Mary nodded, but she’d spotted a groundrat ahead of us, and she held out her hand in front of me to tell me to be quiet, so she could creep up on it. We were always on the lookout for food in Circle Valley. But the rat ran off, and she relaxed and carried on.
‘But you were always so honest, Angie, always so straight with me, always on the lookout for ways in which the True Story might be bent or broken by other things, like what the high people wanted, or what would make my life easier. Remember how you used to ask me about that, again and again? Was I just saying what the high people wanted me to say? Why did Gela only tell off the low people? So when you said you couldn’t hear Gela, part of me was angry with you for not having the guts to believe, but another part of me was afraid that you actually had more guts than I did. Because it would have been much easier for you, wouldn’t it, to tell me you’d heard Gela than to tell me you hadn’t? Just as it was easier for me to say to old Firespark that I’d heard our Mother, and have her hug me and tell me what a clever girl I was.’
We came to a little stream. The shining wavyweed under the water made it into a kind of smooth, glowing path, winding through the criss-cross pattern of light and shadow under the trees. Without even thinking about it, we both peered down into the water for fish.
‘I thought about all this all over again,’ Mary said, ‘when I heard the news about these people from Earth. It made me doubt everything. It made me wonder if I’d been completely wrong all my life, claiming to hear the voice of Gela, and then not even knowing it when she was right here in Eden. And it made me think about you, and the courage you’d shown by not saying something was true unless you were sure. And—’
I put my fingers over her lips to make her stop. ‘Listen, Mary. I did hear our Mother in the Circle, but I didn’t like what she was saying to me, so I pretended to myself I didn’t. Not so brave at all, I’m afraid.’
Mary looked at me. Her face was more lined than I remembered, but those small sharp eyes were so familiar as they searched me, so familiar and also so dear. ‘So . . . So can I ask what she said to you?’
‘There were things I was hiding from you. She told me I shouldn’t keep them secret.’ I hesitated for a moment, but it didn’t seem so hard any more to tell her those things that I’d been so afraid to speak of before. ‘I was hiding the fact that my best friend went over to the Johnfolk across the water. And that she wore Gela’s ring on her finger, and spoke the Secret Story out loud. I was hiding the fact that I was proud of her. I was hiding that I knew the Secret Story myself.’
‘Oh that stupid story,’ Mary snorted, waving the thing away with a sweep of her hand.
‘Listen, Mary, I got to know those Earth people. You were quite right back in the clearing, they are just people. But they aren’t bad people, and they didn’t come here on purpose to trick us. The truth is, Mary, they didn’t expect to find us at all. They assumed people wouldn’t have survived here. They just came here to look at the animals and the trees. Don’t ask me why. It’s something called science. But listen, Mary, that voice from the screens telling the Secret Story. It was Gela. The life in those screens comes from a thing called a bat-tree – I guess because it’s like a living tree that life comes flying out from – and the Earth people told me that a bat-tree of that kind only lasts five years at most. And that’s only if you don’t use the screen at all. If you use it a lot, it doesn’t even live half that long. So if you think about it, even if it was only used that one time when the voice was put inside it, there would only have been one grownup woman on Eden when that screen died, and that woman was Gela.’
Mary picked up a stick and pushed the wavyweed about in the water like you do when you’re looking to see if any fish are hiding underneath, though I doubt she’d have noticed right then even if there was a whole bunch of them. Forest hummed all round us. Not far away the stream trickled down a sparkly little waterfall into a pool.
‘I’ve got so many things wrong, Angie, haven’t I? How many women have had a beating from the guards over the years because I got it out in the open that they’d told that Secret Story?’
‘Certainly quite a few when I was with you.’
Mary nodded. ‘Do you remember when we went to the White Streams? There was an old woman down there who asked about those stories you hear about fights on Earth – the white people and the black people, the Germ Men and the Juice – and I told her they were just silly children’s tales.’
