Nation

by Terry Pratchett

  Foxlip just grunted, and sat down with his back to the inner wall, which was solid rock.

  “This is a trap, right?” he said.

  “No. You asked me to swear on my mother’s life,” said Daphne coldly, and thought: And that was a sin. Even if you have no god at all, that was a sin. Some things are a sin all by themselves. And I’m going to murder you, and that is a mortal sin, too. But it won’t look like murder.

  She said: “Would you like some beer?”

  “Beer?” said Foxlip. “You mean real beer?”

  “Well, it’s like beer. It’s the Demon Drink, anyway. I’ve always got some freshly made.”

  “You make it? But you’re a nob!” said Polegrave.

  “Perhaps I make ‘nobby’ beer,” said Daphne. “Sometimes you have to do what needs doing. Do you want some?”

  “She’ll poison us!” said Polegrave. “It’s all a trick!”

  “We’ll have some beer, princess,” said Foxlip, “but we’ll watch you drink it first. ’Cause we were not born yesterday.” He gave her an unpleasant wink, full of guile and mischief and with no humor in it at all.

  “Yeah, you look after us, missie, an’ we’ll look after you when Cox’s cannibal chums come for a picnic!” said Polegrave.

  She heard Foxlip hissing at him for this as she stepped outside, but she’d never for one minute believed that they intended to “rescue” her. And Cox had found the Raiders, had he? Who should she feel sorry for?

  She went next door to the beer hut and took three bubbling shells of beer off the shelf, taking care to brush all the dead flies off.

  What I am about to do won’t be murder, she told herself. Murder is a sin. It won’t be murder.

  Foxlip would make sure she drank some beer first, to prove it wasn’t poisoned, and up until now she had never drunk much, only a tiny amount when she had been experimenting with a new recipe.

  Just one drop of beer would turn you into a madman, her grandmother had said. It made you defile yourself and neglect your children and break up families, among quite a lot of other things. But this was her beer, after all. It hadn’t been made in a factory somewhere, with who knew what in it. It was just made of good, honest…poison.

  She came back balancing three wide, shallow clay bowls that she put down on the floor between the mats.

  “Well now, you’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts,” said Foxlip in his disgustingly unfriendly friendly way, “but I’ll tell you what, missie, you’ll mix the beer up so’s we all get the same, right?”

  Daphne shrugged, and did as he said, with both men watching closely.

  “Looks like horse piss,” said Polegrave.

  “Well, horse piss ain’t too bad,” said Foxlip. He picked up the bowl in front of him, looked at the one in front of Daphne, hesitated for a moment, and then grinned his unpleasant grin.

  “I reckon you’re too smart to put poison in your bowl and expect me to be daft enough to swap them over,” he said. “Drink up, princess!”

  “Yeah, down the little red lane!” said Polegrave. There it was again, another tiny arrow into her heart. Her own mother had said that to her when she wouldn’t eat her broccoli. The memory stung.

  “The same beer is in every bowl. You made me swear,” she said.

  “I said drink up!”

  Daphne spat into her bowl and began to sing the beer song—the island version, not her own. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” just wouldn’t work now.

  So she sang the Song of the Four Brothers, and because most of her mind was taken up with that, a smaller part took the opportunity to remind her: Air is the planet Jupiter, which we believe to be made of gases. Isn’t that a coincidence! And she faltered a moment before recovering herself, because some tiny part of her mind was worrying her with what she was about to do.

  There was a stunned silence when she finished, and then Foxlip said, “What the hell was that all about? You gobbed in your drink!”

  Daphne tipped up the bowl and took a good swig. It was a little more nutty than usual. She paused to feel it bubbling down, and saw them still staring.

  “You have to spit in the bowl and then sing the beer song.” She burped and put a hand over her mouth. “Pardon me. I can teach it to you. Or you can just hum along. Please? It is an ancient custom—”

  “I’m not singing no pagan mumbo jumbo!” said Foxlip, and he snatched up his bowl and took a long swig, while Daphne tried not to scream.

