“The little girl told me you had said something about a stone,” said Mau. “And then I had to have a bowl of beef. She insisted. And then I came as fast as I could, but she can’t run very fast.” He pointed. Blibi was walking up the valley, treading carefully in order to avoid snoring birds. “She said you told her she has to watch over me.”
They sat and waited, avoiding each other’s gaze. Then Mau said: “Er, the way it works is that the birds drink the beer, but the spirit of the beer flies to the Grandfathers. That’s what the priests used to say.”
Daphne nodded. “We have bread and wine at home,” she said, and thought, Oops, I won’t try to explain that one. They have cannibals down here. It could get… confusing.
“I don’t think it’s true, though,” said Mau.
Daphne nodded, and then thought a bit more. “Perhaps things can be true in special ways?” she suggested.
“No. People say that when they want to believe lies,” Mau said flatly. “And they usually do.”
There was another pause, which was filled by the parrot. With its mortal enemies paralyzed by the Demon Drink, it had swooped down and was industriously pulling their pants off them, which meant very neatly and carefully plucking out every white feather on their legs while making happy but fortunately muffled parrot noises.
“They look very… pink,” said Daphne, glad of something innocent, more or less, to talk about.
“Do you remember… running?” said Mau after a while.
“Yes. Sort of. I remember the fish.”
“Silver fish? Long and thin?”
“Like eels, yes!” said Daphne. Feathers were drifting across the valley in clumps.
“So it did happen, did it?”
“I suppose so.”
“I mean, was it a dream or was it real?”
“Mrs. Gurgle says yes,” said Daphne.
“Who is Mrs…. Gurgle, please?”
“The very old woman,” Daphne explained.
“You mean Mar-isgala-egisaga-gol?”
“Probably.”
“And she says yes to what?”
“Your question. I think she means it wasn’t the right one. Look, does Locaha talk to you?”
“Yes!”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
“In your head? Like your dreams?”
“Yes, but I know the difference!” said Mau.
“That’s good, because the Grandmothers have been talking to me.”
“Who are the Grandmothers?”
Blibi, if that was really her name, had caught up with them long before Daphne had finished talking and Mau had finished understanding. She sat at their feet, playing with pantaloon bird feathers.
Mau picked up a feather and twiddled it in his fingers. “They don’t like warriors, then.”
“They don’t like people being killed. Nor do you.”
“Have you heard of the Raiders?” asked Mau, brushing a feather off his face.
“Of course. Everyone’s talking about them. They have great war galleys, and they hang the skulls of their enemies along the sides of them. Oh, and enemy means everyone else.”
“We have perhaps thirty people here now. Some more arrived this morning, but most of them can hardly stand. They survived the wave, but they weren’t going to wait for the Raiders to come.”
“Well, you’ve got enough canoes. Can’t we just head east?” She said that without thinking, and then sighed. “We can’t, can we?”
“No. If we had more able-bodied people, and time to get provisions together, then we could try it. But it’s eight hundred miles of open ocean.”
“The weaker people would die. They came here to be safe!”
“They call this island ‘the place where the sun is born’ because it’s in the east. They look to us.”
“Then we could hide until the Raiders go away. Roll away the stone, the Grandmothers said.”
Mau stared at her. “And hide among the dead men? Do you think we should?”
“No! We should fight!” She was amazed at how fast the words came out. They had been pushed out by her ancestors, all those calm stone knights down in the crypt. They’d never ever thought about hiding, even when it was the sensible thing to do.
“Then I will think of a way,” said Mau.
“What do the Grandfathers say?”
“I don’t hear them anymore. I just hear… clicks, and insect noises.”
“Perhaps the Grandmothers have told them off,” said Daphne, giggling. “My grandmother was always telling my grandfather off. He knew everything there is to know about the fifteenth century but he was always coming down to breakfast without his teeth in.”
“They fell out in the night?” asked Mau, puzzled.
“No. He used to take them out to clean them. They were new teeth made out of animal bone.”
“You trousermen can give an old man new teeth? What will you tell me next? That you can give him new eyes?”
“Um… yes, actually something very much like that.”
“Why are you so much smarter than us?”
“I don’t think we are, really. I think it’s just that you have to learn to make things when it’s cold for half the year. I think we got our empire because of the weather. Anything was better than staying at home in the rain. I’m pretty certain people looked out of the window and rushed off to discover India and Africa.”
“Are they big places?”
“Huge,” said Daphne.
Mau sighed and said, “With the people who leave stones.”
