Nation

CHAPTER 2 The New World

THE MORNING WAS A lighter shade of night. Mau felt as if he hadn’t slept at all, hunched up among the broad fallen leaves of a coconut tree, but there must have been times when his body and mind just shut down, in a little rehearsal of death. He awoke or maybe came alive again with the dead gray light, stiff and cold. Waves barely moved on the shore, the sea was almost the same color as the sky, and still it rained tears.

The little river that came from the mountain was choked with sand and mud and bits of trees, and when he dug down with his hands, it didn’t flow. It just oozed. In the end Mau had to suck at the rain as it trickled off leaves, and it tasted of ashes.

The lagoon was a mess of broken coral, and the wave had ripped a big hole in the reef. The tide had changed, and water was pouring in. Little Nation, which was barely more than a sandbank on the rim of the lagoon, had been stripped of all its trees but one, which was a ragged stem with, against all hope, a few leaves still on it.

Find food, find water, find shelter… these were the things you had to do in a strange place, and this was a strange place and he’d been born here.

He could see that the village had gone. The wave had sliced it off the island. A few stumps marked the place where the longhouse had stood since… forever. The wave had torn up the reef. A wave like that would not have even noticed the village.

He’d learned to look at coasts when he’d been voyaging with his father and his uncles. And now, looking up, he could see the story of the wave, written in tumbled rocks and broken trees.

The village faced south. It had to. The other three sides were protected by sheer, crumbling cliffs, in which sea caves boomed and foamed. The wave had come from the south of east. Broken trees pointed the trail.

Everyone would have been on the shore, around the big fire. Would they have heard the roar of the wave above the crackle of the flames? Would they have known what it meant? If they had been quick, they would have headed up Big Pig Valley, to the higher ground beyond the fields. But some of the wave would already have been roaring up the eastern slope (all grassy there, nothing much to slow it down), and they would have met it pouring back on them.

And then the rolling cauldron of rocks and sand and water and people would have broken through the west of the reef and into the deepwater current, where the people would have become dolphins.

But not everyone. The wave had left behind fish and mud and crabs, to the delight of the leg-of-pork birds and the gray ravens and, of course, the grandfather birds. The island was full of birds this morning. Birds Mau had never seen before were squabbling with the familiar, everyday ones.

And there were people, tangled in broken branches, half buried in mud and leaves, just another part of the ruined world.

It took him a few long seconds to realize what he was looking at, to see that what he had thought was a broken branch was an arm.

He looked around slowly and realized why there were so many birds, and why they were fighting.

He ran. His legs took him and he ran, screaming out names, up the long slope, past the lower fields, which were covered with debris, past the higher plantations, too high even for the wave, and almost to the edges of the forest. And there he heard his own voice, echoing back from the cliffs.

No one. But there must be someone….

But they had all been waiting, for someone who was no longer a boy but had yet to become a man.

He walked up to the Women’s Place — totally forbidden for any man, of course — and risked a quick peek through the big hedge that surrounded the gardens, untouched up here by the water. But he saw nothing moving, and no voice called out in answer to his cry.

They had been waiting on the beach. He could see them all so clearly in his mind, talking and laughing and dancing in circles around the fire, but there was no silver line, nothing to pull them back.

They had been waiting for the new man. The wave must have hit them like a hammer.

As he went back down to the fields, he grabbed a broken branch and flailed ineffectively at the birds. There were bodies everywhere in the area just above the scoured place where the village had been. At first they were hard to see, tangled as they were with debris and as gray as the ashen mud. He’d have to touch them. They had to be moved. The pigs would come down soon. The thought of pigs eating — No!

There was some brightness behind the clouds in the east. How could that be? Another night had passed? Had he slept? Where had he been? But tiredness certainly had him now. He dragged some leafy branches up against a big rock for shelter, crawled inside, and felt the gray of the mud and the rain and the bruised-looking sky sneak in silently and fill him up and close over him.

And Mau dreamed. It had to be a dream. He felt himself become two people. One of them, a gray body made of mud, began to look for the bodies that the wave hadn’t taken. It did this carefully and as gently as it could, while the other Mau stayed deep inside, curled in a ball, doing the dreaming.

And who am I, doing this? thought the gray Mau. Who am I now? I am become like Locaha, measuring the contours of death. Better be him than be Mau, on this day… because here is a body. And Mau will not see it, lift it, or look into its eyes, because he will go mad, so I will do it for him. And this one has a face Mau has seen every day of his life, but I will not let him see it now.

