Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 49

She said: “Would you like some beer?”

“Beer?” said Foxlip. “You mean real beer?”

“Well, it’s like beer. It’s the Demon Drink, anyway. I’ve always got some freshly made.”

“You make it? But you’re a nob!” said Polegrave.

“Perhaps I make ‘nobby’ beer,” said Daphne. “Sometimes you have to do what needs doing. Do you want some?”

“She’ll poison us!” said Polegrave. “It’s all a trick!”

“We’ll have some beer, princess,” said Foxlip, “but we’ll watch you drink it first. ’Cause we were not born yesterday.” He gave her an unpleasant wink, full of guile and mischief and with no humor in it at all.

“Yeah, you look after us, missie, an’ we’ll look after you when Cox’s cannibal chums come for a picnic!” said Polegrave.

She heard Foxlip hissing at him for this as she stepped outside, but she’d never for one minute believed that they intended to “rescue” her. And Cox had found the Raiders, had he? Who should she feel sorry for?

She went next door to the beer hut and took three bubbling shells of beer off the shelf, taking care to brush all the dead flies off.

What I am about to do won’t be murder, she told herself. Murder is a sin. It won’t be murder.

Foxlip would make sure she drank some beer first, to prove it wasn’t poisoned, and up until now she had never drunk much, only a tiny amount when she had been experimenting with a new recipe.

Just one drop of beer would turn you into a madman, her grandmother had said. It made you defile yourself and neglect your children and break up families, among quite a lot of other things. But this was her beer, after all. It hadn’t been made in a factory somewhere, with who knew what in it. It was just made of good, honest… poison.

She came back balancing three wide, shallow clay bowls that she put down on the floor between the mats.

“Well now, you’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts,” said Foxlip in his disgustingly unfriendly friendly way, “but I’ll tell you what, missie, you’ll mix the beer up so’s we all get the same, right?”

Daphne shrugged, and did as he said, with both men watching closely.

“Looks like horse piss,” said Polegrave.

“Well, horse piss ain’t too bad,” said Foxlip. He picked up the bowl in front of him, looked at the one in front of Daphne, hesitated for a moment, and then grinned his unpleasant grin.

“I reckon you’re too smart to put poison in your bowl and expect me to be daft enough to swap them over,” he said. “Drink up, princess!”

“Yeah, down the little red lane!” said Polegrave. There it was again, another tiny arrow into her heart. Her own mother had said that to her when she wouldn’t eat her broccoli. The memory stung.

“The same beer is in every bowl. You made me swear,” she said.

“I said drink up!”

Daphne spat into her bowl and began to sing the beer song — the island version, not her own. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” just wouldn’t work now.

So she sang the Song of the Four Brothers, and because most of her mind was taken up with that, a smaller part took the opportunity to remind her: Air is the planet Jupiter, which we believe to be made of gases. Isn’t that a coincidence! And she faltered a moment before recovering herself, because some tiny part of her mind was worrying her with what she was about to do.

There was a stunned silence when she finished, and then Foxlip said, “What the hell was that all about? You gobbed in your drink!”

Daphne tipped up the bowl and took a good swig. It was a little more nutty than usual. She paused to feel it bubbling down, and saw them still staring.

“You have to spit in the bowl and then sing the beer song.” She burped and put a hand over her mouth. “Pardon me. I can teach it to you. Or you can just hum along. Please? It is an ancient custom — ”

“I’m not singing no pagan mumbo jumbo!” said Foxlip, and he snatched up his bowl and took a long swig, while Daphne tried not to scream.

Polegrave hadn’t touched his beer. He was still suspicious! His beady little eyes flicked from his fellow mutineer to Daphne and back again.

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.]