“Who?”
“The god anchors,” said Mau. “I understand Ataba now. I don’t think he believes in his gods, but he believes in belief. And he also thinks trousermen came here a long time ago,” he added, shaking his head. “Maybe they brought the stones as ballast. It must have happened like that. Look at all the stone Judy the Sweet brought. Worthless rock to you, all kinds of tools to us. And maybe they gave us metal and tools, like giving toys to children, and we carved the stones because we wanted them to come back. Isn’t that how it would go? We are a little island. Tiny.”
The Phoenicians, thought Daphne glumly. They went on long, long voyages. So did the Chinese. What about the Aztecs? Even the Egyptians? Some people say they visited Further Australia. And who knows who might have been around thousands of years ago? He’s probably right. But he looks so sad.
“Well, you might be a small island,” she said, “but you are an old one. The Grandmothers must have some reason for telling you to roll away the big stone.”
They looked at the stone, which glowed a golden yellow in the afternoon light.
“You know, I can’t remember a longer day than this,” said Daphne.
“I can,” said Mau.
“Yes. That was a long day, too.”
“It takes ten strong men to move the stone,” said Mau after a while. “We don’t have that many.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Daphne. “How many would it take if one of them was Milo, and he had a crowbar made of steel?”
It took time. There was a groove in the rock that had to be scraped out, and tree trunks to be dragged into position to stop the door from falling outward as it moved. The sun was starting to fall down the sky by the time Milo stepped up to the stone with a six-foot bar of steel in his hand.
Mau looked at it glumly. It was useful and he was glad to have it, but it was a trouserman thing, another present from the Sweet Judy. They were still stripping her like termites.
Even a canoe had a soul, of a kind. Everyone knew that; sometimes it wasn’t a good soul, and the craft was hard to handle, even though it seemed to be well built. If you were lucky you got a canoe with a good soul, like the one he’d built on the Boys’ Island, which always seemed to know what he wanted. The Sweet Judy had a good soul, he could tell. It was a shame to break her up, and another kind of shame to know that, once again, they had to rely on the trousermen to get things done. He was almost ashamed of carrying one of the smaller crowbars himself, but they were so useful. Who but the trousermen had so much metal that they could afford to make sticks out of it. But the bars were wonderful. They opened anything.
“There may be a curse on the door,” said Ataba, behind Mau.
“Can you tell if there is?”
“No! But this is wrong.”
“These are my ancestors. I seek their guidance. Why should they curse me? Why should I fear their old bones? Why are you afraid?”
“What is in the dark should be left alone.” The priest sighed. “But no one listens to me now. The coral is full of white stones, people say, so which ones are holy?”
“Well, which?”
“The three old ones, of course.”
“You could test them,” said Daphne, without thinking. “People could leave a fish on a new stone and see how their fortune changes. Hmm, I’d need to work out a scientific way — ” She stopped, aware that everyone was watching her. “Well, it would be interesting,” she finished lamely.
“I did not understand any of that,” said Ataba, looking coldly at her.
“I did.”
Mau craned to see who had spoken and saw the tall skinny figure of Tom-ali, a canoe builder who had arrived with two children who were not his, one boy and one girl.
“Speak, Mr. Tom-ali,” he said.
“I would like to ask the gods why my wife and son died and I did not.” There was some murmuring from the crowd.
Mau already knew him. He knew all the newcomers. They walked the same way, slowly. Some just sat and watched the sea. And there was a grayness about them all. Why am I here? their faces said. Why me? Was I a bad person?
Tom-ali was repairing the canoes now, with the boy helping him, while the girl helped out in the Place. Some of the children were coping better than the adults; after the wave, you just found a place that fitted. But Tom-ali had said what a lot of people didn’t want to hear said, and the best thing to do was to give them something else to think about, right now.
“We all want answers today,” Mau said. “Please, all of you, help me move the stone. No one else has to set foot inside. I will go in by myself. Perhaps I’ll find the truth.”
“No,” said Ataba firmly, “let us go in there together and find the truth.”
“Fine,” said Mau. “That way we can find twice as much.”
Ataba stood next to Mau as the men took up their positions. “You say you are not frightened. Well, I am frightened, young man, to my very toes.”
“The truth will be the dead men in there, that’s all,” said Mau. “Dried up. Dust. If you want to be frightened, think about the Raiders.”
“Do not dismiss the past so lightly, demon boy. It may still teach you something.”
