Dark Eden

37 Gela Brooklyn

It took two whole wakings for Julie’s baby to be born. It seemed to be stuck inside her, no matter how hard she pushed, and she screamed and screamed, and we all thought she was going to die. There were oldmums back in Family who knew how to help with things like that, but none of us did. None of us had any idea. Everyone cowered down inside themselves while Julie screamed and screamed and screamed, and even while I tried to comfort and reassure her, I felt my own baby growing inside me, and wondered if this was going to be how I died too.

And then something shifted somehow, and the baby came out. It was a tiny tiny little batfaced boy and it was dead and blue and shrivelled up. Another death to add to Suzie’s and her baby’s and make Tall Tree seem even more like a place of loneliness and sadness, however much we all tried to tell each other that it was fine.

After we’d buried the baby under stones, we stayed up by that stream at the edge of forest for a couple of wakings. Then Tina and me persuaded everyone to move further down into forest and we all built shelters and a new fence down there next to a small pool.

Me and Tina pretty much ran things after that, just like we’d done back at Valley Neck. John might have been the one that brought us here, but now he was busy busy again with his own things: trips up to edge of Dark, sewing new wraps and greasing them and storing them in logs, cutting new snowboots from bark, drying wavyweed and twisting ropes, trying out new kinds of footwrap with different mixtures of grease and sap and buckfoot glue.

We’d been living there for some time — two three periods — when we heard the lookouts calling out during a sleep, and crawled out of our shelters to find snow falling. It fell and fell and fell all across Tall Tree Valley, until the ground was white with snow everywhere, and the lanterns on the trees shone out through lumps of snow, and icy water came drip-drip-dripping from every branch as the snow melted on the warm bark. Even when snow had covered everything, it still kept falling falling from the black sky, until it lay two three feet deep, and our shelters were smooth white heaps. A couple of them collapsed under the weight.

‘Snow! Snow! I hate cold snow,’ whimpered Harry Spiketree. ‘Why won’t it stop? I’m scared. Why won’t it go away?’

As usual people yelled at him to shut up, but really all Harry ever did was say out loud what everyone felt inside. It was scary. I thought so too. It was like we’d come down here to this dismal bloody place to get away from Snowy Dark, but now Dark was following after us.

We built up our main fire quickly, before the snow could put it out, dragging logs out from under the snow that had covered our big log pile, and then we huddled round the flames with greased buckskins over our heads, trying to keep as warm and dry as we could.

I felt something squirm inside me. It was the little baby in my womb. My first baby.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘It’s started to . . .’

But I never finished telling them. A cry had come from somewhere on the slopes above us.

Aaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaah!

A snow leopard. Gela’s heart! Lucy London burst into tears, and quite a few of the others began to sob and moan and rock.

‘We’ll be alright,’ I told everyone. ‘We’ll be alright. Even forest leopards don’t like fire, do they?’

‘That’s right,’ Tina said straight away. ‘And snow leopards aren’t used to any sort of light, are they? So they’ll be even more scared if anything’

We were trying to be cheerful, but weirdly John suddenly seemed like he really was happy happy.

‘Snow. Cold. Leopards,’ he said cheerfully, jumping up to get more wood for the fire. ‘It’s like Dark’s come down to get us, isn’t it? It’s like we haven’t really got away from it at all.’

He chucked a log onto the flames and looked around at us with a big smile on his face.

‘The fire should scare them away,’ he said, ‘but better get a few bows and spears ready, just in case, eh?’

The slinker! He was hoping that this would put us all off Tall Tree Valley for good.

Actually, even though I’d felt scared at first, I didn’t think the snow would really harm us. Even back in Circle Valley it happened occasionally that snow fell, and sometimes it even settled for a waking or two in forest on slopes of Blue Mountains or Peckham Hills. I guessed it would be the same here. It wasn’t going to be fun, but we wouldn’t freeze. We had a huge pile of wood to burn and keep us warm till the snow had passed, and we had a fence round us, and I’d never heard of any animal that would come close to a big fire.

‘Trouble with Tall Tree Valley,’ John said, ‘is that it’s still in Dark. It’s not really so different from that place up there where we saw the giant slinker: just a little warm patch in middle of Snowy Dark. We won’t really get away from Dark until we’re right across and down the other side.’

If he’d said that a waking earlier, we’d have all been mad at him, but now, our shelters buried and leopards wailing on the slopes, I could see people listening to him and thinking and taking it in, and I could see them remembering all the things that they didn’t like about small, cold, lonely Tall Tree Valley, the things that people like me had been trying to push away with our cheerful chatter about how easy it was to find bucks, or how nice the bloody starflowers tasted.