And so he worked, as the sky brightened and the sun came up behind the plume of steam in the east and the forest burst into song, despite the drizzle. He combed the lower slopes until he found a body, dragged it or carried it — some were small enough to carry — down to the beach and out to the point where you could see the current. There were usually turtles there, but not today.

He, the gray shadow, would find rocks and big coral lumps, and there were plenty of those, and tie them to the body with papervine. And now I must take my knife and cut the spirit hole, thought the gray Mau, so that the spirit will leave quickly, and pull the body out into the waves where the current sinks, and let it go.

The dreaming Mau let his body do the thinking: You lift like this, you pull like this. You cut the papervine like that, and you don’t scream, because you are a hand and a body and a knife, and they don’t even shed a tear. You are inside a thick gray skin that can feel nothing. And nothing can get through. Nothing at all. And you send the body sinking slowly into the dark current, away from birds and pigs and flies, and it will grow a new skin and become a dolphin.

There were two dogs, too, and that almost broke him. The people, well, the horror was so great that his mind went blank, but the twisted bodies of the dogs twisted his soul. They had been with the people, excited but not knowing why. He wrapped them in papervine and weighed them down and sent them into the current anyway. Dogs would want to stay with the people, because they were people, too, in their way.

He didn’t know what to do with the piglet, though. It was all by itself. Maybe the sow had legged it for the high forest, as they did when they sensed the water coming. This one hadn’t kept up. His stomach said it was food, but he said no, not this one, not this sad little betrayed thing. He sent it into the current. The gods would have to sort it out. He was too tired.

It was near sunset when he dragged the last body to the beach and was about to wade out to the current when his body told him: No, not this one. This is you and you are very tired but you are not dead. You need to eat and drink and sleep. And most of all you must try not to dream.

He stood for a while until the words sank in, and then trudged back up the beach, found his makeshift shelter, and fell into it.

Sleep came but brought no good thing. Over and over again he found the bodies and carried them to the shore because they were so light. They tried to talk to him, but he could not hear them because the words could not get through his gray skin. There was a strange one, too, a ghost girl, totally white. She tried to talk to him several times but faded back into the dream, like the others. The sun and moon whirled across the sky, and he walked on in a gray world, the only moving thing in veils of silence, forever.

And then he was spoken to, out of the grayness.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING, MAU?

He looked around. The land looked odd, without color. The sun was shining, but it was black.

When the voices spoke again, they seemed to come from everywhere at once, on the wind.

THERE IS NO TIME FOR SLEEPING. THERE IS SO MUCH THAT MUST BE DONE.

“Who are you?”

WE ARE THE GRANDFATHERS!

Mau trembled, and trembling was all he could manage. His legs would not move.

“The wave came,” he said. “Everyone is dead! I sent some into the dark water!”

YOU MUST SING THE DARK WATER CHANT.

“I didn’t know how!”

YOU MUST RESTORE THE GOD ANCHORS.

“How do I do that?”

YOU MUST SING THE MORNING SONG AND THE EVENING SONG.

“I don’t know the words! I am not a man!” said Mau desperately.

YOU MUST DEFEND THE NATION! YOU MUST DO THE THINGS THAT HAVE ALWAYS BEEN DONE!

“But there is just me! Everyone is dead!”

EVERYTHING THE NATION WAS, YOU ARE! WHILE YOU ARE, THE NATION IS! WHILE YOU REMEMBER, THE NATION LIVES!

There was a change in the pressure of air, and the Grandfathers… went.

Mau blinked and woke up. The sun was yellow and halfway down the sky, and beside him was a flat round metal thing, on top of which was a coconut with the top sliced off and a mango.

He stared at them.

He was alone. No one else could be here, not now. Not to leave him food and creep away.

He looked down at the sand. There were footprints there, not large, but they had no toes.

He stood up very carefully and looked around. The creature with no toes was watching him, he was sure. Perhaps… perhaps the Grandfathers had sent it?

“Thank you,” he said to the empty air.

The Grandfathers had spoken to him. He thought about this as he gnawed the mango off its huge stone. He’d never heard them before. But the things they wanted… how could a boy do them? Boys couldn’t even go near their cave. It was a strict rule.

