Nation (12 page)

This is impossible, Daphne thought. Is it about that poor woman? But she can’t possibly be having another baby! Or maybe he means…?

“People come island?”

“Yes!” shouted Mau, relieved.

“A woman?”

Mau did the pumpkin act again. “Yes!”

“And she’s…
enceinte
?” It meant pregnant, but her grandmother said a lady would never use that word in polite company. Mau, who was certainly not what her grandmother would have thought of as polite company, looked blank.

Blushing furiously, Daphne did her own version of the pumpkin act. “Uh, like this?”

“Yes!”

“Well, that’s nice,” said Daphne, as steel terror rose up inside her. “I hope she’s very happy. Now I’ve really got to do some washing—”

“Women’s Place, you come,” said Mau.

Daphne shook her head. “No! It’s nothing to do with me, is it? I don’t know anything about…babies being born!” Which wasn’t true, but she wished, oh how she wished it was true. If she closed her eyes, she could still hear…no! “I’m not coming! You can’t make me,” she said, pulling back.

He gripped her arm, softly but firmly. “Baby. You come,” he said, his voice as firm as the grip.

“You didn’t see the little coffin next to the big one!” she screamed. “You don’t know what that was like!”

And it came to her like a blow.
He does.
I watched him bury all those people in the sea. He knows. How can I refuse?

She let herself relax. She wasn’t nine years old anymore, sitting at the top of the stairs cowering and listening and getting out of the way quickly when the doctor came thundering up the stairs with his big black bag. And the worst of it all, if you could find the highest wave in a sea of worsts, was that
she hadn’t been able to do anything
.

“Poor Captain Roberts had a medical book in his sea chest,” she said, “and a box of drugs and things. I’ll go and fetch them, shall I?”

The brothers were waiting at the narrow entrance to the Women’s Place when Mau arrived with Daphne, and that was when the world changed yet again. It changed when the older brother said: “This is a trouserman girl!”

“Yes, the wave brought her,” said Mau.

And then the younger brother said something in what sounded like trouserman, and Daphne almost dropped the box she was carrying, and spoke quickly to him in the same language.

“What did you say to her?” said Mau. “What did she say to you?”

“I said: ‘Hello, lovely lady’—” the young man began.

“Who cares what anyone said to anybody? She’s a woman! Now get me in there!”

That was Cahle, the mother-to-be, hanging heavily between her husband and her brother-in-law, and very big and very angry.

The brothers looked up at the rocky entrance. “Er…” the husband began.

Ah, fear of the safety of the wingo, thought Mau. “I’ll help her in,” he said quickly. “I’m not a man. I
can
go in.”

“Do you really have no soul?” said the younger brother. “Only, the priest said you had no soul….”

Mau looked around for Ataba, but the old man suddenly had business elsewhere.

“I don’t know. What does one look like?” he said. He put his arm around the woman and, with a worried Daphne supporting her on the other side, they headed into the Place.

“Sing the baby a good song to welcome it, pretty lady,” shouted Pilu after them. Then he said to his brother: “Do you trust him?”

“He is young and he has no tattoos,” said Milo.

“But he seems…older. And maybe he has no soul!”

“Well, I’ve never seen mine. Have you seen yours? And the trouserman girl in white…you remember the praying ladies in white we saw that time when we helped carry Bos’n Higgs to that big house for makin’ people better and how they sewed up the gash in his leg so neat? She is like them, you bet. She knows all about medicine, for sure.”

D
APHNE FLIPPED DESPAIRINGLY THROUGH
the medical book, which had been published in 1770, before people had learned to spell properly. It was stained and falling apart like a very crumbly pack of cards. It had crude woodcut diagrams like “How to Saw a Leg Off”—aargh aargh aargh—and “How to Set Bones”—yuck—and cutaway diagrams of—oh, no—aargh aargh aargh!

The book’s title was
The Mariners’ Medical Companion
, and it was for people whose medicine cabinet was a bottle of castor oil, whose operating table was a bench sliding up and down a heaving deck, and whose tools were a saw, a hammer, and a bucket of hot tar and a piece of string. There wasn’t much in there about childbirth, and what there was—she turned the page—aargh! An illustration that she really did not want to see; it was for those times when things were so bad that not even a surgeon could make them worse.

The mother-to-be was lying on a woven bed in one of the huts, groaning, and Daphne wasn’t sure if this was good or bad. But she was absolutely certain that Mau shouldn’t be watching her, boy or not. This was called the Women’s Place, and it didn’t get more womanly than it was about to be.

She pointed at the door. Mau looked astonished.

“Shoo, out! I mean it! I don’t care if you’re human or a ghost or a demon or whatever you are, but you aren’t a female one! There’s got to be
some
rules! That’s it, out! And no listening at the keyh—piece of string,” she added, pulling the grass curtains that did, very badly, the job of a door.

She felt better for all that. A good shouting at somebody always makes you feel better and in control, especially if you aren’t. Then she sat down by the mat again.

