Nation Page 6

  He did all this slowly, because his mind was filling up with questions. They came out of the black hole inside him so fast that they made it hard to think in a straight line. And soon he would have to see the ghost girl. That was going to be…difficult.

  He looked at the white oblong again. The shiny metal around the edge was quite soft and useless, and scraped off easily. As for the picture, he thought it might be some kind of magic or charm, like the blue bead. What was the point of throwing a spear at the big canoe? It wasn’t something you could kill. But the ghost girl was the only other person on the island, and she had, after all, given him the spark-maker. He didn’t need it now, but it was still a wonderful thing.

  When the sun was getting close to the Little Nation, he set off along the beach and entered the low forest.

  You could smell things growing. There was never much light down here, but the big canoe had left a wide trail, and daylight was shafting down into spaces that hadn’t seen it for years, and the race was on for a rare place in the sun. New green shoots were fighting for their piece of the sky, fronds were unfolding, seeds were cracking open. The forest was coming back with its own green tide; in six months no one would ever guess what had happened here.

  Mau slowed down when the wreck of the big canoe came in sight, but he could see no movement. He would have to be careful about this. It would be so easy to get things wrong.

  It was so easy to get things wrong.

  She hated the name Ermintrude. It was the trude really. Ermin, now that wasn’t bad at all. Trudy, too, sounded quite jolly, but her grandmother had said it sounded fast, whatever that meant, and banned her from using it. Even Gertrude would have done. You still had your trude, of course, but one of the royal princesses was named Gertrude, and some of the newspapers called her Princess Gertie, and that sounded like the name of a girl who might have some fun in life.

  But Ermintrude, she thought, was exactly the kind of name that would invite a young man to tea and mess it all up. The coal stove kept smoking, the flour she’d tried to make the scones of had smelled funny because of the dead lobster in the barrel, and she felt sure some of the flour shouldn’t have been moving about, either. She’d managed to open the last tin of Dr. Poundbury’s Patented Ever-Lasting Milk, which said on the tin that it would taste as good after a year as it did on the day it was tinned, and, sadly, that was probably true. It smelled like drowned mice.

  If only she’d been taught properly! If only someone had thought to spend an afternoon teaching her a few things that would be handy to know if she was shipwrecked on a desert island! It could happen to anyone! Even some hints on making scones would have been a help! But no, her grandmother had said that a lady should never lift anything heavier than a parasol and should certainly never set foot in a kitchen unless it was to make Economic Charitable Soup for the Deserving Poor, and her grandmother didn’t think there were very many of them.

  “Always remember,” she used to say, far too often, “that it only needs one hundred and thirty-eight people to die and your father will be king! And that means that, one day, you might be queen!”

  Grandmother used to say this with a look in her eye that suggested that she was planning 138 murders, and you didn’t have to know the old lady for long to suspect that she’d be quite capable of arranging them. They wouldn’t be impolite murders, of course. There wouldn’t be any of that desperate business with daggers and pistols. They would be elegant and tactful. A block or stone would fall out of someone’s stately home here, someone would slip on a patch of ice in the castle battlements there, a suspicious blancmange at a palace banquet (arsenic could so easily be confused with sugar) would take care of several at once…. But she probably wouldn’t go that far, not really. Nevertheless, she lived in hope, and prepared her granddaughter for a royal life by seeing to it, wherever possible, that Ermintrude was not taught anything that could possibly be of any practical use whatsoever.

  Now here she was, with her wrong name, struggling to make afternoon tea in a wrecked boat in the middle of the jungle! Why hadn’t anyone thought this might happen?

  And the young man was what her grandmother would have called a savage, too. But he hadn’t been savage. She had watched him bury all those people in the sea. He had picked them up gently, even the dogs. He wasn’t someone throwing away garbage. He had cared. He had cried tears, but he hadn’t seen her, not even when she’d stood in front of him. There had been just one point when his streaming eyes had tried to focus on her, and then he had stepped around her and gotten on with his work. He’d been so careful and gentle, it was hard to believe he was a savage.

