Starlight came to stand beside me. She slipped her arm through mine, and I leaned my head to rest it for a moment on her shoulder. We’d been friends since before we could walk. Hardly a waking went by back on the Grounds when me and Starlight didn’t cuddle up together, just the two of us.
‘Why are you crying, Mum?’ Fox asked me, peering up into my face.
‘I thought she was dead,’ I told him, wiping the tears from my cheeks and forcing myself not to start sobbing. ‘I was told they found her body in the Pool, with its lungs full of water and a stab wound right through it. But here she is, look! Here’s my Starlight, alive and well!’
Starlight kissed my hair. ‘There’s a reason for that story, which I’ll tell you later. But you can see for yourself that I’m fine,’ she laughed, ‘and a lot more grownup than when you last saw me. It’s good to see you again, Angie. I heard stories about you as well. I heard you’d gone off with a shadowspeaker.’
Twenty-eight
That was me and Starlight, I thought. She’d gone off with the beautiful Headmanson of New Earth. I’d gone off with prickly old Mary with her square face and her small grey eyes.
And just for two heartbeats, even with all these other things that were going on, I went right back in my mind to a time when me and Starlight were maybe six years old – eight wombtimes we’d have said back then – and the two of us were alone by that big rock that stuck up out of the beach at Knee Tree Grounds. We’d found a piece of string that someone had dropped there, and we’d hunted round for small things to tie onto it: a stone, a piece of wood, a fish claw, a black bone from a fatbuck. Now the necklace was finished. Starlight held it round her neck while I stood behind her to tie it on, then we ran off together to show it to her uncle Dixon.
‘Look at my necklace, Uncle! Me and Angie made it by ourselves!’
Dixon was rubbing buckfat into a new boat. He looked round and laughed. ‘That pair!’ he said to Starlight’s brother Johnny. ‘Starlight and Angie! You just can’t separate those two, can you?’
I suppose there’s always a story about any friendship between two people. It doesn’t have to be mentioned out loud, but it’s still there every time they meet, tied up tight in a little bundle: a certain particular shape that neither one has to unwrap to know what’s inside it. The story about me and Starlight was well known on Knee Tree Grounds. Every one of the Kneefolk knew that the two of us had been best friends since we were babies, everyone knew we were always together. And though we loved each other, and I’m sure we would have been friends anyway, that story bound us even more tightly together. We’d started the story but now we were in it too.
‘Here come the two of them again!’ people would say. ‘Jeff’s ride, did you ever see two kids who were so close?’
Of course there were lots of other kids on Knee Tree Grounds who had a special friend, but we were the pair that people noticed the most. Would they have gone on about us so much if we’d been two pretty girls like Starlight? I don’t think so. Would they have gone on about us if we’d been two little batfaces like me? Certainly not. Stories catch on for a reason – we Kneefolk loved the story of Jeff’s Shining Ride, for instance, because it made our Jeff look good, and he was the many-greats granddad of pretty much all of us – and the reason people liked the story of me and Starlight was the huge difference between the two of us, which made our friendship seem sweet.
Yes, and that wasn’t just what made the story work for the Kneefolk. It was one of the things that made it work for me and Starlight too. It helped me because people would have noticed me a lot less if I hadn’t come as a pair with her. And Starlight, well, her name was well chosen, she really was bright like a star, and stars look best against the darkness of the sky. Don’t get me wrong. The two of us really did love each other, really did have fun together, really did talk to each other about almost everything that happened. But still, when we made a necklace, it was Starlight that put it on and me that ran along behind her to show it to the grownups. She was the star and I was the grateful darkness.
And look at us now! Here she was beside me, tall beautiful Starlight in her blue longwrap, with pretty coloured stones hanging from her ears and her wrists: one of the highest and most powerful people in all of Eden. And here was me in my rough skin waistwrap, a mum of three kids from a little cluster that no one had heard of, the shelterwoman of a clawfoot man I didn’t really love.
All that stuff I’ve just said, I don’t mean I went over it all in my mind. Of course not! There was no time. Two heartbeats and it was done. But it was there all the same, that old bundle, and I didn’t need to unwrap it to know what it contained. I was happy happy to have Starlight beside me again, happy happy to know she was alive and doing well. But I wasn’t so pleased to find that old story still lying between us, that old familiar shape.
And yet having it there close again made me notice something. There was no time to think about it right then, but in those two heartbeats, maybe because those tall and beautiful Earth people made even Starlight shine less brightly, I’d glimpsed something that I’d never quite noticed before. Seeing that old story up close, seeing it there between us in its wrap, made me realize that it hadn’t just shaped my life on Knee Tree Grounds, but my life ever since as well. With Mary as we travelled round the Davidfolk Ground, with Tom when I first met him in Davidstand, with the Michael’s Place people when I’d come to join them, over and over again I’d played the part of the grateful darkness.
