Read Online Nation by Terry Pratchett - Free Book Online Page A

long for several more grandfather birds to alight on the bowl. They squabbled for a while and then, with the occasional pause for another brief fight, settled down to some serious boozing, rocking backward and forward because that is how birds move when they drink, then rocking backward and forward and forward and falling over a lot, which is how birds move when they have been drinking fresh beer. One took off and flew backward into some bushes.
    Mau walked back thoughtfully to the beach, stopping on the way to cut himself a spear from the forest. Down on the beach he sharpened it to a point, which he hardened in the fire, occasionally glancing up at the sun.
    He did all this slowly, because his mind was filling up with questions. They came out of the black hole inside him so fast that they made it hard to think in a straight line. And soon he would have to see the ghost girl. That was going to be…difficult.
    He looked at the white oblong again. The shiny metal around the edge was quite soft and useless, and scraped off easily. As for the picture, he thought it might be some kind of magic or charm, like the blue bead. What was the point of throwing a spear at the big canoe? It wasn’t something you could kill. But the ghost girl was the only other person on the island, and she had, after all, given him the spark-maker. He didn’t need it now, but it was still a wonderful thing.
    When the sun was getting close to the Little Nation, he set off along the beach and entered the low forest.
    You could smell things growing. There was never much light down here, but the big canoe had left a wide trail, and daylight was shafting down into spaces that hadn’t seen it for years, and the race was on for a rare place in the sun. New green shoots were fighting for their piece of the sky, fronds were unfolding, seeds were cracking open. The forest was coming back with its own green tide; in six months no one would ever guess what had happened here.
    Mau slowed down when the wreck of the big canoe came in sight, but he could see no movement. He would have to be careful about this. It would be so easy to get things wrong.
     
    It was so easy to get things wrong.
    She hated the name Ermintrude. It was the trude really. Ermin, now that wasn’t bad at all. Trudy, too, sounded quite jolly, but her grandmother had said it sounded fast, whatever that meant, and banned her from using it. Even Gertrude would have done. You still had your trude , of course, but one of the royal princesses was named Gertrude, and some of the newspapers called her Princess Gertie, and that sounded like the name of a girl who might have some fun in life.
    But Ermintrude, she thought, was exactly the kind of name that would invite a young man to tea and mess it all up. The coal stove kept smoking, the flour she’d tried to make the scones of had smelled funny because of the dead lobster in the barrel, and she felt sure some of the flour shouldn’t have been moving about, either. She’d managed to open the last tin of Dr. Poundbury’s Patented Ever-Lasting Milk, which said on the tin that it would taste as good after a year as it did on the day it was tinned, and, sadly, that was probably true. It smelled like drowned mice.
    If only she’d been taught properly! If only someone had thought to spend an afternoon teaching her a few things that would be handy to know if she was shipwrecked on a desert island! It could happen to anyone! Even some hints on making scones would have been a help! But no, her grandmother had said that a lady should never lift anything heavier than a parasol and should certainly never set foot in a kitchen unless it was to make Economic Charitable Soup for the Deserving Poor, and her grandmother didn’t think there were very many of them .
    “Always remember,” she used to say, far too often, “that it only needs one hundred and thirty-eight people to die and your father will be king! And that means that, one day, you might be