  She remembered First Mate Cox shooting at monkeys with his pistol when they had moored in that river mouth in the Sea of Ceramis. He had laughed every time a small brown body dropped into the river, especially if it was still alive when the crocodiles caught it.

  She’d shouted at him to stop it, and he’d laughed, and Captain Roberts had come down from the wheelhouse and there had been a terrible row, and after that things had gone very sour on the Sweet Judy. But just as she had begun the first part of her journey around the world, there had been a lot in the newspapers about Mr. Darwin and his new theory that people had a kind of monkey as their distant ancestor. Ermintrude did not know if this was true, but when she’d looked into First Mate Cox’s eyes, she’d seen something much worse than any monkey could be.

  At which point a spear crashed through the cracked porthole, hissed across the cabin, and left via the porthole on the other side, which had lost all its glass to the wave.

  Ermintrude sat very still, first out of shock and then because she was remembering her father’s advice. In one of his letters to her, he had said that when she joined him in Government House, she would be his first lady and would be able to meet all kinds of people who might act in ways she found strange at first, and perhaps would even misunderstand. And so she would have to be gracious and make allowances.

  Very well. This was about the time the boy would be here. What had she expected him to do when he arrived? Even on a boat that isn’t wrecked, it’s hard to find a doorbell. Perhaps throwing a spear means: Look, I’ve thrown away my spear! I’m not armed! Yes, that sounds right. It’s just like shaking hands, after all, to show you are not holding a sword. Well, I’m glad that’s one little mystery solved, she thought.

  For the first time since the spear had hissed across the cabin, she breathed out.

  Outside, Mau was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong when there were some wooden noises and the ghost girl’s head appeared over the side of the big canoe.

  “So kind of you to be punctual,” she said, trying to smile, “and thank you very much for breaking the window, it was getting very stuffy in here!”

  He didn’t understand any of this, but she was very nearly smiling and that was a good thing. She wanted him to come into the wreck, too. He did so, very cautiously. The Sweet Judy had keeled over a bit when the wave had dropped her at ground level, so everything sloped.

  Inside was just a mess, made of many different messes all jumbled up. Everything stank of mud and stale water. But the girl led him into another space that looked at least as though someone had tried to clean things up a bit, even if they had failed.

  “I’m afraid the chairs all got smashed,” said the girl, “but I’m sure you will find poor Captain Roberts’s sea chest an adequate substitute.”

  Mau, who had never sat on anything but the ground or a hut floor when he ate, edged his bottom onto a wooden box.

  “I thought it would be nice to get properly acquainted, since we haven’t been introduced,” said the ghost girl. “Obviously the fact that we cannot understand each other will be something of a drawback….”

  While this gibberish was going on, Mau stared at the fire in its little cave. Steam was coming out of a round black pipe. Next to it was a flat round thing. Pale things on it looked like some kind of bread. This is a Woman’s Place, he thought, and I don’
t know the rules. I must be careful. She might do anything to me.

  “…and the butter had gone runny, but I threw away the flour that had gone really green. Would you like some tea? I expect you don’t take milk?”

  He watched as a brown liquid was poured into a blue-and-white bowl. Mau watched it carefully, while the girl went on talking faster and faster. How do you know what’s right and wrong? he wondered. What are the rules when you are all alone with a ghost girl?

  He’d not been alone on the Boys’ Island. Oh, there hadn’t been anyone else there, but he’d felt the Nation around him. He was doing the Right Thing. But now? What were the Right Things? The Grandfathers bellowed and complained and ordered him about and didn’t listen.

  He couldn’t find the silver thread either, or the picture of the future. There was no picture now. There was just him and this girl, and no rules to fight the darkness ahead.

  Now she had taken the bready things off the fire, and put them on another of the round metal things, which he tried to balance on his knees.

