Nation (22 page)

“I suppose so.”

“I mean, was it a dream or was it real?”

“Mrs. Gurgle says yes,” said Daphne.

“Who is Mrs…. Gurgle, please?”

“The very old woman,” Daphne explained.

“You mean Mar-isgala-egisaga-gol?”

“Probably.”

“And she says yes to what?”

“Your question. I think she means it wasn’t the right one. Look, does Locaha talk to you?”

“Yes!”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“In your head? Like your dreams?”

“Yes, but I know the difference!” said Mau.

“That’s good, because the Grandmothers have been talking to me.”

“Who are the Grandmothers?”

Blibi, if that was really her name, had caught up with them long before Daphne had finished talking and Mau had finished understanding. She sat at their feet, playing with pantaloon bird feathers.

Mau picked up a feather and twiddled it in his fingers. “They don’t like warriors, then.”

“They don’t like people being killed. Nor do you.”

“Have you heard of the Raiders?” asked Mau, brushing a feather off his face.

“Of course. Everyone’s talking about them. They have great war galleys, and they hang the skulls of their enemies along the sides of them. Oh, and enemy means everyone else.”

“We have perhaps thirty people here now. Some more arrived this morning, but most of them can hardly stand. They survived the wave, but they weren’t going to wait for the Raiders to come.”

“Well, you’ve got enough canoes. Can’t we just head east?” She said that without thinking, and then sighed. “We can’t, can we?”

“No. If we had more able-bodied people, and time to get provisions together, then we could try it. But it’s eight hundred miles of open ocean.”

“The weaker people would die. They came here to be safe!”

“They call this island ‘the place where the sun is born’ because it’s in the east. They look to us.”

“Then we could hide until the Raiders go away. Roll away the stone, the Grandmothers said.”

Mau stared at her. “And hide among the dead men? Do
you
think we should?”

“No! We should fight!” She was amazed at how fast the words came out. They had been pushed out by her ancestors, all those calm stone knights down in the crypt. They’d never ever
thought
about hiding, even when it was the sensible thing to do.

“Then I will think of a way,” said Mau.

“What do the Grandfathers say?”

“I don’t hear them anymore. I just hear…clicks, and insect noises.”

“Perhaps the Grandmothers have told them off,” said Daphne, giggling. “My grandmother was always telling my grandfather off. He knew everything there is to know about the fifteenth century but he was always coming down to breakfast without his teeth in.”

“They fell out in the night?” asked Mau, puzzled.

“No. He used to take them out to clean them. They were new teeth made out of animal bone.”

“You trousermen can give an old man new teeth? What will you tell me next? That you can give him new eyes?”

“Um…yes, actually something very much like that.”

“Why are you so much
smarter
than us?”

“I don’t think we are, really. I think it’s just that you have to learn to make things when it’s cold for half the year. I think we got our empire because of the weather. Anything was better than staying at home in the rain. I’m pretty certain people looked out of the window and rushed off to discover India and Africa.”

“Are they big places?”

“Huge,” said Daphne.

Mau sighed and said, “With the people who leave stones.”

“Who?”

“The god anchors,” said Mau. “I understand Ataba now. I don’t think he believes in his gods, but he believes in belief. And he also thinks trousermen came here a long time ago,” he added, shaking his head. “Maybe they brought the stones as ballast. It must have happened like that. Look at all the stone Judy the Sweet brought. Worthless rock to you, all kinds of tools to us. And maybe they gave us metal and tools, like giving toys to children, and we carved the stones because we wanted them to come back. Isn’t that how it would go? We are a little island. Tiny.”

The Phoenicians, thought Daphne glumly. They went on long, long voyages. So did the Chinese. What about the Aztecs? Even the Egyptians? Some people say they visited Further Australia. And who knows who might have been around thousands of years ago? He’s probably right. But he looks so sad.

“Well, you might be a small island,” she said, “but you are an old one. The Grandmothers must have some reason for telling you to roll away the big stone.”

They looked at the stone, which glowed a golden yellow in the afternoon light.

“You know, I can’t remember a longer day than this,” said Daphne.

“I can,” said Mau.

“Yes. That was a long day, too.”

