Nation (27 page)

“Well, he’s grinning,” said Mau. “I think just hearing the word
sugarcane
was enough!”

“A mountain of sugar would not have been enough.” Daphne held up her purchase. “Shall I tell you what these are? They were made by someone who did not just watch the skies and sail to new lands. He thought about small things that make life better for people. I’ve never heard of them being made of gold before, but these are definitely false teeth!”

When she was a lot older and had to deal with meetings all the time, Daphne remembered the council of war. It was probably the only one ever to have children running around in it. It was certainly the only one to have Mrs. Gurgle scuttling around in it with her new teeth. She had snatched them out of Daphne’s hand when she was demonstrating them to Cahle, and it was impossible to get anything off Mrs. Gurgle if she didn’t want you to take it. They were too big for her, and almost certainly she couldn’t eat with them, but if she opened her mouth in daylight, it was like looking at the sun.

Pilu did most of the talking, but always with one eye on Mau. He talked so fast and hard that the words formed pictures in front of her eyes, and what she saw was the Agincourt speech from
Henry V
, or at least what it might have been like if Shakespeare had been small and dark and worn a little loincloth instead of trousers, or tights in Shakespeare’s case. But there was a lot more in there, and Pilu had one wonderful talent for a speaker: He began with the truth and then he hammered it out until it was very thin but gleamed like Mrs. Gurgle’s new teeth at noon.

They were the oldest people! He told them their ancestors had invented canoes and sailed them under new skies, to land so far away they ended up back home! And they had seen farther than any other people! They had seen the four sons of Air race across the sky! They had seen the Papervine Woman lash her vines around the Fire god! They had built wondrous devices, back in the long ago, when the world was otherwise!

But now bad men were coming! They were very bad men indeed! So Imo himself had sent them the
Sweet Judy
, the first ship ever built, which had come back on the great wave, carrying everything they would need in this dark time, including the wonderful salt-pickled beef and the ghost girl, who knows the secrets of the sky and makes wonderful beer—

Daphne blushed at this and tried to catch Mau’s eye, but he looked away.

And Pilu was shouting, “And with the help of the
Sweet Judy
we shall blow the Raiders across the seas!”

Oh no, she thought, he knows about the cannon! He’s found the
Judy
’s cannon.

There was cheering as Pilu finished. People surrounded Mau.

There had always been wars, even among the local islands. From what she could work out, they were mostly not much worse than a fight among the stableboys and a good way of getting impressive scars and a story to exaggerate for your grandchildren. And there were often raids from one island to another to steal brides, but since the women arranged it all beforehand, they hardly counted.

But…cannon! She’d seen gun drill on the
Judy
, and even Cox handled them with care. There was one right way of firing a cannon, and lots of wonderfully explosive ways of getting it wrong.

When the crowd was gathering around Pilu for some patriotic singing, Daphne strode up to Mau and glared at him.

“How many cannon?” she demanded.

“Milo has found five,” said Mau. “We are going to put them on the hill above the beach. Yes, I know what you’re going to say, but the brothers know how to use them.”

“Really? They might have watched! Pilu thinks he knows how to read, but mostly he just guesses!”

“The cannon give us hope. We know who we are now. We are not beggars outside the trouserman world. We are not children. Once
we
were the bold sailors, all the way to the other end of the world. Perhaps
we
wore the trousers.”

“Er, I think Pilu might have been going too far with that—”

“No, he is clever. Should he tell them the truth? Should he tell them that all I’ve got is a few things I know and a handful of guesses and a big hope, and that we are so weak, and that if I am wrong, those of us not dead by sunset on the day the Raiders attack will wish they were? That will only make them fear. If a lie will make us strong, a lie will be my weapon.” He sighed. “People want lies to live by. They cry out for them. Have you looked at the
Judy
lately? I must show you something.”

The path through the low forest was well worn. So much had been dragged out to the beach in the past months that even high-speed vines and voracious grasses had not been able to keep up everywhere. In places the forest floor was just shards of crumbling stone.

