“Slow the hoe!” Faturaki commanded

The four remaining warriors lifted their paddles in unison. Water dripped in threads of pearl light from each blade, catching the first flare of dawn. The waka slowed, rocking gently as the wind rose—light at first, then full enough to scatter a cool mist across their faces.

Faturaki steadied the steering blade beneath his foot and raised his face to the east. “E komo ma Rā,” he murmured, a short karakia to greet the god of light. The crew listened, silent but grateful for the pause. The glow of dawn spread over the horizon, warming their shoulders as Rā ascended on the third day of the voyage.

When the northeasterly trade winds had died the day before, they had furled the crab-claw sail and taken to the hoe—a hard paddle through calm seas. Now, with the wind’s return, the sail began to breathe again. Faturaki moved forward along the centre strake, balancing with each roll of the hull, his shadow long and wavering over the deck.

He paused at the place where Pareora once sat. Her paddle was still tied beneath with a loop of tapa cord, salt-dried and idle. The harakeke lashings rubbed a sound softly. He rested a hand on the empty space but said nothing.

From the bow came the slow rasp of breathing—four crew spent from the night’s work. Faturaki had driven them hard since pre-dawn, determined to make distance before the tide turned. Now they floated and sweated in silence, drawing deep breaths, the waka gently sighing around them.

The wind shifted, filling the tan matting above. Faturaki raised his eyes once more to the horizon, and in that sacred dawn-light, the sea god whispered: Keep her steady old man.

Faturaki was a confident navigator but none of these escorts were full-time sailors—a kau takitini, half Feke and half Matavai, bound together by his command. He drove them to a faster pace to make up for the slack wind. They needed the favour of the current and the strength of youth—for they were not born navigators.

He lifted his hand toward the sky in thanks, “That was a good pull. I can almost smell Ho on the wind.”

While the crew chewed dried fish and fruit, Faturaki checked Hōkūpa‘a. In the last dark before dawn he raised his hand to eye level, palm toward him, fingers together. Last finger on the horizon—one, two, three. Three to the star: they were still on the right latitude for Ho’s atoll. Bearing next. Along the waka’s side-rail, carved notches marked the horizon houses; tonight they were aligned to the northwest guide they had chosen at the outset—Hōkūle‘a. Facing it, Faturaki lifted his fist, thumb on the horizon, then sighted up his forefinger. The swell rose, the canoe dipped—he held his breath and took the reading. Like all navigators he kept the sky’s names at the tongue and their houses in his bones. The crew watched him in silence until a smile touched his usually stern face.

“How far—uh, how far to go, Tohunga Faturaki?” Galiaga asked, his voice cracking midway.

“Not far now,” he said, slapping his hands together and grinning.

They had made good time after all. Still, their waka rode seas under Namaka’s eye, and she was jealous of her domain. From here, every precaution mattered if they were to avoid more deaths. Faturaki stood at the stern and read the water ahead. The swells, deepened in blue, lifted and fell; shadows moved within them, revealing less than they hid.

Hiria, his third and favourite wife, spoke from the world of spirits: Fatu my love, invoke Fisaga, bringer of soft winds and fair weather, to temper Namaka’s changeable moods. Only now—this morning, for the first time in days—did his doubts about guiding this voyage to its end begin to quiet. Fatu thanked Hiria, but she was already gone, like so many spirits with no time to hover over flesh. He longed to be with her again but would not let the feeling root as it had after he first lost her, years wasted in grief, empty of appetite and sleep.

Fifty years had passed since he was last with her, and just as long since he had served as a full-time navigator and steersman. The ocean night skies were as familiar to him as the forests of his Ahukai homelands, but his command of the hoe—the steering paddle—and the paddling chants had not returned easily. Faturaki whispered the incantation to Fisaga before drifting memory once more. Too many seasons away from open sea had fogged his mind, and these foreign warriors were not familiar with Ahukai cadence; they stumbled at the beat.

“You’ve heard this one before, eh?” he had asked them yesterday, before sunset, and chanted a newer turn of the old Hunt for the Moa:

Tread softly—softer. Quick through the brush—faster. Let your spear fly with fury, thrusting forward and back. The moa is snared. Hear it cry; mark its tears. Under Kauri’s watch, the guard is lifted. Now, hunter—warrior;

now, hunter—warrior;

now the death-stroke.

His voice had faltered on “hunter” and “warrior.” His tongue caught, and the timing at the hoe went with it just as the swells began to rise. Waves bunched like a rumpled tapa mat, shouldering under them until they crested—near rolling the waka. It was an embarrassing mistake for a kaihautū and timekeeper, and he fell back to the common waka chants—the ngeri taught to children—to keep the beat from breaking again. If they made it back at all, his failures on this voyage would become gossip in the weaving houses of all nine tribes of Kafiki: how the ancient, immovable Faturaki had begun to crack. A return to Kafiki might not be welcome anyway—not after the decree. The chiefs had laid a tapu on visiting Ho’s island: no waka were to seek him out unless the risk to Kafiki outweighed the cost of the exile’s wrath. That time, Faturaki believed, had come.