  Polegrave hadn’t touched his beer. He was still suspicious! His beady little eyes flicked from his fellow mutineer to Daphne and back again.

  Foxlip put down his bowl and belched. “Well, it’s a long time since—”

  Silence exploded. Polegrave reached for his pistols, but Daphne was already moving. Her bowl hit him on the nose, with a crunch. The man screamed and went over backward, and Daphne snatched his pistols from the floor.

  She tried to think and not think at the same time.

  Don’t think about the man you just killed. [It was an execution!]

  Think about the man you may have to kill. [But I can’t prove he’s a murderer! He didn’t kill Ataba!]

  She fumbled with a pistol as Polegrave, spitting blood, tried to get up. The gun was heavier than it looked and she choked back a curse, courtesy of the Sweet Judy’s Great Barrel of Swearing, as clumsy fingers disobeyed her.

  Finally she pulled the hammer back, just as Captain Roberts had taught her. It clicked twice, what Cookie called the two-pound noise. When she had asked him why, he’d said, “Because when a man hears that in the dark, he loses two pounds of…weight, quickly!”

  It certainly made Polegrave go very quiet.

  “I will fire,” she lied. “Don’t move. Good. Now, listen to me. I want you to go away. You didn’t kill anyone here. Go away. Right away. If I see you again, I will—well, you will regret it. I’m letting you go because you had a mother.

  Someone actually loved you once, and tried to teach you manners. You won’t understand that at all. Now get up, and get out. Get out! Get out and run far away! Quickly now!”

  Trying to run and crouch at the same time, holding his hand over his ruined nose, dribbling strings of snot and blood, and certainly not looking back, Polegrave scuttled into the sunset like a crab running for the safety of the surf.

  Daphne sat down, still holding the pistol in front of her, and waited until the hut stopped spinning.

  She looked at the silent Foxlip, who hadn’t moved at all.

  “Why did you have to be so—so stupid?” she said, prodding him with the pistol. “Why did you kill an old man who was shaking a stick at you? You shoot at people without a thought and you call them savages! Why are you so stupid as to think I was stupid? Why didn’t you listen to me? I told you we sing the beer song. Would it have hurt to hum along? But no, you knew better, because they are savages! And now you are dead, with a stupid little smile on your stupid face! You needn’t have died, but you didn’t listen. Well, you’ve got just enough time to listen now, Mr. Stupid! The thing is, the beer is made from a very poisonous plant. It paralyzes you, all at once. But there’s some chemical in human spit, you see, and if you spit into the beer and then sing the beer song, it turns the poison into something harmless with a lovely nutty flavor that, incidentally, I have improved very considerably, everyone says. It takes a little less than five minutes to make the beer safe, which is just long enough to sing the official beer song, but “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” sung about sixteen times also works, you see, because it’s not the song that matters, you see, it’s the waiting. I worked that out using scientific thinkink”—she burped—“sorry, I mean thinking.”

  She stopped to throw up the beer and then, by the feel of it, to throw up everything she’d eaten in the last year. “And it could have been such a lovely evening,” she said. “Do you know what this island is? Have you any idea what this island is? Of course you don’t, because you’re so stupid! And dead! And I’m a murderer!”

  She burst in
to tears, which were large and sticky, and began to argue with herself.

  “Look, they were mutineers! If they were in a court of law, they’d be hung!”

  [Hanged, not hung. But that’s the point of having courts. It’s to stop people murdering other people just because they think they deserve it. There’s a judge and jury, and if they were found guilty, they would be hanged by the hangman, neatly and properly. He’d have his breakfast first, very calmly, and perhaps say a prayer. He would hang them calmly and without anger, because at that moment he would be the Law. That’s how it works.]

  “But everyone saw him shoot Ataba!”

  [Correct. So everyone should have decided what to do.]

  “How could they? They didn’t know what I know! And you know what they’re like! They had four pistols between them! If I hadn’t got them out of the way, they’d have shot other people! They were talking about taking over the island!”

