Daughter of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  Mary laughed. ‘You mean like that Watcher of yours on Knee Tree Grounds?’ She reached out and took my hand to show she wasn’t cross and was only teasing. I didn’t try to tell her that the Watcher wasn’t supposed to be in our heads, but behind the whole world, looking out at everything through our eyes, because I knew she’d say, as she always did, that that came to the same thing.

  ‘Listen, Angie,’ she said. ‘We know our Gela’s not just an idea in our heads because she speaks to us. It’s difficult for you now to understand this, I know, it’s difficult difficult, but I promise you, my dear, when you hear our Mother’s voice more clearly, you’ll know exactly what I mean.’

  Eventually we came to Veeklehouse. It was the first time I’d been there since I said goodbye to Starlight, and it was strange strange to be back again, in that place where me and her had seen all the wonders and possibilities that lay beyond our home, and she’d gone after them, and I’d just paddled back home again. All those old feelings were still there, it turned out, waiting for me just where I’d left them. Grief, loneliness, jealousy, anger: they all welled up inside me again, as if no time had passed at all since I was last there. And as they welled up, they stirred up newer feelings that had been building up since I’d been with Mary: mixed-up feelings about leaving my home behind out in the bright water, and spending all my time with no one but Mary to be my family and my friend.

  Soon after we arrived, a guard came to bring some meat and flowercakes for Mary, and to ask her to come and meet the guard leader so he could discuss with her the messages she was going to give to the people in Veeklehouse. This had happened a couple of times before when we arrived in a new place: guard leaders wanting to discuss what the shadowspeaker was going to say in her show. After all, it was their guards that kept us safe when we were travelling round. And this time, of course, it was Leader Hunter, guard leader of Veeklehouse and Strongheart’s third son: the same one who received our buckskins and starflowers and boys when I came to live at Michael’s Place.

  Mary told the guard that me and her had just arrived after travelling all waking. Would it be alright if he came back for her a bit later when she’d had a chance to wash her feet and put on another wrap? As he headed off, she glanced round at me, and seemed to see something in my face that made her uneasy.

  ‘I’m not here to speak for the high people,’ she told me. ‘I hope you know that, Angie. I’m here for everyone, but I do need the high people’s help and support, and if they want things from me that Mother Gela wants too, there’s no harm in helping them out. Meet me in a half waking by the Veekle Gate, and we’ll get ready for our show.’

  I wondered what expression she’d seen on my face. All I’d really been thinking at that moment was that I didn’t fancy being on my own in Veeklehouse just then. It was only now she mentioned it that it struck me as interesting that the guard leaders thought they could tell the shadowspeakers what to talk about. And it was interesting too to discover that Mary imagined me watching her and judging her, when I still saw her as the teacher who knew almost everything and myself as the helper who knew hardly anything at all. I really hadn’t noticed that before. Yet now I had noticed it, I remembered a few other times when she’d glanced at me uneasily in that same way, like she thought I wouldn’t approve of what she was doing.

  While Mary was busy with Leader Hunter, I walked round the trading shelters for a while, looking at the feather hats and the earrings, the wraps and rings and spears and boats. Then I went to see the Veekle, and after that, I filled in some time by watching a little group of guards and traders playing a game called toss-up that men like to play right across the Davidfolk Ground, where they all chuck trading sticks into a heap, and then throw little wooden dice to decide who gets the lot.

  After a while, I walked to the cliff and down the path to the ledge below, where traders from other places pulled their boats out of the water. I hadn’t set out on that walk with any clear plan, but now I was there I knew exactly what I was looking for, and it wasn’t hard to find. The boats from New Earth were easy to spot back then, when the rest of Eden still hadn’t yet figured how to copy those smooth bodies made of planks of wood, or those windcatchers hanging from their poles. I found a couple of New Earth guys who were sitting down there drinking badjuice from a jug, and got talking with them. They were just paddle-men, blokes that came across with the New Earth traders to pull their boats back home for them against the wind. They wore simple skin wraps like I used to do back on the Grounds (I wore plain fakeskin now I was Mary’s helper) and the older one of the two was a batface like me. I think he was the dad of the younger one, or maybe his uncle. They both had arms like tree branches and massive shoulders, from all that paddling paddling paddling, waking after waking, across the Pool.

