Nation

WATER SPLASHED ON DAPHNE’S face. She opened her eyes, and her mouth said: “ — gle! ”

Cahle and the old woman looked down on her, smiling. As she blinked in the light, she felt Mrs. Gurgle gently pulling something out of her hair. But something else was happening. Memory was flowing out of her mind in a tide. The face of death… the great pillars of the world… the white slabs… they sped into the past like silver fish, fading as they went.

She turned to the mat beside her. Mau lay still and snored.

No reason to get excited, she thought, feeling a little lightheaded. He had been so cold, and she’d brought him up here to keep him warm. There had been… something that happened. The shape of it was still in her head, but she couldn’t fill it in. Except… “There was a silver fish? ” she wondered aloud.

Mrs. Gurgle looked very surprised and said something to Cahle, who smiled and nodded.

“She says you are indeed a woman of power, ” Cahle said. “You pulled him out of a dark dream. ”

“I did? I can’t remember. But there was a fish in it. ”

The hole in her memory was still there when Cahle had gone, and there was still a fish in it. Something big and important had happened and she had been there, and all she could remember was that there had been a fish in it?

Mrs. Gurgle had curled up in her corner, and it looked as if she was asleep. Daphne was certain that she wasn’t. She’d be peeking through eyelids that were almost closed and listening so hard that her ears would try to flap. All the women took far too much interest in her and Mau. It was like the maids back home gossiping. It was silly and quite unnecessary, it really was!

Mau looked quite small on the mat. The twitching had stopped, but he had curled up in a ball. It was a shock, now, to see him so still.

“Ermintrude, ” said her voice in the air.

“Yes, ” she said, and added, “You are me, aren’t you? ”

“When he is asleep, he still dreams of dark waters. Touch him. Hold him. Warm him. Let him know he is not alone. ”

It sounded like her own voice, and it made her blush. She could feel the hot pinkness rising up her neck. “That wouldn’t be seemly, ” she hissed, before she could stop herself. Then she wanted to shout: “That wasn’t me! That was some old woman’s stupid granddaughter! ”

“So who are you? ” said the voice in the air. “Some creature who knows how to feel but not how to touch? Here? In this place? Mau is alone. He thinks he has no soul, so he is building himself one. Help him. Save him. Tell him the stupid old men are wrong. ”

“The stupid old — ” Daphne began, and felt a memory uncoil. “The Grandfathers? ”

“Yes! Help him roll away the stone! He is a woman’s child and he is crying! ”

“Who are you? ” she asked the air.

The voice came back like an echo: “Who are you? ” Then the voice went, leaving not even a shape in the silence.

I’ve got to think about this, Daphne thought. Or perhaps not. Not now, in this place, because maybe there’s such a thing as too much thinking. Because however much of a Daphne you yearn to be, there is always your Ermintrude looking over your shoulder. Anyway, her thoughts added, Mrs. Gurgle is here, so she counts as a chaperone, and a better one than poor Captain Roberts, since she’s nothing like as dead.

She knelt by Mau’s mat. The voice had been right: There was a trickle of tears down his face, even though he seemed fast asleep. She kissed the tears because this felt like the right thing to do, and then tried to get an arm under him, which was really hard to manage and in any case her arm went to sleep and then got pins and needles, and she had to pull it out. So much for romance, she decided. She dragged her own mat over to his and lay down on it, which meant that an arm could go over him without too much difficulty but also that she had to rest rather awkwardly with her head on her other arm. But after a while his hand came up and grasped hers, gently, at which point, and despite the extreme discomfort, she fell asleep.

Mrs. Gurgle waited until she was sure that Daphne was sleeping, and then she uncurled her hand and looked at the little silver fish she had picked out of the girl’s hair. It coiled backward and forward in her palm.

She swallowed it. It was only a dream fish, but such things are good for the soul.

Daphne woke up just as the first light of dawn was painting the sky pink. She was stiff in muscles she’d never known she possessed. How did married couples manage? It was a mystery.

Mau was snoring gently and didn’t stir at all.

How could you help a boy like that? He wanted to be everywhere and do everything. And so he’d probably try to do more than he should and end up in trouble again and she would have to sort it out again. She sighed a sigh that was older than she was. Her father had been the same, of course. He’d spend all night working on dispatch boxes for the Foreign Office, with a footman on duty at all times to bring him coffee and roast duck sandwiches. It was quite usual for the maids to find him still at his desk in the morning, fast asleep with his head on a map of Lower Sidonia.

Her grandmother used to make sniffy remarks like: “I suppose His Majesty doesn’t have any other ministers? ” But now Daphne understood. He’d been like Mau, trying to fill the hole inside with work so that it didn’t overflow with memories.

Right now she was glad she was alone. Apart from the snoring of Mau and Mrs. Gurgle there was no sound but the wind and the boom of the waves on the reef. On the island, that was what counted as silence.

“Show us yer drawers! ” floated in through the doorway.

Oh, yes, and the wretched parrot. It really was very annoying. You often didn’t see it for days, because it had picked up a deep, cheerful hatred of the pantaloon birds and took a huge delight in annoying them at every opportunity. And then, just when you had a moment that was quiet and a bit, well, spiritual, it was suddenly all over the place shouting, “Show us your… underthings! ”

She sighed. Sometimes the world ought to be better organized. Then she listened for a while and heard the bird fly off up the mountain.

Right, she thought, first things first. So, first, she went out to the fireplace and set some salt-pickled beef to simmering in a pot. She added some roots that Cahle had said were okay, and one half of a very small red pepper. It had to be just one half because they were so hot a whole one burned her mouth, although Mrs. Gurgle ate them raw.

Anyway, she owed the old woman a lot of chewed beef.