Dark Eden

32 Jeff Redlantern

Def ran and ran and I couldn’t hold him back. All I could do was hang on tightly tightly to his fur, lying down flat against his body. I knew that if I fell off in the dark and the snow, that would have been that, that would have been the end of me. The world would still have had lots of other eyes to see through, but not mine.

Def ran on and on down that long dark snowy valley. His headlantern was pulsing and bright bright with fear, and he kept giving out a strange cry I’d never heard him make before: Ayeeee! Ayeeee! I heard the echoes come back from the rocks and mountains. Big snowflakes crowded towards me and rushed past. I got glimpses of huge rocks and cliffs and giant greenish hunks of ice jutting out from under the snow.

When we’d been running for some time flat out, he slowed down a little bit. I could see that the snowy ground ahead of us was breaking up and tipping down, and there were more and more of those big twisted hunks of ice sticking up, and icy cracks opening up in the snow. It was a big snowslug we’d been on all this time, I realized. Up to now it had been covered up by packed-down snow, but here the ice was cracking and bending and sticking out through the snow, like splintered bones sticking out through a broken leg.

Ayeeee! Ayeeee! went Def. He paused for a moment and then called out again: Ayeee! Ayeee! Suddenly he swerved to the left, and started climbing the rocky slopes above the snowslug, up up, until he came to the top of a ridge, and we could look down at the other side.

There was light below us! There were thousands of lights, white and greeny-yellow. There was a little round valley full of shining trees, surrounded by Snowy Dark.

Ayeee! Ayeee!, went Def.

I put my hand on the soft lantern on his head and tried to make him turn round again so we could go back to tell the others. He had always let me guide him that way before. It was him that found the paths, but when we came to a choice of paths, he would pause and lift his head and snuffle and sniff at the air, and wave his feelers, and then I chose for him, by putting my hand on his lantern and turning his head in the direction I wanted him to go. Woollybucks could stay up on Snowy Dark for wakings and wakings, I figured, but we needed to get down the other side. So I made sure, as best I could, that we kept heading across Peckham Hills, and not along them.

But now, on the top of the ridge, Def refused to do what I asked of him. I could turn his head all I liked but he wasn’t going to go back. I guess the leopard was still not far enough behind.

He wasn’t going to stay still either. Ayeeee! he cried out again, and started straight down towards the lights of the valley. I pulled back on his headlantern to try and get him to at least stop still, but he took no notice at all. There was nothing I could do to make him change his mind, nothing I could do at all really, right then, except just to remind myself to keep my eyes open and to notice the world that I was in.

‘We are here,’ I whispered to myself, ‘we are really here.’

I might never see the others again, I thought. I might die on my own, and no one would ever know what I’d seen. But that didn’t change the fact that right now I was seeing it. I was alive and seeing it, and it was really there.

We came down into a strange forest, where the trees were as tall as that tree up in the snow with the bat and the slinker, and had trunks that went way way up before they even put out a single branch. It made me feel small small as we passed underneath them, even sitting up there on Def’s back, when their branches were so far above us. But their lanternflowers were as bright as any whitelantern back in Circle Valley, even if they were high over our heads, and the tree trunks were warm and made that same familiar sound that we’d all heard around us every waking and sleeping all our lives until we first went up onto Snowy Dark. Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, they went. And whole forest went hmmmmmmmmmm.

A tree fox came running down one of the trunks, and peeked at us around the side of it with its flat blank eyes, sniffling with its long bendy snout. A bright coloured bird flew past, with its hands held out in front of it. And a monkey with six long arms gazed down at me from a high high branch, bigger than the monkeys we had in Circle Valley, and with loose flaps of skin hanging down between its arms.

Everything seemed clear clear in my mind and I stared and stared, because the only thing I could do just then was to see and see and see, so I might as well do that as well as I possibly could. I felt myself grow calmer, and I could feel Def getting calmer too. His hearts weren’t beating so fast and his lantern had stopped pulsing and was settling into a steady glow. I pulled gently back on it to see if he would stop, and he stopped at once, without any fuss or trouble. I got off him, and led him to a stream, and rested my back against a tree while he gathered wavyweed into his mouth feelers, using his front legs as arms.

Presently he lay down on the ground beside me and slept.

‘In a way I was the leader, not John,’ I said to myself, stroking Def’s woolly back and thinking about how it had been me that made the horses and chose the paths.

‘I was the real leader,’ I said. It made me laugh.

Of course I wasn’t a leader in the way John was. I couldn’t be, and I wouldn’t want to be either, not at all, not even one little bit. My life was different different from John’s because I was a clawfoot, and no one expected me to become a man. Other boys ran and fought and kicked balls (even batfaces, however much they got teased), but if you were a clawfoot they left you out of all that. Other boys became men by putting on the masks of men, and shutting out of their heads all the things that didn’t fit with their masks, but if you were a clawfoot no one expected you to wear that mask, or to shut those things out of your head. That was why I saw things that other people didn’t see.

‘That’s why it was me that worked out how to make horses,’ I said to myself sleepily, running my hands through Def’s fur. ‘Because there was something about animals I saw but no one else did.’

What I’d seen was that it didn’t make any difference whether you were an Earth animal or a human being or an Eden animal. You still had the same thing inside you looking out of your eyes, the same awakeness. It was knowing that about woollybucks that kept me going when I was teaching them to be horses. It was knowing that they weren’t really so different from us. Most boys couldn’t have had that thought because they were too busy being tough hunters.

I felt peaceful peaceful, and I felt warm and safe between Def’s body and the tree trunk.

Not that I’d ever worried in the way most people did, about whether I lived or died. I knew quite well that, even when someone died, the secret awakeness that had been looking out of their eyes would always still be there.

Pretty soon I was fast asleep too.