  ‘A friend of mine went to New Earth,’ I told them. ‘My best friend.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘We grew up on a little grounds far out in the Pool – a waterhill, I think you people would call it – but when we came down here to Veeklehouse once, she met your Headmanson, and crossed over with him.’

  The men looked at each other, half-impressed, half-disbelieving.

  ‘What?’ exclaimed the younger one. ‘You’re saying you knew the Ringwearer ?’

  ‘Ringwearer? Is that what you call her now? Her name’s Starlight, and the Headmanson was called Greenstone. I was with her when she met him. He had red hair tied up in a hundred little bows.’

  Again the men looked at each other. ‘Well, they do say she came from a little waterhill,’ the older one said. He laughed, and the guy laughed with him. ‘Tom’s dick! Who’d have thought we’d meet a friend of the Ringwearer!’

  ‘Do you know her then? Can you give her a message from me?’

  They laughed even louder at that.

  ‘What? Us? Us know the Ringwearer?’ the younger one said. ‘Some chance. If we’re lucky, we’ll see her in the distance someplace one waking, with people crowding round her to kiss the ring.’

  ‘What ring?’

  ‘What ring?’ The younger one glanced uncomfortably at his companion. ‘Well . . . a special ring that the Headman’s housewoman wears.’

  ‘Not the ring in the story? Not the one that John found and—’

  ‘Let’s not go over all that,’ the old guy said. ‘It’s always made trouble between us Johnfolk and you lot.’ He smiled, and reached out to shake my hand. ‘A pleasure to meet you, though, my dear, a pleasure to meet a friend of the Ringwearer. She’s pretty pretty, so they say, and all the small people love her.’

  ‘Small people?’

  ‘You call them low people here,’ the young guy said. ‘It means regular people like us. The ones that do the work, in other words. The ones that take all the crap. We all love her. Everyone says she’s as kind and gentle as Gela herself.’

  I loved Starlight, but kind and gentle wouldn’t be the words I’d have used to describe her. Determined, yes. Tough, yes. Smart, yes. But not kind and gentle.

  Never mind that, though. What I was thinking about right then was this ring the men had spoken about. They didn’t like to say so, but it was obviously Gela’s ring, the one that Gela lost and John Redlantern found, the one that John had worn on his finger when he set out across Worldpool from the Brown River Ground, all those years ago.

  Tom’s dick, I thought, imagine that! My best friend was wearing that ring from the old story, the ring that was made on Earth, the ring that was the cause of all that fighting! It was almost like Starlight was in a story herself. In fact never mind almost, she was in a story. A young girl from a place no one had heard of, putting on the ring of the Mother of us all: if that wasn’t a story, then what was? Starlight had become a story, and I was there when it all started, so I was kind of in it as well.

  As I made my way back to meet Mary, I was bursting bursting to tell her this exciting news, but I knew I couldn’t. S
he hated the Johnfolk. She hated them for breaking up Family, and destroying the Circle (though of course the Circle had been put back again by Lucy, the first shadowspeaker, with Gela herself guiding her hand). And, like all the Davidfolk, she hated the Johnfolk especially for stealing the ring, which Gela had been given by her mum and dad, and which ought to belong to all of us. Ringstealers, she called the Johnfolk. If I told her, she’d be angry angry with Starlight for wearing that stolen ring. And she’d never rest until she was sure I was angry about it too.

