‘I agree with you, Gaia,’ said Deep, ‘but you need to remember that whatever we tell them or don’t tell them, their beliefs will still have to change, just to cope with the new situation the three of us have created simply by being here.’
I stood up and looked out through the clear dome of our flying saucer, at the people out there in the eerie glow of the trees round the clearing, waiting for a glimpse of us. Such a tiny outpost of humankind, they were, and so incredibly far away from everyone else. No wonder they were excited to have us there.
‘You’re right,’ I said, waving back to a small child who’d spotted me and was pointing in my direction. ‘The fact that we can’t live up to their expectations means that a large chunk of their belief system no longer works.’
‘It’ll be painful for them,’ Deep said. ‘But it’s always been hard, hasn’t it, throughout human history, when new realities come up against old certainties? It was hard when Earth society had to adjust to the ecological problems in the twenty-first century, and the Salvationists came along. It was hard when the Salvationists were overthrown. There was a lot of blood spilt each time, a lot of cruelty. But then again there was bloodshed here too, wasn’t there, before we even arrived?’
I looked down at the people below us, with their bare feet, and their animal-skin loincloths, and their crude spears tipped with shards of volcanic glass. The little girl’s mother was standing beside her now, and both of them were waving and smiling, trying to get my attention. The woman was one of the people who had twisted feet – clawfoot, to use the Eden word – like Angie’s Dave. A bunch of other people round them were waving with them, all of them beaming delightedly up at me, now that I was looking their way. There was another clawfoot among them, and a couple of batfaces. I waved quickly back and just managed a smile for them before I had to turn away with tears in my eyes, unable to bear their hope. Marius had stood up to come and join me, and he too smiled and waved at the folk outside.
‘You know what would really help these people more than anything else we could do?’ he said. ‘It would be if Deep and I were to go out there and get as many women pregnant as possible. We could double Eden’s gene pool at a stroke.’
I studied his face for a moment. ‘You are joking, right?’
‘Of course I am, Gaia, but it happens to be true all the same.’
Forty-two
Leader Harry and his men met a guard riding at full speed towards them on the back of an exhausted woollybuck, its mouth dripping with green foam. He pulled up in front of them in a cloud of snow that glittered in the light of the headlanterns.
‘The Johnfolk are right up on the Dark already, Leader!’ the guard said, jumping down and bowing to the high man. ‘I was watching the fire with my mates two crossings away from here, and we saw their lights coming towards us. They’ve only got a few woollybucks, but we could see the shadows of the men against the snow, and the light on the metal spears, and I can tell you there were a whole lot of them. They’ll have reached my mates by now, I reckon. I guess they’ll have done for them.’
Harry nodded. ‘I’m sorry about your mates, my friend, but it’s actually good the Johnfolk are on the Dark already.’
The poor guard was amazed. ‘It’s good, Leader?’
‘We’re looking for them. We’ve come to tell them that Earth has come! There’s a new veekle standing in the Circle right now, and a new Gela.’
The guard – he was a friend of our Tom’s – stood there beside his exhausted buck and watched Harry and his men riding on towards Wide Forest. After a while, when his buck had cooled down a bit, he climbed back up onto it and carried on towards Circle Valley.
Earth had come! He was happy happy like everyone, thinking that all the cold and dark and fear would soon be over. But he felt sad for his friends who he’d left by their fire, waiting for the Johnfolk and their metal blades. It seemed cruel cruel that the two of them should have died less than half a waking before this news would have reached them.
Harry met a few more frightened people from Wide Forest, on their way over to Circle Valley. And then, after another half waking or so, he saw at last the headlanterns of the New Earthers’ few woollybucks in the distance, on far side of a black emptiness where a valley of ice and rock was completely hidden in the darkness. And in their grey light, he saw what that guard and his mates had seen earlier: the shadowy shapes of many ringmen on the backs of their own thin New Earth bucks. There were more than a hundred of them, against his eight men.
He pulled off his headwrap, cupped his hands round his mouth.
