Nation

by Terry Pratchett

  “The gods let you down. When you needed them they weren’t there. That is it, and all of it. To worship them now would be to kneel before bullies and murderers.”

  Those were the words he’d wanted to say, but with her looking at him, he’d rather bite his tongue off than say them. They would be true, he knew it, yet here and now that didn’t mean anything. He’d looked around at the anxious faces, still waiting for his answer, and remembered how shocked and hurt Pilu had been. A thought could be like a spear. You do not throw a spear at the widow, the orphan, the grieving.

  “Tomorrow,” he’d told them, “I will bring up the anchor of Water.”

  And people sat back and looked at one another in satisfaction. It wasn’t smugness, it wasn’t a look of triumph, but the world had wobbled a bit and was now back where it should be.

  And now it was tomorrow, somewhere beyond the hissing rain.

  I’ll bring the three stones together, he thought. And what will happen next? Nothing! The world has changed! But they’ll catch fish to put on the stones, and cower!

  Light was leaking slowly through the rain, and something made him turn.

  There was a figure standing a handful of paces away. It had a large head that looked, as he concentrated, as if it were more like some enormous beak. And the rain made a slightly different noise as it landed, more a click than a patter.

  There were stories about demons. They came in all shapes; they could come disguised as a human, or an animal, or anything in between, but—

  —there were no demons. There couldn’t be. If there were no gods, then there were no demons, so what was standing there in the rain was not a creature with a beak bigger than a man’s head that looked quite capable of slicing Mau in two. It couldn’t exist, and he had to prove it. Somehow, though, rushing up and shouting at it didn’t seem the sensible next thing to do.

  I’ve got a brain, haven’t I? he thought. I will prove it’s not a monster.

  There was a small gust of wind and the creature flapped a wing.

  Ugh…but remember the toolbox. There was nothing special about the trousermen. They’d just been lucky. Pilu said they came from a place where, sometimes, the weather could get so cold, the sky shed freezing feathers, like the hail you sometimes got in storms, but more fluffy, and so they had to invent trousers to stop their wingos getting frozen and big boats to find places where the water never got hard. They had to learn new ways of thinking: a new toolbox.

  This isn’t a demon. Let’s find out what it is.

  He stared. The feet looked human. And what he thought was that thing flapping didn’t really look like a wing; when you watched carefully, it was more like cloth blowing in the breeze. The only demon was in his fear.

  The thing made a cooing noise. This was so undemonic that Mau splashed over to it and saw someone who’d draped themselves in a tarpaulin from the Sweet Judy that was so stiff that it had formed a sort of hood.

  It was the Unknown Woman, cuddling her baby in the dry while the rain trickled around them. She gave him her haunted little smile.

  How long had she been there? Before the light began to rise, he was certain. What was she doing there? Well, why was he there, if it came to that? It just felt right. Someone had to watch over the Nation. Perhaps she thought the same thing.

  The rain was slackening off now and he could see the surf. Any minute now, the—

  “Show us yer drawers! Roberts is on the gin again!”

  —parrot would be waking up.

  Pilu said that cry meant “Show me your small trousers.” Perhaps it was the way trousermen recognized one another.

  He had small trousers now. He’d cut the legs off at the knee and used the material to make more of what made trousers really worthwhile, which were pockets. You could keep so many things in them.

  The Unknown Woman had walked back up the beach, and there were the sounds of people waking up.

  Do it now. Give them their gods.

  He slipped out of the half trousers with their so-useful pockets, ran forward, and dived into the lagoon.

  The tide was just about to turn, but the water around the break was calm. The wave had really pounded through here; he could see deep blue water beyond the gap.

  The anchor of Water gleamed below him, right in the gap. It was deeper than the others had been, and farther from the shore. It would take ages to bring it back. Better start now, then.

  He dived, got his arms around the stone cube, and heaved. It didn’t budge.

  Mau brushed aside some weeds. The white block was trapped by a piece of coral. Mau tried to move that, too.

  About five seconds later his head broke water and he swam back, slowly and thoughtfully, to the shore. He found Ataba using a metal hammer from the toolbox on a slab of salt-pickled beef. The stuff went down well with nearly everyone except the priest, who didn’t have enough teeth and couldn’t often find anyone prepared to do the chewing for him. He sat down and watched the old man in silence.

  “You’ve come to laugh at me in my infirmity, demon boy?” said Ataba, looking up at him.

  “No.”

  “Then you might at least have the decency to take over the hammering.”

  Mau did so. It was hard work. The blows just bounced off it. You could make a shield out of the stuff.

  “Something on your mind, demon boy?” said the priest after a while. “You haven’t insulted the gods for at least ten minutes.”

  “I need some advice, elderly one,” said Mau. “It’s about the gods, actually.”

  “Yes? But you do believe in them today? I watched you yesterday night; you learned that belief is a complicated matter, yes?”

  “There are three gods, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  “Not four, ever?”

  “Some say Imo is the fourth god, but he is the All in which they and we, and even you, exist.”

  “Imo has no god anchors?”