But boys did, though. Mau had been eight when he’d tagged along after some of the older boys. They hadn’t seen him as he’d shadowed them all the way up through the high forests to the meadows where you could see to the edge of the world. The grandfather birds nested up there, which was why they were called grandfather birds. The older boys had told him that the birds were spies for the Grandfathers and would swoop on you and peck your eyes out if you came too close, which he knew wasn’t true, because he’d watched them and knew that — unless there was beer around — they wouldn’t attack anything bigger than a mouse if they thought it might fight back. But some people would tell you anything if they thought you’d be scared.

At the end of the meadows was the Cave of the Grandfathers, high up in the wind and the sunlight, watching over the whole world. They lived behind a round stone door that took ten men to shift, and you might live for a hundred years and see it moved only a few times, because only the best men, the greatest hunters and warriors, became Grandfathers when they died.

On the day he had followed the boys, Mau had sat and watched from the thick foliage of a grass tree as they dared one another to go near the stone, to touch it, to give it a little push — and then someone had shouted that he’d heard something, and within seconds they’d vanished into the trees, running for home. Mau had waited a little while, and when nothing happened, he had climbed down and gone and listened at the stone. He had heard a faint crackling right on the edge of hearing, but then a grandfather bird on the cliff above was throwing up (the ugly-looking things didn’t just eat everything, they ate all of everything, and carefully threw up anything that didn’t fit, taste right, or had woken up and started to protest). There was nothing very scary at all. No one had ever heard of the Grandfathers coming out. The stone was there for a reason. It was heavy for a reason. He forgot about the sound; it had probably been insects in the grass.

That night, back in the boys’ hut, the older boys boasted to the younger boys about how they had rolled away the big stone and how the Grandfathers had turned their ancient, dry old faces to look at them, and tried to stand up on their crumbling legs, and how the boys had (very bravely) rolled the big stone back again, just in time.

And Mau had lain in his corner and wondered how many times this story had been told over the last hundreds of years, to make big boys feel brave and little boys have nightmares and wet themselves.

Now, five years later, he sat and turned over in his hands the gray round thing that had acted as a holder for the mango. It looked like metal, but who had so much metal that they could waste it on something to hold food?

There were marks on it. They spelled out Sweet Judy in faded white paint — but they spelled out Sweet Judy in vain.

Mau was good at reading important things. He could read the sea, the weather, the tracks of animals, tattoos, and the night sky. There was nothing for him to read in lines of cracked paint. Anyone could read wet sand, though. A toeless creature had come out of the low forest and had gone back the same way.

At some time in the past something had split the rock of the island, leaving a long low valley on the east side that was not very far above sea level and had hardly any soil. Things had soon taken root even so, because something will always grow somewhere.

The low forest was always hot, damp, and salty, with the sticky, itchy, steamy atmosphere of a place that never sees much new air. Mau had forced his way in a few times, but there wasn’t much of interest, at least not at ground level. Everything happened high above, up in the canopy. There were wild figs up there. Only the birds could get at them, and they fought over the little morsels, which meant there was a steady rain of bird poo and half-eaten figs onto the forest floor, which in turn was a permanent feast for the little red crabs that scuttled around and cleared up anything that dropped in. Sometimes pigs came down to feed on the crabs, so the low forest was worth an occasional look. You had to be careful, though, because you often got a tree-climbing octopus or two in there, after baby birds and anything else they could find, and they were hard to pull off if they landed on your head. Mau knew that you must never let them think you are a coconut. You learned that fast, because they had sharp beaks.[! The tree-climbing octopus (Octopus arbori) is found on the Island Where the Sun Is Born, in the Mothering Sunday Islands. They are extremely intelligent, and cunning thieves.!]

Now he came around the huge broken rocks that stood at the entrance to the valley and stopped.

Something much bigger than a bird plop or a pig had hit the forest. It couldn’t have been just the wave. Some enormous thing had charged through, leaving a line of smashed trees into the distance.

And not just trees; it had left treasure behind. Rocks! Gray round ones, brown ones, black ones… good hard rocks had a lot of uses here, where the mountain rock was too crumbly to make decent weapons.

But Mau resisted the temptation to collect them now, because rocks don’t go anywhere and, besides, there was the dead man. He lay by the track, as if the creature had tossed him aside, and he was covered in little red crabs whose big day had come.