‘Well, like you say yourself, Mary, if you wait to be quite certain you’re completely right, you’ll wait forever, and never do anything at all. People come to hear you because you’ve got the guts to believe in something. Of course sometimes you’re wrong, but then you think again. I didn’t like how you made the poor Earth folk look bad, but . . . well, you were trying to make sense of things – I could see that – and helping us make sense of them as well.’
She studied my face doubtfully. ‘Was I?’
I couldn’t believe that Mary – strong fierce Mary – was asking me to reassure her.
‘I think so. I think that’s what you do. Most of the time, anyway.’
She smiled. ‘Gela’s heart, Angie, I do love you! It’s so good to see you again. I’ve missed our talks so much.’
Fifty-seven
Come on, men!’ Luke said. ‘We’re not staying here with the fishing girl!’
He turned towards the door of Strongheart’s shelter, and the two ringmen hurried to follow him out. David Strongheart had sunk down again over the stiff bent body of his dead son, and seemed quite ready just to let Luke go. And seeing that Newjohn wasn’t going to step in against the son of his fellow Headman, Starlight decided to take charge.
‘Stop them, guards!’ she bellowed. My old friend was nothing to do with the Davidfolk Ground. She wasn’t born there, she didn’t live there now, and before this time in Circle Valley, the only Davidfolk places she’d even visited were Nob Head on our trading trips from Knee Tree Grounds, and Veeklehouse on that one single occasion. But never mind that: she spoke so firmly that Strongheart’s guards rushed to do as she said, blocking the way to the door of the shelter and surrounding Headmanson Luke and his two men.
‘Here’s my suggestion, Head Guard,’ Starlight said to Strongheart. ‘You hold Luke here, and you make him tell his men on poolside to hand over all their metal spears and arrows and knives, and all their metal masks, and get onto their boats, and disappear over World’s Edge. That way you’ll take away the advantage they have, and they’ll know there’s no point in trying to come straight back over again and take over your ground again.’
Starlight knew that it had taken New Earth years to gather together the metal they used for all those arrows and spears and masks. Just to make a couple of arrowheads, she told me, it took a pile of green rock the weight of a tree trunk, which had to be dug out of the ground, and broken up into little pieces, and heated in a big clay oven, many times hotter than any oven we’d ever seen on this side of the pool.
‘Let one boat stay back for Headmanson Luke,’ Starlight suggested, ‘and when you’re sure that all the rest have gone, let him follow them back over to New Earth.’
Still on the floor, Strongheart nodded, while his two young shelterwomen stared at Starlight with a mixture of puzzlement, jealousy, hate and admiration. No high woman of the Davidfolk would ever take charge of guards as she had done, or get involved in a fight between two grounds. Their job was to look after the high men, and to help bind together the families of the different guard leaders by being sent from one family to join another.
‘I’m not accepting that,’ Luke said, realizing he was about to be the fool of the story all over again, even if it was a different story. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Starlight, and it seemed silly to speak to the frail griefstricken old man on the floor, so he spoke to Newjohn. ‘Ringmen don’t go skulking back across the water without their spears, least of all
when they’re winning, as you know quite well they were doing, until I sent them back to poolside. Do for me if you want, but I’m not telling my men to throw down their spears.’
Newjohn gave a sort of shrug, as if to say it was nothing to do with him. But the truth was that he was kind of trapped too. There was no way now that he could take the side of the New Earthers.
‘So what’s going to happen then, Headmanson Luke?’ Starlight asked. ‘Let’s think about it, shall we? You can’t get a message to your men, whether you’re alive or dead, and they’re divided into three separate parts, spread out along poolside, that can’t speak to one another. I guess they’ll wait where they are, as you’ve told them to do, until they start to get seriously hungry, and then they’ll have to make up their own minds what to do. But it won’t be like when they first grounded. This time they’ll have guards all round them who are good and ready for them. You might have done for Leader Harry, but his big brother Mehmet is over there now to organize things, along with Leader Hunter. And they’re not boys like you, Headmanson Luke, they’re grown men with grandchildren. And they’ve got all of Wide Forest back again to feed their men, and all the Davidfolk to support them. Your men might have been stronger when they were all working together, but things are different now.’
