Nation

“Pant-aa-loooon birddd, ” she said very slowly.

She thinks I’m a baby, thought Mau. That’s how you talk to babies when you want them to un-der-stand. She wants me to say it! www.authoringstore.ru

“Pant-aaa-looooon birrrrdd, ” he said.

She smiled, as if he’d just done a good trick, and pointed to the thickly feathered legs of the bird. “Pantaloons, ” she said, and this time she pointed to her frilly trousers, peeking from under her torn skirt. “Pantaloons! ”

All right, it looks as though “pantaloon bird” means “trouser bird, ” Mau told himself. Those frilly legs did look just like the bird’s strange feathered legs. But she’s got the name wrong!

He pointed to the picture again and said, in a talking-to-babies voice: “Graaaandfaaather birrrrd! ”

“Grandfather? ”

Mau nodded.

“Grandfather? ” The girl still looked bewildered.

Oh. She needed to be shown one. Well, he wasn’t going to roll away the big stone for anyone but…

It was quite a performance. Mau stroked an invisible long beard, staggered around leaning on a nonexistent walking stick, muttered angrily while waving a finger in the air, and — he was proud of this bit — tried to chew a tough piece of pork with invisible nonexistent teeth. He’d watched the old men eating, and he made his mouth look like two rats trying to escape from a bag.

“Old man? ” shouted Daphne. “Oh yes! Very droll! The old man bird! Yes, I see what you mean! They always look so annoyed! ”

After that, things happened quite fast, with the aid of the sand, a stick, and some pebbles, and a lot of acting. Some things were easy, like canoe, sun, and water. Numbers were not too bad, after a false start (one pebble is, in addition to being a pebble, one). They worked hard. Bird, big bird, small bird, bird flying… Nest! Egg!

Fire, cook, eat, good, bad (good was a mime of eating followed by a big smile, bad was Daphne’s unladylike but realistic pantomime of throwing up). They got the hang of here and there, and probably something that did the job of this is or here is. Mau wasn’t too sure of a lot of it, but at least they had the start of… something.

Back to the sand. Mau drew a stick figure and said “Man. ”

“Man, ” said Daphne, and took the stick from him. She drew another figure, but the legs were thicker.

Mau thought about it. “Pantaloon man? ” he tried.

“Trouser man, ” said Daphne firmly.

What does that mean? Mau wondered. Only trousermen are proper men? I don’t wear trousers. Why should I? Imagine trying to swim in them!

He took the stick and carefully drew a stick woman, which was like a stick man with a woven papervine skirt and two added circles and two dots. Above the skirt.

The stick was snatched out of his hand and, at speed, Daphne hastily drew a new figure. It was a woman, probably, but as well as the skirt there was another skirt thing covering the top of her body, with only the arms and head sticking out. Then she stuck the stick in the sand and crossed her arms defiantly, her face red.

Ah, right. This was like the time before his older sister went off to live in the unmarried girls’ hut. Suddenly everything he said and did had been wrong, and he never knew why. His father had just laughed when he told him, and said he’d understand one day, and it was best to keep away.

Well, he couldn’t keep away here, so he grabbed the stick and tried, as best he could, to draw a second skirt on the top half of the stick woman in front of him. It wasn’t very good, but Daphne’s look told him he’d done the right thing, whatever it was.

But it put a cloud in the sky. It had been fun, playing with the words and pictures, a sort of game that filled his world and kept the visions of dark water away. And now he’d hit a rule he didn’t understand, and the world was back to what it was before.

He squatted down on the sand and stared out to sea. Then he looked down at the little blue bead on his wrist. Oh, yes… and he had no soul. His boy soul had vanished with the island, and he’d never get a man soul now. He was the blue hermit crab, hurrying from one shell to another, and the big shell he had thought he could see had been taken away. A squid could snap a crab up in a second, only it wouldn’t be a squid for him, it would be some demon or ghost. It would enter his head and take him over.

He started to draw in the sand again, little figures this time, men and — yes — women, women whom he remembered, not covered-up trousermen women, and smaller figures, people of all sizes, filling the sand with life. He drew dogs and canoes and huts and —

— he drew the wave. The stick seemed to do it all by itself. It was a wonderful curve, if you didn’t know what it had done.

He shifted along a little and drew one stick figure, with a spear, looking out at the flat horizon.

“I think all that means sadness, ” said the girl behind him. Gently she took the stick out of his hand and drew another figure beside the first one. It was holding a portable roof, and wore pantaloons. Now two figures looked out at the endless ocean.

“Sadness, ” said Mau. “Saad ness. ” He turned the word over on his tongue. “Saaad nesssss. ” It was the sound of a wave breaking. It meant you could hear the dark waters in your mind. Then —

“Canoe! ” said Daphne. Mau looked along the beach, his head still full of sadness. What about canoe? They’d already done canoe, hours ago, hadn’t they? Canoe was sorted out!

And then he saw the canoe, a four-man canoe, coming through the reef. Someone was trying to steer it, and not doing a bad job, but the water tumbled and swirled in the new gap, and a canoe like that needed at least two people to guide it.

Mau dived into the lagoon. As he surfaced he could see that the lone paddler was already losing control; the gap in the reef was indeed big enough for a four-man canoe to come through it sideways, but any four-man canoe that actually tried anything as stupid as that while the tide was running would soon be overturned. He fought his way through the churning surf, expecting every second to see the thing break up.