Nation (3 page)

There were birds everywhere, perching on anything that floated. Mostly they were little finches, chattering madly as the canoe went past. Some of them even fluttered over and perched on the canoe itself, huddling together and staring at him with a sort of desperate, terrified optimism. One even perched on his head.

While he was tying to untangle it from his hair, there was a thump as something much heavier landed on the stern of the canoe, causing the finches to scatter and then flutter back because they were too tired to make it to anywhere else. But they kept as far away as possible from the new passenger, because it wasn’t particular about who it ate.

It was a big bird, with shiny blue-black feathers and a white chest, and little white feathers covering its legs. Its huge beak, though, was brilliant red and yellow.

It was a grandfather bird, and good luck—to people at least—even if it did slow Mau down and eat one of his fish. Grandfather birds had learned not to be frightened of people; it was bad luck even to shoosh one away. He could feel its beady eyes on the back of his neck as he paddled onward. He hoped it might
be
lucky. If he had some luck, he could be home long before midnight.

There was an
Erk!
as the grandfather bird took off again with another of Mau’s boiled fish in its beak, making the canoe wallow for a moment. Well, at least I’m a bit lighter, Mau thought. It’s not as though I need the fish in any case. I’ll be filling up with pork tonight!

The bird landed heavily on a log a little way ahead. Quite a large log, in fact. As he drew nearer, Mau saw that it was a whole tree, even with its roots, although a lot of its branches had been torn off.

He saw the axe, tangled, rising out of the water. But part of him already knew he was going to see it. The sight of it raced toward his eyes and became, just for a moment, the center of the turning world.

The grandfather bird, having juggled the fish so that it could swallow it whole, took off in its gloomy is-this-really-worth-it? way and flapped with its big, slow wings nearly touching the scummy water.

With its weight gone, the tree started to roll back. But Mau was already in the water and caught the axe handle as it was pulled under. Holding his breath, he braced his legs against the tree’s trunk and tugged. Oh, he’d been clever, hadn’t he, that moment a hundred years ago now, slamming the axe hard into the tree to show the next boy what a big man he was….

It should have worked. With his last mighty heave the axe should have come free. That’s how it should have been, in a perfect world. But the swollen wood had gripped it firmly.

Mau dived again three more times, and came up every time coughing and spitting seawater. He had a deep, angry feeling that this wasn’t right; the gods had sent the axe to him, he was sure of that. They had sent it to him because he was going to need it, he was
certain
of it, and he had failed.

In the end he swam back to the canoe and grabbed the paddle before the grandfather bird was out of sight. They always flew back to land at night, and he was pretty certain that there couldn’t be much of the Boys’ Island to go back to. The tabago tree was hundreds of years old, and it had roots thicker than Mau’s waist. It looked as though they had practically held the island together! And there had been a god anchor among them. No wave should have been able to shift a god anchor. It would be like moving the world.

The grandfather bird flapped onward. Ahead of it, the thin line of the horizon grew redder, redder than any Mau had ever seen before. He paddled on as fast as he could, trying not to think about what he was going to find ahead of him; and because he was trying
not
to think them, the thoughts ran around in his head like excited dogs.

He tried to calm them down. Look, the Boys’ Island was hardly anything more than a lump of rock surrounded by sandbanks, was it? he thought. It wasn’t good for being anything but a fishing camp or a place for boys to try to be men. The Nation had mountains—well, one good one—had a river, there were caves, there were whole forests, there were men who’d know what to do!

Wouldn’t they? And what
could
they do?

But the little picture of his man-soul feast flickered in his head. It wouldn’t stay still, and he couldn’t find the silver thread that dragged him toward it.

Something dark drifted in front of the sunset, and he almost burst into tears. It was a perfect sunset wave, rolling across the red disk that was just sinking below the horizon. Every man in the Islands of the Sun had that image as his manhood tattoo, and in a few hours—he knew it—so would he.

And then, where the wave had been, there was the Nation. He could recognize its outline anywhere. It was five miles away maybe. Well, he could do another five miles. And soon he’d see the light of the fires.

Paddling faster, eyes straining to see the darker shape in the strange twilight, he made out the whiteness of the surf over the reef. And soon, please, soon
he would see the light of the fires!

Now he could smell them, all the smells of the land except the one he wanted, which was the smell of smoke.

And then, there it was, a sharp little tone in the scents of sea and forest. There was a fire somewhere. He couldn’t see it, but where there was smoke, there were people. Of course, if the wave had come this way, there wouldn’t be much dry wood. The wave wouldn’t be bad here, not here. He’d seen big waves before, and they would make a mess, and splinter a canoe or two. All right, this one had looked
really
big, but waves did when they went over the top of you! People had gone up the mountain and brought down dry wood. Yes, that’s what had happened. That was certainly what had happened. He had worried about nothing. They would be back soon.

