Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 24

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“What are you looking for?” asked Mau.

“Omens, portents, messages from the gods, demon boy.”

Mau looked up. Only the star of Fire was visible this close to dawn. “Have you seen any?” he asked.

“No, but it would be terrible to miss one, wouldn’t it?” said Ataba.

“Was there one before the wave? Was there a message in the sky?”

“Quite possibly, but we were not good enough to know what it meant.”

“We would have, if they had shouted a warning. We’d have understood that! Why didn’t they just shout?”

“HELLO!” It was so loud it seemed to echo off the mountain.

Mau felt the shock down his body, and then his brain cut in with: It came from the sea! There’s a light on the water! And it’s not Raiders, because they wouldn’t shout “Hello!”

But the old man was on his feet, mouth open in a horrible grin. “Aha, you believed!” he crowed, waving a skinny finger at Mau. “Oh yes you did, just for a second! And you were fearful, and rightly so!”

“There’s a canoe with a lobster-claw sail!” said Mau, trying to ignore him. “They’re coming around the point! Look, they even have a torch burning!”

But Ataba hadn’t finished gloating. “For just one moment you — ”

“I don’t care! Come on! There’s more people!”

The canoe was coming through the new gap in the reef. Mau made out two figures, still shadowy against the rising light, lowering the sail. The tide was right and the people knew what they were doing, because the craft slid easily into the lagoon, as if it were steering itself.

It nudged the beach gently, and a young man jumped down and ran toward Mau.

“Are there women here?” he said. “Please, my brother’s wife is going to have a baby!”

“We have one woman, but she is sick.”

“Can she sing the calling song?”

Mau glanced at the Unknown Woman. He’d never heard a word from her, and he wasn’t at all sure she was right in the head.

“I doubt it,” he said.

The man sagged. He was young, only a few years older than Mau. “We were taking Cahle to the Women’s Place on the Overshoal Islands when the wave hit,” he said. “They’re gone. So many places have… gone. And we saw your smoke. Please, where is your chief?”

“I’m here,” said Mau firmly. “Take her up to the Women’s Place. Ataba here will show you the way.” The old priest sniffed and scowled but didn’t argue.

The young man stared at Mau. “You are the chief? But you are just a boy!”

“Not just. Not even. Not only. Who knows?” said Mau. “The wave came. These are new days. Who knows what we are? We survived, that’s all.” He paused, and thought: And we become what we have to be…. “There is a girl who can help you. I will send her up to the Women’s Place,” he said.

“Thank you. It is going to be very soon! My name is Pilu. My brother is Milo.”

“You mean the ghost girl?” hissed Ataba in Mau’s ear as the boy ran back down the beach. “That’s not right! She doesn’t know the birthing customs!”

“Do you?” asked Mau. “Can you help her?”

Ataba backed away as if he’d been burned. “Me? No!”

“Then stay out of the way. Look, she will know what to do. Women always do,” said Mau, trying to sound certain. Besides, it was true, wasn’t it? Boys had to live on the island and build a canoe before they were officially men, but with girls it just happened somehow. Then they magically knew things, like how to hold babies the right way up and how to go “Ooozeewididwidwden?” without the baby screaming until its little face went blue. “Besides, she’s not a man, she can talk, and she’s alive,” he finished.

“Well, I suppose, in the circumstances — ” Ataba conceded.

Mau turned to look at the two brothers, who were helping a very pregnant woman onto the beach. “Show them the way. I’ll be quick!” he said, and ran off.

Are trousermen women the same as real women? he wondered as he ran. She got very angry when I drew that picture! Do they ever take their clothes off? Oh, please, please don’t let her say no!

And his next thought, as he ran into the low forest, which was alive with birdsong, was: Who did I just say “please” to?

Daphne lay in the dark with a towel around her head. It was stuffy in the wreck, and damp and smelly. But you had to maintain standards. Her grandmother had been very keen on Maintaining Standards. She positively looked for Standards to Maintain, and if she didn’t find any, she made some up and Maintained them.

Sleeping in the captain’s hammock probably wasn’t Maintaining Standards, but her mattress was damp and sticky with salt. Everything was damp. Nothing dried properly down here, and of course she couldn’t hang her washing out up above the beach, in case men saw her underthings, which would definitely not Maintain any Standards at all.

The hammock swung gently back and forth. It was very uncomfortable, but it had the big advantage that the little red crabs couldn’t get onto it. She knew they would be scuttling around on the floor again, getting into everything, but at least with the towel around her head she couldn’t hear the little scrittle scrittle noise they made as they ran about.

Unfortunately, it didn’t cut out what, back home, would have been called the dawn chorus, but that just wasn’t the right word for the explosion of noise that was happening outside. It was like a war with whistles; everything with a feather on it went crazy. And the wretched pantaloon birds’ suppers also came up as the sun rose (she could hear them pattering on the deck above her) and, by the sound of it, Captain Roberts’s parrot still hadn’t run out of swear words. Some of them were foreign, which made it worse. But she could still tell it was swearing. She just could.

Sleep came and went in patches, but in every fuzzy half-awake dream the boy moved.

When she had been younger, she’d been given a book full of patriotic pictures about the Empire, and one had stuck in her mind because it was called “the Nobbly Savage.” She hadn’t understood why the boy with the spear and the skin as golden-brown as freshly poured bronze was called nobbly, since he looked as smooth as cream, and it wasn’t until years later that she realized how you were supposed to pronounce the word that was spelled noble.

Mau looked like him, but the boy in the picture had been smiling, and Mau didn’t smile, and he moved like something trapped in a cage. She was sorry now that she had shot at him.

Her memory swirled in the ripples of her sleepy brain. She remembered him on that first dreadful day. He’d walked around as though he were some kind of engine, and hadn’t heard her, hadn’t even seen her. He was carrying the bodies of dead people and his eyes were looking into another world. Sometimes she thought they still were. He seemed angry all the time, in the way that Grandmother got angry when she found out that Standards were not being Maintained.

She groaned as there was a pattering overhead. Another pantaloon bird had thrown up the remains of last night’s dinner, vomiting little bones all over the deck. Time to get up.

She unwrapped the towel from her head and sat up.

Mau was standing by the bed, watching her. How’d he gotten in? How had he walked across the deck without treading on a crab? She would have heard! Why was he staring like that? Why, oh why, hadn’t she worn her one clean nightshirt?

“How dare you walk in like —?” she began.

“Woman baby,” said Mau urgently. He had only just arrived, and had been wondering how to wake her up.

“What?”

“Baby come!”

“What’s wrong with it now? Did you get the milk?”

Mau tried to think. What was that word she used to mean one thing after another thing. Oh yes…

“Woman and baby!” he said.

“What about them?”

He could see that it hadn’t worked, either. Then an idea struck him. He held his arms out, as if there was a huge pumpkin in front of him. “Woman, baby.” Then he folded his arms and rocked them.

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