Nation

CHAPTER 4 Bargains, Covenants, and Promises

ERMINTRUDE HAD HEARD THAT when you drown, your whole life passes in front of your eyes.

In fact it’s when you don’t drown that this happens, as life races back from the start to get to the last known living moment. Mostly it’s a blur, but every life has its important moments that get more and more colorful the longer they are remembered.

In hers, one of them was about the map. Every life should have a map.

The map. Oh yes, the map. She’d found it in the big atlas in the library one wet winter afternoon. In a week she could have drawn it from memory.

And the name of it was the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean.

It was half a world of blue sea, but it was stitched together with seams of little marks, tiny dots that her father had called island chains. There were hundreds and thousands of islands and a lot of them were just about big enough for a coconut tree, he’d said. There had to be one coconut tree on every tiny island, by law, so that if someone was shipwrecked, then at least he’d have some shade to sit in.[!The lonesome palm (Cocos nucifera solitaria) is common over most of the Pelagic, and is unusual in that an adult tree secretes a poison in its root that is deadly only to other palms. Because of this it is not unusual to find only one such palm on the smaller islands and a thousand cartoons are, therefore, botanically correct.!] He drew a picture of her sitting in the shade of a coconut tree, with her white dress and her parasol, but he quickly added, on the penciled horizon, a ship coming to rescue her.

Much later on, she was able to read the names of the groups of islands: The Bank Holiday Monday Islands, All Souls Island, The Rogation Sunday Islands, The Mothering Sunday Islands, The Hogmanay Islands… it seemed that the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean had been navigated not with a compass and a sextant but with a calendar.

Her father had said that if you knew where to look, you could find Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island, and loaned her a large magnifying glass. She spent long Sunday afternoons lying on her stomach, minutely examining every necklace of dots, and concluded that Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island was a Father Joke, i.e., not very funny but sort of lovable in its silliness. But now, thanks to him, she knew the island chains of the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean by heart.

She had wanted, there and then, to live on an island that was lost at sea, and so small that you weren’t sure if it was an island or just that a fly had done its business on the page.

But that wasn’t all. There was a map of the stars at the back of the atlas. For her next birthday she’d asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: “Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn’t paying attention!” And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who’d want a pony when you could have the whole universe? It was far more interesting and you didn’t have to muck it out once a week.

“Well, that was a good day,” said her father when they were coming back from one meeting.

“Yes, Papa. I think Dr. Agassiz is certainly providing evidence for the Ice Age theory, and I shall need a bigger telescope if I am to see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.”

“Well, we shall have to see about that,” said her father with hopeless parental diplomacy. “But please don’t let your grandmother know you shook hands with Mr. Darwin. She thinks he is the devil.”

“Gosh! Is he?” The prospect had seemed quite interesting.

“As a matter of fact,” said her father, “I believe he is the greatest scientist who has ever lived.”

“Greater than Newton? I don’t think so, Papa. Many of his ideas were first voiced by other people, including his own granddad!”

“Aha? You’ve been in my library again. Well, Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants.”

“Yes, but… well, he was just being modest!” And they had argued all the way home.

It was a game. He loved it when she assembled her facts and pinned him down with a cast-iron argument. He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty that dismissed all opposition.

In fact there was always something a little naughty about going to the lectures. Her grandmother objected to them on the grounds that they “would make the girl restless and give her ideas.” She was right. Ermintrude was already pretty good at ideas, but a few more are always welcome.

At this point the racing line of life speeds up, to get past some dark years she never remembered except in nightmares and whenever she heard a baby crying, and leaps ahead to the day when she first knew she would see islands under new stars….

Her mother was dead by then, which meant that things at the Hall were now run entirely by her grandmother, and her father, a quiet, hardworking man, didn’t have much spirit left to battle with her. The wonderful telescope was locked away, because “a well-brought-up young lady has no business looking at the moons of Jupiter, whose home life was so different from that of our own dear king!” It didn’t matter that her father very patiently explained that there were at least thirty-six million miles of difference between Jupiter, the Roman god, and Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. She didn’t listen. She never listened. And you put up with that or you hit her over the head with a battle-axe, and her father didn’t do that sort of thing, even though one of his ancestors had once done something really horrible to the duke of Norfolk with a red-hot poker.

