Nation

CHAPTER 9 Rolling the Stone

WATER SPLASHED ON DAPHNE’S face. She opened her eyes, and her mouth said: “ — gle!”

Cahle and the old woman looked down on her, smiling. As she blinked in the light, she felt Mrs. Gurgle gently pulling something out of her hair. But something else was happening. Memory was flowing out of her mind in a tide. The face of death… the great pillars of the world… the white slabs… they sped into the past like silver fish, fading as they went.

She turned to the mat beside her. Mau lay still and snored.

No reason to get excited, she thought, feeling a little lightheaded. He had been so cold, and she’d brought him up here to keep him warm. There had been… something that happened. The shape of it was still in her head, but she couldn’t fill it in. Except… “There was a silver fish?” she wondered aloud.

Mrs. Gurgle looked very surprised and said something to Cahle, who smiled and nodded.

“She says you are indeed a woman of power,” Cahle said. “You pulled him out of a dark dream.”

“I did? I can’t remember. But there was a fish in it.”

The hole in her memory was still there when Cahle had gone, and there was still a fish in it. Something big and important had happened and she had been there, and all she could remember was that there had been a fish in it?

Mrs. Gurgle had curled up in her corner, and it looked as if she was asleep. Daphne was certain that she wasn’t. She’d be peeking through eyelids that were almost closed and listening so hard that her ears would try to flap. All the women took far too much interest in her and Mau. It was like the maids back home gossiping. It was silly and quite unnecessary, it really was!

Mau looked quite small on the mat. The twitching had stopped, but he had curled up in a ball. It was a shock, now, to see him so still.

“Ermintrude,” said her voice in the air.

“Yes,” she said, and added, “You are me, aren’t you?”

“When he is asleep, he still dreams of dark waters. Touch him. Hold him. Warm him. Let him know he is not alone.”

It sounded like her own voice, and it made her blush. She could feel the hot pinkness rising up her neck. “That wouldn’t be seemly,” she hissed, before she could stop herself. Then she wanted to shout: “That wasn’t me! That was some old woman’s stupid granddaughter!”

“So who are you?” said the voice in the air. “Some creature who knows how to feel but not how to touch? Here? In this place? Mau is alone. He thinks he has no soul, so he is building himself one. Help him. Save him. Tell him the stupid old men are wrong.”

“The stupid old — ” Daphne began, and felt a memory uncoil. “The Grandfathers?”

“Yes! Help him roll away the stone! He is a woman’s child and he is crying!”

“Who are you?” she asked the air.

The voice came back like an echo: “Who are you?” Then the voice went, leaving not even a shape in the silence.

I’ve got to think about this, Daphne thought. Or perhaps not. Not now, in this place, because maybe there’s such a thing as too much thinking. Because however much of a Daphne you yearn to be, there is always your Ermintrude looking over your shoulder. Anyway, her thoughts added, Mrs. Gurgle is here, so she counts as a chaperone, and a better one than poor Captain Roberts, since she’s nothing like as dead.

She knelt by Mau’s mat. The voice had been right: There was a trickle of tears down his face, even though he seemed fast asleep. She kissed the tears because this felt like the right thing to do, and then tried to get an arm under him, which was really hard to manage and in any case her arm went to sleep and then got pins and needles, and she had to pull it out. So much for romance, she decided. She dragged her own mat over to his and lay down on it, which meant that an arm could go over him without too much difficulty but also that she had to rest rather awkwardly with her head on her other arm. But after a while his hand came up and grasped hers, gently, at which point, and despite the extreme discomfort, she fell asleep.

Mrs. Gurgle waited until she was sure that Daphne was sleeping, and then she uncurled her hand and looked at the little silver fish she had picked out of the girl’s hair. It coiled backward and forward in her palm.

She swallowed it. It was only a dream fish, but such things are good for the soul.

Daphne woke up just as the first light of dawn was painting the sky pink. She was stiff in muscles she’d never known she possessed. How did married couples manage? It was a mystery.

Mau was snoring gently and didn’t stir at all.