After confirming their position, his own limbs creaking from long hours at the paddles, death feels like a rich reward right about now my love, he moved between the crew and along the crossbeams, checking for damage along the main hull. He trusted the mana of the waka and the name of its carver. Tākuta Nui held mana over the waka by way of carving it, and he had whispered protective karakia to masts, sails, and lashings the morning the escort voyage began. Even so, a navigator tends his sailing waka without cease—even more when the chief is not a chief.

The task was simple named: sail from Kafiki Motu to Ho’s atoll and ask his adopted son to return to the mainland—to slay again. That last part was the tangle; he would need a reason stronger than the giant’s skill as a monster-hunter. By his reckoning they were two days from Ho’s atoll on this heading. Two days to shape a lure and hook Ho.

Faturaki washed dried seaweed from the outer hull and thought of the prophecy again. Is this the beginning of it? Is this what starts the undoing of Kafiki Motu?

Faturaki had kept to himself—the hermit of Takali Foto—brooding twenty years over a prophecy spoken at the edge of a death, the only words ever heard from a child who never spoke. He was trying to read whether this was the time foretold for Kafiki’s undoing. Then the Baby Eater came stalking and began its taking, and when the council of chiefs judged that only Ho could stop the beast, Faturaki feared their last days had come. So, before they sailed, he chose the sacrifice. He refused the first two captives offered and instead named a young Ahukai boy—already failing with the laughing sickness. Discovered in the remote valleys, killing children at the same rate as the Baby Eater. Taking the young was a terrible decision, regardless of the fitness of the child. Which was why it was important the sacrifice come from his own tribal seed. That was tika and correct for this undertaking but left him little room; if Ho could not be lured back to Kafiki Motu, the ending would surely be loosed.

After eating at dawn the next day, the four remaining crew stowed their hoe and weapons, then slipped into the moana-clear water. Faturaki was careful to give neither the young warriors of Feke nor the Matavai escorts any cause to idle. The Feke contingent was a temporary gift from Chief Taumatafiti, who understood the gravity of the voyage. Matavai witnesses—sent to confirm Ho lives, alone upon his rock. His legend would attract women to leave the safety of the island in waka voyage, asking to seek him out. It was shameful for their men—which made them more prone to easing off their duties. A brief swim in the calm would help clear their mana before they set off again. The crew washed quickly, then began to play-fight, laughing as they ducked under to evade each other’s grasp.

Faturaki, fussy in his old ways, sorted through the weapons, lingering on one of the finer club-axes, an excuse to sit and rest his legs. By the time they had left Kafiki Motu’s shores seven suns past, Faturaki had tested their water-sense, making them set the crab-claw sail in the Tumutumu fashion. All six had given up before he finished loading provisions. They were slow to stow their weapons, tripping over them and accusing one another of trickery. His mind was made up: warriors first, girls and boys second, navigators never. No sooner had they cleared the bay than they began to mock his age.

Sinokoa, the Feke girl, teased. “Fatu, is it true you turned your back on women for that mountain you call home?” Galiaga chuckled. “Ah, he met her long ago—when she was still a young spine of rock, fresh from the ocean’s womb.”

There was more child than adult on the voyage—eager for the killing art, not the open sea. Coastal raids in waka was the schooling; tattoos carved into forearms and thighs for Feke and thighs and wrists and ankles for Matavai, carrying the warrior lines. By the third day Faturaki had heard enough to know the temper of the young people of this season: village talk on Kafiki Island, as if no other shore mattered. They cared little for navigation or voyaging, less for the sacred arts by which one becomes a tohunga, or any other craft besides.

When the weather turned gentle, they spoke almost in whispers of certain village girls and boys; women who welcomed many, of any tribe. Men who moved through villages as if seed blown by the wind—leaving small forests wherever they pass. They handled one another’s club-axes, pointing out flaws and advantages with a show of respect, certain that muscle alone would carry any fight—willfully blind to the heavier spiritual currents moving around them. War talk filled their hours: bloody tales of utu and how balance is restored to one’s mana. They boasted of campaigns and not the losses, recited weapon-names, and ranked the great warriors of the islands.

Within two generations, across Kafiki and her outer isles, people were speaking of mana rising again—not only for one man or woman, but for families and lesser branches seeking to grow among the people. After the longest peace in twelve generations, the old ban on war had been lifted. Where music, weaving, and carving had once held the villages’ hearts, binding seven of the nine tribes into a celebrated trade alliance, speech had turned back to ruin. Peace agreements, it seemed, had lived only to be broken. Most young men now weighed their mana by wounds and prowess, not by the strength of speeches or song in the meeting houses.

