I was gasping for breath as I ran into the cluster, Candy still squirming angrily in my arms: ‘Let me go! Let me go! Let me go!’ Ten eleven grownups were sitting there peacefully working on this and that – Tom, the head of our cluster, was slowly chopping up a buck with his one hand, Lucy was sewing wraps, Kate was grinding up starflowers – and little naked kids were playing round them or helping with small jobs.
‘Dave!’ I screamed, as soon as I had the breath to speak. ‘Dave! Quick! Get the boys and the buck!’
Dave turned his long grey face towards me. He’d been sitting by the fire – he always seemed to feel cold – whittling away at buckbone, while Metty played nearby. Now he climbed uncertainly to his feet and took a couple of hobbling steps towards me, like he still hadn’t quite figured out what it was I wanted from him.
‘Kate! Davidson! Lucy!’ I screamed. ‘Get your kids! Blow the horn! They’re coming now! Now! Ringmen in masks! Johnfolk from across the water!’
What was wrong with them all? How could they be so slow?
‘The Johnfolk?’ asked Tom.
‘Yes, the Johnfolk, ten boats of them, with metal masks on their faces and metal spears in their hands! Come on, everyone, move! We need to get away from the poolside.’
Tom stood up. He was a big big man with a loud voice, and could hardly have been more different to his brother Dave. He’d been a guard for a long time until he lost his hand, and he was used to bossing people about.
‘Right everyone, pack up whatever you can carry, and we’ll head for Davidstand.’
Davidstand sat at the foot of Snowy Dark, and it was where David Strongheart himself lived when he wasn’t travelling about his ground, along with all his shelterwomen and most of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. There were many guards there, and if there was any place in Wide Forest that was going to be safe from the Johnfolk, Davidstand would surely be it.
‘Oh Gela’s heart!’ Dave groaned. ‘I just sent Fox to Veeklehouse to get some glue. I’d better go after him.’
Fox liked to go to Veeklehouse along the little path that went through the trees, rather than the one along the cliffs. He liked to imagine he was a hunter, out by himself, far out in the depths of forest.
‘No you hadn’t, Dave,’ I said, ‘not with those clawfeet. You get the buck loaded up and the other kids ready, and head straight towards Davidstand. I’ll go after Fox.’
Kate’s man Davidson started blowing our old hollowbranch horn to bring in the people who were out scavenging or hunting in forest, and everyone began fretting about people they couldn’t get back, such as sons in the guards, and daughters who were the housewomen of guards.
‘They’ll know we’d go to Davidstand,’ Tom said. He had four sons in the guards himself. ‘They’ll be able to come and find us there if they need to. But I reckon that won’t be necessary. We’ll be back here soon. Our guards are more than a match for a bunch of ringmen.’
‘Dave, take Candy and Metty,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and get . . .’
But right then Fox came running back into the cluster: my own little Fox with his thin little arms and legs and his big big eyes.
‘Oh thank Gela!’ I murmured, grabbing him up with tears of relief welling from deep inside of me. Fox wriggled free. He was past the age where boys liked to be babied, and anyway he had news.
‘Everyone’s running away from Veeklehouse, Mum.’
‘I know, Foxy, I know,’ I told him as I let him go. ‘Your dad’s getting the buck ready, look, and then we’re all going to Davidstand. It’ll be safe there.’
Dave had thrown dried meat and bags of flowercakes over the back of our old smoothbuck, Ugly, and now he lifted up Candy and Metty onto its back before hauling himself up there behind them. He wasn’t being lazy. He knew that his clawfeet would hold us all back if he tried to walk.
Waves of grey were rippling across Ugly’s flat black eyes and its four mouth feelers were sniffing and snuffling at the air, like it was trying to figure out what all the humans were so agitated about. Then it tipped back its head and gave one of those little shrieking sounds that bucks make when they know they’re in danger.
A few of the other dads or mums had gone off to look for missing people, but the rest of them had loaded up bucks like we’d done, with dried meat, trading sticks, wraps, sleeping skins, spears and bundles of arrows. I scooped up some embers in a pot, so we could cook along the way.
As we set off towards Davidstand, we heard a huge roar rising up from somewhere in the distance, down alpway and towards the Pool. Tom nodded wisely, like he was the only one who could tell what that sound could possibly be.
‘That’s the guards on the cliff,’ he said, ‘shouting and yelling to ready themselves for a fight.’
It was strange to think about. At that moment every single one of those guards at Veeklehouse was still healthy and whole and strong, and so was each one of the ringmen on the boats from New Earth. But soon the arrows would be flying back and forth across the water: metal-tipped arrows one way, glass-tipped arrows the other, and then people would start to die, and bodies that now were fit and whole would be torn and broken. There would be fire arrows too. Our men would shoot them to set their windcatchers alight, and their fire arrows would come flying back in answer to burn the shelters in Veeklehouse.
Fox was terrified, but he was trying hard not to show it.