Mau had never seen a man like this before, but he’d heard of them — of the pale people in the north who wrapped their legs in cloth so they looked like a grandfather bird. They were called the trousermen, and were as pale as ghosts. This one didn’t worry him, not after the memory of yesterday, which screamed all the time behind a door in his head. This was just a dead man. He didn’t know him. People died.

Mau didn’t know what to do with him either, especially since the crabs did. Under his breath he said: “Grandfathers, what shall I do with the trouserman?”

There was a sound like the forest drawing its breath, and the Grandfathers said: HE IS NOT IMPORTANT! ONLY THE NATION IS IMPORTANT!

This was not a lot of help, so Mau dragged the man off the broken track and into a deeper part of the forest, with an army of little crabs following in a very determined way. They’d had years of fig seeds and bird plop. They’d put up with this like good little crabs, they seemed to say, but now it was time for their perfect world.

There was another trouserman farther along the trail, also dropped by the creature. Mau didn’t think about it at all this time, but just dragged him into the tangle of undergrowth, too. It was the best he could do. He had walked too much in the footsteps of Locaha lately. Perhaps the crabs would take the soul of the man back to the trouserman world, but here and now Mau had other things to think about.

Something had come out of the sea on the wave, he thought. Something big. Bigger than a sailfin crocodile,[!The sailfin crocodile (Crocodylus porosus maritimus) is still found in all parts of the Pelagic. It travels immense distances on the surface by means of a large skin-and-cartilage “sail” that it can, to some extent, steer.!] bigger than a war canoe, bigger even than… a whale? Yes, that could be it, a big whale. Why not? The wave had hurled big rocks beyond the village, so a whale wouldn’t stand a chance. Yes, a whale, that would be it, thrashing around in the forest with its big tail and slowly dying under its own weight. Or one of the really big sea squids, or a very big shark.

He had to be sure. He had to find out. He looked around and thought: Yes, but not in the dark. Not in the twilight. In the morning he’d come with weapons. And in the morning it might be dead.

He selected a couple of useful-looking rocks from the monster’s trail and ran for it.

Night rolled over the jungle. The birds went to bed, the bats woke. A few stars appeared in the desolate sky.

And in the tangle of broken trees at the end of the trail, something sobbed, all night.

Mau awoke early. There was no more fruit on the round metal thing, but a grandfather bird was watching him hopefully, in case he was dead. When it saw him moving, it sighed and waddled off.

Fire, thought Mau. I must make fire. And for that I need punk wood. His punk bag was a muddy mess because of the wave, but there was always punk in the high forest.

He was hungry, but you had to have fire. Without fire and a spear, you could never hope to be a man, wasn’t that right?

He spent some time hammering the metal thing between the two stones he’d taken from the monster’s track, and ended up with a long sliver of metal that was pretty bendy but very sharp. That was a good start. Then he chipped one stone against the other until he had enough of a groove to allow him to bind the stone to a stick with papervine. He wound papervine around one end of the new metal knife to make a kind of handle.

As the sun rose, so did Mau, and he raised his new club and his new knife.

Yes! They might be sorry things that a man would have thrown away, but now he could kill things. And wasn’t that part of being a man?

The grandfather bird was still watching him from a safe distance, but when it saw his expression, it shuffled off hurriedly and lumbered into the air.

Mau headed up to the high forest while the sun grew hotter. He wondered when he’d last eaten. There had been the mango, but how long ago? It was hard to remember. The Boys’ Island was far away in time and space. It had gone. Everything had gone. The Nation had gone. The people, the huts, the canoes, all wiped away. They were just in his head now, like dreams, hidden behind a gray wall —

He tried to stop the thought, but the gray wall crumbled and all the horror, all the death, all the darkness poured in. It filled up his head and buzzed out into the air like a swarm of insects. All the sights he had hidden from himself, all the sounds, all the smells crept and slithered out of his memory.

And suddenly it all became clear. An island full of people could not die. But a boy could. Yes, that was it! It made sense! He was dead! And his spirit had come back home, but he couldn’t see out of the spirit world! He was a ghost. His body was on the Boys’ Island, yes! And the wave had not been real, it had been Locaha, coming for him. It all made sense. He’d died on land with no one to put him into the dark water, and he was a ghost, a wandering thing, and the people were all around him, in the land of the living.

