Fires of Change (The Fire Blossom Saga #2) - Sarah Lark Page 0,2

the meeting ground. An old woman stepped out of the wharenui, the communal house, followed by a group of girls Mara’s age. They purposefully led their sheep past the warriors and returned her song with their own. The girls sang of the beauty of the North Island, the endless white beaches, the thousand colors of the sea, and the spirits of the holy kauri trees that protected the open expanses of green hills.

Mara smiled and hoped that the Ngati Hine wouldn’t take it as an invitation to begin an entire powhiri. That could last for hours. But the old woman, obviously the tribal elder, kept the greeting brief. She approached the two pakeha women. Ida tipped her face to offer hongi, the traditional greeting. The farmers, Johnson, and the soldiers looked on mistrustfully as the women touched noses and foreheads.

Karl and Father O’Toole looked relieved. Mara, too, breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, they were getting somewhere.

“I brought gifts,” Ida said. “My daughter and I would like to visit with the tribe while these men clear up a misunderstanding. Of course, only if that’s all right with you. We don’t know how serious the disagreement about the land is.”

Mara interpreted happily, and the woman nodded and welcomed them.

Then Karl spoke with the chieftain as O’Toole interpreted. Maihi scowled at the farmers but seemed open to Karl’s suggestion to examine the maps to determine ownership of the disputed piece of land.

The elder who had initiated the temporary truce quickly returned to one of the houses. She came back immediately with a copy of the contract and the maps that the tribe had received when they sold the land. The documents had obviously been well taken care of, preserved as though they were sacred.

Mara watched with moderate interest as Karl carefully unfolded the papers and laid his own documents next to theirs.

“May I ask which parcels are being contested, Mr. Simson, Mr. Carter?” he said, turning to the farmers. “That would save us some time. Then we won’t have to ride the entire perimeter.”

Peter Carter indicated an area directly on the border of the Maori land. “I bought this here for my sheep to graze on. Then I discovered that the Maori women had planted a field there. When I drove my sheep over anyway, warriors with spears and muskets appeared, defending ‘their’ land.”

“Fine,” Karl said. “We’ll go there. Ariki, will you accompany us? And what about your land, Mr. Simson?”

The square-built, red-faced farmer pushed to the front of the group but couldn’t make heads or tails of the map.

The old Maori woman pointed to the paper. “Here. Land belong not him, not us,” she explained in English. “Belongs gods. Spirits live there. He not destroy.”

“There, you heard it!” Simson shouted. “She said herself that the land doesn’t belong to them. That means—”

“It’s documented as Maori land,” Karl said sharply. “See the little mark on the map? She means that place. We’ll have to go look at that too. Please come, ariki. The sooner we go, the sooner we’ll have this sorted out. Mr. Johnson, please inform Mr. Simson and Mr. Carter that they’ll have to accept our decision, whatever it may be.” He shot them an annoyed look.

Karl walked back to his horse, and Ida and Mara followed to get their gifts for the Maori women out of their saddlebags. They were just small things—colorful scarves, costume jewelry, and a few sacks of seeds. They hadn’t been able to transport more practical gifts like blankets or pots and pans. But Mara could tell that it wasn’t necessary. The women and children were already wearing mostly pakeha clothing, which provided more protection against the cool climate than the traditional flax garments of the Maori. Many of them also wore little wooden crosses on leather bands around their necks, in place of the traditional god figurines carved from pounamu jade. Several of the women approached Father O’Toole trustfully, spoke with him, and allowed themselves to be blessed.

“We all Christians,” a young woman declared to Ida, and proudly touched her cross. “Baptized. Mission Kororareka.”

“Our mission in Russell was founded in 1838,” Father O’Toole added. “It was started by French Dominican priests and Marist priests and nuns.”

“Are they . . . Catholic?” Ida asked. She herself had grown up in a strict community of Lutherans where Papists had been viewed as the enemy rather than as brothers and sisters in Christ.

For her part, Mara had never differentiated very much between different types of Christianity. There