  But I knew I couldn’t be angry about it. I loved Mary for choosing me, and I respected her, but I couldn’t help myself from loving Starlight as well, and I couldn’t help myself from being proud of her. So, bursting though I was to tell someone, I said nothing about what I’d heard. When Mary came back, we talked about this and that as we began to get ourselves ready in the place that was set aside for shows, but I didn’t mention Starlight at all. In fact I’d never spoken to Mary about Starlight. I hadn’t mentioned her even once.

  Nine

  Fox slept for a couple of hours, but then woke up.

  ‘Mum! What’s that sound?’

  ‘What sound, darling?’

  Dave sat bolt upright beside me.

  ‘What? What is it? What can you hear, Fox?’

  ‘Oh shhh, Dave. Don’t wake everyone up. It’s just forest, Foxy. It’s just the trees and the animals.’

  It was my job, I figured, to be a home for my children, even when they had no home, and to try and make them feel safe, even when there was danger. But the truth was I’d been lying awake myself, listening to rustlings in the starflowers and cracking branches, imagining the Johnfolk creeping up on us with their metal masks and spears. They were near near. Even if they’d stopped right there on poolside where they’d grounded and not moved into forest at all, they were still only a waking’s walk away. And who was to say they had stopped? Who was to say they weren’t heading straight for Davidstand just as we were? Hmmmph hmmmph went the trees, hmmmmmmmm went forest, and I wanted to yell at it to shut up and be quiet for once so I could listen out properly for danger.

  No one had been sleeping deeply. Foxy and Dave set off a whole string of other anxious voices round us: grownups muttering to other grownups, kids calling out to their mums or dads. A baby started to cry – it was little Suzie, the daughter of Tom’s new young shelterwoman – and that woke up Metty, so he began to cry as well. So much noise! The Johnfolk could have crept right up to us and we still wouldn’t have heard them.

  ‘We’ll carry on,’ Tom decided. ‘Seeing as we’re all awake, we’ll get the bucks loaded up and get going again.’

  As we set off again with our bucks, Clare came to walk with me: Trueheart’s mum and Tom’s first shelterwoman. She was older than me, old enough to be my mum, but she’d been my friend since I came to Michael’s Place. A big solid woman with big long breasts and broad hips, she plodded along beside with three of her smallest kids. She’d had seventeen children, as she liked to tell people often, and fourteen of them had lived. But now she’d reached the end of her childbearing time, and Tom had got himself a second shelterwoman called Flame, who was barely older than his daughter Trueheart, and given her a baby. He’d told Clare that he was cluster head, and so it was only right that he have two shelter­women, just as it was right that guard leaders often had five or six. Strongheart had twenty-three by then.

  ‘It’s not like you can give me any more babies,’ Tom had said to Clare.

  Clare hated that and, though she was usually a kind woman, she couldn’t stop herself from muttering about Flame and her baby Suzie.

  ‘She doesn’t know how to handle that kid,’ she grumbled, looking back at Flame, who was riding on Tom’s buck and trying to get little Suzie to suck from her. ‘She’s only a kid herself, and all she cares about is herself.’

  Poor Flame. I don’t suppose she’d have gone for an old granddad with a missing hand if she’d had a choice in the matter. But she was the daughter of another cluster head further up poolside who’d been in the guards with Tom, and Tom had gone up there to collect her in his guard’s fakeskin wrap, carrying a whole big bag of trading sticks.

  ‘I mean, what was Tom thinking of ?’ Clare muttered. ‘It’s like he thinks he’s some kind of high man or something, not just a bloody old cluster head who was chucked out of guards when he lost his hand.’

  ‘Mum, my feet are sore sore,’ said Fox.

  ‘Oh poor love. Walk a little bit more if you can, sweetheart, and then we’ll let you have a go on the buck with your dad. I can carry Candy for a bit.’

