The Moai Murders

URE E REKA

THEY SHOULD NEVER have come back, Ure e Reka thought. As much as they had dreamed of the return to their home, as harsh as the life had been, they should have stayed where they were.

He could still feel his face burn at the humiliation of it, the way the men from the big ship had thrown their gifts onto the sand of the shore, forcing all of them to crawl on their hands and knees to retrieve them. And then, while they scrambled, those same bad men had grabbed them from behind, tied their hands, and carried them to the waiting boats. So many of them! Even the ariki mau and the other wise men of the clan Miruf Even his father, maori rongorongo.

They had been frightened then, on the long voyage to the terrible place, but it was nothing compared to what awaited them: the guano fields of the Chincha Islands, where they had worked in the stench and the heat, forced to the hard labor by the men who took them. He and the others could only dream of returning home.

But then, the word came, from some important ariki far away. They were to be returned to the island. Their fortune had been almost too happy to be believed.

Marama was the first man among them to fall ill. As the ship sank into the troughs, then rose again, he began to scream, tearing off his clothes as the fever took him. And then one by one the others had succumbed to the fever, and one by one they had died. His father had been among the last to be taken.

There were only a handful of them left, perhaps fifteen in all, of the thousand who were taken and the hundred who set sail for home, dumped on the beach they had been taken from so many months before.

His mother had been there, throwing herself into his arms. She too had later sickened and died, as the hideous fever swept on. Delirious, she told him to find his sister. She could not tell him where she was.

Already he knew he was ill. The sores had begun to appear on his flesh as it had with the others. If he found his sister, she too would die. No, she would have to fend for herself. What he needed to do before the fever had him in its grip was to hide the tablet, as his dying father had told him to do—the tablet, the kopeka, and the votives. His father had entrusted him with the location of the cave, and he would take it there. His father's aku-aku was very powerful. It would guard over the cave and its contents until someone came.

They should never have come back. Death had come with them.