‘Hey! New Earthers!’ His voice echoed round him against bare black rocks he couldn’t see. ‘My name is Leader Harry! I’m the son of David Strongheart!’ He let the echo fade before carrying on. ‘I’ve not come to fight you. I’ve come to talk!’ He paused again, listening for any kind of answer from across far side of that pit of darkness. But apart from the echoes nothing came back. ‘We have news! Important news! We have a message from Earth! A veekle has come down from the sky!’ Again he waited. ‘Can you hear me?’ But there was still no reply from the ringmen who’d begun to make their way onto a narrow ridge at the top of that invisible valley.
Harry looked round at his men. ‘You, David, and you, Mehmet, leave your spears behind and come with me. The rest of you, wait here.’
The three of them made their way down to the ridge that the Johnfolk had already reached. Presently Harry stopped and shouted out once again, and this time another voice called back.
‘We’ve won the fight!’ the voice shouted. ‘The sons of John have won back Old Ground. Admit that! Give us Circle Valley, and we’ll let you live.’
‘You can come to Circle Valley. We promise not to fight you. We promise to let you leave.’
‘That’s not what I asked you for. Give us Circle Valley! Admit John has won! Accept the True Story!’
‘Didn’t you hear me? A veekle has come down from Earth! A new Gela has come! We’ve got a message from her for you.’
There was a short silence, and then a scornful laugh. ‘That’s a silly trick! A kid’s trick. It shows how desperate you stonespears are.’
‘Wait here,’ Harry told the two guards.
He climbed down from his buck. He threw his own spear away into the snow, he pulled off the top part of his bodywrap so he was naked down to the waist in that freezing freezing air, and he held up the little black square that held the voice of Gaia inside it. He was a big man, as his dad had been in his young days, with a thick black beard and hair all over his body, halfway turned to grey.
‘I wouldn’t believe it myself if I was you,’ he shouted out, ‘but I have Gela’s voice inside this thing, and if you let me come near you’ll be able to hear it for yourself. You can shoot an arrow through me if I’m wrong.’
We saw Leader Harry sometimes back at Veeklehouse, and once he even passed through Michael’s Place. Our own guard leader, Leader Hunter, had been showing his older brother round his ground, and they came through our little cluster on bucks draped in coloured fakeskin, with a bunch of guards riding behind them. Of course we knelt and bowed our heads as they rode past. These were high high men, the sons of Strongheart, and that’s what high people expected. We knelt and bowed, and then, when they’d passed on, we went back to working for them. One quarter of all the starflowers we gathered in Michael’s Place, a quarter of all the buckskins we scraped and cleaned, a quarter of the meat we cut up and dried, went to Leader Hunter, and I know the people up in Circle Valley had to do just the same for his brother Leader Harry. It was to provide for the guards to protect us, we low people were told, but we weren’t stupid, we knew that what a guard leader gathered in from his clusters didn’t just go to his guards. Lots of it was traded for fancy fakeskin wraps for the leader and all his shelterwomen and kids, and for bucks for them to ride wherever they went, and for the special food that was broug
ht in for them from far away, and for those big big shelters of theirs, built round trees, where they could sit at ease, with helpers running round them.
We’d always grumbled about this, of course. Even Tom our cluster head grumbled, though he was proud proud of being one of David Strongheart’s men. But at the same time we accepted that this was just how things were with high people. You worked and worked for them, and yet you had to behave as if it was you who had to be grateful to them, you who were gratefully receiving, and them who were kindly giving. For when we bowed to him, they would barely smile in return. They would just slightly slightly nod their heads, and perhaps if we were lucky, they would give that little lazy wave.
That was what Leader Hunter was like, that’s what all the high men were like that I’ve ever heard of, and I’m sure Harry was no different. He wasn’t an especially nice man. He wasn’t especially good. He didn’t think much about the feelings of his low people. He took whatever he wanted from them, even sometimes their daughters, if he had a fancy to it. (Could a low girl say no to a high man who was a son of David Strongheart? Of course not. Whatever he asked of her, she’d have to say yes, and pretend to be pleased about it as well.) And if any low person challenged him, whether they were right or wrong, he would have them beaten, or tied to a spiketree to burn their skin, the same as all the high men did with those they saw as troublemakers.
