Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 25

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The ghost girl stared at him. If Imo made the world, Mau thought, why can’t we understand one another?

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.”

DAPHNE 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.

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