Nation

by Terry Pratchett

  It was windy up here, and colder than it was down below. It wasn’t a place where you’d want to be at night.

  Oh, well, time to say what she had to say.

  She marched up to the stone, stuck her fists on her hips, and said: “Now listen to me, you! I know about ancestors! I’ve got lots of ancestors! One of them was a king, and that’s about as ancestral as you can be! I’m here about Mau! He tries to do everything, and you just bully him all the time! He’s doing wonderful things, and he’s nearly killed himself, and you never even thank him! Is that any way to behave?”

  Well, it’s how your ancestors behave, said her conscience. What about the way their pictures all stare at you in the Long Gallery? What about the way your father keeps spending all that money on the Hall just because his great-great-great-great-grandfather built it? Yes, what about your father?

  “I know what happens to people who get bullied,” she shouted, even louder this time. “They end up thinking they really are no good! It doesn’t matter that they work so hard they fall asleep at their desks; it’s still never enough! They get timid and jumpy and make wrong decisions, and that means more bullying because, you see, the bully is never going to stop, whatever they do, and my—the person being bullied will do anything to make it stop, but it never will! I’m not going to put up with that, do you understand? If you don’t mend your ways in very short order, there will be trouble, understand?”

  I’m shouting at a rock, she thought as her voice echoed off the mountain. What am I expecting it to do? Reply?

  “Is there anyone listening?” she yelled, and thought: What do I do if someone says “yes”? For that matter, what do I do if they say “no”?

  Nothing happened, in quite an offensive way, considering she’d taken a lot of trouble to get up here.

  I’ve just been snubbed by a cave full of dead old men.

  Someone was standing behind her. Someone she hadn’t heard coming. But she was angry at all sorts of things and right now was mostly angry at herself for shouting at a rock, and whatever it was behind her, it was going to get the sharp end of her tongue.

  “One of my ancestors fought in the Wars of the Roses,” she announced haughtily, without looking round, “and in those wars you were supposed to wear a red rose or a white rose to show whose side you were on, but he was very attached to a pink rose called Lady Lavinia, which we still grow at the Hall, actually, so he ended up fighting both sides at once. He lived, too, because everyone thought it was bad luck to kill a madman. That’s what you need to know about my family: We might be pigheaded and stupid, but we do fight.” She spun around. “Don’t you dare creep up on—Oh.”

  Something went pnap. It was a pantaloon bird staring up at her with an affronted expression on its beak. That wasn’t the most noticeable thing about it, however, which was that it was not alone. There were at least fifty of the birds, with more flying in. Now there was sound, because the big birds had the aerodynamics of a brick in any case, and in aiming to land near Daphne they were put off their concentration and mostly crashed on other pantaloon birds, in clouds of feathers and angry beak snapping: Pnap! Pnap!

  It was a bit like being in a snowfall. It’s all fun and games at the start, a winter wonderland, and you think because it’s soft, it’s harmless. And then you realize you can’t see the path anymore and it’s getting dark and the snow is blotting out the sky—

  A big bird, out of sheer luck, landed on her head, scrabbling for a foothold in her hair with claws like old men’s hands. She screamed at it and managed to force it off. But they were still piling up around her, pushing and pnapping at one another. She could hardly think, in the storm of noise and stink and feathers, but it seemed they weren’t actually attacking her. They just wanted to be where she was, wherever that was.

  Oh yes, the stink. Nothing stank like a lot of pantaloon birds up close. On top of the ordinary dry, bony bird smell, they had the worst breath of any living creature. She could feel it hitting her skin like scrubbing brushes. And all the time they pnapped, each trying to outpnap all the others, so that she nearly didn’t hear the cry of rescue.

  “Show us yer drawers! Once I was an awful drinker, now I am a dreadful stinker!”

  The birds panicked. They hated the parrot as much as it hated them. And when a pantaloon bird wants to get away fast, it makes sure it leaves behind anything not wanted on the journey.

