Dark Eden

44 Tina Spiketree

When he came back down from Tall Tree Valley John was full full of himself, like he hadn’t been for a long long time. He had all his authority back. He knew exactly what he was doing and how to carry everyone with him. And the funny thing was, he didn’t have good news at all. He had bad bad news, but he was happy happy happy. It was just like when the snow came down into Tall Tree Valley: he liked having trouble to deal with.

‘We need to leave this place,’ he told us. ‘David Redlantern and his lot could soon be down here after us. We need to get far enough away from here that they can’t see the smoke from our fire from the top of the ridge. Where we are now, they could be here within twenty wakings if they put their mind to it.’

He looked back the way the three of them had just come down. There was a dip going on and Starry Swirl was filling up sky, bright bright and big as whole world, with the black shadow of Snowy Dark sharp up against it.

‘We won’t always run from them,’ he told us. ‘Time will come when we’ll turn round and face them. And, if we need to, when that time comes, we’ll fight David and his lot and beat them. But we’re not ready for that now. There’s only sixteen of us here, not counting little kids, and he could bring maybe fifty sixty grownup men and newhairs with him over the ridge, with blackglass spears and bows and everything. We’re not ready for that. But a waking will come when there’ll be more of us, and we’ll have found our own blackglass, and then . . .’

‘And then,’ said Gela with a sigh, ‘there’ll be a lot more killing. There’ll be lots and lots more red red blood. Harry’s dick, John, you don’t have to apologize for telling us to run away! Surely there’s enough space in Eden for people who feel like doing for each other just to move apart and keep out of each other’s way?’

‘Yeah, and let’s stop talking about killing, if you don’t mind,’ Clare said. ‘What’s poor Fox and Flower going to make of it, eh?’

The two children were both listening intently, their faces stiff. Poor things. It was never like that when we were littles. We might have been scared of leopards or slinkers sometimes, we might even have felt scared of grownup people who were angry or unkind, but we never never thought that other people might come and do for us on purpose.

‘We need to take everything we can,’ John said, ‘skins, wraps, blackglass, spears, everything. Load it onto bucks, or carry it. We’ll go that way,’ he was standing facing Dark, and he pointed behind and to his left, ‘along between the hills and Worldpool, but making our way over towards Worldpool till we’re going along the edge of it. We’ll keep going for ten wakings. That’ll take us far enough from the ridge. After that we won’t have to move so fast, but we’ll still keep moving on every few wakings for a while, to get us a good long way away. We should be safe then for wombs and wombs, by Worldpool somewhere, far off from here. We could even make boats, if we wanted, make boats and figure out how to cross the water. Then we’ll have somewhere else to go to if we have to get away again.’

Yes, we could be safe, I thought, but you won’t like that, John. You’ll get bored again. You’ll do something to make things more exciting, just as you’ve just done by going up to Tall Tree Valley and stirring up an ant’s nest, just like we feared would happen.

But I didn’t say that then. We needed to move. Tom’s dick, I did not want to be around when David Redlantern and his lot came over Dark, and I certainly didn’t want my little ones to be there to see what they did to us. We needed to move. And of course I had to admit John was good at getting things moving.

We started to pack stuff up, sort things out, figure out just how much we could carry on our backs or load onto the seven woollybucks we had now managed to turn into horses. It wasn’t all that much we could take with us when it came to it, not when Jeff had to ride on one buck, and we had twelve little ones to bring along with us, and we needed to take embers on a bark so we could make fires again without spending whole wakings trying to get a spark from twigs. Within a waking we had loaded up everything we could carry and were ready to leave our camp at L-Pool behind us, that big empty space inside John’s fence that we’d hardly begun to fill up.

‘The annoying thing is,’ said Gela, ‘that when David’s lot do come over the top they’ll find this place and make it their own. We’ve done all the work for them.’

It was probably true. From what John and Gerry and Jeff had heard up at Tall Tree, Family had been happy to steal all the ideas that John and the rest of us came up with, even though they condemned us for having them in the first place: they were turning bucks into horses over there now; they were making footwraps and headwraps and bodywraps. Why wouldn’t they start their own camp in Wide Forest?

But who cared, eh? We’d be long gone when they arrived here.

Hunting and scavenging as we went along, we moved slowly through forest. The trees went hmmmmmmm all around us. Starbirds called to each other. Two three times we heard a leopard singing in the distance. Once we passed two of those huge slow animals that John had named Nightmakers, and three four times we crossed the wide dark paths they made through forest as they slowly munched up every shining flower on the trees and the ground. You could tell how old the paths were by the number of flowers that had grown back.