How could you help a boy like that? He wanted to be everywhere and do everything. And so he’d probably try to do more than he should and end up in trouble again and she would have to sort it out again. She sighed a sigh that was older than she was. Her father had been the same, of course. He’d spend all night working on dispatch boxes for the Foreign Office, with a footman on duty at all times to bring him coffee and roast duck sandwiches. It was quite usual for the maids to find him still at his desk in the morning, fast asleep with his head on a map of Lower Sidonia.

Her grandmother used to make sniffy remarks like: “I suppose His Majesty doesn’t have any other ministers?” But now Daphne understood. He’d been like Mau, trying to fill the hole inside with work so that it didn’t overflow with memories.

Right now she was glad she was alone. Apart from the snoring of Mau and Mrs. Gurgle there was no sound but the wind and the boom of the waves on the reef. On the island, that was what counted as silence.

“Show us yer drawers!” floated in through the doorway.

Oh, yes, and the wretched parrot. It really was very annoying. You often didn’t see it for days, because it had picked up a deep, cheerful hatred of the pantaloon birds and took a huge delight in annoying them at every opportunity. And then, just when you had a moment that was quiet and a bit, well, spiritual, it was suddenly all over the place shouting, “Show us your… underthings!”

She sighed. Sometimes the world ought to be better organized. Then she listened for a while and heard the bird fly off up the mountain.

Right, she thought, first things first. So, first, she went out to the fireplace and set some salt-pickled beef to simmering in a pot. She added some roots that Cahle had said were okay, and one half of a very small red pepper. It had to be just one half because they were so hot a whole one burned her mouth, although Mrs. Gurgle ate them raw.

Anyway, she owed the old woman a lot of chewed beef.

And now for the big test. Things shouldn’t be allowed to just happen. If she was going to be a woman of power, she had to take charge. She couldn’t always be the ghost girl, pushed around by events.

Right. Should she kneel? People didn’t seem to kneel here, but she didn’t want to be impolite, even if she was talking to herself.

Hands together. Eyes closed? It was so easy to get things wrong —

The message came right away.

“You did not put a spear into Twinkle’s hand,” said her own voice in her own head, even before she’d had time to think how to begin. She thought: Oh dear, whoever it is, they know that I still think of the baby as Twinkle.

“Are you a heathen god of some sort?” she asked. “I’ve been thinking about this, and well, gods do talk to people, and I understand there are quite a lot of gods here. I just want to know if there is going to be any thunder and lightning, because I really don’t like that. Or if I’ve gone mad and I’m hearing voices. However, I have dismissed this hypothesis because I don’t believe that people who have really gone mad think they have gone mad, so wondering if you have gone mad means that you haven’t. I just want to know who I’m talking to, if you don’t mind.”

She waited.

“Er, I apologize for calling you heathen,” she added.

There was still no reply. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not and decided instead to be a bit hurt.

She coughed. “All right. Very well,” she said, standing up. “At least I tried. I’m sorry to have trespassed on your time.” She turned to leave the hut.

“We would take the newborn child and make his little hand grasp a spear, so that he would grow up to be a great warrior and kill the children of other women,” said the voice. “We did it. The clan said so, the priests said so, the gods said so. And now you come, and what do you know of the custom?” the voice went on. “And so the first thing the baby touches is the warmth of his mother, and you sing him a song about stars!”

Was she in trouble? “Look, I’m really sorry about the twinkle song — ” she began.

“It was a good song for a child,” said the voice. “It began with a question.”

This was getting very strange. “Have I done something wrong or not?”

“How is it that you hear us? We are blown about by the wind, and our voices are weak, but you, a trouserman, heard our struggling silence! How?”

Had she been listening? Daphne wondered. Perhaps she’d never stopped after all those days in the church after her mother died, saying every prayer she knew, waiting for even a whisper in reply. She hadn’t been looking for an apology. She wasn’t asking for time to run backward. She just wanted an explanation that was better than “It’s the will of God,” which was grown-up speak for “because.”

