Nation Read online

  Something had come out of the sea on the wave, he thought. Something big. Bigger than a sailfin crocodile,* bigger than a war canoe, bigger even than…a whale? Yes, that could be it, a big whale. Why not? The wave had hurled big rocks beyond the village, so a whale wouldn’t stand a chance. Yes, a whale, that would be it, thrashing around in the forest with its big tail and slowly dying under its own weight. Or one of the really big sea squids, or a very big shark.

  He had to be sure. He had to find out. He looked around and thought: Yes, but not in the dark. Not in the twilight. In the morning he’d come with weapons. And in the morning it might be dead.

  He selected a couple of useful-looking rocks from the monster’s trail and ran for it.

  Night rolled over the jungle. The birds went to bed, the bats woke. A few stars appeared in the desolate sky.

  And in the tangle of broken trees at the end of the trail, something sobbed, all night.

  Mau awoke early. There was no more fruit on the round metal thing, but a grandfather bird was watching him hopefully, in case he was dead. When it saw him moving, it sighed and waddled off.

  Fire, thought Mau. I must make fire. And for that I need punk wood. His punk bag was a muddy mess because of the wave, but there was always punk in the high forest.

  He was hungry, but you had to have fire. Without fire and a spear, you could never hope to be a man, wasn’t that right?

  He spent some time hammering the metal thing between the two stones he’d taken from the monster’s track, and ended up with a long sliver of metal that was pretty bendy but very sharp. That was a good start. Then he chipped one stone against the other until he had enough of a groove to allow him to bind the stone to a stick with papervine. He wound papervine around one end of the new metal knife to make a kind of handle.

  As the sun rose, so did Mau, and he raised his new club and his new knife.

  Yes! They might be sorry things that a man would have thrown away, but now he could kill things. And wasn’t that part of being a man?

  The grandfather bird was still watching him from a safe distance, but when it saw his expression, it shuffled off hurriedly and lumbered into the air.

  Mau headed up to the high forest while the sun grew hotter. He wondered when he’d last eaten. There had been the mango, but how long ago? It was hard to remember. The Boys’ Island was far away in time and space. It had gone. Everything had gone. The Nation had gone. The people, the huts, the canoes, all wiped away. They were just in his head now, like dreams, hidden behind a gray wall—

  He tried to stop the thought, but the gray wall crumbled and all the horror, all the death, all the darkness poured in. It filled up his head and buzzed out into the air like a swarm of insects. All the sights he had hidden from himself, all the sounds, all the smells crept and slithered out of his memory.

  And suddenly it all became clear. An island full of people could not die. But a boy could. Yes, that was it! It made sense! He was dead! And his spirit had come back home, but he couldn’t see out of the spirit world! He was a ghost. His body was on the Boys’ Island, yes! And the wave had not been real, it had been Locaha, coming for him. It all made sense. He’d died on land with no one to put him into the dark water, and he was a ghost, a wandering thing, and the people were all around him, in the land of the living.

  It seemed to Mau that this was not too bad. The worst had already happened. He would not be able to see his family again, because everyone hung ghost bags around the huts, but he would know that they were alive.

  The world breathed in.

  WHY HAVE YOU NOT REPLACED THE GOD ANCHORS? WHY HAVE YOU NOT SUNG THE CHANTS? WHY HAVE YOU NOT RESTORED THE NATION?

  The little valley of the grandfather birds floated in front of Mau’s eyes. Well, at least they would believe him this time.

  “I’m dead, Grandfathers.”

  DEAD? NONSENSE, YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE DEAD!

  Hot pain struck Mau’s left foot. He rolled and yelped, and a grandfather bird that had also decided he was dead and had pecked his foot to make sure hopped away hurriedly. It didn’t go far away, though, in case he died after all. In the grandfather bird’s experience, everything died if you watched it for long enough.

