Tuhoto Ariki, Tohunga who predicted disaster before the Tarawera eruption

The old  man waiting in Eleanor’s parlour was unlike anyone she had seen. Old? The man was ancient. He had ignored the chairs scattered around the room, and sat on the hearth rug before the fire, but he looked around as she entered the room.

“Tuhoto Ariki?” she asked, unsure of how to pronounce the unfamiliar name that had appeared in her appointment diary.

He gave a smile of considerable sweetness, distorted though it was by the tattoos that covered his face. His return greeting was in a fluid and musical language that she did not know, but whatever alchemy presented people from other times and places in her parlour also translated their words, so that her ears heard a foreign tongue, but her brain understood the meaning.

“Greetings,” he said. “I am he, and this is a strange dream. Am I in the land of Queen Victoria? Perhaps you are she?”

Eleanor took a seat on the chair closest to the old man. “Our queen is Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George. I am the Duchess of Haverford. May I ask where you come from, and what year?”

She could make nothing of his answer. He spoke of a canoe, a mountain, a river. He talked about the generations since that ancestral canoe first arrived, but none of the names he mentioned translated into anything Eleanor could understand. In return, she told him a little of the United Kingdom in her time, but that got them no further.

They were interrupted by the procession of maids, bringing the makings for tea and plates of refreshment. Tuhoto Ariki accepted tea, asking for sugar but refusing the milk.

“I am trapped in my house by the ash from the taniwha’s fire,” he explained. “My throat is parched, back in my life. I like your pretty room better, though it is cold, Duchess of Haverford.”

“Trapped in your house?” Eleanor queried.

“I warned them, the foolish young men. You are greedy, I told them, and the gods are angry. You take too many visitors to the sacred places. ‘The visitors make us rich,’ they said. ‘The carvings in Hinemihi, our meeting house, have gold coins for eyes.'” He shook his head. “They did not listen. Even when the phantom canoe came, they did not listen.”

Eleanor leaned forward. “Tell me about the phantom canoe.”

“They appeared out of nowhere. A canoe the like of which has not been seen on the lake in half of my lifetime. They were dressed for a funeral, chiefly spirits who paddled a short distance and faded away like mist. ‘We shall be overwhelmed’, I warned the villages, but no one listened to me. Then the taniwha under the mountain awoke and the sky split apart with its fire. Who knows how many will survive? Te Wairoa, the village of the meeting house with the golden eyes, is buried and me with it.” He took another great gulp of his tea, and then faded away like the phantom canoe, leaving nothing behind but a cup and saucer tumbling from the air to land on the hearth rug.

Tuhoto Ariki is an historical figure. The events of which he speaks, culminating in the eruption of Mount Tarawera, form the background for my story Forged in Fire, in the Belles’ collection Never Too Late and my own collection of New Zealand based stories, Hearts in the Land of Ferns, Love Tales from New Zealand.