  Daphne crouched down and put her hands over her head as a rain of bones and lumps of fish pattered down. Perhaps the noise was the worst part, but when you got down to it, it was all worst.

  A golden-brown shape leaped past her, with a coconut in each hand. It kicked and staggered its way through the panicking birds until it reached the big stone bowl, which was full of pantaloon birds like flowers in a vase. It raised shells high in the air over the bowl and in one sharp movement smashed them together.

  Beer poured out, filling the air with its scent. Instantly the birds’ beaks swung toward the bowl, seeking the beer like a compass needle seeks north. Daphne was immediately forgotten.

  “I wish I was dead,” she said to the world in general, pulling bones out of her hair. “No, I wish I was in a nice warm bath, with proper soap and towels. And after that I wish I was in another bath, because, believe me, this is a two-bath head. And then I wish I was dead. I think this is the worst thing”—she paused, because, yes, there had been something worse, and always would be, and went on—“the second-worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

  Mau crouched down beside her. “Men’s Place,” he said, grinning.

  “Yes, it looks like one,” snapped Daphne. She stared at Mau. “How are you?”

  Mau’s brow wrinkled, and she knew that one wasn’t going to work. They had got a language working pretty well now, thanks to Pilu and Cahle, but it was for simple everyday things, and “How are you?” was too complicated because it didn’t really ask the question you thought it asked. She could see Mau working it out.

  “Er, I am because one day my mother and my father—” he began, but she had been halfway ready for this.

  “I mean here!” she said loudly. There were several soft thumps while he thought about this. The pantaloon birds were falling over, like an elderly lady who has had too much sherry on Christmas Day. Daphne wondered if they were poisoned by the beer, because none of them had sung a song, but she didn’t think so. She had seen one eat a whole dead crab that had been lying in the sun for days. Besides, as they lay there, their beaks trembled and they made happy little pnap-pnap noises. As they fell over, thirsty ones took their places.

  “The little girl told me you had said something about a stone,” said Mau. “And then I had to have a bowl of beef. She insisted. And then I came as fast as I could, but she can’t run very fast.” He pointed. Blibi was walking up the valley, treading carefully in order to avoid snoring birds. “She said you told her she has to watch over me.”

  They sat and waited, avoiding each other’s gaze. Then Mau said: “Er, the way it works is that the birds drink the beer, but the spirit of the beer flies to the Grandfathers. That’s what the priests used to say.”

  Daphne nodded. “We have bread and wine at home,” she said, and thought, Oops, I won’t try to explain that one. They have cannibals down here. It could get…confusing.

  “I don’t think it’s true, though,” said Mau.

  Daphne nodded, and then thought a bit more. “Perhaps things can be true in special ways?” she suggested.

  “No. People say that when they want to believe lies,” Mau said flatly. “And they usually do.”

  There was another pause, which was filled by the parrot. With its mortal enemies paralyzed by the Demon Drink, it had swooped down and was industriously pulling their pants off them, which meant very neatly and carefully plucking out every white feather on their legs while making happy but fortunately muffled parrot noises.

  “They look very…pink,” said Daphne, glad of something innocent, more or less, to talk about
.

  “Do you remember…running?” said Mau after a while.

  “Yes. Sort of. I remember the fish.”

  “Silver fish? Long and thin?”

  “Like eels, yes!” said Daphne. Feathers were drifting across the valley in clumps.

  “So it did happen, did it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I mean, was it a dream or was it real?”

  “Mrs. Gurgle says yes,” said Daphne.

  “Who is Mrs…. Gurgle, please?”

  “The very old woman,” Daphne explained.

  “You mean Mar-isgala-egisaga-gol?”

  “Probably.”

  “And she says yes to what?”

  “Your question. I think she means it wasn’t the right one. Look, does Locaha talk to you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  “In your head? Like your dreams?”

  “Yes, but I know the difference!” said Mau.

