‘We’re not going to find any food round here,’ my Dave fretted, tugging anxiously at his straggly grey beard. ‘And now it looks like we won’t be safe from the ringmen here either.’
‘The guards will still fight, won’t they,’ said Clare’s sister Kate, ‘even if Strongheart isn’t here? Maybe they’ll feed us too?’
‘Don’t think there’s much chance of that,’ said Kate’s man, Davidson. ‘They’ve got a fight on. They need the food for themselves.’
‘So what are we going to do then?’ asked Little Harry. (We called him that because he was tall tall tall.)
We all looked at Tom. He was our cluster head, after all, even if he didn’t know any better than anyone else what was happening, or what our options were.
Tom passed the stump of his right wrist over his mouth. He gave a little sideways glance at Clare in that funny furtive way he had, half-hoping she’d make a suggestion, half-warning her not to. But Clare’s face told him nothing at all.
‘Well . . .’ he began, and then hesitated. ‘Well, I reckon we should go on to Circle Valley.’
It was the obvious choice. Where else was there to go? But Kate was appalled.
‘What? Take our kids across the Dark? No way! There’s snow there, and ice, and big white leopards that sneak up and eat people. You can’t even see them coming!’
‘I’ve been across it before,’ I told her. ‘It’s different these wakings from how it used to be. The guards have put up big poles in the snow to show the way across.’
‘Yes,’ said Tom, who’d been there too when he was a guard. ‘And so many people go back and forth that the path is clear to see anyway, even without the poles, except when there’s been a new fall of snow. There are even little shelters every few miles, with guards on watch, and fires.’
‘That’s true,’ said Davidson, who’d also been there as a guard, ‘but it’s still as cold as it ever was, and cold like that will do for you if you’re not prepared for it.’
‘We’ve got some woollybuck skins,’ Clare said. ‘We can make some bodywraps and headwraps and footwraps. I know how. I made them for Tom when he was a guard. We just need some grease for the footwraps.’
‘What about snowleopards?’ asked Trueheart, who’d been standing on the edge of this talk between the grownups, not quite part of it, but not quite outside of it with the kids either. She came to stand beside me. She had a cut in the corner of her mouth where her dad had hit, a big dark bruise round her left eye, and an ugly weal on her arm, with the skin split open along most of its length.
‘Honestly, Trueheart,’ I said, ‘they’re hardly any danger.’ As I spoke I was aware of my Fox’s big scared eyes, waiting desperately to be told why he should not be scared of snowleopards. Gela’s heart, if only it was just snowleopards he had to fear, I thought, and not ringmen with metal knives and heads full of hate. ‘I never saw even one leopard when I crossed with Mary. She’d been that way many times herself and she told me she’d never seen one once.’
‘Yes, they keep out of people’s way these wakings,’ Tom said, ‘now there are men up there who trap them and hunt them for their—’
‘And anyway, they’re afraid of loud noises, aren’t they, Mum?’ Fox interrupted in that funny false shouting voice he put on when he wanted to show he wasn’t scared. ‘If I see one, I’ll just chase it away!’
‘Okay.’ Kate frowned. ‘So the leopards don’t do for us, and nor does the cold. But suppose we get to Circle Valley, and then the Johnfolk follow us there as well? They wanted the Veekle. Won’t they want the Circle too?’
‘John didn’t like the Circle, though, did he?’ began Dave. ‘He destroyed it, remember, and Lucy Lu had to—’
‘Oh Gela’s heart,’ muttered Trueheart, ‘not more old stories.’
No matter how often her dad hit her, she would not give up.
‘Perhaps we should wait here for the Johnfolk,’ Little Harry said. No one had yet spoken that thought among us, though I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who’d had it before. Yes, the ringmen had been cruel, but wasn’t that only to people who tried to stand up to them? ‘Or even go back to Michael’s Place and accept that Headmanson Luke as our new leader. They can’t do for all of us, can they? And at least we’d have enough to eat.’