“It takes ten strong men to move the stone,” said Mau after a while. “We don’t have that many.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Daphne. “How many would it take if one of them was Milo, and he had a crowbar made of steel?”

It took time. There was a groove in the rock that had to be scraped out, and tree trunks to be dragged into position to stop the door from falling outward as it moved. The sun was starting to fall down the sky by the time Milo stepped up to the stone with a six-foot bar of steel in his hand.

Mau looked at it glumly. It was useful and he was glad to have it, but it was a trouserman thing, another present from the
Sweet Judy
. They were still stripping her like termites.

Even a canoe had a soul, of a kind. Everyone knew that; sometimes it wasn’t a good soul, and the craft was hard to handle, even though it seemed to be well built. If you were lucky you got a canoe with a good soul, like the one he’d built on the Boys’ Island, which always seemed to know what he wanted. The
Sweet Judy
had a good soul, he could tell. It was a shame to break her up, and another kind of shame to know that, once again, they had to rely on the trousermen to get things done. He was almost ashamed of carrying one of the smaller crowbars himself, but they were so
useful
. Who but the trousermen had so much metal that they could afford to make sticks out of it. But the bars were wonderful. They opened anything.

“There may be a curse on the door,” said Ataba, behind Mau.

“Can you tell if there is?”

“No! But this is wrong.”

“These are my ancestors. I seek their guidance. Why should they curse me? Why should I fear their old bones? Why are you afraid?”

“What is in the dark should be left alone.” The priest sighed. “But no one listens to me now. The coral is full of white stones, people say, so which ones are holy?”

“Well, which?”

“The three old ones, of course.”

“You could test them,” said Daphne, without thinking. “People could leave a fish on a new stone and see how their fortune changes. Hmm, I’d need to work out a scientific way—” She stopped, aware that everyone was watching her. “Well, it would be interesting,” she finished lamely.

“I did not understand any of that,” said Ataba, looking coldly at her.

“I did.”

Mau craned to see who had spoken and saw the tall skinny figure of Tom-ali, a canoe builder who had arrived with two children who were not his, one boy and one girl.

“Speak, Mr. Tom-ali,” he said.

“I would like to ask the gods why my wife and son died and I did not.” There was some murmuring from the crowd.

Mau already knew him. He knew all the newcomers. They walked the same way, slowly. Some just sat and watched the sea. And there was a grayness about them all. Why am I here? their faces said. Why me? Was I a bad person?

Tom-ali was repairing the canoes now, with the boy helping him, while the girl helped out in the Place. Some of the children were coping better than the adults; after the wave, you just found a place that fitted. But Tom-ali had said what a lot of people didn’t want to hear said, and the best thing to do was to give them something else to think about, right now.

“We all want answers today,” Mau said. “Please, all of you, help me move the stone. No one else has to set foot inside. I will go in by myself. Perhaps I’ll find the truth.”

“No,” said Ataba firmly, “let
us
go in there
together
and find the truth.”

“Fine,” said Mau. “That way we can find twice as much.”

Ataba stood next to Mau as the men took up their positions. “You say you are not frightened. Well,
I
am frightened, young man, to my very toes.”

“The truth will be the dead men in there, that’s all,” said Mau. “Dried up. Dust. If you want to be frightened, think about the Raiders.”

“Do not dismiss the past so lightly, demon boy. It may still teach you something.”

Milo forced the bar between the rock and the stone, and heaved. The stone creaked, and moved an inch—

They did it carefully and slowly, because it would certainly crush anybody it fell on. But cleaning out the groove had been a good idea. The stone ran smoothly, until half of the cave entrance could be seen.

Mau looked inside. There was nothing there. He’d imagined all kinds of things, but not
nothing
. The floor was quite smooth. There was a bit of dust on the floor, and a few beetles scuttled off into the dark, and that was all the cave held. Except depth.

Why had he expected bones to fall out when the door was opened? Why should it be full up? He picked up a piece of rock and threw it into the darkness as hard as he could. It seemed to bounce and rattle for a long time.

“All right,” he said, and the cave threw his voice back at him. “We’re going to need those lamps, Daphne.”

She stood up, with one of the
Sweet Judy
’s lamps in each hand. “One red one and one green one,” she said. “The spare port and starboard lights. Sorry about that, but we haven’t got very many cabin lamps left, and we’re short of oil.”

