Terry Pratchett - Nation

And there was the Place, a round bowl of a valley full of sunlight. Screens of trees kept out the wind, and thorn and briar bushes were woven so thickly among them that nothing except maybe a snake could get through, and today the valley looked as though it was asleep. Mau could hear the sea, but it seemed to be a long way off. There was the tinkle of a little stream that dribbled out of the rock at one side of the bowl, filled a rocky hollow that was a natural bathing place, and lost itself in the gardens.

The Nation grew the big crops in the large field. That was where you found aharo, sugarcane, tabor, boomerang peas, and black corn. There men grew the things that made you live.

In the Place, the gardens of the women grew the things that made the living enjoyable, possible, and longer: spices and fruits and chewing roots. They had ways of making crops grow bigger or more tasty. They dug up or traded plants and brought them here, and knew the secrets of seeds and pods and things. They raised pink bananas here and rare plantains and yams, including the jumping yam. They also grew medicines here, and babies.

Here and there around the edges of the gardens were huts. Mau approached them carefully, beginning to feel nervous. Someone should be shouting at him, some old woman should be pointing and mumbling, and he should be running away very fast with his hands cupped over his groin, just in case. Anything would be better than this sunny, empty silence.

So there are still rules, he thought. I brought them with me. They’re in my head.

There were baskets in some of the huts, and bunches of roots hung from the ceiling, out of reach of small fingers. They were maniac roots. You learned about them very early on. They made the best beer of all or they killed you as dead as a stone, and the secret ingredient that decided which of these happened was a song that everybody knew.

He found what he was looking for in the hut by the spring. A whole bowl of chopped root was hissing and bubbling gently to itself under a pile of palm leaves. The sharp, prickly smell filled the hut.

How much did some dead men drink? He filled a calabash with the stuff, which should be enough. He was careful how he poured it, because it was very dangerous at this stage, and he hurried away before a ghost could catch him.

He reached the valley of the Grandfathers without spilling much, and tipped the contents of the calabash into the big stone bowl in front of the sealed cave. From the gnarly old trees a couple of grandfather birds watched him carefully.

He spat into the bowl, and the beer seethed for a while. Big yellow bubbles burst on the surface.

Then he sang. It was a simple little song, easy to remember, about the four brothers, all sons of Air, who one day decided to race around the huge belly of their father to see which of them would court the woman who lived in the Moon, and the tricks each one played on the others so that he could be first. Babies learned it. Everyone knew it. And, for some reason, singing that song turned the poison into beer. It really did.

The beer foamed in the bowl. Mau watched the big round stone, just in case, but the Grandfathers probably had a way of drinking beer from the spirit world.

He sang his way through the song, taking care not to miss any verse, especially the one that was very funny when you did the right gestures. When he finished, the beer had gone clear, with golden bubbles rising to the top. Mau took a sip, to check. His heart didn’t stop after one beat, so the beer was probably fine.

He took a few steps back and said, to the wide open sky: “Here is your beer, Grandfathers!”

Nothing happed. It was a bad thought, but a thank you might have been nice.

Then the world drew a breath and the breath became voices: YOU HAVE FAILED TO DO THE CHANT!

“I have sung the song! It is good beer!”

WE MEAN THE CHANT THAT CALLS US TO THE BEER!

A couple more grandfather birds crash-landed in the trees.

“I didn’t know there was one!”

YOU ARE A LAZY BOY!

Mau grabbed at this. “That’s right, I’m just a boy! There is no one to teach me! Can you —?”

HAVE YOU RIGHTED THE GOD ANCHORS? NO! And with that the voices snapped into silence, leaving only the sighing of the wind.

Well, it looked like good beer. What was a chant needed for? Mau’s mother had made good beer, and people had just turned up.

With a flapping of wings, a grandfather bird landed on the edge of the beer stone and gave him the usual stare that said: If you are going to die, hurry up. Otherwise, leave.

Mau shrugged and walked away. But he hid behind a tree, and he was good at hiding. Maybe the big round stone would roll.

It didn’t take long for several more grandfather birds to alight on the bowl. They squabbled for a while and then, with the occasional pause for another brief fight, settled down to some serious boozing, rocking backward and forward because that is how birds move when they drink, then rocking backward and forward and forward and falling over a lot, which is how birds move when they have been drinking fresh beer. One took off and flew backward into some bushes.

Mau walked back thoughtfully to the beach, stopping on the way to cut himself a spear from the forest. Down on the beach he sharpened it to a point, which he hardened in the fire, occasionally glancing up at the sun.

He did all this slowly, because his mind was filling up with questions. They came out of the black hole inside him so fast that they made it hard to think in a straight line. And soon he would have to see the ghost girl. That was going to be… difficult.

He looked at the white oblong again. The shiny metal around the edge was quite soft and useless, and scraped off easily. As for the picture, he thought it might be some kind of magic or charm, like the blue bead. What was the point of throwing a spear at the big canoe? It wasn’t something you could kill. But the ghost girl was the only other person on the island, and she had, after all, given him the spark-maker. He didn’t need it now, but it was still a wonderful thing.

When the sun was getting close to the Little Nation, he set off along the beach and entered the low forest.

You could smell things growing. There was never much light down here, but the big canoe had left a wide trail, and daylight was shafting down into spaces that hadn’t seen it for years, and the race was on for a rare place in the sun. New green shoots were fighting for their piece of the sky, fronds were unfolding, seeds were cracking open. The forest was coming back with its own green tide; in six months no one would ever guess what had happened here.

Mau slowed down when the wreck of the big canoe came in sight, but he could see no movement. He would have to be careful about this. It would be so easy to get things wrong.

It was so easy to get things wrong.

She hated the name Ermintrude. It was the trude really. Ermin, now that wasn’t bad at all. Trudy, too, sounded quite jolly, but her grandmother had said it sounded fast, whatever that meant, and banned her from using it. Even Gertrude would have done. You still had your trude, of course, but one of the royal princesses was named Gertrude, and some of the newspapers called her Princess Gertie, and that sounded like the name of a girl who might have some fun in life.

But Ermintrude, she thought, was exactly the kind of name that would invite a young man to tea and mess it all up. The coal stove kept smoking, the flour she’d tried to make the scones of had smelled funny because of the dead lobster in the barrel, and she felt sure some of the flour shouldn’t have been moving about, either. She’d managed to open the last tin of Dr. Poundbury’s Patented Ever-Lasting Milk, which said on the tin that it would taste as good after a year as it did on the day it was tinned, and, sadly, that was probably true. It smelled like drowned mice.