The woman grabbed her arm and rattled out a question.

“Er…I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Daphne said, and the woman spoke again, gripping her arm so tightly that the skin went white.

“…I don’t know what to do…. Oh, no, don’t let it go wrong….”

The little coffin, so small on top of the big one. She’d never forget it. She’d wanted to look inside, but they wouldn’t let her, and they wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t let her explain. Men came around to sit with her father, so the house was full of people all night, and there wasn’t a new baby brother or sister, and that wasn’t all that had gone from her world. So she’d sat there on the top landing all night, next to the coffins, wanting to do something and not daring to do it, and feeling so sorry for the poor little dead boy crying, all alone.

The woman arched her body and yelled something. Hold on, there had to be a song, yes? That’s what they said. A song to welcome the baby. What song? How would she know?

Maybe it wouldn’t matter what song it was, so long as it was a welcoming song, a good song for the child’s spirit to hear, so that it would hurry up to be born. Yes, that sounded like a good idea, but why did she have, just for the moment, the
certainty
that it was supposed to be a good one? And here
came
a song, so old in her mind that she could not remember not knowing it, a song her mother sang to her, in the days when she still had a mother.

She leaned down, cleared her throat carefully, and sang:
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are—”

The woman stared at her, seemed puzzled for a moment, and then relaxed.

“Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky—”
sang Daphne’s lips, while her brain thought: She’s got a lot of milk, she could easily feed two babies, so I should get them to bring the other woman and her child up here. And this thought was followed by: Did I just think that? But I don’t even know how babies are born! I hope there’s no blood; I hate the sight of blood—

“When the blazing sun is gone,

When he nothing shines upon,

Then you show your little light,

Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

Then the traveler in the dark

Thanks you for your tiny spark…”

And now something was happening. She carefully pulled aside the woman’s skirt. Oh, so
that’s how
. My goodness.
I don’t know what to do!
And here came another thought, as if it had been lying in wait:
This
is what you do….

The men were waiting outside the gateway to the Place, feeling unnecessary and surplus to requirements, which is exactly the appropriate feeling in the circumstances.

At least Mau had time to learn their names. Milota-dan (big, the oldest, who was head and shoulders taller than anyone Mau had ever seen) and Pilu-si (small, always rushing, and hardly ever not smiling).

He found out that Pilu did all the talking: “We went on a trouserman boat for six months once, all the way to a big place called Port Mercia. Good fun! We saw huge houses made of stone, and they had meat called beef and we learned trousermen talk, and when they dropped us off back home they gave us big steel knives and needles and a three-legged pot—”

“Hush,” said Milo, raising a hand. “She’s singing! In trouserman! Come on, Pilu, you’re the best at this!”

Mau leaned forward. “What’s it about?”

“Look, our job was to pull on ropes and carry things,” Pilu complained. “Not work out songs!”

“But you said you could speak trouserman!” Mau insisted.

“To get by, yes! But this is very complicated! Um…”

“This is
important
, brother!” said Milo. “This is the first thing my son will hear!”

“Quiet! I think it’s about…stars,” said Pilu, bent in concentration.

“Stars is good,” said Milo, looking around approvingly.

“She’s saying the baby—”

“He,” said Milo firmly. “He will be a boy.”

“Er, yes, certainly. He will be, yes, like a star, guiding people in the dark. He will twinkle, but I don’t know what that means….”

They looked up at the dawn sky. The last of the stars looked back, but twinkled in the wrong language.

“He will guide people?” said Pilu. “How does she know that? This is a powerful song!”

“I think she’s making it up!” Ataba snapped.

“Oh?” said Milo, turning on him. “Where did you come from? Do you think my son
won’t
be a great leader?”

“Well, no, but I—”

“Hold on, hold on,” said Pilu. “I think…he will seek to know what the stars mean, I’m pretty sure of that. And—look, I’m having to work hard on this, you know—
because
of this wondering, people won’t…be in the dark,” he finished quickly, and then added, “That was really hard to do, you know! My head aches! This is priest stuff!”

“Quiet,” said Mau. “I just heard something….”

They fell silent, and the baby cried again.

“My son!” said Milo as the others cheered. “And he will be a great warrior!”

“Er, I’m not sure it meant—” Pilu began.

“A great man, anyway,” said Milo, waving a hand. “They say the birth song can be a prophecy, for sure. That type of language at this time…it’s telling us what will be, right enough.”

“Do the trousermen have gods?” asked Mau.

“Sometimes. When they remember—Hey, here she comes!”

The outline of the ghost girl appeared in the stone entrance to the place.

“Mr. Pilu, tell your brother he is the father of a little boy and his wife is well and sleeping.”

That news was passed on with a whoop, which is easy to translate.

“And he be called Twinkle?” Milo suggested, in broken English.

