Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 26

Then the traveler in the dark

Thanks you for your tiny spark… ”

And now something was happening. She carefully pulled aside the woman’s skirt. Oh, so that’s how. My goodness. I don’t know what to do! And here came another thought, as if it had been lying in wait: This is what you do….

The men were waiting outside the gateway to the Place, feeling unnecessary and surplus to requirements, which is exactly the appropriate feeling in the circumstances.

At least Mau had time to learn their names. Milota-dan (big, the oldest, who was head and shoulders taller than anyone Mau had ever seen) and Pilu-si (small, always rushing, and hardly ever not smiling).

He found out that Pilu did all the talking: “We went on a trouserman boat for six months once, all the way to a big place called Port Mercia. Good fun! We saw huge houses made of stone, and they had meat called beef and we learned trousermen talk, and when they dropped us off back home they gave us big steel knives and needles and a three-legged pot — ”

“Hush,” said Milo, raising a hand. “She’s singing! In trouserman! Come on, Pilu, you’re the best at this!”

Mau leaned forward. “What’s it about?”

“Look, our job was to pull on ropes and carry things,” Pilu complained. “Not work out songs!”

“But you said you could speak trouserman!” Mau insisted.

“To get by, yes! But this is very complicated! Um… ”

“This is important, brother!” said Milo. “This is the first thing my son will hear!”

“Quiet! I think it’s about… stars,” said Pilu, bent in concentration.

“Stars is good,” said Milo, looking around approvingly.

“She’s saying the baby — ”

“He,” said Milo firmly. “He will be a boy.”

“Er, yes, certainly. He will be, yes, like a star, guiding people in the dark. He will twinkle, but I don’t know what that means….”

They looked up at the dawn sky. The last of the stars looked back, but twinkled in the wrong language.

“He will guide people?” said Pilu. “How does she know that? This is a powerful song!”

“I think she’s making it up!” Ataba snapped.

“Oh?” said Milo, turning on him. “Where did you come from? Do you think my son won’t be a great leader?”

“Well, no, but I — ”

“Hold on, hold on,” said Pilu. “I think… he will seek to know what the stars mean, I’m pretty sure of that. And — look, I’m having to work hard on this, you know — because of this wondering, people won’t… be in the dark,” he finished quickly, and then added, “That was really hard to do, you know! My head aches! This is priest stuff!”

“Quiet,” said Mau. “I just heard something….”

They fell silent, and the baby cried again.

“My son!” said Milo as the others cheered. “And he will be a great warrior!”

“Er, I’m not sure it meant — ” Pilu began.

“A great man, anyway,” said Milo, waving a hand. “They say the birth song can be a prophecy, for sure. That type of language at this time… it’s telling us what will be, right enough.”

“Do the trousermen have gods?” asked Mau.

“Sometimes. When they remember — Hey, here she comes!”

The outline of the ghost girl appeared in the stone entrance to the place.

“Mr. Pilu, tell your brother he is the father of a little boy and his wife is well and sleeping.”

That news was passed on with a whoop, which is easy to translate.

“And he be called Twinkle?” Milo suggested, in broken English.

“No! I mean, no, don’t. Not Twinkle,” said the ghost girl quickly. “That would be wrong. Very, very wrong. Forget about Twinkle. Twinkle, NO!”

“Guiding Star?” said Mau, and that met with general approval.

“That would be very auspicious,” said Ataba. He added, “Is there going to be beer, by any chance?”

The choice was also translated for the ghost girl, who indicated that any name that wasn’t Twinkle was bound to be good. Then she asked — no, commanded — that the other young woman and her baby be brought up and all sorts of things carried to the Place from the wreck of the Sweet Judy. The men jumped to it. There was a purpose.

… And now it was two weeks later, and a lot had happened. The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then. And what they need most of all is nothing much happening.

And this is me, seeing all that horizon, Daphne thought, looking at the wash of blue that stretched all the way to the end of the world. My goodness, Father was right. If my horizon was any broader it would have to be folded in half.

It’s a funny saying, “broaden your horizons.” I mean, there’s just the horizon, which moves away from you, so you never actually catch up with it. You only get to where it’s been. She’d watched the sea all around the world, and it had always looked pretty much the same.

Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe you moved, you changed.

She couldn’t believe that back in ancient history, she’d given the poor boy scones that tasted like rotting wood and slightly like dead lobster! She’d fussed about napkins! And she’d tried to shoot him in the chest with poor Captain Roberts’s ancient pistol, and in any book of etiquette that was a wrong move.

But then, was that her back there? Or was this her, right here, in the sheltered garden that was the Women’s Place, watching the Unknown Woman sitting by the pool but holding her little son tightly, like a little girl holds a favorite dolly, and wondering if she shouldn’t take the child again, just to give it some time to breathe.

It seemed to Daphne that the men thought all women spoke the same language. That had seemed silly and a bit annoying, but she had to admit that in the Place, right now, the language was Baby. It was the common language. Probably everyone makes the same sort of cooing noises to babies, everywhere in the world, she thought. We kind of understand it’s the right thing to do. Probably no one thinks that the thing to do is to lean over it and hit a tin tray with a hammer.

And suddenly, that was very interesting. Daphne found herself watching the two babies closely, in between the chores. When they didn’t want feeding, they turned their heads away, but if they were hungry, their little heads bobbed forward. It’s like shaking your head for no and nodding it for yes. Is this where it comes from? Is it the same everywhere? How can I find out? She made a note to write this down.

But she was really worried about the mother of the baby whom, in the privacy of her head, Daphne called the Pig Boy. The woman was sitting up now, and sometimes walked around, and smiled when you gave her food, but there was something missing. She didn’t play with her baby as much as Cahle, either. She let Cahle feed it, because there must have been some lamp still burning in her brain that knew it was the only way, but afterward she’d grab it and scuttle off to the corner of a hut, like a cat with a kitten.

Cahle was already bustling round the place, always with her baby under her arm, or handed to Daphne if she needed to use both hands. She was a bit puzzled about Daphne, as if she wasn’t quite sure what the girl was but was going to be respectful anyway, just in case. They tended to smile at each other in a slightly wary “we’re getting on fine, I hope” kind of way when their eyes met, but sometimes, when Cahle caught Daphne’s attention, she made a little motion toward the other woman and tapped her own head sadly. That didn’t need a translation.

Every day one of the men brought some fish up, and Cahle showed Daphne some of the plants in the Place. They were mostly roots, but there were also some spicy plants, including a pepper that made Daphne go and lie with her mouth in the stream for three minutes, although she felt very good afterward. Some of the plants were medicines, as far as she could tell. Cahle was good at pantomime. Daphne still wasn’t sure whether the little brown nuts on the tree with the red leaves made you sick or stopped you from being sick, but she tried to remember everything anyway. She was always superstitious about remembering useful things she had been told, at least outside lessons. You would be bound to need it one day. It was a test the world did to make sure you were paying attention.