It seemed to Mau that this was not too bad. The worst had already happened. He would not be able to see his family again, because everyone hung ghost bags around the huts, but he would know that they were alive.

The world breathed in.

WHY HAVE YOU NOT REPLACED THE GOD ANCHORS? WHY HAVE YOU NOT SUNG THE CHANTS? WHY HAVE YOU NOT RESTORED THE NATION?

The little valley of the grandfather birds floated in front of Mau’s eyes. Well, at least they would believe him this time.

“I’m dead, Grandfathers.”

DEAD? NONSENSE, YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH TO BE DEAD!

Hot pain struck Mau’s left foot. He rolled and yelped, and a grandfather bird that had also decided he was dead and had pecked his foot to make sure hopped away hurriedly. It didn’t go far away, though, in case he died after all. In the grandfather bird’s experience, everything died if you watched it for long enough.

All right, not dead, Mau thought, pushing himself upright. But dead tired. A sleep full of dark dreams was no sleep at all; it was like a meal of ashes. He needed fire and real food. Everyone knew that bad dreams came when you were hungry. He didn’t want those dreams again. They were about dark waters, and something chasing him.

Mud and sand covered the fields, but worse than that, the wave had broken down the thorn fences, and the pigs had clearly been rooting all over the fields in the night, when Mau had been in the prison of his dreams. There would probably be something left in the muck if he grubbed about long enough, but a man didn’t eat where a pig had eaten.

There was plenty of wild food to eat on the island: upside-down fruit, bad-luck root, malla stems, red star tree, papervine nuts… you’d stay alive, but a lot of it you had to chew for a long time and even then it tasted as though someone had eaten it before you. Men ate fish or pork, but the lagoon was still cloudy, and he hadn’t seen a pig since he’d been back. They were wily, too. A man by himself might get a lucky shot if a pig came down in the low forest at night to eat crabs, but once they were in the high forest, you needed many men to catch one pig.

He found tracks as soon as he entered the forest. Pigs were always making tracks. These were fresh, though, so he poked around a bit to see what they’d been after and found some mad-root tubers, big and white and juicy; the pigs had probably been so stuffed with the food from the field that they were grubbing around out of pure habit, and didn’t have room for one more tuber. Mad-root tubers had to be roasted before they could be eaten, though, or else you went mad. Pigs ate them raw, but pigs probably didn’t notice if they were mad or not.

There was no dry punk wood. There were rotten branches all over the place, but they were sodden to the core. Besides, he thought, as he threaded the tubers on a length of papervine, he hadn’t found any fire stones yet, or decent dry wood for fire sticks.

Granddad Nawi, who did not go raiding because of his twisted leg, sometimes took the boys tracking and hunting, and he used to talk about the papervine bush. It grew everywhere, its long leaves as tough as anything even when they were crackling dry. “Take one strip of the vine lengthwise and yes, it needs the strength of two men to pull it apart. But weave five strands of it into a rope and a hundred men can’t break it. The more they pull, the more it binds together and the stronger it becomes. That is the Nation.”

They used to laugh at him behind his back because of his wobbling walk, and didn’t pay much attention to him, because what could a man with a twisted leg know about anything important? But they made sure that when they laughed they were well behind his back, because Nawi always had a faint little smile and an expression that said he already knew far more about you than you could possibly guess.

Mau tried not to laugh too much because he had liked Nawi. The old man watched how birds flew and always knew the best places to fish. He knew the magic word that would keep sharks away. But he hadn’t been carefully dried out in the hot sand and taken to the Cave of the Grandfathers when he’d died, because he’d been born with a leg that didn’t work properly and that meant he’d been cursed by the gods. He could look at a finch and tell you which island it had been born on; he used to watch spiders make webs, and saw things other people didn’t notice. Thinking about it, Mau had wondered why any god would curse someone like that. He’d been born with that leg. What had a baby done to make the gods angry?

One day he’d plucked up the courage to ask him. Nawi was sitting out on the rocks, occasionally staring out to sea in between carving something, but he’d given Mau a look that indicated company would not be objected to.

The old man had laughed at the question.

“It was a gift, boy, not a curse,” he said. “When much is taken, something is returned. Since I had a useless leg, I had to make myself a clever brain! I cannot chase, so I learn to watch and wait. I tell you boys these secrets and you laugh. When I hunt, I never come back empty-handed, do I? I think the gods looked at me and said to themselves, Well this one is a sharp one, eh? Let’s give him a gimpy leg so he can’t be a warrior and will have to stay at home among the women (a fate which has something to recommend it, my boy, believe me), and I thank them.”