‘I wish I could watch the fighting, Mum,’ he shouted out in an odd, loud, excited voice, though I was standing right by him and would have heard him quite clearly if he’d simply spoken. ‘It would be exciting exciting, and I know our blokes are going to win.’
On Ugly’s back, little Metty cried in Dave’s arms, sensing the fear round him, while Candy frowned out from Ugly’s back and said nothing at all. Dave tried to catch my eye so he could give me one of his worried looks, one of those looks that grownups give each other over the heads of their children, but I avoided it. Gela’s heart, I thought, it’s not as if all of us don’t already know how bad things are.
As we started to walk away from Michael’s Place, we looked back one last time at the shelters we’d built for ourselves, the fence of branches we’d worked on for wakings and wakings, so as to make sure it was strong enough to keep out leopards.
Four
I was telling you about that shadowspeaker who came over to Knee Tree Grounds.
We’d never had one there before – Jeff didn’t believe in clinging to the past or talking to the dead – but we’d seen shadowspeakers from time to time when we went to trade over in Nob Head. They would cry and wail in middle of a circle of silent, troubled Davidfolk, or even have a kind of fit and roll on the ground with spit bubbling from their mouths. Sometimes, they’d pick out people in the crowd and tell them, in front of everyone, the bad bad things they’d done. We’d seen big grownup Davidfolk hanging their heads and crying like little kids who’ve been told off.
‘Mother Gela is reaching out to you!’ the shadowspeakers would wail. ‘But how can she help you if you don’t reach back? How can she guide you home through the emptiness between the stars?’
Sometimes they’d suddenly stop and listen, holding up their hands for quiet, so they could hear the voices of the dead loved ones of people in the crowd.
‘It’s . . . Yes, it’s your little boy, my dear, the one who died. He’s telling me his name – I can’t quite hear him. David, is it? Yes, I thought so, David – he’s begging me to tell you to be true to our Mother. He’s afraid that otherwise you’ll never find your way back to him.’
The Kneefolk grownups always kept out of the way of the shadowspeakers. If we were over in Nob Head and came across a shadowspeaker giving a show, our grownups would go and sit on the cliff and talk among themselves until the shouting and crying was over and the speaker had collected her presents. This was Davidfolk business, they said, and nothing to
do with us. But newhairs like to be different from their grownups and me and Starlight and our friends would sometimes sneak off to watch the shows. We were careful to keep a straight face, and avoid looking at one another – we understood that we were among the Davidfolk and on their ground, and mustn’t give them any reason to be upset with us – but afterwards we’d all go off along the cliff together and, as soon as we were alone, we’d burst out laughing.
‘Mother Gela is crying!’ Starlight would wail through her own tears of laughter. ‘She’s crying crying crying!’
‘You’ll all be lost in the cold cold darkness!’ our friend Poolshine would sob.
‘The starship will never come back for us,’ I’d moan, ‘unless you listen to our Mother and look after her family!’
We laughed and laughed. How could those stupid Davidfolk be so easily fooled, we wondered? Wasn’t it obvious that the speakers told people whatever they thought would either please them enough or frighten them enough to get good presents out of them?
But of course this was only obvious to us because our grownups had told us what to look for, and how to explain what we saw. It was only obvious to us because they’d told us, as Jeff had taught, that a single life was like a wave moving over the surface of the Pool – the wave disappears completely, but the Pool remains the same, shifting this way and that in its enormous bowl – and that Mother Gela was long dead, and that even when she was alive, she’d just been a person like anyone else, nothing more and nothing less.
Yes, and even though we told ourselves it was obvious that what the shadowspeakers said wasn’t true, I think one of the reasons we laughed so loudly was to shut out the little secret doubts that came to each of us. What if the Davidfolk were right? What if it really was true that when our bodies died, our shadows lived on, to wander through the emptiness between the stars, and maybe get lost there forever, all alone, with no hope of company or warmth?
After all, the Davidfolk were many and powerful. They’d built Veeklehouse and Davidstand. Their ground stretched from Worldpool to Circle Valley, and from Rockway Edge down to the White Streams. They had the Veekle, the Circle of Stones and all the other things from Earth except the ring. Their Head Guard was such a high man that he had seventeen shelterwomen and more than a hundred kids. Who were we to say that they were wrong and we were right?
So we’d seen shadowspeakers before, but when that shadowspeaker came over to Knee Tree Grounds, it was a different thing. This was our ground, not the Davidfolk Ground, and yet here she was. And there were guards with her too, guards who had suspicions that we Kneefolk were really Johnfolk in disguise, and who were watching us carefully to see how we’d behave. We gathered unhappily. Most of the grownups felt we had to go along so as not to upset the Davidfolk, but it felt all wrong that she was there.
‘Remember, no laughing and no smiling,’ mums and dads warned their children, just as our mums and dads had done when we went over to Nob Head. ‘Not unless the speaker smiles herself.’
There she was, the shadowspeaker, standing right in middle of our own Meeting Place, the same place where we Kneefolk met every waking to listen out, not for some long-dead person, or some far off voice calling out to us from Earth, but for the Watcher who was as close as can be, the secret awakeness that looks out from the eyes of everyone. I could see the tree right behind her where Jeff Redlantern’s own words were carved. WE ARE REELY HEAR, he’d written.