  He was a good boy. He didn’t argue, just picked up a stick as he carried on and began to slash out at flutterbyes that came too close to the ground, stamping on them as they flapped about on the dirt with their broken wings still shining, waving their tiny legs and arms. Poor little man, he had dark rings under his eyes from lack of sleep. Presently Clare’s kids joined in with the flutterbye hunt. Little bits of shining wing flew this way and that through the air, as they let out their anger and fear.

  ‘We’re taking too much stuff with us,’ Clare said, after a bit. ‘That’s the problem. I told Tom, but he wouldn’t listen. Kids their age can’t walk for wakings on end like this. It’s all well and good carrying pots and jugs, but we’re going to need these bucks to carry people. Especially if we have to move on from Davidstand.’

  I looked down at Fox.

  ‘Well, we will have to,’ I said. ‘We’re not going to be able to feed ourselves at Davidstand.’

  ‘Where do you reckon we should go then? We need a plan, don’t we? I need to start working on Tom now, so it’ll be there in his head when we need it to be.’

  ‘Well, I think we should . . .’ Then I stopped. ‘Oh Gela’s heart!’

  There were men coming towards us through the shining trees, men on the backs of bucks, in front of us, behind us and on either side. The bucks were a strange new kind with bluish skin and tough lean bodies, and the men’s faces were hidden behind metal masks.

  Ten

  That first time Mary took me back to Veeklehouse, Leader Hunter himself came to watch her show, bringing three of his shelterwomen, and six seven of his kids. Mary cried and rolled on the ground. She begged and wept and scolded. She warned some folk that they must come back to Gela or it would be too late, and gave others news of their loved ones who’d died and crossed the darkness between the stars. One of Leader Hunter’s women began to cry and cry, and Mary spoke gently to her about her little daughter who’d drowned in a pool.

  Then, after a while, Mary began to speak of problems and difficulties that were happening in Veeklehouse.

  ‘How is it for you here,’ she asked, ‘now these Johnfolk are coming here to trade: the ones from New Earth as well as the ones from Brown River? Do you worry your children are listening to their stories, or that they might go back with them across the water?’

  ‘My boy has done,’ called out one woman. ‘The silly kid crossed the Pool as a paddle-man with one of these New Earth traders. What will happen to him if he stays over there, among the people who turned their back on Family? Where will his shadow go when he dies?’

  Mary took the woman’s hand and held it tight.

  ‘What a worry for you, my dear. What a big big worry. I’m so sorry to say it but not one of those Johnfolk will ever find their way home, unless they first come back to Family. Just as John Red­lantern tricked those foolish newhairs long ago and led them up into the darkness and snow, so he leads the Johnfolk even now into the icy blackness between the stars.’

  The woman sobbed. ‘But my boy Luke? He’s not so bad really. Surely there must be some hope for him?’

  Still Mary held her hand tightly. ‘Gela is reaching out for him now,’ she said, her own eyes filling with tears. ‘She’s whispering to him, she’s begging him to come back home to his mother and his True Fam
ily, the people of David. Let’s trust in Gela, eh? She’s a true mother, my dear. She’ll never never give up.’

  What would Mary think, I wondered, if she knew my friend Starlight was living at that moment with the high people in New Earth, and wearing the stolen ring on her finger?

  But Mary had moved on to something else.

  ‘Gela wants me to warn you about a bad bad thing that’s happening right here in Veeklehouse,’ she said. ‘It’s as harmful in its own way as the Johnfolk are with their lies. In some ways it’s even worse, because it’s secret and hidden away. I’m sure some of you already know what I’m talking about. Gela needs your help to make it stop.’

  And now she started talking about some secret words that certain foolish mothers passed on in secret to their daughters, claiming that the words came from Gela herself.

  ‘What could be worse?’ asked Mary, walking round the circle of people, peering one by one into women’s faces. ‘What could be worse than pretending to speak for our Mother?’

  She stopped in front of a young batfaced woman, about the same age as me, and stared intently into the woman’s eyes.

  ‘You’ve heard it, haven’t you, my darling? You’ve been told the Secret Story yourself ?’