Dark Eden

22 John Redlantern

There was some stuff that Bella had done that wasn’t good, but she’d been the best grownup in Family all the same. And she’d looked after me, she’d made me, and I loved her. But it was me that caused her death.

I couldn’t get round it. If I hadn’t done what I did, she wouldn’t have lost her place in Family and she wouldn’t have done a Tommy. Her place in Family and in Redlantern group was everything to her, which is how it should be for a leader in a family. She gave up her whole self to being a group leader and member of Council and she couldn’t go on without her job, because all it left of her was a shadow.

The first few wakings after they told me, I felt like doing a Tommy a lot of the time. I’d never really have done it of course. That really would have been following my own feelings and not thinking about the future, and I’d made up my mind I’d never make decisions like that. But still, whenever I wasn’t busy dealing with something else, whenever there was a gap to be filled, it came back into my mind. Wham! Bella was dead, Bella did for herself, and it was all down to me.

I made sure not to let the others see this, of course, and I made sure it didn’t stop me from getting on with what I needed to do. In fact what I decided was that Bella’s death made it even more important to carry on with my plan and see it through. The fact that my idea had done for her meant that I had to make it work or her death would have been for no purpose at all.

I felt Gela’s ring in its little pocket on the edge of my wrap. It helped to remind me that bad things were bound to happen. People died, people lost things and couldn’t get them back, however much they wanted to. It happened to Gela, it happened to Tommy, it happened to everyone, not just to me. I mean, Angela didn’t just lose Earth, and her mum and dad and her friends. She didn’t just lose the ring. A couple of wombs after the ring, she lost her daughter Candice. A slinker bit the little girl on the lip when she was reaching for stumpcandy, and the bite turned bad and she died.

And then Tommy lost Gela, and then . . . Well, it goes on. That’s just how it is.

Me and Tina went up Cold Path Valley and towards the place where Cold Path itself comes down from Dark. I had my blackglass spear and my spiketip one, Tina had two spiketips, and we had a skin bag with us that I’d brought from Redlantern, plus a roll of thick wavyweed rope. I liked her being there. She was strong and quick and she wouldn’t let anything defeat her, not even me.

I thought maybe we’d be too late for any woollybucks, seeing as the dip had been short short and had passed over while we were asleep. (Never do that again, I thought to myself: what’s the point of living up Cold Path way if you don’t go after woollybuck in a dip?) But bucks do sometimes stay down in forest for a waking or two after a dip and, sure enough, after we’d got a couple of little birds and bats, we found three good bucks by some rocks along the stream. I stayed in front of them, lying low, while Tina went in a big circle out round the rocky bit and back again behind them. There were three of them, two fully grown and one about three-quarters size. They weren’t just having a drink, they were eating wavyweed from the water, like bucks sometimes do. They were standing with their back legs on the bank and their middle legs splayed out at the edge of the stream, and they were using their front legs like arms, reaching into the water and yanking up the shiny weed. They were in no hurry to move on and the soft lanterns on their heads weren’t shining bright like they do up on Dark, but just softly glowing.

Well, it couldn’t have been a better time to find them because the strong muddy smell of the fresh weed would prevent them from getting wind of us. They lifted their big heavy heads from time to time and stared out into forest with those round flat Eden eyes, but I kept myself down, just peeping over the edge of a ridge, and they didn’t see me.

When she was ready behind them, Tina made a sound like a starbird: Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! The bucks lifted their heads again and looked round, but after a few seconds they carried on gorging at the weed. I crept forward. I’d left the bag and the rope behind on a rock so that all I was carrying was my good spear ready in my right hand and the other spear in my left.

I was about ten yards from the stream when they all looked up again. They knew something was up now, and they dropped the weed they were holding back into the water, so as to have all six legs ready for running.

I made a starbird noise — Hoom! Hoom! Hoom! — to tell Tina to close up behind them. The bucks were sampling the air with those four feelers they had round their mouths, at the end of their long bendy snouts. One of them growled softly, and the lanterns on the heads of all three of them started to shine more brightly. Then they began to move off to the left.

Tina jumped up behind them and ran towards them yelling.

They turned and ran straight towards me. I kept down low until they were nearly on top of me, then threw the blackglass spear straight at the first one. I got it right in the shoulder, right in deep so I knew it wouldn’t need another spear to finish it, then turned and chucked my second spear at the second buck, the newhair. The spear got it in the face. It didn’t badly injure it, but the creature was scared and turned round again, which meant that Tina, jumping across the stream, could get it smack in the side with one of her spears.

The other buck ran off. We ran up to the two injured ones threshing about on the ground there, and Tina did for them both with her remaining spear. Then she knelt and dipped her fingers in its greeny-black blood.

Gela’s tits, that was enough meat for two whole groups and there were only four of us here to feed.

‘Michael’s names!’ I said laughing. ‘How are we expected to get this lot back to the caves?’

Tina stood up, licking the blood from her fingers and laughing too. It felt great. It felt, for the first time since I’d been out of Family, like everything might work out well.

‘One of us can stay here and guard them to keep off the tree foxes and starbirds. The other can go back to get Gerry. Then we can take them back one at a time. Look at all this meat, look at all this woolly skin! And we’ve only been hunting a couple of hours!’

‘Didn’t get a live baby, though,’ I said.

‘No. Do you really think that would work?’

‘Worth a try, I reckon, like you said. And, think about it, if there had been a baby one here, we could have got it, couldn’t we? If one of us had done for its mother the other could have jumped the baby and held it down, and we could have tied its feet with rope so it couldn’t run. Those little bucklings can’t be that strong.’

She bent and ran her fingers through the wool on the big old buck.

‘Enough skin here to try and make some warm wraps for us, and even some of those greased footwraps you were talking about.’

‘Easily. If it’s enough to keep two big bucks warm, it should do for all of us.’

‘Taste the blood,’ she said. ‘You should taste the blood when you make a kill.’

She got some more on her fingers and offered them to me to lick. All round her mouth was stained dark with buck blood.

‘You should see your face,’ I said, laughing as I took the thick sweet stuff.

‘You should see yours!’

She reached out to pull me towards her for a kiss.

And I wanted to kiss her too, but at the moment our lips touched Bella came back into my head. I thought about her tying a wavyweed rope to a branch and round her neck, all alone, all alone in forest, thinking I didn’t care about her. I thought of her testing the rope to make sure it was firm and then getting ready to jump, knowing that in the next second there’d be a horrible scary choking time and then nothing, nothing, nothing ever again.

I froze up inside. Kissing me must have been like kissing a stone.

‘What’s the matter, John?’

I didn’t tell her. I didn’t like to talk about things like that. I didn’t want people to think things like that were a problem for me.

‘We shouldn’t hang about,’ I said, trying to move away in my head from that cold cold stone inside me, which was how it felt to know that Bella was dead, a big icy lump of stone filling me up. ‘We’ve got two dead bucks here, look, and foxes and starbirds will soon want their share. I’ll mind these bucks, and you run back and get Gerry. You won’t need to run all the way. You should be able to call him not far from here, if you just get above the trees a bit.’

Tina looked at me, and shrugged.

‘We need to get some clay,’ I reminded myself out loud, as she walked off. ‘Clay to line the glue pit with.’