It had seemed to her, thinking about it in her chilly bedroom, that what had happened was very much like a miracle. After all, it had been a terrible storm, and if the doctor had managed to get there without his horse being struck by lightning, that would have been a miracle, wouldn’t it? That’s what people would have said. Well, in that big, dark, rainy, roaring night, the lightning had managed to hit quite a small horse among all those big thrashing trees. Didn’t that look like a miracle, too? It was almost exactly the same shape, wasn’t it? In any case, besides, didn’t they call something like this an “act of God”?

She’d been very polite when she put the question to the archbishop, and in her opinion it had been really unreasonable for her grandmother to scream like a baboon and drag her out of the cathedral by her ear.

But she had kept looking out for a voice, a whisper, a word that would let it all make sense. She just wanted it all… sorted out.

She looked up into the gloomy roof of the hut.

“I heard you because I was listening,” she said.

“Then listen to us, girl who can hear those who have no voices.”

“And you are —?”

“We are the Grandmothers.”

“I’ve never heard of the Grandmothers!”

“Where do you think little grandfathers come from? Every man has a mother, and so does every mother. We gave birth to little grandfathers, and filled them with milk, and wiped their bottoms and kissed their tears away. We taught them to eat, and showed them what food was safe, so that they grew up straight. We taught them the songs of children, which have lessons in them. And then we gave them to the Grandfathers, who taught them how to kill other women’s sons. The ones who were best at this were dried in the sand and taken to the cave. We went back to the dark water, but part of us remains, here in this place where we were born and gave birth and, often, died.”

“The Grandfathers shout at Mau all the time!”

“They are echoes in a cave. They remember the battle cries of their youth, over and over again, like the talking bird. They are not bad men. We loved them, as sons and husbands and fathers, but old men get confused and dead men don’t notice the turning of the world. The world must turn. Tell Mau he must roll away the stone.”

And they left. She felt them slide out of her mind.

That, thought Daphne, was impossible. Then she thought: Up to now, anyway. They were real, and they’re still here. They’re what I felt when Twinkle was being born, as if the Place was alive and on my side. Perhaps some voices are so old everyone understands them.

The light came back slowly, gray at first like the dawn. Daphne heard a faint noise close at hand, looked around, and saw a young girl standing in the hut doorway, staring at her in horror. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, because she had been here only a few days, and was going to tell her off when she did remember that although the girl had arrived with some other survivors, none of them had been her relatives. And she’d been about to shout at her.

Moving very carefully, Daphne crouched down and held out her arms. The child looked as though she was one heartbeat away from fleeing.

“What is your name?”

The girl looked down at her feet and whispered something that sounded like “Blibi.”

“That’s a nice name,” said Daphne, and gently drew the child to her. As the sobs began to shake the little body, she made a note to tell Cahle. People were turning up every day now, and people who needed looking after were looking after others. That wasn’t such a bad thing, but while everyone got food to eat and a place to sleep, there were other things that were just as important that tended to get overlooked when everyone was busy.

“Do you know about cooking, Blibi?” she asked. There was a kind of muffled nod. “Good! And do you see that man lying on the mat?” Another nod. “Good. Good. I want you to watch over him. He has been ill. The meat in the pot will be ready when the sun has moved a hand-width above the trees. I’m going to look at a stone. Tell him he must eat. Oh, and you must eat, too.”

Where will I end up? she wondered as she hurried out of the Place. I’ve slept in the same room as a young man without an official chaperone (would Mrs. Gurgle count?), made beer, have been going around practically naked, and let gods talk with my mouth, like the Pelvic Oracle in Greece in ancient times, although the voices of the Grandmothers probably didn’t count as gods and, come to think of it, it was the Delphic Oracle, anyway. And technically I was nursing him, so that was probably permissible….

She stopped, and looked around. Who cared? Who, on this island, cared a fig? So who was she apologizing to? Why was she making excuses?

“Roll away the stone?” Why did everyone want him to do things? She’d heard about the stone. It was in a little valley in the side of the mountain, where women weren’t supposed to go.

