Nation Page 13

  “Oh, yeah, you said.” Pilu pulled at the trousers for a moment and then stood them on the beach. They were so encrusted with mud and salt that they stayed up by themselves. They looked fearsome.

  “They’re powerful magic, they are,” Milo said. “They’re the future, sure enough.”

  Mau tried to avoid crunching the red crabs when they went back along the track to the wreck. They probably didn’t know if they were alive or dead, he thought. I’m certain they don’t believe in little sideways crab gods, and here they are, after the wave, as many as ever. And the birds knew it was coming, too. We didn’t. But we are smart! We make spears and trap fish and tell stories! When Imo made us out of clay, why didn’t he add the bit that tells us that the wave would come?

  Back in the Sweet Judy, Pilu whistled cheerfully as he levered up planks with a long metal bar from the toolbox. It was a jaunty tune and unlike anything Mau had heard before. They used to whistle the dogs when they were hunting, but this sounded…complicated.

  “What is that?” he said.

  “It’s called ‘I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,’” said Pilu. “One of the men on the John Dee taught it to me. It’s a trouserman song.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means I’ve got a lot of coconuts and I want you to throw things at them,” said Pilu as a piece of the deck began to come free.

  “But you don’t have to throw things at them if you’ve already got them down from the tree,” Mau pointed out, leaning on the toolbox.

  “I know. The trousermen take coconuts back to their own country and stand them on sticks and throw things at them.”

  “Why?”

  “For fun, I think. It’s called a coconut shy.” The plank came up with a long-drawn-out scream of nails. It was a horrible noise. Mau felt that he was killing something. All canoes had a soul.

  “Shy? What does that mean?” he said. It was better to talk about nonsense than about the death of the Judy.

  “It means coconuts want to hide from people,” Milo volunteered, but he looked a bit uncertain at this.

  “Hide? But they are in the trees! We can see them.”

  “Why do you ask so many questions, Mau?”

  “Because I want so many answers! What does shy really mean?”

  Pilu looked serious, as he always did when he had to think; generally he preferred talking.

  “Shy? Well, the crew said to me, ‘You’re not shy like your brother.’ That was because Milo never said anything much to them. He just wanted to earn a three-legged cauldron and some knives, so he could get married.”

  “Are you telling me the trousermen throw things at coconuts because coconuts don’t talk?”

  “Could be. They do crazy things,” said Pilu. “The thing about the trousermen is, they are very brave and they sail their boats from the other end of the world, and they have the secret of iron, but there is one thing that they are frightened of. Guess what it is?”

  “I don’t know. Sea monsters?” Mau wondered.

  “No!”

  “Getting lost? Pirates?”

  “No.”

  “Then I give up. What are they afraid of?”

  “Legs. They’re scared of legs,” said Pilu triumphantly.

  “They are scared of legs? Whose legs? Their own legs? Do they try to run away from them? How? What with?”

  “Not their own legs! But trousermen women get very upset if they see a man’s leg, and one of the boys on the John Dee said a young trouserman fainted when he saw a woman’s ankle. The boy said the trousermen women even put trousers on table legs in case young men see them and think of ladies’ legs!”

  “What’s a table? Why does it have legs?”

  “That is,” said Pilu, pointing toward the other end of the big cabin. “It’s for making the ground higher.”

  Mau had noticed it before but paid it no attention. It was nothing more than a few short planks held off the deck by some bits of wood. It sloped, because the wreck of the Sweet Judy lay on her side and the table was nailed to it. There were twelve pieces of dull metal nailed to the wood. These turned out to be called plates (“What are they for?”), which were nailed down so that they didn’t slip off in stormy weather and could be washed up by someone sloshing a bucket of water (“What’s a bucket?”) over them. The deep marks in the plates were because mostly the food was two-year-old salt-pickled beef or pork, which was very hard to cut even with a steel knife, but Pilu had loved it because you could chew it all day. The Sweet Judy had big barrels of pork and beef. They were feeding the whole island. Mau liked the beef best; according to Pilu, it came from an animal called a cattle.

