Pōhutukawa was launched under the auspices of blazing Venus and got properly underway as the sun was rising, surging out of the harbour channel at thirty knots. Her pilot, Matt, pleased with the sickle-shaped wake he had cut in front of the headland, set the autopilot for the Aldermen Islands with a few taps on a touchscreen console. The boat’s outboard motor, seized by a life of its own, swung the Pōhutukawa east and then settled into twitching adjustments.
Tāne stood barefoot on the port gunwale, watching for prey boiling atop the water. He was always watching for a catch. John passed coffee in a travel mug up to him.
“How about it, city boy—got it in ya to grab a cray by the horns?” Tāne asked. The wind was wilding his hair.
“Too easy, mate,” John lied. He preferred to sightsee underwater. He had never caught a crayfish before.
“A fulla with some ticker! You hear this, Matt? Your bro’s gonna land a massive cray.”
“That’ll be the day!” Matt shouted from the cockpit.
Exiting Mercury Bay, the Pōhutukawa swung herself south, the rising sun warming their left shoulders and the sea shifting from turquoise to pelagic blue. On mornings like these, John felt reborn. They sped southward, past cow-dotted farmsteads atop grassy mountains. Sleepy beach towns and black stands of pine faded to a misty blue, and then dropped below the horizon. Their destination, the Aldermen Islands, remained featureless at this distance, only a range of broken blue tombstones.
Tāne emptied his coffee dregs into the boat’s wake.
“Let’s get to work.”
He tossed his mug into the cabin, tied his hair back, and heaved out the dive bag by its straps. It rumbled across the cross-hatched aluminium floor and crumpled against the back of the boat. John unzipped the bag and reached into its guts. He withdrew his wetsuit and set it aside in the ripening sunlight, then drew out his dive octopus. The four air hoses—three black, one yellow—hung limp in his hand. Both regulators were sand-speckled and scuffed. John side-eyed Tāne’s gear scattered over the boat’s floor; it looked rougher than his, more well-used.
Tāne, balancing against the boat’s rocking, lifted an aluminium slab out of the floor. He extracted a steel air bottle by its neck and laid it down parallel to the boat’s beam, before reaching for the second bottle. John rolled the bottle over; its buttercup paint chipped in places. Holding it between his knees so it didn’t topple, he dropped his buoyancy control vest over the top and then cinched the straps and clamped them down.
Next, he inspected the bottle’s rubber O-ring for damage, and satisfied with its only-slightly-shredded condition, clunked the octopus’s head over the valve and screwed it tight. He snapped the air supply into his vest, arranged the hoses under Velcro straps, and then held his air supply gauge at arm’s length and turned its glass face away. He twisted the air supply on. The hoses swelled. John tucked his hoses inside his vest and laid the bottle against the floor—it looked like a jellyfish hauled in by net.
Seaward, the Aldermens had resolved themselves into verdure-cloaked statues. The Pōhutukawa pitched to port, cutting into the gap between the mainland and the islands where the sea was roused into a whitecap-speckled fervour. She laid into the complex seascape, her knife-edged prow cutting open geysers that glittered with the colours of the rainbow.
Bracing against the conditions, John slipped off his shorts and squeezed into the wetsuit. He massaged the neoprene until his feet came through, then stretched his legs while engaging his abdomen. The legs of his wetsuit, wrestled into submission, slid into a snug fit. He removed his shirt and squeezed his head through the undervest, and then, cupping his hands, wormed his arms through the sleeves. John reached over his shoulder, taking the opportunity to stretch, and zipped up his back. The wetsuit felt warm.
“Stick close to me, Johnny boy!” Tāne was shouting over the engine’s roar. “I know it’s been a while since you’ve gone swimming, but try to keep up, eh?”
John felt his cheeks, pressed into cherubic balls by the stiff fabric, redden. It had been longer than a year since he’d dived. He went over the snatches of training he could remember. Relax and breathe, mate, he told himself. In a sticky situation, drop your weights and ascend. Scream as you do, so the expanding air doesn’t pop your lungs.