  [Yes. What you did was murder, even so.]

  “What about the hangman? Doesn’t he do murder, then?”

  [No, because enough people say it isn’t. That’s what a courtroom is for. It’s where the law happens.]

  “And that makes it right? Didn’t God say ‘Thou shalt not kill’?”

  [Yes. But after that it got complicated.]

  There was movement in the doorway, and her hand raised the pistol. Then her brain lowered it.

  “Good,” said Mau. “I do not want to be shot a second time. Remember?”

  The tears started again. “I’m sorry about that. I thought you were…I thought you were a savage,” Daphne managed.

  “What’s a savage?”

  She pointed the pistol toward Foxlip. “Someone like him.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry. He insisted on drinking his beer.”

  “We saw the other one run off toward the low forest. He was bleeding and snorting like a sick pig.”

  “He wouldn’t drink his beer!” Daphne sobbed. “I’m sorry—I brought Locaha here.”

  Mau’s eyes gleamed. “No, they brought him, and you sent him away full,” he said.

  “More are going to come! They talked about it,” Daphne managed. Mau said nothing but put an arm around her. “Tomorrow I want a trial,” she said.

  “What’s a trial?” said Mau. He waited for a while, but the only reply was a snore. He sat with her, watching the eastern sky darken. Then he carefully settled her down on her mat, hoisted the rigid body of Foxlip over his shoulder, and went down to the beach. The Unknown Woman watched him load the body into a canoe and paddle out into the ocean, where Foxlip went over the side with a lump of coral tied to his foot, to be eaten by whatever was hungry enough to eat carrion.

  She saw him return and go back up the mountain, where Milo and Cahle had been watching over the body of Ataba, so that he would not become a ghost.

  In the morning they followed Mau down to the beach, where the Unknown Woman and a few others joined them. The sun was rising now, and Mau was not surprised to see the gray shadow drifting beside him. At one point, Milo walked through it without noticing.

  Two more deaths, Hermit Crab, said Locaha.

  “Do they make you happy?” growled Mau. “Then send this priest to the Perfect World.”

  How can you ask that, little hermit crab who does not believe?

  “Because he did. And he cared, which is more than his gods did.”

  No bargains, Mau, even for another.

  “At least I’m trying!” Mau yelled. Everyone stared at him.

  The shadow faded.

  On the edge of the reef, above the dark current, Mau tied broken coral to the old man and watched him sink beyond the reach of sharks.

  “He was a good man!” he shouted to the sky. “He deserved better gods!”

  Down in the steams of the low forest, someone shivered.

  It had not been a good night for Arthur Septimus Polegrave, who would have been known to his friends, if he’d had any friends, as “Septic.” He knew he was dying, he just knew it. He must be. There couldn’t be a single thing in this jungle that hadn’t tried to bite, peck, or sting him during the last dark soupy hour. There were spiders—giant, horrible things, waiting at nose height in every path—there were the insects, every one armed, by the feel of it, with red-hot needles. Things had bitten his ears and climbed up his trousers. Things had trodden on him. In the middle of the night something horrible had flopped down from the trees and onto his head, which it had tried to unscrew. As soon as he could see clearly, he would take his chances and make a run for the boat and a getaway. All in all, he thought as he pulled something with far too many legs out of his ear, things were about as bad as they could get.

  There was a rustling in the tree above him, and he looked up just as a well-fed grandfather bird threw up in time for breakfast, and found that he was wrong.

  Later that morning Daphne marched up to Pilu with the log of the Sweet Judy in her hand and said: “I want a fair trial.”

  “That’s good,” said Pilu. “We’re going to look at the new cave. Are you going to come?” Most of the population were gathered around him; news of the gods had got around fast.

  “You don’t know what a trial is, do you?”

  “Er, no,” said Pilu.

  “It’s where you decide if someone has done something wrong and if they should be punished.”

  “Well, you punished that trouserman,” said Pilu cheerfully. “He killed Ataba. He was a pirate!”

