Nation

by Terry Pratchett

No reason to get excited, she thought, feeling a little lightheaded. He had been so cold, and she’d brought him up here to keep him warm. There had been…something that happened. The shape of it was still in her head, but she couldn’t fill it in. Except…“There was a silver fish?” she wondered aloud.

  Mrs. Gurgle looked very surprised and said something to Cahle, who smiled and nodded.

  “She says you are indeed a woman of power,” Cahle said. “You pulled him out of a dark dream.”

  “I did? I can’t remember. But there was a fish in it.”

  The hole in her memory was still there when Cahle had gone, and there was still a fish in it. Something big and important had happened and she had been there, and all she could remember was that there had been a fish in it?

  Mrs. Gurgle had curled up in her corner, and it looked as if she was asleep. Daphne was certain that she wasn’t. She’d be peeking through eyelids that were almost closed and listening so hard that her ears would try to flap. All the women took far too much interest in her and Mau. It was like the maids back home gossiping. It was silly and quite unnecessary, it really was!

  Mau looked quite small on the mat. The twitching had stopped, but he had curled up in a ball. It was a shock, now, to see him so still.

  “Ermintrude,” said her voice in the air.

  “Yes,” she said, and added, “You are me, aren’t you?”

  “When he is asleep, he still dreams of dark waters. Touch him. Hold him. Warm him. Let him know he is not alone.”

  It sounded like her own voice, and it made her blush. She could feel the hot pinkness rising up her neck. “That wouldn’t be seemly,” she hissed, before she could stop herself. Then she wanted to shout: “That wasn’t me! That was some old woman’s stupid granddaughter!”

  “So who are you?” said the voice in the air. “Some creature who knows how to feel but not how to touch? Here? In this place? Mau is alone. He thinks he has no soul, so he is building himself one. Help him. Save him. Tell him the stupid old men are wrong.”

  “The stupid old—” Daphne began, and felt a memory uncoil. “The Grandfathers?”

  “Yes! Help him roll away the stone! He is a woman’s child and he is crying!”

  “Who are you?” she asked the air.

  The voice came back like an echo: “Who are you?” Then the voice went, leaving not even a shape in the silence.

  I’ve got to think about this, Daphne thought. Or perhaps not. Not now, in this place, because maybe there’s such a thing as too much thinking. Because however much of a Daphne you yearn to be, there is always your Ermintrude looking over your shoulder. Anyway, her thoughts added, Mrs. Gurgle is here, so she counts as a chaperone, and a better one than poor Captain Roberts, since she’s nothing like as dead.

  She knelt by Mau’s mat. The voice had been right: There was a trickle of tears down his face, even though he seemed fast asleep. She kissed the tears because this felt like the right thing to do, and then tried to get an arm under him, which was really hard to manage and in any case her arm went to sleep and then got pins and needles, and she had to pull it out. So much for romance, she decided. She dragged her own mat over to his and lay down on it, which meant that an arm could go over him without too much difficulty but also that she had to rest rather awkwardly with her head on her other arm. But after a while his hand came up and grasped hers, gently, at which point, and despite the extreme discomfort, she fell asleep.

  Mrs. Gurgle waited until she was sure that Daphne was sleeping, and then she uncurled her hand and looked at the little silver fish she had picked out of the girl’s hair. It coiled backward and forward in her palm.

  She swallowed it. It was only a dream fish, but such things are good for the soul.

  Daphne woke up just as the first light of dawn was painting the sky pink. She was stiff in muscles she’d never known she possessed. How did married couples manage? It was a mystery.

  Mau was snoring gently and didn’t stir at all.

  How could you help a boy like that? He wanted to be everywhere and do everything. And so he’d probably try to do more than he should and end up in trouble again and she would have to sort it out again. She sighed a sigh that was older than she was. Her father had been the same, of course. He’d spend all night working on dispatch boxes for the Foreign Office, with a footman on duty at all times to bring him coffee and roast duck sandwiches. It was quite usual for the maids to find him still at his desk in the morning, fast asleep with his head on a map of Lower Sidonia.