  “Imo Is, and since He Is, He Is everywhere. Since He Is everywhere, He is not anywhere. The whole universe is His anchor.”

  “What about the star Atindi, which is always close to the sun?”

  “That is the son of the moon. Surely you know this?”

  “He has no god anchors?”

  “No,” said Ataba. “It is nothing more than the clay that Imo had left over after he made the world.”

  “And the red star called Imo’s Campfire?”

  Ataba gave Mau a suspicious look. “Boy, you know that is where Imo baked the mud to make the world!”

  “And the gods live in the sky, but also are close to their anchors?”

  “Don’t be smart with me. You know this one. The gods are everywhere, but can have a greater presence in certain places. What is this about? Are you trying to trap me in some way?”

  “No. I just want to understand. No other island has white stone god anchors, right?”

  “Yes!” snapped Ataba. “And you are trying to make me say something wrong!” He looked around suspiciously, in case of lurking heresy.

  “Have I succeeded?”

  “No, demon boy! What I have told you is right and true!”

  Mau stopped hammering, but held on to the hammer. “I’ve found another god anchor. It’s not the one for Water. So that means I’ve found you a new god, old man…and I think he’s a trouserman.”

  In the end they worked from one of the big canoes.

  Milo, Mau, and Pilu took turns diving with the hammer and steel chisel from the Sweet Judy’s toolbox and pounding at the coral that held the white cube in its grip.

  Mau was hanging on to the canoe to get his breath when Pilu surfaced on the other side.

  “I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing,” Pilu said, glancing up nervously at Ataba’s hunched figure in the stern, “but there is another one down there, behind the first one.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Come and see. It’s your turn anyway. Careful, though—the tide’s really tugging now.”<
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  It was. Mau had to fight against the pull of the water as he swam down. As he did so, Milo dropped the hammer and chisel and swam up past him. It seemed as though they had been doing this for hours. It was hard to hammer under the water; the hammer just didn’t seem to work so well.

  There was the stone Mau had first dived for. It looked free of coral now, but where it had been broken away there was the corner of another cube, in the unmistakable white stone. What did all this mean? Not more gods, he thought; we’ve had enough trouble with the ones we’ve got.

  He ran his fingers over the shape cut in the first of the new stones. It looked like a tool from the trouserman toolbox, one that he’d held in his hand and wondered about, until Pilu had told him what it was for. But there had been no trousermen around even when his grandfather was a boy, he knew that. And coral was ancient. One of these cubes had been right inside the rock, even so, like a pearl in an oyster. He would never have found it if the wave hadn’t smashed up the reef.

  He heard the splash above, and a hand reached past him and snatched the hammer. He looked up into the furious features of Ataba, just as the old man brought the hammer down on the stone. Bubbles rose as the priest man shouted something. Mau tried to grab the hammer and got a surprisingly powerful kick in the chest. There was nothing for it but to swim for the surface with what breath he had left.

  “What happened?” asked Pilu.

  Mau hung on to the side of the canoe, wheezing. The old fool! Why did he do that?

  “Are you all right? What is he doing? Helping at last?” asked Pilu, with the cheeriness of someone who doesn’t know what’s going on yet.

  Mau shook his head and dived again.

  The old man was still hammering madly at the stones, and it occurred to Mau that he didn’t have to risk getting another kick. All he had to do was wait. Ataba needed air, just like everyone else, and how much of it could that skinny chest hold?

  More than he expected.

  Ataba was hammering wildly as if he intended to be down there all day…and then there was an explosion of bubbles as the last of his air ran out. That was chilling, and also quite insane. What was so dangerous about a rock that the old fool would waste his last breath trying to smash it?

  Mau fought his way down through the running tide, grabbed the man’s body, and dragged it back up to the surface, almost flinging Ataba into the arms of the brothers. The canoe rocked.

  “Drain the water out of him!” he yelled. “I don’t want him to die! I can’t scream at him if he’s dead!”

  Milo had already turned Ataba upside down and was slapping him on the back. A lot of water came out, chased by a cough. More coughs followed, and he lowered the old man to the deck.

  “He was trying to smash the new stones,” said Mau.

  “But they look like god anchors,” said Milo.

  “Yes,” said Mau. Well, they did. Whatever you thought about the gods and their stones, these looked like god anchors.

  Milo pointed to the groaning Ataba. “An’ he’s a priest,” he said. Milo believed in laying out the facts of the matter. “An’ he was trying to smash the stones?”

  “Yes,” said Mau. There was no doubt about it. A priest, trying to smash god stones.

  Milo looked at him. “I’m puzzled,” he said.

  “One of those down there has got calipers carved on it,” said Pilu cheerfully. “The trousermen use calipers to measure distance on their charts.”

  “That means nothing,” Milo intoned. “Gods are older than the trousermen, an’ they can make what they like on the stones—Hey!”

  Ataba had jumped over the side again. Mau saw his feet disappear under the water.

  “That was the caliper stone he was trying to smash!” he growled, and dived.

  The water was pouring through the gap now. It grabbed Mau as he swam after the skinny figure, tried to play with him, tried to throw him against the jagged coral.

