Nation

over them.
    Then he lay back. When was the last time he had sat by a fire, here at home? The memory rushed in before he could stop it. It was his last meal as a boy, with all his family there, and in the Nation all his family meant, sooner or later, just about everyone. It was his last meal because the next time he ate on the island it would be as a man, no longer living in the boys’ hut but sleeping in the house of the unmarried men. He hadn’t eaten much, because he’d been too excited. He’d been too scared, too, because he could just about get the idea that this wasn’t only about him; it was also about his family. If he came back ready for a man’s tattoos and, obviously, the…thing with the knife where you must not scream, then it would be a triumph for them, too. It would mean that he had been brought up in the right way and had learned the Right Things.
    The fire crackled and sent smoke and steam up into the darkness, and he saw his family in the firelight, watching him, smiling at him. He closed his eyes and tried to force the clamoring memories away, into the dark.
    Had he sent any of them into the dark current when he’d walked in the steps of Locaha? Perhaps. But there was no memory there. He’d been curled up in the gray body of the Locaha-Mau, as a part of him trudged back and forth, doing what was needed, taking the dead to become dolphins so that they wouldn’t become food for the pigs. He should have sung a burial chant, but he’d never been taught the words, so instead he’d straightened limbs on the bodies as tidily as he could. Perhaps he had seen faces, but then that part of him had died. He tried to remember the face of his mother, but all he could see was dark water. He could hear her voice, though, singing the song about the god of Fire, and how the Papervine Woman got fed up with him chasing her daughters and bound his hands to his sides with great coils of vine; and Man’s younger sister used to laugh at that and chase him with coils of—But a wave passed over his mind, and he was glad it washed the bright memory away.
    He could feel the hole inside, blacker and deeper than the dark current. Everything was missing. Nothing was where it should be. He was here on this lonely shore, and all he could think of was the silly questions that children ask…Why do things end? How do they start? Why do good people die? What do the gods do?
    And this was hard, because one of the Right Things for a man was: Don’t ask silly questions.
    And now the little blue hermit crab was out of its shell and scuttling across the sand, looking for a new shell, and there wasn’t one. Barren sand stretched away on every side, and all it could do was run….
    He opened his eyes. And now there was just him and the ghost girl. Had she been real? Was he real? Was that a silly question?
    The smell of the tubers came up through the sand. His stomach suggested that they might be real, at least, and he burned his fingers digging them up. One would keep until tomorrow. The other one he broke open and stuck his face into the fluffy, crunchy, hot, savory heart of, and he went to sleep with his mouth full, while the shadows danced in circles around the fire.

Calenture

    I N THE DARKNESS OF the wreck of the Sweet Judy , a match flared. There were some pings and scraping noises and at last the lamp was alight. It wasn’t broken, but she had to be sparing with it because she hadn’t found any more oil yet. It was probably underneath everything else. Everything was under everything else. It was a mercy she’d wrapped the mattress around her before the Sweet Judy tried to sail through trees. She’d remember the snapping and the screams as long as she lived. She’d heard the hull split and the masts crack, and worst of all she had heard the silence.
    And she’d climbed out into a steaming morning full of birdsong, with most of the Judy back on the smashed trail behind her and one word in her head.
    The word was Calenture .
    It meant a special kind of madness, brought on by the heat. First Mate Cox had told her about it, probably hoping to frighten her because he was that sort of person. Sailors got calenture when they’d been becalmed at sea for too long. They’d look over the side and see, instead of the ocean, cool green fields. They’d leap down into them and drown. First Mate Cox said he’d seen grown men do it. They’d jumped into a meadow full of daisies and drowned or, as he put it, drownded. And