Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 22

Daphne tugged another log onto the fire, straightened up, and glared at the old man. He might do a bit of work, she thought. Some clothes could only help, too. But all he did was sit by the fire and nod at her occasionally. He’d eaten more than his fair share of the baked fish (she’d measured it with a stick) and she had been the one to mash up some of the fish with her own hands and feed it to the Unknown Woman, who looked a bit better now and had at least eaten a few mouthfuls. She was still clutching her baby, but it wasn’t crying anymore, and that was more worrying than the crying had been….

Something screamed up in the hills, and went on screaming, and then went on screaming louder.

The old man creaked to his feet and picked up Mau’s club, which he could barely lift. When he tried to raise it over his shoulder, he went over backward.

The scream arrived, followed by the screamer, something that looked human but was dripping green mud and smelled like a swamp on a very hot day. It thrust a warm, heavy gourd toward Daphne, who took it before she could stop herself. Then it shouted “MILK!” and ran on into the dark. There was a splash as it dived into the lagoon.

The smell hung in the air for quite a long time. When a faint breeze blew it over the fire, the flames burned blue for a moment.

Mau spent the night much farther along the beach, and went for another swim as soon as it was light. The smell had this about it: He could sit on the bottom of the lagoon and scrub himself with sand and weeds and then swim underwater in any direction and yet, as soon as he surfaced, there the smell was, waiting for him.

He caught some fish and left them where people could see them. At the moment they were fast asleep; the mother and her baby were curled up in their blanket, sleeping so peacefully that Mau envied them, and the old man was sleeping with his mouth open and looked as if he was dead, although by the sound of it he wasn’t. The girl had gone back to the Sweet Judy, for some strange trouserman reason.

He tried to keep away from the others during the day, but the ghost girl seemed to be watching for him all the time, and he was running out of nonchalant ways to avoid her. In the end she found him in the evening, while he was repairing the field fences with fresh thorns, to keep the pigs out. She didn’t say anything but just sat and watched him. That can be quite annoying when people do it for long enough. A big cloud of silence builds up like a thunderstorm. But Mau was good at silence, and the girl wasn’t. Sooner or later she had to talk or burst. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t understand nearly everything she said. She just had to talk, to fill up the world with words.

“My family owns more land than there is on this whole island,” she said. “We have farms, and once a shepherd gave me an orphan lamb to look after. That’s a baby sheep, by the way. I haven’t seen any here, so you probably don’t know what they are. They go maaaa. People say they go baaa, but they don’t. Sheep can’t pronounce their bs, but people still go on saying it because they don’t listen properly. My mother made me a little shepherdess outfit, and I looked so sweet it would make you sick, and the wretched creature used to take every opportunity to butt me in the — to butt me. Of course, all this won’t mean very much to you.”

Mau concentrated on weaving the long thorns between the stakes. He’d have to go and get some more from the big thickets on the north slope, he thought. Perhaps I ought to go and get some right now. If I run, perhaps she won’t try to follow me.

“Anyway, the thing is that the shepherd showed me how to get a lamb to suck milk off your fingers,” the girl went on relentlessly. “You have to sort of dribble the milk slowly over your hand. Isn’t that funny? I can speak three languages and play the flute and the piano, but it turns out that the most useful thing I’ve ever learned is how to make something small and hungry suck milk off my fingers!”

That sounds as though she’s said what she thinks is an important bit, Mau told himself, and so he nodded and smiled.

“We also own lots of pigs. I’ve seen them with the little piglets and everything,” she continued. “I’M TALKING ABOUT PIGS. Oink oink, grunt grunt.”

Ah, thought Mau, this is about pigs, and milk. Oh, good. Just what I wasn’t hoping for.

“Oink?” he said.

“Yes, and, you see, I want to get something sorted out. I know you can’t milk a pig like you can a sheep or a cow because they don’t have” — she touched her chest for a moment, and then rapidly put her hands behind her back — “they don’t have uddery parts. There’s just the little… the little… tubes.” She coughed. “THEY CAN’T BE MILKED, UNDERSTAND?” And now she moved her hands up and down, as if she was pulling ropes, while at the same time making squish-squish noises for some reason. She cleared her throat. “Er… so I think the only way you could have got the baby’s milk, excuse me, is to sneak up on some sow with a litter of little ones, which would be very dangerous indeed, and crawl up when she was feeding them — they make such a noise, don’t they? — and, er… ” She screwed up her lips and made a sucking sound.

Mau groaned. She’d worked it out!

“And, er, well, I mean, YUCK!” she said. “And then I thought, Well, all right, yuck, but the baby is happy and has stopped crying, thank goodness, and even his mother is looking better… so, well, I thought, I bet even great heroes of history, you know, with helmets and swords and plumes and everything, I bet they wouldn’t get down in the dirt because a baby was dying of hunger and crawl up to a pig and… I mean, when you think about it, it’s still YUCK, but… in a good way. It’s still yucky, but the reason you did it… it makes it sort of… holy….” At last her voice trailed away.

Mau had understood baby. He was also pretty sure about yuck, because her tone of voice practically drew a picture. But that was all. She just sends words up into the sky, he thought. Why is she going on at me? Is she angry? Is she saying I did a bad thing? Well, around about the middle of the night I’m going to have to do it again, because babies need feeding all the time.

And it’ll be worse. I’ll have to find another sow! Ha, ghost girl, you weren’t there when she realized something was going on! I’d swear her eyes had shone red! And run? Who’d have thought that something that big could go that fast that quickly! I only outran her because the piglets couldn’t keep up! And soon I’ll have to do it all again, and go on doing it until the woman can feed the baby herself. I must, even though I may have no soul, even though I may be a demon who thinks he’s a boy. Even though I may be an empty thing and in a world of shadows. Because…

His thoughts stopped, just there, as if they had run into sand. Mau’s eyes opened wide.

Because what? Because “Does not happen”? Because… I must act like a man, or they will think less of me?

Yes, and yes, but more than that. I need there to be the old man and the baby and the sick woman and the ghost girl, because without them I would go into the dark water right now. I asked for reasons, and here they are, yelling and smelling and demanding, the last people in the world, and I need them. Without them I would be just a figure on the gray beach, a lost boy, not knowing who I am. But they all know me. I matter to them, and that is who I am.

Daphne’s face glistened in the firelight. She’d been crying. All we can do is talk baby talk, Mau thought. So why does she talk all the time?

“I set some of the milk to keep cool in the river,” said Daphne, idly drawing on the sand with a finger. “But we will need some more tonight. MORE MILK. Oink!”

“Yes,” said Mau.

They fell into another of those awkward silences, which the ghost girl ended with: “My father will come, you know. He will come.”