Nation

They fell silent, and the baby cried again.

“My son! ” said Milo as the others cheered. “And he will be a great warrior! ”

“Er, I’m not sure it meant — ” Pilu began.

“A great man, anyway, ” said Milo, waving a hand. “They say the birth song can be a prophecy, for sure. That type of language at this time… it’s telling us what will be, right enough. ”

“Do the trousermen have gods? ” asked Mau.

“Sometimes. When they remember — Hey, here she comes! ”

The outline of the ghost girl appeared in the stone entrance to the place.

“Mr. Pilu, tell your brother he is the father of a little boy and his wife is well and sleeping. ”

That news was passed on with a whoop, which is easy to translate.

“And he be called Twinkle? ” Milo suggested, in broken English.

“No! I mean, no, don’t. Not Twinkle, ” said the ghost girl quickly. “That would be wrong. Very, very wrong. Forget about Twinkle. Twinkle, NO! ”

“Guiding Star? ” said Mau, and that met with general approval.

“That would be very auspicious, ” said Ataba. He added, “Is there going to be beer, by any chance? ”

The choice was also translated for the ghost girl, who indicated that any name that wasn’t Twinkle was bound to be good. Then she asked — no, commanded — that the other young woman and her baby be brought up and all sorts of things carried to the Place from the wreck of the Sweet Judy. The men jumped to it. There was a purpose.

… And now it was two weeks later, and a lot had happened. The most important thing was that time had passed, pouring thousands of soothing seconds across the island. People need time to deal with the now before it runs away and becomes the then. And what they need most of all is nothing much happening.

And this is me, seeing all that horizon, Daphne thought, looking at the wash of blue that stretched all the way to the end of the world. My goodness, Father was right. If my horizon was any broader it would have to be folded in half.

It’s a funny saying, “broaden your horizons. ” I mean, there’s just the horizon, which moves away from you, so you never actually catch up with it. You only get to where it’s been. She’d watched the sea all around the world, and it had always looked pretty much the same.

Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe you moved, you changed.

She couldn’t believe that back in ancient history, she’d given the poor boy scones that tasted like rotting wood and slightly like dead lobster! She’d fussed about napkins! And she’d tried to shoot him in the chest with poor Captain Roberts’s ancient pistol, and in any book of etiquette that was a wrong move.

But then, was that her back there? Or was this her, right here, in the sheltered garden that was the Women’s Place, watching the Unknown Woman sitting by the pool but holding her little son tightly, like a little girl holds a favorite dolly, and wondering if she shouldn’t take the child again, just to give it some time to breathe.

It seemed to Daphne that the men thought all women spoke the same language. That had seemed silly and a bit annoying, but she had to admit that in the Place, right now, the language was Baby. It was the common language. Probably everyone makes the same sort of cooing noises to babies, everywhere in the world, she thought. We kind of understand it’s the right thing to do. Probably no one thinks that the thing to do is to lean over it and hit a tin tray with a hammer.

And suddenly, that was very interesting. Daphne found herself watching the two babies closely, in between the chores. When they didn’t want feeding, they turned their heads away, but if they were hungry, their little heads bobbed forward. It’s like shaking your head for no and nodding it for yes. Is this where it comes from? Is it the same everywhere? How can I find out? She made a note to write this down.

But she was really worried about the mother of the baby whom, in the privacy of her head, Daphne called the Pig Boy. The woman was sitting up now, and sometimes walked around, and smiled when you gave her food, but there was something missing. She didn’t play with her baby as much as Cahle, either. She let Cahle feed it, because there must have been some lamp still burning in her brain that knew it was the only way, but afterward she’d grab it and scuttle off to the corner of a hut, like a cat with a kitten.

Cahle was already bustling round the place, always with her baby under her arm, or handed to Daphne if she needed to use both hands. She was a bit puzzled about Daphne, as if she wasn’t quite sure what the girl was but was going to be respectful anyway, just in case. They tended to smile at each other in a slightly wary “we’re getting on fine, I hope” kind of way when their eyes met, but sometimes, when Cahle caught Daphne’s attention, she made a little motion toward the other woman and tapped her own head sadly. That didn’t need a translation.

Every day one of the men brought some fish up, and Cahle showed Daphne some of the plants in the Place. They were mostly roots, but there were also some spicy plants, including a pepper that made Daphne go and lie with her mouth in the stream for three minutes, although she felt very good afterward. Some of the plants were medicines, as far as she could tell. Cahle was good at pantomime. Daphne still wasn’t sure whether the little brown nuts on the tree with the red leaves made you sick or stopped you from being sick, but she tried to remember everything anyway. She was always superstitious about remembering useful things she had been told, at least outside lessons. You would be bound to need it one day. It was a test the world did to make sure you were paying attention.

She tried to pay attention when Cahle showed her cookery stuff; the woman seemed to think it was very important, and Daphne tried hard to hide the fact that she’d never cooked anything in her life. She’d learned how to make some kind of drink, too, that the woman was… emphatic about.

It smelled like the Demon Drink, which was the cause of Ruin. Daphne knew this because of what happened when Biggleswick the butler broke into her father’s study one night and got Rascally Drunk on whiskey and woke up the whole house with his singing. Grandmother had sacked him on the spot and refused to relent even when Daphne’s father said that Biggleswick’s mother had died that day. The footmen pulled him out of the house and carried him to the stables and left him crying in the straw with the horses trying to lick the tears off his face, for the salt.

What upset Daphne, who had quite liked Biggleswick, especially the way he walked with his feet turned out so that he looked as if he might split in two at any moment, was that he lost his job because of her. Grandmother had stood at the top of the stairs like some ancient stone goddess, pointed at Daphne (who had been watching with interest from the upper landing), and screamed at her father: “Will you stand there doing nothing when your only child is exposed to such Lewdness? ”

And that had been it for the butler. Daphne had been sorry to see him go, because he was quite kind and she’d very nearly mastered his waddle. Later she’d heard via the dumbwaiter that he’d met a Bad End. And all because of the Demon Drink.