That was it. That was how it would be.

But there was no silver thread. He could make the happy pictures in his mind, but they were out there in the dark, and there was no path to them.

It was almost fully dark when he entered the lagoon. He could make out leaves and branches, and he hit a big lump of coral that must have been broken off the reef by the wave, but that was what the reef was for. It took the pounding of the storms. Behind the reef, around the lagoon, they were safe.

With a little kiss of crushed sand, the canoe touched the beach.

Mau jumped out, and remembered just in time about the sacrifice. It should be a red fish for a successful journey, and this journey had to be called a success, even if it was a very strange one. He hadn’t got a red fish but, well, he was still a boy, and the gods excused boys many things. At least he’d
thought
about it. That must count.

There were no other canoes. There should have been many. Even in this gloom, things looked wrong. There was nobody here; nobody knew he was standing on the shore.

He tried anyway: “Hello! It’s me, Mau! I’m back!”

He started to cry, and that was worse. He’d cried in the canoe, but that was just water escaping from his face. But now the tears came in big sobs, dribbling from his eyes and nose and mouth, unstoppably. He cried for his parents, because he was afraid, because he was cold and very tired, and because he was fearful and couldn’t pretend. But most of all he cried because only he knew.

In the forest, something heard. And in the hidden firelight, sharp metal gleamed.

Light died in the west. Night and tears took the Nation. The star of Water drifted among the clouds like a murderer softly leaving the scene of the crime.

T
HE MORNING WAS A
lighter shade of night. Mau felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, hunched up among the broad fallen leaves of a coconut tree, but there must have been times when his body and mind just shut down, in a little rehearsal of death. He awoke or maybe came alive again with the dead gray light, stiff and cold. Waves barely moved on the shore, the sea was almost the same color as the sky, and still it rained tears.

The little river that came from the mountain was choked with sand and mud and bits of trees, and when he dug down with his hands, it didn’t flow. It just oozed. In the end Mau had to suck at the rain as it trickled off leaves, and it tasted of ashes.

The lagoon was a mess of broken coral, and the wave had ripped a big hole in the reef. The tide had changed, and water was pouring in. Little Nation, which was barely more than a sandbank on the rim of the lagoon, had been stripped of all its trees but one, which was a ragged stem with, against all hope, a few leaves still on it.

Find food, find water, find shelter…these were the things you had to do in a strange place, and this was a strange place and he’d been born here.

He could see that the village had gone. The wave had sliced it off the island. A few stumps marked the place where the longhouse had stood since…forever. The wave had torn up the reef. A wave like that would not have even noticed the village.

He’d learned to look at coasts when he’d been voyaging with his father and his uncles. And now, looking up, he could see the story of the wave, written in tumbled rocks and broken trees.

The village faced south. It had to. The other three sides were protected by sheer, crumbling cliffs, in which sea caves boomed and foamed. The wave had come from the south of east. Broken trees pointed the trail.

Everyone would have been on the shore, around the big fire. Would they have heard the roar of the wave above the crackle of the flames? Would they have known what it meant? If they had been quick, they would have headed up Big Pig Valley, to the higher ground beyond the fields. But some of the wave would already have been roaring up the eastern slope (all grassy there, nothing much to slow it down), and they would have met it pouring back on them.

And then the rolling cauldron of rocks and sand and water and people would have broken through the west of the reef and into the deepwater current, where the people would have become dolphins.

But not everyone. The wave had left behind fish and mud and crabs, to the delight of the leg-of-pork birds and the gray ravens and, of course, the grandfather birds. The island was full of birds this morning. Birds Mau had never seen before were squabbling with the familiar, everyday ones.

And there were people, tangled in broken branches, half buried in mud and leaves, just another part of the ruined world.

It took him a few long seconds to realize what he was looking at, to see that what he had thought was a broken branch was an arm.

He looked around slowly and realized why there were so many birds, and why they were fighting.

He ran. His legs took him and he ran, screaming out names, up the long slope, past the lower fields, which were covered with debris, past the higher plantations, too high even for the wave, and almost to the edges of the forest. And there he heard his own voice, echoing back from the cliffs.

No one. But there must be someone….

But they had all been waiting, for someone who was no longer a boy but had yet to become a man.

He walked up to the Women’s Place—totally forbidden for any man, of course—and risked a quick peek through the big hedge that surrounded the gardens, untouched up here by the water. But he saw nothing moving, and no voice called out in answer to his cry.