  “Most of the crockery got smashed in the wreck,” said the girl sadly. “It’s a miracle I could find two cups. Will you have a scone?” She pointed at the bread things.

  Mau took one. It was hot, which was good, but on the other hand it tasted like a piece of slightly rotten wood.

  She was watching anxiously as he moved the lump around in his mouth, looking for something to do with it.

  “I’ve done it wrong, haven’t I?” she said. “I thought the flour was too damp. Poor Captain Roberts used to keep a lobster in the flour barrel to eat the weevils, and I’m sure that can’t be right. I’m sorry, I won’t mind if you spit it out.”

  And she started to cry.

  Mau hadn’t understood a word, but some things don’t need language. She weeps because the bread is awful. She should not cry. He swallowed, and took another bite. She stared, and sniffed, not certain if it was too early to stop crying.

  “Very nice food,” said Mau. He swallowed the thing with a fight and was sure he felt it hit the bottom of his stomach. And then he ate the other one.

  The girl dabbed at her eyes with a cloth.

  “Very good,” Mau insisted, trying not to taste rotted lobster.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t understand you,” she said. “Oh, dear, and I completely forgot to lay out the napkin rings. What must you think of me….”

  “I don’t know the words you say,” said Mau.

  There was a long, helpless pause, and Mau felt the two lumps of bad, dreadful bread sitting in his stomach, planning their exit. He was drinking the cup of sour, hot liquid to drown them when he became aware of a faint murmur coming from a corner of the cabin, where a big blanket covered—what? It sounded as though someone under there was muttering angrily to itself.

  “It’s good to have someone to talk to,” said the girl loudly. “I see you walking around and it’s not so lonely.”

  The flour balls in Mau’s stomach didn’t like the brown drink. He kept very still, fighting to keep them down.

  The girl looked at him nervously and said: “My name is, um…Daphne.” She gave a little cough and added, “Yes, Daphne.” She pointed to herself and held out her hand.

  “Daphne,” she said again, even more loudly. Well, she’d always liked the name.

  Mau looked obediently at her hand, but there was nothing to see. So…she was from Daphne? In the islands the most important thing about you was the name of your clan. He hadn’t heard of the place, but they always said that no one knew all the islands. Some of the poorer ones disappeared completely at high tide and the huts were built to float. They would have gone now…so how many were left? Had everyone in the world been washed away?

  The ghost girl stood and walked up the sloping deck to the door. Mau thought this looked promising. With any luck he didn’t have to eat any more wood.

  She said: “Could you please help me with poor Captain Roberts?”

  She wanted him to go outside, that was clear, and Mau got up quickly. The bad bread wanted to escape, and the smell of the fire was giving him a headache.

  He staggered up and out into the fresh afternoon air. The girl was standing on the ground, by the big gray roll Mau had seen yesterday. She looked at him helplessly.

  “Poor Captain Roberts,” she said, and prodded it with her foot.

  Mau pulled away the heavy cloth and saw the body of an old trouserman with a beard. He was lying on his back, his eyes staring up at nothing. Mau pulled the cloth down farther and found that the man’s hands were holding a big circle of wood, with things like wooden spikes all around the edge of it.

  “He tied himself to the ship’s wheel so that he wouldn’t get washed away,” said the girl behind him. “I cut the ropes but his poor hands wouldn’t let go, so I found a hammer and knocked the pin out of the wheel, and I tried and tried to bury him but the ground is too hard and I can’t move him by myself. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind being buried at sea,” she finished, all in one breath.

  Mau sighed. She must know I can’t understand her but she goes on talking, he thought. She wants this body buried, I can tell. I wonder how long it took her to scrape that pathetic little hole in the rock? But she’s lost and far from home, like me.

  “I can send him into the dark water,” he said. He made wave noises and wave shapes with his hand. She looked terrified for a moment, and then laughed and clapped her hands.

  “Yes! Yes! That’s right! The sea! Whoosh, swoosh! The sea!”

