Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 55

It was horrible to watch her face change. It went from a kind of desperate excitement to dark despair, in gentle slow motion. It was as though a shadow had drifted across a landscape.

He caught her before she fell, and he felt her tears on his skin. “He will come,” he said quickly. “There is so much ocean.”

“But he would know the course of the Judy, and this is a big island! He should have gotten here by now!”

“The ocean is much bigger. And there was the wave! He could be looking south, thinking the Judy capsized. He could be looking north, in case you were swept along. Oh, he will come. We must be ready.” Mau patted her on the back and looked down. The children, who had soon gotten fed up with looking at big dark things they didn’t understand, had gathered around and were watching them with interest. He tried to shoo them away.

The sobbing stopped. “What was that little boy holding?” said Daphne hoarsely.

Mau beckoned the child over and borrowed the new toy from him. Daphne stared at it and started to laugh. It was more like a panting noise, in fact, the noise made by someone too astonished to draw breath. She managed to say: “Where did he get these, please?”

“He says Uncle Pilu gave them to him. He has been diving in the god pool.”

Uncle Pilu, Daphne noted. There were lots of uncles and aunts on the island now, and not many mothers and fathers.

“Tell the little boy I will give him an arm’s length of sugarcane for them,” she said, “and he can stretch his arm as long as he likes. Is that a trade?”

“Well, he’s grinning,” said Mau. “I think just hearing the word sugarcane was enough!”

“A mountain of sugar would not have been enough.” Daphne held up her purchase. “Shall I tell you what these are? They were made by someone who did not just watch the skies and sail to new lands. He thought about small things that make life better for people. I’ve never heard of them being made of gold before, but these are definitely false teeth!”

When she was a lot older and had to deal with meetings all the time, Daphne remembered the council of war. It was probably the only one ever to have children running around in it. It was certainly the only one to have Mrs. Gurgle scuttling around in it with her new teeth. She had snatched them out of Daphne’s hand when she was demonstrating them to Cahle, and it was impossible to get anything off Mrs. Gurgle if she didn’t want you to take it. They were too big for her, and almost certainly she couldn’t eat with them, but if she opened her mouth in daylight, it was like looking at the sun.

Pilu did most of the talking, but always with one eye on Mau. He talked so fast and hard that the words formed pictures in front of her eyes, and what she saw was the Agincourt speech from Henry V, or at least what it might have been like if Shakespeare had been small and dark and worn a little loincloth instead of trousers, or tights in Shakespeare’s case. But there was a lot more in there, and Pilu had one wonderful talent for a speaker: He began with the truth and then he hammered it out until it was very thin but gleamed like Mrs. Gurgle’s new teeth at noon.

They were the oldest people! He told them their ancestors had invented canoes and sailed them under new skies, to land so far away they ended up back home! And they had seen farther than any other people! They had seen the four sons of Air race across the sky! They had seen the Papervine Woman lash her vines around the Fire god! They had built wondrous devices, back in the long ago, when the world was otherwise!

But now bad men were coming! They were very bad men indeed! So Imo himself had sent them the Sweet Judy, the first ship ever built, which had come back on the great wave, carrying everything they would need in this dark time, including the wonderful salt-pickled beef and the ghost girl, who knows the secrets of the sky and makes wonderful beer —

Daphne blushed at this and tried to catch Mau’s eye, but he looked away.

And Pilu was shouting, “And with the help of the Sweet Judy we shall blow the Raiders across the seas!”

Oh no, she thought, he knows about the cannon! He’s found the Judy’s cannon.

There was cheering as Pilu finished. People surrounded Mau.

There had always been wars, even among the local islands. From what she could work out, they were mostly not much worse than a fight among the stableboys and a good way of getting impressive scars and a story to exaggerate for your grandchildren. And there were often raids from one island to another to steal brides, but since the women arranged it all beforehand, they hardly counted.

But… cannon! She’d seen gun drill on the Judy, and even Cox handled them with care. There was one right way of firing a cannon, and lots of wonderfully explosive ways of getting it wrong.

When the crowd was gathering around Pilu for some patriotic singing, Daphne strode up to Mau and glared at him.

“How many cannon?” she demanded.

“Milo has found five,” said Mau. “We are going to put them on the hill above the beach. Yes, I know what you’re going to say, but the brothers know how to use them.”

“Really? They might have watched! Pilu thinks he knows how to read, but mostly he just guesses!”

“The cannon give us hope. We know who we are now. We are not beggars outside the trouserman world. We are not children. Once we were the bold sailors, all the way to the other end of the world. Perhaps we wore the trousers.”

“Er, I think Pilu might have been going too far with that — ”

“No, he is clever. Should he tell them the truth? Should he tell them that all I’ve got is a few things I know and a handful of guesses and a big hope, and that we are so weak, and that if I am wrong, those of us not dead by sunset on the day the Raiders attack will wish they were? That will only make them fear. If a lie will make us strong, a lie will be my weapon.” He sighed. “People want lies to live by. They cry out for them. Have you looked at the Judy lately? I must show you something.”

The path through the low forest was well worn. So much had been dragged out to the beach in the past months that even high-speed vines and voracious grasses had not been able to keep up everywhere. In places the forest floor was just shards of crumbling stone.

“We go to the Sweet Judy for everything,” said Mau as he led the way. “It gives us wood and food and light. Without the Judy and her cargo, where would we be? What could we want that the Judy could not give us? That’s what people say. And now, since our gods have failed us… ”

He stood back.

Someone had nailed a red fish to the planking of the ship. By the smell, it had been there for several days. And below it were a stick man and a stick woman, drawn very crudely in red, white, and black. Daphne stared at them.

“That’s supposed to be me, isn’t it,” she said, “and that’s you with poor Captain Roberts’s cap on.”

“Yes.” Mau sighed.

“It’s a good one of the cap,” said Daphne diplomatically. “Where did they get the white?”

“There’s a stick of it in the carpenter’s toolbox,” said Mau gloomily.

“Ah, that would be called chalk,” said Daphne. “I suppose all these round things they have drawn here are barrels?”

“Yes. This is a god place now. I’ve heard them talking, sometimes. Some of them think the gods sent the Judy here to help them! Can you believe that? Then who sent the wave? They’ll believe in anything! This morning I heard one of the new ones talking about ‘The Cave the Gods Made’! We made it! Men made the gods, too. Gods of cold stone, which we made so that we could hide from the dark in a shell of comfortable lies. But when the Raiders come, there will be five cannon on the beach, made by men! And when they speak, they will not tell lies!”

“You will blow yourself up! Those cannon have been thrown about and dragged over rocks, and they were old and rusty to start with! Cookie said they’d turn into a tin banana if you fire them with more than half a load. They’ll blow up!”