“What about that white lamp next to you?” asked Mau.

“Yes, that’s the one I’m going to bring,” said the ghost girl, “and to save time, shall we pretend we’ve had the argument and I won?”

More trouserman things, Mau thought as he picked up his lamp. I wonder what we used to use? The low ceiling told him when he touched it. His fingers came away covered in soot.

Torches, then. You could make decent ones out of hog fat. If there was enough of the stuff to spare, they were good for night fishing, because the fish would rise to the light. We’ve been living off fish and the
Sweet Judy
’s salt-pickled beef, because that’s easy, he thought, so now we’ll have to find our dead by trouserman lamplight.

T
HE CAVE WAS WAITING.
It might contain anything, Mau thought. And that was the point, wasn’t it? You had to find out. You had to
know
. And Daphne didn’t seem concerned. Mau told her that there would probably be bones, and she said that was fine, because bones didn’t try to kill you, and that since
she
had got the message from the Grandmothers, she was going to see it through, thank you so very much.

They found the Grandfathers right at the point where you could just see the waning daylight, and Mau began to understand. They weren’t scary, they were just…sad. Some of them still sat as they had been put, with their knees up under their chins, staring toward the distant light with flat dead eyes. They were just husks and crumbled bones. If you looked carefully, you could see that they had been held together with papervine. It really did have many uses, even after death.

They stopped when the daylight was a little dot at the end of the tunnel.

“How many more can there be?” Ataba wondered.

“I’m counting,” said Mau. “There’s more than a hundred of them so far.”

“One hundred and two,” said Daphne. There seemed to be no end to them, sitting one behind the other like the world’s oldest rowing crew, sculling into eternity. Some of them still had their spears or clubs, tied to their arms.

They went on, and the light vanished. The dead passed in their hundreds and Daphne lost count. She kept reminding herself how scared she wasn’t. After all, hadn’t she quite enjoyed that lecture on anatomy she had attended? Even though she had kept her eyes shut throughout?

However, if you were going to look at hundreds and thousands of dead men, it didn’t help to see the light from Ataba’s lamp flicker over them. It seemed to make them move. And they had been men of the islands; she could see, on ancient, leathery skin, blurred tattoos, like the ones every man—well, every man except Mau—wore even now. A wave, curling across the face of the setting sun…

“How long have you been putting people in here?” she asked.

“Forever,” said Mau, running on ahead. “And they came from the other islands, too!”

“Are you tired, sir?” said Daphne to Ataba, when they were left alone.

“Not at all, girl.”

“Your breathing does not sound good.”

“That is my affair. It is not yours.”

“I was just…concerned, that’s all.”

“I would be obliged if you would stop being concerned,” Ataba snapped. “I know what is happening. It starts with knives and cooking pots, and suddenly we belong to the trousermen, yes, and you send priests and our souls do not belong to us.”

“I’m not doing anything like that!”

“And when your father comes in his big boat? What will happen to us then?”

“I…don’t know,” said Daphne, which was better than telling the truth. We do tend to stick flags in places, she had to admit it herself. We do it almost absentmindedly, as though it’s a sort of chore.

“Hah, you fall silent,” said the priest. “You are a good child, the women say, and you do good things, but the difference between the trousermen and the Raiders is that sooner or later the cannibals go away!”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!” said Daphne hotly. “We don’t eat people!”

“There are different ways to eat people, girl, and you are clever, oh yes, clever enough to know it. And sometimes the people don’t realize it’s happened until they hear the belch!”

“Come quickly!” That was Mau, whose lamp was a faint green glow in the distance.

Daphne ran to stop Ataba from seeing her face. Her father, well, he was a decent man but, well, this century was a game of empires, apparently, and no little island was allowed to belong to itself. What would Mau do if someone stuck a flag on his beach?

There he was now, looking green, and pointing to the line of Grandfathers.

As she got closer, she saw the white stone on the edge of the passage. There was a Grandfather sitting on it like a chieftain, but with his hands clasped around his knees like the rest. And he was facing down the corridor, away from the cave mouth, toward the unknown.

In front of him the line of dead warriors continued, all now turned to face…what? The light of day was behind them now.

