Nation (4 page)

Now he came around the huge broken rocks that stood at the entrance to the valley and stopped.

Something much bigger than a bird plop or a pig had hit the forest. It couldn’t have been just the wave. Some enormous thing had charged through, leaving a line of smashed trees into the distance.

And not just trees; it had left treasure behind. Rocks! Gray round ones, brown ones, black ones…good hard rocks had a lot of uses here, where the mountain rock was too crumbly to make decent weapons.

But Mau resisted the temptation to collect them now, because rocks don’t go anywhere and, besides, there was the dead man. He lay by the track, as if the creature had tossed him aside, and he was covered in little red crabs whose big day had come.

Mau had never seen a man like this before, but he’d heard of them—of the pale people in the north who wrapped their legs in cloth so they looked like a grandfather bird. They were called the trousermen, and were as pale as ghosts. This one didn’t worry him, not after the memory of yesterday, which screamed all the time behind a door in his head. This was just a dead man. He didn’t know him. People died.

Mau didn’t know what to do with him either, especially since the crabs did. Under his breath he said: “Grandfathers, what shall I do with the trouserman?”

There was a sound like the forest drawing its breath, and the Grandfathers said: HE IS NOT IMPORTANT! ONLY THE NATION IS IMPORTANT!

This was not a lot of help, so Mau dragged the man off the broken track and into a deeper part of the forest, with an army of little crabs following in a very determined way. They’d had years of fig seeds and bird plop. They’d put up with this like good little crabs, they seemed to say, but now it was time for their perfect world.

There was another trouserman farther along the trail, also dropped by the creature. Mau didn’t think about it at all this time, but just dragged him into the tangle of undergrowth, too. It was the best he could do. He had walked too much in the footsteps of Locaha lately. Perhaps the crabs would take the soul of the man back to the trouserman world, but here and now Mau had other things to think about.

Something had come out of the sea on the wave, he thought. Something
big
. Bigger than a sailfin crocodile,
*
bigger than a war canoe, bigger even than…a whale? Yes, that could be it, a big whale. Why not? The wave had hurled big rocks beyond the village, so a whale wouldn’t stand a chance. Yes, a whale, that would be it, thrashing around in the forest with its big tail and slowly dying under its own weight. Or one of the really big sea squids, or a very big shark.

He had to be sure. He had to find out. He looked around and thought: Yes, but not in the dark. Not in the twilight. In the morning he’d come with weapons. And in the morning it might be dead.

He selected a couple of useful-looking rocks from the monster’s trail and ran for it.

Night rolled over the jungle. The birds went to bed, the bats woke. A few stars appeared in the desolate sky.

And in the tangle of broken trees at the end of the trail, something sobbed, all night.

Mau awoke early. There was no more fruit on the round metal thing, but a grandfather bird was watching him hopefully, in case he was dead. When it saw him moving, it sighed and waddled off.

Fire, thought Mau. I must make fire. And for that I need punk wood. His punk bag was a muddy mess because of the wave, but there was always punk in the high forest.

He was hungry, but you had to have fire. Without fire and a spear, you could never hope to be a man, wasn’t that right?

He spent some time hammering the metal thing between the two stones he’d taken from the monster’s track, and ended up with a long sliver of metal that was pretty bendy but very sharp. That was a good start. Then he chipped one stone against the other until he had enough of a groove to allow him to bind the stone to a stick with papervine. He wound papervine around one end of the new metal knife to make a kind of handle.

As the sun rose, so did Mau, and he raised his new club and his new knife.

Yes! They might be sorry things that a man would have thrown away, but now he could kill things. And wasn’t that part of being a man?

The grandfather bird was still watching him from a safe distance, but when it saw his expression, it shuffled off hurriedly and lumbered into the air.

Mau headed up to the high forest while the sun grew hotter. He wondered when he’d last eaten. There had been the mango, but how long ago? It was hard to remember. The Boys’ Island was far away in time and space. It had gone. Everything had gone. The Nation had gone. The people, the huts, the canoes, all wiped away. They were just in his head now, like dreams, hidden behind a gray wall—

He tried to stop the thought, but the gray wall crumbled and all the horror, all the death, all the darkness poured in. It filled up his head and buzzed out into the air like a swarm of insects. All the sights he had hidden from himself, all the sounds, all the smells crept and slithered out of his memory.

