Haka! The Backlash

Chapter One
Pāhuatanga: The Invasion

“Move out, men! March!”

Major Smith’s peremptory command cleaved the nascent dawn like a swift blade of battle-scarred austerity. Roused from a shallow, disturbed slumber, the campaign-fatigued ranks of the Queen’s Armed Constabulary donned their scarlet habiliments and shouldered their accoutrements, their regimented ingress encumbered by the oppressive inertia of this fern-choked frontier.

Hedged upon either flank by towering walls of impenetrable verdure, they toiled with sodden boots into the morning gloom, a madder-red thread winding through a labyrinthine forest of ancient rot and silver ferns. The rhythmic percussion of their laboured advance was swallowed by the viscous mire, wherein rain-filled puddles reflected the arterial shimmer of the sunrise.

Here they come—with bayonets burnished, sabres whetted to a lethal edge, and rifles slick with the sheen of sweet oil, the column of three hundred and fifty soldiers set its unwavering sights on the fortified pā atop yonder peak.

A company of infantrymen at the rear endured the Herculean undertaking of hauling—up precipitous inclines, and down sharp, mossy ravines—the dismantled irons of an Armstrong cannon. The company manually heaving the industrial weight of Victorian England through a tangled wilderness of supplejack and nīkau palms that moved against their treacherous, ineluctable advance like a tightening tourniquet.

Eight pā had already fallen to Smith & Co.’s omnicidal, cruentous campaign. They were not merely conquered, but sacked, razed, and completely expunged from the face of the earth. Myriads were indiscriminately butchered, with countless others marched into the maws of colonial gaols, asphyxiated by the legal garrotte of Hostile Resistance—a fabricated treason levelled against any who dared obstruct them.

Their intentions were clear: a grim momentum determined to execute the iron-inked orders of a decree writ by the Native Minister of the New Zealand Government at Wellington. It was a brutal mandate—a statutory Death Sentence stamped with the cold seal of imperial betrayal in open defiance of the sacred pact struck at Waitangi. Drafted by men who would never smell the blood spilt on the earth, it was birthed over whiskey, cognac, and cigars in stagnant, wood-panelled chambers. It demanded nothing less than the total purgation of the soil—the jungles had to be cleared, the contours surveyed, and a rigid, geometric grid superimposed to satiate the voracious appetites of London’s counting-houses.

All across the islands of Māui, this unprecedented evil scoured every arboreal precinct, executing that official government decree in the most merciless and opprobrious fashion. These were frantic, terminal hours. Where timbers and bone once stood, now there was blood and silence. Yet, within the private confessions of his vellum court ledgers, Major Smith recorded for the formal annals:
“All Natives: ‘Humanely Dispersed—’”

The unembellished truth: Massacred—young and old alike. Hewn to pieces, immolated within their own whare, and reduced to a bloody pulp by the foudroyant lead of maniacal redcoats.

“March on, men!” Major Smith pressed. “May God be with ye!”

¤ ¤ ¤

Here they come—in the Name of a foreign God whose statutes and commandments serve only to attest to the abysmal depths of their own odium.

Bearing their theocratic scriptural ruse in one hand and the Lightning-Rod in the other, this polity spent centuries perfecting the macabre arts of regicide and antinomy, and was now executing that same hypocrisy upon the unprofaned shores of Aotearoa.

Here they come—marching relentlessly beneath their Union Jack in the name of Queen and country. Their regimented footfalls shuddered the ferny dale.

The wan aubade, a whispering echo of its former glory, fell silent at the passage of that heaving, scarlet tide. The unsuspecting pā atop the craggy escarpment still slumbered in illusory serenity beneath a thin veil of blue wood smoke, gently curled by the caress of a zephyr. And the Queen’s Armed Constabulary crowned the last crest, strangling the forested peak with a thread of blood.

¤ ¤ ¤

“Kia hiwa rā!” the ever-watchful sentries cried through the twilight, raising the alarm of incursion for the pā.
“Kia hiwa rā!” the cry warned the irrupting column below that their soiled feet trespassed upon the sacred ground of sovereignty.
“Kia hiwa rā!” The cries echoed through wooded gullies, a sharp knell against the beauty of the coming dawn.

¤ ¤ ¤

At first light, Hine Kura had descended the steep forest trail. She carried a bundle of decorated hue by their plaited flax ropes, moving down a steep, tree-tunnelled incline toward the ferny brook deep within the ravine. The return ascent constituted a gruelling travail, yet it remained her customary diurnal pilgrimage. When she heard the sentries’ cries of alarm echoing through the twilight, the weight of her burden magnified as an undulating, palpable terror seized her. The bellbird and kākā, piopio and tūī, who sang all around her, lowered their songs to a hush.

And the cry of a solitary falcon lanced the dreadful silence.

The pā was still terribly distant. Her feet rooted to the earth, her heart thrashed against her ribs—a frantic, resonating thump syncopating with the indomitable dread. Should she discard her burden and flee? She calculated with a desperate arithmetic. Who could possibly be approaching? Only family and blood-bound allies inhabited this coastal stretch; no messenger had been dispatched to herald a travelling party. It could not be a traditional siege, for the sanguinary gore of the Musket Wars lay over a generation interred.

No, this was an altogether new species of shadow. It had to be the Pākehā—her guts whispered the allegation.

¤ ¤ ¤

Propelled by frantic terror, Hine Kura threw herself at the ladder-steep ascent of rain-slicked clay with ragged, shallow gasps. Every desperate handhold was fuelled by the whispered nightmares that haunted the coast—the colonial legions with their Lightning-Rod‘s, scorched-earth crusades, and a decree authorising total genocide.

She clawed higher, the damp bracken tearing at her skin, the weight of the hue dragging at her form like a physical anchor.

“In Hell! You shall burn forever!”

The missionaries’ puritanical threats thundered incessantly through her mind. They promised an insatiable, eternal furnace for any who refused to surrender both their souls and all their terrestrial domains to the Pākehā—it all made sudden, perfect sense.

She gripped desperately at soft clay and weeping ferns.

They were here!—the winds of rumour had warned of this. Of Kūpapa surrendering the veiled byways of the forest, guiding the militant redcoats directly to their hidden sanctuaries to take the land, committing the ultimate transgression against their own whakapapa for a few coins and a sly foreigner’s favour.

“Kia hiwa rā!—Kia hiwa rā!”—she climbed with all her might.