Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 9

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How had he spotted that? But you couldn’t deny it, not now, not with those pale eyes looking through you.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Good. And now that I have answered your questions, I think you owe me a favor.”

“Do you want me to run an errand? Or I could — ”

“I want you to remember something for me. Have you heard that I know a word that drives away sharks?”

“People say so, but they laugh.”

“Oh, yes. But it works. I’ve tried it three times. The first was when I discovered it, which was when I was about to have my good leg bitten off, and then I tried it out from a raft, just to see if I’d been lucky the first time, and then I swam off the reef one day and frightened away a hammerhead.”

“You mean you went looking for a shark?” said Mau.

“Yes. Quite a big one, as I recall.”

“But you might have been eaten!”

“Oh, I’m not bad with a spear, and I had to find out,” said Nawi, grinning. “Someone had to eat the first oyster, you know. Someone looked at half a shell full of snot and was brave.”

“Why doesn’t everybody know?”

Nawi’s permanent smile turned down a little. “I’m a bit strange, yes? And the priests don’t like me much. If I told everyone, and someone died, I think things would be very tricky for me. But someone should know, and you are a boy who asks questions. Don’t use it until I’m dead, all right? Or until you are about to be eaten by a shark, of course.”

And there on the rocks, as the sunset made a path of red across the sea, Mau learned the shark word.

“It’s a trick!” he said, without thinking.

“Not so loud,” snapped Nawi, glancing back at the shore. “Of course it’s a trick. Building a canoe is a trick. Throwing a spear is a trick. Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it. And now you know another one. If it saves your life one day, catch a big fish and throw it to the first dolphin you see. With luck, it will be me!”

And now the old man and his leg were only a memory, along with everyone Mau had ever known. Mau wanted to scream with the weight of it. The world had emptied.

He looked down at his hands. And he’d made a club. A weapon for what? Why did it make him feel better? But he had to stay alive. Yes! If he died, then the Nation would never have been. The island would be left to the red crabs and the grandfather birds. There would be no one to say that anyone had been there.

There was a fluttering overhead. A grandfather bird had landed in a shaggy-headed grass tree. Mau knew that, even though he couldn’t see up through the tangle of vines; grandfather birds were very clumsy and didn’t so much land as crash slowly. It hopped around up there making the nab-nab grumbling noises, and then there was the familiar sound of throwing up and a shower of small bones pattered around the forest floor.

The tree shook as the grandfather bird took off again. It flapped out into the open, saw Mau, decided to watch him for signs of being dead, and landed heavily on a branch of a tree that could barely be seen under its weight of strangler vines.

For a moment boy and bird stared at each other.

The branch snapped.

The grandfather bird squawked and leaped away before the rotted wood hit the ground, and disappeared, flapping and squawking with injured pride, into the undergrowth. Mau paid it no attention. He was staring at the cloud of fine yellow dust rising from the fallen branch. It was punk dust, what you got when rot and termites and time hollowed out a dead branch. And this one had been up in the air, out of reach of the damp. The dust was like pollen. It would be the best ever for starting fires.

He took the biggest lump of branch that he could hold, stuffed both ends with leaves, and started back down the mountain.

There were pigs rooting in the fields again now, but he had no time to shoo them away. One piece of papervine soon breaks, he thought, and five bound together are strong. That’s good to know and it is true. The trouble is, I’m the one piece.

He stopped. He was taking the other, steeper track down to the vill — to the place where the village had been. The wave had surged across the island here, too. Trees were broken and everything stank of seaweed. But on the other side of the shattered trees was a cliff that overlooked the low forest.

Mau carefully tucked the tubers and the punk branch under some grass and pushed his way through the tangle of vines and branches at the edge of the cliff. It was possible to climb all the way up or down the cliff quite easily. He’d done it before. There were so many roots and vines and creepers growing over the stone, and so much soil and old birds’ nests had made a home for every drifting seed, that it was more like a vertical meadow, with flowers everywhere. There was papervine, too. There was always papervine. He cut enough to make a sling for his club, while whispering belated thank-yous to the Papervine Woman for her ever-reliable hair.

Now he slid to the edge and pushed aside a spray of orchids.

Mists were rising everywhere below him, but he could see the track the monster had left through the forest, a white scar half a mile long. It stopped at the group of fig trees that grew in the highest part of the low forest. They were massive. Mau knew them well. Their trunks had huge buttresses that looked as though they might reach down to the roots of the world. They would stop anything, but the steam and the spread of the tree canopy meant that he couldn’t see what it was that had been stopped.

But he heard a voice. It was very faint, but it was coming from somewhere below Mau. It sounded a bit like singing, but not a very big bit. To Mau, it just sounded like “na, na, na.”

But it was a human voice. Perhaps it was another trouserman? It was a bit squeaky. Were there trouserwomen? Or it could be a ghost. There would be a lot of ghosts now.

It was past noon. If it was a ghost, then it would be very weak. Mau was the Nation. He had to do something.

He started to climb down the cliff, which was easy enough even with trying to move quietly, although birds flew up all around him. He shivered. He didn’t know how to make a ghost bag. That was a woman’s task.

The a-bit-like-singing went on. Perhaps it was some sort of ghost, then. The birds had made such a racket that any living person would surely have stopped and investigated.

His feet touched the tangle of flaking stone and tree roots that was the floor of the lower forest, and he moved silently between the dripping trees.

“Na, na, na” — clink! — “na, na, na” — clink!

That sounded like metal. Mau grasped his club in both hands.

— “give, for, wild, con-fu-sion, peace” — clink! — “Oh, hear, us, when, we, cry, to, Thee” — clink! — “for, those in per-ril on the sea!” — clang! — “drat!”

Mau peered around the buttress of a giant fig tree.

There was a lot to see.

Something had been wrecked, but it was not alive. It was some kind of giant canoe, stuck between the trunks of two trees and covered with debris that looked as though it would be worth investigating, but not now. A big hole in the side leaked stones. But all this was background. Much closer to Mau, and staring at him in horror, was a girl — probably. But she could be a ghost; she was very pale.

And a trouserman, too. The trousers were white and frilly, like the feathery legs of a grandfather bird, but she also had some kind of skirt tucked up around her waist. And her hair glowed in the sunlight. She had been crying.

She had also been trying to dig into the forest floor with some odd kind of flat-headed spear that had the glint of metal about it. That was stupid; it was all roots and rocks, and there was a very small heap of rocks next to her. There was something else, too, large and wrapped up. Perhaps I did walk in the footsteps of Locaha, Mau thought, because I know that there is a dead man in there. And the ghost girl, she was in my nightmares.

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