  “That’s good, because the Grandmothers have been talking to me.”

  “Who are the Grandmothers?”

  Blibi, if that was really her name, had caught up with them long before Daphne had finished talking and Mau had finished understanding. She sat at their feet, playing with pantaloon bird feathers.

  Mau picked up a feather and twiddled it in his fingers. “They don’t like warriors, then.”

  “They don’t like people being killed. Nor do you.”

  “Have you heard of the Raiders?” asked Mau, brushing a feather off his face.

  “Of course. Everyone’s talking about them. They have great war galleys, and they hang the skulls of their enemies along the sides of them. Oh, and enemy means everyone else.”

  “We have perhaps thirty people here now. Some more arrived this morning, but most of them can hardly stand. They survived the wave, but they weren’t going to wait for the Raiders to come.”

  “Well, you’ve got enough canoes. Can’t we just head east?” She said that without thinking, and then sighed. “We can’t, can we?”

  “No. If we had more able-bodied people, and time to get provisions together, then we could try it. But it’s eight hundred miles of open ocean.”

  “The weaker people would die. They came here to be safe!”

  “They call this island ‘the place where the sun is born’ because it’s in the east. They look to us.”

  “Then we could hide until the Raiders go away. Roll away the stone, the Grandmothers said.”

  Mau stared at her. “And hide among the dead men? Do you think we should?”

  “No! We should fight!” She was amazed at how fast the words came out. They had been pushed out by her ancestors, all those calm stone knights down in the crypt. They’d never ever thought about hiding, even when it was the sensible thing to do.

  “Then I will think of a way,” said Mau.

  “What do the Grandfathers say?”

  “I don’t hear them anymore. I just hear…clicks, and insect noises.”

  “Perhaps the Grandmothers have told them off,” said Daphne, giggling. “My grandmother was always telling my grandfather off. He knew everything there is to know about the fifteenth century but he was always coming down to breakfast without his teeth in.”

  “They fell out in the night?” asked Mau, puzzled.

  “No. He used to take them out to clean them. They were new teeth made out of animal bone.”

  “You trousermen can give an old man new teeth? What will you tell me next? That you can give him new eyes?”

  “Um…yes, actually something very much like that.”

  “Why are you so much smarter than us?”

  “I don’t think we are, really. I think it’s just that you have to learn to make things when it’s cold for half the year. I think we got our empire because of the weather. Anything was better than staying at home in the rain. I’m pretty certain people looked out of the window and rushed off to discover India and Africa.”

  “Are they big places?”

  “Huge,” said Daphne.

  Mau sighed and said, “With the people who leave stones.”

  “Who?”

  “The god anchors,” said Mau. “I understand Ataba now. I don’t think he believes in his gods, but he believes in belief. And he also thinks trousermen came here a long time ago,” he added, shaking his head. “Maybe they brought the stones as ballast. It must have happened like that. Look at all the stone Judy the Sweet brought. Worthless rock to you, all kinds of tools to us. And maybe they gave us metal and tools, like giving toys to children, and we carved the stones because we wanted them to come back. Isn’t that how it would go? We are a little island. Tiny.”

  The Phoenicians, thought Daphne glumly. They went on long, long voyages. So did the Chinese. What about the Aztecs? Even the Egyptians? Some people say they visited Further Australia. And who knows who might have been around thousands of years ago? He’s probably right. But he looks so sad.

  “Well, you might be a small island,” she said, “but you are an old one. The Grandmothers must have some reason for telling you to roll away the big stone.”

  They looked at the stone, which glowed a golden yellow in the afternoon light.

  “You know, I can’t remember a longer day than this,” said Daphne.

  “I can,” said Mau.

  “Yes. That was a long day, too.”

  “It takes ten strong men to move the stone,” said Mau after a while. “We don’t have that many.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” said Daphne. “How many would it take if one of them was Milo, and he had a crowbar made of steel?”

