Nation (10 page)

“Gave…
thanks
?” said Mau.

“They may have plans for you,” said the priest cheerfully.

“Plans,” said Mau, his voice as cold as the dark current. “Plans? Yes, I see. Someone must be alive to bury the rest, was that it?” He took a step forward, his fists clenched.

“We cannot know the reasons for all that happ—” Ataba began, backing away.

“
I saw their faces!
I sent them into the dark water! I tied small stones to little bodies. The wave took everyone I love, and everything I am wants to know why!”

“Why did the wave spare you? Why did it spare me? Why did it spare that baby which will die soon enough? Why does it rain? How many stars are in the sky? We cannot know these things! Just be thankful that the gods spared your life!” shouted the old man.

“I will not! To thank them for my life means I thank them for the deaths. I want to find reasons. I want to understand the reasons! But I can’t because there are
no
reasons. Things happen or do not happen, and that is all there is!”

The roar of the Grandfathers’ anger in Mau’s head was so loud that he wondered why Ataba didn’t hear it.

YOU SCREAM OUT AGAINST THE GODS, BOY. YOU KNOW NOTHING. YOU WILL BRING DOWN THE WORLD. YOU WILL DESTROY THE NATION. ASK FORGIVENESS OF IMO.

“I will not! He gave this world to Locaha!” roared Mau. “Let him ask forgiveness of the dead. Let him ask forgiveness of me. But don’t tell me that I am supposed to thank the gods that I’m alive to remember that everyone else died!”

Someone was shaking Mau, but it seemed to be happening to another person, a long way off.

“Stop this! You’re making the baby cry!” Mau stared at Daphne’s furious face. “Baby, food,” she said insistently. Her meaning was very clear, even if he didn’t understand the actual words.

Did she think he was a magician? Women fed babies, everyone knew that! There was no milk on the island. Didn’t she understand? There was no—He stopped, because a bit of his raging brain had just opened up and was showing him pictures. He stared at them, and thought: Could that work? Yes, there it was, the silver thread to a small part of the future. It might work. It
had
to work.

“Baby, food!” Daphne repeated insistently, giving him another shake.

He gently pushed her arms out of the way. This needed thinking about, and careful planning. The old man was looking at him as if he were on fire, and he stepped back quickly when Mau picked up his fish spear and strode into the lagoon. At least he tried to make it look like a good manly stride, but inside his mind was full of rage.

Were the Grandfathers mad? Was Ataba mad? Did they
really
think he should thank the gods for his life? If it hadn’t been for the ghost girl, he’d have taken himself to the dark water!

Babies and milk was a smaller problem, but it was noisier, and closer to hand. He could see the answer. He could see a little picture of how it would have to work. It depended on many things. But there was a path. If he followed the steps, there should be milk. And it had to be easier to get milk for a baby than to understand the nature of the gods.

He stared down into the water, not actually seeing anything other than his thoughts. He’d need more tubers, and maybe some beer, but not too much. First, though, he’d have to catch a fish—

And there one was, only a little way away from his feet, white against the white sand so that only its pale shadow gave it away. It floated there like a gift from the gods—No! It was there because he had been so still, as a hunter should be. It was completely unaware of him.

He speared the fish, cleaned it, and took it to the priest, who was sitting between the two big god anchors.

“You know how to cook fish, sir?”

“Are you here to blaspheme against the gods, demon boy?” said Ataba.

“No. It would only be blasphemy to say they didn’t exist if they were real,” said Mau, keeping his voice level. “Now, can you cook fish?”

By the look of it, Ataba was not going to argue religion when there was fresh food around.

“Since before you were born,” said the old man, eyeing the fish greedily.

“Then let the ghost girl have some, and please make a gruel for the woman.”

“She won’t eat it,” said Ataba flatly. “There was food on her raft. There is something wrong in her head.”

Mau looked at the Unknown Woman, who was still by the fire. The ghost girl had brought along more blankets from the
Sweet Judy
, and at least the woman was sitting up now. Daphne was beside her, holding her hand and talking to her. They are making a Women’s Place, he thought. The language doesn’t matter.

“There will be others,” said Ataba behind him. “Lots of people will end up here.”

“How do you know?”

“The smoke, boy! I saw it from miles away! They will come. We weren’t the only ones. And maybe the Raiders will come, too, from their great land. You will call upon the gods then, oh yes! You will grovel before Imo when the Raiders come.”

“After all this? What’s left for them? What have we still got that they would want?”