Huddled up all wet and cold with a buckskin over my head to keep the snow off my hair, I thought about what it would really be like to stay forever under these lonely high trees, and deal with snows like this every couple of periods.

‘Yeah, you’ve got a point, John,’ I said. ‘Tall Tree Valley just doesn’t feel like a place where people are meant to live.’

Mehmet laughed angrily.

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s, what is this? People lived on Earth in places where it snowed for wombs on end, Gela. Didn’t you know that? And as for you, John, what is your problem? You know this snow won’t last, and you know quite well we could manage it easy easy if we put our minds to it, with bigger fires and better shelters and thicker wraps. So what is it you’re trying to do? Are you determined to do for us all?’

I’d never liked Mehmet much, but I had to admit he was learning. He used just to moan at everything John did without offering another plan of his own, but now for the first time he was proposing something that could actually work. We could stay in Tall Tree. We could build stronger shelters. His hands were shaking and his voice was wobbly, but finally Mehmet was offering an alternative to John.

He didn’t have long to wait either for someone else to take his side.

‘No way am I going back up there where my sister died,’ said Dave Fishcreek. ‘And no way am I going to let you lead me anywhere again, John, not after what happened last time.’

His voice was shaking too. I’d tried a few times to point out to Dave and his brother Johnny that nobody made us go over to John from Family, and nobody forced us to follow John up onto Dark. I’d tried to point out that none of us could have have known that there was such a thing as snow leopards, and that John’s quick thinking had at least saved the rest of us from what happened to Suzie. I’d even tried reminding them Suzie was my friend, and that I loved her and grieved for her too, but she wasn’t the sort of person that would want them bitter bitter like this. But they’d never been willing to hear what I said.

Johnny backed up his brother straight away. He wasn’t going to leave Tall Tree Valley and that was that. And as soon as he’d spoken, the three Blueside girls, one by one, said the same. And then the six of them — Mehmet and his five followers — looked around at the rest of us, hoping for more support. But everyone else stayed silent. Hunched under our buckskins, we peered up at the falling snow and wished wished we were somewhere else. And John was telling us we could be.

‘I’m getting tired of living in this little patch of trees up in Snowy Dark,’ John said. ‘I’m going to try and get down the other side to a proper forest, and if anyone wants to join me they can. It’ll mean going through more snow, I admit, but look around you. We’re in the snow already!’

Mehmet jumped to his feet.

‘Harry’s dick, John. Don’t pretend this is the same as it is up on Dark. We can still see here! We can still find things to eat! We can still make fires! There’s firewood everywhere! And if we just built bigger and stronger shelters we wouldn’t even need to get wet.’

I looked across the fire at Tina. I knew she’d be annoyed with John for once again springing a whole new plan on everyone, but when I mouthed the question to her ‘Will you go?’, she nodded, and I nodded back to say ‘Me too’. Then I looked at my sister Clare and asked her the same thing, and she nodded as well. So did Lucy Batwing. So did Janny and Jane and Mike.

Aaaaaaaah! cried the leopard again, not so far up above us. Lucy and Martha London started crying again and said they couldn’t bear to live any more in this cold snowy place. I looked at John and saw the old slinker was having a job not to smile.

Something came into my mind then that my mum made me learn when I was fourteen fifteen wombs old. It was a secret thing that I wasn’t to talk about. It was words that had passed from mother to daughter all the way down from First Angela, who I was named for. And Mum said I should remember the words exactly and pass them on in turn when I was older to any of my own daughters who would be able to remember them carefully, and keep them to themselves.

‘It’s not that these things are such a big big secret,’ my mum said. ‘But if everyone were to tell these words to each other all the time, they wouldn’t stay the same. They’d change in the telling in the way that the True Story does, and we wouldn’t remember any more what Angela actually said.’

There were a lot of words from Angela that Mum taught me, but the ones I remembered now, as John and Mehmet were fighting over whether we should stay in Tall Tree Valley or whether we should go, were these:

‘Some men want the story to be all about them.’

It was so true of John, I thought. As soon as things got quiet, and everyone was just getting on with things, he got uneasy because life stopped being a story about anyone in particular, and certainly not about him.

But it was true of Mehmet too.

‘John doesn’t know the way to another forest,’ Mehmet hissed now, his face all blotchy with anger. ‘He doesn’t know it any more this time than he did before. Michael’s names, what’s the matter with all of you? This snow here won’t kill us, but that snow will.’