  Mau rapped on the tabletop. “This table doesn’t wear trousers,” he said.

  “I asked about that,” said Pilu, “and they said there was nothing in the world that would stop a sailor thinking about ladies’ legs, so it would be a waste of trousers.”

  “A strange people,” said Mau.

  “But there’s something about the trousermen,” Pilu went on. “Just when you think they are mad, you see something like Port Mercia! Great big huts made of stone, higher than a tree! Some of them are like a forest inside! More boats than you can count! And the horses! Oh, everyone should see the horses!”

  “What are horses?”

  “Well, they’re…well, you know hogs?” said Pilu, ramming the bar under another plank.

  “Better than you can imagine.”

  “Oh, yes. Sorry. We heard about that. It was very brave of you. Well, they are not like hogs. But if you took a hog and made it bigger and longer, with a longer nose and a tail, that’s a horse. Oh, and much more handsome. And much longer legs.”

  “So a horse is not really like a pig at all?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so. But it’s got the same number of legs.”

  “Do they wear trousers?” asked Mau, thoroughly confused.

  “No. Just people and tables. You should try them!”

  They made her do it. That was probably a good thing, Daphne admitted. She’d wanted to do it but hadn’t dared do it, but they’d made her do it, although really they’d made her make herself do it, and now that she’d done it, she was glad. Glad, glad, glad. Her grandmother would not have approved, but that was all right because: a) she wouldn’t find out; b) what Daphne had done was entirely sensible in the circumstances; and c) her grandmother really wouldn’t find out.

  She had removed her dress and all but one of her petticoats. She was only three garments away from being totally naked! Well, four if you included the grass skirt.

  The Unknown Woman had made it for her, much to Cahle’s approval; she’d used lots of the strange vine that grew everywhere here. It seemed to be a sort of grass, but instead of growing upward it just unrolled itself, like an endless green tongue. It tangled up with other plants, blew up into the trees, and generally just got everywhere. According to quite a good pantomime from Cahle, you could make a so-so soup of it, or wash your hair in its juice, but mostly you used it as string or made clothes and bags out of it. Like this skirt the Unknown Woman had made. Daphne knew she had to wear it, because it was quite something for the poor woman to let go of her baby for any reason other than to let Cahle feed it, and that was a good thing and ought to be encouraged.

  The skirt rustled when she walked, in a most disconcerting way. She thought she sounded like a restless haystack. The wonderful breeze got in, though.

  This must be what Grandmother called “Going Native.” She thought that being foreign was a crime, or at least some sort of illness that you could catch by being out in the sun too much, or eating olives. Going Native was giving in and becoming one of them. The way to not go native was to act exactly as if you were at home, which included dressing for dinner in heavy clothes and eating boiled meat and brown soup. Vegetables were “unwholesome,” and you should also avoid fruit because “you don’t know where it’s been.” That had always puzzled Daphne because, after all, how many places could a p
ineapple go?

  Besides, wasn’t there a saying, When in Rome, do as the Romans do? But her grandmother would probably say that meant bathing in blood, throwing people to the lions, and eating peacocks’ eyeballs for tea.

  And I don’t care, Daphne thought. This is rebellion! But obviously she wasn’t going to take off her bodice or her pantaloons or her stockings. This was no time to go totally mad. You had to Maintain Standards.

  And then she realized she had thought that last thought in her grandmother’s voice.

  “You know, on you they look good!” said Pilu, down in the low forest. “The ghost girl will say, ‘Aha, it’s a trouserman.’ And then you can kiss her.”

  “I told you, this is not about kissing the ghost girl!” snapped Mau. “I…just want to see if they have any effect on me, that’s all.”

  He took a few steps. The trousers had been swirled around in the river and bashed on a rock a few times to get the stiffness out of them, but they still made creaking noises as he walked.

  This was foolish, he knew, but if you couldn’t put your trust in gods, then trousers might do. After all, in the Song of the Four Brothers, didn’t the North Wind have a cloak that carried him through the air? And if you couldn’t believe in a song that turned poison into beer, what could you believe in?