Their Royal Society visits were banned on the grounds that the scientists were nothing but people who asked silly questions, and that was that. Her father came and apologized to her about it, which was horrible.

But there were other ways to explore the universe….

One of the things about being a quiet girl in a very big house is that you can, if you try, be invisible in plain view, and it is amazing what you can overhear when you are being a good little girl helping Cook in the kitchen by cutting out pastry shapes. There were always delivery boys or men from the estate wanting a cup of tea, or Cook’s old friends just dropping in for a chat. The secret was to wear ribbons in your hair and skip everywhere. It completely fooled people.

Except her grandmother, unfortunately, who put a stop to the visits below stairs as soon as she took over the running of the household. “Children should be seen, but not be seen listening!” she said. “Off you go! Quickly, now!”

And that was that. Ermi — Daphne spent most of her time doing embroidery in her room. Sewing, provided you weren’t doing it to make something useful, was one of the few things a girl “who was going to be a lady one day” was allowed to do, at least according to her grandmother.

However, it wasn’t all she did. To begin with, she found the old dumbwaiter, a sort of elevator just for food, that hadn’t been used since the days when her great-great-aunt had lived in Daphne’s bedroom on the top floor and all her food had to be hauled up five floors from the kitchen. Daphne didn’t know much about the old woman, but apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she’d gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapors and stayed there, still gently vaporizing, until she completely vaporized at the age of eighty-six, apparently because her body was fed up with having nothing to do.

The dumbwaiter had never been officially used since then. Daphne, though, had found that with the removal of a few planks and the greasing of some wheels, she could haul it up and down by its pulleys and eavesdrop on several rooms. It became a sort of sound telescope to explore the indoor solar system that revolved around her grandmother.

She gave it a bit of scrub, and then another because — yuck — if the maids weren’t going to carry a food tray up five floors, then they weren’t going to — yuck — carry down anything else, like the guzunder.

It was an interesting education, listening to the big house when it was unaware, but getting it was like tipping out a jigsaw puzzle on the floor and trying to guess at the picture from looking at five pieces.

And it was while listening to two of the maids talking about Albert the stable boy and how naughty he was (a state of affairs they didn’t entirely disapprove of, apparently, and that she was starting to suspect very strongly had nothing to do with how he looked after the horses) that she heard the argument in the dining room. Her grandmother’s voice cut through the ear like a diamond on glass, but her father was using the calm, flat voice he always used when he was very angry and didn’t dare show it. By the time she’d pulled up the dumbwaiter to get a better listen, the argument had been going on for some time:

“… and you’ll end up in a cannibal’s cooking pot!” That was the unmistakable sound of her grandmother.

“Cannibals usually roast their food, Mother, not boil it.” — And that was certainly the quiet voice of her father who, when he was talking to his mother, always sounded as though he was determined not to look up from his newspaper.

“And is that any better, pray?”

“I doubt it, Mother, but at least it is more accurate. In any case, the Rogation Sunday Islanders have never been known to cook anyone al fresco in any kind of utensil, as far as we know.”

“I don’t see why you have to go to the other end of the world.” — And that was her grandmother changing her line of attack.

“Somebody must. We have to keep the flag flying.”

“Why, pray?”

“Oh dear, Mother, I’m surprised at you. It’s our flag. It has to fly.”

“Do remember that only one hundred and thirty-eight people have to die and you will be king!”

“So you keep telling me, Mother, although Father always said that claim is rather weak when you consider what happened in 1421. In any case, while I’m waiting for that very unlikely death toll, I might as well do my bit in the service of the empire.”

“Is there any Society there?” Grandmother could say a capital letter so distinctly that you heard it. Society meant people who were rich or influential or, preferably, both. Although they shouldn’t be richer and more influential than her.