We went slow slow. There was a lot to carry, including all the little kids except for Fox and Flower, who’d walk a little way, and then ride up together on a buck, and then walk a little more.

About three four hours into the second waking, I went up to the front with my little boy Peter riding on my back in a buckskin sling. John was up there already walking next to Jeff on Def, with Gerry following on just behind them. John had Star in his arms. She was fast asleep and he bent from time to time to kiss the top of her head. Now that things were moving on again for him, he seemed to have forgiven her for maybe being Mike’s kid and not his own, and he loved the sweet fresh smell of her hair.

‘Why do we need to stop in one place at all?’ I said to John. ‘We could just keep moving on slowly forever.’

John beamed round at me. He was in a good good mood, relieved relieved to get away from that little place we’d made for ourselves by L-pool. Tom’s neck, he’d worked for wakings and wakings on that big fence, scratching and cutting himself, wearing himself out, but now he’d left it behind without even a moment of regret. Moving was what he liked to do best.

‘Now you’re talking, Tina,’ he said laughing. ‘It could work, couldn’t it? Just going a few hours further on each waking, perhaps, so we had time to hunt and scavenge and rest. We’d just need a few more bucks to ride on and carry our stuff, and we’d be fine, we’d never need to stop anywhere.’

We walked on a bit.

‘You know,’ John said after thinking for a little while, ‘you really are right, Tina. It would be good to keep moving.’

I’d hardly ever heard him so willing to discuss anything that another person had suggested to him.

‘But not heading away all the time,’ he went on. ‘Sooner or later we need to turn and face them. When there’s a few more of us, I mean. When we’re stronger. When we’re ready. It’s not good just to keep running away.’

I shrugged. Why should we ever turn round? Why should we face them? Eight nine wakings’ journey from here, back in Circle Valley, Mehmet had probably already talked to David Redlantern. Now, or soon, David and his Guards would be gathering themselves together — their blackglass spears, their horsebucks, their bows and arrows, their knives, their clubs — and making their way up to Tall Tree Valley and on to the ridge beyond. And when they got there, they’d look down on Wide Forest as we had done. They’d be amazed amazed, like we’d been, and, for a while, their mouths would water at the thought of all that space and all that easy meat. But then they’d remember why they came, and they’d stop admiring Wide Forest for its own sake, and start searching searching searching for signs of us.

They’d have ridden on the backs of bucks, which was Jeff’s idea, and they’d have followed the route that no one would have taken if it wasn’t for John, but that wouldn’t make any difference to them. They’d use the things we’d found, to hunt us down for daring to find them.

I didn’t doubt, now Caroline was out of the way, that David Redlantern really would stick John onto a spiketree if he could, and let his skin burn off on its scalding bark, just as he’d always said he would. And I didn’t doubt that if he got hold of me, he would do to me what Dixon Blueside would have done if John and the others hadn’t come back to stop him. He’d hold me down and force himself up me and spurt his juice inside me, just to show how much power he had, and how little I had, however pretty I might be and however horrible and ugly he was. And if there was no one to stop him he wouldn’t just do it once. He’d do it again and again and again, until he’d used me up, and he could chuck me aside, like the empty husk of a whitelantern fruit with its sweet flesh eaten away.

Why should we face all that, any more than we would choose to stick our arms down an airhole with a slinker hiding in it or pick up a piece of shit and force it down our throats? No, I thought, we should just go on and on and on. I even began to think that I’d go along with paddling out across Worldpool, if that’s what it took to keep us safe. In fact I could see myself agreeing to any plan at all that would distract John from his idea of turning round and facing David.

But then my mood changed, and I thought that the further away we travelled from Circle Valley, the further we left behind all those other human beings too, the nice ones, like my mum, and nice batfaced Sue Redlantern, and all those others back in Family who weren’t like David Redlantern at all. And even though we hadn’t seen any of them since we left Cold Path Neck, it was sad to think that we might go so far far from them that there stopped being any possibility of contact again.

Yes, and there was Earth to think about too of course. It was dreadful dreadful to think of Earth coming for us and not being able to find us because we’d gone too far, so that David and all the others went back to that world of light, and we few were left behind here like Tommy and Angela had been, all alone in dark dark Eden.

And now I understood why John wanted to turn and face them. It wasn’t just about fighting and killing. That was part of it, but it wasn’t whole thing. It was also about staying connected. Even fighting was.

‘Jeff was just saying that maybe we could get some baby leopards somehow and train them up like bucks to protect us,’ John said, looking round at me for my opinion. ‘Sounds worth a go, don’t you think? If it works with bucks, why wouldn’t it work with leopards too?’

