Nation

And now for the big test. Things shouldn’t be allowed to just happen. If she was going to be a woman of power, she had to take charge. She couldn’t always be the ghost girl, pushed around by events.

Right. Should she kneel? People didn’t seem to kneel here, but she didn’t want to be impolite, even if she was talking to herself.

Hands together. Eyes closed? It was so easy to get things wrong —

The message came right away.

“You did not put a spear into Twinkle’s hand, ” said her own voice in her own head, even before she’d had time to think how to begin. She thought: Oh dear, whoever it is, they know that I still think of the baby as Twinkle.

“Are you a heathen god of some sort? ” she asked. “I’ve been thinking about this, and well, gods do talk to people, and I understand there are quite a lot of gods here. I just want to know if there is going to be any thunder and lightning, because I really don’t like that. Or if I’ve gone mad and I’m hearing voices. However, I have dismissed this hypothesis because I don’t believe that people who have really gone mad think they have gone mad, so wondering if you have gone mad means that you haven’t. I just want to know who I’m talking to, if you don’t mind. ”

She waited.

“Er, I apologize for calling you heathen, ” she added.

There was still no reply. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or not and decided instead to be a bit hurt.

She coughed. “All right. Very well, ” she said, standing up. “At least I tried. I’m sorry to have trespassed on your time. ” She turned to leave the hut.

“We would take the newborn child and make his little hand grasp a spear, so that he would grow up to be a great warrior and kill the children of other women, ” said the voice. “We did it. The clan said so, the priests said so, the gods said so. And now you come, and what do you know of the custom? ” the voice went on. “And so the first thing the baby touches is the warmth of his mother, and you sing him a song about stars! ”

Was she in trouble? “Look, I’m really sorry about the twinkle song — ” she began.

“It was a good song for a child, ” said the voice. “It began with a question. ”

This was getting very strange. “Have I done something wrong or not? ”

“How is it that you hear us? We are blown about by the wind, and our voices are weak, but you, a trouserman, heard our struggling silence! How? ”

Had she been listening? Daphne wondered. Perhaps she’d never stopped after all those days in the church after her mother died, saying every prayer she knew, waiting for even a whisper in reply. She hadn’t been looking for an apology. She wasn’t asking for time to run backward. She just wanted an explanation that was better than “It’s the will of God, ” which was grown-up speak for “because. ”

It had seemed to her, thinking about it in her chilly bedroom, that what had happened was very much like a miracle. After all, it had been a terrible storm, and if the doctor had managed to get there without his horse being struck by lightning, that would have been a miracle, wouldn’t it? That’s what people would have said. Well, in that big, dark, rainy, roaring night, the lightning had managed to hit quite a small horse among all those big thrashing trees. Didn’t that look like a miracle, too? It was almost exactly the same shape, wasn’t it? In any case, besides, didn’t they call something like this an “act of God”?

She’d been very polite when she put the question to the archbishop, and in her opinion it had been really unreasonable for her grandmother to scream like a baboon and drag her out of the cathedral by her ear.

But she had kept looking out for a voice, a whisper, a word that would let it all make sense. She just wanted it all… sorted out.

She looked up into the gloomy roof of the hut.

“I heard you because I was listening, ” she said.

“Then listen to us, girl who can hear those who have no voices. ”

“And you are —? ”

“We are the Grandmothers. ”

“I’ve never heard of the Grandmothers! ”

“Where do you think little grandfathers come from? Every man has a mother, and so does every mother. We gave birth to little grandfathers, and filled them with milk, and wiped their bottoms and kissed their tears away. We taught them to eat, and showed them what food was safe, so that they grew up straight. We taught them the songs of children, which have lessons in them. And then we gave them to the Grandfathers, who taught them how to kill other women’s sons. The ones who were best at this were dried in the sand and taken to the cave. We went back to the dark water, but part of us remains, here in this place where we were born and gave birth and, often, died. ”

“The Grandfathers shout at Mau all the time! ”

“They are echoes in a cave. They remember the battle cries of their youth, over and over again, like the talking bird. They are not bad men. We loved them, as sons and husbands and fathers, but old men get confused and dead men don’t notice the turning of the world. The world must turn. Tell Mau he must roll away the stone. ”

And they left. She felt them slide out of her mind.

That, thought Daphne, was impossible. Then she thought: Up to now, anyway. They were real, and they’re still here. They’re what I felt when Twinkle was being born, as if the Place was alive and on my side. Perhaps some voices are so old everyone understands them.

The light came back slowly, gray at first like the dawn. Daphne heard a faint noise close at hand, looked around, and saw a young girl standing in the hut doorway, staring at her in horror. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name, because she had been here only a few days, and was going to tell her off when she did remember that although the girl had arrived with some other survivors, none of them had been her relatives. And she’d been about to shout at her.

Moving very carefully, Daphne crouched down and held out her arms. The child looked as though she was one heartbeat away from fleeing.

“What is your name? ”

The girl looked down at her feet and whispered something that sounded like “Blibi. ”

“That’s a nice name, ” said Daphne, and gently drew the child to her. As the sobs began to shake the little body, she made a note to tell Cahle. People were turning up every day now, and people who needed looking after were looking after others. That wasn’t such a bad thing, but while everyone got food to eat and a place to sleep, there were other things that were just as important that tended to get overlooked when everyone was busy.

“Do you know about cooking, Blibi? ” she asked. There was a kind of muffled nod. “Good! And do you see that man lying on the mat? ” Another nod. “Good. Good. I want you to watch over him. He has been ill. The meat in the pot will be ready when the sun has moved a hand-width above the trees. I’m going to look at a stone. Tell him he must eat. Oh, and you must eat, too. ”