Nation
Page 26
“Well now, here’s a thing,” he said. “Fancy seeing you here, young lady. The Judy got this far, then? And where’s old Roberts and his upstanding crew? At prayer?”
“They are here and armed, Mr. Cox,” Daphne said.
“Are they indeed?” said Cox cheerfully. “Then I’m the queen of Sheba.” He pointed to the upper slope, where the cannon were clearly visible. “Those guns are from the Judy, right?”
“I’m not telling you anything, Mr. Cox.”
“Then they are. A load of scrap iron, as I recall. That skinflint Roberts was too mean to get new ones. I know I’m right. First time you use them, they’ll split like a sausage! Seems to have put the wind up my jolly loyal subjects, though. Oh, yeah, I’m their chief, as a matter of fact. See my new hat? It’s quite the style, ain’t it? Me, king o’ the cannibals.” He leaned forward. “You got to be nice to me now I’m a king,” he said. “You should call me Your Majesty, eh?”
“And how did you become a king, Mr. Cox?” said Daphne. “I’m sure it involved killing people.” She had to make an effort not to back away, but backing away from the man never worked.
“Only one, so don’t be so hoity-toity. We’d just got a nice new boat courtesy of a bunch of Dutchmen of a charitable disposition, and then just after we’d chucked them over the side, a load of our brown chums comes up on us all in a rush, and we had a bit of an argument. I shot this big devil, all war paint and feathers, just as he’s about to flatten me with his big hammer—lovely gun, the cheese-eater captain had, far too good for a Dutchman, which is why I grabbed it off him before we threw him to the sharks—but anyway, I let a bit of air into Johnny Savage, lovely action that gun’s got, smooth as a kiss—and next thing you know, abracadabra, I’m king of ’em. And then it’s all off to a nice island for a big coronation feast. An’ don’t you look at me like that—I had the fish.”
He looked around. “Oh dear me, where are my manners? May I introduce to you the lads from what they call the Land of Many Fires? I daresay you’ve heard of them? As blackhearted a bunch of villains as you might find in a dozen chapels!” He waved a hand theatrically at a group of men, lesser chiefs perhaps, who had gathered around Pilu and Milo, and went on: “They are a bit whiffy on the nose, my word, yes, but that’s ’cause of their diet. Not enough roughage, see? Leave the clothes on, I tell ’em; the buttons’ll do you good! But they don’t listen. Nearly as bad as me, and I don’t spread praise like that around in a hurry. These lads here are the gentry, believe it or not.”
She took a look at some of the said gentry and, to her shock, recognized them. She knew them. She’d lived among them for most of her life. Well, not actual cannibals, obviously (although there had been all those rumors about the tenth earl of Crowcester, but dinner-party opinion picked up via the trusty dumbwaiter was that he had just been very hungry and extremely shortsighted).
These old men had bones in their noses and shells in their ears, but there was something familiar there, too. They had the well-fed, important, careful look of people who took care not to be at the top. A lot of government people like them had dined at the Hall. They had learned over the years that the top was not a happy or safe place to be. One rung down, that was the place for a sensible man. You advised the king, you had a lot of power, in a quiet kind of way, and you didn’t get murdered anything like as often. And, if the ruler started to get funny ideas and became a bit of an embarrassment, you just…took care of things.
The nearest one gave her a nervous smile, although later she realized that he might have just been hungry. In any case, if you took away the long hair, which was curled up into a headdress with a feather stuck in it, and then added a pair of silver spectacles, he would look exactly like the prime minister back home, or at least like the prime minister would look after a year in the sun. She could see his wrinkles under his paint.
Cannibal Chief, she thought. It’s such a nasty name. But she could see the polished skull on his belt, and his necklace was made of little white shells and finger bones, and as far as she knew, the prime minister didn’t have a big black club studded with shark’s teeth.
“Amazin’ resemblance, ain’t it?” said Cox, as if he’d been reading her thoughts. “And there’s one back there who could pass for the archbishop of Canterbury in a poor light. Just goes to show what a haircut and a Savile Row suit will do, eh?”