She’d always worried that by going over to New Earth and stirring things up, she’d brought forward the waking that the ringmen would come across the water, but she’d more than made up for that now. ‘Of course now I’ve got to worry about the power of the Davidfolk,’ she told me later, ‘and the threat they pose to Half Sky.’ But that was a problem for another waking. Stories do not end, this is what we’ve learned. There’s always another bit to come.
Luke glanced guiltily at his two ringmen, and then turned back to Newjohn.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll send a message to my men by the Pool.’
He had a long time ahead of him in Circle Valley. A long time not to hear all the stories about the Earth people, and the pictures of Earth, and the voice of Gela, and the veekle that was alive. A long time not to think about the ring that Strongheart now wore on his little finger. Some stories are hard hard work to keep on believing in, but he worked away at it anyway.
And eventually, over beside Worldpool, in Veeklehouse and Nob Head and David Water, the ringmen piled their spears and masks in great heaps, pushed their boats out and began the hard hard work of paddling back out against the wind into the bright water where my Candy had first seen them coming with her sharp sharp eyes.
And finally Luke was allowed to follow them, out into the bright water and on into Deep Darkness where the great waves rise and fall unseen, as they’ve done since long before any human being ever heard of Eden.
Fifty-eight
I’m a shadowspeaker now. I went back into the Circle and heard the voice of our Mother. It’s completely different from the voice that the Earth people found inside those screens. That Gela was just a woman, like Jeff Redlantern used to say; she was just a woman from Earth and Earth is just a place, even though she was the mother of all of us here on Eden. The Mother that me and Mary hear doesn’t speak in words. Words would never be enough for her. She speaks in feelings, and pictures, and whole big ideas that come suddenly into your mind.
You can’t always be sure that you’ve heard her right, and of course sometimes you wonder if you’ve really heard her at all. But it’s like the bits of this story I’ve told you that are about times where I wasn’t there and can’t be absolutely sure about. I could have missed them out completely, and given you a story with all kinds of holes in it, but I decided to figure out what happened as best I could, even at the risk of getting some things wrong. What else are we going to do? We don’t have science to tell us things like they have on Earth, and if we only spoke about what we were certain of, we’d hardly say anything at all. But people still need stories to make sense of their lives, and clever Mary has figured out a new kind of, story that fits with what we know now and yet still lets the Davidfolk carry on drawing their circles and singing ‘Come Tree Row’, even though Earth has been and gone. It even lets those crazy brave boys up at Rockway Edge carry on burning their backs on spiketrees and showing off their horrible scars.
I travel round the Davidfolk Ground with Mary like I did before, back and forth, rockway to alpway, peckway to blueway. Candy and Metty come with me, but Fox prefers to stay with his dad and his friends. I don’t like to think about it too much but I guess one waking Candy may decide she prefers that too, even though she tells me now that she never will, and that when she’s a grownup she’ll be a shadowspeaker like me and Auntie Mary. Metty, I’m pretty sure, will want to stay behind when he’s older. Children like to have friends round them to grow up with, not just their mum and an old shadowspeaker and a couple of guards, and no one to play with but strangers’ children who tend to keep their distance from the shadowspeaker’s kids.
Every Virsry time, we go back to Veeklehouse and I spend a hundred wakings in Michael’s Place. That’s part of the deal I made with Dave and Tom. I hate leaving Fox when the hundred wakings are up – it feels like tearing out my heart – and I hate how distant he is at first when I return, each time a little more distant than the last. Dave mutters that it’s a funny kind of mum who can walk away from one of her kids for two hundred wakings at a time, and take her other kids away from their dad, and I do feel badly about it myself. But I know my kids are proud of me – the older two, anyway: Metty’s not really big enough for that – and I kind of hope my example will help them see that, if they don’t want, they don’t have to be exactly like the other people in Michael’s Place.