And suddenly it all became clear. An island full of people could not die. But a boy could. Yes, that was it! It made sense!
He was dead!
And his spirit had come back home, but he couldn’t see out of the spirit world! He was a ghost. His body was on the Boys’ Island, yes! And the wave had not been real, it had been Locaha, coming for him. It all made sense. He’d died on land with no one to put him into the dark water, and he was a ghost, a wandering thing, and the people were all around him, in the land of the living.

It seemed to Mau that this was not too bad. The worst had already happened. He would not be able to see his family again, because everyone hung ghost bags around the huts, but he would know that they were alive.

The world breathed in.

WHY HAVE YOU NOT REPLACED THE GOD ANCHORS? WHY HAVE YOU NOT SUNG THE CHANTS? WHY HAVE YOU NOT RESTORED THE NATION?

The little valley of the grandfather birds floated in front of Mau’s eyes. Well, at least they would believe him this time.

“I’m dead, Grandfathers.”

DEAD? NONSENSE, YOU ARE NOT
GOOD
ENOUGH TO BE DEAD!

Hot pain struck Mau’s left foot. He rolled and yelped, and a grandfather bird that had also decided he was dead and had pecked his foot to make sure hopped away hurriedly. It didn’t go far away, though, in case he died after all. In the grandfather bird’s experience, everything died if you watched it for long enough.

All right, not dead, Mau thought, pushing himself upright. But dead tired. A sleep full of dark dreams was no sleep at all; it was like a meal of ashes. He needed fire and real food. Everyone knew that bad dreams came when you were hungry. He didn’t want those dreams again. They were about dark waters, and something chasing him.

Mud and sand covered the fields, but worse than that, the wave had broken down the thorn fences, and the pigs had clearly been rooting all over the fields in the night, when Mau had been in the prison of his dreams. There would probably be something left in the muck if he grubbed about long enough, but a man didn’t eat where a pig had eaten.

There was plenty of wild food to eat on the island: upside-down fruit, bad-luck root, malla stems, red star tree, papervine nuts…you’d stay alive, but a lot of it you had to chew for a long time and even then it tasted as though someone had eaten it before you. Men ate fish or pork, but the lagoon was still cloudy, and he hadn’t seen a pig since he’d been back. They were wily, too. A man by himself might get a lucky shot if a pig came down in the low forest at night to eat crabs, but once they were in the high forest, you needed many men to catch one pig.

He found tracks as soon as he entered the forest. Pigs were always making tracks. These were fresh, though, so he poked around a bit to see what they’d been after and found some mad-root tubers, big and white and juicy; the pigs had probably been so stuffed with the food from the field that they were grubbing around out of pure habit, and didn’t have room for one more tuber. Mad-root tubers had to be roasted before they could be eaten, though, or else you went mad. Pigs ate them raw, but pigs probably didn’t notice if they were mad or not.

There was no dry punk wood. There were rotten branches all over the place, but they were sodden to the core. Besides, he thought, as he threaded the tubers on a length of papervine, he hadn’t found any fire stones yet, or decent dry wood for fire sticks.

Granddad Nawi, who did not go raiding because of his twisted leg, sometimes took the boys tracking and hunting, and he used to talk about the papervine bush. It grew everywhere, its long leaves as tough as anything even when they were crackling dry. “Take one strip of the vine lengthwise and yes, it needs the strength of two men to pull it apart. But weave five strands of it into a rope and a hundred men can’t break it. The more they pull, the more it binds together and the stronger it becomes. That is the Nation.”

They used to laugh at him behind his back because of his wobbling walk, and didn’t pay much attention to him, because what could a man with a twisted leg know about anything important? But they made sure that when they laughed they were
well
behind his back, because Nawi always had a faint little smile and an expression that said he already knew far more about you than you could possibly guess.