Several people had tried to interrupt him angrily while he was still speaking, and now they began talking all at once.
‘Have you gone mad, Harry?’ shouted Davidson. ‘Have you forgotten we’re Davidfolk?’
‘No way!’ growled Tom. ‘No way will I ever live among ring-stealers!’
‘Yes, and didn’t you hear what the ringmen did at David Water?’ demanded Kate. ‘Men, women, newhairs, kids . . . That woman just over there told me she’d heard they chucked babies in the air for a game, and caught them on the end of their spears.’
Oh well done, Kate, I thought, as Fox and Candy turned to me in terror. That was a smart smart thing to say!
Squatting on the ground in the background, Flame gave a little gasp and clutched baby Suzie against her tiny breasts. She never spoke when the whole family was together. The older women always talked over her, and she’d learned that if she ever did manage to get a word in, they’d just pour scorn on what she said.
‘And they’re cruel to low people,’ Davidson said. ‘They’re cruel even to their own low people. I spoke to one of their paddle-men once, when he’d had too much badjuice. He said the low people over there have to dig for metal all waking long in little holes deep under the ground, too small to stand up in or even to sit up straight. You need big big fires, apparently, to burn the metal out of the rock, so they cut down all the trees, all the trees in a whole valley, until the only light and warmth comes from fires and lamps. It’s almost as dark and cold in the clusters round those holes, this bloke told me, as it is up in the ice and snow, but they still have to live there when they’re not underground, never seeing proper treelight from one waking to the next.’
‘I bet those are just stories,’ muttered Trueheart, but so quietly that only I could hear. ‘I bet they say things like that about us as well.’
‘We’re going to Circle Valley,’ Tom decided. ‘Not now, but in a couple of wakings, when we’ve have time to make ourselves some warm bodywraps.’
‘Quite right, Tom,’ Davidson said. ‘It’s the only way we can go. And if the Johnfolk do follow us over there, I’ve heard there’s a path over the Dark on the other side of Circle Valley too, over the Blue Mountains, to Half Sky.’
Tom snorted. No one ever mentioned Half Sky in Michael’s Place without one or other of the men snorting like that and making some kind of joke. I knew hardly anything about the place, but I’d heard you got there by going down to Brown River, and then paddling up the river itself right through middle of Snowy Dark and round the other side. Only other thing I really knew about it was that it was Tina Spiketree who first took people there, about the time that Jeff and his followers came out to Knee Tree Grounds, and for the same reason: to try and get away from the fight between the Davidfolk and Johnfolk. Sometimes you heard the Half Sky people spoken of as the Tinafolk. Not that people spoke much of them at all.
‘What?’ said Tom. ‘To the Women’s Ground? To let women boss me round? You must be joking! No way would I—’
‘They have Head Women and Headmen both, from what I’ve heard,’ Clare said, ‘and a Council that has men and women in equal numbers. And anyway, if it’s such a stupid useless place, how come Strongheart himself has invited their high people to the four hundredth Virsry?’
But Tom took no notice of that. ‘No way am I ever going to live in a Women’s Ground,’ he repeated firmly, glancing half-angrily and half-guiltily, first at Clare, and then at Trueheart, daring them to argue.
‘Me neither!’ said his brother, my Dave. ‘We get bossed round by women way too much already if you ask me.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Clare soothed them. ‘But if we don’t like their ground, we could find our own place over there. There’s lots of space, so I’ve been told. There’s a whole big forest on far side of the Dark that’s every bit as big as Wide Forest. We could find ourselves a new Michael’s Place, with no high people there to tell us what to do. Whether men or women.’
Flame giggled, that poor lonely girl. She might be Tom’s second shelterwoman but she was squatting there on the ground behind the rest of the grownups, almost like she was just another kid. ‘No high people,’ she said. ‘That sounds good to me.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ I came in quickly, mainly to stop one of the other women crushing her as they often did. ‘The trouble with high people is that they think the story is all about them.’
