Nation (16 page)

But Milo, who took things sensibly, and who happened to be facing the sea, stood up and pointed and said: “Sails.”

I
T RAINED GENTLY, FILLING
the night with a rustling.

Three more canoes, Mau thought, staring into the dark. Three all at once, sailing on the gentle wind.

Now there were two babies and another coming soon, one little girl, one boy, eleven women including the ghost girl, and eight men not including Mau, who had no soul—and three dogs.

He’d missed dogs. Dogs added something that even people didn’t, and one of the dogs was sitting by his feet, here in the darkness and the gentle rain. It wasn’t bothered much about the rain or what might be out there on the unseen sea, but Mau was a warm body moving about in a sleeping world and might at any moment do something that called for running around and barking. Occasionally it looked up at him adoringly and made a slobbery gulping noise, which possibly meant “Anything you say, boss!”

More than twenty people, Mau thought as the rain dripped off his chin like tears. It wasn’t enough, if the Raiders came. Not enough to fight, but too many to hide. And certainly enough for a few good dinners for the people-eaters….

No one had
seen
the Raiders. They were coming from island to island, people said, but it was always a rumor. On the other hand, if you had seen the Raiders, then they had seen you….

There was a slight grayness to the air now, not really light but the ghost of it. It would get stronger, and the sun would come up and maybe the horizon would be black with canoes, and maybe it wouldn’t.

Inside Mau’s head there was one bright memory. There was the ghost girl, looking silly in the grass skirt, and there was him, looking even sillier in the trousers, and everyone was laughing, even the Unknown Woman, and everything had been…right.

And then there had been all these new people, milling around and worried and ill and hungry. Some of them were not even sure where they’d ended up, and all of them were scared.

They were a rabble, according to the Grandfathers. They were the people the wave had not swallowed. Why? Not even they knew. Maybe they had held on to a tree while others had been swept away, or had been on higher ground, or at sea, like Mau.

Those afloat had gone back to people and villages that weren’t there, and had scavenged what they could and set out to find other people. They’d followed the current, and had met up, and had become a kind of floating village—but one of children without parents, parents without children, wives without husbands, people without all those things around them that told them what they were. The wave had shaken up the world and left broken pieces. There might be hundreds more out there.

And then, and then…from where had they come, the rumors of the Raiders? A shout from other refugees, fleeing too urgently to stop? An old woman’s dream? A corpse floating by? Did it matter when terrified people had set out again in anything that would still float, with little to eat and brackish water?

And so the second wave came, drowning people in their own fear.

And at last they had seen the smoke. Nearly all of them knew the Nation. It was rock! It couldn’t be washed away! It had the finest god anchors in the world!

And what they had found was ragtag—not much better off than themselves, with one old priest, a strange ghost girl, and a chief who was not a boy and not a man and didn’t have a soul and might be a demon.

Thank you, Ataba, Mau thought. When people are not sure what you are, they don’t know what you might do. The newcomers seemed awkward about a chief who wasn’t a man, but a touch of demon got respect.

He’d dreamed about the island being full of people again, but in his dream it was the people who used to be there.
These
people didn’t belong. They didn’t know the chants of the island, they didn’t have the island in their bones. They were lost, and they wanted their gods.

They had been talking about it yesterday. Someone asked Mau if he was sure that the Water anchor had been in its right place before the wave. He’d had to think hard about that, keeping his expression blank. He must have seen the god anchors nearly every day of his life. Were all three there when he went to the Boys’ Island? Surely he’d have noticed if one was missing? The empty space would have cried out to him!

Yes, he’d said, they were all there. And then a gray-faced woman had said: “But a man could lift one, yes?” And he saw how it was going. If someone had moved the stone and rolled it into the water, couldn’t that have caused the wave? That would explain it, wouldn’t it? That would be the reason, wouldn’t it?

He’d looked at all the haggard faces, all of them willing him to say yes. Say yes, Mau, and betray your father and your uncles and your nation, just so that people would have a reason.