“Well, there’s the bishop — jolly decent chap, apparently. Goes around the place in a canoe and speaks the lingo like a native. Doesn’t wear shoes. Then there’s McRather; he runs the dockyard. Teaching the native lads to play cricket. As a matter of fact I’m to take some more bats with me. And of course there will often be a ship in, so as governor I’ll have to entertain the officers.”

“Sun-struck madmen, naked savages — ”

“They wear pads, actually.”

“What? What? What are you talking about?” Another thing about Grandmother was her belief that a conversation consisted of someone else listening to her talking, so even mild interruptions seemed to her to be some strange, puzzling inversion of the natural order of things, like pigs flying. It baffled her.

“Pads,” said Daphne’s father helpfully, “and protective thingummies. McRather says they’ve confused hitting the wicket with hitting the batsman.”

“Very well then, sunstruck madmen, seminaked savages, and the Royal Navy. And you really think I will allow my granddaughter to face these perils?”

“The Royal Navy isn’t very perilous.”

“Supposing she marries a sailor!”

“Like Auntie Pathenope did?” Daphne could imagine her father’s faint smile, which always made his mother angry, but then, so did practically everything else.

“He was a rear admiral!” her grandmother snapped. “That’s not the same thing at all!”

“Mother, there is no need for this fuss. I have told the king that I will go. Ermintrude will follow in a month or two. It will do us good to be away for a while. This house is too cold and too big.”

“Nevertheless, I forbid — ”

“It is also too lonely. It has too many memories! It has too much silenced laughter, too many unheard footsteps, too many soundless echoes since they died!” The words came out like slabs of thunder. “I have made my decision and it will not be unmade, even by you! I have told the palace to send her out to me as soon as I am settled in. Do you understand? I believe my daughter would!! And perhaps at the other end of the world there is a place where the screaming can’t be heard, and I may find it in my heart to grant God absolution!”

She heard him walk to the door, while tears met on her chin and soaked her nightgown.

And Grandmother said: “And the child’s schooling, may I ask?”

How did she manage it? How did she come out with something like that, when the silverware and the chandeliers were still jingling with tinny echoes. Didn’t she remember the coffins?

Perhaps she did. Perhaps she thought that her son needed to be anchored to the Earth. It worked, then, because he stopped with his hand on the door handle and said, in a voice that almost didn’t shake, “She will have a tutor in Port Mercia. It will do her good, and broaden her horizons. You see? I have thought about this.”

“It won’t bring them back, you know.” That was her grandmother. Daphne put her hand over her mouth in sheer shock. How could the woman be so… stupid?

She could imagine her father’s face. She heard him walk to the dining-room door. She waited for the slam, but that wouldn’t be her father. The sharp little click of the door shutting was louder in her head than any slam could be.

At which point Daphne awoke, glad that she had. The broadened horizon was red but the back of the sky was full of stars; she was stiff to her very bones, and she felt that she’d never eaten in her life, ever. And this was very convenient, because the smell coming out of the pot was fishy and spicy and was making her drool.

The boy was standing some way off, holding his spear and looking out to sea. She could just see him in the firelight.

He’d piled on even more logs. They roared and crackled and exploded with steam, sending a thick cloud of smoke and vapor into the sky. And he was guarding the beach. What from? This was a real island, much bigger than many that she had seen on the voyage. Some had been not much more than a sandbank and a reef. Could anyone be left alive within a hundred miles? What was he frightened of?

Mau stared at the sea. It was so flat that all night he had been able to see the stars in it.

Somewhere out there, flying to him from the edge of the world, was tomorrow. He had no idea what shape it would be, but he was wary of it. They had food and fire, but that wasn’t enough. You had to find water and food and shelter and a weapon, people said. And they thought that was all you had to have, because they took for granted the most important thing. You had to have a place where you belonged.

He’d never counted the people in the Nation. There were… enough. Enough to feel that you were part of something that had seen many yesterdays and would see many tomorrows, with rules that everyone knew, and that worked because everyone knew them, so much so that they were just part of the way people lived. People would live and die but there would always be a Nation. He’d been on long voyages with his uncles — hundreds of miles — but the Nation had always been there, somewhere over the horizon, waiting for him to come back. He’d been able to feel it.

