Nation

by Terry Pratchett

  “They want me to bring up the last of the god anchors,” he said.

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes, it’s in the lagoon, and it can stay there!”

  “All right, but what actual harm would it do to bring it up?”

  “Harm?” said Mau, trying to understand this. “You want to thank the god of Water?”

  “You don’t have to mean it, and people will feel better,” said Pilu.

  Something whispered in Mau’s ear, but whatever it was trying to say was far too faint to be understood. It’s probably some ancient Grandfather who was a bit slow, he thought sourly. And even though I am the chief, my job is to make people feel better, is it? Either the gods are powerful but didn’t save my people, or they don’t exist and all we’re believing in is lights in the sky and pictures in our heads. Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that important?

  The voice in his head answered, or tried to. It was like watching someone shouting at the other end of the beach. You could see them jumping up and down and waving their arms and maybe even make out their lips moving, but the wind is blowing through the palms and rustling the pandanuses and the surf is pounding and the grandfather birds are throwing up unusually loudly, so you can’t hear but you do know that what you can’t hear is definitely shouting. In his head it was exactly like that, but without the beach, the jumping, the waving, the lips, the palms, the pandanuses, the surf, and the birds, but with the same feeling that you are missing something that someone really, really wants you to hear. Well, he wasn’t going to listen to their rules.

  “I’m the little blue hermit crab,” said Mau under his breath. “And I am running. But I will not be trapped in a shell again, because…yes, there has to be a because…because…any shell will be too small. I want to know why. Why everything. I don’t know the answers, but a few days ago I didn’t know there were questions.”

  Pilu was watching him carefully, as if uncertain whether he should run or not.

  “Let’s go and see if your brother can cook, shall we?” said Mau, keeping his voice level and friendly.

  “He can’t, usually,” said Pilu. He broke into his grin again, but there was something nervous about it.

  He’s frightened of me, Mau thought. I haven’t hit him or even raised my hand. I’ve just tried to make him think differently, and now he’s scared. Of thinking. It’s magic.

  It can’t be magic, Daphne thought. Magic is just a way of saying “I don’t know.”

  There were quite a few shells of beer fizzing on the shelves in the shed. They all had little bubbles growing and bursting from the seals at the top. It was beer that hadn’t been sung to yet. Mother-of-beer, they called it at that stage. She could tell quite easily, because there were dead flies all around it. They didn’t drown in it; they died and became little fly statues as soon as they drank it. If you were looking for the real Demon Drink, this was it.

  You spit in it, you sing it a song, you wave your hands over it in time to said song, the demon is magically sent back to, er, wherever, and there’s just the good drink left. How does that happen?

  Well, she had a theory; she’d spent half the night thinking it up. The ladies were at the other end of the Place, picking blossoms. They probably wouldn’t hear her if she sang quietly. The spitting…well, that was for luck, obviously. Besides, you had to be scientific about these things, and test one bit at a time. The secret was in the hand movements, she was sure of it. Well, slightly sure.

  She poured a little of the deadly pre-beer into a bowl and stared at it. Or perhaps it was in the song, but not in the words? Perhaps the frequency of the human voice did something to the tiny atomic substances, such as happened when the famous operatic soprano Dame Ariadne Stretch broke a glass by singing at it? That sounded very promising, especially when you knew that only women were supposed to make beer and they, of course, had higher voices!

  The Demon Drink stared back at her, rather smugly in her view. Go on, it seem to say, impress me.

  “I’m not sure I know all the words to this one,” she said, and realized that she had just apologized to a drink. That was the trouble with being brought up in a polite household. She cleared her throat. “Once my father took me to the music hall,” she said. “You might enjoy this one.” She cleared her throat again and began:

  “Let’s all go down to the Strand,

  (’ave a banana!)

  Oh! What a happy land,

  I’ll be the leader, you can march behind—”

  No, that sounded a bit complicated for a beverage, and the banana only confused matters. What about…? She hesitated, and thought about songs. Could it be that simple? She started to sing again, counting on her fingers as she sang.

  “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full—”

  She sang sixteen verses, counting all the time, singing to the beer as it bubbled, and noted when it was suddenly as clear and sparkly as a diamond. Then she tested her conclusion, like a proper scientist would, on another bowl of mother-of-beer, feeling rather certain and more than a little pleased with herself. Now she had a working hypothesis.

  “Baa, baa, black—”

  She stopped, aware of people trying to be quiet. Cahle and the Unknown Woman were standing in the doorway, listening with interest.

  “Men!” said Cahle cheerfully. She had a flower tucked in her hair.

  “Er…what?” said Daphne, flustered.

  “I want to go and see my husbun!”

  Daphne understood that, and there was no rule against it. Men weren’t allowed into the Place, but women could come and go as they pleased.

  “Er…good,” she said. She felt something touch her hair, went to brush it away, and realized that the Unknown Woman was undoing her plaits. She went to stop her and caught Cahle’s warning look. In her head the Unknown Woman was coming back from somewhere bad, and every sign of her being a normal person again was to be encouraged.

  She felt the plaits being gently teased apart.

  Then she smelled a whiff of perfume, and realized the woman had stuck a flower behind her ear. They grew everywhere in the Place, huge floppy pink and purple blooms that knocked you down with their scent. Cahle generally wound one into her hair in the evenings.

  “Er, thank you,” she said.

  Cahle took her gently by the arm, and Daphne felt the panic rise. She was going to the beach as well? But she was practically naked! She had nothing under the grass skirt but one petticoat, her pantaloons, and a pair of Unmentionables! And her feet were bare right up to the ankles!