I’m sure Dave misses Candy and Metty like I miss Fox, but a big part of why he hates me going away is that it makes him feel ashamed. It shames him that, though he’s told me I shouldn’t go and that I shouldn’t take the little ones with me, I still do go and still do take them, and he and his brother Tom don’t feel able to stop me. They know that Mary is the most powerful shadowspeaker in all the Davidfolk Ground. They know that my old friend Starlight has become a friend of Head Guard Mehmet since she helped his old dad get rid of the Johnfolk, and that she comes over the Blue Mountains each year to share the Virsry with him in Circle Valley. They know that I’m known myself across the Davidfolk Ground as the one who made friends with the dark-skinned woman who came in a veekle from Earth. And all those things give me power.
Being a shadowspeaker gives me power as well, of course. It makes me into a kind of high person, in a way, far more so than I would have ever been if I’d gone with Starlight to Half Sky, or with Gaia to Earth. And that’s one of the things I like about it, if I’m honest. I like being well known, I’ve found out, and I like being looked up to. Come to that, I don’t mind the presents people give us either. They’re not my reason for being a shadowspeaker, but I do like them, and they certainly help me to smooth things over with the people at Michael’s Place. It’s easier to get past that awkwardness when I go back there if I can bring a metal knife for Dave, or a necklace for Clare, or a handful of sticks for Tom.
We don’t pass on messages from dead people in our shows any more, and we don’t pretend we know where our Mother is exactly, or what the place is like that she’s calling us to: we just call it the true home, and say the Circle is the sign of it. After all, like Gaia said, even for the Earth people everything they know is only a little patch of light with mystery all round it. Mary admits that she was wrong to say that Earth was our true home. She says that out loud in our shows. Earth is just a place, she says, a faraway place, where our many-greats grandparents used to live. Which is pretty much what Jeff Redlantern used to say, if our old Knee Tree stories are true, but I tend not to point that out to her.
Mary doesn’t go on about the Johnfolk being bad any more either. She knows that sometimes other people hear our Mother saying different things, and sometimes they may be right and her wrong. We don’t let
the high people tell us what to say either, and I guess one waking that’s going to get us in trouble: that and the fact that we regularly say things that come from the Secret Story, not because Gela said them, but because, like she said, they’re obviously true. But the high people are grateful to us for helping people feel okay about the fact that Earth has come and gone again, and so, for the moment, they let us alone.
After we’ve done a show and settled down the kids, me and Mary like to sit up and talk. I’ve often said how smart Mary is, and how smart Starlight and Trueheart are, but lately I’ve come to see that I’m pretty smart myself. I notice things that most people don’t bother with, and I have a need inside me to think about the world round me and try and figure it out, much as bats have a need to fly, or little kids have a need inside them to shout and run round. Me and Mary talk a lot about true home and whether it’s a place you can touch or see, or whether it’s more like a feeling or an idea. Mary wants it to be a place. She wants that so much that, if anyone can do such a thing, she’ll make it true just by believing it. I’m not so sure, but I figure that even the idea of home is a kind of home, and that when you really feel at home, like at the end of ‘Come Tree Row’, then home is where you really are, whether you’re on dark dark Eden or pale pale Earth.
And one thing I’ve found out is that I feel at home with Mary and she feels at home with me. We kiss and cuddle sometimes now as well, and give each other some pleasure in that way. ‘You used to think I was too ugly for this, didn’t you?’ I sometimes say to her, and she just laughs and says, ‘Well, you are ugly, Angie. You are ugly ugly. But I can’t help loving you anyway.’ Funnily enough I kind of like that. It feels more comfortable somehow, more secure, than when she told me that first time I was beautiful. It’s not so hard to live up to, I guess.
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