Nation

about? You gobbed in your drink!”
    Daphne tipped up the bowl and took a good swig. It was a little more nutty than usual. She paused to feel it bubbling down, and saw them still staring.
    “You have to spit in the bowl and then sing the beer song.” She burped and put a hand over her mouth. “Pardon me . I can teach it to you. Or you can just hum along. Please? It is an ancient custom—”
    “I’m not singing no pagan mumbo jumbo!” said Foxlip, and he snatched up his bowl and took a long swig, while Daphne tried not to scream.
    Polegrave hadn’t touched his beer. He was still suspicious! His beady little eyes flicked from his fellow mutineer to Daphne and back again.
    Foxlip put down his bowl and belched. “Well, it’s a long time since—”
    Silence exploded. Polegrave reached for his pistols, but Daphne was already moving. Her bowl hit him on the nose, with a crunch. The man screamed and went over backward, and Daphne snatched his pistols from the floor.
    She tried to think and not think at the same time.
    Don’t think about the man you just killed. [It was an execution!]
    Think about the man you may have to kill. [But I can’t prove he ’s a murderer! He didn’t kill Ataba!]
    She fumbled with a pistol as Polegrave, spitting blood, tried to get up. The gun was heavier than it looked and she choked back a curse, courtesy of the Sweet Judy ’s Great Barrel of Swearing, as clumsy fingers disobeyed her.
    Finally she pulled the hammer back, just as Captain Roberts had taught her. It clicked twice, what Cookie called the two-pound noise. When she had asked him why, he’d said, “Because when a man hears that in the dark, he loses two pounds of…weight, quickly!”
    It certainly made Polegrave go very quiet.
    “I will fire,” she lied. “Don’t move. Good. Now, listen to me. I want you to go away. You didn’t kill anyone here. Go away. Right away. If I see you again, I will—well, you will regret it. I’m letting you go because you had a mother.
    Someone actually loved you once, and tried to teach you manners. You won’t understand that at all. Now get up, and get out. Get out! Get out and run far away! Quickly now!”
    Trying to run and crouch at the same time, holding his hand over his ruined nose, dribbling strings of snot and blood, and certainly not looking back, Polegrave scuttled into the sunset like a crab running for the safety of the surf.
    Daphne sat down, still holding the pistol in front of her, and waited until the hut stopped spinning.
    She looked at the silent Foxlip, who hadn’t moved at all.
    “Why did you have to be so—so stupid?” she said, prodding him with the pistol. “Why did you kill an old man who was shaking a stick at you? You shoot at people without a thought and you call them savages! Why are you so stupid as to think I was stupid? Why didn’t you listen to me? I told you we sing the beer song. Would it have hurt to hum along? But no, you knew better, because they are savages! And now you are dead, with a stupid little smile on your stupid face! You needn’t have died, but you didn’t listen. Well, you’ve got just enough time to listen now, Mr. Stupid! The thing is, the beer is made from a very poisonous plant. It paralyzes you, all at once. But there’s some chemical in human spit, you see, and if you spit into the beer and then sing the beer song, it turns the poison into something harmless with a lovely nutty flavor that, incidentally, I have improved very considerably, everyone says. It takes a little less than five minutes to make the beer safe, which is just long enough to sing the official beer song, but “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” sung about sixteen times also works, you see, because it’s not the song that matters, you see, it’s the waiting . I worked that out using scientific thinkink”—she burped—“sorry, I mean thinking.”
    She stopped to throw up the beer and then, by the feel of it, to throw up everything she’d eaten in the last year. “And it could have been such a lovely evening,” she said. “Do you know what this island is? Have you any idea what this island is? Of course you don’t, because you’re so stupid! And dead! And I’m a murderer!”
    She burst into tears, which were large and sticky, and began to argue with herself.
    “Look, they were mutineers! If they were in a court of law, they’d be hung!”
    [Hanged, not hung. But that’s the point of having courts. It’s to stop people murdering other people