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She didn't have her fur cape on, only her trousers, stained with spots of dark brown.

“Where is your cloak?” he asked. “Have you been sleeping in the bush with no blanket or fire, Hine?”

She shook her head. There were many questions but he said simply, “I came to find you.”

“The men came,” she said. “Mister Bailey, he woke me before they came up the hill.”

Billhook felt a cold, deadening in his stomach. “What did Bailey say?”

“He say … he say, ‘Come with me, Weed. We being attacked. Come with me.' ”

Billhook stumbled through the scrub, unable to get his dark visions of the child and Bailey out of his mind.

When he reached the cairn on the plate of stone at the highest point on the island, he stood before it, dizzy with fury, and punched into the manmade pile of rocks. It didn't hurt enough. He hit them again and again until his fists were a mess of blood and gristle.

He took her in blood. He cut her with his knife so he could take her. He took her in blood.

Billhook grabbed a stone from the top of the cairn and smashed it against the sheet of granite. Sparks flew and the stone rolled, clattering down the steep, southern face of the island. He could not see it when it crashed into the sea. He threw another and another until the cairn was just a small pile of litter. Then he grabbed the green glass bottle that had been nested inside and dashed it on the rocks.

He could see the camp from where he stood amid a mess of
broken glass. Figures moved about the fireplace and the shelters. One man lolled like a seal beside the fire and Billhook guessed it was Bailey, drinking his proceeds.

An ancient manorial right.

Ae! He would kill him! Blood dripped from his hands and splashed crimson into a ring of green lichen.

Samuel Bailey had woken before anyone else the night that Randall and his men arrived. Samuel Bailey did not seem to sleep at all or if he did, he slept like a dog with one ear cocked. He was the first man alert to the wind change at Investigator Island and the only man to take advantage of Randall's chaos. Samuel Bailey had been waiting for his chance. He took the child away and raped her in the bush because Billhook and the women were busy getting bashed with oars and waddies. As the sky lightened in the east, Samuel Bailey finished with the girl. He told her to stay in the bush or he would take her again. Then he scrambled away, striking his head with a stick to make himself bleed, for effect.

Billhook crouched amongst the glass, held his fists to his face and wept. He was there for a long time until the knowledge of what he must do became clear.

Then he made his way back to talk to the child.

Tommy North held the Frenchman's compass and tipped it from side to side. “It's a shitty old piece. You been gammoned if you paid anything for that.”

Billhook wouldn't commit to the jibe but nodded over to the hut, where Moennan sat lashed to one of the beams. “It's for the girl. I want her tonight.”

Tommy looked at Bailey who was still lying by the fire, drinking from a crock.

“You haven't had a go at her yet?”

“I like to take my time.”

“She be well poxed by now. A right fireship.”

Billhook was silent.

“As it be,” said Tommy Tasman, looking curiously at Billhook. “Tonight then.”

Hobson's little jolly-boat fidgeted against the barnacles. Billhook held the rope and waited. When Bailey was finally paralysed by liquor and the rest of the men asleep, Tama Hine crept into the camp, untied Moennan's bonds and coaxed her away.

“You brave, Tama Hine, bravest I ever seen,” Billhook whispered to her when she arrived on the rocks with Moennan and the dingo. Moennan's eyes were wide and both of the girls were very frightened. He could smell the fear in their sweat.

All four of them were spooked by the silent arrival of Dancer. Billhook hadn't mentioned the night flight to the Tyreelore, not wanting to implicate them.

“I'm taking them away safe, Dancer,” he said.

“So you do good work,” said Dancer in perfect English. “At last Billhook, you do the good thing.” And then she did something else quite out of character. She took Billhook's bandaged hands in hers and looked straight into his eyes. “You be good to those girls now.”

They sailed all night to the east. The flames of burning Michaelmas Island became smaller behind them until they rounded the pocked monolith of Rock Dunder. Tama Hine clung to the gunwale, terrified by the dark sea. He could not get her to sit trim. She clutched that stone of grey pumice. It was the shape of her heel, something else he had seen her hold when she was too scared to run.

Moennan watched ahead. She held the child's hand sometimes, or she ran her hands through the coarse hackles of her dog, ran her hand against his grain, ruffled up his spine and hugged him close to her.

The sky was lightening by the time he found the inlet, marked by the two stony mountains. They surfed a rush of tide through the stone-bound channel and into quiet, breathing waters, ringed with granite, flowering with orange lichen. They spread skins in the belly of a huge cave that curved into the mountain, and slept.

