Strongheart sent some guards to keep them safe. There were no forest leopards any more in Circle Valley, but there were still slinkers, which could take off your finger or bite a hole in your face, and lately snowleopards had started to come down sometimes from the Dark.
‘I’m sure we’ll be alright,’ Gaia said, and Deep showed us another new thing that they each of them carried, called a gun. He said it could do for an animal, even if it was a long distance away. He pointed it at a dead tree. ‘Prepare yourselves,’ he said, ‘it will make a loud noise.’ We thought he was going to throw it like a spear, or maybe put something into it like you put an arrow onto a bow, but he just pointed it and it suddenly went Bang! We all jumped, and the tree had a hole going right through it. No arrow could do that. Not even a metal one. Not even a metal arrow shot from a yard’s distance. Yet Deep was at least a hundred feet from the tree.
The Earth people were moving off on their bike, and the guards on their woollybucks were getting ready to follow them, when Trueheart suddenly spoke.
‘I’m going to go with them.’
‘You certainly are not !’ Tom told her, but she ran after them anyway, calling out to them to wait. They stopped their bike and helped her onto the back of it with them, and then the bike rolled off along the path beside Longpool that led out into forest.
Tom watched them disappear through the shining trees, his face dark with anger and shame. It seemed pretty certain that the Earth people would have heard what he said to Trueheart and had chosen to ignore him, taking the side of a newhair daughter against a grey-haired dad. And they’d done so not only in front of all the Michael’s Place people, but in front of the crowd that was always waiting round their shelter. Tom was a strong strong man, or at any rate that was how he liked to see himself, he was a guard who’d lost his hand standing up for the laws of the Davidfolk, and he was proud of being cluster head of Michael’s Place, but now all these people had seen him failing to control his own newhair daughter. Gela’s heart, a batfaced girl was already hard enough to find a man for. Who would want one who hadn’t learned to do as she was told?
‘What am I supposed to do with that girl?’ he bellowed, pretending to be speaking to Trueheart’s mother, Clare, though really it was for the benefit of everyone watching. ‘It’s not like I’ve spared her the stick when she steps out of line – you know that! – but she still just does what she likes. Anyone would think she was Head Guard of Eden.’
Some people shook their heads and clicked their tongues sympathetically. But no one – not Tom, not anyone else – said a word against the people from Earth.
‘I would have gone with them myself,’ Starlight said when we met later on beside Longpool. ‘But I don’t like to leave Strongheart and Newjohn alone too long. They’re getting on so well now, you wouldn’t believe! If I’m not there to keep an eye on them, I’m afraid they’ll start sharing out Half Sky between the two of them. It could double the size of both their grounds.’
‘Is it really true that men and women decide things equally in Half Sky?’
‘Yes, I’d say it is.’
‘How do you stop the men from taking over?’
‘Well, they didn’t take over in Knee Tree Grounds, did they?’
‘No, but . . .’ I laughed. ‘But then nothing happened there, did it? Nothing happened at all.’
‘Half Sky was started by Tina Spiketree, remember. She was with John Redlantern at the beginning, along with Jeff and Gerry, but then she broke away from him, like Jeff did. You don’t hear many stories about her in the Davidfolk Ground, or in New Earth either, but of course there are lots of stories about her in Half Sky. The thing she particularly wanted people there to remember was that before John and David came along, men and women decided things equally in Old Family. These Davidfolk like to think they’re keeping Old Family as it always was, but really that’s nonsense. Actually, Great David turned Old Family upside down when he started the guards and began the fight against the Johnfolk. That was when the men took over. It was the guards and the fighting that did it. It was when power started to come from the point of a spear.’
I thought about this for a bit, looking out over the softly glowing water of the pool. A couple of guys were out there fishing from log boats and, from time to time, there’d be a gentle splash splash, as one of them paddled his boat onto another spot to try his luck there. Splash splash from the water, and of course the hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph of trees round us that never stopped: if I closed my eyes, me and Starlight could have been back on Knee Tree Grounds, paddling through the water forest and gathering nuts.
‘If it came to a spear fight between men and women,’ I said, ‘I guess men would win. Most men are bigger and stronger than most women.’
‘Of course. So in Half Sky we make sure that men and woman don’t ever think of themselves as two sides of a . . . what’s that word the Earth folk use? . . . two sides of a war. Something I figured out when I was in New Earth is that women might not have so much power as men when it comes to things like spear fights, but they have lots of other kinds of power, and one of them is power over little kids and how they’re raised. It seems Tina figured that out as well.’ Starlight took my hand and smiled. ‘But you should come and see how it all works for yourself, Angie. You can’t go back to Wide Forest now, can you, and here in Circle Valley is not a good place to stay. Food is running out. If it wasn’t for all the flowercakes and dried meat that Strongheart is trading out from those big big stores of his, everyone would already be hungry. And I can tell you for a fact that there’s not much food left in those stores.’
‘Well, we’ll have to go somewhere, it’s true. And somehow I don’t think we’re going to go to Earth.’