Tom frowned at me, not quite sure what I meant, but not liking the way this was going. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘that’s something to think about another time. For now, we’re going to Circle Valley.’
He brightened up a bit. ‘Maybe it’s good that Strongheart is going to meet the guy from Brown River. Those Riverfolk play a clever game, you know. Sometimes they offer their friendship to the other Johnfolk in New Earth, and sometimes they offer it to us Davidfolk. You can’t trust them of course – you can’t trust anyone that follows John – but maybe if Strongheart talks to their head guy, he can persuade him to line up with us and not with New Earth.’
He gave that snort again. ‘Same for the Women’s Ground, I guess. Whatever we might think of that place, we certainly don’t want the New Earthers getting round there.’
Sixteen
Me and Mary set out from Veeklehouse and did another big loop, over to Davidstand, and then back to poolside and down alpway again towards the White Streams. In each little cluster Mary would walk out into whatever kind of circle they’d laid out on the ground – it might be six yards wide and made of rocks as big as heads, it might be a little ring of pebbles just big enough for one person to stand in – and speak to however many people were there. She’d sense their mood, pick up the things they were worried about and feared, the things they felt guilty and ashamed about, the things they loved or longed for. She’d let those feelings build inside herself: one woman holding all the hopes and fears of a whole cluster, and then, so she explained to me – and I saw it happen for myself – she let their feelings wake up her own longings and fears until she was so full of all those powerful feelings that she couldn’t hold them inside herself any more and they came bursting out. And that meant everyone could see that what came pouring out of her was real. Everyone could see she wasn’t acting or playing a part, but living out for all of us the way we felt.
And yet, even though she wasn’t acting, she was riding those feelings skilfully, like some of the kids back on Knee Tree Grounds used to ride the waves that came rolling in from Deep Darkness when a storm was coming, to break on the edge of our little water forest. She would pace about, fall to her knees, stand up again, cry, laugh, and then look into people’s eyes and, without even hesitating, boldly tell them what was going on inside of them. Words would pour from her: warnings, bright flashes of truth that suddenly came to her, words of comfort, tellings-off, messages of hope. Just as the kids who rode the waves would turn their little bark boats first this way and then that so as to keep the force of each wave behind them as long as possible, so Mary would move quickly from one thing to another, from grief to joy, from one person to the whole group and back to another person, somehow sensing the exact heartbeat when it was time to change. It was wonderful to watch. You couldn’t help but be moved by it. You couldn’t help admiring her smartness and her courage and her skill. And you couldn’t help admiring how much she gave of herself, so that at the end of it, when we’d left the cluster and moved on, she’d be pouring with sweat, trembling, dazed. I just had to hold her sometimes, like you’d hold a child. I had to cook for her. I had to rub her shoulders and her neck to loosen her tense tense muscles. Sometimes I even had to feed her and make her open her mouth to take a drink.
I liked doing all that for her. I still couldn’t believe that of all the people she could have chosen to look after her, from all across the Davidfolk Ground, she’d picked ordinary old me: batfaced Angie from Knee Tree Grounds. I was proud proud of that, desperate desperate to live up to it, afraid afraid that I wouldn’t. But it was a strange life for me, all the same. The guards that rode with us came and went, changing over whenever we passed from the ground of one guard leader into the ground of another, and there was no one I could grow to know and feel at home with apart from Mary herself. It felt lonely lonely sometimes. I missed my family and my old friends. And sometimes, however much I tried not to, I couldn’t help thinking of my friend Starlight and imagining the horror of her last moments, and it was like someone had shoved a spear through me, and I was writhing round on the tip of it, with no one anywhere to help me. But I still loved Mary, I still respected her, I still admired how hard she worked to hear what Mother Gela wanted to say and pass on her messages to the Davidfolk, I still liked how she hugged me and kissed my cheek, and told me I was beautiful and smart.