He winked his horrible wink, and Daphne, who had vowed not to rise to this sort of thing, heard herself say: “The archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Cox, is not a cannibal!”
“He doesn’t think so, miss. Wine and wafers, m’lady, wine and wafers!”
Daphne shuddered. The man had an uncanny ability to look inside your head and leave it feeling grubby. Even on the beach she wanted to apologize to the sand for letting him tread on it, but the looks on the faces of the wrinkled old men with him made her heart leap. They were glaring! They hated him! He’d brought them here, and now they were under the barrels of cannon! They might get killed, and they had spent a lifetime not getting killed. All right, he’d killed the last king, but that was just because he had the magic gun stick. He smelled of madness. Tradition was fine, but sometimes you had to be practical….
“Tell me, Mr. Cox, can you speak the language of your new subjects?” she asked sweetly.
Cox looked astonished. “What, me? Catch me speaking their heathen lingo! Ugga wugga this, lugga mugga that! That’s not for me! I’m learnin’ ’em English, since you ask. I’ll civilize ’em if I have to shoot every mother’s son of ’em, trust me on that. Talking of ugga wugga, what’s all this chin-wagging about?”
Daphne listened out of the corner of her ear. War negotiations were going rather oddly. The enemy warriors listened to Pilu but looked up at Milo when they replied, as if Pilu himself was not important.
Mau was taking no part in things at all. He stood behind the brothers, leaning on his spear and listening. Daphne went to push her way through them and found she didn’t need to; cannibal chiefs shuffled out of her way as fast as they could.
“What’s happening?” she whispered. “Are they worried about the cannon?”
“Yes. They believe in single combat, one chief against another. If our chief beats their chief, they will go away.”
“Can you trust them?”
“Yes. This is about belief. If their god doesn’t smile on them, they won’t fight. But Cox wants them all to fight, and they know they should obey him. He wants a massacre. He’s told them that the cannon won’t work.”
“You think they will, though,” said Daphne.
“I think one will,” said Mau quietly.
“One? One!”
“Don’t shout. Yes, one. Just one. But that isn’t going to matter, because we don’t have enough gunpowder for more than one shot.”
Daphne was speechless. She finally managed to say, “But there were three kegs!”
“That’s true. The little one from your cabin was half empty. The others are full of gunpowder soup. The water got in. It’s just stinking muck.”
“But you fired a cannon weeks ago!”
“The little keg had enough for two firings. The first one we tried with what looked like the least-rotten gun. It worked. You saw it. But there’s a crack all along it now, and it was the best one. But don’t worry, we repaired it.”
Daphne’s brow furrowed. “How can you repair a cannon? You can’t repair a cannon, not here!”
“A trouserman might not be able to, but I can,” said Mau proudly. “Remember, you didn’t know how to milk a pig!”
“All right then, how do you repair a broken cannon?” said Daphne.
“Our way,” said Mau, beaming. “With string!”
“With str—?”
“Waark! Cox is the prawn of the devil!”
Even Daphne, mouth open to object, turned to look—
But Cox was quicker than all of them. His hand moved fast as the parrot glided over the beach. He cocked, aimed, and fired in one moveme
nt, three shots, one after another. The parrot squawked and tumbled into the papervine thickets above the beach, leaving a few bits of feather floating in the air.
Cox looked at the watchers, and bowed and waved like a musician who had just played a very difficult piano concerto. But the Raiders glanced at him as if he was a little boy who was proud of having wet himself.
Daphne was still trying to deal with string, but on top of that floated: Three shots in a row! The Dutch captain’s gun was a revolver!
“I think this is the time,” Mau said. “Pilu should have got them confused enough by now. Turn my words into Trouserman, will you?”
And he strode off down the beach before she could argue. He pushed his way into the circle before anyone knew he was there, and faced the Raiders.
“Who says our guns do not fire?” he bellowed. “Enough arguing! Fire!”