The Grandfathers had thundered their anger in his head until he thought his ears would bleed. Who were these beggars from little sandy islands to come here and insult them? They urged his blood to sing war chants in his veins, and Mau had to lean on his spear to stop himself from raising it.

But his eye had stayed on the gray woman. He couldn’t remember her name. She’d lost her children and her husband, he knew. She was walking in the steps of Locaha. He saw it in her eyes and kept his temper.

“The gods let you down. When you needed them they weren’t there. That is it, and all of it. To worship them now would be to kneel before bullies and murderers.”

Those were the words he’d wanted to say, but with her looking at him, he’d rather bite his tongue off than say them. They would be true, he knew it, yet here and now that didn’t mean anything. He’d looked around at the anxious faces, still waiting for his answer, and remembered how shocked and hurt Pilu had been. A thought could be like a spear. You do not throw a spear at the widow, the orphan, the grieving.

“Tomorrow,” he’d told them, “I will bring up the anchor of Water.”

And people sat back and looked at one another in satisfaction. It wasn’t smugness, it wasn’t a look of triumph, but the world had wobbled a bit and was now back where it should be.

And now it was tomorrow, somewhere beyond the hissing rain.

I’ll bring the three stones together, he thought. And what will happen next? Nothing! The world has changed! But they’ll catch fish to put on the stones, and cower!

Light was leaking slowly through the rain, and something made him turn.

There was a figure standing a handful of paces away. It had a large head that looked, as he concentrated, as if it were more like some enormous beak. And the rain made a slightly different noise as it landed, more a click than a patter.

There were stories about demons. They came in all shapes; they could come disguised as a human, or an animal, or anything in between, but—

—there were no demons. There couldn’t be. If there were no gods, then there were no demons, so what was standing there in the rain was
not
a creature with a beak bigger than a man’s head that looked quite capable of slicing Mau in two. It couldn’t exist, and he had to prove it. Somehow, though, rushing up and shouting at it didn’t seem the sensible next thing to do.

I’ve got a brain, haven’t I? he thought. I will
prove
it’s not a monster.

There was a small gust of wind and the creature flapped a wing.

Ugh…but remember the toolbox. There was nothing special about the trousermen. They’d just been lucky. Pilu said they came from a place where, sometimes, the weather could get so cold, the sky shed freezing feathers, like the hail you sometimes got in storms, but more fluffy, and so they had to invent trousers to stop their wingos getting frozen and big boats to find places where the water never got hard. They had to learn new ways of thinking: a new toolbox.

This isn’t a demon. Let’s find out what it is.

He stared. The feet looked human. And what he thought was that thing flapping didn’t really look like a wing; when you watched carefully, it was more like cloth blowing in the breeze. The only demon was in his fear.

The thing made a cooing noise. This was so undemonic that Mau splashed over to it and saw someone who’d draped themselves in a tarpaulin from the
Sweet Judy
that was so stiff that it had formed a sort of hood.

It was the Unknown Woman, cuddling her baby in the dry while the rain trickled around them. She gave him her haunted little smile.

How long had she been there? Before the light began to rise, he was certain. What was she doing there? Well, why was he there, if it came to that? It just felt right. Someone had to watch over the Nation. Perhaps she thought the same thing.

The rain was slackening off now and he could see the surf. Any minute now, the—

“Show us yer drawers! Roberts is on the gin again!”

—parrot would be waking up.

Pilu said that cry meant “Show me your small trousers.” Perhaps it was the way trousermen recognized one another.

He had small trousers now. He’d cut the legs off at the knee and used the material to make more of what made trousers really worthwhile, which were pockets. You could keep so many things in them.

The Unknown Woman had walked back up the beach, and there were the sounds of people waking up.

Do it now. Give them their gods.

He slipped out of the half trousers with their so-useful pockets, ran forward, and dived into the lagoon.

The tide was just about to turn, but the water around the break was calm. The wave had really pounded through here; he could see deep blue water beyond the gap.