  The man and the wooden wheel together were too heavy to lift, but the cloth was very thick and Mau found he could drag the body quite well over the crushed vegetation of the track. The girl helped him with the difficult bits, or at least tried to, and once they reached the shore, the gray roll slid well enough on the damp sand, but it was a long tiring drag to the western end of the beach. At last Mau managed to get the captain into the waist-deep water at the very edge of the reef.

  He looked into the dead eyes, staring straight ahead, and wondered what they would see down in the dark current. Would they see anything? Did anyone see anything?

  The shock of the question hit him like a blow. How could he think it?

  Once we were dolphins and Imo made us into men! That was true, wasn’t it? Why did he even wonder if it wasn’t? And if that wasn’t true, then there was just the dark water and nothing was anything….

  He stopped those thoughts before they could run away with him. The Daphne girl was watching him, and this was no time to be uncertain and hesitant. He twisted papervine together to fasten stones and pieces of broken coral to poor Captain Roberts and his wheel. Papervine got tighter when it was wet and didn’t rot for years. Wherever poor Captain Roberts was going, he was going to stay there. Unless he turned into a dolphin, of course. Then, quickly, Mau made the cut to release his spirit.

  On the rocks behind him, the girl sang a song. It wasn’t all na-na-na this time. Somehow Mau could hear her voice better, now he’d heard her speak. There were words, probably, although they had no meaning to Mau. But he thought: It’s a trouserman chant for the dead. They are like us! But if Imo made them, why are they so different?

  The captain was almost underwater now, still holding on to the wheel. Mau held the last stone in one hand and pushed the floating captain forward, feeling all the time with his toes for the edge of the rock. He could sense the cold of the deeps below him, too.

  The current was down there. No one knew where it came from, although there were stories of a land to the south where the water fell like feathers. But everyone knew where it went. They could see it. It became the Shining Path, a river of stars that flowed across the night sky. Once in a thousand years, it was said, when Locaha looked among the dead for those who should go to the Perfect World, they would climb that path and send the rest back to be dolphins until it was time for them to be born again.

  How does that happen? Mau thought. How does water become stars? How does a dead man become a living dolphin
? But those were a child’s questions, weren’t they? The kind you shouldn’t ask? The kind that were silly or wrong, and if you asked why too much you were given chores to do and told that’s how the world is.

  A wavelet broke over the captain. Mau fastened the last stone to the wheel and, as the captain slid gently under the water, gave him a push out into the current.

  A few bubbles came up as the captain sank, very slowly, out of sight.

  Mau was just turning away when he saw something rising through the water. It broke the surface and turned over slowly. It was the captain’s hat, and now that it had filled with water, it began to drift back down again.

  There was a splash from behind him and the girl of the Daphne clan floundered past, her white dress floating around her like a huge jellyfish.

  “Don’t let it sink again!” she shouted. “He wants you to have it!” She plunged forward, grabbed the hat, waved it triumphantly—and sank.

  Mau waited for her to come back up, but there were just bubbles.

  Could it possibly be that there was someone in the world who couldn’t—

  His body worked without thinking. He ducked under the surface, grabbed the biggest lump of coral he could see, and dived over the edge and into the dark water.

  There below him was poor Captain Roberts, drifting gently down toward posterity. Mau went past in a rip of silver.

  There were more bubbles below, and a pale shape disappearing at the farthest reach of the sunlight.

  Not this one, Mau thought, as loudly as he could. Not now. No one goes alive into the dark. I served you, Locaha. I walked in your steps. You should owe me this one. One life back from the dark!

  And a voice returned from the gloom: I recall no arrangement, Mau, no bargain, covenant, or promise. There is what happens, and what does not happen. There is no should.

  And then he was tangling in the sea anemone of her skirts. He let the stone continue into the dark, found her face, breathed the air from his bursting lungs into hers, saw her eyes open wide, and kicked for the surface, dragging her behind him.