Nation (9 page)

Then she turned over the sheet….

Mau gasped. Her words were gibberish to his ears, but he knew how to speak pictures…. It was a grandfather bird! There, right on the paper! It looked real! In wonderful colors! No one on the island had been able to make colors like that, and they never turned up in trade. It looked as though someone had pulled a grandfather bird out of the air!

“How is this done?” he asked.

Daphne tapped it with a finger. “Pantaloon bird!” she said. She looked expectantly at Mau, then pointed to her mouth and made a sort of snapping motion with her thumb and forefinger.

What does that mean? Mau wondered. “I’m going to eat a crocodile”?

“Pant-aa-loooon birddd,” she said very slowly.

She thinks I’m a baby, thought Mau. That’s how you talk to babies when you want them to un-der-stand. She wants me to
say
it!

“Pant-aaa-looooon birrrrdd,” he said.

She smiled, as if he’d just done a good trick, and pointed to the thickly feathered legs of the bird. “Pantaloons,” she said, and this time she pointed to her frilly trousers, peeking from under her torn skirt. “Pantaloons!”

All right, it looks as though “pantaloon bird” means “trouser bird,” Mau told himself. Those frilly legs did look just like the bird’s strange feathered legs. But she’s got the name wrong!

He pointed to the picture again and said, in a talking-to-babies voice: “
Graaaandfaaather
birrrrd!”

“Grandfather?”

Mau nodded.

“Grandfather?” The girl still looked bewildered.

Oh. She needed to be shown one. Well, he wasn’t going to roll away the big stone for
anyone
but…

It was quite a performance. Mau stroked an invisible long beard, staggered around leaning on a nonexistent walking stick, muttered angrily while waving a finger in the air, and—he was proud of this bit—tried to chew a tough piece of pork with invisible nonexistent teeth. He’d watched the old men eating, and he made his mouth look like two rats trying to escape from a bag.

“Old man?” shouted Daphne. “Oh yes! Very droll! The old man bird! Yes, I see what you mean! They always look so annoyed!”

After that, things happened quite fast, with the aid of the sand, a stick, and some pebbles, and a lot of acting. Some things were easy, like canoe, sun, and water. Numbers were not too bad, after a false start (one pebble is, in addition to being a pebble, one). They worked hard. Bird, big bird, small bird, bird flying…Nest! Egg!

Fire, cook, eat, good, bad (good was a mime of eating followed by a big smile, bad was Daphne’s unladylike but realistic pantomime of throwing up). They got the hang of here and there, and probably something that did the job of this is or here is. Mau wasn’t too sure of a lot of it, but at least they had the start of…something.

Back to the sand. Mau drew a stick figure and said “Man.”

“Man,” said Daphne, and took the stick from him. She drew another figure, but the legs were thicker.

Mau thought about it. “Pantaloon man?” he tried.

“Trouser man,” said Daphne firmly.

What does that mean? Mau wondered. Only trousermen are proper men? I don’t wear trousers. Why should I? Imagine trying to swim in them!

He took the stick and carefully drew a stick woman, which was like a stick man with a woven papervine skirt and two added circles and two dots. Above the skirt.

The stick was snatched out of his hand and, at speed, Daphne hastily drew a new figure. It was a woman, probably, but as well as the skirt there was another skirt thing covering the top of her body, with only the arms and head sticking out. Then she stuck the stick in the sand and crossed her arms defiantly, her face red.

Ah, right. This was like the time before his older sister went off to live in the unmarried girls’ hut. Suddenly everything he said and did had been wrong, and he never knew why. His father had just laughed when he told him, and said he’d understand one day, and it was best to keep away.

Well, he couldn’t keep away here, so he grabbed the stick and tried, as best he could, to draw a second skirt on the top half of the stick woman in front of him. It wasn’t very good, but Daphne’s look told him he’d done the right thing, whatever it was.

But it put a cloud in the sky. It had been fun, playing with the words and pictures, a sort of game that filled his world and kept the visions of dark water away. And now he’d hit a rule he didn’t understand, and the world was back to what it was before.