  It had got the priest already. He was struggling down toward the blocks, but the racing tide snatched at him, banged him against the coral, and tumbled him away, struggling, with a thin trail of blood blooming in the water behind him.

  Never fight the tide! It was always stronger! Didn’t the old fool know that?

  Mau swam after him, curving his body like a fish, using all his energy to keep away from the edges of the gap. Ahead of him, Ataba struggled to the surface, tried to grab a handhold, and was spun away into the foam.

  Mau rose to take a breath and swam on—

  Blood in the water, Mau, said Locaha, swimming alongside him. And there will be sharks outside the reef. What now, little hermit crab?

  Does not happen! thought Mau, and tried to swim faster.

  Demon boy, he calls you. He smiles in your face but tells people you are mad. What is he to you?

  Mau tried to keep his mind blank. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the gray shadow, easily keeping up with him.

  There’s no shell for you here, little hermit crab. You are heading for the open sea.

  Things happen or do not happen, thought Mau, and he felt the deep water open up under him. The sunlight shone blue through the waves above, but below Mau it was green, shading to black. And there was Ataba, hanging in the light, not moving. Blood uncoiled in the water around him like smoke from a slow fire.

  A shadow passed over the sun, and a gray shape slid overhead.

  It was the canoe. As Mau grabbed the priest, there was a splash, and Pilu swam out of a cloud of bubbles. He pointed frantically.

  Mau turned to see a shark already circling. It was a small gray, although when there is blood in the water then no shark is small, and this one seemed to fill the whole of Mau’s world.

  He thrust the old man toward Pilu but kept his attention on the shark, looking into its mad, rolling eye as it swam past. He thrashed around a little to keep its attention on him and didn’t relax until, behind him, he could feel the boat rocking as Ataba was hauled up for the second time.

  The shark was going to rush him on the next pass, Mau could tell. And—

  —suddenly it didn’t matter. This was the world, all of it, just this silent blue ball of soft light, and the shark and Mau, without a knife. A little ball of space, with no time.

  He swam gently toward the fish, and this seemed to worry it.

  His thoughts came slowly and calmly, without fear. Pilu and Ataba would be out of the water now, and that was what mattered.

  When a shark is coming at you, you are already dead, old Nawi had said, and since you were already dead, then anything was worth trying.

  He rose gently and gulped a lungful of air. When he sank back down again, the shark had turned and was slicing through the water toward him.

  Wait…Mau trod water gently as the shark came onward, as gray as Locaha. There would be one chance. More sharks would be here at any second, but a second passed slowly in the arena of light.

  Here it came….

  Wait. Then…Does not happen, said Mau to himself, and let all his breath out in a shout.

  The shark turned as if it had hit a rock, but Mau did not wait for it to come back. He spun in the water and raced for the canoe as fast as he dared, trying to make the maximum of speed with the minimum of splash. As the brothers hauled him aboard, the shark passed underneath them.

  “You drove it away!” said Pilu, heaving him up. “You shouted and it turned and ran!”

  Because old Nawi was right, Mau thought. Sharks don’t like noise, which sounds louder underwater; it doesn’t matter what you shout, so long as you shout it loud!

  It probably wouldn’t have been a good idea if the shark had been really hungry, but it had worked. If you were alive, what else mattered?

  Should he tell them? Even Milo was looking at him with respect. Without quite being able to put words to it, Mau felt that being mysterious and a little dangerous was not a bad thing right now. And they would never know that he’d pissed himself on the way back to the canoe, which as far as
sharks were concerned was nearly as bad as blood in the water, but the shark was unlikely to tell anyone. He looked around, half expecting to see a dolphin waiting for him to throw it a fish—and it would feel…right…to do so. But there was no dolphin.

  “It was scared of me,” he said. “Perhaps it was scared by the demon.”

  “Wow!” said Pilu.

  “Remind me when we get back that I owe a fish to Nawi.” Then he looked along the little deck to Ataba, who was lying in a heap. “How is he?”

  “He’s been banged about on the coral, but he’ll live,” said Milo. He gave Mau a questioning look, as if to say “If that’s all right with you?” He went on, “Er…who’s Nawi? A new god?”

  “No. Better than a god. A good man.”

  Mau felt cold now. It had seemed so warm in the blue bubble. He wanted to shiver, but he didn’t dare let them see. He wanted to lie down, but there was no time for that. He needed to get back, he needed to find ou—

  “Grandfathers?” he said under his breath. “Tell me what to do! I do not know the chants, I do not know the songs, but just once, help me! I need a chart for the world, I need a map!”

  There was no reply. Perhaps they were just tired, but they couldn’t be more tired than he was. How tiring was it, being dead? At least you could lie down.

  “Mau?” Milo rumbled, behind him. “What is happening here? Why did the priest try to smash the holy stones?”

  This was not the time to say “I don’t know.” The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn’t be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried…and then his mind caught alight.

  That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.

  So what can I say now?

  “I think he thinks they aren’t really holy,” Mau managed.