I heard one of the older grownups mutter that the shadowspeaker was trampling on purpose on the things that mattered most to us, trampling on the story that made us Kneefolk into who we were, and I must say it felt like that to me as well. But I’d decided the best way of dealing with this was to see the funny side of it. Just like we’d done at Nob Head, I’d listen politely, and then have a good laugh when she and her guards had gone.
But now we were actually faced with the shadowspeaker, things felt different. This woman wasn’t really ridiculous at all. You could see she was smart smart. You could see her studying our faces with her sharp sharp eyes, and it was like she could see right through us. Her name was Mary. She was a short, solid, fierce-looking woman, with a big square face, reddish hair that she’d cut short so it stuck out in little tufts and spikes, and small piercing grey eyes. She wore a longwrap made of fakeskin, woven from crushed starflower stems, much as the high people wore on Mainground, though without the fancy colours or the feathers and beads and dried batwings. We Kneefolk just wore little buckskin waistwraps, with bare feet and bare breasts.
Mary stood there waiting until we were all silent, and then, without speaking a word, she took a stick and drew a circle in the sand, the way that Davidfolk always do when they find themselves in a place where there isn’t already a circle of stones. Then she stood up straight again and looked round at us. She’d made the Davidfolk sign, right there in middle of the place where we met to tell our own stories, and it was like she was daring us to object. None of us did – we knew better than to do anything that might upset the Davidfolk, and in any case, Mary wasn’t the kind of person you’d want to argue with – so then she stepped inside her circle, which was something that only shadowspeakers and Head Guards were supposed to do.
‘Do you know what the Circle stands for?’ she asked.
No one wanted to answer, but she just waited, knowing quite well that sooner or later someone wouldn’t be able to bear the silence any longer. And sure enough, a woman called Fire finally spoke.
‘The Circle of Stones,’ she muttered.
Mary nodded.
‘Thankyou. You’re right. It stands for the Circle of Stones, where the Veekle from Earth landed and where one day people from Earth will come again. But it doesn’t just stand for that. It stands for the one True Family of Eden, and how we’re all linked together. John Redlantern tried to break that Family but, though he stirred up trouble among us, it’s still one Family. Jeff Redlantern tried to break up that Family.’ She paused to look round at our faces, daring us to rise to this challenge to our precious Jeff. ‘And he stirred up trouble among us too. But it’s still one Family all the same, one Family with one Mother. And our Mother still loves us all.’
Again Mary paused, the stick still in her hand, searching our faces, figuring out who would be easiest to reach and who would be hardest. Then suddenly she took up the stick, snapped it in two and flung the pieces out at us to her left and right.
‘Oh you foolish, silly people! You babies!’ A little bit of spit flew from her mouth. ‘Hiding away out here in the bright water! How do you think that’s going to help you, eh? What do you think it’s going to save you from?’
She paused just for a moment while the questions sank in, and then she carried on. ‘Oh you can hide away from trouble out here, I’ll give you that. You can hide from playing your part. But do you really think you can hide from death?’
I could see some angry faces round the Meeting Place. I could see people who were fighting back the desire to shout out in our defence. But I could see many faces that were scared as well. Not just the kids who were there but grownups too looked like children who had been told off. I was close to tears myself. Mary had made me ashamed of being one of the Kneefolk.
‘You’re lucky lucky,’ she told us. ‘Your Mother still loves you. In spite of everything. You might have turned your back on her. You might have stamped on her face. You might have stood back and let her precious ring be taken from her. But she still loves you. She still . . .’
Mary broke off, like something inside herself had interrupted her, and suddenly she began to shake all over. At first we thought she was having some kind of fit, but then we saw in amazement and horror that she was shaking with sobs of grief.
‘I can hear her,’ Mary said, struggling to get her voice under control. ‘I can hear her now. Mother Gela is crying, but . . . but – oh our dear good Mother! – she’s not crying for herself, however much you’ve hu
rt her. She’s crying for you. She’s crying crying crying for her foolish children. And she’ll never stop crying until every single one of you turns away from wicked John and foolish Jeff, and comes back to True Family of Eden.’
I could feel my own tears running down my face now, and I could see others crying all round the Meeting Place. Well, we had been hiding out here, hadn’t we? We’d been hiding out here for generations! The world went on without us across the water, Eden grew and changed, but we refused to be part of it, staying here on our own, cutting bark and fishing just as our parents and their parents had done, and turning our backs on everything else.
Mary walked over to a girl called Brightwater and asked her name.
‘Do you know why our Mother cries for you, Brightwater?’ she said.
Brightwater had been crying and crying. ‘Because . . .’ She sniffed. ‘Because we’re bad!’
Mary shook her head, half-smiling through her own tears.
‘No, it’s not because you’re bad, Brightwater. It’s because if you don’t reach out to her, she can’t reach back to you. And do you know what will happen then?’
Daughter of Eden Page 2