I squatted down in middle. I closed my eyes.
‘Please, Mother Gela, if you love me, speak to me, or I will disappoint Mary and lose all the trust she put in me.’
I waited for a moment, just in case our Mother was going to answer at once, but of course she didn’t. Under the pulsing of the trees, I heard the faint slap and flick of flutterbyes’ wings.
‘I know I shouldn’t keep secrets from Mary,’ I whispered. ‘Perhaps you can help me figure out the best way to tell her?’
That’s easy, I answered myself at once, just as I’d done the first time. Walk over there now and tell her that you have these secrets and you think they might be stopping you from hearing Gela.
Again I wondered if that thought, so clear and strong, could have been Gela, Gela herself telling me to go and talk to Mary? Perhaps that’s what Gela’s voice was like?
But no. I’d said the same thing to myself so many times as we travelled up and down the Davidfolk Ground, and there was nothing the slightest bit new about it this time. If it was Gela at all, it was Gela speaking to me as she spoke to all her children, not Gela speaking to me in the way that a shadowspeaker was supposed to hear her.
But now another thought came to me, one that I’d never had before. Perhaps I should pretend? Perhaps I should go back to Mary and tell her I heard Gela’s voice, tell her it was different this time, tell her I’ve finally understood?
Mary would be so so pleased with me! She would be happy happy! And then we could be shadowspeakers together!
I was so relieved that I actually began to stand up to go and do it, but almost straight away I saw how stupid I was being. Didn’t I feel bad enough already about the secrets between me and her? And they were just small secrets. Up to now I hadn’t been lying to Mary, I just hadn’t told her a couple of things about myself. Pretending to hear Gela would be different. That would be a huge lie, and once I’d told it I wouldn’t be able to stop. I’d have to pretend every waking. I’d have to cry and tremble in shows, as if Gela was speaking to me. I’d have to talk with Mary about the things that Gela said, and Gela’s plans for us, and what Gela wanted us to do next. (She’d said so often how much she looked forward to that.) And Mary would look at my face and think she could see me, but what she’d really be seeing would be like one of those little wooden people that they have in Veeklehouse: the ones that talk and dance and seem to be alive, but are really just being moved by someone hiding behind them, who pulls them about with strings and speaks their voices.
No, there was no other way. I’d have to go back to Mary a third time to tell her that yet again I’d heard nothing at all.
She didn’t hug me this time, or take hold of my hands.
‘Still nothing?’ she asked as she stood up to meet me.
‘I’m so sorry, Mary.’
For a little while she just stood there in front of me, her small grey eyes searching my face.
‘You always have to be better, don’t you, Angie?’ she finally said. ‘You always have to be better than me and better than everyone else.’
This was so unexpected that my mouth fell open with the sheer surprise of it.
‘Better? No, Mary, that’s not it! That’s not right at all! I don’t think I’m—’
‘Always questioning, always poking away at what I say, hinting that you think I’m a fool at best and a liar at worst, but never quite saying it.’
‘But Mary, you said that—’
‘Hinting over and over again that I just say what the high people want me to say, but never coming out and telling me straight that’s what you think.’ She put on an ugly spluttery voice, imitating my batface speech as cruelly as any kid had done back on Knee Tree Grounds. ‘“I’m not saying anyfing bad about you, Mawy. I twust you. I juft wondered.” Yeah, right, you just wondered. Do you think I didn’t notice the expression on your face when I came back from Leader Harry? Oh I noticed alright. And I know exactly what you think. You think I trade with the high people, don’t you? You think I trade Gela’s truth for their support.’
Sweet Mother of Eden, the poison in her voice! Her face was red. Her spit spattered into my face. It was like she’d been storing up every single little angry thought she’d had about me all these last two years, squeezing them tightly tightly together into some small dark space inside herself, and now the whole lot was coming out at once.
‘No, Mary! I don’t think that. I don’t think that at—’
‘It’s no good, Angie. I know your tricks now. It’s always the same. You hint and hint at something, and then you insist you didn’t really mean it.’
‘But you said you liked me asking questions, Mary!’
She gave a snort and half-turned away from me.
‘I was a fool. There are honest questions and there are sneaky questions that crawl round inside the truth like a tubeslinker in a tree. I should have noticed the difference. I should have noticed how your questions made me feel inside.’
She turned back to me.
‘Do you know why you don’t hear Mother Gela?’
‘I’m not sure, Mary, but I guess maybe it’s because I—’
‘Oh, no need to guess, Angie, I’ll tell you why it is. It’s because you’re too good. Nothing is true enough for you unless you can be absolutely certain of it, is it? Good good Angie! Pure pure Angie! You can’t take the risk that you might be wrong!’
I was sobbing by then. She was my only friend. My only family. She was my mum, my dad, my sister, my brother.
