Nation

time to say what she had to say.
    She marched up to the stone, stuck her fists on her hips, and said: “Now listen to me, you! I know about ancestors! I’ve got lots of ancestors! One of them was a king, and that’s about as ancestral as you can be! I’m here about Mau! He tries to do everything, and you just bully him all the time! He’s doing wonderful things, and he’s nearly killed himself, and you never even thank him! Is that any way to behave?”
    Well, it’s how your ancestors behave, said her conscience. What about the way their pictures all stare at you in the Long Gallery? What about the way your father keeps spending all that money on the Hall just because his great-great-great-great-grandfather built it? Yes, what about your father?
    “I know what happens to people who get bullied,” she shouted, even louder this time. “They end up thinking they really are no good! It doesn’t matter that they work so hard they fall asleep at their desks; it’s still never enough! They get timid and jumpy and make wrong decisions, and that means more bullying because, you see, the bully is never going to stop, whatever they do, and my—the person being bullied will do anything to make it stop, but it never will! I’m not going to put up with that, do you understand? If you don’t mend your ways in very short order, there will be trouble, understand?”
    I’m shouting at a rock, she thought as her voice echoed off the mountain. What am I expecting it to do? Reply?
    “Is there anyone listening ?” she yelled, and thought: What do I do if someone says “yes”? For that matter, what do I do if they say “no”?
    Nothing happened, in quite an offensive way, considering she’d taken a lot of trouble to get up here.
    I’ve just been snubbed by a cave full of dead old men.
    Someone was standing behind her. Someone she hadn’t heard coming. But she was angry at all sorts of things and right now was mostly angry at herself for shouting at a rock, and whatever it was behind her, it was going to get the sharp end of her tongue.
    “One of my ancestors fought in the Wars of the Roses,” she announced haughtily, without looking round, “and in those wars you were supposed to wear a red rose or a white rose to show whose side you were on, but he was very attached to a pink rose called Lady Lavinia, which we still grow at the Hall, actually, so he ended up fighting both sides at once. He lived, too, because everyone thought it was bad luck to kill a madman. That’s what you need to know about my family: We might be pigheaded and stupid, but we do fight.” She spun around. “Don’t you dare creep up on—Oh.”
    Something went pnap . It was a pantaloon bird staring up at her with an affronted expression on its beak. That wasn’t the most noticeable thing about it, however, which was that it was not alone. There were at least fifty of the birds, with more flying in. Now there was sound, because the big birds had the aerodynamics of a brick in any case, and in aiming to land near Daphne they were put off their concentration and mostly crashed on other pantaloon birds, in clouds of feathers and angry beak snapping: Pnap! Pnap!
    It was a bit like being in a snowfall. It’s all fun and games at the start, a winter wonderland, and you think because it’s soft, it’s harmless. And then you realize you can’t see the path anymore and it’s getting dark and the snow is blotting out the sky—
    A big bird, out of sheer luck, landed on her head, scrabbling for a foothold in her hair with claws like old men’s hands. She screamed at it and managed to force it off. But they were still piling up around her, pushing and pnapp ing at one another. She could hardly think, in the storm of noise and stink and feathers, but it seemed they weren’t actually attacking her. They just wanted to be where she was, wherever that was.
    Oh yes, the stink. Nothing stank like a lot of pantaloon birds up close. On top of the ordinary dry, bony bird smell, they had the worst breath of any living creature. She could feel it hitting her skin like scrubbing brushes. And all the time they pnap ped, each trying to out pnap all the others, so that she nearly didn’t hear the cry of rescue.
    “Show us yer drawers! Once I was an awful drinker, now I am a dreadful stinker!”
    The birds panicked. They hated the parrot as much as it hated them. And when a pantaloon bird wants to get away fast, it makes sure it leaves behind anything not