Awesome / Nation

• For starters, Mau gets one almost every chapter:
  • He saves Daphne from drowning. More awesome when you remember that he's considering drowning himself at the time.
  • While saving a guy who hates him, there is a shark coming for them. He shouts it down, scares the shit out of it, and it runs away.
  • He outruns the God of Death.
  • He beats First Mate Cox using a shark and his own blood.
  • He gets milk for a starving child by personally milking a large, drunk pig. Most important here is the fact that pigs can't be milked by hand: he had to put his mouth to the pig's muddy, stinking belly and suck out a mouthful of milk, spit it into the container he'd brought, then repeat....
    • Just to be clear, this is a feral pig we're talking about. One that would have ripped his guts out in defense of her piglets if she'd been any less drunk or sleepy.
  • Probably the premise of the story counts as a Moment of Awesome for him, too; he single-handedly recreates a Nation from people who have been washed up after a tidal wave, at the same time hating the gods, refusing to believe in the gods, talking to the gods, and having no soul.
  • In the end, he uses the knowledge he has to Take a Third Option and ask Daphne's father that the Nation become members of the Royal Society, so that the Nation keeps learning from the British empire without being subject to colonists' genocidal tendencies.
• Let's not forget Ermin - that is, Daphne.
  • She poisons a man because she knows he won't take the time to listen to her and make his drink safe.
  • She saves Mau from the land of the dead.
  • Her medical aid to various prisoners and captives near the end. She is a well-brought-up lady who hates blood, and has incidentally just sawn someone's leg off.
    "I thought you hated the sight of blood."
    "That's why I try to stop it."
  • The flashback to the Wounded Gazelle Gambit she played on her sadistic cousin.
• Daphne's father gets one, just after he's been crowned King, when he immediately takes the opportunity of ranking higher than his mother to give her a piece of his mind so that she doesn't try to rule through him and instead be respectful to the hosts.
• A subtle one for Cahle and the brothers, who somehow seem to turn up and get everyone busy doing other things whenever the new arrivals start discussing whether Mau is old enough to be in charge of the developing community. All because Daphne wants it that way, and she sang Twinkle a birthing-song about stars.
• Pilu is a masterful storyteller, but just how masterful he is becomes clear in chapter 8, when he recounts the story of Mau and the shark to an amazed crowd — if nothing else because he manages to, with a few simple word, take the humiliating detail of Mau wetting himself in terror and turn it into the biggest moment of awesome for Mau in the nation's eyes.
  "And that was when I saw," whispered Pilu, lowering his voice and staring around the circle of faces, catching every eye. "That is when I knew. That is when I understood. He was no demon! He was no god, no hero. No. He was nothing but a man! A man who was frightened! A man like you and me! But would we wait there, full of fear, as the shark with huge teeth came to eat us? He did! I saw him!"

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