  “Er, yes…but the question is, should I have done it? I had no authority to kill him.”

  Milo loomed behind his brother, bent down, and whispered to him.

  “Ah, yes,” said Pilu, “my brother reminds me of the time we were in Port Mercia and a Navy man had been found thieving, and they tied him to the mast and beat him with some leather thing. Is this what we’re talking about? I think we’ve got some leather.”

  Daphne shuddered. “Er…no, thank you. But, er, don’t you ever have crime on the islands?”

  It took some time to get the idea settled in Pilu’s head, and then he said, “Ah, I’ve got it. You want us to tell you that you didn’t do a bad thing, yes?”

  “The ghost girl is saying that there must be rules and there must be reasons,” said Mau, right behind Daphne. She hadn’t even known he was there.

  “Yes, but you’re not to say I did a good thing just because you like me,” she added.

  “Well, we didn’t like him,” said Pilu. “He killed Ataba!”

  “I think I see what she means,” said Mau. “Let’s try it. It sounds…interesting.”

  And so the Nation had its first court. There was no question of judge and jury; everyone sat around in a circle, children too. And there was Mau, sitting in the circle. No one was more important than anyone else…and there was Mau, sitting in the circle just like everybody else.

  Everyone should make up their own mind…and there was Mau, sitting in the circle. Not big, not even tattooed, not shouting orders—but somehow being slightly more there than anyone else. And he had the cap. He was the captain.

  Daphne had heard some of the newcomers talking about him. They used a kind of code, about “the poor boy,” and how hard it must be, and somewhere in it all there was, unspoken yet still present, the suggestion that he wasn’t old enough to be a chief—and around that point, either Milo or Cahle turned up like an eclipse of the sun and the conversation turned to fishing or babies. And every day Mau was a little older, and still chief.

  Pilu was in charge of the court. It was the sort of thing he was born for. But he did need some help….

  “We must have a prosecutor,” Daphne explained. “That’s someone who thinks what I did was wrong, and a defender, who says what I did was right.”

  “Then I’ll be the defender,” said Pilu cheerfully.

  “And the prosecutor?” said Daphne.

  “That would be you.”

  “Me? I have to be someone else!”

 
; “But everyone knows that man killed Ataba. We saw him!” said Pilu.

  “Look, hasn’t there ever been a killing in these islands?”

  “Sometimes too much beer, a fight over women, such things as these. Very sad. There is a story, a very old story, about two brothers who fought. One killed the other, but in the battle it could have been otherwise, and the other one dead. The killer fled, knowing the punishment and taking it upon himself.”

  “Was the punishment awful?”

  “He would be sent far away from the islands, far from his people, from his family, never to walk in the steps of his ancestors, never to sing a death chant for his father, never to hear the songs of his childhood, never again to smell the sweet water of home. He built a canoe and sailed in new seas far away, where men are baked into different colors and for half of every year trees die. He lived for many lifetimes and saw many things, but one day he found a place that was best of all, because it was the island of his childhood, and he stepped onto the shore and died, happily, because he was home again. Then Imo made the brothers into stars, and put them in the sky so that we shall remember the brother who sailed so far away that he came back again.”

  Oh my word, thought Daphne as the picture of the dying brother faded in her mind, that is so sad. And it’s a story about something else, about sailing so far that you come back again…. Oh, I must go back into that cave!

  “But the ghost girl is already banished,” Mau pointed out. “The wave banished her to us.” And so there had to be even more discussion.

  Half an hour later matters were not much improved. The whole population of the island sat in a circle around Daphne, trying to be helpful. Trying to understand as the trial went on.

  “You say they were bad trousermen,” said Mau.

  “Yes. The worst kind,” said Daphne. “Murderers and bullies. You say you walk in the shadow of Locaha, but they walked in his loincloth when he has not bathed for many months.” That got a laugh. She’d probably said it wrong.

  “And how did they walk in Locaha’s loincloth?” said Pilu, and got a slightly smaller laugh, to his obvious disappointment.