Nation

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 www.papertyne.ru 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. !]