And yet I held things back from her. I didn’t tell her I’d heard the Secret Story. I didn’t tell her about Starlight and what she’d done. I didn’t tell her I was proud of Starlight for becoming the Ringwearer of New Earth, even if that did mean wearing the stolen ring. I didn’t tell her that I even felt proud of her for speaking the words of the Secret Story out loud. (How brave that had been, when the Johnfolk hated those words every bit as much as the Davidfolk, and you could be thrown into a fire for saying them!) I didn’t tell her about Starlight’s death, or about how I grieved for her.
I was often angry with myself for not telling her these things. I often told myself I was a coward, and that I was a fool to myself. I told myself I should trust Mary. I reminded myself what she’d said about how, deep down, we always know when we’re doing the wrong thing and always feel relieved when we do the right thing, however scary it might be. I even told myself that holding these things back from her was like holding them back from Mother Gela herself.
‘Of course you feel lonely,’ I whispered to myself when I was alone, ‘if you can’t even share things with your closest friend.’ But I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I was afraid that if I did, she’d ask things of me that I didn’t know how to give. And then she’d think less of me, and maybe decide I wasn’t good enough after all to be a shadowspeaker like her, or not even good enough to be her helper.
The worst of it was that she kept praising me for my honesty.
‘I’ve had helpers before,’ she’d tell me, ‘but never one like you. The others just wanted to learn shadowspeaking like it was some kind of trick, a bunch of things you had to remember to do in the right order, like building a shelter, or cooking a sweetbat with candy, or making a string for a bow. But you know it’s nothing like that, don’t you? That’s why you ask questions, isn’t it? That’s why you tell me your doubts and your worries about what I do. Because you know it’s not about doing this thing or that thing, it’s about opening yourself up completely.’
I’d smile and nod, and tell her I did know that, and that I admired her courage for doing it so well, and she’d grab my hand and pull me towards her so she could look straight into my eyes.
‘But you’re like that too, Angie!’ she’d say. ‘That’s what I keep telling you. You open yourself up as well. I spotted that straight away, as soon as I saw you. I saw you’d be more than a helper. I saw you could be my friend, my sister, my equal.’
We went right down to the White Streams this time, right to the edge of the Brown River Ground. There are many many shallow streams there, running side by side, joining each other and then branching away again. They run over beds of round white stones, with whitelantern trees hanging over them and making their whiteness shine up at the black black sky. All round is stony ground
with white cliffs, and strange-shaped lumps of white glittery rock that stick up from forest, and here and there are dark dark patches, some of them half a mile wide, where this hard rock completely covers the ground without so much of a crack in it for trees to push through from Underworld, so there’s no light at all, like that place called Night that Mary spoke about.
It’s a long journey for the people down there to get to the rest of the Davidfolk Ground, but it’s easy easy for them to go back and forth across those shallow streams to the Brown River Ground on the other side. So the Davidfolk cross the streams to trade with the people of the Brown River Ground – the people down there always just call them the Riverfolk – and the Riverfolk come back over and trade with them. In fact some of the Riverfolk have come to live among the Davidfolk, and some of the Davidfolk have moved the other way, and they all wear the same kind of wraps, and talk with the same kind of speech, so that I couldn’t tell one from another.
But of course the Riverfolk people were Johnfolk. It was true they were different from the Johnfolk across the Pool. It was true that they’d been separated from those other Johnfolk for such a long time that their speech sounded more like Davidfolk speech than like the speech of New Earth, and it was true that they had their own Headman and their own stories, which were sometimes more like the Davidfolk stories than they were like the New Earthers’. But still they were Johnfolk. Their stories still said that John was the good guy in the Breakup, and Great David the bad guy, and that Gela was on the side of John, and led him to the ring.
‘These people down here get muddled up sometimes,’ Mary told me. ‘They truly think of themselves as good Davidfolk, and they are at heart, I know. They’re good good people. But living alongside Riverfolk all the time, they get muddled up and sometimes they tell stories that really come from John, without even knowing it. Part of our job here is to set them straight.’
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