The Predictions (6 page)

Sheepishly, the six of us went to see Shakti and confessed to her that Lukas had split. She asked us to sit with her in a circle under the trees by her caravan, a space she had hung with dream catchers, talismans, and crystals to enhance its sacred vibe. “You do realize,” she said, after some consideration, “that without Lukas we can’t go ahead with the ceremony?”

I felt deflated, and so did the others. “That’s not fair,” said Meg. “He can’t ruin it for the rest of us.”

Shakti said, “The universe has made it quite clear to me that for the ritual to work, the seven of you must form an unbroken circle. Take any one of you away and that magic is lost.”

“Can’t we just do it another day?” said Timon.

“Timon,” said Shakti gravely. “There
is
no other day. I have been summoned to heal Gaialands on the summer solstice in the year 1978. I didn’t choose that date. The universe chose it. Just like it chose me to be the instrument of your destiny.”

The six of us fell silent, overwhelmed by the gravity of her words.

“I want to do it,” said Fritz. “It’s Lukas who’s stuffing everything up.”

“I know, darling Fritz. It isn’t fair.” Shakti focused her amber-flecked eyes on me. “Poppy,” she said. “You have the power to turn this around.”

“How?”

“You can change Lukas’s mind.”

Six pairs of eyes turned my way.

“Me? But I don’t even know where he is . . .”

Shakti sighed dramatically. Her eyes had filled with tears. “I don’t think any of you understand how important this is—how many preparations have taken place. The fate of the commune is at stake.”

“I’ll try,” I said, feeling suddenly responsible for everyone’s future. “I’ll do my best to find him.”

Timon had a hunch that Lukas had gone into Coromandel to replace the transistor radio, so I hitched in the same direction, hoping to find him. It wasn’t easy to get a ride, but eventually an elderly couple stopped to pick me up, and I sat in the back of their dusty car, next to a picnic basket full of delicious-smelling ham sandwiches.

In town, I asked around. Had anyone had seen a boy fitting Lukas’s description? Someone said they had spotted him hanging out with the Maori boys at the end of the wharf. Everybody knew everybody in this town, and if you weren’t from around here, then you stood out even more.

I recognized Lukas from a long way off, his lean torso and the flared jeans that ended too far above his ankles. He had grown taller, suddenly, but we did not have any new clothes. The guys he was with seemed older, more like men, but then, when I got closer, I realized Lukas was the same age, that he was no longer the boy I thought of him as. Approaching the group, my confidence stalled. In my plain, boyish clothes, and despite Shakti’s declaration otherwise, I still felt very much like a child.

One of the boys must have seen me approaching and alerted Lukas, because he turned around before I reached the group. He looked baffled, but also pleased, to see me.

“What are you doing here?”

“You have to come back to Gaialands.” In front of these boys, I was reluctant to say what for. “If we leave now, we can be back before it starts.”

Lukas felt no such reluctance. “I don’t want anything to do with her fortune-telling bullcrap.”

“But Shakti says . . . She says the fate of the commune is at stake.”

“The fate of the commune my arse.” Lukas laughed, and the other boys joined in. He was showing off for them, using dirty words. “It’s a power trip. I’m telling you, she’s a witch.”

One of the boys said, “Oooooooh,” like he was a ghost,
and another said, “Don’t do it, bro. What if she chops off your old fella?”

They hooted with laughter, Lukas loudest of all. Had he been telling them stories about us, how crazy and weird we all were? I bit my lip, not knowing what to say. One of the guys, wearing a Coromandel school T-shirt a few sizes too small for him, had been looking me up and down, and now he caught my eye and tilted his eyebrows and chin in a way that was definitely flirtatious but also mocking.

I scowled at him, as much to stop myself from crying as to show disapproval. “Please come back,” I said to Lukas, in a plaintive and pathetic voice. “You’re ruining it for the others.”

Lukas wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was still smiling—not taking any of this seriously—and rather than humiliate myself by crying in front of all these boys, I turned on my heel and scurried away. The tears that came were blinding, and I stumbled once or twice before making it to the road.

I was almost there when, behind me, Lukas called out: “Poppy, wait!”

I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my T-shirt but didn’t stop.

Lukas caught up to me and gently grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t bugger off yet. Stick around. I’ll get you a milkshake or something.”

