Nation

What was he frightened of?
     
    Mau stared at the sea. It was so flat that all night he had been able to see the stars in it.
    Somewhere out there, flying to him from the edge of the world, was tomorrow. He had no idea what shape it would be, but he was wary of it. They had food and fire, but that wasn’t enough. You had to find water and food and shelter and a weapon, people said. And they thought that was all you had to have, because they took for granted the most important thing. You had to have a place where you belonged.
    He’d never counted the people in the Nation. There were…enough. Enough to feel that you were part of something that had seen many yesterdays and would see many tomorrows, with rules that everyone knew, and that worked because everyone knew them, so much so that they were just part of the way people lived. People would live and die but there would always be a Nation. He’d been on long voyages with his uncles—hundreds of miles—but the Nation had always been there, somewhere over the horizon, waiting for him to come back. He’d been able to feel it.
    What should he do with the ghost girl? Maybe some other trousermen would come looking for her? And then she’d go, and he’d be alone again. That would be horrible. It wasn’t ghosts that frightened him, it was memories. Perhaps they were the same thing? If a woman followed the same path every day to fill a calabash from the waterfall, did the path remember?
    When Mau closed his eyes, the island was full of people. Did it remember their footsteps and their faces, and put them in his head? The Grandfathers said he was the Nation, but that couldn’t be true. Many could become one, but one could not become many. He would remember them, though, so that if people came here, he would tell them about the Nation, and it would come alive again.
    He was glad she was here. Without her, he’d walk into the dark water. He’d heard the whispering as he had dived down after her in that scream of silver bubbles. It would have been so easy to heed the wily words of Locaha and sink into the blackness, but that would have drowned her, too.
    He was not going to be alone here. That was not going to happen. Just him and the voices of the old dead men, who gave orders all the time and never listened? No.
    No…there would be two of them to stay here, and he would teach her the language, so they would both remember, so that when people came, they could say: Once there were many people living here, and then the wave came.
    He heard her stir and knew she was watching him. He knew one other thing, too—the soup smelled good, and he probably wouldn’t have made it just for himself. It was whitefish off the reef and a handful of shellfish and ginger from the Women’s Place and taro chopped up fine to give it all some body.
    He used a couple of twigs to drag the pot out of the embers and gave the girl a big half shell to use as a spoon.
    And it was…funny, mostly because they both had to blow on the soup to get it cool, and she seemed very surprised that he spat out fish bones into the fire while she very carefully coughed them into a piece of frilly cloth that was very nearly stiff with salt and sand. One of them started giggling, or maybe it was both of them at the same time, and then he was laughing so much, he couldn’t spit the next bone at all and, instead, coughed it out into his hand with the same little noise that she made, which was “uh-pur,” which made her nearly choke. But she managed to stop laughing long enough to try to spit out a bone, which she couldn’t get the hang of at all.
    They didn’t know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you’ve got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you’re alive, when you really shouldn’t be.
    And then they lay back looking up at the sky, where the star of Air sparkled yellow-white in the east and Imo’s Campfire was a sharp red overhead, and sleep hit them like a wave.
     
    Mau opened his eyes.
    The world was full of birdsong. It was everywhere, and every kind of song, from the grandfather birds honking up last night’s leftovers to—from the direction of the low forest—something that really should not count as birdsong at all, because it went: “Polly wants a fig, you Bible-thumping ol’ fool! Waark! Show us yer drawers!”
    He sat up.
    The girl had gone, but her strange toeless prints