Twenty-nine
Marius went up into the veekle to fetch something to help Suzie, while Gaia squatted down and looked at the huge dark swelling that had puffed up the little girl’s shoulder and arm to twice their proper thickness. I noticed as she gently touched it that Gaia was wearing a ring on her finger, made of two metals, one white and one yellow, like the one the Johnfolk stole in the old old story. I was about to point it out to Starlight when Marius came back again, carrying a big box made of some hard smooth red stuff, and he and Gaia began to search through the strange things that were packed inside it in neat neat rows.
‘Here it is,’ said Marius. Whatever he’d found was wrapped up in some kind of thin covering that you could almost see through, a bit like people sometimes wrap up pieces of stumpcandy in the skin of a bat’s wing.
Gaia tore off the wrapping and a tiny metal thing flashed. It was white metal, like the white metal in her ring, not red like the metal from New Earth. All round us people pushed and shoved to see, but if anyone so much as whispered, the whole crowd round them hissed at them to be quiet. We wanted to hear every single thing the Earth people said.
‘This is a knife,’ Gaia said. ‘It’s completely clean. Will you let me use it to let out the pus?’
Flame nodded, and Gaia, carefully carefully, pushed it into the horrible swollen wound on the little girl’s shoulder. The pus came bursting out at once, splattering over Gaia’s face, so she had to wipe it off with the back of her hand. And more kept coming, its yellow colour streaked dirty brown and purple with stale blood. A kind of sigh went up from the people all round us, while Gaia carried on prodding and probing with the knife, all the while gently pressing the flesh round the wound to get all the poison out.
‘Now I’ll clean it with this,’ she said, setting aside the knife and taking something else out of the red box: something soft, a bit like a piece of fakeskin, only completely white. She carefully wiped the gash in Suzie’s shoulder, pushed more soft white stuff inside it, and then wrapped even more soft white stuff round it and under her armpit, so that her shoulder was covered up.
‘And now,’ she said, taking another thing out of her box, ‘I’ll give her . . .’ She said some words that she could see that neither Flame nor anyone else there could understand, so she tried again. ‘I’ll put something in her blood to make her better.’
Everything in the red box came wrapped in the same strange shiny covering with tiny writing on
it. Gaia tore the stuff off and threw it aside (later on, people would fight for a piece of it) and took out a long thin thing with a point on the end, a bit like the needles made from spiketree thorns that we use to sew our wraps. Then she pressed the thorn into the flesh of the little girl’s arm. I saw it catch the light as it slid in, and realized that it was made of white metal too. Everyone gasped. After a short time Gaia pulled it out again and wiped clean the tiny hole that it had made with some more white stuff out of yet another shiny wrap.
‘Her fever will go down soon,’ she told Flame, standing up, and gently placing Suzie back into her arms. ‘But we’ll need to clean her wound again.’
Flame and Tom and the others stared up at her.
‘Are you saying she’ll live?’ Tom asked, his voice all wobbly and choked up.
‘Oh yes,’ Gaia said. ‘You’ll see her looking a lot better quite soon, and she’ll be fine in a day or two.’
She said ‘day’ instead of waking, that old Earth word, like a few old folk still did in Circle Valley.
Tom and Flame were crying, and so was Clare and me and Trueheart. Even Gaia’s eyes were shiny, like people’s sometimes are when they’ve done something good. Big grey old Tom fell down onto his knees and pressed her hand against his tear-smeared beard.
‘Thankyou, Mother, thankyou.’
Now there was a pause, while the people who had seen all this took it in, and those further back gradually received the news about what had happened. Whole of the clearing outside the Circle was packed with people now, and their excited voices came together in a constant restless clamour that drowned out the sound of the trees. Then people started to shout out.
‘Hey, I’ve got a sore leg,’ called out a woman just beyond the guards. ‘Can you fix that for me too?’
‘My eyes are going,’ shouted an old guy. ‘Can you make me see again?’
‘My little girl has a sore rash on her skin that won’t go away!’ called a young woman.
‘My teeth ache!’ a man said. ‘They hurt so much I can’t sleep.’
‘I’ve got clawfeet.’
‘My baby boy has a bad batface.’
‘My granddad can’t breathe properly. Have you got something in your red box for that?’
More and more voices called out. Who doesn’t have aches and illnesses, or at least know someone that does? As Gaia and the two Earth men looked round at these people and then glanced back at one another, I noticed something in their faces that maybe most people couldn’t see. I noticed they were scared. And I noticed once again how tired they were, tired tired, like they hadn’t slept for many wakings.
I caught Trueheart’s eye. She was standing by her mother, Clare, looking at Gaia’s face, then down at the red box, then at the two Earth men, then at me, as she took everything in. She could see, just as I could, that there was only so much stuff in there, that there was no way the Earth people were going to be able to fix all the sores and rashes and wounds of everyone here in Circle Clearing, let alone in all of Eden.
‘I guess you can’t help everyone,’ she said.
Marius looked across at her, the shyer of the two men, the one with yellowy-brown skin like we had in Eden, and dark curly hair.
‘No, we can’t,’ he said. ‘We just haven’t got enough stuff.’
The people standing round us bent towards one another as those who’d understood what Marius had said repeated it to those who hadn’t.
‘Never mind,’ said the woman with the sore leg. ‘There’ll be plenty for everyone, won’t there, when you take us all back to Earth.’