“So you can make fun of me?” I shook off his hand. “No thanks.”

“I was just kidding around. You know I didn’t mean anything by it.”

I burst into tears again. “You don’t get it,” I said, sobbing. “We can’t do it without you.”

He tried, more gently, to put his hand on my shoulder again, and I let him. “Does it mean that much to you?”

“Not just to me. To everyone.”

“I don’t give a shit about the others,” he said, brushing the hair out of my eyes and putting it behind my ear, something I did a hundred times a day but no one else had ever done for me. When he realized what he had done, Lukas quickly withdrew his hand and shoved it in his pocket.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay, what?”

“I’ll do it.”

“You will?” The despair lifted so suddenly that without thinking, I threw my arms around him and squeezed.

He hugged me back, saying, “Steady on,” in such a prim way that I laughed.

“I can’t believe you ran away,” I said, punching his arm. “You’re such a dork.”

“
I’m
a dork?” he said. “What about you? Crying like a baby in front of all those boys.”

Normality had been restored, or so I thought, but as we walked back to the main road and stuck out our thumbs to hitch, Shakti’s words echoed in my ear. She was right. I had been able to change Lukas’s mind. But how had she known?

A ute picked us up at the start of the 309 Road, and we climbed into the backseat, which was narrow with very little legroom. Even so, Lukas managed to shuffle into a position, hard up against the opposite window, where there was no
danger of our arms or legs accidentally touching. He didn’t speak once the whole way back to the commune, not even when the ute almost skidded off the road and into a ravine. Worse than that, he was broody, deep in thought. Going to fetch him had been a mistake. He was mad with me.

A cheer went around the mess hall when I returned to Gaialands with Lukas in tow, but I couldn’t join in. I was worried that saving the day had come at a price. We ate early, a light supper of dal and brown rice, followed by bottled peaches and thin, sour yogurt for dessert. While we ate, Shakti gave each of us our tasks. Nelly and I were to gather up candles, one for each person, plus a couple of spares. To this we were to add a box of matches and a kerosene lamp, in case it rained or was windy on top of Mount Aroha. Sigi had put together what looked like a first aid kit, but when I asked if that was what it was, she said it was more of a just-in-case kit. “Things could get messy, but I don’t think anyone will get hurt,” she said ominously. We had been told not to ask questions, that we should trust in the universe’s plan.

The base of Mount Aroha lay just beyond the boundary fence of the commune, on Maori land. The lower slopes were covered with wild manuka bushes, home to swarms of honey-making bees. As children we had called it Buzzy Mountain.

In the twilight, the bush-clad peak was already in silhouette, a blue-black slab, giving away nothing of its difficult terrain, the bracken so dense that climbing through it would be like trying to unpick knitting. Despite the status of the land as Maori owned, we wouldn’t be trespassing. Local
iwi
had given us permission to go up there, but still I worried we might disturb something, an ancestral spirit or a long-forgotten curse. Not to mention the bees. We kept hives on the commune, but these ones were wild and didn’t like humans.

Wide tracts of sunlight broke through the clouds. “You see?” said Shakti, pointing skyward. “The cosmos has blessed our little gathering.”

Shakti had timed our ascent so that we would reach the peak when there was still light in the sky. It was the summer solstice, which coincided this year with a full moon, and she reassured us, even though it was cloudy, that there would be plenty of light by which to navigate our way down.

On past ascents, it had taken hours to reach the peak of Mount Aroha, but on this occasion, we arrived near the top, fresh and giddy, after what felt like no time at all. In a clearing of flat stones, we sat down to catch our breath, and none of us could fathom how we had climbed up so quickly, stomping through the thick, tangled bush as though it was a smattering of weeds. “Another blessing!” said Katrina, throwing her hands in the air.

Before we climbed the final section, Sigi retrieved a large earthenware jar from her knapsack and passed it to Shakti, who then passed it to Lukas. “I’d like each of the seven of you to take a long drink,” said Shakti. “It’s to open your chakras.” She watched us drink the bitter liquid, but she herself abstained. “The unusual taste comes from a rare and sacred herb,” she explained.