What should he do with the ghost girl? Maybe some other trousermen would come looking for her? And then she’d go, and he’d be alone again. That would be horrible. It wasn’t ghosts that frightened him, it was memories. Perhaps they were the same thing? If a woman followed the same path every day to fill a calabash from the waterfall, did the path remember?

When Mau closed his eyes, the island was full of people. Did it remember their footsteps and their faces, and put them in his head? The Grandfathers said he was the Nation, but that couldn’t be true. Many could become one, but one could not become many. He would remember them, though, so that if people came here, he would tell them about the Nation, and it would come alive again.

He was glad she was here. Without her, he’d walk into the dark water. He’d heard the whispering as he had dived down after her in that scream of silver bubbles. It would have been so easy to heed the wily words of Locaha and sink into the blackness, but that would have drowned her, too.

He was not going to be alone here. That was not going to happen. Just him and the voices of the old dead men, who gave orders all the time and never listened? No.

No… there would be two of them to stay here, and he would teach her the language, so they would both remember, so that when people came, they could say: Once there were many people living here, and then the wave came.

He heard her stir and knew she was watching him. He knew one other thing, too — the soup smelled good, and he probably wouldn’t have made it just for himself. It was whitefish off the reef and a handful of shellfish and ginger from the Women’s Place and taro chopped up fine to give it all some body.

He used a couple of twigs to drag the pot out of the embers and gave the girl a big half shell to use as a spoon.

And it was… funny, mostly because they both had to blow on the soup to get it cool, and she seemed very surprised that he spat out fish bones into the fire while she very carefully coughed them into a piece of frilly cloth that was very nearly stiff with salt and sand. One of them started giggling, or maybe it was both of them at the same time, and then he was laughing so much, he couldn’t spit the next bone at all and, instead, coughed it out into his hand with the same little noise that she made, which was “uh-pur,” which made her nearly choke. But she managed to stop laughing long enough to try to spit out a bone, which she couldn’t get the hang of at all.

They didn’t know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you’ve got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you’re alive, when you really shouldn’t be.

And then they lay back looking up at the sky, where the star of Air sparkled yellow-white in the east and Imo’s Campfire was a sharp red overhead, and sleep hit them like a wave.

Mau opened his eyes.

The world was full of birdsong. It was everywhere, and every kind of song, from the grandfather birds honking up last night’s leftovers to — from the direction of the low forest — something that really should not count as birdsong at all, because it went: “Polly wants a fig, you Bible-thumping ol’ fool! Waark! Show us yer drawers!”

He sat up.

The girl had gone, but her strange toeless prints led toward the low forest.

Mau looked into the clay pot. There had been hardly anything left by the time the shells had scraped it out, but while they had been sleeping something small had licked it clean.

He could try clearing some more of the debris off the fields today. There could be more crops to —

REPLACE THE GOD ANCHORS! SAY THE CHANTS!

Oh, well… up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

The god anchors… well, they were things. If you asked about them, you’d be told you were too young to understand. All that Mau knew was that they kept the gods from floating away into the sky. Of course, the gods were in the sky in any case, but asking about that was a silly question. Gods could be anywhere they wanted. But somehow, for reasons that were perfectly clear, or at least perfectly clear to the priests, the gods stayed near the god anchors and brought good luck to the people.

So which god brought the great wave, and how lucky was that?

There had been a great wave before, everyone said. It turned up in stories of the Time When Things Were Otherwise and the Moon Was Different. Old men said it was because people had been bad, but old men always said that kind of thing. Waves happened, people died, and the gods did not care. Why had Imo, who had made everything and was everything —? Would He have made useless gods? There it was, out of the darkness inside, another thought that he wouldn’t even have known how to think a few days ago, and so dangerous he wanted to get it out of his head as soon as possible.

What did he have to do to the god anchors? But the Grandfathers didn’t answer questions. There were little mud or wood god stones all over the island. People placed them for all sorts of reasons, from watching over a sick child to making sure a crop didn’t spoil. And since it was seriously bad luck to move a god stone, no one did. They were left to fall apart naturally.

