Nation - Пратчетт Терри Дэвид Джон - Страница 58

“They are here and armed, Mr. Cox,” Daphne said.

“Are they indeed?” said Cox cheerfully. “Then I’m the queen of Sheba.” He pointed to the upper slope, where the cannon were clearly visible. “Those guns are from the Judy, right?”

“I’m not telling you anything, Mr. Cox.”

“Then they are. A load of scrap iron, as I recall. That skinflint Roberts was too mean to get new ones. I know I’m right. First time you use them, they’ll split like a sausage! Seems to have put the wind up my jolly loyal subjects, though. Oh, yeah, I’m their chief, as a matter of fact. See my new hat? It’s quite the style, ain’t it? Me, king o’ the cannibals.” He leaned forward. “You got to be nice to me now I’m a king,” he said. “You should call me Your Majesty, eh?”

“And how did you become a king, Mr. Cox?” said Daphne. “I’m sure it involved killing people.” She had to make an effort not to back away, but backing away from the man never worked.

“Only one, so don’t be so hoity-toity. We’d just got a nice new boat courtesy of a bunch of Dutchmen of a charitable disposition, and then just after we’d chucked them over the side, a load of our brown chums comes up on us all in a rush, and we had a bit of an argument. I shot this big devil, all war paint and feathers, just as he’s about to flatten me with his big hammer — lovely gun, the cheese-eater captain had, far too good for a Dutchman, which is why I grabbed it off him before we threw him to the sharks — but anyway, I let a bit of air into Johnny Savage, lovely action that gun’s got, smooth as a kiss — and next thing you know, abracadabra, I’m king of ’em. And then it’s all off to a nice island for a big coronation feast. An’ don’t you look at me like that — I had the fish.”

He looked around. “Oh dear me, where are my manners? May I introduce to you the lads from what they call the Land of Many Fires? I daresay you’ve heard of them? As blackhearted a bunch of villains as you might find in a dozen chapels!” He waved a hand theatrically at a group of men, lesser chiefs perhaps, who had gathered around Pilu and Milo, and went on: “They are a bit whiffy on the nose, my word, yes, but that’s ’cause of their diet. Not enough roughage, see? Leave the clothes on, I tell ’em; the buttons’ll do you good! But they don’t listen. Nearly as bad as me, and I don’t spread praise like that around in a hurry. These lads here are the gentry, believe it or not.”

She took a look at some of the said gentry and, to her shock, recognized them. She knew them. She’d lived among them for most of her life. Well, not actual cannibals, obviously (although there had been all those rumors about the tenth earl of Crowcester, but dinner-party opinion picked up via the trusty dumbwaiter was that he had just been very hungry and extremely shortsighted).

These old men had bones in their noses and shells in their ears, but there was something familiar there, too. They had the well-fed, important, careful look of people who took care not to be at the top. A lot of government people like them had dined at the Hall. They had learned over the years that the top was not a happy or safe place to be. One rung down, that was the place for a sensible man. You advised the king, you had a lot of power, in a quiet kind of way, and you didn’t get murdered anything like as often. And, if the ruler started to get funny ideas and became a bit of an embarrassment, you just… took care of things.

The nearest one gave her a nervous smile, although later she realized that he might have just been hungry. In any case, if you took away the long hair, which was curled up into a headdress with a feather stuck in it, and then added a pair of silver spectacles, he would look exactly like the prime minister back home, or at least like the prime minister would look after a year in the sun. She could see his wrinkles under his paint.

Cannibal Chief, she thought. It’s such a nasty name. But she could see the polished skull on his belt, and his necklace was made of little white shells and finger bones, and as far as she knew, the prime minister didn’t have a big black club studded with shark’s teeth.

“Amazin’ resemblance, ain’t it?” said Cox, as if he’d been reading her thoughts. “And there’s one back there who could pass for the archbishop of Canterbury in a poor light. Just goes to show what a haircut and a Savile Row suit will do, eh?”

He winked his horrible wink, and Daphne, who had vowed not to rise to this sort of thing, heard herself say: “The archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Cox, is not a cannibal!”

“He doesn’t think so, miss. Wine and wafers, m’lady, wine and wafers!”

Daphne shuddered. The man had an uncanny ability to look inside your head and leave it feeling grubby. Even on the beach she wanted to apologize to the sand for letting him tread on it, but the looks on the faces of the wrinkled old men with him made her heart leap. They were glaring! They hated him! He’d brought them here, and now they were under the barrels of cannon! They might get killed, and they had spent a lifetime not getting killed. All right, he’d killed the last king, but that was just because he had the magic gun stick. He smelled of madness. Tradition was fine, but sometimes you had to be practical….

“Tell me, Mr. Cox, can you speak the language of your new subjects?” she asked sweetly.

Cox looked astonished. “What, me? Catch me speaking their heathen lingo! Ugga wugga this, lugga mugga that! That’s not for me! I’m learnin’ ’em English, since you ask. I’ll civilize ’em if I have to shoot every mother’s son of ’em, trust me on that. Talking of ugga wugga, what’s all this chin-wagging about?”

Daphne listened out of the corner of her ear. War negotiations were going rather oddly. The enemy warriors listened to Pilu but looked up at Milo when they replied, as if Pilu himself was not important.

Mau was taking no part in things at all. He stood behind the brothers, leaning on his spear and listening. Daphne went to push her way through them and found she didn’t need to; cannibal chiefs shuffled out of her way as fast as they could.

“What’s happening?” she whispered. “Are they worried about the cannon?”

“Yes. They believe in single combat, one chief against another. If our chief beats their chief, they will go away.”

“Can you trust them?”

“Yes. This is about belief. If their god doesn’t smile on them, they won’t fight. But Cox wants them all to fight, and they know they should obey him. He wants a massacre. He’s told them that the cannon won’t work.”

“You think they will, though,” said Daphne.

“I think one will,” said Mau quietly.

“One? One!”

“Don’t shout. Yes, one. Just one. But that isn’t going to matter, because we don’t have enough gunpowder for more than one shot.”

Daphne was speechless. She finally managed to say, “But there were three kegs!”

“That’s true. The little one from your cabin was half empty. The others are full of gunpowder soup. The water got in. It’s just stinking muck.”

“But you fired a cannon weeks ago!”

“The little keg had enough for two firings. The first one we tried with what looked like the least-rotten gun. It worked. You saw it. But there’s a crack all along it now, and it was the best one. But don’t worry, we repaired it.”

Daphne’s brow furrowed. “How can you repair a cannon? You can’t repair a cannon, not here!”

“A trouserman might not be able to, but I can,” said Mau proudly. “Remember, you didn’t know how to milk a pig!”

“All right then, how do you repair a broken cannon?” said Daphne.

“Our way,” said Mau, beaming. “With string!”

“With str —?”

“Waark! Cox is the prawn of the devil!”

Even Daphne, mouth open to object, turned to look —

But Cox was quicker than all of them. His hand moved fast as the parrot glided over the beach. He cocked, aimed, and fired in one movement, three shots, one after another. The parrot squawked and tumbled into the papervine thickets above the beach, leaving a few bits of feather floating in the air.