“
No!
I mean, no, don’t. Not Twinkle,” said the ghost girl quickly. “That would be wrong. Very, very wrong. Forget about Twinkle. Twinkle, NO!”

“Guiding Star?” said Mau, and that met with general approval.

“That would be very auspicious,” said Ataba. He added, “Is there going to be beer, by any chance?”

The choice was also translated for the ghost girl, who indicated that any name that wasn’t Twinkle was bound to be good. Then she asked—no,
commanded
—that the other young woman and her baby be brought up and all sorts of things carried to the Place from the wreck of the
Sweet Judy
. The men jumped to it. There was a purpose.

…And now it was two weeks later, and a lot had happened. The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then. And what they need most of all is nothing much happening.

And this is me, seeing all that horizon, Daphne thought, looking at the wash of blue that stretched all the way to the end of the world. My goodness, Father was right. If my horizon was any broader it would have to be folded in half.

It’s a funny saying, “broaden your horizons.” I mean, there’s just
the
horizon, which moves away from you, so you never actually catch up with it. You only get to where it’s been. She’d watched the sea all around the world, and it had always looked pretty much the same.

Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe
you
moved,
you
changed.

She couldn’t believe that back in ancient history, she’d given the poor boy scones that tasted like rotting wood and slightly like dead lobster! She’d fussed about napkins! And she’d tried to shoot him in the chest with poor Captain Roberts’s ancient pistol, and in any book of etiquette that was a wrong move.

But then, was that her back there? Or was
this
her, right here, in the sheltered garden that was the Women’s Place, watching the Unknown Woman sitting by the pool but holding her little son tightly, like a little girl holds a favorite dolly, and wondering if she shouldn’t take the child again, just to give it some time to breathe.

It seemed to Daphne that the men thought all women spoke the same language. That had seemed silly and a bit annoying, but she had to admit that in the Place, right now, the language was Baby. It was the common language. Probably everyone makes the same sort of cooing noises to babies, everywhere in the world, she thought. We kind of understand it’s the right thing to do. Probably no one thinks that the thing to do is to lean over it and hit a tin tray with a hammer.

And suddenly, that was very interesting. Daphne found herself watching the two babies closely, in between the chores. When they didn’t want feeding, they turned their heads away, but if they were hungry, their little heads bobbed forward. It’s like shaking your head for no and nodding it for yes. Is this where it comes from? Is it the same everywhere? How can I find out? She made a note to write this down.

But she was really worried about the mother of the baby whom, in the privacy of her head, Daphne called the Pig Boy. The woman was sitting up now, and sometimes walked around, and smiled when you gave her food, but there was something missing. She didn’t play with her baby as much as Cahle, either. She let Cahle feed it, because there must have been some lamp still burning in her brain that knew it was the only way, but afterward she’d grab it and scuttle off to the corner of a hut, like a cat with a kitten.

Cahle was already bustling round the place, always with her baby under her arm, or handed to Daphne if she needed to use both hands. She was a bit puzzled about Daphne, as if she wasn’t quite sure what the girl was but was going to be respectful anyway, just in case. They tended to smile at each other in a slightly wary “we’re getting on fine, I hope” kind of way when their eyes met, but sometimes, when Cahle caught Daphne’s attention, she made a little motion toward the other woman and tapped her own head sadly. That didn’t need a translation.

Every day one of the men brought some fish up, and Cahle showed Daphne some of the plants in the Place. They were mostly roots, but there were also some spicy plants, including a pepper that made Daphne go and lie with her mouth in the stream for three minutes, although she felt very good afterward. Some of the plants were medicines, as far as she could tell. Cahle was good at pantomime. Daphne still wasn’t sure whether the little brown nuts on the tree with the red leaves made you sick or stopped you from being sick, but she tried to remember everything anyway. She was always superstitious about remembering useful things she had been told, at least outside lessons. You would be bound to need it one day. It was a test the world did to make sure you were paying attention.

She tried to pay attention when Cahle showed her cookery stuff; the woman seemed to think it was very important, and Daphne tried hard to hide the fact that she’d never cooked anything in her life. She’d learned how to make some kind of drink, too, that the woman was…emphatic about.

It smelled like the Demon Drink, which was the cause of Ruin. Daphne knew this because of what happened when Biggleswick the butler broke into her father’s study one night and got Rascally Drunk on whiskey and woke up the whole house with his singing. Grandmother had sacked him on the spot and refused to relent even when Daphne’s father said that Biggleswick’s mother had died that day. The footmen pulled him out of the house and carried him to the stables and left him crying in the straw with the horses trying to lick the tears off his face, for the salt.

What upset Daphne, who had quite liked Biggleswick, especially the way he walked with his feet turned out so that he looked as if he might split in two at any moment, was that he lost his job because of
her
. Grandmother had stood at the top of the stairs like some ancient stone goddess, pointed at Daphne (who had been watching with interest from the upper landing), and screamed at her father: “Will you stand there doing nothing when your only child is exposed to such Lewdness?”