We were lucky, I guess. The ringmen did carry straight on. I guess they weren’t interested in a bunch of low people like us – what use to them were women and kids and guys who were too old to fight in the guards? – but as they passed through one of them put an arrow on his bow. Turning his empty metal face towards the half of our group that were out in front, he shot it among us. And then, without waiting to see whether he had hit anyone or not, he went crashing on down the slope with the others, giving an excited whoop as he disappeared under the shining trees. We heard a starbird screeching as it blundered off through the branches. And then we heard a terrible scream that came, not from forest, but from right up close.
‘Suzie! ’
It was Flame, that thin little girl that Tom had got with trading sticks to be his second shelterwoman. Clare always refused to speak to her and, out of loyalty to Clare, none of the other women had really befriended her either, but right now it was impossible to ignore her. She was standing there screaming and screaming with her little baby clutched in her arms, and the child was pouring with blood.
Clare got to her first.
‘Hey, hey,’ she soothed, taking Suzie from Flame and laying her gently on the ground. ‘It’s not so bad. It’s not so bad. She’s been lucky, look. The arrow just grazed her shoulder. We just need to stop the bleeding and she’ll be fine.’
I had a little bit of fakeskin that I carried for things like this – it’s much better than buckskin – so I knelt beside the little screaming child and pressed it firmly against the wound.
‘There, you see.’ Clare seemed to have forgotten for a moment that she was angry with Flame, and she put one arm round the shoulder of Tom’s other shelterwoman. Truth was, Flame was younger than five six of Clare’s own kids. ‘She’ll be fine, look, she’ll be fine. Angie will stop that bleeding and she’ll be fine.’
Tom was boiling over with rage. He looked round him to find Trueheart.
‘So what do you say to that, eh?’ he demanded of her. ‘What do you say about your friends the Johnfolk now? That’s your little sister there, in case you’d forgotten! That little child there that couldn’t harm anyone! What kind of man shoots an arrow at a tiny baby?’
Trueheart turned away from him and wouldn’t answer, though her eyes were shining with angry tears. She was standing under a whitelantern tree, and you could still just see the fading bruise next to one eye from that last time he’d beaten her.
We stopped to sleep less than halfway up, and then it was another whole waking after that before we reached the place where the trees started to get thinner and smaller, so that the light was much dimmer and the air much cooler than it was down in Wide Forest. There were monkeys up there, those weird creatures that have six arms sticking out from their body in all directions, with hands on the end of each, so it’s hard to say sometimes which is top or bottom, or which is front or back. We’d seen them sometimes in cages in Veeklehouse but this was the first time most of our group had ever seen one moving freely. We managed to shoot a couple of them to cook over the fire we made, after much puffing and blowing, with the embers we’d brought with us from Davidstand.
Starry Swirl shone down cold and bright as we munched the tough green meat, without a proper forest to steal away its light. Another bunch of people came past us as we were eating and pushed on towards the Dark. We called out to ask them where they came from and why they’d left, and they told us they were from a place in forest called Tomsneck, halfway between Nob Head and Davidstand. They told us that New Earthers had grounded at Nob Head too, as well as at Veeklehouse and David Water. I thought about Nob Head and how we used to visit it when we were kids, with its high cliff and its little circle of stones, and the batfaced trader in bowls and pots called Met who always used to give us a bit of stumpcandy.
Again we rested up for a few hours, and then began to climb once more. The air was getting much colder now – or at least it seemed cold then: it was nothing compared to what lay ahead – so we put on those bodywraps and headwraps and footwraps. This took a while, because the little kids didn’t like them and some of them kicked and screamed to stop us from wrapping them. Metty managed to tear his bodywrap with his kicking and struggling, so I had to mend it, and Candy kept pulling off her headwrap: ‘I don’t want it, Mum. It stinks! It makes me feel sick!’ When we finally set off again, we didn’t look like people any more, but strange furry creatures, strange even to themselves, that walked on their back legs and smelled of wet fur and sour stale meat.
We had nine bucks, all told, but only one of them was a woollybuck with a headlantern to give us light. It belonged to Tom, and he led it out in front with two of his boys beside him. Dave followed behind his brother on his buck with Candy and Metty. (Our Ugly was a smoothbuck, of course. It didn’t like the cold. It kept snuffling and spluttering with its mouth feelers and trying to turn round and go back down.) I walked further back with Trueheart and Clare, while Flame rode another buck next to Clare, holding little Suzie tightly in her arms. Clare seemed to have decided to be nice to her, at least for the moment. We were all worried worried about the nasty cut that arrow had made on Suzie’s shoulder, although we tried to tell Flame that it would be alright. It wasn’t just a graze, whatever Clare had said. That metal arrow had made a deep cut as it passed, and there was a redness round it that we didn’t like, though there was nothing we could do about it except wait and hope. Flame whispered to a little wooden doll of Mother Gela that her mum had given her when she first came to our cluster. It was the kind you could get for three four sticks in Veeklehouse, carved, so the traders always said, from wood that came from Circle Clearing.