  Her grandmother used to make sniffy remarks like: “I suppose His Majesty doesn’t have any other ministers?” But now Daphne understood. He’d been like Mau, trying to fill the hole inside with work so that it didn’t overflow with memories.

  Right now she was glad she was alone. Apart from the snoring of Mau and Mrs. Gurgle there was no sound but the wind and the boom of the waves on the reef. On the island, that was what counted as silence.

  “Show us yer drawers!” floated in through the doorway.

  Oh, yes, and the wretched parrot. It really was very annoying. You often didn’t see it for days, because it had picked up a deep, cheerful hatred of the pantaloon birds and took a huge delight in annoying them at every opportunity. And then, just when you had a moment that was quiet and a bit, well, spiritual, it was suddenly all over the place shouting, “Show us your…underthings!”

  She sighed. Sometimes the world ought to be better organized. Then she listened for a while and heard the bird fly off up the mountain.

  Right, she thought, first things first. So, first, she went out to the fireplace and set some salt-pickled beef to simmering in a pot. She added some roots that Cahle had said were okay, and one half of a very small red pepper. It had to be just one half because they were so hot a whole one burned her mouth, although Mrs. Gurgle ate them raw.

  Anyway, she owed the old woman a lot of chewed beef.

  And now for the big test. Things shouldn’t be allowed to just happen. If she was going to be a woman of power, she had to take charge. She couldn’t always be the ghost girl, pushed around by events.

  Right. Should she kneel? People didn’t seem to kneel here, but she didn’t want to be impolite, even if she was talking to herself.

  Hands together. Eyes closed? It was so easy to get things wrong—

  The message came right away.

  “You did not put a spear into Twinkle’s hand,” said her own voice in her own head, even before she’d had time to think how to begin. She thought: Oh dear, whoever it is, they know that I still think of the baby as Twinkle.

  “Are you a heathen god of some sort?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking about this, and well, gods do talk to people, and I understand there are quite a lot of gods here. I just want to know if there is going to be any thunder and lightning, because I really don’t like that. Or if I’ve gone mad and I’m hearing voices. However, I have dismissed this hypothesis because I don’t believe that people who have really gone mad think they have gone mad, so wondering if you have gone mad means that you haven’t. I just want to know who I’m talking to, if you don’t mind.”

  She waited.

  “Er, I apologize for calling you heathen,” she added.

  There was still no reply. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not and decided instead to be a bit hurt.

  She coughed. “All right. Very well,” she said, standing up. “At least I tried. I’m sorry to have trespassed on your time.” She turned to leave the hut.

  “We would take the newborn child and make his little hand grasp a spear, so that he would grow up to be a great warrior and kill the children of other women,” said the voice. “We did it. The clan said so, the priests said so, the gods said so. And now you come, and what do you know of the custom?” the voice went on. “And so the first thing the baby touches is the warmth of his mother, and you sing him a song about stars!”

  Was she in trouble? “Look, I’m really sorry about the twinkle song—” she bega
n.

  “It was a good song for a child,” said the voice. “It began with a question.”

  This was getting very strange. “Have I done something wrong or not?”

  “How is it that you hear us? We are blown about by the wind, and our voices are weak, but you, a trouserman, heard our struggling silence! How?”

  Had she been listening? Daphne wondered. Perhaps she’d never stopped after all those days in the church after her mother died, saying every prayer she knew, waiting for even a whisper in reply. She hadn’t been looking for an apology. She wasn’t asking for time to run backward. She just wanted an explanation that was better than “It’s the will of God,” which was grown-up speak for “because.”