He wasn’t expecting it but I put my arm round his neck and kissed him. And he let me this time. He relaxed and laughed and kissed me back.

‘And another idea me and Jeff had was about cars,’ he told me. ‘Do you remember that model Car that Oldest kept back in Family, with its four wheels? I reckon we could figure out how to make a kind of snow-boat with wheels that we could get bucks to pull along with our stuff on, even if there wasn’t any snow.’

And then he talked about catching a baby nightmaker and turning that into a horse.

‘Think of the load a thing like that would carry!’ he said, looking round at me again to be sure that I was as excited about it as he was.

I laughed and kissed him again, and then fell behind a bit to see Dix, and ask him to take a turn with Peter, who was getting big now and was hard to carry for too long.

In two more wakings we reached Worldpool.

I’d been to the edge of Worldpool three four times since John first found it, but just seeing it was a different thing from walking along next to it. This way you really got a sense of how big big it was. It was a pool that you could walk alongside all of one waking and still not reach or see the end of it, a pool with ripples on it half as tall as a grownup, like moving hills of shining water, which you could look into and see shining fishes swimming inside, before they came toppling over to swirl round the rocks in white bubbles that caught the light from the plants and creatures below. It was a pool that stretched away from us, softly shining into the distance, but didn’t reach another bank, like all the other water we’d ever seen, but stretched out instead to a far-off place where it seemed to touch the edge of the black black starry sky in a long straight line. But it wasn’t really touching sky. That line was Eden itself, our own dark Eden, curving down and away from us, hiding even more wonders from our sight.

After we’d walked for half a waking, we came to a place where a river, thirty forty yards wide, had cut through the cliff and was pouring out into Worldpool over a shallow bed of stones. We and our bucks had to wade across it — it was waist deep in the middle — carrying our kids and all the stuff we had with us. Dix and Gerry carefully lifted the fire-bark above the water, with the embers glowing on their flat stone.

‘Hey, look at this!’ shouted Lucy Batwing in the middle of the stream.

She’d noticed something that was floating by. She caught it and brought it to shore to show John. It was a little toy boat made of a dry fruit skin rubbed with grease, like the ones little kids used to play with back in Family. But, Michael’s names, how could a little thing like that end up here on the edge of Worldpool?

‘Well, this must be Main River,’ Jeff said. ‘This must be where Main River comes to from the bottom of Exit Falls.’

It was strange strange to think that this exact same water had flowed down from Dixon Snowslug, and Cold Path Snowslug and all the other snowslugs and streams that fed into Circle Valley, strange to think it must have come through Deep Pool where me and John had dived for shining oysters, and through Longpool and Stream’s Join and Main Stream, and on through Greatpool. It was strange to think that some little kid in Family, some kid probably not even born when we were back there, had played with this little boat up there, just like we used to do, among all those old familiar places. It can’t even have been all that long ago. Grease or no grease, those little boats didn’t last many wakings before they turned to mush.

‘We’ll come back here one waking,’ John said, ‘and follow the water up towards Dark. Maybe this is another way back into Circle Valley. Maybe we could climb up Exit Falls from below.’

Tom’s dick, did he never let up?

There was a warm wind blowing in from Worldpool as we continued along the cliffs. It had a strange scent to it, rich and pungent, a bit like the way wavyweed smells when you spread it out on branches to dry it out for rope, but sweeter and more complicated. Birds and long-winged bats of kinds we’d never seen before gave out strange hoots and cries from little hiding places in the cliffs below us, and looked down at us from high high up under Starry Swirl.

We came across a completely new kind of creature lying below us on the rocks beside the water. There were twenty thirty of them, as big as widebucks and with a buck’s mouth-feelers and big flat eyes, but they had no legs at all, only two little arms at the front with webbed hands on them like a duck, and four long fishy fins. They were slow slow when they were moving about on the rocks, just like a woollybuck or widebuck would be if it lost its legs and was trying to wriggle around without them. But in the water, among the wavy trees that swayed down there with their watery lanterns shining yellow and green, those great fat things swooped and dived as quickly and gracefully as bats hunting flutterbyes among the lantern trees in Circle Clearing.

Dix shot one of the creatures with an arrow. What a screaming and a yelling it made! Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee! And then all of the other ones started up as well. Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee! they screeched as they wriggled to the edge of the rocks, tipped themselves into the water and then shot off down into the depths like they’d suddenly become arrows themselves, shot from a powerful bow, heading down and down and down.