  All right, not dead, Mau thought, pushing himself upright. But dead tired. A sleep full of dark dreams was no sleep at all; it was like a meal of ashes. He needed fire and real food. Everyone knew that bad dreams came when you were hungry. He didn’t want those dreams again. They were about dark waters, and something chasing him.

  Mud and sand covered the fields, but worse than that, the wave had broken down the thorn fences, and the pigs had clearly been rooting all over the fields in the night, when Mau had been in the prison of his dreams. There would probably be something left in the muck if he grubbed about long enough, but a man didn’t eat where a pig had eaten.

  There was plenty of wild food to eat on the island: upside-down fruit, bad-luck root, malla stems, red star tree, papervine nuts…you’d stay alive, but a lot of it you had to chew for a long time and even then it tasted as though someone had eaten it before you. Men ate fish or pork, but the lagoon was still cloudy, and he hadn’t seen a pig since he’d been back. They were wily, too. A man by himself might get a lucky shot if a pig came down in the low forest at night to eat crabs, but once they were in the high forest, you needed many men to catch one pig.

  He found tracks as soon as he entered the forest. Pigs were always making tracks. These were fresh, though, so he poked around a bit to see what they’d been after and found some mad-root tubers, big and white and juicy; the pigs had probably been so stuffed with the food from the field that they were grubbing around out of pure habit, and didn’t have room for one more tuber. Mad-root tubers had to be roasted before they could be eaten, though, or else you went mad. Pigs ate them raw, but pigs probably didn’t notice if they were mad or not.

  There was no dry punk wood. There were rotten branches all over the place, but they were sodden to the core. Besides, he thought, as he threaded the tubers on a length of papervine, he hadn’t found any fire stones yet, or decent dry wood for fire sticks.

  Granddad Nawi, who did not go raiding because of his twisted leg, sometimes took the boys tracking and hunting, and he used to talk about the papervine bush. It grew everywhere, its long leaves as tough as anything even when they were crackling dry. “Take one strip of the vine lengthwise and yes, it needs the strength of two men to pull it apart. But weave five strands of it into a rope and a hundred men can’t break it. The more they pull, the more it binds together and the stronger it becomes. That is the Nation.”

  They used to laugh at him behind his back because of his wobbling walk, and didn’t pay much attention to him, because what could a man with a twisted leg know about anything important? But they made sure that when they laughed they were well behind his back, because Nawi always had a faint little smile and an expression that said he already knew far more about you than you could possibly guess.

  Mau tried not to laugh too much because he had liked Nawi. The old man watched how birds flew and always knew the best places to fish. He knew the magic word that would keep sharks away. But he hadn’t been carefully dried out in the hot sand and taken to the Cave of the Grandfathers when he’d died, because he’d been born with a leg that didn’t work properly and that meant he’d been cursed by the gods. He could look at a finch and tell you which island it had been born on; he used to watch spiders make webs, and saw things other people didn’t notice. Thinking about it, Mau had wondered why any god would curse someone like that. He’d been born with that leg. What had a baby done to make the gods angry?

  One day he’d plucked up the courage to ask him. Nawi was sitting out on the rocks, occasionally staring out to sea in between carving something, but he’d given Mau a look that indicated company would not be objected to.

  The old man had laughed at the question.

  “It was a gift, boy, not a curse,” he said. “When much i
s taken, something is returned. Since I had a useless leg, I had to make myself a clever brain! I cannot chase, so I learn to watch and wait. I tell you boys these secrets and you laugh. When I hunt, I never come back empty-handed, do I? I think the gods looked at me and said to themselves, Well this one is a sharp one, eh? Let’s give him a gimpy leg so he can’t be a warrior and will have to stay at home among the women (a fate which has something to recommend it, my boy, believe me), and I thank them.”

  Mau had been shocked at this. Every boy wanted to be a warrior, didn’t he?

  “You didn’t want to be a warrior?”

  “Never. It takes a woman nine months to make a new human. Why waste her effort?”

  “But then when you died, you could be taken up to the cave and watch over us forever!”