He squatted down on the sand and stared out to sea. Then he looked down at the little blue bead on his wrist. Oh, yes…and he had no soul. His boy soul had vanished with the island, and he’d never get a man soul now. He was the blue hermit crab, hurrying from one shell to another, and the big shell he had thought he could see had been taken away. A squid could snap a crab up in a second, only it wouldn’t be a squid for
him
, it would be some demon or ghost. It would enter his head and take him over.

He started to draw in the sand again, little figures this time, men and—yes—women, women whom he remembered, not covered-up trousermen women, and smaller figures, people of all sizes, filling the sand with life. He drew dogs and canoes and huts and—

—he drew the wave. The stick seemed to do it all by itself. It was a wonderful curve, if you didn’t know what it had done.

He shifted along a little and drew one stick figure, with a spear, looking out at the flat horizon.

“I think all that means sadness,” said the girl behind him. Gently she took the stick out of his hand and drew another figure beside the first one. It was holding a portable roof, and wore pantaloons. Now two figures looked out at the endless ocean.

“Sadness,” said Mau. “Saad ness.” He turned the word over on his tongue. “Saaad nesssss.” It was the sound of a wave breaking. It meant you could hear the dark waters in your mind. Then—

“Canoe!” said Daphne. Mau looked along the beach, his head still full of sadness. What about canoe? They’d already done canoe, hours ago, hadn’t they? Canoe was sorted out!

And then he saw the canoe, a four-man canoe, coming through the reef. Someone was trying to steer it, and not doing a bad job, but the water tumbled and swirled in the new gap, and a canoe like that needed at least two people to guide it.

Mau dived into the lagoon. As he surfaced he could see that the lone paddler was already losing control; the gap in the reef was indeed big enough for a four-man canoe to come through it sideways, but any four-man canoe that actually tried anything as stupid as that while the tide was running would soon be overturned. He fought his way through the churning surf, expecting every second to see the thing break up.

He surfaced again after a big wave passed over him, and now the paddler was trying to fend the canoe off the ragged edges of the gap. He was an old man. But he wasn’t alone. Mau heard a baby crying somewhere in the bottom of the canoe.

Another big surge made the canoe spin, and Mau grabbed at it. It rammed his back against the coral before turning away once more, but he was ready for it when it swung around for a second try at crushing him, and he heaved himself up and into the canoe a moment before it crunched into the reef again.

There was someone else lying under a blanket in the rocking canoe. He paid them no attention but grabbed a paddle and dug it into the water. The old man had some sense, at least, and kept the canoe off the rocks while Mau tried to move it toward the beach. Panic wouldn’t help here; you just had to pull it out of the churning mass of water a few inches at a time, with long patient strokes that got easier as you drove it free, until suddenly it was in calmer water and moving quickly. He relaxed a little then, but not too much, because he wasn’t sure he’d have the strength left to move it again if it stopped.

He leaped out as the canoe was about to hit the beach, and managed to pull it a little farther up onto the sand.

The man almost tumbled out—and tried to lift the other person out from under the blanket. A woman. The old man was a bag of bones, and with far more bones than bag. Mau helped him carry the woman and the baby close to the fire, and laid them on the blanket. At first he thought the woman was dead, but there was a flicker of life around her lips.

“She needs water,” croaked the old man, “and the child needs milk! Where are your women? They will know!”

Daphne came running up, parasol bobbing. “Oh, the poor things!” she said.

Mau took the baby from the woman, who made a weak and pitiful attempt to hang on to it, and handed it to the girl.

He heard “Oh, isn’t he
lovely—ur, yuck
!” behind him as he hurried to the river and came back with a couple of brimming coconut shells of water that still had the taste of ashes.

“Where are the other women?” asked the old man as Daphne held the dripping baby at arm’s length and looked around desperately for somewhere to put it.

“There’s just this one,” said Mau.

“But she’s a trouserman woman! They are not proper human beings!” said the old man.

This was news to Mau. “There’s only the two of us here,” he said.

The old man looked crestfallen. “But this is the Nation!” he wailed. “An island of stone, beloved of the gods! I trained as a priest here. All the time I paddled I was thinking, the Nation will have survived! And there’s just a boy and a cursed girl from the unbaked people?”