He’d seen them so often that he didn’t look at them anymore. The wave must have moved hundreds of them, and washed them away. How could he put them back?

He looked up and down the beach. Most of the branches and broken trees had gone now, and for the first time he saw what wasn’t there.

There had been three special god stones in the village — the god anchors. It was hard, now, to remember where they had been, and they certainly weren’t there now. Those anchors were big cubes of white stone, almost too heavy for a man to lift, but the wave had even snapped the house posts and thrown lumps of coral the size of a man across the lagoon. It wouldn’t have worried about some stone blocks, no matter what they anchored.

He walked along the beach, hoping to see signs leading him to one almost buried in the sand. He didn’t. But he could see a god stone on the floor of the lagoon, now that the water had cleared a bit. He dived in to fetch it, but it was so heavy that bringing it out needed several tries. The lagoon had been scoured by the wave and shelved quite deeply at the west end. He had to carry the stone along the bed, sometimes leaving it behind and coming up to fill his lungs with air, until he found a place shallow enough to bring it out. And of course it weighed more out of the water for some magical reason no one understood; he was out of breath by the time he’d rolled it end over end up the beach.

He remembered this one. It had been next to the chief’s house. It was the one with the strange creature carved on it. The creature had four legs, like a hog but much longer, and a head like an elas-gi-nin. People called it the Wind, and gave it fish and beer for the god of Air before they went on a long journey. Birds and pigs and dogs took the fish, and the beer soaked into the sand, but that didn’t matter. It was the spirit of the fish and the spirit of the beer that mattered. That’s what they said.

He dived in again. The lagoon was a mess. The wave had scattered house-size bits of the reef everywhere, as well as tearing a new entrance for the sea. But he had seen something white over there.

As he got near, he saw how big the new gap was. A ten-man canoe could have got through it sideways.

Another god stone was right under Mau’s feet. He dived, and a school of small silver fish fled from him.

Ah, the Hand, the anchor for the Fire god. This one was smaller, but it was deeper, and farther from the beach. It took him more than an hour to steal it back from the sea, in short slow underwater bounds across the white sand.

There was another one he’d glimpsed right in the new gap, where the surf swirled dangerously. But that would be Water, and right now he felt that Water had taken too many sacrifices lately. Water could wait.

GATHER THE STONES AND GIVE HUMBLE THANKS OR YOU WILL BRING BAD LUCK ON THE NATION! said the Grandfathers in his head.

How did they get into his mind? How did they know things? And why didn’t they understand?

The Nation had been strong. There were bigger islands, but they were a long way off and weren’t as favored. They were too dry, or the winds were bad, or they didn’t have enough soil, or they were at places where the currents were wrong and the fishing was poor, or they were too close to the Raiders, who never came this far into the islands these days.

But the Nation had a mountain, and fresh water all the time. It could grow lots of vegetables, ones that most of the islands couldn’t grow. It had plenty of wild pigs and jungle fowl. It grew maniac roots and had the secret of the beer. It could trade. That was where the jade bead had come from, and the two steel knives, and the three-legged cook pots, and cloth from far away. The Nation was rich and strong, and some said it was because it had the white stone anchors. There was no stone like that anywhere else in the islands. The Nation was blessed, people said.

And now a little boy wandered around on it, doing the best he could, always getting things wrong.

He tumbled the block called the Hand onto the sand near the fire. You left something on the anchor of the Hand if you wanted success in hunting or war. If you were lucky, it was probably a good idea to give it something else when you got back, too.

Right now he gave it his bum. I fished you out of the sea, he thought. The fishes wouldn’t have left you offerings! So excuse me if I offer you my tiredness. He heard the rage of the Grandfathers but tried to ignore it.

Give thanks to the gods or you will bring bad luck, he thought. What, right now, would be bad luck? What could the gods do to him that was worse than they had done already? A wave of anger rose like bile, and he felt the darkness in him open up. Had the people called on the gods when the wave broke? Had his family clung to these stones? Did the gods watch them as they tried to reach higher ground? Did the gods laugh?

His teeth chattered. He felt cold under the hot sun. But fire filled his head, burning up his thoughts.