“Skulls. Flesh. Their pleasure in our death. The usual things. Pray to the gods, if you dare, that those cannibals do not come this far.”

“Will that help?” said Mau.

Ataba shrugged. “What else do we have?”

“Then pray to the gods to send milk for the child,” said Mau. “Surely they can do something so simple?”

“And what will you do, demon boy?”

“Something else!” Mau paused then, and thought: He’s an old man. He came many miles, and he did stop for the woman and her baby. That is important. He let his anger subside again. “I don’t mean to insult you, Ataba,” he said.

“Oh, I understand,” said the old man. “We all rage against the gods sometimes.”

“Even you?”

“Yes. First thing every morning, when my knees go click and my back aches. I curse them then, you can be certain of it. But quietly, you understand. And I say, ‘Why did you make me old?’”

“And what do they reply?”

“It doesn’t work like that. But as the day wears on and there is maybe some beer, I think I find their answer arising in my mind. I think they tell me: ‘It is because you will prefer it to the alternative.’” He looked at Mau’s puzzled expression. “Not dead, you see?”

“I don’t believe that,” said Mau. “I mean, I think you’re just hearing your own thoughts.”

“Do you wonder where your thoughts come from?”

“I don’t think they come from a demon!”

Ataba smiled. “We shall see.”

Mau stared at the old man. He had to be proud about this. This was Mau’s island. He had to act like a chief.

“There is something I am going to try,” he said stiffly. “This is for my Nation. If I don’t come back, you can stay here. If you stay, there are the huts at the Women’s Place. If I come back, I will fetch you beer, old man.”

“There is beer that happens and beer that does not happen,” said the priest. “I like the beer that happens.”

Mau smiled. “First there must be the milk that happens,” he said.

“Fetch it, demon boy,” said Ataba, “and I’ll believe anything!”

M
AU HURRIED UP TO
the Women’s Place and entered more boldly than he had done before. There was no time to waste. The sun was dropping down the sky, and the ghost of the moon was rising.

This had to work. And he’d have to concentrate, and time it right and he probably wouldn’t get another try.

First, get some beer. That wasn’t hard. The women made mother-of-beer every day, and he found some fizzing gently to itself on a shelf. It was full of dead flies, but they would be no problem. He did the beer ceremony and sang the Song of the Four Brothers as the beer required, and took down a big bunch of plantains and some whistling yams. They were old and wrinkled, just right for pigs.

The Nation had been rich enough to have four three-legged cauldrons, and two of them were up here in the Place. He got a fire going under one and dumped the plantains and the yams in. He added a bit of beer, let it all boil until the roots were soft and floury, and then it was just a matter of pounding it all together into one big beery mess with the butt of his spear.

Even so, the shadows were getting longer by the time he continued on toward the forest, with the oozing, beery mash dripping in a woven punk-wood bag under one arm and a small calabash under the other. It was the best one he could find: Someone had been very careful to scrape out as much of the orange flesh as possible and dry the rind with care so that it was light and strong, without any cracks.

He left his spear propped up outside the Women’s Place. For a lone man, a spear was no good against an angry hog—a furious boar would bite one in half, or spit itself on the shaft and keep on going, a ball of biting, slashing rage that didn’t know when it was dead. And the sows were worse when they had piglets at heel, so he was probably going to die if the beer didn’t work.

At least there was a little piece of luck. There was a fat old sow on the track, piglets all around her, and Mau saw her before she saw him, but only just. He stopped dead. She gave a snort and shifted her big wobbling body, uncertain at the moment whether to charge but ready to do so if he made a wrong move.

He took the big ball of mash out of the bag and tossed it toward her. He was running before it hit the forest floor, crashing away like a frightened creature. He stopped after a minute and listened. From some way behind him came some very satisfied grunting.

And now for the dirty bit. He moved a lot more quietly now, making a big circle to bring himself back onto the path past where the sow lay. She’d come from the big mucky wallow the pigs had made where a stream crossed the track. They loved it, and it was filthy. It stank of pig, and Mau rolled in it until he did, too.

Globs of the slimy stuff slithered off him as he crept back along the track. Well, he certainly didn’t smell human anymore. He probably never would again.

The old sow had trampled herself a nest in the undergrowth and was making happy, beery snoring noises, with her family crawling and fighting all over her.

Mau dropped to the ground and began to crawl forward. The sow’s eyes were shut. Surely she wouldn’t smell him through all the muck? Well, that was a risk he had to take. Would the piglets, already shoving one another aside to get at the teats, work out what he was? They squealed all the time in any case, but did they have a special squeal that would set the sow on him? He’d find out. Would he even be able to get the milk out? He’d never heard of anyone milking a pig before. Something else to find out. He’d have to learn a lot in a short time. But he’d fight Locaha everywhere he spread his dark wings.

