Nation

shall we?” said Mau, keeping his voice level and friendly.
    “He can’t, usually,” said Pilu. He broke into his grin again, but there was something nervous about it.
    He’s frightened of me, Mau thought. I haven’t hit him or even raised my hand. I’ve just tried to make him think differently, and now he’s scared. Of thinking. It’s magic.
     
    It can’t be magic, Daphne thought. Magic is just a way of saying “I don’t know.”
    There were quite a few shells of beer fizzing on the shelves in the shed. They all had little bubbles growing and bursting from the seals at the top. It was beer that hadn’t been sung to yet. Mother-of-beer, they called it at that stage. She could tell quite easily, because there were dead flies all around it. They didn’t drown in it; they died and became little fly statues as soon as they drank it. If you were looking for the real Demon Drink, this was it.
    You spit in it, you sing it a song, you wave your hands over it in time to said song, the demon is magically sent back to, er, wherever, and there’s just the good drink left. How does that happen?
    Well, she had a theory; she’d spent half the night thinking it up. The ladies were at the other end of the Place, picking blossoms. They probably wouldn’t hear her if she sang quietly. The spitting…well, that was for luck, obviously. Besides, you had to be scientific about these things, and test one bit at a time. The secret was in the hand movements, she was sure of it. Well, slightly sure.
    She poured a little of the deadly pre-beer into a bowl and stared at it. Or perhaps it was in the song, but not in the words? Perhaps the frequency of the human voice did something to the tiny atomic substances, such as happened when the famous operatic soprano Dame Ariadne Stretch broke a glass by singing at it? That sounded very promising, especially when you knew that only women were supposed to make beer and they, of course, had higher voices!
    The Demon Drink stared back at her, rather smugly in her view. Go on , it seem to say, impress me .
    “I’m not sure I know all the words to this one,” she said, and realized that she had just apologized to a drink. That was the trouble with being brought up in a polite household. She cleared her throat. “Once my father took me to the music hall,” she said. “You might enjoy this one.” She cleared her throat again and began:
“Let’s all go down to the Strand,

(’ave a banana!)

Oh! What a happy land,

I’ll be the leader, you can march behind—”
    No, that sounded a bit complicated for a beverage, and the banana only confused matters. What about…? She hesitated, and thought about songs. Could it be that simple? She started to sing again, counting on her fingers as she sang.
    “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full—”
    She sang sixteen verses, counting all the time, singing to the beer as it bubbled, and noted when it was suddenly as clear and sparkly as a diamond. Then she tested her conclusion, like a proper scientist would, on another bowl of mother-of-beer, feeling rather certain and more than a little pleased with herself. Now she had a working hypothesis.
    “Baa, baa, black—”
    She stopped, aware of people trying to be quiet. Cahle and the Unknown Woman were standing in the doorway, listening with interest.
    “Men!” said Cahle cheerfully. She had a flower tucked in her hair.
    “Er…what?” said Daphne, flustered.
    “I want to go and see my husbun!”
    Daphne understood that, and there was no rule against it. Men weren’t allowed into the Place, but women could come and go as they pleased.
    “Er…good,” she said. She felt something touch her hair, went to brush it away, and realized that the Unknown Woman was undoing her plaits. She went to stop her and caught Cahle’s warning look. In her head the Unknown Woman was coming back from somewhere bad, and every sign of her being a normal person again was to be encouraged.
    She felt the plaits being gently teased apart.
    Then she smelled a whiff of perfume, and realized the woman had stuck a flower behind her ear. They grew everywhere in the Place, huge floppy pink and purple blooms that knocked you down with their scent. Cahle generally wound one into her hair in the evenings.
    “Er, thank you,” she said.
    Cahle took her gently by the arm, and Daphne felt the panic rise. She was going to the beach as well? But she was practically naked! She had