  It had seemed to her, thinking about it in her chilly bedroom, that what had happened was very much like a miracle. After all, it had been a terrible storm, and if the doctor had managed to get there without his horse being struck by lightning, that would have been a miracle, wouldn’t it? That’s what people would have said. Well, in that big, dark, rainy, roaring night, the lightning had managed to hit quite a small horse among all those big thrashing trees. Didn’t that look like a miracle, too? It was almost exactly the same shape, wasn’t it? In any case, besides, didn’t they call something like this an “act of God”?

  She’d been very polite when she put the question to the archbishop, and in her opinion it had been really unreasonable for her grandmother to scream like a baboon and drag her out of the cathedral by her ear.

  But she had kept looking out for a voice, a whisper, a word that would let it all make sense. She just wanted it all…sorted out.

  She looked up into the gloomy roof of the hut.

  “I heard you because I was listening,” she said.

  “Then listen to us, girl who can hear those who have no voices.”

  “And you are—?”

  “We are the Grandmothers.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Grandmothers!”

  “Where do you think little grandfathers come from? Every man has a mother, and so does every mother. We gave birth to little grandfathers, and filled them with milk, and wiped their bottoms and kissed their tears away. We taught them to eat, and showed them what food was safe, so that they grew up straight. We taught them the songs of children, which have lessons in them. And then we gave them to the Grandfathers, who taught them how to kill other women’s sons. The ones who were best at this were dried in the sand and taken to the cave. We went back to the dark water, but part of us remains, here in this place where we were born and gave birth and, often, died.”

  “The Grandfathers shout at Mau all the time!”

  “They are echoes in a cave. They remember the battle cries of their youth, over and over again, like the talking bird. They are not bad men. We loved them, as sons and husbands and fathers, but old men get confused and dead men don’t notice the turning of the world. The world must turn. Tell Mau he must roll away the stone.”

  And they left. She felt them slide out of her mind.

  That, thought Daphne, was impossible. Then she thought: Up to now, anyway. They were real, and they’re still here. They’re what I felt when Twinkle was being born, as if the Place was alive and on my side. Perhaps some voices are so old everyone understands them.

  The light came back slowly, gray at first like the dawn. Daphne heard a faint noise close at hand, looked around, and saw a young girl standing in the hut doorway, staring at her in horror. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, because she had been here only a few days, and was going to tell her off when she did remember that although the girl had arrived with some other survivors, none of them had been her relatives. And she’d been about to shout at her.

  Moving very carefully, Daphne crouched down and held out her arms. The child looked as though she was one heartbeat away from fleeing.

  “What is your name?”

  The girl looked down at her feet and whispered something that sounded like “Blibi.”

  “That’s a nice name,” said Daphne, and gently drew the child to her. As the sobs began to shake the little body, she made a note to tell Cahle. People were turning up every day now, and people who needed looking after were looking after others. That wasn’t such a bad thing, but while everyone got food to eat and a place to sleep, there were other things that were just as important that tended to get overlooked when everyone was busy.

  “Do you know about cooking, Blibi?” she asked. There was a kind of muffled nod. “Good! And do you see that man lying on the mat?” Another nod. “Good. Good. I want you to watch over him. He has been ill. The meat in the pot will be ready when the sun has moved a hand-width above the trees. I’m going to look at a stone. Tell him he must eat. Oh, and you must eat, too.”

  Where will I end up? she wondered as she hurried out of the Place. I’ve slept in the same room as a young man without an official chaperone (would Mrs. Gurgle count?), made beer, have been going around practically naked, and let gods talk with my mouth, like the Pelvic Oracle in Greece in ancient times, although the voices of the Grandmothers probably didn’t count as gods and, come to think of it, it was the Delphic Oracle, anyway. And technically I was nursing him, so that was probably permissible….

  She stopped, and looked around. Who cared? Who, on this island, cared a fig? So who was she apologizing to? Why was she making excuses?

  “Roll away the stone?” Why did everyone want him to do things? She’d heard about the stone. It was in a little valley in the side of the mountain, where women weren’t supposed to go.