They had been waiting on the beach. He could see them all so clearly in his mind, talking and laughing and dancing in circles around the fire, but there was no silver line, nothing to pull them back.

They had been waiting for the new man. The wave must have hit them like a hammer.

As he went back down to the fields, he grabbed a broken branch and flailed ineffectively at the birds. There were bodies everywhere in the area just above the scoured place where the village had been. At first they were hard to see, tangled as they were with debris and as gray as the ashen mud. He’d have to touch them. They had to be moved. The pigs would come down soon. The thought of pigs eating—
No!

There was some brightness behind the clouds in the east. How could that be? Another night had passed? Had he slept? Where had he been? But tiredness certainly had him now. He dragged some leafy branches up against a big rock for shelter, crawled inside, and felt the gray of the mud and the rain and the bruised-looking sky sneak in silently and fill him up and close over him.

And Mau dreamed. It had to be a dream. He felt himself become two people. One of them, a gray body made of mud, began to look for the bodies that the wave hadn’t taken. It did this carefully and as gently as it could, while the other Mau stayed deep inside, curled in a ball, doing the dreaming.

And who am I, doing this? thought the gray Mau. Who am I now? I am become like Locaha, measuring the contours of death. Better be him than be Mau, on this day…because here is a body. And Mau will not see it, lift it, or look into its eyes, because he will go mad, so I will do it for him. And this one has a face Mau has seen every day of his life, but I will not let him see it now.

And so he worked, as the sky brightened and the sun came up behind the plume of steam in the east and the forest burst into song, despite the drizzle. He combed the lower slopes until he found a body, dragged it or carried it—some were small enough to carry—down to the beach and out to the point where you could see the current. There were usually turtles there, but not today.

He, the gray shadow, would find rocks and big coral lumps, and there were plenty of those, and tie them to the body with papervine. And now I must take my knife and cut the spirit hole, thought the gray Mau, so that the spirit will leave quickly, and pull the body out into the waves where the current sinks, and let it go.

The dreaming Mau let his body do the thinking: You lift like
this
, you pull like
this
. You cut the papervine like
that
, and you don’t scream, because you are a hand and a body and a knife, and they don’t even shed a tear. You are inside a thick gray skin that can feel nothing. And nothing can get through. Nothing at all. And you send the body sinking slowly into the dark current, away from birds and pigs and flies, and it will grow a new skin and become a dolphin.

There were two dogs, too, and that almost broke him. The people, well, the horror was so great that his mind went blank, but the twisted bodies of the dogs twisted his soul. They had been with the people, excited but not knowing why. He wrapped them in papervine and weighed them down and sent them into the current anyway. Dogs would want to stay with the people, because they were people, too, in their way.

He didn’t know what to do with the piglet, though. It was all by itself. Maybe the sow had legged it for the high forest, as they did when they sensed the water coming. This one hadn’t kept up. His stomach said it was food, but he said no, not this one, not this sad little betrayed thing. He sent it into the current. The gods would have to sort it out. He was too tired.

It was near sunset when he dragged the last body to the beach and was about to wade out to the current when his body told him:
No, not this one. This is you and you are very tired but you are not dead. You need to eat and drink and sleep. And most of all you must try not to dream.

He stood for a while until the words sank in, and then trudged back up the beach, found his makeshift shelter, and fell into it.

Sleep came but brought no good thing. Over and over again he found the bodies and carried them to the shore because they were so light. They tried to talk to him, but he could not hear them because the words could not get through his gray skin. There was a strange one, too, a ghost girl, totally white. She tried to talk to him several times but faded back into the dream, like the others. The sun and moon whirled across the sky, and he walked on in a gray world, the only moving thing in veils of silence, forever.

And then he was spoken to, out of the grayness.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MAU?

He looked around. The land looked odd, without color. The sun was shining, but it was black.

When the voices spoke again, they seemed to come from everywhere at once, on the wind.

THERE IS NO TIME FOR SLEEPING. THERE IS SO MUCH THAT MUST BE DONE.

“Who are you?”

WE ARE THE GRANDFATHERS!

Mau trembled, and trembling was all he could manage. His legs would not move.

“The wave came,” he said. “Everyone is dead! I sent some into the dark water!”

YOU MUST SING THE DARK WATER CHANT.

“I didn’t know how!”

YOU MUST RESTORE THE GOD ANCHORS.

“How do I do that?”

YOU MUST SING THE MORNING SONG AND THE EVENING SONG.

“I don’t know the words! I am not a man!” said Mau desperately.