Again, I saw the three of them glance at one another. How strange and scary this must be for them, I thought, to be three Earth people, tired tired by travelling across the stars, surrounded by hundreds of people from Eden.
‘Do you need to sleep?’ I asked them.
That made them all smile at once. ‘Do we need to sleep?’ asked Deep. ‘I’ll tell you what. I could happily sleep for a weak!’ No one really knew what he meant by that exactly, but we could tell he meant he could sleep a long time.
‘Well, you must come to my shelters,’ said David Strongheart at once, ‘and I’ll have my helpers—’
This was our Head Guard, remember, a man who only had to ask his guards to do it, and people would be speared, or beaten, or tied to spiketrees to die, a man with twenty-three shelterwomen and a hundred kids, a man whose Great Shelter in Davidstand was as tall as a tree and wide as whole of Circle Clearing. This was the great-great-grandson of Great David. This was one of the people who knew they’re already in a story, even while they’re still alive. But next thing I knew I’d interrupted him!
‘Or I could look after you,’ I said to the Earth people, ‘me and Trueheart who saw you first, and all our family. If the Head Guard can give you a shelter, we could live next to it and cook for you, and fetch you the things you need.’
‘That would be great, Angie,’ said Gaia.
No one argued – how could you argue with someone who came from Earth? – and my old friend Starlight spoke out in my support.
‘Good plan,’ she said. ‘Good good plan. I know Angie. She’ll look after you well.’
I’m not quite sure, but I think it was just after that when a weird thing happened. Strongheart stepped forward, and, fat and old as he was, high as he was among the Davidfolk, he knelt down in front of the Earth people. It was hard hard for him to do so, but with great difficulty he knelt down anyway, brushing aside his son and his helpers and shelterwomen when they stepped forward to support him.
‘I know you must rest,’ he said to the Earth people. ‘I know you’ve travelled far far. And I know you can’t help everyone here who has a toothache or a bad back. But please please help your Family. The Johnfolk are attacking us right now, they’re doing for our people, just over far side of the Dark. They’ve already taken Veeklehouse from us, and Davidstand as well, and if we don’t do something to stop them, pretty soon they’ll be coming over here. Please help us to stop them. We’re your True Family. We’re the ones that stayed and waited for you. If it had been all up to the Johnfolk, there’d have been no one here to meet you at all.’
Trueheart had moved over to stand near Marius – even that early on, there was something about him that interested her – and she heard Marius speak softly softly to Deep about what Strongheart had just said.
‘That might have been easier for everyone, actually,’ that’s what Trueheart heard Marius say. But then, straight away, he stepped forward and spoke directly to David Strongheart, loudly enough for us all to hear. ‘You mean you’re at war?’ he asked. None of us knew the word, so he tried again: ‘You mean two whole groups of people are fighting and killing each other?’
‘Yes, exactly!’ cried Strongheart. ‘We need your help to make them stop.’
The Earth people looked at each other.
‘We can’t take sides,’ I heard Deep say to Gaia. ‘We don’t know anything about the rights and wrongs of this.’
‘How far away are these people who are attacking you?’ asked Marius.
‘Four five wakings across the Dark,’ said Strongheart’s son, Leader Harry. He was a big man, with thick hair over the backs of his arms and hands, hair poking out of the top of his wrap, and a big thick beard, black but turning to grey.
‘We could send them a message,’ suggested Gaia. ‘We could send the other side a message, telling them to come here and talk.’
Leader Harry shook his head. ‘They’ll think it’s a trick.’
‘Even if they can hear my voice?’ asked Gaia.
She took a little black square from out of a pocket in her shiny wrap, and spoke softly to it as if it was alive.
‘Now touch it here,’ she told Harry, handing it over to him.
Harry took the thing from her, carefully carefully like he thought it might be hot, a
nd touched it where she’d told him to. All at once her voice came out of it, as loud as if she was really speaking. The people crowded round gasped in amazement, and Harry almost dropped the thing.
‘Hello Johnfolk,’ said Gaia’s voice from the little black square, ‘this is Gaia from Earth. Three of us have come in a starship. Please stop fighting now and come to meet us.’
Leader Harry turned to his father, and then to Headman Newjohn and Starlight. All three of them nodded.
‘I’ll get a buck and some men and take it over there right now,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring their leaders back with me.’
Thirty
So Leader Harry and eight of his guards began their journey back towards the Dark and Wide Forest beyond, and the Earth people tried to rest. Strongheart gave them one of his big square shelters in Brooklyn. It had its own fence round it, with guards to watch over it, and inside the fence, us Michael’s Place people, all thirty of us, built little shelters of our own round the big shelter where the Earth people slept. So we kind of had our own little cluster again, except that where once we’d had our little stone circle in middle, now we had people: people who weren’t just reminders of Earth, but came from Earth themselves.
All round the fence, people stood and stared. They knew to keep quiet, because the Earth people were sleeping, but even so they couldn’t help murmuring and whispering, and once in a while even singing, in soft low voices, some old Earth song like ‘Come Tree Row’.
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