  “Hah! I think I’ve seen enough of you already! I like the fresh air, boy. I’ll become a dolphin like everyone else. I’ll watch the sky turn and I will chase sharks. And since all the great warriors will be shut up in their cave, it occurs to me there will be rather more female dolphins than male ones, which is a pleasing thought.” He leaned forward and stared into Mau’s eyes. “Mau…,” he said. “Yes, I remember you. Always at the back. But I could see you thinking. Not many people think, not really think. They just think they do. And when they laughed at old Nawi, you didn’t want to. But you laughed anyway, to be like them. I’m right, yes?”

  How had he spotted that? But you couldn’t deny it, not now, not with those pale eyes looking through you.

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Good. And now that I have answered your questions, I think you owe me a favor.”

  “Do you want me to run an errand? Or I could—”

  “I want you to remember something for me. Have you heard that I know a word that drives away sharks?”

  “People say so, but they laugh.”

  “Oh, yes. But it works. I’ve tried it three times. The first was when I discovered it, which was when I was about to have my good leg bitten off, and then I tried it out from a raft, just to see if I’d been lucky the first time, and then I swam off the reef one day and frightened away a hammerhead.”

  “You mean you went looking for a shark?” said Mau.

  “Yes. Quite a big one, as I recall.”

  “But you might have been eaten!”

  “Oh, I’m not bad with a spear, and I had to find out,” said Nawi, grinning. “Someone had to eat the first oyster, you know. Someone looked at half a shell full of snot and was brave.”

  “Why doesn’t everybody know?”

  Nawi’s permanent smile turned down a little. “I’m a bit strange, yes? And the priests don’t like me much. If I told everyone, and someone died, I think things would be very tricky for me. But someone should know, and you are a boy who asks questions. Don’t use it until I’m dead, all right? Or until you are about to be eaten by a shark, of course.”

  And there on the rocks, as the sunset made a path of red across the sea, Mau learned the shark word.

  “It’s a trick!” he said, without thinking.

  “Not so loud,” snapped Nawi, glancing back at the shore. “Of course it’s a trick. Building a canoe is a trick. Throwing a spear is a trick. Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it. And now you know another one. If it saves your life one day, catch a big fish and throw it to the first dolphin you see. With luck, it will be me!”

  And now the old man and his leg were only a memory, along with everyone Mau had ever known. Mau wanted to scream with the weight of it. The world had emptied.

  He looked down at his hands. And he’d made a club. A weapon for what? Why did it make him feel better? But he had to stay alive. Yes! If he died, then the Nation would never have been. The island would be left to the red crabs and the grandfather birds. There would be no one to say that anyone had been there.

  There was a fluttering overhead. A grandfather bird had landed in a shaggy-headed grass tree. Mau knew that, even though he couldn’t see up through the tangle of vines; grandfather birds were very clumsy and didn’t so much land as crash slowly. It hopped around up there making the nab-nab grumbling noises, and then there was the familiar sound of throwing up and a shower of small bones pattered around the forest floor.

  The tree shook as the grandfather bird took off again. It flapped out into the open, saw Mau, decided to watch him for signs of being dead, and landed heavily on a branch of a tree that could barely be seen under its weight of strangler vines.

  For a moment boy and bird stared at each other.

  The branch snapped.

  The grandfather bird squawked and leaped away before the rotted wood hit the ground, and disappeared, flapping and squawking with injured pride, into the undergrowth. Mau paid it no attention. He was staring at the cloud of fine yellow dust rising from the fallen branch. It was punk dust, what you got when rot and termites and time hollowed out a dead branch. And this one had been up in the air, out of reach of the damp. The dust was like pollen. It would be the best ever for starting fires.

  He took the biggest lump of branch that he could hold, stuffed both ends with leaves, and started back down the mountain.

  There were pigs rooting in the fields again now, but he had no time to shoo them away. One piece of papervine soon breaks, he thought, and five bound together are strong. That’s good to know and it is true. The trouble is, I’m the one piece.