‘No, I don’t think so either. Not more than one two of us at most, anyway, and maybe not even that. The Earth people told me and Strongheart and Newjohn that one of the reasons Gela and Tommy stayed on Eden was that if all five had headed back to Earth together, there probably wouldn’t have been enough air and water in the starship to keep them going.’
‘So what’s going to happen now?’
‘I don’t know. None of us do, do we? Not even the Earth people.’
Starlight took a stone and chucked it out into the water. There are strange birds called ducks that live on the pools of Circle Valley. You never see them in Wide Forest. They sit on the water and coo, and make a strange rattling sound with their wings. They have a little green light on top of their heads that sometimes flashes, and their hands and feet have flat skin between their toes like some fishes do, so as to help them paddle through the water. The splash of Starlight’s stone set off a whole flock of them. Giving low sad cries, they flapped their wings and started to run across the surface with their hands and feet together until they were in the air, then glided off to far side of the pool. We watched the water near us as it became still again.
‘Earth didn’t come here for us,’ Starlight said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I heard something when we were going over for that meeting in Strongheart’s shelter. I was walking in front with Gaia, and the two of us were talking: you know, comparing how things were on Earth and Eden, stuff like that. Deep and Marius were walking a little way behind us, chatting between themselves. I asked Gaia a question and she answered it. But you know how it is with the Earth people: when they answer a question it just raises more questions. So I was thinking about what she’d said and what I wanted to ask her next, when I heard Marius speaking behind her. He wasn’t talking to me and he didn’t know I was listening, but I clearly heard him say, “It’s a shame there are people here.”’
‘What did he mean by that?’
‘Deep was cross with Marius for saying it. “How can you think that?” he said. “These people are lovely and they’re absolutely fascinating.” “Lovely, certainly,” Marius answered. “Really lovely. But fascinating? I’m
not sure. What are we really going to learn from them that hasn’t already been learned from . . .” He said some of those funny words they say that you just can’t figure out, and then he said: “Okay, I admit it is pretty amazing that they’re here at all. It goes against what we thought we knew about . . .” He said one or two of those weird words – jenny ticks it sounded like, but I’m not sure – and then he went on. “And, yeah, it’s true, that’s going to make a bunch of people scratch their heads. But that’s not why we came, is it? This trip took a hundred years to make happen, remember, and we can only stay here so long. I’m just worried that all the stuff we’re having to do here to keep these people happy is taking our time away from what we’re really here for.”’
‘So what are they here for?’
‘Well, Marius more or less answered that question. “I mean, look, Deep!” he said. “Look at this incredible life all round us. It shouldn’t be here at all! It shouldn’t be able to keep this air warm enough to live in! Everything we know tells us that the heat should go straight out into space and the surface of Eden ought to be covered with a mile-deep layer of ice. Yet here it is! Humming away all round us! There is so much here to find out and learn, so much amazing science to do. But the way things are going – all these meetings and conversations we’re having to have, and this war we’re supposed to be helping them stop – we may not have the time left to even begin to answer the questions that Eden raises.”’
‘What did Deep say?’
‘I didn’t hear. Gaia asked me something about New Earth, and how far away it was, and why the Johnfolk and Davidfolk were fighting, and I had to pay attention to her.’
‘It’s forest they came to see, not us? Is that what you’re saying? That’s why they’ve gone off on that bike of theirs, to get on with what they intended to do without us getting in the way?’
‘That’s right. I don’t know why anyone would come all this way just to look at bucks and trees, but it seems that’s the reason they came.’
‘But all the stories—’
‘Yes, I know. A lot of stories will have to change.’ She sighed. ‘Those bloody stories. So many people depend on them in so many different ways.’
Thirty-seven
Every waking of her stay in Tall Tree Valley, Mary did a new show. That was unusual for her. She normally did one show in a place – two at most – and then moved on, but there were new people coming into the valley all the time, desperate people, cold and hungry people, who needed to hear from Mother Gela. And the people who were already there were starting to get scared and angry about their valley being taken over by strangers, so they needed to hear from Mother Gela too. Everyone needed to be reminded that they were all one Family with one Father and one Mother, whether they were the people coming in or the people who’d always lived there.
‘Life is hard hard for us at the moment,’ she said to a big crowd of people who had squeezed themselves into the space round between Wise Mehmet’s circle of stones and those strange stone shelters he’d had built. Like people do in the High Valleys, everyone was wearing bodywraps against the cold. Even down there on the valley bottom, the trees don’t give enough warmth to be comfortable with bare skin. ‘It’s hard hard to have the Johnfolk trampling over our clusters and our forests, and taking away everything we love. It’s hard having to cross the Dark. It’s hard even to feed ourselves. Your Mother knows that. She knows how hard it is. Gela lost her own home once, remember? She lost her own family. She lost everything. Now she’s back on Earth again of course, far far away, but she still watches you all as closely as any mother watches her children. I hear her right now. “Don’t let them fight each other, Mary,” she begs me. “Tell them not to fight and quarrel. Remind them that’s exactly what caused all this trouble in first place: Family fighting against itself. Please don’t let it happen again!”’
