Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 12

He found what he was looking for in the hut by the spring. A whole bowl of chopped root was hissing and bubbling gently to itself under a pile of palm leaves. The sharp, prickly smell filled the hut.

How much did some dead men drink? He filled a calabash with the stuff, which should be enough. He was careful how he poured it, because it was very dangerous at this stage, and he hurried away before a ghost could catch him.

He reached the valley of the Grandfathers without spilling much, and tipped the contents of the calabash into the big stone bowl in front of the sealed cave. From the gnarly old trees a couple of grandfather birds watched him carefully.

He spat into the bowl, and the beer seethed for a while. Big yellow bubbles burst on the surface.

Then he sang. It was a simple little song, easy to remember, about the four brothers, all sons of Air, who one day decided to race around the huge belly of their father to see which of them would court the woman who lived in the Moon, and the tricks each one played on the others so that he could be first. Babies learned it. Everyone knew it. And, for some reason, singing that song turned the poison into beer. It really did.

The beer foamed in the bowl. Mau watched the big round stone, just in case, but the Grandfathers probably had a way of drinking beer from the spirit world.

He sang his way through the song, taking care not to miss any verse, especially the one that was very funny when you did the right gestures. When he finished, the beer had gone clear, with golden bubbles rising to the top. Mau took a sip, to check. His heart didn’t stop after one beat, so the beer was probably fine.

He took a few steps back and said, to the wide open sky: “Here is your beer, Grandfathers!”

Nothing happed. It was a bad thought, but a thank you might have been nice.

Then the world drew a breath and the breath became voices: YOU HAVE FAILED TO DO THE CHANT!

“I have sung the song! It is good beer!”

WE MEAN THE CHANT THAT CALLS US TO THE BEER!

A couple more grandfather birds crash-landed in the trees.

“I didn’t know there was one!”

YOU ARE A LAZY BOY!

Mau grabbed at this. “That’s right, I’m just a boy! There is no one to teach me! Can you —?”

HAVE YOU RIGHTED THE GOD ANCHORS? NO! And with that the voices snapped into silence, leaving only the sighing of the wind.

Well, it looked like good beer. What was a chant needed for? Mau’s mother had made good beer, and people had just turned up.

With a flapping of wings, a grandfather bird landed on the edge of the beer stone and gave him the usual stare that said: If you are going to die, hurry up. Otherwise, leave.

Mau shrugged and walked away. But he hid behind a tree, and he was good at hiding. Maybe the big round stone would roll.

It didn’t take long for several more grandfather birds to alight on the bowl. They squabbled for a while and then, with the occasional pause for another brief fight, settled down to some serious boozing, rocking backward and forward because that is how birds move when they drink, then rocking backward and forward and forward and falling over a lot, which is how birds move when they have been drinking fresh beer. One took off and flew backward into some bushes.

Mau walked back thoughtfully to the beach, stopping on the way to cut himself a spear from the forest. Down on the beach he sharpened it to a point, which he hardened in the fire, occasionally glancing up at the sun.

He did all this slowly, because his mind was filling up with questions. They came out of the black hole inside him so fast that they made it hard to think in a straight line. And soon he would have to see the ghost girl. That was going to be… difficult.

He looked at the white oblong again. The shiny metal around the edge was quite soft and useless, and scraped off easily. As for the picture, he thought it might be some kind of magic or charm, like the blue bead. What was the point of throwing a spear at the big canoe? It wasn’t something you could kill. But the ghost girl was the only other person on the island, and she had, after all, given him the spark-maker. He didn’t need it now, but it was still a wonderful thing.

When the sun was getting close to the Little Nation, he set off along the beach and entered the low forest.

You could smell things growing. There was never much light down here, but the big canoe had left a wide trail, and daylight was shafting down into spaces that hadn’t seen it for years, and the race was on for a rare place in the sun. New green shoots were fighting for their piece of the sky, fronds were unfolding, seeds were cracking open. The forest was coming back with its own green tide; in six months no one would ever guess what had happened here.

Mau slowed down when the wreck of the big canoe came in sight, but he could see no movement. He would have to be careful about this. It would be so easy to get things wrong.

It was so easy to get things wrong.

She hated the name Ermintrude. It was the trude really. Ermin, now that wasn’t bad at all. Trudy, too, sounded quite jolly, but her grandmother had said it sounded fast, whatever that meant, and banned her from using it. Even Gertrude would have done. You still had your trude, of course, but one of the royal princesses was named Gertrude, and some of the newspapers called her Princess Gertie, and that sounded like the name of a girl who might have some fun in life.

But Ermintrude, she thought, was exactly the kind of name that would invite a young man to tea and mess it all up. The coal stove kept smoking, the flour she’d tried to make the scones of had smelled funny because of the dead lobster in the barrel, and she felt sure some of the flour shouldn’t have been moving about, either. She’d managed to open the last tin of Dr. Poundbury’s Patented Ever-Lasting Milk, which said on the tin that it would taste as good after a year as it did on the day it was tinned, and, sadly, that was probably true. It smelled like drowned mice.

If only she’d been taught properly! If only someone had thought to spend an afternoon teaching her a few things that would be handy to know if she was shipwrecked on a desert island! It could happen to anyone! Even some hints on making scones would have been a help! But no, her grandmother had said that a lady should never lift anything heavier than a parasol and should certainly never set foot in a kitchen unless it was to make Economic Charitable Soup for the Deserving Poor, and her grandmother didn’t think there were very many of them.

“Always remember,” she used to say, far too often, “that it only needs one hundred and thirty-eight people to die and your father will be king! And that means that, one day, you might be queen!”

Grandmother used to say this with a look in her eye that suggested that she was planning 138 murders, and you didn’t have to know the old lady for long to suspect that she’d be quite capable of arranging them. They wouldn’t be impolite murders, of course. There wouldn’t be any of that desperate business with daggers and pistols. They would be elegant and tactful. A block or stone would fall out of someone’s stately home here, someone would slip on a patch of ice in the castle battlements there, a suspicious blancmange at a palace banquet (arsenic could so easily be confused with sugar) would take care of several at once…. But she probably wouldn’t go that far, not really. Nevertheless, she lived in hope, and prepared her granddaughter for a royal life by seeing to it, wherever possible, that Ermintrude was not taught anything that could possibly be of any practical use whatsoever.

Now here she was, with her wrong name, struggling to make afternoon tea in a wrecked boat in the middle of the jungle! Why hadn’t anyone thought this might happen?