  He stopped. He was taking the other, steeper track down to the vill—to the place where the village had been. The wave had surged across the island here, too. Trees were broken and everything stank of seaweed. But on the other side of the shattered trees was a cliff that overlooked the low forest.

  Mau carefully tucked the tubers and the punk branch under some grass and pushed his way through the tangle of vines and branches at the edge of the cliff. It was possible to climb all the way up or down the cliff quite easily. He’d done it before. There were so many roots and vines and creepers growing over the stone, and so much soil and old birds’ nests had made a home for every drifting seed, that it was more like a vertical meadow, with flowers everywhere. There was papervine, too. There was always papervine. He cut enough to make a sling for his club, while whispering belated thank-yous to the Papervine Woman for her ever-reliable hair.

  Now he slid to the edge and pushed aside a spray of orchids.

  Mists were rising everywhere below him, but he could see the track the monster had left through the forest, a white scar half a mile long. It stopped at the group of fig trees that grew in the highest part of the low forest. They were massive. Mau knew them well. Their trunks had huge buttresses that looked as though they might reach down to the roots of the world. They would stop anything, but the steam and the spread of the tree canopy meant that he couldn’t see what it was that had been stopped.

  But he heard a voice. It was very faint, but it was coming from somewhere below Mau. It sounded a bit like singing, but not a very big bit. To Mau, it just sounded like “na, na, na.”

  But it was a human voice. Perhaps it was another trouserman? It was a bit squeaky. Were there trouserwomen? Or it could be a ghost. There would be a lot of ghosts now.

  It was past noon. If it was a ghost, then it would be very weak. Mau was the Nation. He had to do something.

  He started to climb down the cliff, which was easy enough even with trying to move quietly, although birds flew up all around him. He shivered. He didn’t know how to make a ghost bag. That was a woman’s task.

  The a-bit-like-singing went on. Perhaps it was some sort of ghost, then. The birds had made such a racket that any living person would surely have stopped and investigated.

  His feet touched the tangle of flaking stone and tree roots that was the floor of the lower forest, and he moved silently between the dripping trees.

  “Na, na, na”—clink!—“na, na, na”—clink!

  That sounded like metal. Mau grasped his club in both hands.

  —“give, for, wild, con-fu-sion, pea
ce”—clink!—“Oh, hear, us, when, we, cry, to, Thee”—clink!—“for, those in per-ril on the sea!”—clang!—“drat!”

  Mau peered around the buttress of a giant fig tree.

  There was a lot to see.

  Something had been wrecked, but it was not alive. It was some kind of giant canoe, stuck between the trunks of two trees and covered with debris that looked as though it would be worth investigating, but not now. A big hole in the side leaked stones. But all this was background. Much closer to Mau, and staring at him in horror, was a girl—probably. But she could be a ghost; she was very pale.

  And a trouserman, too. The trousers were white and frilly, like the feathery legs of a grandfather bird, but she also had some kind of skirt tucked up around her waist. And her hair glowed in the sunlight. She had been crying.

  She had also been trying to dig into the forest floor with some odd kind of flat-headed spear that had the glint of metal about it. That was stupid; it was all roots and rocks, and there was a very small heap of rocks next to her. There was something else, too, large and wrapped up. Perhaps I did walk in the footsteps of Locaha, Mau thought, because I know that there is a dead man in there. And the ghost girl, she was in my nightmares.

  I am not alone.

  The girl dropped the flat-headed spear and quickly held up something else, something that also shone like metal.

  “I kn-know how to use this!” she shouted very loudly. “One step more and I will pull the trigger, I mean it!” The metal thing waved back and forth in her hands. “Don’t think I’m afraid! I’m not afraid! I could have killed you before! Just because I felt sorry for you doesn’t mean you can come down here! My father will be here soon!”

  She sounded excited. Mau took the view that she wanted him to have the metal thing, because by the way she was holding it with both hands and waving it about she was obviously very frightened of it.