Tāne tossed John a flashlight and then kicked his empty bag back up toward the cockpit. John pulled out his long white fins and did the same.
The Aldermen Islands had presided over the fringes of the Pacific for a million years, and their deliberations would last a million more. Near these stone giants the sea was subdued into calm. Matt guided the Pōhutukawa through the eye of a needle rock and into a shaded bay, where one Alderman towered over the boat, its belly dropping straight down into water as black as obsidian. The sun had yet to rise over the islands. John shivered. Rusty kelp mats swayed in the swell as water surged up onto the rock, the black ocean foaming into sapphire.
As the Pōhutukawa puttered to a halt, Tāne was already standing his bottle assembly on the gunwale. John spat in his mask, rubbed in the bubble-specked goo, and leant over to baptise his mask in the sea.
“Hurry up,” Tāne said.
John heaved his assembly up and stepped in. It was like putting on a backpack full of rocks. He tightened first his cummerbund, and then his shoulder straps. His bottle’s air tasted lightly salted, lightly rubbery. Hunching, careful not to pitch forward, he clicked fifteen pounds of lead into his vest.
Tāne dropped off the side, sending up a torpedo impact and causing the Pōhutukawa to roll back and forth. John pulled his mask on and felt around the seal for errant hairs. Foggy splotches began to form on the glass. He pulled on his gloves. Matt helped him wrestle his fin-straps over his ankles.
“All good, bro?” Matt asked. “Tāne’s a good egg—he’s just keen for a solid catch. Don’t let him hurry you.”
John savoured a final breath of surface air. It tasted sweet.
“Yeah, mate,” he said.
Tāne yelled to hurry up. John bit on the regulator, pressed his mask with his palm, and relaxed backwards. Cocooned in the gear, he didn’t feel the drop; there was simply a blurry moment and then he was looking up at his fins and the beaten silver surface of the ocean from below. Refreshing cold seeped into his wetsuit through a hundred seams. The air in his buoyancy control vest popped him back to the surface, where he signalled to Matt that he was okay.
“He’s already down!” Matt pointed starboard.
John turned himself so that he looked down into the water; there was nothing below but gold threads of refracted light. John evacuated his vest and slipped beneath the surface. He followed the anchor rope down into the murk, flying through Tāne’s bubble clouds. Pain in his ears mounted, so he pinched his nose and squeezed air into his head. His ears squeaked and the pain dissolved. The dry bottle air tickled his throat.
Gradually, shapes resolved into recognisable forms: kelp down in the dimness below, flocks of black fishes flowing among and around undulating branches, a volcanic mesa jutting from the forest canopy. Framed against the blue-green sea, the reef appeared to John like the prow of a sunken pirate ship.
Tāne floated down atop the reef, shuffling his knees to avoid spiking himself on kina—sea urchins—scattered across the dust-coated rock. John added air to his vest by pressing a button, the sound like tapping on a live microphone, decelerating until he felt himself suspended in zero gravity. Tāne signalled that he was okay and then swam down a black crack that had been driven into the length of the reef.
John checked his depth gauge: eleven metres. When he looked up, Tāne was shining his flashlight across John’s face, drawing his attention to a hand signal— two horns made with his index and pinkie finger. Crayfish. He pointed.
Halfway down the crack, a cray the size of a wine bottle and the colour of merlot peeked out, conducting an adagio with its antennae. Its tangerine-accented front legs were splayed on the barnacled lip of the crack. When the beam of the flashlight brushed against its eyestalks, the cray retreated into the fissure.
John and Tāne swam to where it had disappeared. The fissure expanded into a hollow a few metres deep, and in the gloom, John detected movement. He pointed his flashlight inside, spotlighting a dozen crays that retreated as if singed. In a sense they were burned—their dark exoskeletons igniting into a spectacular sunset of scorched reds flared with licks of purple and orange.