Mau was waiting, a glint in his eye, when Ataba hobbled up. “Do you know why they are facing the wrong way, Ataba?” he asked.

“They look as though they are protecting us from something,” said the priest.

“Down here? From what? There’s nothing down here but darkness.”

“And something best forgotten, perhaps? Do you think the wave never happened before? And the last time it never went away. It was a wave that never ebbed. It ended the world.”

“That’s just a story. I remember my mother telling it to me,” said Mau. “Everyone knows it: ‘In the Time When Things Were Otherwise and the Moon Was Different…Men were becoming troublesome, and so Imo swept them away with a great wave.’”

“Was there an ark? I mean, er, some sort of big boat?” asked Daphne. “I mean, how did anyone survive?”

“There were people on the sea and high ground,” said Mau. “That’s the story, isn’t it, Ataba?”

“What had they done that was so bad?” Daphne asked.

Ataba cleared his throat. “It is said they tried to make themselves into gods,” he said.

“That’s right.” Mau went on: “I wonder if you can tell me what we did wrong this time?”

Ataba hesitated.

Mau did not, and he spoke sharp and fast, like a spring unwinding: “I am talking about my father, my mother, my whole family, my whole
Nation
! They all
died
! I had a sister who was seven years old. Just give me the reason. There must have been a reason! Why did the gods let them die? I found a little baby stuck in a tree. How had it offended the gods?”

“We are small. We cannot understand the nature of the gods,” said Ataba.

“No! You don’t believe that—I can hear it in your voice! I don’t understand the nature of a bird, but I can watch it and listen to it and learn about it. Don’t you do this with the gods? Where are the rules? What did we do wrong? Tell me!”

“
I don’t know!
Don’t you think I haven’t asked them?” Tears started to roll down Ataba’s cheeks. “You think I am a man alone? I haven’t seen my daughter or her children since the wave. Do you hear what I say? It is not all about you! I envy your rage, demon boy. It fills you up! It feeds you, gives you strength. But the rest of us listen for the certainty, and there is nothing. Yet in our heads we know there must be…something, some reason, some pattern, some order, so we call upon the silent gods, because they are better than the darkness. That is it, boy. I have no answers for you.”

“Then I’ll look for them in the darkness,” said Mau, holding up the lantern. “Come farther with us,” he said in a quieter voice.

The light glistened off the tears streaming down the priest’s face. “No,” he said hoarsely.

“We’ll have to leave you here,” said Mau. “Among the dead men, which I think is no place for you. Or you can come with us. At least you’ll have a demon and a ghost on your side. We may need your wisdom, too.”

To Daphne’s surprise, the old man smiled. “You think I have some left?”

“Certainly. Shall we continue? What can you find that is worse than me?”

“I’d like to ask a question,” said Daphne quickly. “How often is a new Grandfather put in here, please?”

“Once or twice in fifty years,” said Ataba.

“There are
thousands
here. Are you sure?”

“This place has been here since the world was made, and so have we,” said Mau.

“On that, at least, we are in full agreement,” said Ataba stoutly.

“But that’s a very long time ago!”

“And that is why there are so many Grandfathers!” said Mau. “It’s very simple.”

“Yes,” said Daphne, “when you put it like that, I suppose it is.” They set off, and then she said: “What was that noise?”

They stopped, and this time they all heard the faint crackling and rustling from behind them.

“Are the dead rising?” asked Ataba.

“You know, I really hoped nobody was going to suggest that,” said Daphne.

Mau walked a few steps back along the cave, which was full of tiny crackling sounds. The dead don’t walk, he thought. That’s one of the ways you know they are dead. So what I’m doing is standing here, a long way from the sky, and I have to work out what they
are
doing. So what is the reason? And where have I heard this noise before?

He walked a little way farther up the tunnel, where there was no noise at all, and waited. After a while, the crackling started again, and he thought of sunshine on hot days. It was crackling where he had left the others, too. “Let’s keep going,” he said, “and it will stop, provided we keep moving.”

“They won’t wake up?” said Ataba.

“It’s the papervine bindings on the Grandfathers,” Mau said. “Even when it’s bone-dry, it crackles and pops when it’s warmed up. The heat of the lamps and our bodies sets it off if we stay in one place too long. That’s all it is.”