“Did you hear their screams?” he yelled to the empty sky. “Did you watch them? You gave them to Locaha! I will not thank you for my life! You could have saved theirs!”

He sat down on the Hand, trembling with anger and apprehension.

There was no reply.

He looked up into the sky. There were no storm clouds, and it didn’t look as if it was about to rain snakes. He glanced at the blue bead on his wrist. It was supposed to work for only a day. Could a demon have crept in while he’d slept? Surely only a demon could have thought those thoughts!

But they were right.

Or maybe I have no soul at all, maybe the darkness inside is my dead soul…. He sat with his arms around himself, waiting for the trembling to stop. He had to fill his mind with everyday things — that was it. That would keep him safe.

He sat and looked along the naked beach and thought: I’d better plant some coconuts — there’s plenty being washed up. And pandanuses, I’ll plant some of those, too, for shade. That didn’t sound demonic. He could see the picture of what it would be in his mind’s eye, overlaid on the horrible mess that the beach had become, and in the middle of the image was a white dot. He blinked, and there was the ghost girl, coming toward him. She was covered in white and carried some kind of round white thing above her head, to keep the sun off, perhaps, or to stop the gods from seeing her.

She had a determined expression on her face, and he saw, under the arm that wasn’t holding the sunshade, what looked like a slab of wood.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Daphne,” said Mau, the only word he was certain of.

She looked down meaningfully at the block he was sitting on and gave a little cough. Then her face went bright pink. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I am the one who’s being bad mannered, aren’t I! Look, we need to be able to talk, and I had this idea because you’re always looking at the birds….”

The wooden slab… wasn’t. It split open when Daphne pulled at it. Inside, it looked like sheets of papervine, rolled flat instead of being twisted up. There were marks on it. Mau couldn’t read them, but Daphne ran her finger over them and said loudly:

“Birds of the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean,

by Colonel H. J. Hookwarm, M.R.H, F.R.A.

With sixteen hand-colored illustrations by the Author.”

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?”

“Gave… thanks?” said Mau.

“They may have plans for you,” said the priest cheerfully.

“Plans,” said Mau, his voice as cold as the dark current. “Plans? Yes, I see. Someone must be alive to bury the rest, was that it?” He took a step forward, his fists clenched.

“We cannot know the reasons for all that happ — ” Ataba began, backing away.

“I saw their faces! I sent them into the dark water! I tied small stones to little bodies. The wave took everyone I love, and everything I am wants to know why!”

“Why did the wave spare you? Why did it spare me? Why did it spare that baby which will die soon enough? Why does it rain? How many stars are in the sky? We cannot know these things! Just be thankful that the gods spared your life!” shouted the old man.

“I will not! To thank them for my life means I thank them for the deaths. I want to find reasons. I want to understand the reasons! But I can’t because there are no reasons. Things happen or do not happen, and that is all there is!”

The roar of the Grandfathers’ anger in Mau’s head was so loud that he wondered why Ataba didn’t hear it.

YOU SCREAM OUT AGAINST THE GODS, BOY. YOU KNOW NOTHING. YOU WILL BRING DOWN THE WORLD. YOU WILL DESTROY THE NATION. ASK FORGIVENESS OF IMO.

“I will not! He gave this world to Locaha!” roared Mau. “Let him ask forgiveness of the dead. Let him ask forgiveness of me. But don’t tell me that I am supposed to thank the gods that I’m alive to remember that everyone else died!”

Someone was shaking Mau, but it seemed to be happening to another person, a long way off.

“Stop this! You’re making the baby cry!” Mau stared at Daphne’s furious face. “Baby, food,” she said insistently. Her meaning was very clear, even if he didn’t understand the actual words.

Did she think he was a magician? Women fed babies, everyone knew that! There was no milk on the island. Didn’t she understand? There was no — He stopped, because a bit of his raging brain had just opened up and was showing him pictures. He stared at them, and thought: Could that work? Yes, there it was, the silver thread to a small part of the future. It might work. It had to work.

“Baby, food!” Daphne repeated insistently, giving him another shake.