He was selfish, in other words. He acted like the story was all about him. He used other people like they were just starflowers or bucks or lumps of blackglass, not human beings like himself. And yet right now, standing there shivering in the pale light from the buck behind him, and his shadow stretched out in front of him over the snow, Leader Harry was brave brave. For he had stripped away everything that made him high, everything that made him more comfortable than other people, everything that made him safer, and he still walked towards our enemies.
I’ve thought about this a lot since I heard about it. I reckon we all live by stories, high people and low people. We all tell ourselves that what we do, we do for a good reason. ‘I take things from the low people,’ high men said, ‘so I can feed and wrap the guards who protect them.’ It wasn’t just a story they told us, it was a story they told themselves. And each of us, high and low, half-believed it, and half-knew at the same time that it wasn’t true. We all knew that the things they took didn’t just go to the guards, and that anyway the guards were just our own men and our own sons, and the high men knew that too. We knew that the guards didn’t really protect us, but protected the high people, and the high men knew that as well. Yet we all needed stories, them and us, we all needed something to tie things together, and so we all went along with those stories, half-believing them, believing them just enough to give ourselves a sense that the world we were in meant something, staying with each story no longer than we had to, and then moving on before it all toppled over or fell apart. It was as if all of us, high and low, were crossing a stream on wobbly stones, moving quickly from one to the next before we fell.
But right now it was different for Harry. He had a story to tell that he knew for certain was true. He knew the Johnfolk wouldn’t believe it, any more than he would have believed it if they’d told it to him, but he had seen with his own eyes the veekle in Circle Clearing, and he had no doubts about it at all. And that made him strong strong. He wasn’t standing on a wobbly stone just at that moment. He was standing on solid rock. It felt good good. Even the coldness of the Dark felt kind of good as it bit through to his bones. It told him he was right there in the world, with nothing left to hide behind.
‘We were proud proud of him,’ was what his guards said afterwards.
‘You can shoot me if you want,’ he called out, ‘but I’m coming forward anyway, and you can see for yourself that I can’t possibly hurt you.’
Forty-three
Gaia let me try on her ring. We were sitting outside the Earth people’s shelter with Starlight and Clare. Little Suzie was sleeping beside Clare on a piece of woollybuck skin: her shoulder hadn’t completely healed yet, of course, but all the heat had gone out of it. She wasn’t sick any more, and Flame had gone out scavenging with the other grownups and older kids. Metty was asleep on my lap. Candy and two three other little kids were playing nearby with a couple of little dolls Dave had made for them from bone and buckskin.
‘Let’s pretend they get in the veekle and go flying off to Earth,’ Candy said.
‘No, that’s boring,’ said her friend Mehmet. ‘Let’s pretend a leopard comes for them, but they do for it with a spear.’
Earlier on, the three Earth people had opened up that old Screen with a kind of metal knife. All three of them had spent some time leaning over it, looking at what was inside and saying things to one another that I couldn’t make sense of at all. Now Deep and Marius were poking round in it with some of their strange tools, still speaking to each other from time to time in words that I could hear, but could get no meaning from. Dave squatted nearby, whittling away at bits of bone with a stone knife. He was no good for hunting or scavenging.
After I’d tried the ring on my finger, I took it off and looked at the tiny letters inside. ‘It’s beautiful beautiful,’ I said as I handed it back to Gaia.
