Nation (24 page)

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 into 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.

“That’s the wrong question,” said Mau. The laughter stopped. He went on: “You say you told them about the beer song, and they didn’t listen? It is not your fault the man was a fool, is it?”

“Yes, but you see, it was a trick,” Daphne said. “I knew they wouldn’t take any notice!”