There was no reason to go now, but she was angry at everyone and she just wanted to get out in the fresh air and do something people didn’t want her to. There were skeletons, probably, behind the stone, but so what? A lot of her ancestors were in the crypt of the church at home, and they never tried to get out and they never spoke to people. Her grandmother would have had something to say about it if they did! Besides, it was broad daylight, and obviously they’d only come out at night — except, of course, it would be pure superstition to believe that they came out at all.

She set off. There was a clear track leading uphill. The forest wasn’t very big, she’d heard, and the track ran right through it. There were no man-eating tigers, no giant gorillas, no ferocious lizards from ancient times… in fact it wasn’t very interesting at all. But the thing about a forest that’s only a few square miles in area is that when it’s scrunched up into little crisscrossing valleys and every growing thing is fighting every other living thing for every ragged patch of sunlight, and you cannot see more than a few feet in any direction, and you can’t judge where you are by the sound of the sea because the sound of the sea is very faint and in any case all around you, then the forest not only seems very big but also appears to be growing all the time. That’s when you began to believe it hated you as much as you hated it.

Following the track was no use, because it soon became a hundred tracks, splitting and rejoining all the time. Things rustled in the undergrowth, and sometimes creatures that sounded a lot bigger than pigs galloped away on paths she could not see. Insects went zing and zip all around her, but they weren’t as bad as the huge spiders that had woven their webs right across the paths and then hung in them, bigger than a hand and almost spitting with rage. Daphne had read in one of her books about the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean islands that “with a few regrettable examples, the larger and more fearsome the spider is, the less likely it is to be venomous.” She didn’t believe it. She could see Regrettable Examples everywhere, and she was sure that some of them were drooling.

— And suddenly there was clear daylight ahead. She would have run toward it, but there was — by good fortune not apparent at the time — a Regrettable Example using its web as a trampoline and she had to ease her way past it with caution. This was just as well, because while the end of the path offered vast amounts of fresh air, there was a total insufficiency of anything to stand on. There was a little clearing, big enough for a couple of people to sit and watch the world, and then a drop all the way to the sea. It wasn’t a totally sheer drop; you’d bounce off rocks several times before you ever hit the water.

She took the opportunity to take a few breaths that didn’t have flies in them. It would have been nice to see a sail on the horizon. In fact it would be narratively satisfying, she considered. But at least she could see that the day was getting on. She wasn’t scared of other people’s ghosts, much, but she did not fancy an evening walk through this forest.

And getting back shouldn’t be too hard, should it? All she had to do was take a downward path every time she found one. Admittedly taking the upward path at every opportunity, or at least every up path not blocked by a particularly evil-looking Regrettable Example, had completely failed to work, but logic had to triumph in the end.

In a way, it did. After a change of path she stepped out into a small valley, held in the arms of the mountain, and there, ahead of her, was the stone. It couldn’t be anything else.

There were trees here and there in the valley, but they were sorry-looking things and half dead. The ground beneath them was covered with bird doo-dahs.

A little way in front of the stone, a large bowl, also of some kind of stone, sat on a tripod made of three big rocks. Daphne peered into it with a kind of shameful curiosity because, to make no bones about it, it was, in this place, just the kind of big stone bowl that you’d expect to have a few skulls in it. There was something in the brain that said: Sinister-looking valley + half-dead trees + ominous doorway = skulls in a bowl, or possibly on a stick. But even by listening to it, she felt she was being unfair to Mau and Cahle and the rest of them. Human skulls never came up in day-to-day conversation. More importantly, they never came up at lunch.

The sickly smell of sour, sticky Demon Drink rose from the bowl. It was stale, but couldn’t have been very good to start with. It was a terrible thing to admit, but she was getting really good at making beer. Everyone said so. It was just some kind of a knack, Cahle had said, or at least had partly said and partly gestured, and that being able to make beer so well meant she would be able to get a very fine husband. Her getting married still seemed to be the big topic of discussion in the Place. It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

It was windy up here, and colder than it was down below. It wasn’t a place where you’d want to be at night.

Oh, well, time to say what she had to say.