Time came when the trees were barely taller than a man, and stood forty fifty feet apart from each other. There were no bats and flutterbyes any more, and the ground was mostly stones. It was almost dark but not quite. Here and there we could just make out a monkey or two squatted on the ground, turning over the stones in search of bugs. The place was quiet quiet, without a proper forest pulsing away round us, but from every side came the tinkling trickly sound of the little cold streams that brought water down from the big snowslugs above us, joining together into bigger and bigger streams as they tumbled towards Wide Forest below. We saw pale blotches round us in the dimness here and there, and realized that they were patches of snow.
We came to a big square rock that had been set up beside the path. It had writing on it, letters that had been scratched deeply into its surface with a leopardtooth knife or piece of blackglass, and then stained with red dye. I couldn’t read – all letters were just marks to me except for the ones in my name – but I’d been this way before and I already knew what these ones said, even before Trueheart had read them aloud. They said: ‘DAVID’S PATH’.
‘Funny, isn’t it?’ said Trueheart, or rather the furry creature said it that spoke with Trueheart’s voice. ‘We call it David’s Path, yet it was John Redlantern who first found it.’
And that was weird because I’d said the same thing last time I’d come this way. I’d been with Mary, of course. It had been some eight years before, when I was only five years or so older than Trueheart was now. I’d changed since then, so many things had changed, but the stone looked just the same now as it did then, exactly the same, almost as if the time in between had never really happened. The darkguide had read out the words to us, and straight away I’d turned to Mary and said exactly the same thing as Trueheart had just said now.
It was the same place, the same stone, the same feeling of dread at the thought of snowleopards and getting lost, and at the thought of wakings of coldness and darkness ahead. And this time, just as last time, there was a young batfaced woman to speak those same words. It felt to me as if two separate streams of time had somehow come together and were flowing in a single bed.
‘Hey! Look round!’ said Clare suddenly, and we turned and saw far far below us the hundred thousand lights of Wide Forest,
stretching away alpway and rockway, to our left and right, and peckway ahead of us, until they met the soft soft glow of Worldpool.
Eighteen
There were five of us altogether back then, the darkguide, two guards and me and Mary. The guide and the guards all rode their own woollybucks. Me and Mary shared the same big smoothbuck, with a woollybuck skin draped over it to keep it warm. She was riding in front.
‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ I said, ‘that it’s called David’s Path, yet it was John Redlantern who first found it.’
Mary was silent for some time. She was silent for so long, in fact, that when she did finally speak, I assumed at first she was talking about something completely different.
‘A bunch of people were walking through forest,’ she said, ‘heading for a pool to have a swim. They were all sorts – grownups, kids, newhairs, oldies – and because of the oldies with them, and the clawfeet and the little kids, they were moving slowly slowly. But one young newhair boy grew bored of going slow. “I want to see the pool now,” he complained. “Why can’t we walk faster?” The grownups scolded him. “Be patient,” they said. “Think about the ones who can’t walk as fast as you.” But the boy didn’t listen and ran on ahead, ignoring their shouts. Well, of course, when they’d seen him get away with it, a bunch of other kids decided to run on ahead as well. And soon as they all reached the pool, they dived straight in without bothering to wait for the grownups, even though some of the kids couldn’t swim too well. If the grownups had been there, they’d have told those silly newhairs to be careful, and been there to help if there was a problem, but there weren’t any grownups. The poor swimmers dived in with the other kids, and a couple of them got caught in the wavyweed and drowned.’
She turned round and looked at me.
‘So what do you reckon, Angie? Should that pool be named after the silly boy who ran on ahead and got those kids drowned? He was the first one there, after all.’
‘No, of course not. They were all going there. He just ran on ahead.’
‘Do you know who first told that story?’
I told her I’d never heard it before.
‘That story was told by Wise Mehmet, way back when this stone was first set up, two hundred years ago. It was a few years after Great David died. David’s son Harry had asked Mehmet to set up the poles and the guard fires that mark the way across the Dark between Wide Forest and Circle Valley, and when he’d finished doing that, Mehmet came here and put up this stone. As you know, Wise Mehmet himself was one of the group of silly kids who followed John – he was called Mehmet Batwing then – but, unlike most of the others, he had the sense to realize he’d made a mistake and he came back to David. He made up that story about the pool and the swim as his way of explaining what John had done wrong. Okay, John didn’t drown anyone, as far as I know, but there’s no doubt that many people died, thanks to him, who would have lived otherwise.’
‘But what happened back then with John wasn’t quite the same as the story, was it? It wasn’t as if everyone agreed it was a good idea to try and cross the Dark, and John was just rushing ahead. Everyone told him it was a bad idea. In fact he was told he mustn’t even talk about it.’
Again Mary turned to look at me.
‘How do you know he was told that, dearest? It was – what? – two hundred forty years ago, near enough, and you weren’t there!’
‘No, but I thought that . . .’
But of course, I didn’t know. There was no way I could know what really happened all those years ago. I just felt like I knew because I’d been brought up with a certain story about those times, a story that Jeff and his followers had told their kids long ago, and their kids had passed on to us through the generations. And of course Jeff was one of the ones who’d chosen to go with John. He wouldn’t be likely to say that it had all been a silly mistake. There really was no reason why his version should be any truer than Mehmet’s.