Dix and me and John and Gerry put down the kids we were carrying and scrambled down the rocks to finish off the squirming thing with clubs and spears. We skinned it and cut it into pieces. We didn’t cook it on a fire, because we didn’t want to make smoke, but we cut the meat in strips and scorched it on a spiketree. It was rich fatty meat. It filled you up quickly and lay heavy in your stomach for a long time, and it made a couple of people get sick. But, Gela’s eyes, that was good thick fat, and, like John said, if you needed fat for snow-wraps or to seal up a boat, those creatures would be the place to go to get it. So we called them fatbucks.

Next waking, John went out in front as usual, this time with Jeff and Gerry and Harry, excited and keen to find more new things. Pretty soon they were so far ahead of the rest of us that we could hardly see them at all. The brightness of Worldpool made the cliffs along its edge look dark by comparison and we could just barely make out the four of them — John, Jeff, Gerry and my big dumb brother — as little dark specks on top of that dark mass of rock, with the shining water on one side of them, and the shining forest on the other. Far off ahead of them — so far off you couldn’t tell if it was in forest or out in Worldpool or in Dark or what — a volcano was burning. You could see its dark red flame where Eden’s shadow met sky, and then, above that, the stain of black smoke trailing across Starry Swirl.

The rest of us plodded along steadily behind for some time, until suddenly we realized that the ones in front were yelling and hollering. We couldn’t tell what they were saying, or whether they were excited or scared — the warm wind coming off the water was blowing in our ears and buffeting our faces — but John and Harry and Gerry were waving and jumping up and down on the cliff like they were crazy. Only Jeff was still calm, sitting up on the back of his buck and watching the others shout and yell.

Gela’s tits, what was it? What could they have found?

We began to run forward.

As we drew nearer we saw they were standing in front of some big solid thing lying in the trees some ten fifteen yards back from top of the rocks. At first it looked like a boulder of some kind, a big big boulder, almost a hill. And then — Tom’s neck — as we got closer we began to see why their cries had sounded so strange. They didn’t know if they were excited or scared. They didn’t know if this was good good or bad bad, because it was something we’d never seen before. We’d never seen anything that was even a bit like it.

You had to stand and stare at it a long long time before you could even get your eyes to tell you what sort of shape you were looking at. Even the stuff it was made of was something new, not wood or rock or earth or anything like that at all. It was smooth and shiny, like . . . like metal. But it was hard to believe so much metal could be all together in one place, because this thing wasn’t the size of the little metal ring on John’s finger, it was the size of Circle of Stones itself!

It was that shape too. It was a huge huge circle of metal, tipped a little bit on its side with the lowest part of it sticking into dirt of the forest floor, all mashed and broken up. It was like this huge thing had somehow fallen there, or been thrown down hard into the edge of forest, like you’d throw a lump of stone. But what could possibly have thrown a thing as big as that?

We went up to it. We gingerly touched it and then, when it didn’t sting or burn, we felt it all over. It really was metal, hard like stone but colder, and smooth smooth all over, with no grain in it, no roughness, no texture, only from time to time straight lines that divided the surface up into square shapes, and straight rows of little round dots. But the metal was only the beginning of the strangeness of it. At the top of it, in middle, there was a smooth shape sticking out like a bowl that you might use for water but twenty thirty times the size and made of what looked like smooth ice, so clear that you could see Starry Swirl shining right through it.

Dix was nimble. He climbed up there and touched it.

‘It’s not ice,’ he said. ‘It’s warm and dry. And it’s smoother even than metal, smooth smoo . . . Oh Gela’s tits!’

He came scrambling and tumbling down like he had six leopards after him.

‘What is it? What is it?’ we were all yelling at him.

‘Faces,’ he said, ‘faces inside that ice thing looking out. White grinning faces with huge eyes!’

Lucy and Clare and Mike grabbed their kids and started to run. The little ones began to scream. But John and me climbed up the top and looked in. It was dark inside, but there was just enough light from forest and stars for us to make out two white faces staring up at us, with big dark eyes and toothy gaping mouths.

‘They’re just skulls,’ said John, ‘that’s all. They’re just human bones.’

Human bones weren’t something we saw too often because we always used to bury dead people back in Circle Valley under stones. In fact I’d only ever seen the clean white bones of a person once before, when a bunch of us found the remains of an old Batwing bloke called Johnny in forest when I was a little kid. (He’d been out there scavenging by himself and he’d died for some reason — maybe a heart attack or something — and had the flesh eaten off him by starbirds.) I looked through the smooth hard icy stuff at the faces looking out at us. Their mouths hung open like they were roaring with laughter. Ugh!

