Nation

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 referencebooks.ru 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.