Nation

And it was… funny, mostly because they both had to blow on the soup to get it cool, and she seemed very surprised that he spat out fish bones into the fire while she very carefully coughed them into a piece of frilly cloth that was very nearly stiff with salt and sand. One of them started giggling, or maybe it was both of them at the same time, and then he was laughing so much, he couldn’t spit the next bone at all and, instead, coughed it out into his hand with the same little noise that she made, which was “uh-pur, ” which made her nearly choke. But she managed to stop laughing long enough to try to spit out a bone, which she couldn’t get the hang of at all.

They didn’t know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you’ve got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you’re alive, when you really shouldn’t be.

And then they lay back looking up at the sky, where the star of Air sparkled yellow-white in the east and Imo’s Campfire was a sharp red overhead, and sleep hit them like a wave.

Mau opened his eyes.

The world was full of birdsong. It was everywhere, and every kind of song, from the grandfather birds honking up last night’s leftovers to — from the direction of the low forest — something that really should not count as birdsong at all, because it went: “Polly wants a fig, you Bible-thumping ol’ fool! Waark! Show us yer drawers! ”

He sat up.

The girl had gone, but her strange toeless prints led toward the low forest.

Mau looked into the clay pot. There had been hardly anything left by the time the shells had scraped it out, but while they had been sleeping something small had licked it clean.

He could try clearing some more of the debris off the fields today. There could be more crops to —

REPLACE THE GOD ANCHORS! SAY THE CHANTS!

Oh, well… up until now it had been a good day, in a horrible kind of way.

The god anchors… well, they were things. If you asked about them, you’d be told you were too young to understand. All that Mau knew was that they kept the gods from floating away into the sky. Of course, the gods were in the sky in any case, but asking about that was a silly question. Gods could be anywhere they wanted. But somehow, for reasons that were perfectly clear, or at least perfectly clear to the priests, the gods stayed near the god anchors and brought good luck to the people.

So which god brought the great wave, and how lucky was that?

There had been a great wave before, everyone said. It turned up in stories of the Time When Things Were Otherwise and the Moon Was Different. Old men said it was because people had been bad, but old men always said that kind of thing. Waves happened, people died, and the gods did not care. Why had Imo, who had made everything and was everything —? Would He have made useless gods? There it was, out of the darkness inside, another thought that he wouldn’t even have known how to think a few days ago, and so dangerous he wanted to get it out of his head as soon as possible.

What did he have to do to the god anchors? But the Grandfathers didn’t answer questions. There were little mud or wood god stones all over the island. People placed them for all sorts of reasons, from watching over a sick child to making sure a crop didn’t spoil. And since it was seriously bad luck to move a god stone, no one did. They were left to fall apart naturally.

He’d seen them so often that he didn’t look at them anymore. The wave must have moved hundreds of them, and washed them away. How could he put them back?

He looked up and down the beach. Most of the branches and broken trees had gone now, and for the first time he saw what wasn’t there.

There had been three special god stones in the village — the god anchors. It was hard, now, to remember where they had been, and they certainly weren’t there now. Those anchors were big cubes of white stone, almost too heavy for a man to lift, but the wave had even snapped the house posts and thrown lumps of coral the size of a man across the lagoon. It wouldn’t have worried about some stone blocks, no matter what they anchored.

He walked along the beach, hoping to see signs leading him to one almost buried in the sand. He didn’t. But he could see a god stone on the floor of the lagoon, now that the water had cleared a bit. He dived in to fetch it, but it was so heavy that bringing it out needed several tries. The lagoon had been scoured by the wave and shelved quite deeply at the west end. He had to carry the stone along the bed, sometimes leaving it behind and coming up to fill his lungs with air, until he found a place shallow enough to bring it out. And of course it weighed more out of the water for some magical reason no one understood; he was out of breath by the time he’d rolled it end over end up the beach.

He remembered this one. It had been next to the chief’s house. It was the one with the strange creature carved on it. The creature had four legs, like a hog but much longer, and a head like an elas-gi-nin. People called it the Wind, and gave it fish and beer for the god of Air before they went on a long journey. Birds and pigs and dogs took the fish, and the beer soaked into the sand, but that didn’t matter. It was the spirit of the fish and the spirit of the beer that mattered. That’s what they said.

He dived in again. The lagoon was a mess. The wave had scattered house-size bits of the reef everywhere, as well as tearing a new entrance for the sea. But he had seen something white over there.

As he got near, he saw how big the new gap was. A ten-man canoe could have got through it sideways.