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

queen!”
    Grandmother used to say this with a look in her eye that suggested that she was planning 138 murders, and you didn’t have to know the old lady for long to suspect that she’d be quite capable of arranging them. They wouldn’t be impolite murders, of course. There wouldn’t be any of that desperate business with daggers and pistols. They would be elegant and tactful. A block or stone would fall out of someone’s stately home here , someone would slip on a patch of ice in the castle battlements there , a suspicious blancmange at a palace banquet (arsenic could so easily be confused with sugar) would take care of several at once…. But she probably wouldn’t go that far, not really. Nevertheless, she lived in hope, and prepared her granddaughter for a royal life by seeing to it, wherever possible, that Ermintrude was not taught anything that could possibly be of any practical use whatsoever.
    Now here she was, with her wrong name, struggling to make afternoon tea in a wrecked boat in the middle of the jungle! Why hadn’t anyone thought this might happen?
    And the young man was what her grandmother would have called a savage, too. But he hadn’t been savage. She had watched him bury all those people in the sea. He had picked them up gently, even the dogs. He wasn’t someone throwing away garbage. He had cared. He had cried tears, but he hadn’t seen her, not even when she’d stood in front of him. There had been just one point when his streaming eyes had tried to focus on her, and then he had stepped around her and gotten on with his work. He’d been so careful and gentle, it was hard to believe he was a savage.
    She remembered First Mate Cox shooting at monkeys with his pistol when they had moored in that river mouth in the Sea of Ceramis. He had laughed every time a small brown body dropped into the river, especially if it was still alive when the crocodiles caught it.
    She’d shouted at him to stop it, and he’d laughed, and Captain Roberts had come down from the wheelhouse and there had been a terrible row, and after that things had gone very sour on the Sweet Judy . But just as she had begun the first part of her journey around the world, there had been a lot in the newspapers about Mr. Darwin and his new theory that people had a kind of monkey as their distant ancestor. Ermintrude did not know if this was true, but when she’d looked into First Mate Cox’s eyes, she’d seen something much worse than any monkey could be.
    At which point a spear crashed through the cracked porthole, hissed across the cabin, and left via the porthole on the other side, which had lost all its glass to the wave.
    Ermintrude sat very still, first out of shock and then because she was remembering her father’s advice. In one of his letters to her, he had said that when she joined him in Government House, she would be his first lady and would be able to meet all kinds of people who might act in ways she found strange at first, and perhaps would even misunderstand. And so she would have to be gracious and make allowances.
    Very well. This was about the time the boy would be here. What had she expected him to do when he arrived? Even on a boat that isn’t wrecked, it’s hard to find a doorbell. Perhaps throwing a spear means: Look, I’ve thrown away my spear! I’m not armed! Yes, that sounds right. It’s just like shaking hands, after all, to show you are not holding a sword. Well, I’m glad that’s one little mystery solved, she thought.
    For the first time since the spear had hissed across the cabin, she breathed out.
    Outside, Mau was beginning to wonder if something had gone wrong when there were some wooden noises and the ghost girl’s head appeared over the side of the big canoe.
    “So kind of you to be punctual,” she said, trying to smile, “and thank you very much for breaking the window, it was getting very stuffy in here!”
    He didn’t understand any of this, but she was very nearly smiling and