Up on the cliff, the unknown Papervine Woman, who had been crouched obediently over her green cannon, touched the slow match to the fuse and, as instructed, ran away very fast and stood behind a tree until the thunder had died away, and then ran back even faster. She ignored the cannon, which was under a cloud of steam, and looked at the lagoon.
The ball had splashed in the middle, capsizing three boats. Figures were in the water. She smiled and turned back to the cannon. Wordless though she was, she’d begged to be allowed to fire it. Hadn’t she gathered all the papervine? Hadn’t she woven it into ropes from dawn to dust, tangling into it the inexhaustible hatred in her heart? Hadn’t Mau seen her helping Pilu shaping metal plates over the cracks in the cannon? Hadn’t he seen how she had taken care to wrap the ropes around the cannon, layer after layer, every one as strong as her longing for revenge?
And he had, and they had held; thin little blades of papervine had bound the red thunder in.
She went back to the tree, took up her baby from his cradle made from papervine, and kissed him, and wept.
“We will fire again,” Pilu yelled, in the confusion. “We will destroy your big canoes. We have made the challenge of single combat. You must accept! Or do you want to swim home?”
Raiders clustered around Cox, who was swearing at them.
“What have we got to lose, Mr. Cox?” Daphne shouted above the hubbub. “Don’t you think you’ll win?” And then in the island tongue she hissed: “We will sink every canoe! Our guns are well guarded!” Mau whispered to her and she added, “If you raise a weapon in the Kahana circle, they will kill you, Mr. Cox. It’s against all the rules!”
There was a heavy thudding that turned out to be Milo thumping his chest. “Who will fight?” he yelled. “Who will fight?”
“All right! I’ll fight!” Cox snarled. He pushed away a few hangers-on and dusted off his shirt. “Huh, and I’m supposed to be king in this vicinity,” he complained. “You wouldn’t find the Brigade of Guards coming over all treasonable like this, my word, no!” He glared at Milo. “I’ll fight the big one,” he said. “It’s not like he’ll be easy to miss.”
“You have a plan, don’t you?” Daphne hissed to Mau. “You’re not going to let him shoot Milo dead, are you?”
“Yes, I have a plan. No, he’s not going to shoot Milo. We’d say Milo is chief if one of the Raiders was fighting, because he’d win. But I can’t let Cox shoot Milo. He’s so big, so easy to sho—”
Daphne’s expression went solid as understanding came. “It’s you, isn’t it…? You are going to fight him.”
She was jostled out of the way as Milo dropped his huge hand on the boy’s shoulder, causing him to stand a bit lopsidedly.
“Listen to me!” he declared to the Raiders. “I am not the chief! Mau is the chief. He has risen from the country of Locaha. He set the dead men free. The gods hid from him in a cave, but he found them, and they told him the secret of the world! And he has no soul.”
Cor blimey! thought Daphne. One of the footmen had been sacked for saying that when she was eight, and until she’d sailed on the Sweet Judy she’d thought it was the worst swear word in the world. It still felt as if it was.
Cor blimey! That was the most words Milo had ever said in a day! They might have been said by his brother, because they were the truth disguised as lies, and there was something about that fact that made them echo in the head. They seemed to be doing so in the heads of the warriors. They stared at Mau in astonishment.
A heavy hand landed on Daphne’s shoulder too, and Cox said, “Missie? I’m going to have to shoot the little bugger, right?”
She spun around and shoved his arm away. But he caught her tightly by the wrist.
“I could shoot you, Cox, whatever you say!”
Cox laughed. “Oh, you’ve got the taste for killing, missie?” he said, his face a few inches from hers. “Mind you, poisoning don’t really count, I always think. Did he gurgle? Did he go green? But well done for bashin’ two of Polegrave’s teeth right out, the evil little monkey…. He didn’t try to mess you up, did he? I’d shoot him if he tried anything unsavory. Oh, but in point of fact I shot him yesterday, ’cause he really was a pain in the arse, excuse my French—”
Daphne managed to pull her arm free. “Don’t touch me again! Don’t you even suggest that I’m like you! Don’t you—”
“Stop.” Mau didn’t shout. His spear shouted for him. It was aimed at Cox’s heart.