She marched up to the stone, stuck her fists on her hips, and said: “Now listen to me, you! I know about ancestors! I’ve got lots of ancestors! One of them was a king, and that’s about as ancestral as you can be! I’m here about Mau! He tries to do everything, and you just bully him all the time! He’s doing wonderful things, and he’s nearly killed himself, and you never even thank him! Is that any way to behave?”

Well, it’s how your ancestors behave, said her conscience. What about the way their pictures all stare at you in the Long Gallery? What about the way your father keeps spending all that money on the Hall just because his great-great-great-great-grandfather built it? Yes, what about your father?

“I know what happens to people who get bullied,” she shouted, even louder this time. “They end up thinking they really are no good! It doesn’t matter that they work so hard they fall asleep at their desks; it’s still never enough! They get timid and jumpy and make wrong decisions, and that means more bullying because, you see, the bully is never going to stop, whatever they do, and my — the person being bullied will do anything to make it stop, but it never will! I’m not going to put up with that, do you understand? If you don’t mend your ways in very short order, there will be trouble, understand?”

I’m shouting at a rock, she thought as her voice echoed off the mountain. What am I expecting it to do? Reply?

“Is there anyone listening?” she yelled, and thought: What do I do if someone says “yes”? For that matter, what do I do if they say “no”?

Nothing happened, in quite an offensive way, considering she’d taken a lot of trouble to get up here.

I’ve just been snubbed by a cave full of dead old men.

Someone was standing behind her. Someone she hadn’t heard coming. But she was angry at all sorts of things and right now was mostly angry at herself for shouting at a rock, and whatever it was behind her, it was going to get the sharp end of her tongue.

“One of my ancestors fought in the Wars of the Roses,” she announced haughtily, without looking round, “and in those wars you were supposed to wear a red rose or a white rose to show whose side you were on, but he was very attached to a pink rose called Lady Lavinia, which we still grow at the Hall, actually, so he ended up fighting both sides at once. He lived, too, because everyone thought it was bad luck to kill a madman. That’s what you need to know about my family: We might be pigheaded and stupid, but we do fight.” She spun around. “Don’t you dare creep up on — Oh.”

Something went pnap. It was a pantaloon bird staring up at her with an affronted expression on its beak. That wasn’t the most noticeable thing about it, however, which was that it was not alone. There were at least fifty of the birds, with more flying in. Now there was sound, because the big birds had the aerodynamics of a brick in any case, and in aiming to land near Daphne they were put off their concentration and mostly crashed on other pantaloon birds, in clouds of feathers and angry beak snapping: Pnap! Pnap!

It was a bit like being in a snowfall. It’s all fun and games at the start, a winter wonderland, and you think because it’s soft, it’s harmless. And then you realize you can’t see the path anymore and it’s getting dark and the snow is blotting out the sky —

A big bird, out of sheer luck, landed on her head, scrabbling for a foothold in her hair with claws like old men’s hands. She screamed at it and managed to force it off. But they were still piling up around her, pushing and pnapping at one another. She could hardly think, in the storm of noise and stink and feathers, but it seemed they weren’t actually attacking her. They just wanted to be where she was, wherever that was.

Oh yes, the stink. Nothing stank like a lot of pantaloon birds up close. On top of the ordinary dry, bony bird smell, they had the worst breath of any living creature. She could feel it hitting her skin like scrubbing brushes. And all the time they pnapped, each trying to outpnap all the others, so that she nearly didn’t hear the cry of rescue.

“Show us yer drawers! Once I was an awful drinker, now I am a dreadful stinker!”

The birds panicked. They hated the parrot as much as it hated them. And when a pantaloon bird wants to get away fast, it makes sure it leaves behind anything not wanted on the journey.

Daphne crouched down and put her hands over her head as a rain of bones and lumps of fish pattered down. Perhaps the noise was the worst part, but when you got down to it, it was all worst.

A golden-brown shape leaped past her, with a coconut in each hand. It kicked and staggered its way through the panicking birds until it reached the big stone bowl, which was full of pantaloon birds like flowers in a vase. It raised shells high in the air over the bowl and in one sharp movement smashed them together.