Mau tried not to laugh too much because he had liked Nawi. The old man watched how birds flew and always knew the best places to fish. He knew the magic word that would keep sharks away. But he hadn’t been carefully dried out in the hot sand and taken to the Cave of the Grandfathers when he’d died, because he’d been born with a leg that didn’t work properly and that meant he’d been cursed by the gods. He could look at a finch and tell you which island it had been born on; he used to watch spiders make webs, and saw things other people didn’t notice. Thinking about it, Mau had wondered why any god would curse someone like that. He’d been
born
with that leg. What had a baby done to make the gods angry?

One day he’d plucked up the courage to ask him. Nawi was sitting out on the rocks, occasionally staring out to sea in between carving something, but he’d given Mau a look that indicated company would not be objected to.

The old man had laughed at the question.

“It was a gift, boy, not a curse,” he said. “When much is taken, something is returned. Since I had a useless leg, I had to make myself a clever brain! I cannot chase, so I learn to watch and wait. I tell you boys these secrets and you laugh. When I hunt, I never come back empty-handed, do I? I think the gods looked at me and said to themselves, Well this one is a sharp one, eh? Let’s give him a gimpy leg so he can’t be a warrior and will have to stay at home among the women (a fate which has something to recommend it, my boy, believe me), and I thank them.”

Mau had been shocked at this. Every boy wanted to be a warrior, didn’t he?

“You didn’t
want
to be a warrior?”

“Never. It takes a woman nine months to make a new human. Why waste her effort?”

“But then when you died, you could be taken up to the cave and watch over us forever!”

“Hah! I think I’ve seen enough of you already! I like the fresh air, boy. I’ll become a dolphin like everyone else. I’ll watch the sky turn and I will chase sharks. And since all the great warriors will be shut up in their cave, it occurs to me there will be rather more female dolphins than male ones, which is a pleasing thought.” He leaned forward and stared into Mau’s eyes. “Mau…,” he said. “Yes, I remember you. Always at the back. But I could see you thinking. Not many people think, not
really
think. They just think they do. And when they laughed at old Nawi, you didn’t want to. But you laughed anyway, to be like them. I’m right, yes?”

How had he spotted that? But you couldn’t deny it, not now, not with those pale eyes looking through you.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Good. And now that I have answered your questions, I think you owe me a favor.”

“Do you want me to run an errand? Or I could—”

“I want you to remember something for me. Have you heard that I know a word that drives away sharks?”

“People say so, but they laugh.”

“Oh, yes. But it works. I’ve tried it three times. The first was when I discovered it, which was when I was about to have my good leg bitten off, and then I tried it out from a raft, just to see if I’d been lucky the first time, and then I swam off the reef one day and frightened away a hammerhead.”

“You mean you went
looking
for a shark?” said Mau.

“Yes. Quite a big one, as I recall.”

“But you might have been eaten!”

“Oh, I’m not bad with a spear, and I had to find out,” said Nawi, grinning. “Someone had to eat the first oyster, you know. Someone looked at half a shell full of snot and was brave.”

“Why doesn’t everybody know?”

Nawi’s permanent smile turned down a little. “I’m a bit strange, yes? And the priests don’t like me much. If I told everyone, and someone died, I think things would be very tricky for me. But someone should know, and you are a boy who asks questions. Don’t use it until I’m dead, all right? Or until you are about to be eaten by a shark, of course.”

And there on the rocks, as the sunset made a path of red across the sea, Mau learned the shark word.

“It’s a trick!” he said, without thinking.

“Not so loud,” snapped Nawi, glancing back at the shore. “Of course it’s a trick. Building a canoe is a trick. Throwing a spear is a trick. Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it. And now you know another one. If it saves your life one day, catch a big fish and throw it to the first dolphin you see. With luck, it will be me!”

And now the old man and his leg were only a memory, along with everyone Mau had ever known. Mau wanted to scream with the weight of it. The world had emptied.

He looked down at his hands. And he’d made a club. A weapon for what? Why did it make him feel better? But he had to stay alive. Yes! If he died, then the Nation would never have been. The island would be left to the red crabs and the grandfather birds. There would be no one to say that anyone had been there.