‘Please, Mary, you don’t—’
‘I’m finished with you, Angie. I’ve given you two years of my life – two whole years! – and I’m not going to waste any more time on you. But let me tell you one thing before we go our own ways. If you wait to be absolutely certain of a thing before you believe it’s true, you’ll never know anything, you’ll never be with anyone, and you’ll never have a home. That’s how it is with everything in this life, and that’s how it is with Gela. If you want to hear her voice you have to take a risk. You have to be brave enough to take the risk that you might be wrong. You weren’t willing to take that risk in Circle, and now your chance has gone. I just hope that sometime you learn to take it in your own life, or you’ll have no life at all.’
She wouldn’t talk to me after that. She wouldn’t look at me. She walked away, back to where the guards who’d come over with us from Wide Forest were playing chess in the blue light and warmth of a big spiketree, on a board scratched into the dirt.
‘When you’re ready, men, I’m set to go. Angie here isn’t coming with us. It seems she’s too good for us. It seems she’s too good even for Mother Gela.’
And that was it. I tried again to speak to her, but she turned her head and told the guards to keep me away from her.
So then I was alone. Really really alone. I was in Circle Valley where I knew nobody. All the rest of the Davidfolk Ground was on far side of the Dark, and I didn’t know anyone there either. The place I came from was ten miles out in the Pool, and there was no one there any more. They’d all left, and I had no idea where they’d gone.
I had those metal cubes with me that the Kneefolk had given me when I left them. I gave one of them to a trader to let me cross over the Dark with him and his bucks.
Twenty-five
Well, I’d say it was obvious,’ said Trueheart, as we squatted side by side at the edge of Circle Clearing, pretty much exactly in the same spot where Mary had been waiting for me that third time. ‘I’d say it was obvious obvious. She wanted you to fake it, didn’t she? She wanted you to fake it like she did, and she was angry because you weren’t prepared to do it. It made what she did look bad.’
‘I don’t think so. You don’t know Mary, Trueheart, but I know she believed in what she did. I’ve got no doubt about that. I was with her two years, remember, and all that time she played the part of a speaker,
whether she was doing a show, or whether we were alone. It was all she cared about.’
Trueheart shrugged, looking at the silent Circle of Stones.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So she believed in that stuff, but in that case, she’d fooled herself. She’d persuaded herself what she heard was Gela’s voice, and now you’d called that into question by hearing nothing. No wonder she was upset.’
‘Maybe.’ I turned to look at her: strong straight Trueheart with her beautiful shoulders and the ugly hole in middle of her face. ‘Listen, dear, you should be careful about mocking people’s stories. They’re like . . .’ I struggled to find a way of describing the picture that was in my mind. ‘They’re like the paths in forest that stop us from getting lost. They’re . . . They’re like the trunk and branches of a tree.’
She didn’t answer me. I thought of all the times I’d watched her quarrel with her dad, Tom, and seen him lash out at her with a stick or the shaft of his spear gripped in his one good hand, and how she still refused to shut up, or hide her feelings. And I thought of the things her dad did to me, out in forest, that no one knew about except me and him, and how I told no one, didn’t speak about it even to Tom himself. She was braver than me and, because of that, she saw things in a different way, and maybe she was right as well. But still, I could only say what I thought.
‘Your dad’s wrong to hit you the way he does, but when you make fun of the True Story, I can understand why people get upset. It’s like you’re covering up the path that will lead them home. It’s like they’re lanternflowers and you’re chopping down the tree that holds them up, and feeds them, and brings them warmth, and connects them to all the other lanterns.’
‘Tom’s dick, Auntie, I’ve never said there’s no Earth! I’ve never said there’s no Gela! Of course she’s there. I know that for myself. I don’t need bloody shadowspeakers to tell me. You know how sometimes when Dad’s hit me, I have to go out into forest until he’s calmed down? Well, I’m all my own then, aren’t I? Everyone’s angry with me, everyone’s wishing I’d just bloody shut up, and I think to myself, well, what am I anyway? Just a batfaced newhair, who doesn’t know anything, stuck here in bloody old Eden, where no one else knows anything either. And sometimes Gela comes to me then. I feel her near me. I feel I’m not alone. She comes to me like she comes to everyone. What I hate are the stories that say she only comes to some people: only to the Davidfolk, only to the shadowspeakers.’
We sat there in silence under the trees at the edge of the clearing. The old guard had dozed off, his back against a warm whitelantern trunk. All round us, Old Family cluster slept, except over there in Brooklyn where the high people from the Davidfolk Ground and Brown River and Half Sky were still talking talking talking.
‘Do you think Suzie will die?’ asked Trueheart.
‘I think it’s quite likely, I’m afraid, dear. Germs must have got into the cut, and now their poison is spreading, and—’
‘Germs!’ Trueheart snorted. ‘What exactly are germs? We say that word like it explains something, but it’s just a made-up word. We’ve got no idea what we mean by it.’
‘I guess not.’
‘Poor little Suzie. Poor Flame too, I guess. I mean, I don’t like her because she slips with my dad and that makes Mum unhappy. But I guess she hasn’t got much choice.’
I wondered what Trueheart would say if she knew her dad sometimes slipped with me as well?
‘I guess we should go back soon,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could look after Suzie for a bit and let Flame get some rest.’
‘Yeah, soon, Auntie. But let’s stay here just a little bit longer. I like it here. It makes me feel stronger.’