She looked at all the tired suspicious faces. The trees pulsed – those strange tall trees whose lowest branches are far above the ground – and the black shadow of the Dark rose up all behind her.
‘Remember,’ said Mary, ‘that it’ll only be when Family is together and at peace that Earth will come back from the sky and take us home. Only when Family is one. So please—’
And then a man’s voice broke in. ‘Oh yeah?’ it called out. ‘So how come a veekle has just come down from the sky into Circle Valley, eh? How come Gela herself is over there, walking around right now?’
Mary had been the centre of attention up to that moment. Those terrified and grief-striken people had been listening raptly to every word she spoke, hungry hungry for any little comfort the shadowspeaker could give them, however tiny it might be, desperate for any story she could tell that would bind their broken world together again, at least a little bit, and make them feel like there was still a home for them somewhere, and a path that led to it. But in the space of one heartbeat, all that changed. Mary was forgotten and every head turned towards the man who’d called out. They saw straight away he wasn’t some crazy guy, but a guard who’d just come down from the Dark. They all began shouting at once.
‘What do you mean a veekle’s come down ? What do you mean Gela ?’
The guard laughed and raised his hands. He’d never had this much attention in his life.
‘Whoa, people! Whoa! Listen to me and I’ll tell what I know.’
Everyone fell silent, everyone craned towards him. Mary was forgotten.
The man pointed to the circle of white dots painted on his forehead. ‘As you can see I’m a guard. Me and my mates were sitting by our fire at Five Ways crossing when Leader Harry came through with eight men, riding full speed from Circle Valley towards Wide Forest. They were in a big big hurry, I can tell you. Their bucks were spitting out green froth. If they kept going at that pace much longer, they’d have a bunch of dead bucks on their hands. They didn’t stop to talk, but the men shouted down to us that a new veekle had come down back in the Circle, and that Gela herself was walking round. Her skin was black black, they said, just like in the story.’
The guard rubbed his hand over his beard as he paused for breath, looking round all the while at the watching faces to see if he’d been understood. Everyone was silent. The only sound was the pulsing of trees and the tinkling of streams running down from the snow.
‘If it had just been the men that told us that,’ he said, ‘we might have taken it for a stupid joke. You know how blokes like to wind each other up! But then Leader Harry called down to us too. Leader Harry, mind you! Strongheart’s second son. Guard Leader of Circle Valley. The third highest man among the Davidfolk, with only Strongheart himself and Leader Mehmet above him. He took off his headwrap so we could see who he was, and he called out to us that what his men said was true, and that one of us should come down here and spread the story among the High Valleys.’
Again, the guard paused and looked round at all the faces watching him. ‘So there it is,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can tell you. I know it sounds weird – Tom’s dick, it sounds weird to me as well! – but don’t tell me Leader Harry would joke about a thing like that, least of all when we’re in middle of fight with the Johnfolk. A veekle has come down, people, and Mother Gela is alive on Eden.’
I heard about all this later from four five people who were there. Apparently, when that guard had finished speaking, there were two whole heartbeats of complete silence, and then, all at once, the people began to sob and scream, until it seemed that whole of that lonely bowl of rock called Tall Tree Valley was full up to the brim with the sound.
Poor Mary. No one took any notice of her. What news did she have to offer compared with the news that the guard had brought down from the Dark? And anyway, who would believe anything she said? Only just before the guard spoke she’d been claiming to hear the voice of Mother Gela speaking to her, yet she’d obviously had no idea that Gela was actually here on Eden. If our Mother really did speak to her, as
Mary claimed, why wouldn’t she have told her that?
And Mary was smart smart. If other people could figure that out, then she could figure it out for herself. She’d built her whole life on a story about her being able to hear the voice of Gela, and she’d travelled back and forth, back and forth for more than twenty years, telling people to get ready for Earth to return. She believed in that story more than pretty much anyone, and she’d proved her belief in it by giving her life up to it. But now the thing that she’d looked forward to for so long had happened, the thing that she’d worked and worked so hard for. Earth had returned, Gela had returned, the Circle of Stones had finally done the job that it was laid out to do, four hundred years ago. You’d think she’d have been happy happy, happier even than all the other people who right now were singing ‘Come Tree Row’ with tears running down their faces. And Mary knew that too. She knew she ought to be happy. Of course she did. The thing she’d been telling people about for twenty years had finally happened! And yet how could she be happy when the news had made her look, not just to others but to herself, like she was either a liar or a fool?
So many times she’d wept and cried in her shows, as she talked about Earth and Gela and home, but now, when everyone else was crying and laughing, dancing and singing ‘Come Tree Row’, Mary’s eyes were dry. She looked round for her helpers and guards.
‘Come on,’ she told them. ‘I’m sure you want to see for yourselves. Let’s get the bucks ready and start out for Circle Valley before the paths are so full of people we won’t be able to move.’
How can I be so ungrateful? she must have asked herself in her head, as she and the others began to climb the steep path out of Tall Tree Valley. It doesn’t matter about me. Why can’t I get that through my head? Of course it doesn’t matter about me. All that matters now is that Earth has come.
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