  “Do you feel anything?” said Pilu.

  “Yes, they really chafe the sresser!”

  “Ah, that would be because you’re not wearing long johns,” Pilu pointed out.

  “Long john’s what?”

  “It’s what they call soft trousers that you wear underneath the outside trousers. I think they are named after a pirate.”

  “So even the trousers wear trousers?”

  “That’s right. They think you can’t have too much trouser.”

  “Hold on, what are these things called?” said Mau, fumbling around in them.

  “I don’t know,” said Pilu cautiously. “What do they do?”

  “They’re like little bags inside the trousers. Now, that’s clever!”

  “Pockets,” said Pilu.

  But trousers alone weren’t something that changed the world. Mau could see that. Trousers would be useful if you were hunting in thorny scrub, and the bags for carrying things were a wonderful idea, but it wasn’t the trousers that gave the trousermen their metal and their big ships.

  No, it was the toolbox. He’d been cool about it in front of Pilu, because he did not like to admit that the Nation was behind the trousermen in any way, but the toolbox had impressed him. Oh, everyone could invent a hammer, but there were things in that box—beautiful, gleaming wooden and metal things—that not even Pilu knew the use of. And they spoke to Mau somehow.

  We never thought of pliers because we didn’t need them. Before you make something that is truly new, you first have to have a new thought. That’s the important thing. We didn’t need new things, so we didn’t think new thoughts.

  We need new thoughts now!

  “Let’s get back to the others,” Mau said. “But we’ll take the tools this time.” He stepped forward, and fell over. “Aargh, there’s a huge stone here!”

  Pilu pulled aside the ever-growing papervine as Mau tried to rub some life back into his foot.

  “Ah, it’s one of the Judy’s cannon,” he announced.

  “What’s a cannon?” said Mau, peering at the long black cylinder.

  Pilu told him.

  The next question was: “What’s gunpowder?”

  Pilu told him that, too. And Mau saw the little silver picture of the future again. It wasn’t clear, but cannon fitted into it. It was hard to believe in gods, but the Judy was a gift from the wave. It held what they needed—food, tools, timber, stone—so perhaps they needed what it held, even if they didn’t know it yet, even if they didn’t want it yet. But now they should be getting back.

  They each took a handle of the toolbox, which even by itself was almost too much to carry. They had to stop every few minutes to get their breath back, while Milo trudged on with the planks. In fact, Mau got his breath back while Pilu chatted. He talked all the time, about anything.

  Mau had learned this about the brothers: It wasn’t a case of big stupid Milo and little clever Pilu. Milo didn’t talk as much, that was all. When he did talk, he was worth listening to. But Pilu swam through words like a fish through water, he painted pictures in the air with them, and he did it all the time.

  Eventually Mau said, “Don’t you wonder about your people, Pilu? About what happened to them?”

  And, for once, Pilu slowed down. “We went back. All the huts were gone. So were the canoes. We hope they made it to one of the stone islands. When we have rested and the baby is fine and strong, we’ll go looking for them. I hope the gods took care of them.”

  “Do you think they did?” asked Mau.

  “The best of the fish were always taken to the shrine,” said Pilu in a flat voice.

  “Here they are—I mean they were—left on the god anchors,” said Mau. “The pigs ate them.”

  “Well, yes, but only what’s left.”

  “No, the whole fish,” said Mau bluntly.

  “But the spirit goes to the gods,” said Pilu, his voice seeming to come from a distance, as if he was trying to draw back from the conversation without actually backing away.

  “Have you ever seen it happen?”

  “Look, I know you think there are no gods—”

  “Perhaps they do exist. I want to know why they act as if they don’t—I want them to explain!”

  “Look, it happened, all right?” said Pilu wretchedly. “I’m just grateful I’m alive.”

  “Grateful? Who to?”

  “Glad, then! Glad that we are all alive, and sad that others died. You are angry, and what good is that going to do?” said Pilu, and now his voice had a strange kind of growl to it, like some small harmless animal that has been trapped in a corner and is ready to fight back in a fury.

