Nation (15 page)

“Are you all right?” asked Pilu.

“Ugh,” said Mau, and spat bile. It wasn’t just that the old men got into his head, although that was bad enough, but they left everything in a mess when they went away again. He stared at the sand until the bits of his thoughts came back together again.

“The Grandfathers spoke to me,” he mumbled.

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Then you’re lucky! Ugh!” Mau clutched at his head. It had been really bad this time, the worst ever. And there was something extra, too. It had sounded as though there had been more voices, very weak or a long way off, and they had been shouting something different, but it had got lost in the clamor. More of them, he thought gloomily. A thousand years of Grandfathers, all shouting at me, and never shouting anything new.

“They want me to bring up the last of the god anchors,” he said.

“Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, it’s in the lagoon, and it can stay there!”

“All right, but what actual harm would it do to bring it up?”

“Harm?” said Mau, trying to understand this. “You want to thank the god of Water?”

“You don’t have to mean it, and people will feel better,” said Pilu.

Something whispered in Mau’s ear, but whatever it was trying to say was far too faint to be understood. It’s probably some ancient Grandfather who was a bit slow, he thought sourly. And even though I am the chief, my job is to make people feel better, is it? Either the gods are powerful but didn’t save my people, or they don’t exist and all we’re believing in is lights in the sky and pictures in our heads. Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that important?

The voice in his head answered, or tried to. It was like watching someone shouting at the other end of the beach. You could see them jumping up and down and waving their arms and maybe even make out their lips moving, but the wind is blowing through the palms and rustling the pandanuses and the surf is pounding and the grandfather birds are throwing up unusually loudly, so you can’t hear but you
do
know that what you can’t hear is definitely shouting. In his head it was exactly like that, but without the beach, the jumping, the waving, the lips, the palms, the pandanuses, the surf, and the birds, but with the same feeling that you are missing something that someone really, really wants you to hear. Well, he wasn’t going to listen to their rules.

“I’m the little blue hermit crab,” said Mau under his breath. “And I am running. But I will not be trapped in a shell again, because…yes, there has to be a because…because…any shell will be too small. I want to know why. Why
everything
. I don’t know the answers, but a few days ago I didn’t know there were questions.”

Pilu was watching him carefully, as if uncertain whether he should run or not.

“Let’s go and see if your brother can cook, shall we?” said Mau, keeping his voice level and friendly.

“He can’t, usually,” said Pilu. He broke into his grin again, but there was something nervous about it.

He’s frightened of me, Mau thought. I haven’t hit him or even raised my hand. I’ve just tried to make him think differently, and now he’s scared. Of thinking. It’s magic.

It can’t be magic, Daphne thought. Magic is just a way of saying “I don’t know.”

There were quite a few shells of beer fizzing on the shelves in the shed. They all had little bubbles growing and bursting from the seals at the top. It was beer that hadn’t been sung to yet. Mother-of-beer, they called it at that stage. She could tell quite easily, because there were dead flies all around it. They didn’t drown in it; they died and became little fly statues as soon as they drank it. If you were looking for the
real
Demon Drink, this was it.

You spit in it, you sing it a song, you wave your hands over it in time to said song, the demon is magically sent back to, er, wherever, and there’s just the good drink left. How does that happen?

Well, she had a theory; she’d spent half the night thinking it up. The ladies were at the other end of the Place, picking blossoms. They probably wouldn’t hear her if she sang quietly. The spitting…well, that was for luck, obviously. Besides, you had to be scientific about these things, and test one bit at a time. The secret was in the hand movements, she was sure of it. Well, slightly sure.

She poured a little of the deadly pre-beer into a bowl and stared at it. Or perhaps it was in the song, but not in the words? Perhaps the frequency of the human voice did something to the tiny atomic substances, such as happened when the famous operatic soprano Dame Ariadne Stretch broke a glass by singing at it? That sounded very promising, especially when you knew that only women were supposed to make beer and they, of course, had higher voices!

The Demon Drink stared back at her, rather smugly in her view.
Go on
, it seem to say,
impress me
.

“I’m not sure I know all the words to this one,” she said, and realized that she had just apologized to a drink. That was the trouble with being brought up in a polite household. She cleared her throat. “Once my father took me to the music hall,” she said. “You might enjoy this one.” She cleared her throat again and began:

“Let’s all go down to the Strand,

(’ave a banana!)

Oh! What a happy land,

I’ll be the leader, you can march behind—”

No, that sounded a bit complicated for a beverage, and the banana only confused matters. What about…? She hesitated, and thought about songs. Could it be
that
simple? She started to sing again, counting on her fingers as she sang.

“Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full—”

She sang sixteen verses, counting all the time, singing to the beer as it bubbled, and noted when it was suddenly as clear and sparkly as a diamond. Then she tested her conclusion, like a proper scientist would, on another bowl of mother-of-beer, feeling rather certain and more than a little pleased with herself. Now she had a working hypothesis.

“Baa, baa, black—”

She stopped, aware of people trying to be quiet. Cahle and the Unknown Woman were standing in the doorway, listening with interest.

“Men!” said Cahle cheerfully. She had a flower tucked in her hair.

“Er…what?” said Daphne, flustered.

“I want to go and see my husbun!”

Daphne understood that, and there was no rule against it. Men weren’t allowed into the Place, but women could come and go as they pleased.

“Er…good,” she said. She felt something touch her hair, went to brush it away, and realized that the Unknown Woman was undoing her plaits. She went to stop her and caught Cahle’s warning look. In her head the Unknown Woman was coming back from somewhere bad, and every sign of her being a normal person again was to be encouraged.

She felt the plaits being gently teased apart.

Then she smelled a whiff of perfume, and realized the woman had stuck a flower behind her ear. They grew everywhere in the Place, huge floppy pink and purple blooms that knocked you down with their scent. Cahle generally wound one into her hair in the evenings.