In the gloom of the cave, Billhook woke, wretched and sore, confused, with dark dreams still soaking his body. Being in the lee of the mountain meant no warning of the squall that ripped across the sky, rubbing out the sun. That brave yellow dingo whimpered and crept closer to the side of the cave with every bright flash or thump of thunder. The stone on which they lay began to run with water. Muttonbirds kept up their crying and the fairy penguins sounded like babies that would not thrive.

He looked out of the cave to the mountain above, where huge rivers rushed down the stone gullies. He knew that Bailey would find them. He peered past Moennan's matted hair, looking for the quicksilver splash of oars. He listened for the grind of a keel against granite. Then he rolled over and sought warmth in the furry bundle of Moennan, her dog and Tama Hine.

We shall live like oystercatchers, he thought. Red-eyed gamblers watching the tide surge, chancing our lives every day.

There was a big moon and then another, her belly swelling. All the time they lived on the quiet water Moennan did not question the Māori's lack of kindness for keeping her from her people. She was glad for the peace, and frightened too, for what would happen to her on her return. Something terrible had happened to the child. Moennan saw her eyes as she saw her own and they both knew. All that time on the inlet Tama Hine was her precious baby and her friend and her sister.

At night, they fished.

She was the tallest girl, the tallest thing on the whole inlet and above her the sky blazed and the black emu stretched out her wings. Quarter moon glowed the water. She forgot her sadness, her loss and the angry tingling of her diseased sex when the little boat swished over the seagrass and she spread her toes over the nets and used the stick to push the boat into clear water again. Wiremu forced a stick into the soft sand of the shallows, moving it in a circle to ease it in, looped the cork line around the wood. The boat lurched with his weight and Moennan spooled out a ragged net while he rowed. Later, they went back to his stick.

“Feel this,” he handed her the rope. She took the wet, muddy cork in her hand. She felt fish hitting the net; a sharp tug on the rope, a lighter hit from the smaller fish, a flutter as they struggled. He wriggled a big silver fish out of the net. “Hauture,” said he in his countryman's language. “Skipjack of the sealers.”

“Madawick,” said she.

She woke early when the air was still and cold. The wind had stopped. She left her skins to squat a little way from the cave, drove a neat hole into the gritty sand with her stream. She watched the dark loom of the Māori.

“Get up Tama Hine,” he shook the little girl. “See this … something in the water.” He stood right on the lacy edge of the beach and strange blue lights shot out of his toes. He waded in further and hot blue bullets fired away from his legs. She heard the girl breathe in quick. “Fire in the water, Tama Hine.”

Each step in the sea as they pushed out the boat made the fire sprites flare. Every stroke of the oars made a sparkling rush of sun-diamond water in the inky inlet and then the dripping airborne oars traced arcs of wild colour in the water beside the boat. Shrimp became brilliant drawings, stars falling through the sea. Fish flew away from them leaving a comet tail of blue fire in their wake. The Māori rowed and rowed straight past the stick that held fast his net and none of the dreaming three even noticed until they were well into the centre of the inlet.

“There be no fish tonight,” he said. “Net is lit up like a Chinaman's party.”

Moennan could see every mesh of the net illuminated shining blue, soaring up towards Wiremu's grappling fingers. They caught a few fish, yes, some gleaming fat madawick. But the sky was pinkening and all the blue fire creatures melted back to be secrets of the inlet.

After they ate a feast, Hine and Moennan walked over the mountain to the women's place, to show Tama Hine for when she was older and betrothed. But there was a fire burning inside the great stones and so they didn't go inside. On their way back to the inlet they broke touchwood from a rotten tree and found some good grubs. She showed the child how to carry the grubs
in her hair and how to peel a stick from the tree and push it into the ground nearby, so the people whose tree it was did not get angry with them.

Billhook waited above the carpet shark's stone grotto, throwing in the crushed pieces of crab, bits of their bright yellow bodies and black claws. He ate the claw meat raw, broke them against the rocks or crunched the shells open with his teeth and then threw in the rest, carapaces floating to the surface, the meat and guts trailing down through the water.

The wobbegong waited beneath a ledge. Billhook could see whiskers and the snout of the shark poking out. He threw in the last crab. Waited. He saw his reflection looming over the pool, his wild hair waving against the blue and the clouds. He saw himself as a shark would see him, looking up through the skin of the water to a waving sea urchin creature waiting, a wild predator, his spear a black line in the sky.