Beer poured out, filling the air with its scent. Instantly the birds’ beaks swung toward the bowl, seeking the beer like a compass needle seeks north. Daphne was immediately forgotten.

“I wish I was dead,” she said to the world in general, pulling bones out of her hair. “No, I wish I was in a nice warm bath, with proper soap and towels. And after that I wish I was in another bath, because, believe me, this is a two-bath head. And then I wish I was dead. I think this is the worst thing” — she paused, because, yes, there had been something worse, and always would be, and went on — “the second-worst thing that has ever happened to me.”

Mau crouched down beside her. “Men’s Place,” he said, grinning.

“Yes, it looks like one,” snapped Daphne. She stared at Mau. “How are you?”

Mau’s brow wrinkled, and she knew that one wasn’t going to work. They had got a language working pretty well now, thanks to Pilu and Cahle, but it was for simple everyday things, and “How are you?” was too complicated because it didn’t really ask the question you thought it asked. She could see Mau working it out.

“Er, I am because one day my mother and my father — ” he began, but she had been halfway ready for this.

“I mean here!” she said loudly. There were several soft thumps while he thought about this. The pantaloon birds were falling over, like an elderly lady who has had too much sherry on Christmas Day. Daphne wondered if they were poisoned by the beer, because none of them had sung a song, but she didn’t think so. She had seen one eat a whole dead crab that had been lying in the sun for days. Besides, as they lay there, their beaks trembled and they made happy little pnap-pnap noises. As they fell over, thirsty ones took their places.

“The little girl told me you had said something about a stone,” said Mau. “And then I had to have a bowl of beef. She insisted. And then I came as fast as I could, but she can’t run very fast.” He pointed. Blibi was walking up the valley, treading carefully in order to avoid snoring birds. “She said you told her she has to watch over me.”

They sat and waited, avoiding each other’s gaze. Then Mau said: “Er, the way it works is that the birds drink the beer, but the spirit of the beer flies to the Grandfathers. That’s what the priests used to say.”

Daphne nodded. “We have bread and wine at home,” she said, and thought, Oops, I won’t try to explain that one. They have cannibals down here. It could get… confusing.

“I don’t think it’s true, though,” said Mau.

Daphne nodded, and then thought a bit more. “Perhaps things can be true in special ways?” she suggested.

“No. People say that when they want to believe lies,” Mau said flatly. “And they usually do.”

There was another pause, which was filled by the parrot. With its mortal enemies paralyzed by the Demon Drink, it had swooped down and was industriously pulling their pants off them, which meant very neatly and carefully plucking out every white feather on their legs while making happy but fortunately muffled parrot noises.

“They look very… pink,” said Daphne, glad of something innocent, more or less, to talk about.

“Do you remember… running?” said Mau after a while.

“Yes. Sort of. I remember the fish.”

“Silver fish? Long and thin?”

“Like eels, yes!” said Daphne. Feathers were drifting across the valley in clumps.

“So it did happen, did it?”

“I suppose so.”

“I mean, was it a dream or was it real?”

“Mrs. Gurgle says yes,” said Daphne.

“Who is Mrs…. Gurgle, please?”

“The very old woman,” Daphne explained.

“You mean Mar-isgala-egisaga-gol?”

“Probably.”

“And she says yes to what?”

“Your question. I think she means it wasn’t the right one. Look, does Locaha talk to you?”

“Yes!”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“In your head? Like your dreams?”

“Yes, but I know the difference!” said Mau.

“That’s good, because the Grandmothers have been talking to me.”

“Who are the Grandmothers?”

Blibi, if that was really her name, had caught up with them long before Daphne had finished talking and Mau had finished understanding. She sat at their feet, playing with pantaloon bird feathers.

Mau picked up a feather and twiddled it in his fingers. “They don’t like warriors, then.”

“They don’t like people being killed. Nor do you.”

“Have you heard of the Raiders?” asked Mau, brushing a feather off his face.

