Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 44

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“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.

THE 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.

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