The anchor of Water gleamed below him, right in the gap. It was deeper than the others had been, and farther from the shore. It would take ages to bring it back. Better start now, then.

He dived, got his arms around the stone cube, and heaved. It didn’t budge.

Mau brushed aside some weeds. The white block was trapped by a piece of coral. Mau tried to move that, too.

About five seconds later his head broke water and he swam back, slowly and thoughtfully, to the shore. He found Ataba using a metal hammer from the toolbox on a slab of salt-pickled beef. The stuff went down well with nearly everyone except the priest, who didn’t have enough teeth and couldn’t often find anyone prepared to do the chewing for him. He sat down and watched the old man in silence.

“You’ve come to laugh at me in my infirmity, demon boy?” said Ataba, looking up at him.

“No.”

“Then you might at least have the decency to take over the hammering.”

Mau did so. It was hard work. The blows just bounced off it. You could make a shield out of the stuff.

“Something on your mind, demon boy?” said the priest after a while. “You haven’t insulted the gods for at least ten minutes.”

“I need some advice, elderly one,” said Mau. “It’s about the gods, actually.”

“Yes? But you do believe in them today? I watched you yesterday night; you learned that belief is a complicated matter, yes?”

“There are three gods, yes?”

“Correct.”

“Not four, ever?”

“Some say Imo is the fourth god, but he is the All in which they and we, and even you, exist.”

“Imo has no god anchors?”

“Imo Is, and since He Is, He Is everywhere. Since He Is everywhere, He is not anywhere. The whole universe is His anchor.”

“What about the star Atindi, which is always close to the sun?”

“That is the son of the moon. Surely you know this?”

“He has no god anchors?”

“No,” said Ataba. “It is nothing more than the clay that Imo had left over after he made the world.”

“And the red star called Imo’s Campfire?”

Ataba gave Mau a suspicious look. “Boy, you
know
that is where Imo baked the mud to make the world!”

“And the gods live in the sky, but also are close to their anchors?”

“Don’t be smart with me. You know this one. The gods are everywhere, but can have a greater presence in certain places. What is this about? Are you trying to trap me in some way?”

“No. I just want to understand. No other island has white stone god anchors, right?”

“Yes!” snapped Ataba. “And you are trying to make me say something wrong!” He looked around suspiciously, in case of lurking heresy.

“Have I succeeded?”

“No, demon boy! What I have told you is right and true!”

Mau stopped hammering, but held on to the hammer. “I’ve found another god anchor. It’s not the one for Water. So that means I’ve found you a new god, old man…and I think he’s a trouserman.”

In the end they worked from one of the big canoes.

Milo, Mau, and Pilu took turns diving with the hammer and steel chisel from the
Sweet Judy
’s toolbox and pounding at the coral that held the white cube in its grip.

Mau was hanging on to the canoe to get his breath when Pilu surfaced on the other side.

“I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing,” Pilu said, glancing up nervously at Ataba’s hunched figure in the stern, “but there is another one down there, behind the first one.”

“Are you sure?”

“Come and see. It’s your turn anyway. Careful, though—the tide’s really tugging now.”

It was. Mau had to fight against the pull of the water as he swam down. As he did so, Milo dropped the hammer and chisel and swam up past him. It seemed as though they had been doing this for hours. It was hard to hammer under the water; the hammer just didn’t seem to work so well.

There was the stone Mau had first dived for. It looked free of coral now, but where it had been broken away there was the corner of
another
cube, in the unmistakable white stone. What did all this mean? Not more gods, he thought; we’ve had enough trouble with the ones we’ve got.

He ran his fingers over the shape cut in the first of the new stones. It looked like a tool from the trouserman toolbox, one that he’d held in his hand and wondered about, until Pilu had told him what it was for. But there had been no trousermen around even when his grandfather was a boy, he knew that. And coral was
ancient
. One of these cubes had been right inside the rock, even so, like a pearl in an oyster. He would never have found it if the wave hadn’t smashed up the reef.