They padded over the top of one another, shuffling deeper into the fissure, the large granddaddy crays shepherding young bugs as tiny as John’s thumb. Even these babies would be more than a year old, having metamorphosed from transparent larvae drifting on ocean currents.
Other creatures shared this space. John saw a snake-shaped brittle star with its serpentine arms attached to the ceiling, and returned the unblinking stare of a New Zealand bigeye fish hovering at the back, glinting silver in the flashlight’s beam.
Tāne patted John on the shoulder, urging him to strike. John picked out a cray in arm’s reach. It regarded him impassively. John mentally prepared himself to grab the crustacean’s spiked armour, for it to fight back with its muscular tail. He primed his arm like a compressed spring. Tāne nudged his shoulder again.
John threw himself into the darkness. His arm was up to his shoulder inside the crack. His fingers closed around something and a spike punctured his glove and skin. The pain wasn’t so bad. Dust kicked up as all the crayfish bolted to their escape routes. He had one. He could feel its tail flexing and its hooked legs digging in. He tugged, but it wouldn’t come free. He tugged again, hard, and felt it—or something—come loose. John plucked a broken antenna and a leg from the crack. The crayfish had escaped.
Tāne turned and swam away, taking the catch-bag with him. John’s cheeks felt hot. A black demoiselle with a pair of silver spots on its back fluttered past, as if to offer sympathy. John focused on his breathing as the dust cloud was dissipated by the swell. Next time. There would be other nests here. He searched for Tāne in the gloom but saw nothing. John pushed off and swam above the kelp searching for him, but he couldn’t find his bubbles.
So be it if Tāne wanted to get lost, John thought. He would find him back in the real world. He imagined Tāne shaking his head, splashing with the empty catch-bag and shouting, “John fumbled a good one,” and Matt laughing and pointing to a patch of foam off to starboard where John busied himself soaring among the fishes.
John decided to enjoy himself until he had just enough air to ascend. It was rare to find oneself in such beauty, and all you had to do was remember to raise your head and look around every so often. People like Tāne kept their head down in search of prey, rushing after scents and tracks and keeping their weapons sharpened. Perhaps to Tāne that was being human, as if even at the bottom of the Pacific some part of him was still on the savannah. John wondered if he was the same.
He swam on, coming upon a rocky colonnade speckled with pink and orange sponges, bright like candy. On the steps to this portico, a large flat rock was half-buried in the sand. The rock stared back at John with an elephant’s scowl, its pupil a crescent moon. He back-pedalled. Its edges undulated, and then the stingray picked itself up and swam in a lazy loop around and above John. It dwarfed him, its dragon’s tail leading him onward.
He passed through the underwater columns. Here in the centre of a circular colonnade, a basalt altar had been dropped on the temple’s sandy floor. A long dark crack ran down its flank—the perfect home for a cray, but John found it empty. Beyond the colonnade, a dark bulk loomed. John reckoned he was right at one of the Aldermen’s feet. He felt his chest vibrating with the power of the place.
He wanted to feel it on his skin. Tearing off his mask before he could second-guess himself, John blinked through the blurriness. Breathing slowly, he savoured the cold seawater against his eyes, the water pressure against his nostrils, the cool dry air hissing from the bottle. The columns shimmered and the stingray’s massive shadow flew overhead. He closed his eyes and breathed. In the spaces between his long breaths, absolute silence reigned.
When he put his mask back on and cleared it and opened his eyes, light washed over the temple as the sun rose over the head of the island above. The water brightened. Clarity crystallised over it all: fish gills billowing, bumps on the kelp leaves casting tiny shadows, shell shards in the sand shining like pearls. He noticed the kina strewn all over the temple floor and the severed white stumps of devoured kelp; a kina-barren. Profanity. John gingerly picked up the invaders and arranged them on the altar. Lifting a rock high over his head, he smashed the urchins to pieces. Orange guts, broken spikes, and cloudy goo twisted upward like smoke from a burnt offering.