“Er, thank you,” she said.

Cahle took her gently by the arm, and Daphne felt the panic rise.
She
was going to the beach as well? But she was practically naked! She had nothing under the grass skirt but one petticoat, her pantaloons, and a pair of Unmentionables! And her feet were bare right up to the ankles!

Then it went strange, and forever afterward she never quite understood how it had happened.

She should go down to the beach. The decision floated there in her head, clear and definite. She had decided it was time to go down to the beach. It was just that she couldn’t
remember
deciding. It was a strange sensation, like feeling full even though you can’t recall having had lunch. And there was something else, fading away fast like an echo without a voice:
Everyone has toes!

Milo was a pretty good cook, Mau had to admit. He really knew how to bake fish. The smell hung over the camp when they got back, and the air practically drooled.

There was still plenty of the
Sweet Judy
left. It would take months, maybe years to break her down. They had the tools now, yes, but not enough people; it would need a dozen strong men to shift some of the bigger timbers. But there was a hut, even if its canvas sides rattled in the wind, and there was fire, and now there was a hearth. And what a hearth! The entire galley had been dragged here, every precious metal bit of it, except for the big black oven itself. That could wait, because there was already a fortune in pots and pan and knives.

And we didn’t make them, Mau thought as the tools were passed around. We can build good canoes, but we could never build the
Sweet Judy
—

“What are you doing?” he said to Milo. The man had taken up a hammer and a metal chisel and was bashing away at a smaller chest among the pile of salvage.

“It is locked,” said Milo, and showed him what a lock was.

“There’s something important inside, then?” Mau asked. “More metal?”

“Maybe gold!” said Pilu. That had to be explained, and Mau remembered the shiny yellow metal around the strange invitation the ghost girl had given him. Trousermen loved it almost as much as trousers, said Pilu, even though it was too soft to be useful. One small piece of gold was worth more than a really good machete, which showed how crazy they were.

But when the hasp broke and the lid was thrown back, the chest was found to contain the smell of stale water and—

“Books?” said Mau.

“Charts,” said Pilu. “That’s like a map but, well, looks like this.” He held up a handful of the charts, which squelched.

“What good are they?” said Ataba, laughing.

A soggy chart was laid out on the sand. They inspected it, but Mau shook his head. You probably had to be a trouserman to begin to understand.

What did it all mean? It was just lines and shapes. What good
were
they?

“They are…pictures of what the ocean would look like if you were a bird, high in the sky,” said Pilu.

“Can trousermen fly, then?”

“They have tools to help them,” said Pilu uncertainly. Then he brightened and added: “Like this.” Mau watched as Pilu pulled a heavy round item from his pile of spoils. “It’s called a compass. With a compass and a chart, they are never lost!”

“Don’t they taste the water? Don’t they watch the currents? Don’t they smell the wind? Don’t they
know
the ocean?”

“Oh, they are good seamen,” said Pilu, “but they travel to unknown seas. The compass tells them where home is.”

Mau turned it around in his hand, watching the needle swing.

“And where it isn’t,” he said. “It has a point at both ends. It shows them where unknown places are, too. Where are we on their chart?” He pointed to a large area of what was, apparently, land.

“No, that’s Nearer Australia,” said Pilu. “That’s a
big
place. We are”—he rummaged through the damp charts and pointed to some marks—“here. Probably.”

“So where are we, then,” said Mau, straining to see. “It’s just a lot of lines and squiggles!”

“Er, those squiggles are called numbers,” said Pilu nervously. “They tell the captains how deep the sea is. And these are called letters. They say ‘Mothering Sundays.’ That’s what they call us.”

“We got told that on the
John Dee
,” said Milo helpfully.

“
And
I’m reading it here on the chart,” said his brother, giving him a sharp look.

“Why are we called that?” Mau asked. “We are the Sunrise Islands!”

“Not in their language. Trousermen often get names wrong.”

“And the island? How big is the Nation?” said Mau, still staring at the chart. “I can’t see it.”

Pilu looked away and mumbled something.

“What did you say?” said Mau.

“It’s not actually drawn here. It’s too small….”

“
Small?
What do you mean,
small
?”

“He’s right, Mau,” said Milo solemnly. “We didn’t want to tell you. It’s small. It’s a small island.”

Mau’s mouth was open in astonished disbelief. “That can’t be right,” he protested. “It’s much bigger than any of the Windcatcher Islands.”

“Islands that are even smaller,” said Pilu, “and there’s lots of them.”

“Thousands,” said Milo. “It’s just that…well, as big islands go—”

“—this is one of the smaller ones,” Pilu finished.

“But the best one,” said Mau quickly. “And no one else has got the tree-climbing octopus!”

“Absolutely,” said Pilu.

“Just so long as we remember that. This is our home,” said Mau, standing up. He pulled at the trousers. “Aargh. These really itch! All I can say is trousermen don’t walk about much!”

A sound made him look up, and there was the ghost girl—at least, it looked like the ghost girl. Behind her stood Cahle with a big grin, and the Unknown Woman, smiling her faint, faraway smile.

Mau looked down at his trousers, and then up at her long hair with the flower in it, while she looked down at her toes and then up at his trousers, which were so much longer than his legs that he appeared to be standing in a pair of concertinas, and the captain’s hat floated on his curls like a ship at sea. She turned to look at Cahle, who stared up at the sky. He looked at Pilu, who looked down at his feet, although his shoulders were shaking.

Then Mau and the ghost girl looked directly into each other’s eyes and there was only one thing they could do, which was to laugh themselves silly.

The others joined in. Even the parrot squawked, “Show us yer drawers!” and did its doo-dahs on Ataba’s head.