  To Mau’s astonishment Pilu was crying. Without knowing why, but also knowing, absolutely knowing, down to his bones, that it was the right thing to do, Mau put his arms around him as enormous shuddering sobs escaped from Pilu, mixed with broken words and tangled in snot and tears. Mau held him until he stopped shaking and the forest was given back to birdsong.

  “They went to be dolphins,” Pilu murmured. “I am sure of it.”

  Why can’t I do this? Mau thought. Where are my tears when I need them? Maybe the wave took them. Maybe Locaha drank them, or I left them in the dark water. But I can’t feel them. Perhaps you need a soul to cry.

  After a while the sobbing became coughs and sniffs. Then Pilu very gently pushed Mau’s arms away and said: “Well, this isn’t getting things done, is it? Come on, let’s get going! You know, I’m sure you gave me the heavy end to carry!”

  And there was the smile, as if it had never gone away.

  You didn’t have to know Pilu for long to see that he floated through life like a coconut on the ocean. He always bobbed up. There was some sort of natural spring of cheerfulness that bubbled to the surface. Sadness was like a cloud across the sun, soon past. Sorrow was tucked away somewhere in his head, locked up in a cage with a blanket over it, like the captain’s parrot. He dealt with troubling thoughts by simply not thinking them; it was as if someone had put a dog’s brain in a boy’s body, and right now, Mau would have given anything to be him.

  “Just before the wave came, all the birds flew up into the air,” Mau said as they walked out from under the canopy and into the full light of the afternoon. “It was as if they knew something, something that I didn’t!”

  “Well, birds fly up when hunters go into the forest,” said Pilu. “It’s what they do.”

  “Yes, but this was nearly a minute before the wave came. The birds knew! How did they know?”

  “Who knows?” And that was the other thing about Pilu: No thought stayed in his head for very long, because it got lonely.

  “The ghost girl has got a—a t
hing called a book, you know? Made out of something like papervine. And it’s full of birds!” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to do now. Perhaps he just wanted to see the light of interest in Pilu’s eyes.

  “Squashed?”

  “No, like…tattoos, but the proper colors! And the trouserman name for grandfather bird is ‘pantaloon bird’!”

  “What’s a pantaloon?”

  “Trouserman trousers for trouserwomen,” Mau explained.

  “Silly to have a different name,” said Pilu.

  And that was it. Pilu had a soul to fill him, so he lived happily enough. But Mau looked into himself and found questions, and the only answers seemed to be “because,” and “because” was no answer at all. Because…the gods, the stars, the world, the wave, life, death. There are no reasons, there is no sense, only “because”…“because” was a curse, a struck blow, it was putting your hand in the cold hand of Locaha—

  WHAT WILL YOU DO, HERMIT CRAB? WILL YOU PULL DOWN THE STARS? WILL YOU SMASH THE MOUNTAINS LIKE SHY COCONUTS TO FIND THEIR SECRETS? THINGS ARE AS THEY ARE! EXISTENCE IS ITS OWN “BECAUSE”! ALL THINGS IN THEIR RIGHT PLACE. WHO ARE YOU TO DEMAND REASONS? WHO ARE YOU?

  The Grandfathers had never been as loud as this before. Their thundering made his teeth ache and he collapsed to his knees, the box of tools crashing into the sand.

  “Are you all right?” asked Pilu.

  “Ugh,” said Mau, and spat bile. It wasn’t just that the old men got into his head, although that was bad enough, but they left everything in a mess when they went away again. He stared at the sand until the bits of his thoughts came back together again.

  “The Grandfathers spoke to me,” he mumbled.

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Then you’re lucky! Ugh!” Mau clutched at his head. It had been really bad this time, the worst ever. And there was something extra, too. It had sounded as though there had been more voices, very weak or a long way off, and they had been shouting something different, but it had got lost in the clamor. More of them, he thought gloomily. A thousand years of Grandfathers, all shouting at me, and never shouting anything new.