He gently pushed her arms out of the way. This needed thinking about, and careful planning. The old man was looking at him as if he were on fire, and he stepped back quickly when Mau picked up his fish spear and strode into the lagoon. At least he tried to make it look like a good manly stride, but inside his mind was full of rage.

Were the Grandfathers mad? Was Ataba mad? Did they really think he should thank the gods for his life? If it hadn’t been for the ghost girl, he’d have taken himself to the dark water!

Babies and milk was a smaller problem, but it was noisier, and closer to hand. He could see the answer. He could see a little picture of how it would have to work. It depended on many things. But there was a path. If he followed the steps, there should be milk. And it had to be easier to get milk for a baby than to understand the nature of the gods.

He stared down into the water, not actually seeing anything other than his thoughts. He’d need more tubers, and maybe some beer, but not too much. First, though, he’d have to catch a fish —

And there one was, only a little way away from his feet, white against the white sand so that only its pale shadow gave it away. It floated there like a gift from the gods — No! It was there because he had been so still, as a hunter should be. It was completely unaware of him.

He speared the fish, cleaned it, and took it to the priest, who was sitting between the two big god anchors.

“You know how to cook fish, sir?”

“Are you here to blaspheme against the gods, demon boy?” said Ataba.

“No. It would only be blasphemy to say they didn’t exist if they were real,” said Mau, keeping his voice level. “Now, can you cook fish?”

By the look of it, Ataba was not going to argue religion when there was fresh food around.

“Since before you were born,” said the old man, eyeing the fish greedily.

“Then let the ghost girl have some, and please make a gruel for the woman.”

“She won’t eat it,” said Ataba flatly. “There was food on her raft. There is something wrong in her head.”

Mau looked at the Unknown Woman, who was still by the fire. The ghost girl had brought along more blankets from the Sweet Judy, and at least the woman was sitting up now. Daphne was beside her, holding her hand and talking to her. They are making a Women’s Place, he thought. The language doesn’t matter.

“There will be others,” said Ataba behind him. “Lots of people will end up here.”

“How do you know?”

“The smoke, boy! I saw it from miles away! They will come. We weren’t the only ones. And maybe the Raiders will come, too, from their great land. You will call upon the gods then, oh yes! You will grovel before Imo when the Raiders come.”

“After all this? What’s left for them? What have we still got that they would want?”

“Skulls. Flesh. Their pleasure in our death. The usual things. Pray to the gods, if you dare, that those cannibals do not come this far.”

“Will that help?” said Mau.

Ataba shrugged. “What else do we have?”

“Then pray to the gods to send milk for the child,” said Mau. “Surely they can do something so simple?”

“And what will you do, demon boy?”

“Something else!” Mau paused then, and thought: He’s an old man. He came many miles, and he did stop for the woman and her baby. That is important. He let his anger subside again. “I don’t mean to insult you, Ataba,” he said.

“Oh, I understand,” said the old man. “We all rage against the gods sometimes.”

“Even you?”

“Yes. First thing every morning, when my knees go click and my back aches. I curse them then, you can be certain of it. But quietly, you understand. And I say, ‘Why did you make me old?’”

“And what do they reply?”

“It doesn’t work like that. But as the day wears on and there is maybe some beer, I think I find their answer arising in my mind. I think they tell me: ‘It is because you will prefer it to the alternative.’” He looked at Mau’s puzzled expression. “Not dead, you see?”

“I don’t believe that,” said Mau. “I mean, I think you’re just hearing your own thoughts.”

“Do you wonder where your thoughts come from?”

“I don’t think they come from a demon!”

Ataba smiled. “We shall see.”

Mau stared at the old man. He had to be proud about this. This was Mau’s island. He had to act like a chief.

“There is something I am going to try,” he said stiffly. “This is for my Nation. If I don’t come back, you can stay here. If you stay, there are the huts at the Women’s Place. If I come back, I will fetch you beer, old man.”

“There is beer that happens and beer that does not happen,” said the priest. “I like the beer that happens.”

Mau smiled. “First there must be the milk that happens,” he said.

“Fetch it, demon boy,” said Ataba, “and I’ll believe anything!”