‘Just bones,’ John called out. ‘They can’t hurt us.’

The others who’d scattered in panic came reluctantly back to the metal thing.

‘Hey, look here!’ Gela called. ‘There’s a hole under here. You could get inside.’

John and me jumped down to look. It was only a small hole, but certainly big enough to crawl through. John wriggled straight in there, with faithful Gerry following him and then me and Jeff. The rest of them seemed to think it was our special job, mine and Gerry’s and Jeff’s, to be the first to follow John into strange and scary places.

There was a hollow cave in there under the hard ice-like stuff, a tilted-over cave that smelt like a kind of mud. Three skeletons were sitting in there on special seats made of some soft dark crumbly stuff that we’d never seen before. We hadn’t noticed the third skeleton from outside because its skull had fallen off its neck and had rolled down to the bottom edge of the cave with its skull eyes looking away from us. The skulls and bones stood out because they were white, but it was too dark to make out much else. I went back to the opening and called for someone to pull down some branches of whitelanterns for us to see by.

When I went back inside to the other three, I reached out for their hands. We were all shaking. I don’t honestly know if it was fear or what. We really didn’t know what to think or feel.

Then Gela crawled in with three four bright whitelanterns on a bit of branch, and now we began to see just what a weird weird kind of cave this was. All round us were strange brown surfaces covered with rows of little shapes. They reminded us of the Kee Board and the Screen that Oldest brought out to show us on Any Virsries, but there must have been thousands of those little square shapes here, dozens of different screens. We didn’t really know what to do next, so we began to touch the little springy squares, pushing them in and out like we used to push them in and out on the Kee Board as little kids when Oldest’s helpers carried round the Mementoes at Any Virsries.

More people were trying to get inside now. Mike was crawling in, and Clare, and even little Flower, and the metal thing rocked slightly with the weight of us all moving around inside it, and creaked like a tree does in the wind.

‘It’s the Three, isn’t it?’ John said. ‘It’s the Three Companions. This is Dixon and Mehmet and Michael. The first Dixon, I mean, the first Mehmet. And Michael . . .’ He could hardly bring himself to say it, and when his words came they were all shaky and wobbly. ‘And Michael Name-Giver.’

We didn’t answer him out loud.

‘And this is their sky-boat,’ Jeff said after a while. He spoke quietly, but more calmly than John. He was interested interested in everything, but he didn’t easily get excited or upset. ‘This is the Landing Veekle. They never made it back to Defiant at all.’

In the fading light from the branch of whitelanterns, we could see the three skeletons more clearly and we could see that they still wore wraps around them, wraps to cover their whole bodies, like Tommy and Angela’s wraps that Oldest still kept bits of in the hollow log. The two skeletons with heads had white wraps, the headless skeleton had a blue one. And there was writing on the wraps. Gela’s eyes, once we’d got some fresh whitelanterns in to give us more light, we could see their names written there — Mehmet Haribey, Dixon Thorleye, Michael Tennison — names from that old old story which was so old that, though we believed it was true, we didn’t really believe it happened in the same world as us. But here they were, not in a story world at all, but right in front of us.

Michael Tennison was the one whose head had fallen off. I picked it up now, that hard hollow thing with its white stony mouth that had first spoken the names of the animals and plants of Eden, all that long long time ago.

‘Just think,’ I said. ‘When we say “Michael’s names” this and “Michael’s names” that, this is the Michael we’re talking about!’

People had got tired of pushing on the little squares by now and most had stopped doing it, but little Flower was still at it. She pushed in a square and suddenly — Tom’s dick, it was hard to believe — suddenly there was a voice speaking to us and a face looking out at us from a screen. Flower screamed, everyone shouted and yelled and jumped back, and the sky-boat rocked back and forth once again.

‘Be quiet!’ John yelled furiously. ‘Gela’s eyes, be quiet and listen!’

It was a man’s face, a man with fair hair and tired grey eyes but no beard at all, his shoulders covered in a bright blue wrap.

‘ . . .Tennison,’ his voice was saying, but it sounded all thin and strange, like he was half-buried in the ground, and he spoke his words in a funny way that we could hardly understand, like he was speaking right up at the front of his mouth. ‘Michael Tennison. I’m afraid it looks as if the Landing Veekle must have been damaged when we . . .’

And then the voice stopped, and the face disappeared, and the screen went black like all the others. And we pushed every one of those hundreds of little squares over and over again, over and over and over. We even got Flower to push them all again, in case there was something about her touch that made a difference, but we could not get the face or the voice to come back again, however hard we tried.