‘Are you angry with me, Mary?’ I asked her later, after we’d been riding in silence for some time.
The last tree had been left behind us now, and the only light came from the headlanterns of the four woollybucks, lighting up the strange furry forms of the guide and the two guards.
‘Why would I be angry with you, sweetheart?’
‘For asking why this is called David’s Path?’
Mary gave that loud bright laugh. ‘No of course not, darling. I like the way you ask questions. That’s good in a shadowspeaker. We have to work with people who don’t understand the True Story and help them understand it. Remember those Hiding People and their giant bat woman? Remember that sweet old woman by the White Streams with her children’s stories about Earth? We need to think of all the questions that people might ask and wonder about, and learn to answer them without getting upset.’
She liked the way I asked questions: Mary said that again later on when we were in Circle Valley, the first time I went into the Circle by myself to listen for the voice of Gela. ‘Let your mind go quiet,’ she said, ‘and then ask questions. You’re good at asking questions, after all! You know how much I like that. Ask questions and listen for our Mother’s answer. And, whatever you do, don’t go worrying about whether you’re good enough, because that will just get in your way. You are good enough, Angie, remember that! I know you are, and what’s more I know for certain that Mother Gela thinks the same.’
There was a fug coming on. The air was warm and wet, and the cloud had come down from the sky and was seeping through the trees. I walked into the Circle. How strange! How scary! To walk by myself into the Circle of Stones, where so few were allowed to go. I walked to the five stones in middle that are supposed to remind us of Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions who died in the Veekle: Michael, Dixon and Mehmet. I stood there and looked out. The fug made the edge of the clearing look blurry. Mary was waiting out there, near to one of the guards who are always there watching the Circle, but they were both like blobs of darkness in the mist. All the lanterns on the trees were blurry too, with rings of light round each of them, white or pink or blue. It was only close to me that things were clear. Each one of the white stones in the circle that surrounded me was separate and solid, and inside the Circle I could see every grain of dirt on the ground.
I squatted down. It was quiet and still. The fug seemed to muffle sound as well as light, and there were no flutterbyes round the lanterns as there would be normally, and no bats to hunt them. The trees were still going, of course, they never stop – hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph – and I could hear voices and other sounds from the cluster round us beyond the trees, but they seemed far far away from me, like they were in another world. Only inside the Circle seemed completely real, and even that was a weird kind of real that felt more like a dream than ordinary waking life.
I squatted down there by the stones in middle and tried to settle my mind as Mary had told me to do, and not to fill up my head with worry. It wasn’t easy to do. Mary had said she knew I was good enough, but there were things that Mary didn’t know. I hadn’t told her I knew the Secret Story or who I heard it from. I hadn’t told her that my own best friend had gone over to the Johnfolk and put on the stolen ring. I hadn’t told her that, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t help feeling proud of that, even though poor Starlight had ended up dead, which sort of proved that what she’d done was bad. Mary didn’t know these things and she loved me and wanted to think the best of me, so of course she believed I was good and pure. But Gela would know better. She could see into the hearts of all her children and would know all of my secrets, and all of my doubts.
I remembered that Mary had told me to ask her questions.
‘Mother,’ I whispered. ‘My mum and my brothers and my sisters. Are they alive? Are they well?’
I waited and listened. I listened for a long time, but there was no answer. All I could hear was the pulsing trees, and the sounds of people out there somewhere
in the fug.
But I’m listening to the wrong kind of thing, I said to myself, wiping the sweat from my face. Gela’s voice wasn’t going to be a sound out there like the hmmmph hmmmph hmmmphing of the trees, it was going to be inside my own head, like a voice in a dream. So I tried to shut out all the sounds that came from the world beyond my skin, and concentrate on the sounds inside me. But all I could hear was the racing of my thoughts, and my own blood pounding in my ears, like there was another tiny forest inside my head: a tiny forest, hot and fuggy like forest outside, but with no one living in it but me.
I could still see Mary out there, or at least I could still see the blurred shape in the fug that I knew was Mary, patiently waiting for me to hear what she could already hear herself. ‘I so look forward to when we’re both shadowspeakers together,’ she often said, ‘and can talk between ourselves about our Mother and what she wants for us. It’s lonely doing this on your own, it really is. Everyone is a bit scared of us shadowspeakers. No one wants to come close, and no one really understands what it’s like for us.’
I’m going to let her down, I thought. After all her patience and all she’s done for me, I’m going to let her down!
But then I told myself firmly to stop all this. It was just worry and fretfulness, and Mary had particularly said there was no point in that, and that it would only get in the way. So I pushed thoughts of Mary and whether I was good enough out of my mind and tried again to hear our Mother. Still nothing came. Still there was nothing at all beyond my own thoughts, my own pulse, and the sounds coming in from outside.
I wondered if my question was too selfish? After all, Mother Gela didn’t speak to shadowspeakers for their own benefit, she spoke to them so they could pass on her messages to all her children. I must try again with another question that wasn’t about me.
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