  It took time. There was a groove in the rock that had to be scraped out, and tree trunks to be dragged into position to stop the door from falling outward as it moved. The sun was starting to fall down the sky by the time Milo stepped up to the stone with a six-foot bar of steel in his hand.

  Mau looked at it glumly. It was useful and he was glad to have it, but it was a trouserman thing, another present from the Sweet Judy. They were still stripping her like termites.

  Even a canoe had a soul, of a kind. Everyone knew that; sometimes it wasn’t a good soul, and the craft was hard to handle, even though it seemed to be well built. If you were lucky you got a canoe with a good soul, like the one he’d built on the Boys’ Island, which always seemed to know what he wanted. The Sweet Judy had a good soul, he could tell. It was a shame to break her up, and another kind of shame to know that, once again, they had to rely on the trousermen to get things done. He was almost ashamed of carrying one of the smaller crowbars himself, but they were so useful. Who but the trousermen had so much metal that they could afford to make sticks out of it. But the bars were wonderful. They opened anything.

  “There may be a curse on the door,” said Ataba, behind Mau.

  “Can you tell if there is?”

  “No! But this is wrong.”

  “These are my ancestors. I seek their guidance. Why should they curse me? Why should I fear their old bones? Why are you afraid?”

  “What is in the dark should be left alone.” The priest sighed. “But no one listens to me now. The coral is full of white stones, people say, so which ones are holy?”

  “Well, which?”

  “The three old ones, of course.”

  “You could test them,” said Daphne, without thinking. “People could leave a fish on a new stone and see how their fortune changes. Hmm, I’d need to work out a scientific way—” She stopped, aware that everyone was watching her. “Well, it would be interesting,” she finished lamely.

  “I did not understand any of that,” said Ataba, looking coldly at her.

  “I did.”

  Mau craned to see who had spoken and saw the tall skinny figure of Tom-ali, a canoe builder who had arrived with two children who were not his, one boy and one girl.

  “Speak, Mr. Tom-ali,” he said.

  “I would like to ask the gods why my wife and so
n died and I did not.” There was some murmuring from the crowd.

  Mau already knew him. He knew all the newcomers. They walked the same way, slowly. Some just sat and watched the sea. And there was a grayness about them all. Why am I here? their faces said. Why me? Was I a bad person?

  Tom-ali was repairing the canoes now, with the boy helping him, while the girl helped out in the Place. Some of the children were coping better than the adults; after the wave, you just found a place that fitted. But Tom-ali had said what a lot of people didn’t want to hear said, and the best thing to do was to give them something else to think about, right now.

  “We all want answers today,” Mau said. “Please, all of you, help me move the stone. No one else has to set foot inside. I will go in by myself. Perhaps I’ll find the truth.”

  “No,” said Ataba firmly, “let us go in there together and find the truth.”

  “Fine,” said Mau. “That way we can find twice as much.”

  Ataba stood next to Mau as the men took up their positions. “You say you are not frightened. Well, I am frightened, young man, to my very toes.”

  “The truth will be the dead men in there, that’s all,” said Mau. “Dried up. Dust. If you want to be frightened, think about the Raiders.”

  “Do not dismiss the past so lightly, demon boy. It may still teach you something.”

  Milo forced the bar between the rock and the stone, and heaved. The stone creaked, and moved an inch—

  They did it carefully and slowly, because it would certainly crush anybody it fell on. But cleaning out the groove had been a good idea. The stone ran smoothly, until half of the cave entrance could be seen.

  Mau looked inside. There was nothing there. He’d imagined all kinds of things, but not nothing. The floor was quite smooth. There was a bit of dust on the floor, and a few beetles scuttled off into the dark, and that was all the cave held. Except depth.

  Why had he expected bones to fall out when the door was opened? Why should it be full up? He picked up a piece of rock and threw it into the darkness as hard as he could. It seemed to bounce and rattle for a long time.