  There was no reason to go now, but she was angry at everyone and she just wanted to get out in the fresh air and do something people didn’t want her to. There were skeletons, probably, behind the stone, but so what? A lot of her ancestors were in the crypt of the church at home, and they never tried to get out and they never spoke to people. Her grandmother would have had something to say about it if they did! Besides, it was broad daylight, and obviously they’d only come out at night—except, of course, it would be pure superstition to believe that they came out at all.

  She set off. There was a clear track leading uphill. The forest wasn’t very big, she’d heard, and the track ran right through it. There were no man-eating tigers, no giant gorillas, no ferocious lizards from ancient times…in fact it wasn’t very interesting at all. But the thing about a forest that’s only a few square miles in area is that when it’s scrunched up into little crisscrossing valleys and every growing thing is fighting every other living thing for every ragged patch of sunlight, and you cannot see more than a few feet in any direction, and you can’t judge where you are by the sound of the sea because the sound of the sea is very faint and in any case all around you, then the forest not only seems very big but also appears to be growing all the time. That’s when you began to believe it hated you as much as you hated it.

  Following the track was no use, because it soon became a hundred tracks, splitting and rejoining all the time. Things rustled in the undergrowth, and sometimes creatures that sounded a lot bigger than pigs galloped away on paths she could not see. Insects went zing and zip all around her, but they weren’t as bad as the huge spiders that had woven their webs right across the paths and then hung in them, bigger than a hand and almost spitting with rage. Daphne had read in one of her books about the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean islands that “with a few regrettable examples, the larger and more fearsome the spider is, the less likely it is to be venomous.” She didn’t believe it. She could see Regrettable Examples everywhere, and she was sure that some of them were drooling.

  —And suddenly there was clear daylight ahead. She would have run toward it, but there was—by good fortune not apparent at the time—a Regrettable Example using its web as a trampoline and she had to ease her way past it with caution. This was just as well, because while the end of the path offered vast amounts of fresh air, there was a total insufficiency of anything to stand on. There was a little clearing, big enough for a couple of pe
ople to sit and watch the world, and then a drop all the way to the sea. It wasn’t a totally sheer drop; you’d bounce off rocks several times before you ever hit the water.

  She took the opportunity to take a few breaths that didn’t have flies in them. It would have been nice to see a sail on the horizon. In fact it would be narratively satisfying, she considered. But at least she could see that the day was getting on. She wasn’t scared of other people’s ghosts, much, but she did not fancy an evening walk through this forest.

  And getting back shouldn’t be too hard, should it? All she had to do was take a downward path every time she found one. Admittedly taking the upward path at every opportunity, or at least every up path not blocked by a particularly evil-looking Regrettable Example, had completely failed to work, but logic had to triumph in the end.

  In a way, it did. After a change of path she stepped out into a small valley, held in the arms of the mountain, and there, ahead of her, was the stone. It couldn’t be anything else.

  There were trees here and there in the valley, but they were sorry-looking things and half dead. The ground beneath them was covered with bird doo-dahs.

  A little way in front of the stone, a large bowl, also of some kind of stone, sat on a tripod made of three big rocks. Daphne peered into it with a kind of shameful curiosity because, to make no bones about it, it was, in this place, just the kind of big stone bowl that you’d expect to have a few skulls in it. There was something in the brain that said: Sinister-looking valley + half-dead trees + ominous doorway = skulls in a bowl, or possibly on a stick. But even by listening to it, she felt she was being unfair to Mau and Cahle and the rest of them. Human skulls never came up in day-to-day conversation. More importantly, they never came up at lunch.

  The sickly smell of sour, sticky Demon Drink rose from the bowl. It was stale, but couldn’t have been very good to start with. It was a terrible thing to admit, but she was getting really good at making beer. Everyone said so. It was just some kind of a knack, Cahle had said, or at least had partly said and partly gestured, and that being able to make beer so well meant she would be able to get a very fine husband. Her getting married still seemed to be the big topic of discussion in the Place. It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.