It would have been nice nice, I thought, if this didn’t have to be about John or Mehmet, and could just be about deciding the right thing to do, but there weren’t any other choices apart from what the two of them were offering. It was the same when I first came over to John at Cold Path Neck: only that time the choice was him or ugly old David Redlantern.

‘We can stay up here in middle of Dark until we die,’ said John, ‘or we can finish off the job we started and find a place on the other side. Do we want to live the rest of our lives in the warm wide forests that we know are over there, or do we want to huddle up forever in this small cold place?’

Aaaaaaaah! came the cry again from the slopes up to Dark.

For a few seconds everyone was silent. Then Mehmet spoke.

‘And what about leopards, John? Want to explain to us why it makes sense to go up there among those white leopards all over again?’

John laughed.

‘What makes you think they’re up there, Mehmet? They can throw their voices, remember? Tom’s dick, it was you that first figured that out! They could be down here in forest now. They could be just a few yards away. We’re in Snowy Dark, remember. We’re still in it, and we will be until we get down the other side.’

‘Oh that’s just a load of . . .’ Mehmet began angrily, but John cut him off.

‘Snow leopards cry out before they attack, the same as forest leopards sing. We know that now, don’t we? They cry out to confuse their prey about where they are. And we know now that if we hear that sound up on Dark, we just have to yell and scream loud enough, and we’ll scare them off.’

He looked around at the faces in the firelight, half-hidden under buckskins.

‘In fact those leopards up there are a good sign. I’ll bet you anything they’re there because the bucks are climbing out of Tall Tree Valley to find their way down to lower ground, like we know bucks do in cold dips.’

He made all of us to walk to the edge of forest so we could look up and see for ourselves. He was right. The snow was barely falling now, and, on the huge dark slopes all round us, we could see the headlanterns of bucks moving in long lines up out of Tall Tree Valley.

‘You see?’ he said. ‘Look at them! Heading off for the big low valleys! Those ones over there are going back towards Circle Valley, aren’t they, but look at these ones here! Where are they going, Mehmet? What does that tell you?’

‘It tells me you’re crazy, John. It tells me that, if we let you, you’ll go on until you’ve done for all of us.’

Mehmet turned to the rest of us.

‘Harry’s dick, can’t you see it? He’s doing it again! He’s trying to control our minds. He’s trying to make us think that the way he sees things is the only way to see things!’

‘You don’t have to . . .’ began John.

‘Oh, just shut up, John, will you, shut up and give us all a rest!’

Mehmet had come right up in front of John. He was the shorter one of the two and he glared up into John’s face, and then shoved him, hard hard, so he staggered and nearly fell.

But John was nimble. He recovered his balance quickly quickly, and, in one single movement, he passed his spear from his right to his left hand, grabbed Mehmet by the neck and flung him down into the snow. And then he was over him. Mehmet’s body wrap had fallen open and John pressed the tip of his blackglass spear into the smooth skin of Mehmet’s chest. Both of them were panting panting for breath. A bead of red blood trickled across Mehmet’s skin and under his wrap.

‘Gela’s heart, John, what are you doing!’ I screamed.

‘John! Stop!’ yelled Tina.

And in the same moment she cried out, a leopard cried out too above us.

‘Go on then John,’ jeered Mehmet. ‘Do for me, like you did for Dixon Blueside. It’s getting to be a bit of a habit, isn’t it? That’ll make five, at my count, dead because of you. Or should that be seven, with the two little ones?’

Tina stepped forward, yanked away the spear. I pulled Mehmet roughly up to his feet. The two of us pushed them apart.

‘It’s a choice,’ Tina hissed at Mehmet. ‘It’s a free choice. People can stay with you or they can leave with John. What’s so hard to understand about that?’

No one spoke. The Fishcreek boys and the three Blueside girls went to stand by Mehmet, the boys clutching their spears tightly. The rest of us walked back to our camp and began to dig out our storage logs from under the snow, to get out dry food and spare wraps.

I could see the six of them wavering as we loaded up. I could see them wondering what it would be like to be by themselves in this cold bleak place. I wondered if, at the last minute, they’d crack and come with us, as Mehmet had always done before. But they stayed.

‘Don’t think you’re the brave ones,’ Mehmet jeered after us as we set off behind John and Jeff and Jeff’s woollybuck, Def, ‘just because you’re the ones that are going. Angela stayed, remember, when the Three Companions left. She stayed in one place and made a go of things, like we’re doing. But you, John, and all of you that follow him, you just run run run.’