“Of course. Everyone’s talking about them. They have great war galleys, and they hang the skulls of their enemies along the sides of them. Oh, and enemy means everyone else.”

“We have perhaps thirty people here now. Some more arrived this morning, but most of them can hardly stand. They survived the wave, but they weren’t going to wait for the Raiders to come.”

“Well, you’ve got enough canoes. Can’t we just head east?” She said that without thinking, and then sighed. “We can’t, can we?”

“No. If we had more able-bodied people, and time to get provisions together, then we could try it. But it’s eight hundred miles of open ocean.”

“The weaker people would die. They came here to be safe!”

“They call this island ‘the place where the sun is born’ because it’s in the east. They look to us.”

“Then we could hide until the Raiders go away. Roll away the stone, the Grandmothers said.”

Mau stared at her. “And hide among the dead men? Do you think we should?”

“No! We should fight!” She was amazed at how fast the words came out. They had been pushed out by her ancestors, all those calm stone knights down in the crypt. They’d never ever thought about hiding, even when it was the sensible thing to do.

“Then I will think of a way,” said Mau.

“What do the Grandfathers say?”

“I don’t hear them anymore. I just hear… clicks, and insect noises.”

“Perhaps the Grandmothers have told them off,” said Daphne, giggling. “My grandmother was always telling my grandfather off. He knew everything there is to know about the fifteenth century but he was always coming down to breakfast without his teeth in.”

“They fell out in the night?” asked Mau, puzzled.

“No. He used to take them out to clean them. They were new teeth made out of animal bone.”

“You trousermen can give an old man new teeth? What will you tell me next? That you can give him new eyes?”

“Um… yes, actually something very much like that.”

“Why are you so much smarter than us?”

“I don’t think we are, really. I think it’s just that you have to learn to make things when it’s cold for half the year. I think we got our empire because of the weather. Anything was better than staying at home in the rain. I’m pretty certain people looked out of the window and rushed off to discover India and Africa.”

“Are they big places?”

“Huge,” said Daphne.

Mau sighed and said, “With the people who leave stones.”

“Who?”

“The god anchors,” said Mau. “I understand Ataba now. I don’t think he believes in his gods, but he believes in belief. And he also thinks trousermen came here a long time ago,” he added, shaking his head. “Maybe they brought the stones as ballast. It must have happened like that. Look at all the stone Judy the Sweet brought. Worthless rock to you, all kinds of tools to us. And maybe they gave us metal and tools, like giving toys to children, and we carved the stones because we wanted them to come back. Isn’t that how it would go? We are a little island. Tiny.”

The Phoenicians, thought Daphne glumly. They went on long, long voyages. So did the Chinese. What about the Aztecs? Even the Egyptians? Some people say they visited Further Australia. And who knows who might have been around thousands of years ago? He’s probably right. But he looks so sad.

“Well, you might be a small island,” she said, “but you are an old one. The Grandmothers must have some reason for telling you to roll away the big stone.”

They looked at the stone, which glowed a golden yellow in the afternoon light.

“You know, I can’t remember a longer day than this,” said Daphne.

“I can,” said Mau.

“Yes. That was a long day, too.”

“It takes ten strong men to move the stone,” said Mau after a while. “We don’t have that many.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Daphne. “How many would it take if one of them was Milo, and he had a crowbar made of steel?”

It took time. There was a groove in the rock that had to be scraped out, and tree trunks to be dragged into position to stop the door from falling outward as it moved. The sun was starting to fall down the sky by the time Milo stepped up to the stone with a six-foot bar of steel in his hand.

Mau looked at it glumly. It was useful and he was glad to have it, but it was a trouserman thing, another present from the Sweet Judy. They were still stripping her like termites.

Even a canoe had a soul, of a kind. Everyone knew that; sometimes it wasn’t a good soul, and the craft was hard to handle, even though it seemed to be well built. If you were lucky you got a canoe with a good soul, like the one he’d built on the Boys’ Island, which always seemed to know what he wanted. The Sweet Judy had a good soul, he could tell. It was a shame to break her up, and another kind of shame to know that, once again, they had to rely on the trousermen to get things done. He was almost ashamed of carrying one of the smaller crowbars himself, but they were so useful. Who but the trousermen had so much metal that they could afford to make sticks out of it. But the bars were wonderful. They opened anything.