  Then it went strange, and forever afterward she never quite understood how it had happened.

  She should go down to the beach. The decision floated there in her head, clear and definite. She had decided it was time to go down to the beach. It was just that she couldn’t remember deciding. It was a strange sensation, like feeling full even though you can’t recall having had lunch. And there was something else, fading away fast like an echo without a voice: Everyone has toes!

  Milo was a pretty good cook, Mau had to admit. He really knew how to bake fish. The smell hung over the camp when they got back, and the air practically drooled.

  There was still plenty of the Sweet Judy left. It would take months, maybe years to break her down. They had the tools now, yes, but not enough people; it would need a dozen strong men to shift some of the bigger timbers. But there was a hut, even if its canvas sides rattled in the wind, and there was fire, and now there was a hearth. And what a hearth! The entire galley had been dragged here, every precious metal bit of it, except for the big black oven itself. That could wait, because there was already a fortune in pots and pan and knives.

  And we didn’t make them, Mau thought as the tools were passed around. We can build good canoes, but we could never build the Sweet Judy—

  “What are you doing?” he said to Milo. The man had taken up a hammer and a metal chisel and was bashing away at a smaller chest among the pi
le of salvage.

  “It is locked,” said Milo, and showed him what a lock was.

  “There’s something important inside, then?” Mau asked. “More metal?”

  “Maybe gold!” said Pilu. That had to be explained, and Mau remembered the shiny yellow metal around the strange invitation the ghost girl had given him. Trousermen loved it almost as much as trousers, said Pilu, even though it was too soft to be useful. One small piece of gold was worth more than a really good machete, which showed how crazy they were.

  But when the hasp broke and the lid was thrown back, the chest was found to contain the smell of stale water and—

  “Books?” said Mau.

  “Charts,” said Pilu. “That’s like a map but, well, looks like this.” He held up a handful of the charts, which squelched.

  “What good are they?” said Ataba, laughing.

  A soggy chart was laid out on the sand. They inspected it, but Mau shook his head. You probably had to be a trouserman to begin to understand.

  What did it all mean? It was just lines and shapes. What good were they?

  “They are…pictures of what the ocean would look like if you were a bird, high in the sky,” said Pilu.

  “Can trousermen fly, then?”

  “They have tools to help them,” said Pilu uncertainly. Then he brightened and added: “Like this.” Mau watched as Pilu pulled a heavy round item from his pile of spoils. “It’s called a compass. With a compass and a chart, they are never lost!”

  “Don’t they taste the water? Don’t they watch the currents? Don’t they smell the wind? Don’t they know the ocean?”

  “Oh, they are good seamen,” said Pilu, “but they travel to unknown seas. The compass tells them where home is.”

  Mau turned it around in his hand, watching the needle swing.

  “And where it isn’t,” he said. “It has a point at both ends. It shows them where unknown places are, too. Where are we on their chart?” He pointed to a large area of what was, apparently, land.

  “No, that’s Nearer Australia,” said Pilu. “That’s a big place. We are”—he rummaged through the damp charts and pointed to some marks—“here. Probably.”

  “So where are we, then,” said Mau, straining to see. “It’s just a lot of lines and squiggles!”

  “Er, those squiggles are called numbers,” said Pilu nervously. “They tell the captains how deep the sea is. And these are called letters. They say ‘Mothering Sundays.’ That’s what they call us.”

  “We got told that on the John Dee,” said Milo helpfully.

  “And I’m reading it here on the chart,” said his brother, giving him a sharp look.

  “Why are we called that?” Mau asked. “We are the Sunrise Islands!”

  “Not in their language. Trousermen often get names wrong.”

  “And the island? How big is the Nation?” said Mau, still staring at the chart. “I can’t see it.”

  Pilu looked away and mumbled something.

  “What did you say?” said Mau.

  “It’s not actually drawn here. It’s too small….”

  “Small? What do you mean, small?”

  “He’s right, Mau,” said Milo solemnly. “We didn’t want to tell you. It’s small. It’s a small island.”

  Mau’s mouth was open in astonished disbelief. “That can’t be right,” he protested. “It’s much bigger than any of the Windcatcher Islands.”

  “Islands that are even smaller,” said Pilu, “and there’s lots of them.”

  “Thousands,” said Milo. “It’s just that…well, as big islands go—”

  “—this is one of the smaller ones,” Pilu finished.

  “But the best one,” said Mau quickly. “And no one else has got the tree-climbing octopus!”

  “Absolutely,” said Pilu.

  “Just so long as we remember that. This is our home,” said Mau, standing up. He pulled at the trousers. “Aargh. These really itch! All I can say is trousermen don’t walk about much!”

  A sound made him look up, and there was the ghost girl—at least, it looked like the ghost girl. Behind her stood Cahle with a big grin, and the Unknown Woman, smiling her faint, faraway smile.

  Mau looked down at his trousers, and then up at her long hair with the flower in it, while she looked down at her toes and then up at his trousers, which were so much longer than his legs that he appeared to be standing in a pair of concertinas, and the captain’s hat floated on his curls like a ship at sea. She turned to look at Cahle, who stared up at the sky. He looked at Pilu, who looked down at his feet, although his shoulders were shaking.

  Then Mau and the ghost girl looked directly into each other’s eyes and there was only one thing they could do, which was to laugh themselves silly.

  The others joined in. Even the parrot squawked, “Show us yer drawers!” and did its doo-dahs on Ataba’s head.

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

  CHAPTER 7

  Diving for Gods

  IT 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 sm
oke. 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.