Mau had been shocked at this. Every boy wanted to be a warrior, didn’t he?

“You didn’t want to be a warrior?”

“Never. It takes a woman nine months to make a new human. Why waste her effort?”

“But then when you died, you could be taken up to the cave and watch over us forever!”

“Hah! I think I’ve seen enough of you already! I like the fresh air, boy. I’ll become a dolphin like everyone else. I’ll watch the sky turn and I will chase sharks. And since all the great warriors will be shut up in their cave, it occurs to me there will be rather more female dolphins than male ones, which is a pleasing thought.” He leaned forward and stared into Mau’s eyes. “Mau…,” he said. “Yes, I remember you. Always at the back. But I could see you thinking. Not many people think, not really think. They just think they do. And when they laughed at old Nawi, you didn’t want to. But you laughed anyway, to be like them. I’m right, yes?”

How had he spotted that? But you couldn’t deny it, not now, not with those pale eyes looking through you.

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“Good. And now that I have answered your questions, I think you owe me a favor.”

“Do you want me to run an errand? Or I could — ”

“I want you to remember something for me. Have you heard that I know a word that drives away sharks?”

“People say so, but they laugh.”

“Oh, yes. But it works. I’ve tried it three times. The first was when I discovered it, which was when I was about to have my good leg bitten off, and then I tried it out from a raft, just to see if I’d been lucky the first time, and then I swam off the reef one day and frightened away a hammerhead.”

“You mean you went looking for a shark?” said Mau.

“Yes. Quite a big one, as I recall.”

“But you might have been eaten!”

“Oh, I’m not bad with a spear, and I had to find out,” said Nawi, grinning. “Someone had to eat the first oyster, you know. Someone looked at half a shell full of snot and was brave.”

“Why doesn’t everybody know?”

Nawi’s permanent smile turned down a little. “I’m a bit strange, yes? And the priests don’t like me much. If I told everyone, and someone died, I think things would be very tricky for me. But someone should know, and you are a boy who asks questions. Don’t use it until I’m dead, all right? Or until you are about to be eaten by a shark, of course.”

And there on the rocks, as the sunset made a path of red across the sea, Mau learned the shark word.

“It’s a trick!” he said, without thinking.

“Not so loud,” snapped Nawi, glancing back at the shore. “Of course it’s a trick. Building a canoe is a trick. Throwing a spear is a trick. Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it. And now you know another one. If it saves your life one day, catch a big fish and throw it to the first dolphin you see. With luck, it will be me!”

And now the old man and his leg were only a memory, along with everyone Mau had ever known. Mau wanted to scream with the weight of it. The world had emptied.

He looked down at his hands. And he’d made a club. A weapon for what? Why did it make him feel better? But he had to stay alive. Yes! If he died, then the Nation would never have been. The island would be left to the red crabs and the grandfather birds. There would be no one to say that anyone had been there.

There was a fluttering overhead. A grandfather bird had landed in a shaggy-headed grass tree. Mau knew that, even though he couldn’t see up through the tangle of vines; grandfather birds were very clumsy and didn’t so much land as crash slowly. It hopped around up there making the nab-nab grumbling noises, and then there was the familiar sound of throwing up and a shower of small bones pattered around the forest floor.

The tree shook as the grandfather bird took off again. It flapped out into the open, saw Mau, decided to watch him for signs of being dead, and landed heavily on a branch of a tree that could barely be seen under its weight of strangler vines.

For a moment boy and bird stared at each other.

The branch snapped.

The grandfather bird squawked and leaped away before the rotted wood hit the ground, and disappeared, flapping and squawking with injured pride, into the undergrowth. Mau paid it no attention. He was staring at the cloud of fine yellow dust rising from the fallen branch. It was punk dust, what you got when rot and termites and time hollowed out a dead branch. And this one had been up in the air, out of reach of the damp. The dust was like pollen. It would be the best ever for starting fires.

He took the biggest lump of branch that he could hold, stuffed both ends with leaves, and started back down the mountain.

There were pigs rooting in the fields again now, but he had no time to shoo them away. One piece of papervine soon breaks, he thought, and five bound together are strong. That’s good to know and it is true. The trouble is, I’m the one piece.

