came.

Mara was on the reef at low tide, at dawn, looking for octopus, when the sail came over the edge of the world.

It came from the south. At first it was only a fleck, a white chip on the blue line where the sea met the sky, and Mara thought it was a bird. Then it grew. It grew into a shape Mara had only seen in carvings and heard of in songs: a great crab-claw sail, curved like the claw of a giant crab reaching up for the sky, woven of pandanus, the colour of honey in the early sun. And under it, as it came nearer, two hulls, long and black and slim, side by side, joined by a deck of lashed timbers with a little thatched shelter on it, cutting through the swell as easily as a knife through water, throwing up white spray from both bows at once.

A kalia. A voyaging canoe. A real one.

It came through the gap in the reef at exactly the right moment on exactly the right wave, which nobody except the oldest fishermen on the island could do. Then the sail came down, all at once, like a bird folding its wings, and the kalia glided across the lagoon in silence and slid up onto the white sand of the beach, right in front of Mara's village, as gently as a sleeping child being laid down on a mat.

Five people got off. A huge man. Two women, one young and one very old. A boy, a little older than Mara. And last, a man of about fifty, not tall, not short, lean and brown and creased by the sun, in a plain bark-cloth wrap, with grey in his hair and a face that looked as if it was always about to smile and had decided not to. He stood on the beach and looked up at the island: at the village, the sick gardens behind it, the drooping breadfruit trees. Then he looked down at the reef, where Mara was standing knee-deep in the water, staring, with an octopus spear in one hand.

"You," he said, across the water. "Which way is the swell running this morning?"

Mara did not even have to think. Mara had always known. Ever since Mara could walk, she had stood on the reef at dawn and felt it, the long slow push of the deep ocean coming from far away, through the soles of her feet.

"From there," said Mara, and pointed. "The big one. And a little one, under it, from there."

The man looked where Mara pointed, for a long time.

"Yes," he said. "My name is Tavake. Who taught you that?"

"Nobody," said Mara. "I just feel it. In my feet. I always have."

Tavake said nothing for a moment. Then he walked down the beach into the shallow water, in his bark-cloth wrap, not caring that it got wet, until he was standing beside Mara on the edge of the reef. He stood there with his eyes closed, and his feet apart, and his arms loose at his sides, swaying very slightly, for a long time. Long enough that Mara began to feel foolish.

"Most people," he said at last, without opening his eyes, "have to be taught for ten years to feel the second one. The little one, underneath." He opened his eyes. "Some people never feel it at all. My nephew, for instance." He nodded back at the boy on the beach, who was watching them with his arms folded and a scowl. "Don't tell him I said so."

That night, there was a feast for the visitors, as much of a feast as Hakau'iki could make in a bad year, fish and coconut and yam, and the people of the island sat around the fires and listened to Tavake speak.

He had heard about the rot, he said, from a fishing canoe at Ha'apai. He had heard that the old woman Ula remembered the red taro of Niuatoa. He had been to Niuatoa once, long ago, when he was young, with his own teacher. He knew the way. The star path to Niuatoa: he had it in his head, every star of it, the whole night sky, rising and setting. He would go and ask the people of Niuatoa for shoots of their red taro, and bring them back alive, if he could. He would sail in four days, when the moon was right.

And he would take one more on his canoe. An apprentice. Somebody from Hakau'iki, so that the island would have its own eyes on the voyage. And so that, when Tavake was too old, somebody here would know the way.

Everybody turned and looked at the young men of the island, the strong ones, the fishermen.

Tavake did not look at them. He looked across the fire at Mara, sitting at Grandmother Ula's side.

"That one," he said. "If the grandmother agrees."

Grandmother Ula was quiet for a long time. Then she reached up and took something from around her own neck, and leaned over, and tied it around Mara's, still warm from her skin.

"It went to Niuatoa once before," she said. "With my grandfather. It knows the way home."