“Unbaked?”

“Have you been taught nothing? Imo made them first, when He was learning, but He did not leave them long enough in the sun. And you will learn that they are so proud, they cover themselves in the sun. They really are very stupid, too.”

They have more colors than we do, Mau thought, but he didn’t say so.

“My name is Mau,” he said, because at least that wouldn’t start an argument.

“And I must speak to your chief. Run, boy. Tell him my name. He may have heard of Ataba the priest.” There was a sad but hopeful sound to that last sentence, as if the old man thought this was not very likely.

“There is no chief, not since the wave. It brought the trouserman girl here, and everyone else it…took away. I did tell you, sir.”

“But this is such a big island!”

“I don’t think the wave cared.”

The baby started to cry. Daphne tried to cuddle it without getting too close, and made embarrassed shushing noises.

“Then an older man—” Ataba began.

“There isn’t anyone,” said Mau patiently. “There’s just me and the trouserman girl.” He wondered how many times he would have to say this before the old man managed to find the right-shaped space for it in his bald head.

“Only you?” said Ataba, looking bewildered.

“Believe me, sir, sometimes I don’t believe it either,” Mau said. “I think I’ll wake up and it will all be a dream.”

“You had the wonderful white god anchors,” said the old man. “I was brought here to see them when I was a small boy, and that was when I decided I wanted to be a—”

“I think I’d better give this little boy back to his mummy,” said Daphne quickly. Mau didn’t understand the words, but the tone of determination translated itself very well. The baby was screaming.

“His mother cannot feed him,” said Ataba to Mau. “I found her on a big raft with the child, only yesterday. There was food on it, but she wouldn’t eat and the child takes no nourishment from her. It will die soon.”

Mau looked at the little bawling face, and thought: No. Does not happen.

He caught the ghost girl’s eye, pointed to the baby, and made eating motions with his mouth.

“You
eat
babies?” said Daphne, stepping back. Mau picked up the tone of horror, and it took a lot of creative miming to get her to understand that the one who was going to be fed was the baby.

“What?” said Daphne. “Feed it? What with?”

Oh, well, Mau thought, the baby is screaming and I’m in trouble whatever happens. But…does not happen. He waved vaguely at her flat chest, under its slightly grubby white frills.

Daphne went bright pink. “What? No! How dare you! You have to…” She hesitated. She wasn’t really sure about this, since everything she knew on the subject of the lumps at the front was based on an overheard, giggly conversation between the housemaids that she had found unbelievable, and a strange lecture from one of her aunts, in which the phrase “when you’re old enough” had turned up a lot and the rest of it sounded unlikely.

“You have to be married,” she said firmly. It didn’t matter that he didn’t understand, she felt better for saying it.

“Does she know anything? Has she borne children?” said Ataba.

“I don’t think so!”

“Then there will be no milk. Please fetch another woman, one who has not long had—Oh.” The old man sagged as he remembered.

“We have food,” said Mau.

“It must be milk,” said the old man flatly. “The baby is too young for anything else.”

“Well, at least there can be a hut for the mother, up at the Women’s Place. It’s not too far. I can light a fire there,” said Mau.

“You dare to go into a Women’s Place?” The priest looked shocked, and then smiled. “Ah, I see. You are only a boy.”

“No, I left my boy soul behind me. I think the wave washed it away.”

“It washed away too many things,” said Ataba. “But you have no tattoos, not even the sunset wave. Have you learned the chants? No? No manhood feast? You were not given a man’s soul?”

“None of those.”

“And the thing with the knife where you—?”

“Not that, either,” said Mau quickly. “All I have is this.” He held out his wrist.

“The blue jade stone? They’re protection for only a day or so!”

“I know.”

“Then it could be that behind your eyes is a demon or a vengeful spirit.”

Mau thought about this. He agreed with it. “I don’t know what’s behind my eyes,” he said. “All I know is that it is very angry.”

“On the other hand, you did save us,” said the old man, smiling at him a little nervously. “That doesn’t sound like any demon I’ve ever heard of. And I hope you gave thanks to the gods for your salvation?”