A few meters below the rocky peak there was a broad
circle of earth where nothing grew, not even weeds. It was perfect for our ceremony. Shakti instructed Paul and Hunter to dig a pit for a small fire, and the rest of us set about collecting as much dry kindling and heavier branches as we could find. Most of it was too damp to use, and we were grateful for the stuff we had carried up in slings on our backs. Once the fire was lit, Shakti told us where to stand, the adults to one side of the clearing and the seven of us in a circle around the fire. Because the fire was the only light source, the adults fell into shadow and after a while I forgot they were there. I stood with Fritz on one side and Ned on the other, with Lukas directly opposite me, his face licked with gold from the flames. He was the first one Shakti went over to, whispering something in his ear. He turned to her, mystified, but then nodded.

From the adults, cloaked in darkness, came chanting—an unfamiliar language, mouthed with hesitation. Shakti held Lukas by the arm and guided his hand toward the fire. She moved her grip to his palm and held it over a small metal bowl. She had something in her hand, a sharp tool of some sort, and she pushed it into his thumb. Lukas winced, and in response, I felt a nervous spasm in my own chest. Was that his blood dripping into the bowl? Shakti next approached Timon, who offered up his hand and bit his lip when the tool pierced his skin. Nelly, who was standing alongside him, reached out to touch his arm, then retreated. When her turn came, she yelped in pain.

Soon, Shakti stood in front of me, her skin glowing in the firelight. She smiled at me elatedly, then pricked the
cushion of my thumb with the pointed end of the blade. It didn’t hurt. The anticipation had been worse than the pain itself, but looking into the blood-spattered bowl, my insides churned.

Once Shakti had collected blood from the seven of us, she pushed the blade into her own thumb and squeezed a few drops into the bowl. This she mixed with a series of powders and liquids from vials she had carried up the hill in her knapsack. The resulting liquid was thinner and bluer than the blood had been, and she wiped some on her arm to test the color. She placed the bowl next to the fire, and came and stood with us in the circle.

“Join hands with me,” she said. “And we will say the invocation.”

Fritz, who stood next to me, folded his arms so no one could take his hands, but then, when he saw that he was the only one not joining in, he reluctantly took mine. His hand felt cold and sticky with his own blood, and I felt the familiar surge of tenderness toward him. On the other side of me was Ned, calm and inscrutable and sturdy. You could plant Ned in the middle of a hurricane and he wouldn’t blow away.

“I call on the power of the beloved I Am,” said Shakti, “to bind us and protect us in spirit and in body.” She signaled for us to echo her, and obediently we chanted, “We call on the power of the beloved I Am to bind us and protect us in spirit and in body.”

I was starting to feel woozy, light-headed. Around me the others mumbled incoherently, their eyes shining blankly in the dim light.

“I call on the great spirit of the beloved I Am to heal what was broken, to bind this circle together with love for eternity. Tonight each one of these seven gathered souls will receive the blessing of your guidance in the form of a prediction. We recite for you now our prayer of devotion to the goddess Shakti, the source of all things.”

Had Shakti just referred to herself as a goddess? The thought zoomed across my temples, then was gone. I had trouble remembering where we were. In the flickering light, I caught Lukas’s eye and I thought he mouthed something to me but I couldn’t be certain.

Shakti finished her prayer, then instructed us to join in the chant the adults had been keeping up. At first, I was self-conscious and hesitant, but before long, the sound of my voice had merged with the others, and soon, it was no longer a human voice but part of a hum that was already in the air and I was merely tuning into. It went on and on, this drone, until it was the only thing holding me upright, and I worried I’d collapse if it stopped. For a few seconds, the air in front of me swarmed with tiny pale stars, and I thought I saw the outline of a dancing woman, her hair and skin white to match her dress. She flashed luminous for a second, this ghostly dancer, and then was gone.

Shakti picked up the metal bowl and dipped in her forefinger. She went first to Lukas, then to each of us in turn, dabbed a streak of the blood mixture across our foreheads. Some of it rolled down my nose and a small droplet trickled into the corner of my eye, where it burned like acid.

When she had been around to everyone in the group, Shakti told us to stop chanting and to sit on the ground. The sudden silence was deafening, like being plunged underwater. The fire had been slowly gathering in heat and size—the men had been feeding it logs—and all I could see were flames, orange, red, and fierce, and beyond them, nothing but blackness.