Nation by Terry Pratchett

that?
    There had been a great wave before, everyone said. It turned up in stories of the Time When Things Were Otherwise and the Moon Was Different. Old men said it was because people had been bad, but old men always said that kind of thing. Waves happened, people died, and the gods did not care. Why had Imo, who had made everything and was everything—? Would He have made useless gods? There it was, out of the darkness inside, another thought that he wouldn’t even have known how to think a few days ago, and so dangerous he wanted to get it out of his head as soon as possible.
    What did he have to do to the god anchors? But the Grandfathers didn’t answer questions. There were little mud or wood god stones all over the island. People placed them for all sorts of reasons, from watching over a sick child to making sure a crop didn’t spoil. And since it was seriously bad luck to move a god stone, no one did. They were left to fall apart naturally.
    He’d seen them so often that he didn’t look at them anymore. The wave must have moved hundreds of them, and washed them away. How could he put them back?
    He looked up and down the beach. Most of the branches and broken trees had gone now, and for the first time he saw what wasn’t there.
    There had been three special god stones in the village—the god anchors . It was hard, now, to remember where they had been, and they certainly weren’t there now. Those anchors were big cubes of white stone, almost too heavy for a man to lift, but the wave had even snapped the house posts and thrown lumps of coral the size of a man across the lagoon. It wouldn’t have worried about some stone blocks, no matter what they anchored.
    He walked along the beach, hoping to see signs leading him to one almost buried in the sand. He didn’t. But he could see a god stone on the floor of the lagoon, now that the water had cleared a bit. He dived in to fetch it, but it was so heavy that bringing it out needed several tries. The lagoon had been scoured by the wave and shelved quite deeply at the west end. He had to carry the stone along the bed, sometimes leaving it behind and coming up to fill his lungs with air, until he found a place shallow enough to bring it out. And of course it weighed more out of the water for some magical reason no one understood; he was out of breath by the time he’d rolled it end over end up the beach.
    He remembered this one. It had been next to the chief’s house. It was the one with the strange creature carved on it. The creature had four legs, like a hog but much longer, and a head like an elas-gi-nin . People called it the Wind, and gave it fish and beer for the god of Air before they went on a long journey. Birds and pigs and dogs took the fish, and the beer soaked into the sand, but that didn’t matter. It was the spirit of the fish and the spirit of the beer that mattered. That’s what they said.
    He dived in again. The lagoon was a mess. The wave had scattered house-size bits of the reef everywhere, as well as tearing a new entrance for the sea. But he had seen something white over there.
    As he got near, he saw how big the new gap was. A ten-man canoe could have got through it sideways.
    Another god stone was right under Mau’s feet. He dived, and a school of small silver fish fled from him.
    Ah, the Hand, the anchor for the Fire god. This one was smaller, but it was deeper, and farther from the beach. It took him more than an hour to steal it back from the sea, in short slow underwater bounds across the white sand.
    There was another one he’d glimpsed right in the new gap, where the surf swirled dangerously. But that would be Water, and right now he felt that Water had taken too many sacrifices lately. Water could wait.
    GATHER THE STONES AND GIVE HUMBLE THANKS OR YOU WILL BRING BAD LUCK ON THE NATION! said the Grandfathers in his head.
    How did they get into his mind? How did they know things? And why didn’t they understand?
    The Nation had been