Faturaki slid the club-axe back along the waka’s floor and closed his eyes, taking in the warmth of Rā. An image settled: waters red with blood.

Tufukia rose, touched the oldest mark at his throat, shoulders squared to the open water—the endless face of the sea-god. “Takaroa, favoured of Feke, protect us again,” he began, a humble warrior’s request. Tufukia, a chief’s son, was also known as the scarred one—already sung about by young women whose songs only thickened his mana. Middle of the three remaining men, he kept the same heavy-jawed, steady manner Faturaki had seen twenty summers ago when his mana was first assessed. Even then he had been the middle choice: a keen warrior, with little gift for the sacred arts, balanced by good lineage and earnest intentions.

“Maintain your spirit’s vigilance and preserve this waka. Bring home Ho. It is an honour I can tell my great-great grandchildren about.”

Ho was a living legend. Men who had fought beside him once, rewarded with fatherhood, told blood-soaked tales: how he hunted five taniwha in a day and gifted the beasts to chiefs to settle ancient grievances; how he felled thirty warriors in a single battle; and other tales—of drinking puga and turning on his allies, of insulting ancestors and gods, of shaming nobles by taking their wives, of burning villages over a slight at a feast. His rage spilled beyond battle. A mark of his unknown origins, Faturaki was sure. Seed to the cursed black cloud buried inside him.

“Keep Rā visible by day, and the stars by night.”

This was the man who fled Kafiki of his own choosing when he saw what his rage did to women and children. He was as fickle as the season of the great winds, able to loose havoc across the islands. Faturaki lifted a water gourd from his feet and drank, waiting for the warrior to finish, a spark of pride flickering for these Feke warriors and their Matavai escorts. Though his allegiance would always be to Ahukai and to Takali Foto, the volcano god, they were all united as Kafikians—Matavai and even Feke islanders.

“Let our mana travel the ocean expanse, yet today remain and grow upon this waka,” Tufukia finished.

Galiaga and Sinakoa, and the two Matavai ariki brothers, Tufukia, Tu‘unaga, climbed back to their waka positions, readying for another day’s hoe. Tu‘unaga, the younger of the pair, rubbed at his eyes, red-faced and trying not to cry. His dearest companion Pareora, who had shared his sleeping mat, was one of the two taken by the taniwha; the memory still bit. Faturaki stepped amidships and handed the boy his gourd.

“How much further do you think, tohunga Faturaki?” asked Tu‘unaga, looking up at him while wiping tears from his wet face. He rested a hand on the young warrior’s shoulder. “One more sun, boy. We should sight the island at dawn.”

“Are we going to cut up the pig?” Galiaga asked.

Interest had grown in the small puaka caged at the bow, grunting whenever it lost its footing. Besides the dried fish, taro, banana, and kava—all gifts to Ho from the women of Feke—the pig was the prize, should they find him alive upon the atoll. Their own supplies, in comparison, half of what was being reserved for Ho, were keenly noted by the crew.

Faturaki nodded to the ocean. “Wash your face, Tu‘unaga, and we move,” he said, before turning to Galiaga. “Keep your mind on your hoe, and your thoughts off the pig.”

Tu’unaga offered the gourd to Galiaga, who ignored him and stared toward the horizon, chastened.

Faturaki had not seen his adopted son for almost ten seasons, and while their reunion would be well received, he feared the giant might fly into a rage should they arrive without gifts. Some of the elder women of Feke, wise to the pride of powerful men yet eager to see their island hero return, gifted the puaka—a sure token for his willing return.

One of the chief’s wives had begged him as he gathered the puaka and other provisions for the voyage. “Bring him back safely, tohunga! He is the greatest of all warriors and must find his way home to Feke Motu—though many still speak ill of him.”

His new crew of warriors had struggled to find a suitable pig, delaying their launch until after midday, but now, closer to the island and knowing his son’s appetite, he was thankful for the gifts. A message he would pass to Howaru: the deaths his club-axe had brought across Feke, the widows and childless mothers left behind him, were set aside. Yet as he walked through the village collecting the prepared offerings of food, some passersby would not look at him. An old woman, ancient as the tallest trees of the Mahana ranges, spat on the path before him, cursing Faturaki for wishing to bring Ho back.

“Is that whole puaka for Ho?” Tufukia now asked.

Foolish boys, he thought. The longer they pulled the hoe, the hungrier—and bolder—they became. By denying them the pig, he might have been saving their lives. Ho had once split a man’s head for the last bowl of kava; his moods were unpredictable. That was why Faturaki had been charged with raising the boy, after Ho’s escape from the Autara tribe.

“And what if he’s dead?” one of them persisted. “Then Takaroa has abandoned us,” he said, fearing the worst. “And we eat the puaka, tohunga?”

“We eat the pig.”