He stopped. He was taking the other, steeper track down to the vill — to the place where the village had been. The wave had surged across the island here, too. Trees were broken and everything stank of seaweed. But on the other side of the shattered trees was a cliff that overlooked the low forest.

Mau carefully tucked the tubers and the punk branch under some grass and pushed his way through the tangle of vines and branches at the edge of the cliff. It was possible to climb all the way up or down the cliff quite easily. He’d done it before. There were so many roots and vines and creepers growing over the stone, and so much soil and old birds’ nests had made a home for every drifting seed, that it was more like a vertical meadow, with flowers everywhere. There was papervine, too. There was always papervine. He cut enough to make a sling for his club, while whispering belated thank-yous to the Papervine Woman for her ever-reliable hair.

Now he slid to the edge and pushed aside a spray of orchids.

Mists were rising everywhere below him, but he could see the track the monster had left through the forest, a white scar half a mile long. It stopped at the group of fig trees that grew in the highest part of the low forest. They were massive. Mau knew them well. Their trunks had huge buttresses that looked as though they might reach down to the roots of the world. They would stop anything, but the steam and the spread of the tree canopy meant that he couldn’t see what it was that had been stopped.

But he heard a voice. It was very faint, but it was coming from somewhere below Mau. It sounded a bit like singing, but not a very big bit. To Mau, it just sounded like “na, na, na.”

But it was a human voice. Perhaps it was another trouserman? It was a bit squeaky. Were there trouserwomen? Or it could be a ghost. There would be a lot of ghosts now.

It was past noon. If it was a ghost, then it would be very weak. Mau was the Nation. He had to do something.

He started to climb down the cliff, which was easy enough even with trying to move quietly, although birds flew up all around him. He shivered. He didn’t know how to make a ghost bag. That was a woman’s task.

The a-bit-like-singing went on. Perhaps it was some sort of ghost, then. The birds had made such a racket that any living person would surely have stopped and investigated.

His feet touched the tangle of flaking stone and tree roots that was the floor of the lower forest, and he moved silently between the dripping trees.

“Na, na, na” — clink! — “na, na, na” — clink!

That sounded like metal. Mau grasped his club in both hands.

— “give, for, wild, con-fu-sion, peace” — clink! — “Oh, hear, us, when, we, cry, to, Thee” — clink! — “for, those in per-ril on the sea!” — clang! — “drat!”

Mau peered around the buttress of a giant fig tree.

There was a lot to see.

Something had been wrecked, but it was not alive. It was some kind of giant canoe, stuck between the trunks of two trees and covered with debris that looked as though it would be worth investigating, but not now. A big hole in the side leaked stones. But all this was background. Much closer to Mau, and staring at him in horror, was a girl — probably. But she could be a ghost; she was very pale.

And a trouserman, too. The trousers were white and frilly, like the feathery legs of a grandfather bird, but she also had some kind of skirt tucked up around her waist. And her hair glowed in the sunlight. She had been crying.

She had also been trying to dig into the forest floor with some odd kind of flat-headed spear that had the glint of metal about it. That was stupid; it was all roots and rocks, and there was a very small heap of rocks next to her. There was something else, too, large and wrapped up. Perhaps I did walk in the footsteps of Locaha, Mau thought, because I know that there is a dead man in there. And the ghost girl, she was in my nightmares.

I am not alone.

The girl dropped the flat-headed spear and quickly held up something else, something that also shone like metal.

“I kn-know how to use this!” she shouted very loudly. “One step more and I will pull the trigger, I mean it!” The metal thing waved back and forth in her hands. “Don’t think I’m afraid! I’m not afraid! I could have killed you before! Just because I felt sorry for you doesn’t mean you can come down here! My father will be here soon!”

She sounded excited. Mau took the view that she wanted him to have the metal thing, because by the way she was holding it with both hands and waving it about she was obviously very frightened of it.

He reached out for it, she screamed and turned her head away, something went click, there was a small fountain of sparks from near one end of the metal thing, and, quite slowly, a little round ball rolled out of a hole in the other end and landed in the mud in front of the girl. There were… things on her feet, he noticed with a sort of horrified fascination; they were like black pods and had no toes.

The girl was watching him in round-eyed terror.

Mau gently took the thing away from her, and she flattened herself against the side of the canoe as if he were the ghost.