First, the wrasses were drawn to the scent. One, with parrot stripes behind its gills, tore hungrily at the chum. Then came a school of blue maomao flowing water-like around the colonnade, followed by a crimson pigfish with its cream-coloured snout sniffing at a shred but not biting. Snapper with glowing spots on their backs chased the smaller fish as spotted parore dropped in, drawing the predatory barracuda and kingfish in to sit aloof above the columns.
John bashed more kina, the rock’s crash ringing dully through his bones. A solid wall of yellow-finned jack mackerels rushed into the temple and curled into a spout, the column of silver rising as one with John’s bubbles up and up and up, spiralling endlessly, and John swam into the centre it, bathing in stained-glass light, ringed by pipers and demoiselles and jack macks rotating around his body in great silver bands.
Gradually, they all dissipated as the feeding frenzy passed. The needle of John’s air gauge kissed the red portion of the dial. He smoothed out the sand on the temple floor and took a memento, a pāua shell of azure-pearl. This would do. He pushed off through the temple’s stone columns, allowing his momentum to carry him up and away.
He swam until he came to the edge of the reef, a cliff overlooking desolation dotted with white kelp stumps. There was nothing but open ocean in front of him for ten thousand kilometres. Soon it would drop into total blackness. John checked his depth. Eighteen metres. Looking down the cliff, he saw silhouetted far below a pair of antennae combing the sand. He shivered when he thought of swimming back down there to the bottom of the cliff. For a long moment, he checked his air again.
John swam down, slipping below the icy thermocline. The antennae grew closer. John gripped the ledge and swung himself around, coming to rest on the sand. There he came face-to-face with the largest crayfish he had ever seen. Vexed at the disturbance, it stared into John’s eyes from behind great armoured horns, adorned with golden barbs. Its carapace bulged around its legs, giving it a shape like a sports car. The crack this cray had sheltered in was shallow with a sandy bottom, and no escape hole. This desolation was no place for such a beautiful crayfish.
John’s hand sprang out without hesitation, his fingers closing over its back. The cray exploded at him. Its great legs clawed at his chest, its muscular tail flexing. The pāua shell fell into the sand. John’s heart pounded as he wrestled with the cray, gripping it with both hands and trying fruitlessly to control it. The crayfish’s legs flared out and then levered shut over John’s shoulders and waist, its claws sinking into the skin beneath his wetsuit. John tried to swim upwards, his legs pumping, but a force on his shoulder kept him down. Was he trapped? He kicked again, but went nowhere. The crayfish levered up an edge of his mask and a torrent of frigid seawater flooded in, blinding his right eye. Its churning mouth was right over the top of the glass. John tried to lift the crayfish off him, but he was in its grip more than it was in his. His breath came deep and fast and loud. He twisted, his bottle dragging in the sand.
Then there was Tāne, with flame in his eyes and a cold sense of purpose as he snatched the cray’s back. Unhooking the crayfish’s legs one by one, he pulled it off John’s chest and stuffed it tail-first through the catch-bag’s rubber lid. Tāne grabbed John by both shoulders and shook him—John could hear only robotic monotones, but he could tell that Tāne was screaming congratulations by the air gushing from his regulator. Tāne jerked his thumb at the surface and John signalled okay back. He picked up his pāua shell and they ascended, the catch-bag hanging heavily.
Tāne and John clambered into the Pōhutukawa, spilling seawater everywhere. Tāne was electrified, John stunned. They unzipped the bag, releasing the cray. It skittered into the corner, where Tāne pounced on it to measure its tail with a plastic tool. It was female.
“You lucky bastard,” he said. “They don’t get any bigger than this.”
John thought he heard a hint of disbelief.
“Drinks on me, mate.”
The cray with the golden barbs and thick legs moved lethargically in the surface world, almost as if in a dream. John knew the feeling. He picked it up and held it high. It was longer than his torso, and heavy. Matt snapped a photo and then John held the crayfish close to the lapping water and returned the offering to the temple. It sank first into a white, then a yellow blur, before vanishing from sight.