‘There are thousands just like it on Earth,’ Gaia said. ‘Back when Angela was growing up, it was a common thing for people to give their sons and daughters a coming-of-age ring when they were eighteen. It was a sort of . . . tradition – I guess you know that word? – but it was a tradition that grew up in one generation and then died out again in the next. Things got hard, I guess, and an awful lot of people were too worried about getting enough to eat and staying alive to bother with stuff like rings.’ She slipped it back onto her finger. ‘There were fancier ones than this, rings with . . . with shiny stones . . . but these two-metal ones were one of the commonest kinds. They were . . .’ She paused, as the Earth people did when they came to a word or an idea they thought we wouldn’t understand. ‘They were quite easy to make, so ordinary people could get them. Lots of families still have them back home, tucked away somewhere.’
‘Well, we’ve only got one here,’ Starlight said, with a slight edge in her voice. ‘There were . . . well, you’d call them wars about it. People were done for with spears, and tied to trees, and—’
‘How strange. Wars over one cheep ring.’
Cheep meant easy to get, I found out, like a thing that you could have from a trader for only a stick or two.
‘I guess in that first generation the only people on Eden were just a bunch of kids and two adults,’ said Deep, without looking up from what he was doing inside the Screen. ‘Imagine how they must have admired that ring on their mum’s finger, when it was the only metal they’d ever seen. I can see how it became important to them.’
‘I guess,’ said Gaia, and then she smiled. ‘You know what! I’ve just figured out something! One or two of the things you Eden guys say sound like how little kids speak on Earth. Like you say “big big” when we’d say very big. I guess that must have started at that same time.’
Of course we’d all noticed that new word very that the Earth people used, and many Eden people were already starting to copy it. Of course they were. Earth speech sounded so smart and powerful – even high people’s speech seemed dumb beside it – and it made Eden folk feel a bit smarter and more powerful themselves when they spoke in the same way.
‘I reckon that might be how that double word thing started,’ Gaia said. ‘Tommy and Gela spoke babytalk to their kids, like all mums and dads do, even to one another, but in their case there were no grownups round them to bring them back to talking like adults.’
Deep glanced uncomfortably at me and Clare. ‘Not that you’re saying that these guys talk like babies, of course, Gaia!’
Gaia was embarrassed. ‘Oh no! Certainly not! I’m so sorry, you guys. I didn’t mean that at all!’
Starlight shru
gged. ‘Don’t worry. We are babies compared to you. We know that. And of course it was babyish to fight over a silly thing like a ring. But we don’t have starships and veekles, we don’t have cars, we don’t have telly vijun and screens and lecky-trickity. And so that ring—’
‘Gela lost the ring, remember,’ I interrupted her. The old story suddenly seemed powerful powerful to me, here in the company of these Earth people who were with us now, but would so soon be gone again. It felt so powerful that I almost burst into tears. ‘She lost the ring and it was her last link to Earth. That’s why it’s important to us! If the stories are true, she cried and cried for wakings and wakings, raging against Tommy, raging against the kids she’d had with him, for stealing her from her mum and dad and everyone she knew.’
Dave nodded. ‘Yeah. The Big Row.’
‘The Big Row?’ asked Gaia. ‘That’s a story you all know?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ said Dave. ‘We often tell it and we often act it out.’
Gaia glanced at Deep and Marius. ‘Wow! Think of that! A man and a woman have a fight in front of their kids, and four hundred years later their descendants are still acting it out!’
I’m sure she didn’t mean to shame us, but I felt ashamed. Probably we all did. Because, now that she’d pointed it out, that also seemed pretty babyish, the fact that we kept on acting out a little thing like that after all this time. After all, there must be arguments between men and women every waking, all over Eden.
But then Marius spoke, still bent over the Screen and his tools: ‘I get that, actually,’ he said slowly, like he wasn’t just telling us something, but figuring it out for himself. ‘My mum and dad used to fight a lot when I was little. It was horrible. Each time it felt like the whole world falling apart. Sometimes I’d lie on my bed and stick my fingers in my ears and mutter to myself so it would blot out the sound of their shouting. I had other people to turn to, though. I had my sister, and my friends, and my grandpa, and my aunt Hentie. But for those kids back at the beginning here on Eden, there wasn’t anyone else. Tommy and Angela really were the whole world. It really was the world falling apart.’
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