No one moved for several seconds, and then Cox said, slowly and carefully, “Ah, is this your beau? What will dear Daddy say? Oh my word! An’ you taught him how to talk, too.”
The cannibal twin of the prime minister stepped between them with his hands raised, and suddenly a lot of spears and clubs were being shaken.
“No fight yet!” he said to Cox in broken English, and turned to Daphne. “The boy has no soul?” he asked in the island tongue.
“The wave took away his soul, but he has made himself a new one,” she said.
“Wrong. No man can make a soul!” But he’s worried, Daphne thought.
“This one did. He made it outside himself. You are walking on it,” she said. “And don’t try to shuffle away sideways. It covers the whole island, every leaf and pebble!”
“They call you a woman of power, ghost girl.” The man took a step backward. “Is this true? What is the color of birds in the land of Locaha?”
“There are no colors. There are no birds. The fish are silver, and as fast as thought.” The words were just there, ready, in her head. Great Heavens, she thought, I know this!
“What is the length of time you may stay in the land of Locaha?”
“The fall of a drop of water,” said Daphne’s lips before she had finished hearing the question.
“And the soul who makes his own soul…he was in Locaha’s land?”
“Yes. He ran faster than Locaha, though.”
The dark, piercing eyes stayed fixed on her for a while, and then it seemed that she had passed some test.
“You are very clever,” said the old man shyly. “I would like to eat your brains, one day.”
For some reason the books of etiquette that Daphne’s grandmother had forced on her didn’t quite deal with this. Of course, silly people would say to babies, “You’re so sweet I could gobble you all up!” but that sort of nonsense seemed less funny when it was said by a man in war paint who owned more than one skull. Daphne, cursed with good manners, settled for “It’s very kind of you to say so.”
He nodded and headed back to his fellows, who had clustered around Cox.
Mau approached her, smiling. “Their priest likes you,” he said.
“Only for my brains, Mau, and even if he had them for lunch, I’d still have more than you! Didn’t you see that gun he’s got now? It’s a Pepperbox. One of Father’s friends had one! It has six barrels. That’s six shots without reloading! And he’s got an ordinary pistol, too!”
“I shall move fast.”
“You can’t run faster than bullets!”
“I shall stay out of their way,” said Mau with infuriating calmness.
“Yes, but his gun will run out of bang before my knife runs out of sharp,” said Mau.
“Mau, I don’t want you to die!” Daphne shouted. The words echoed back off the cliffs, and she blushed crimson.
“Then who should die? Milo? Pilu? Who? No. If anyone is going to die, it should be me. I’ve died before. I know how it’s done. No more discussion!”
CHAPTER 14
Duel
BEHIND THEM THE HUBBUB of the meeting had stopped.
Silence fell over the war canoes lined with faces; the cluster of Raider chiefs on the shoreline; the people who had crept out to watch from the cliff. The sun was too bright to look at and was already boiling all the color out of the landscape. The world was holding its breath.
There would be no count, no signal. There were no rules, either. But there was tradition. The fight would start when the first man picked up his weapon. Mau’s spear and knife were on the sand in front of him. Ten feet away, Cox had laid down his guns only after a lot of argument.
Now it was just a case of watching the other man’s eyes.
Cox grinned at him.
Hadn’t every boy dreamed of this? To stand in front of the enemy? And they were all here together, under the white-hot sun, all the lies, all the fears, all the terrors, all the horrors that the wave had brought, all here and in mortal form. Here he could beat them.
And all that mattered was this: If you don’t dare to think you might, you won’t.
Mau’s eyes creaked with staring. He was nearly blinded by the fierce sunlight, but at least there were no more voices in his head—
Except…
It is a good day to die, said the voice of Locaha.
Mau’s arm shot out, hurling the handful of sand into Cox’s eyes. He didn’t wait—he just grabbed his knife and ran, listening to the cursing behind him. But you can’t cheat when there are no rules. He’d picked up his weapon when he’d put his spear down. He didn’t have to say he’d chosen the sand itself. It was a good weapon, too.