“Well, it was frightening
me
,” said Daphne. “Well done. Deductive reasoning based on observation and experiment.”

Mau ignored that, because he didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant. But he felt pleased. The Grandfathers didn’t wake up. The noise he had heard as a boy was just papervine getting hotter or colder. That was true, and he could prove it. It wasn’t hard to work out, so why is it all I can do not to wet myself? Because papervine moving doesn’t sound interesting and walking skeletons does, that’s why. Somehow they make us feel more important. Even our fears make us feel important, because we fear that we might not be.

He watched Ataba move close to a Grandfather, then step back hurriedly when it began to creak.

My body is a coward but
I
am not fearful. I will fear nothing, ever, he thought. Not now.

There was a glow ahead. It appeared suddenly as they walked around a long curve—red, yellow, and green, flickering as they got closer. Ataba groaned and stopped walking, and because he did that, Mau knew
he
couldn’t. He looked down the slope ahead.

“Stay and look after the old man,” he said to the ghost girl. “I don’t want him to run away.”

I will not fear my bladder that wants to explode, he told himself as he sped down past the silent sentries, or my feet that want to turn and flee, and I will not fear the pictures that are running, screaming, through my head. He ran on, the light racing ahead of him, repeating the vow until, like Captain Roberts, he found it necessary to change the words in a hurry. I will not fear the shadow that is walking out of the pretty light, because I have found my fear down here in the dark, and I shall reach out and touch him as he reaches out to touch me….

His fingers met his reflection and touched smooth golden metal, in a slab about the size of a man.

Mau put his ear to it, but there was no sound. When he pushed it, it didn’t move.

“I want you to stay where you are,” he told the others when they caught up to him. “Both of you. We’ve come down a long way. There may be water on the other side of this.”

He prodded at the metal with his crowbar. It was very soft and also very thick, but the stone around it was the ordinary island stone, and that seemed a better bet. It soon started to flake away under blows from the pointed end of the bar, and after some work there was a hiss and the smell of wet salt. So the sea
was
somewhere near, but at least they were above it.

He called the others down and hacked at the stone again, amazed at how easily he could crack it with the metal bar, opening up a gap into blackness. It was damp; he could hear a soft lapping of water in the dark. By the light of the lamp he could just make out some white steps, leading down.

So that was it? All this way for some sea cave? There were a lot of them at the bottom of the cliffs on the western side of the island. Kids had explored them since time began, and had never found anything to get excited about.

But the lamplight glinted on something in the dark.

“I’m going to come in with you,” said Daphne behind him.

“No. Stay here. It might be dangerous.”

“Yes, and that’s why I ought to go in with you.”

“It’s been shut up since forever! What’s going to hurt me?”

“What?
You
were the one who said it might be dangerous!” Daphne said.

“I will enter first,” said Ataba behind her. “If Locaha is in there, I will take his hand.”

“I’m not going to wait out here with all these dead men crackling at me!” Daphne protested. “Yes, I know it’s just the vines but
that really doesn’t help
.”

The three of them looked at one another in the lamplight and then, as one, tried to get through the narrow gap into a space full of bad air. It tasted rotten, if air could rot.

The steps beyond were god stones, every one. They had carvings on them, just like the ones on the beach, but many of the carvings went across several stones. Here and there, stones were cracked or missing.

Lumps of stone, thought Mau. Why did we think they were worthy things to worship? He held the lamp higher and saw the reason.

Ahead of him, knee-deep in the water, gigantic and gleaming white and sparkling all over, were the gods—the huge-stomached Air with his four sons on his shoulders, the brilliant Water, the ferocious Fire, with his hands bound to his side just as the story said. Air and Water each held a big stone globe in their hands, but Fire’s globe was balanced on his head and had a red glitter to it. There was a fourth statue, pale and smashed, with no head and one arm fallen down into the water. For a moment Mau thought: That’s Imo. Broken. Would I dare to find His face?

Ataba screamed (and outside in the tunnel a dead man moved slightly). “Do you see them? Do you
see
them?” the priest managed, in between great gasps of sour air. “Behold the gods, demon boy!” He bent double with a fit of coughing. It definitely was
not
good air; you sucked it down, but there was no life in it.