“We go to the
Sweet Judy
for everything,” said Mau as he led the way. “It gives us wood and food and light. Without the
Judy
and her cargo, where would we be? What could we want that the
Judy
could not give us? That’s what people say. And now, since our gods have failed us…”

He stood back.

Someone had nailed a red fish to the planking of the ship. By the smell, it had been there for several days. And below it were a stick man and a stick woman, drawn very crudely in red, white, and black. Daphne stared at them.

“That’s supposed to be me, isn’t it,” she said, “and that’s you with poor Captain Roberts’s cap on.”

“Yes.” Mau sighed.

“It’s a good one of the cap,” said Daphne diplomatically. “Where did they get the white?”

“There’s a stick of it in the carpenter’s toolbox,” said Mau gloomily.

“Ah, that would be called chalk,” said Daphne. “I suppose all these round things they have drawn here are barrels?”

“Yes. This is a god place now. I’ve heard them talking, sometimes. Some of them think the gods sent the
Judy
here to help them! Can you believe that? Then who sent the wave? They’ll believe in anything! This morning I heard one of the new ones talking about ‘The Cave the Gods Made’!
We
made it! Men made the gods, too. Gods of cold stone, which we made so that we could hide from the dark in a shell of comfortable lies. But when the Raiders come, there will be five cannon on the beach, made by men! And when they speak, they will not tell lies!”

“You will blow yourself up! Those cannon have been thrown about and dragged over rocks, and they were old and rusty to start with! Cookie said they’d turn into a tin banana if you fire them with more than half a load. They’ll blow up!”

“We will not run. We cannot run. So we must fight. And if we fight, we must win. But least we know
how
they will fight.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because when the Raiders come, they will pour onto the beach and challenge our chief to single combat.”

“You? But you can’t—”

“I have more than one plan. Please trust me.”

“You will fire the cannon?”

“Perhaps. They worship Locaha. They think he protects them. They collect skulls for him. They eat the flesh of men in his honor. They believe the more men they kill, the more slaves they will have in his country when he takes them. They don’t care if they die. But Locaha makes no bargains with
anyone
.”

They were back on the beach now. In the distance, a couple of men were, very slowly, carrying a cannon up the track.

“I don’t think we have much time,” said Mau. “The man with the big bleeding nose will tell Cox that we are an island of invalids and children and no trousermen. Except you.”

“He won’t care who gets killed. He shot a butterfly in half, remember?” said Daphne.

Mau shook his head. “How can he rise up every morning and decide to be him?”

“I think that if you could understand him, you’d be him. That’s what he does. He turns people into creatures like himself. That’s what happened to Foxlip. And he’ll make sure that the only way to kill him is to be worse than him. It nearly worked on poor Captain Roberts. Make sure it doesn’t happen to you, Mau!”

Mau sighed. “Let’s get back before they start worshiping us, shall we?”

They followed the cannon and Daphne trailed behind a little. Even wearing the trousers, which were far too big for him, Mau still walked like a dancer. Daphne had been taken to the ballet several times by her grandmother, who wanted to make sure she grew up to be a proper lady and not marry a godless scientist. She’d been bored silly, and the dancers were nothing like as graceful as she had expected. But Mau walked as if every part of his body knew where it was and where it was going to and exactly how fast it had to go to get there. People would have paid good money just to see the muscles on his back move like they were doing now. She understood the maids back home a lot more when the sun gleamed on his shoulders. Ahem.

In the morning they fired a cannon, an enterprise that consisted of lighting a really long fuse and then everyone running very fast in the opposite direction. The bang was impressive and most people got back on their feet in time to see the splash when the ball hit the water on the other side of the lagoon.