YOU MUST DEFEND THE NATION! YOU MUST DO THE THINGS THAT HAVE ALWAYS BEEN DONE!

“But there is just me! Everyone is dead!”

EVERYTHING THE NATION WAS, YOU ARE! WHILE YOU ARE, THE NATION IS! WHILE YOU REMEMBER, THE NATION LIVES!

There was a change in the pressure of air, and the Grandfathers…went.

Mau blinked and woke up. The sun was yellow and halfway down the sky, and beside him was a flat round metal thing, on top of which was a coconut with the top sliced off and a mango.

He stared at them.

He was alone. No one else could be here, not now. Not to leave him food and creep away.

He looked down at the sand. There were footprints there, not large, but they had no toes.

He stood up very carefully and looked around. The creature with no toes was watching him, he was sure. Perhaps…perhaps the Grandfathers had sent it?

“Thank you,” he said to the empty air.

The Grandfathers had spoken to him. He thought about this as he gnawed the mango off its huge stone. He’d never heard them before. But the things they wanted…how could a boy do them? Boys couldn’t even go near their cave. It was a strict rule.

But boys did, though. Mau had been eight when he’d tagged along after some of the older boys. They hadn’t seen him as he’d shadowed them all the way up through the high forests to the meadows where you could see to the edge of the world. The grandfather birds nested up there, which was why they were called grandfather birds. The older boys had told him that the birds were spies for the Grandfathers and would swoop on you and peck your eyes out if you came too close, which he knew wasn’t true, because he’d watched them and knew that—unless there was beer around—they wouldn’t attack anything bigger than a mouse if they thought it might fight back. But some people would tell you anything if they thought you’d be scared.

At the end of the meadows was the Cave of the Grandfathers, high up in the wind and the sunlight, watching over the whole world. They lived behind a round stone door that took ten men to shift, and you might live for a hundred years and see it moved only a few times, because only the best men, the greatest hunters and warriors, became Grandfathers when they died.

On the day he had followed the boys, Mau had sat and watched from the thick foliage of a grass tree as they dared one another to go near the stone, to touch it, to give it a little push—and then someone had shouted that he’d heard something, and within seconds they’d vanished into the trees, running for home. Mau had waited a little while, and when nothing happened, he had climbed down and gone and listened at the stone. He had heard a faint crackling right on the edge of hearing, but then a grandfather bird on the cliff above was throwing up (the ugly-looking things didn’t just eat everything, they ate
all
of everything, and carefully threw up anything that didn’t fit, taste right, or had woken up and started to protest). There was nothing very scary at all. No one had ever heard of the Grandfathers coming out. The stone was there for a reason. It was
heavy
for a reason. He forgot about the sound; it had probably been insects in the grass.

That night, back in the boys’ hut, the older boys boasted to the younger boys about how they had rolled away the big stone and how the Grandfathers had turned their ancient, dry old faces to look at them, and tried to stand up on their crumbling legs, and how the boys had (very bravely) rolled the big stone back again, just in time.

And Mau had lain in his corner and wondered how many times this story had been told over the last hundreds of years, to make big boys feel brave and little boys have nightmares and wet themselves.

Now, five years later, he sat and turned over in his hands the gray round thing that had acted as a holder for the mango. It looked like metal, but who had so much metal that they could waste it on something to hold food?

There were marks on it. They spelled out
Sweet Judy
in faded white paint—but they spelled out
Sweet Judy
in vain.

Mau was good at reading
important
things. He could read the sea, the weather, the tracks of animals, tattoos, and the night sky. There was nothing for him to read in lines of cracked paint. Anyone could read wet sand, though. A toeless creature had come out of the low forest and had gone back the same way.

At some time in the past something had split the rock of the island, leaving a long low valley on the east side that was not very far above sea level and had hardly any soil. Things had soon taken root even so, because something will always grow
somewhere
.

The low forest was always hot, damp, and salty, with the sticky, itchy, steamy atmosphere of a place that never sees much new air. Mau had forced his way in a few times, but there wasn’t much of interest, at least not at ground level. Everything happened high above, up in the canopy. There were wild figs up there. Only the birds could get at them, and they fought over the little morsels, which meant there was a steady rain of bird poo and half-eaten figs onto the forest floor, which in turn was a permanent feast for the little red crabs that scuttled around and cleared up anything that dropped in. Sometimes pigs came down to feed on the crabs, so the low forest was worth an occasional look. You had to be careful, though, because you often got a tree-climbing octopus or two in there, after baby birds and anything else they could find, and they were hard to pull off if they landed on your head. Mau knew that you must never let them think you are a coconut. You learned that fast, because they had sharp beaks.
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