“Does
not
happen,” he whispered, and slid forward into the brawling, squalling mass of pork.

Daphne tugged another log onto the fire, straightened up, and glared at the old man. He might do a bit of work, she thought. Some clothes could only help, too. But all he did was sit by the fire and nod at her occasionally. He’d eaten more than his fair share of the baked fish (she’d measured it with a stick) and
she
had been the one to mash up some of the fish with her own hands and feed it to the Unknown Woman, who looked a bit better now and had at least eaten a few mouthfuls. She was still clutching her baby, but it wasn’t crying anymore, and that was more worrying than the crying had been….

Something screamed up in the hills, and went on screaming, and then went on screaming
louder
.

The old man creaked to his feet and picked up Mau’s club, which he could barely lift. When he tried to raise it over his shoulder, he went over backward.

The scream arrived, followed by the screamer, something that looked human but was dripping green mud and smelled like a swamp on a very hot day. It thrust a warm, heavy gourd toward Daphne, who took it before she could stop herself. Then it shouted “MILK!” and ran on into the dark. There was a splash as it dived into the lagoon.

The smell hung in the air for quite a long time. When a faint breeze blew it over the fire, the flames burned blue for a moment.

Mau spent the night much farther along the beach, and went for another swim as soon as it was light. The smell had this about it: He could sit on the bottom of the lagoon and scrub himself with sand and weeds and then swim underwater in any direction and yet, as soon as he surfaced, there the smell was, waiting for him.

He caught some fish and left them where people could see them. At the moment they were fast asleep; the mother and her baby were curled up in their blanket, sleeping so peacefully that Mau envied them, and the old man was sleeping with his mouth open and looked as if he was dead, although by the sound of it he wasn’t. The girl had gone back to the
Sweet Judy
, for some strange trouserman reason.

He tried to keep away from the others during the day, but the ghost girl seemed to be watching for him all the time, and he was running out of nonchalant ways to avoid her. In the end she found him in the evening, while he was repairing the field fences with fresh thorns, to keep the pigs out. She didn’t say anything but just sat and watched him. That can be quite annoying when people do it for long enough. A big cloud of silence builds up like a thunderstorm. But Mau was good at silence, and the girl wasn’t. Sooner or later she had to talk or burst. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t understand nearly everything she said. She just had to talk, to fill up the world with words.

“My family owns more land than there is on this whole island,” she said. “We have farms, and once a shepherd gave me an orphan lamb to look after. That’s a baby sheep, by the way. I haven’t seen any here, so you probably don’t know what they are. They go
maaaa
. People say they go
baaa
, but they don’t. Sheep can’t pronounce their
b
s, but people still go on saying it because they don’t listen properly. My mother made me a little shepherdess outfit, and I looked so sweet it would make you
sick
, and the wretched creature used to take every opportunity to butt me in the—to butt me. Of course, all this won’t mean very much to you.”

Mau concentrated on weaving the long thorns between the stakes. He’d have to go and get some more from the big thickets on the north slope, he thought. Perhaps I ought to go and get some right now. If I run, perhaps she won’t try to follow me.

“Anyway, the thing is that the shepherd showed me how to get a lamb to suck milk off your fingers,” the girl went on relentlessly. “You have to sort of dribble the milk slowly over your hand. Isn’t that funny? I can speak three languages and play the flute and the piano, but it turns out that the most useful thing I’ve ever learned is how to make something small and hungry suck milk off my fingers!”

That sounds as though she’s said what she thinks is an important bit, Mau told himself, and so he nodded and smiled.

“We also own lots of pigs. I’ve seen them with the little piglets and everything,” she continued. “I’M TALKING ABOUT PIGS. Oink oink, grunt grunt.”

Ah, thought Mau, this is about pigs, and milk. Oh, good. Just what I wasn’t hoping for.

“Oink?” he said.

“Yes, and, you see, I want to get something sorted out. I
know
you can’t milk a pig like you can a sheep or a cow because they don’t have”—she touched her chest for a moment, and then rapidly put her hands behind her back—“they don’t have uddery parts. There’s just the little…the little…tubes.” She coughed. “THEY CAN’T BE MILKED, UNDERSTAND?” And now she moved her hands up and down, as if she was pulling ropes, while at the same time making squish-squish noises for some reason. She cleared her throat. “Er…so I think the only way you could have got the baby’s milk, excuse me, is to sneak up on some sow with a litter of little ones, which would be very dangerous indeed, and crawl up when she was feeding them—they make such a noise, don’t they?—and, er…” She screwed up her lips and made a sucking sound.

