Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 15

A little sound made him look down. The girl was shaking, there on the sand. He knelt beside her and held her hand, which was still clutching the captain’s hat. Her skin was white, and as cold as the touch of Locaha, even in the heat of the fire.

“Cheat! I got her back!” he shouted. “Does not happen!”

Mau ran farther along the beach and onto the track that led into the low forest. Red crabs scuttled out of the way as he bounded along the trail of broken trees. He reached the big canoe and scrambled up the side. There had been — yes, there was that big blanket in the corner. He grabbed it and pulled, and something pulled back. He pulled harder, and something landed on the deck with a splintering noise.

A voice said: “Waark! Roberts is a dreadful boozer! Show us yer drawers!”

This time the blanket had come away, revealing a broken wooden cage on the floor and a very angry gray bird. It glared at Mau.

“Waark! Blessed are the meek, my sainted aunt!”

Mau had no time for birds now, but this one had a worrying glint in its eye. It seemed to demand a reply.

“Does not happen!” he shouted, and ran out of the cabin, the blanket flapping behind him.

He was halfway down the track when there was a flutter of wings overhead and a shriek of “Does not happen!”

Mau didn’t even look up. The world had become too strange. He ran to the fire and wrapped the girl as tight as he could in the blanket. After a while the shivering stopped, and she seemed to be asleep.

“Does not happen!” screamed the bird from a broken tree. Mau blinked. He’d understood it! And he’d understood it before, and not realized it.

Oh, there were some birds that could speak a few words, like the gray raven and the yellow parakeet, but you could hardly understand them. This bird talked as if it knew what it was saying.

“Where’s my grub, you vinegar-faced old piss pot?” said the bird, bouncing up and down eagerly. “Give me my rations, you ol’ hypocrite!”

That sounded like trouserman talk, right enough.

The sun was low but still a hand’s span above the sea. A lot had happened in a short space of time that, on the inside, had lasted nearly forever.

Mau looked down at the sleeping girl. “Does not happen” was not enough. You couldn’t trust Locaha. There were no bargains. Now he had to think about will not happen. Death was not going to rule here.

He found his spear and stood guard until morning.

CHAPTER 4

Bargains, Covenants, and Promises

ERMINTRUDE HAD HEARD THAT when you drown, your whole life passes in front of your eyes.

In fact it’s when you don’t drown that this happens, as life races back from the start to get to the last known living moment. Mostly it’s a blur, but every life has its important moments that get more and more colorful the longer they are remembered.

In hers, one of them was about the map. Every life should have a map.

The map. Oh yes, the map. She’d found it in the big atlas in the library one wet winter afternoon. In a week she could have drawn it from memory.

And the name of it was the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean.

It was half a world of blue sea, but it was stitched together with seams of little marks, tiny dots that her father had called island chains. There were hundreds and thousands of islands and a lot of them were just about big enough for a coconut tree, he’d said. There had to be one coconut tree on every tiny island, by law, so that if someone was shipwrecked, then at least he’d have some shade to sit in.[!The lonesome palm (Cocos nucifera solitaria) is common over most of the Pelagic, and is unusual in that an adult tree secretes a poison in its root that is deadly only to other palms. Because of this it is not unusual to find only one such palm on the smaller islands and a thousand cartoons are, therefore, botanically correct.!] He drew a picture of her sitting in the shade of a coconut tree, with her white dress and her parasol, but he quickly added, on the penciled horizon, a ship coming to rescue her.

Much later on, she was able to read the names of the groups of islands: The Bank Holiday Monday Islands, All Souls Island, The Rogation Sunday Islands, The Mothering Sunday Islands, The Hogmanay Islands… it seemed that the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean had been navigated not with a compass and a sextant but with a calendar.

Her father had said that if you knew where to look, you could find Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island, and loaned her a large magnifying glass. She spent long Sunday afternoons lying on her stomach, minutely examining every necklace of dots, and concluded that Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island was a Father Joke, i.e., not very funny but sort of lovable in its silliness. But now, thanks to him, she knew the island chains of the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean by heart.

She had wanted, there and then, to live on an island that was lost at sea, and so small that you weren’t sure if it was an island or just that a fly had done its business on the page.

But that wasn’t all. There was a map of the stars at the back of the atlas. For her next birthday she’d asked for a telescope. Her mother had been alive then, and had suggested a pony, but her father had laughed and bought her a beautiful telescope, saying: “Of course she should watch the stars! Any girl who cannot identify the constellation of Orion just isn’t paying attention!” And when she started asking him complicated questions, he took her along to lectures at the Royal Society, where it turned out that a nine-year-old girl who had blond hair and knew what the precession of the equinoxes was could ask hugely bearded famous scientists anything she liked. Who’d want a pony when you could have the whole universe? It was far more interesting and you didn’t have to muck it out once a week.

“Well, that was a good day,” said her father when they were coming back from one meeting.

“Yes, Papa. I think Dr. Agassiz is certainly providing evidence for the Ice Age theory, and I shall need a bigger telescope if I am to see Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.”

“Well, we shall have to see about that,” said her father with hopeless parental diplomacy. “But please don’t let your grandmother know you shook hands with Mr. Darwin. She thinks he is the devil.”

“Gosh! Is he?” The prospect had seemed quite interesting.

“As a matter of fact,” said her father, “I believe he is the greatest scientist who has ever lived.”

“Greater than Newton? I don’t think so, Papa. Many of his ideas were first voiced by other people, including his own granddad!”

“Aha? You’ve been in my library again. Well, Newton said that he stood on the shoulders of giants.”

“Yes, but… well, he was just being modest!” And they had argued all the way home.

It was a game. He loved it when she assembled her facts and pinned him down with a cast-iron argument. He believed in rational thinking and scientific inquiry, which was why he never won an argument with his mother, who believed in people doing what she told them, and believed it with a rock-hard certainty that dismissed all opposition.

In fact there was always something a little naughty about going to the lectures. Her grandmother objected to them on the grounds that they “would make the girl restless and give her ideas.” She was right. Ermintrude was already pretty good at ideas, but a few more are always welcome.

At this point the racing line of life speeds up, to get past some dark years she never remembered except in nightmares and whenever she heard a baby crying, and leaps ahead to the day when she first knew she would see islands under new stars….

Her mother was dead by then, which meant that things at the Hall were now run entirely by her grandmother, and her father, a quiet, hardworking man, didn’t have much spirit left to battle with her. The wonderful telescope was locked away, because “a well-brought-up young lady has no business looking at the moons of Jupiter, whose home life was so different from that of our own dear king!” It didn’t matter that her father very patiently explained that there were at least thirty-six million miles of difference between Jupiter, the Roman god, and Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. She didn’t listen. She never listened. And you put up with that or you hit her over the head with a battle-axe, and her father didn’t do that sort of thing, even though one of his ancestors had once done something really horrible to the duke of Norfolk with a red-hot poker.