The metal stank of something bitter and foul, but that wasn’t the important thing. It had sparked. Mau knew what to do with a spark.

“Thank you for this gift of fire,” he said, and picked up his axe and ran for it before she could do anything dreadful to him.

In the wreckage on the beach Mau crouched over his work. The punk branch was only the start. He had combed the forest for dry twigs and bark. There was always some, even after heavy rain, and he’d carefully made little piles of everything from grass to quite thick twigs. He’d made a small heap of crumbled dried-up papervine bark and punk and now, with great care, he picked up the spark-maker.

If you pulled back the piece of metal at the top until it went click, and then pulled the piece of metal at the bottom, and made certain — at least the second time — to keep your fingers out of the way, then a sort of metal claw scraped a dark stone down some metal and sparks would be born.

He tried it again, holding the spark-maker just above the punk heap, and held his breath as a few sparks dropped onto fine dust, which went black where they fell.

Mau blew across the heap, which he shielded in his cupped hands, and a tiny wisp of smoke went up. He kept his breath steady, and a little flame crackled into life.

This was the hard part. He fed the flame with great care, teasing it along with grass and bark until it grew fat enough for its first twig. Every move was thoughtful, because fire is so easily scared away. It wasn’t until it was crackling and hissing and spitting that he tried the first thin branch. There was a nasty moment when the flames seemed to choke on it, and then they came up stronger and before long were asking for more. Well, there was no shortage of fuel. Broken trees were everywhere. He dragged them into the flames, and they burst as the heat boiled the water in them. Mau threw more wood on, piling it up so that sparks and steam soared into the dark. Shadows jumped and danced across the beach and, while the flames burned, there was a sort of life.

After a while he dug out a hole on the edge of the fire, buried the mad-root tubers just under the sand, and scraped glowing embers over them.

Then he lay back. When was the last time he had sat by a fire, here at home? The memory rushed in before he could stop it. It was his last meal as a boy, with all his family there, and in the Nation all his family meant, sooner or later, just about everyone. It was his last meal because the next time he ate on the island it would be as a man, no longer living in the boys’ hut but sleeping in the house of the unmarried men. He hadn’t eaten much, because he’d been too excited. He’d been too scared, too, because he could just about get the idea that this wasn’t only about him; it was also about his family. If he came back ready for a man’s tattoos and, obviously, the… thing with the knife where you must not scream, then it would be a triumph for them, too. It would mean that he had been brought up in the right way and had learned the Right Things.

The fire crackled and sent smoke and steam up into the darkness, and he saw his family in the firelight, watching him, smiling at him. He closed his eyes and tried to force the clamoring memories away, into the dark.

Had he sent any of them into the dark current when he’d walked in the steps of Locaha? Perhaps. But there was no memory there. He’d been curled up in the gray body of the Locaha-Mau, as a part of him trudged back and forth, doing what was needed, taking the dead to become dolphins so that they wouldn’t become food for the pigs. He should have sung a burial chant, but he’d never been taught the words, so instead he’d straightened limbs on the bodies as tidily as he could. Perhaps he had seen faces, but then that part of him had died. He tried to remember the face of his mother, but all he could see was dark water. He could hear her voice, though, singing the song about the god of Fire, and how the Papervine Woman got fed up with him chasing her daughters and bound his hands to his sides with great coils of vine; and Man’s younger sister used to laugh at that and chase him with coils of — But a wave passed over his mind, and he was glad it washed the bright memory away.

He could feel the hole inside, blacker and deeper than the dark current. Everything was missing. Nothing was where it should be. He was here on this lonely shore, and all he could think of was the silly questions that children ask… Why do things end? How do they start? Why do good people die? What do the gods do?

And this was hard, because one of the Right Things for a man was: Don’t ask silly questions.

And now the little blue hermit crab was out of its shell and scuttling across the sand, looking for a new shell, and there wasn’t one. Barren sand stretched away on every side, and all it could do was run….

He opened his eyes. And now there was just him and the ghost girl. Had she been real? Was he real? Was that a silly question?

The smell of the tubers came up through the sand. His stomach suggested that they might be real, at least, and he burned his fingers digging them up. One would keep until tomorrow. The other one he broke open and stuck his face into the fluffy, crunchy, hot, savory heart of, and he went to sleep with his mouth full, while the shadows danced in circles around the fire.