Mau groaned. She’d worked it out!

“And, er, well, I mean, YUCK!” she said. “And then I thought, Well, all right, yuck, but the baby is happy and has stopped crying, thank goodness, and even his mother is looking better…so, well, I thought, I bet even great heroes of history, you know, with helmets and swords and plumes and everything, I bet they wouldn’t get down in the dirt because a baby was dying of hunger and crawl up to a pig and…I mean, when you think about it, it’s still YUCK, but…in a good way. It’s still yucky, but the reason you did it…it makes it sort of…holy….” At last her voice trailed away.

Mau had understood
baby
. He was also pretty sure about
yuck
, because her tone of voice practically drew a picture. But that was all. She just sends words up into the sky, he thought. Why is she going on at me? Is she angry? Is she saying I did a bad thing? Well, around about the middle of the night I’m going to have to do it again, because
babies need feeding all the time
.

And it’ll be worse. I’ll have to find another sow! Ha, ghost girl, you weren’t there when she realized something was going on! I’d swear her eyes had shone red! And run? Who’d have thought that something that big could go that fast that quickly! I only outran her because the piglets couldn’t keep up! And soon I’ll have to do it all again, and go on doing it until the woman can feed the baby herself. I must, even though I may have no soul, even though I may be a demon who thinks he’s a boy. Even though I may be an empty thing and in a world of shadows. Because…

His thoughts stopped, just there, as if they had run into sand. Mau’s eyes opened wide.

Because what? Because “Does not happen”? Because…I must act like a man, or they will think less of me?

Yes, and yes, but more than that. I need there to be the old man and the baby and the sick woman and the ghost girl, because without them I would go into the dark water right now. I asked for reasons, and here they are, yelling and smelling and demanding, the last people in the world, and I need them. Without them I would be just a figure on the gray beach, a lost boy, not knowing who I am. But they all know me. I matter to them, and that is who I am.

Daphne’s face glistened in the firelight. She’d been crying. All we can do is talk baby talk, Mau thought. So why does she talk all the time?

“I set some of the milk to keep cool in the river,” said Daphne, idly drawing on the sand with a finger. “But we will need some more tonight. MORE MILK. Oink!”

“Yes,” said Mau.

They fell into another of those awkward silences, which the ghost girl ended with: “My father will come, you know. He will come.”

Mau recognized this. He looked down at what she had absentmindedly been drawing in the dirt. It was a picture of a stick girl and a stick man, standing side by side on a big canoe, which he knew was called a boat. And when he watched her, he thought: She does it, too. She sees the silver line into the future, and tries to pull herself toward it.

The fire crackled in the distance, sending sparks up toward the red evening sky. There wasn’t much wind today, and the smoke rose to the clouds.

“He
will
come, whatever you think. The Rogation Sunday Islands are much too far away. The wave could never reach them. And if it did, Government House is built of stone and very strong. He is the governor! He could send out a dozen ships to look for me if he wanted! He already has! One will be here in a week!”

She was crying again. Mau hadn’t understood the words, but he understood the tears. You’re not sure of the future either. You thought you were, it was so close you could see it in your head, and now you think it’s washed away, so you’re trying to talk it into coming back.

He felt her hand touch his. He didn’t know what to do about that but squeezed her fingers gently a couple of times, and pointed at the column of smoke. There couldn’t be many fires burning in the islands now. It was a sign that must show up for miles.

“He will come,” he said.

Just for a moment, she looked astonished. “You think he will come?” she said.

Mau rummaged around in his small collection of phrases. Repetition should do it. “He will come.”

“See, I
told
you he would come,” she said, beaming. “He’ll see the smoke and steer right here! A pillar of fire by night and a pillar of smoke by day, just like Moses.” She jumped up. “But while I’m still here, I’d better go and see to the little boy!”

She ran off, happier than he’d ever seen her. And all it had taken was three words.

Would her father come to find her in his big boat? Well, he might. The smoke of the fire streamed across the sky.

Someone
would come.

The Raiders
, he thought….

They were a story. But every boy had seen the big wooden club in the chief’s hut. It was studded with shark teeth, and Mau hadn’t even been able to lift it the first time. It was a souvenir from the last time the Raiders came as far east as the Nation. After that, they knew better!