But Daphne didn’t join in the celebrations. Of course, according to Cookie, everything on the
Judy
was far too old and ready for the scrap heap, but she’d looked into the barrels of the cannon, and they
were
a mess. Four had cracks in them, and the last one’s inside looked as knobbly as the moon. They did not look like the kind of cannon you wanted to fire if you had been raised in the belief that, when it came to cannon, the ball should come out of the
front
. But Mau wouldn’t listen to her when she tried to talk to him about it, and a look came over his face that she’d seen before. It said: “I know what I’m doing. Don’t bother me. Everything will be all right.” And in the meantime, down by the fire, Milo and Pilu banged mysteriously at empty tins from the
Judy
’s galley, hammering them flat for no reason they were prepared to give. Some of the men and older boys were trained in firing the cannon, but since there wasn’t any gunpowder to spare for actually firing any more of the things, they made do with pushing wooden cartridges into the barrel and shouting, “Bang!” They got quite good at that, and were proud at the speed with which “Bang!” could be shouted. Daphne said she hoped the enemy would be trained to say “Aargh!”

Nothing happened and went on happening. They finished the pig fence, which meant that the last of the planting could be done. They started a new hut, but this was a lot higher up the slope. Trees were planted. One of the men got his leg ripped open on the first boar hunt since the wave and Daphne sewed it up again, washing the wound in mother-of-beer to keep it clean. Mau stood guard on the beach every night, often with the Unknown Woman nearby, but now at least she trusted people enough to leave her little boy with them. And that was just as well, because she had taken a sudden interest in papervine, cutting the longest leaves of it from all over the island and then endlessly plaiting them into string after green string. So now, because it’s how people’s minds work, the Unknown Woman was known as the Papervine Woman.

Once she solemnly handed her baby to Daphne, and Cahle made a remark that Daphne didn’t quite catch but which made all the women laugh, so it was almost certainly something like, “It’s about time you made one!”

People relaxed.

And the Raiders came, just at dawn.

They came with drums and torchlight.

Mau ran up the beach to the huts, shouting, “The Raiders are coming! The Raiders are coming!”

People woke up and ran, mostly into one another, while outside the clanging and drumming went on. The dogs barked and got under people’s feet. In ones and twos men hurried up to the cannons on the hill, but by then it was too late.

“You’re all dead,” said Mau.

Out on the lagoon the mists faded. Milo and Pilu stopped their drumming and banging and paddled their canoe back to the beach. People looked around feeling stupid and annoyed. Nevertheless, up on the hill a man shouted “Bang!” at the top of his voice and looked very pleased with himself.

Later, though, Mau asked Daphne what the casualties were.

“Well, one man dropped his spear on his own foot,” she said. “A woman sprained her ankle because she tripped over her dog, and the man up on the cannon got his hand stuck up in the barrel.”

“How can you possibly get your hand stuck up the barrel of a cannon?” said Mau.

“Apparently he was pushing the ball in and it rolled back onto his fingers,” said Daphne. “Perhaps you should write a letter to the cannibals, telling them not to come. I know you don’t know how to write, but they probably don’t know how to read.”

“I must organize people better,” said Mau, sighing.

“No!” said Daphne. “Tell them to organize
themselves
! There should be lookouts. There should always be a man up on the guns. Tell the women to make sure they know where to go. Oh, and tell them that the fastest gun crew will get extra beer. Make them
think
. Tell them what’s got to be done, and let them work out how. And now, thank you, I’ve got some beer half made!”

Back in her hut, with the reassuringly homely smells of the cauldron, the beer, and Mrs. Gurgle, she wondered about Cookie: whether
he
had survived the wave, because if anyone should have done so, it was Cookie.

Daphne had spent a lot of time in the
Sweet Judy
’s galley, because it was only another type of kitchen, and she was at home in kitchens. It was also a safe place. Even at the height of the mutiny, everyone was friends with Cookie, and he had no enemies. Every seaman, even a madman like Cox, knew that there was no point in upsetting the cook, who had all kinds of little opportunities to get his own back, as you might find out one night when it was
you
hanging over the rail, trying to throw up your own stomach.