Nation (21 page)

She stopped, and looked around. Who cared? Who, on this island, cared a fig? So who was she apologizing to? Why was she making excuses?

“Roll away the stone?” Why did everyone want him to
do
things? She’d heard about the stone. It was in a little valley in the side of the mountain, where women weren’t supposed to go.

There was no reason to go now, but she was angry at everyone and she just wanted to get out in the fresh air and do something people didn’t want her to. There were skeletons, probably, behind the stone, but so what? A lot of
her
ancestors were in the crypt of the church at home, and they never tried to get out and they never spoke to people. Her grandmother would have had something to say about it if they did! Besides, it was broad daylight, and obviously they’d only come out at night—except, of course, it would be pure superstition to believe that they came out at all.

She set off. There was a clear track leading uphill. The forest wasn’t very big, she’d heard, and the track ran right through it. There were no man-eating tigers, no giant gorillas, no ferocious lizards from ancient times…in fact it wasn’t very interesting at all. But the thing about a forest that’s only a few square miles in area is that when it’s scrunched up into little crisscrossing valleys and every growing thing is fighting every other living thing for every ragged patch of sunlight, and you cannot see more than a few feet in any direction, and you can’t judge where you are by the sound of the sea because the sound of the sea is very faint and in any case all around you, then the forest not only seems very big but also appears to be growing all the time. That’s when you began to believe it hated you as much as you hated it.

Following the track was no use, because it soon became a hundred tracks, splitting and rejoining all the time. Things rustled in the undergrowth, and sometimes creatures that sounded a lot bigger than pigs galloped away on paths she could not see. Insects went
zing
and
zip
all around her, but they weren’t as bad as the huge spiders that had woven their webs right across the paths and then hung in them, bigger than a hand and almost spitting with rage. Daphne had read in one of her books about the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean islands that “with a few regrettable examples, the larger and more fearsome the spider is, the less likely it is to be venomous.” She didn’t believe it. She could see Regrettable Examples everywhere, and she was sure that some of them were drooling.

—And suddenly there was clear daylight ahead. She would have run toward it, but there was—by good fortune not apparent at the time—a Regrettable Example using its web as a trampoline and she had to ease her way past it with caution. This was just as well, because while the end of the path offered vast amounts of fresh air, there was a total insufficiency of anything to stand on. There was a little clearing, big enough for a couple of people to sit and watch the world, and then a drop all the way to the sea. It wasn’t a totally sheer drop; you’d bounce off rocks several times before you ever hit the water.

She took the opportunity to take a few breaths that didn’t have flies in them. It would have been nice to see a sail on the horizon. In fact it would be narratively satisfying, she considered. But at least she could see that the day was getting on. She wasn’t scared of other people’s ghosts, much, but she did not fancy an evening walk through this forest.

And getting back shouldn’t be too hard, should it? All she had to do was take a downward path every time she found one. Admittedly taking the upward path at every opportunity, or at least every up path not blocked by a particularly evil-looking Regrettable Example, had completely failed to work, but logic had to triumph in the end.

In a way, it did. After a change of path she stepped out into a small valley, held in the arms of the mountain, and there, ahead of her, was the stone. It couldn’t be anything else.

There were trees here and there in the valley, but they were sorry-looking things and half dead. The ground beneath them was covered with bird doo-dahs.

A little way in front of the stone, a large bowl, also of some kind of stone, sat on a tripod made of three big rocks. Daphne peered into it with a kind of shameful curiosity because, to make no bones about it, it was, in this place, just the kind of big stone bowl that you’d expect to have a few skulls in it. There was something in the brain that said: Sinister-looking valley + half-dead trees + ominous doorway = skulls in a bowl, or possibly on a stick. But even by listening to it, she felt she was being unfair to Mau and Cahle and the rest of them. Human skulls never came up in day-to-day conversation. More importantly, they never came up at lunch.

The sickly smell of sour, sticky Demon Drink rose from the bowl. It was stale, but couldn’t have been very good to start with. It was a terrible thing to admit, but she was getting really good at making beer. Everyone said so. It was just some kind of a knack, Cahle had said, or at least had partly said and partly gestured, and that being able to make beer so well meant she would be able to get a very fine husband. Her getting married still seemed to be the big topic of discussion in the Place. It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

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
pnapp
ing 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
pnap
ped, each trying to out
pnap
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?”