Nation

shy like your brother.’ That was because Milo never said anything much to them. He just wanted to earn a three-legged cauldron and some knives, so he could get married.”
    “Are you telling me the trousermen throw things at coconuts because coconuts don’t talk?”
    “Could be. They do crazy things,” said Pilu. “The thing about the trousermen is, they are very brave and they sail their boats from the other end of the world, and they have the secret of iron, but there is one thing that they are frightened of. Guess what it is?”
    “I don’t know. Sea monsters?” Mau wondered.
    “No!”
    “Getting lost? Pirates?”
    “No.”
    “Then I give up. What are they afraid of?”
    “Legs. They’re scared of legs,” said Pilu triumphantly.
    “They are scared of legs ? Whose legs? Their own legs? Do they try to run away from them? How? What with?”
    “Not their own legs! But trousermen women get very upset if they see a man’s leg, and one of the boys on the John Dee said a young trouserman fainted when he saw a woman’s ankle. The boy said the trousermen women even put trousers on table legs in case young men see them and think of ladies’ legs!”
    “What’s a table? Why does it have legs?”
    “That is,” said Pilu, pointing toward the other end of the big cabin. “It’s for making the ground higher.”
    Mau had noticed it before but paid it no attention. It was nothing more than a few short planks held off the deck by some bits of wood. It sloped, because the wreck of the Sweet Judy lay on her side and the table was nailed to it. There were twelve pieces of dull metal nailed to the wood. These turned out to be called plates (“What are they for?”), which were nailed down so that they didn’t slip off in stormy weather and could be washed up by someone sloshing a bucket of water (“What’s a bucket?”) over them. The deep marks in the plates were because mostly the food was two-year-old salt-pickled beef or pork, which was very hard to cut even with a steel knife, but Pilu had loved it because you could chew it all day. The Sweet Judy had big barrels of pork and beef. They were feeding the whole island. Mau liked the beef best; according to Pilu, it came from an animal called a cattle.
    Mau rapped on the tabletop. “This table doesn’t wear trousers,” he said.
    “I asked about that,” said Pilu, “and they said there was nothing in the world that would stop a sailor thinking about ladies’ legs, so it would be a waste of trousers.”
    “A strange people,” said Mau.
    “But there’s something about the trousermen,” Pilu went on. “Just when you think they are mad, you see something like Port Mercia! Great big huts made of stone, higher than a tree! Some of them are like a forest inside! More boats than you can count! And the horses! Oh, everyone should see the horses!”
    “What are horses?”
    “Well, they’re…well, you know hogs?” said Pilu, ramming the bar under another plank.
    “Better than you can imagine.”
    “Oh, yes. Sorry. We heard about that. It was very brave of you. Well, they are not like hogs. But if you took a hog and made it bigger and longer, with a longer nose and a tail, that’s a horse. Oh, and much more handsome. And much longer legs.”
    “So a horse is not really like a pig at all?”
    “Well, yes, I suppose so. But it’s got the same number of legs.”
    “Do they wear trousers?” asked Mau, thoroughly confused.
    “No. Just people and tables. You should try them!”
     
    They made her do it. That was probably a good thing, Daphne admitted. She’d wanted to do it but hadn’t dared do it, but they’d made her do it, although really they’d made her make herself do it, and now that she’d done it, she was glad. Glad, glad, glad . Her grandmother would not have approved, but that was all right because: a) she wouldn’t find out; b) what Daphne had done was entirely sensible in the circumstances; and c) her grandmother really wouldn’t find out.
    She had removed her dress and all but one of her petticoats. She was only three garments away from being totally naked! Well, four if you included the grass skirt.
    The Unknown Woman had made it for her, much to Cahle’s approval; she’d used lots of the strange vine that grew everywhere here. It seemed to be a sort of grass, but instead of growing upward it just unrolled itself, like an endless green tongue. It tangled up with other plants, blew up into the trees, and generally just got