We looked at those stones out there, all by themselves in the criss-crossing light from the treelanterns round them: white, blue, pink, yellow. Bats and flutterbyes dived and looped round the trees round the edge of the clearing, and sometimes the pattern of light and shadow moved just a little when a wind blew the branches of the trees. But the world was still still.
Forest hummed. Behind the sleeping guard, the little river trickled over its rocky bed where Tommy and Gela found the stones. Jeff’s eyes, I thought to myself, if there was anywhere in Eden where you were going to hear the voice of Mother Gela – the voices of all the dead, for that matter – it would be here, in this old old place where people first set their feet on Eden’s ground. That had been one of the things that made it hard for me to admit I heard nothing. It had felt like I should be able to. It had felt like any fool should be able to hear those old voices, if they just sat here quietly and listened.
And now, while I was thinking about that, a weird thing happened. We did hear something.
‘What’s that sound, Auntie?’
Trueheart was younger than me and her ears were sharper. There were a few heartbeats before I could make it out myself, and when I did, I had no idea what to make of it. It wasn’t a voice, certainly. It wasn’t the sound of trees or of wind. It wasn’t the cry of an animal. It was a kind of high-pitched whining sound, almost too high to hear. Neither of us could tell where it was coming from, but pretty much as soon as we heard it, something else began to change.
‘Look, Auntie. The clearing’s getting lighter!’
‘Are you sure? Isn’t it just—’
I broke off because, even while I was speaking, the light had become so much brighter that it was simply obvious. There was a big patch of white light that filled up most of the clearing and it was getting so bright that it was starting to blot out the soft and many-coloured light that came from the trees.
I stood up. I was scared scared, but scared in a weird kind of way, because I had no idea what I was looking at, or what there was to be afraid of. I knew this light wasn’t anything to do with the Johnfolk. I knew the sound wasn’t a leopard, or a crazed buck, or the Johnfolk running down from the Dark, or old Mount Snellins going off in the Rockies, as sometimes happened, and throwing hot ash into Circle Valley.
Trueheart stood up with me, and we reached out to take each other’s hands. There was no obvious threat to us. What scared us was just that there was something here we couldn’t explain. That light had now reached almost right out to the edge of the clearing, and the whining noise was growing louder: not loud loud, not as loud as the trees, not even as loud as the river running over the stones, but still much louder than before.
Where was it coming from? We looked out through the trees all round the clearing, but saw nothing unusual. And then Trueheart looked up at the sky.
‘Auntie! It’s there!’
Straight away I had to cover my face because of the brightness, but not before I’d seen what it was. We knew that at once, both of us did. Just in that one short glimpse we could see that what was coming down towards us was just like the thing that sat in Veeklehouse behind that high fence. But the one at Veeklehouse was dead, and this one was still alive: a huge dark circle coming straight down towards the clearing, with white lights shining down round the edge of it, brighter than anything I’d ever seen. Michael’s names, I hadn’t known until then that light could hurt your eyes.
And now I was in the light. I could see my own hands like I’d never seen them before, the pale skin, the little chaps and scars, all picked out so sharply that it was like I was seeing them for the first time. I could see the trunks of the trees – I always thought of wood as black, but I could see now that it was a dark bluish colour – I could see the folds and twists of Trueheart’s batface, I could see each wrinkle in the buckskin wrap of that old guard, still peacefully sleeping under his redlantern tree. I could even see the hairs on it.
The whining sound the veekle made was almost as loud now as the hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph of the trees behind us. We heard men’s voices shouting out from the shelters by Longpool. Apart from the sleeping guard, me and Trueheart were still the only one in the clearing but others had seen the veekle too. We peeked upward
s again. The landing veekle was right over middle of the clearing, just above the tops of the trees. In the heartbeat before I had to look away, I saw four legs come sliding out from underneath it, spindly and long, like the legs of a flutterbye. The old guard woke up with a cry as the thing reached ground, grabbing his spear and clambering to his feet, his eyes wide with fear. The veekle wobbled, just slightly, on those spindly legs as it settled over the Circle of Stones.
And then suddenly more bright lights appeared all round the side of it, shining sideways out through the trees, filling up forest with a stripy pattern of weird black shadows, sharper than any shadow I’d ever seen. I covered my face and peeped between my fingers. At the top of the veekle was that same round shape there was on the one at Veeklehouse, made of some strange kind of glass that you can see through like water, and I saw the dark forms inside of people’s heads.
Me and Trueheart gripped tightly onto one another’s hands.
And then suddenly a voice spoke. It wasn’t an ordinary human voice – it was so big and strong and metal-like that it felt like the veekle itself was talking to us – but all the same I could tell it was a woman’s voice and not a man’s. And, though the words sounded strange strange, I found I could understand them.
‘Hello there,’ the voice said. ‘Don’t be afraid! We’re your cousins. We come from Earth!’
Then the lights became a little less fierce, still bright bright, still picking out every detail and filling forest with black black shadows, still so bright that the lanterns on the trees didn’t seem to be shining at all, but not so bright any more as to hurt our eyes.
Daughter of Eden Page 17