“There may be a curse on the door,” said Ataba, behind Mau.

“Can you tell if there is?”

“No! But this is wrong.”

“These are my ancestors. I seek their guidance. Why should they curse me? Why should I fear their old bones? Why are you afraid?”

“What is in the dark should be left alone.” The priest sighed. “But no one listens to me now. The coral is full of white stones, people say, so which ones are holy?”

“Well, which?”

“The three old ones, of course.”

“You could test them,” said Daphne, without thinking. “People could leave a fish on a new stone and see how their fortune changes. Hmm, I’d need to work out a scientific way — ” She stopped, aware that everyone was watching her. “Well, it would be interesting,” she finished lamely.

“I did not understand any of that,” said Ataba, looking coldly at her.

“I did.”

Mau craned to see who had spoken and saw the tall skinny figure of Tom-ali, a canoe builder who had arrived with two children who were not his, one boy and one girl.

“Speak, Mr. Tom-ali,” he said.

“I would like to ask the gods why my wife and son died and I did not.” There was some murmuring from the crowd.

Mau already knew him. He knew all the newcomers. They walked the same way, slowly. Some just sat and watched the sea. And there was a grayness about them all. Why am I here? their faces said. Why me? Was I a bad person?

Tom-ali was repairing the canoes now, with the boy helping him, while the girl helped out in the Place. Some of the children were coping better than the adults; after the wave, you just found a place that fitted. But Tom-ali had said what a lot of people didn’t want to hear said, and the best thing to do was to give them something else to think about, right now.

“We all want answers today,” Mau said. “Please, all of you, help me move the stone. No one else has to set foot inside. I will go in by myself. Perhaps I’ll find the truth.”

“No,” said Ataba firmly, “let us go in there together and find the truth.”

“Fine,” said Mau. “That way we can find twice as much.”

Ataba stood next to Mau as the men took up their positions. “You say you are not frightened. Well, I am frightened, young man, to my very toes.”

“The truth will be the dead men in there, that’s all,” said Mau. “Dried up. Dust. If you want to be frightened, think about the Raiders.”

“Do not dismiss the past so lightly, demon boy. It may still teach you something.”

Milo forced the bar between the rock and the stone, and heaved. The stone creaked, and moved an inch —

They did it carefully and slowly, because it would certainly crush anybody it fell on. But cleaning out the groove had been a good idea. The stone ran smoothly, until half of the cave entrance could be seen.

Mau looked inside. There was nothing there. He’d imagined all kinds of things, but not nothing. The floor was quite smooth. There was a bit of dust on the floor, and a few beetles scuttled off into the dark, and that was all the cave held. Except depth.

Why had he expected bones to fall out when the door was opened? Why should it be full up? He picked up a piece of rock and threw it into the darkness as hard as he could. It seemed to bounce and rattle for a long time.

“All right,” he said, and the cave threw his voice back at him. “We’re going to need those lamps, Daphne.”

She stood up, with one of the Sweet Judy’s lamps in each hand. “One red one and one green one,” she said. “The spare port and starboard lights. Sorry about that, but we haven’t got very many cabin lamps left, and we’re short of oil.”

“What about that white lamp next to you?” asked Mau.

“Yes, that’s the one I’m going to bring,” said the ghost girl, “and to save time, shall we pretend we’ve had the argument and I won?”

More trouserman things, Mau thought as he picked up his lamp. I wonder what we used to use? The low ceiling told him when he touched it. His fingers came away covered in soot.

Torches, then. You could make decent ones out of hog fat. If there was enough of the stuff to spare, they were good for night fishing, because the fish would rise to the light. We’ve been living off fish and the Sweet Judy’s salt-pickled beef, because that’s easy, he thought, so now we’ll have to find our dead by trouserman lamplight.