Milo forced the bar between the rock and the stone, and heaved. The stone creaked, and moved an inch —
They did it carefully and slowly, because it would certainly crush anybody it fell on. But cleaning out the groove had been a good idea. The stone ran smoothly, until half of the cave entrance could be seen.
Mau looked inside. There was nothing there. He’d imagined all kinds of things, but not nothing. The floor was quite smooth. There was a bit of dust on the floor, and a few beetles scuttled off into the dark, and that was all the cave held. Except depth.
Why had he expected bones to fall out when the door was opened? Why should it be full up? He picked up a piece of rock and threw it into the darkness as hard as he could. It seemed to bounce and rattle for a long time.
“All right,” he said, and the cave threw his voice back at him. “We’re going to need those lamps, Daphne.”
She stood up, with one of the Sweet Judy’s lamps in each hand. “One red one and one green one,” she said. “The spare port and starboard lights. Sorry about that, but we haven’t got very many cabin lamps left, and we’re short of oil.”
“What about that white lamp next to you?” asked Mau.
“Yes, that’s the one I’m going to bring,” said the ghost girl, “and to save time, shall we pretend we’ve had the argument and I won?”
More trouserman things, Mau thought as he picked up his lamp. I wonder what we used to use? The low ceiling told him when he touched it. His fingers came away covered in soot.
Torches, then. You could make decent ones out of hog fat. If there was enough of the stuff to spare, they were good for night fishing, because the fish would rise to the light. We’ve been living off fish and the Sweet Judy’s salt-pickled beef, because that’s easy, he thought, so now we’ll have to find our dead by trouserman lamplight.
CHAPTER 10
Believing Is Seeing
THE CAVE WAS WAITING. It might contain anything, Mau thought. And that was the point, wasn’t it? You had to find out. You had to know. And Daphne didn’t seem concerned. Mau told her that there would probably be bones, and she said that was fine, because bones didn’t try to kill you, and that since she had got the message from the Grandmothers, she was going to see it through, thank you so very much.
They found the Grandfathers right at the point where you could just see the waning daylight, and Mau began to understand. They weren’t scary, they were just… sad. Some of them still sat as they had been put, with their knees up under their chins, staring toward the distant light with flat dead eyes. They were just husks and crumbled bones. If you looked carefully, you could see that they had been held together with papervine. It really did have many uses, even after death.
They stopped when the daylight was a little dot at the end of the tunnel.
“How many more can there be?” Ataba wondered.
“I’m counting,” said Mau. “There’s more than a hundred of them so far.”
“One hundred and two,” said Daphne. There seemed to be no end to them, sitting one behind the other like the world’s oldest rowing crew, sculling into eternity. Some of them still had their spears or clubs, tied to their arms.
They went on, and the light vanished. The dead passed in their hundreds and Daphne lost count. She kept reminding herself how scared she wasn’t. After all, hadn’t she quite enjoyed that lecture on anatomy she had attended? Even though she had kept her eyes shut throughout?
However, if you were going to look at hundreds and thousands of dead men, it didn’t help to see the light from Ataba’s lamp flicker over them. It seemed to make them move. And they had been men of the islands; she could see, on ancient, leathery skin, blurred tattoos, like the ones every man — well, every man except Mau — wore even now. A wave, curling across the face of the setting sun…
“How long have you been putting people in here?” she asked.
“Forever,” said Mau, running on ahead. “And they came from the other islands, too!”
“Are you tired, sir?” said Daphne to Ataba, when they were left alone.
“Not at all, girl.”
“Your breathing does not sound good.”
“That is my affair. It is not yours.”
“I was just… concerned, that’s all.”
“I would be obliged if you would stop being concerned,” Ataba snapped. “I know what is happening. It starts with knives and cooking pots, and suddenly we belong to the trousermen, yes, and you send priests and our souls do not belong to us.”
“I’m not doing anything like that!”
“And when your father comes in his big boat? What will happen to us then?”
“I… don’t know,” said Daphne, which was better than telling the truth. We do tend to stick flags in places, she had to admit it herself. We do it almost absentmindedly, as though it’s a sort of chore.
“Hah, you fall silent,” said the priest. “You are a good child, the women say, and you do good things, but the difference between the trousermen and the Raiders is that sooner or later the cannibals go away!”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” said Daphne hotly. “We don’t eat people!”
“There are different ways to eat people, girl, and you are clever, oh yes, clever enough to know it. And sometimes the people don’t realize it’s happened until they hear the belch!”
“Come quickly!” That was Mau, whose lamp was a faint green glow in the distance.