Splash splash splash went our paddles, out there in the darkness.
“What do you think the Veekle will be like?” I asked Angie.
“I’ve heard it smells of blood,” she said. And she put on a spooky voice, like one of those horrible shadowspeakers they had over at Nob Head. “The blood of the three men who died in it.”
We both made disgusted noises and laughed.
“There couldn’t really be any of their blood left,” Dixon said. “They were long dead even when John and Jeff found them, and that was generations ago.”
“I’ve got a blister on my thumb,” muttered Julie.
“Shall we have something to eat soon?” asked Delight.
“It’s weird,” I suddenly said. “I made you all come, didn’t I? Angie, Lucky, Johnny, Delight, Dixon, Julie. I got you all to give up twenty wakings of working time, say good-bye to your friends, risk the deep water.”
“Yeah, you did, Starlight,” said Julie. “And I reckon we must have been nuts. My bum is sore already, and my legs are stiff stiff stiff.”
Julie Deepwater
That was a strange thing Starlight had said, I thought as we paddled on through the darkness, a strange thing for a grown-up woman to say. More like a little child.
Thinking about that, I went back in my mind to when she wasn’t the tall young woman she was now but just a skinny little girl. And I remembered a terrible waking, which was surely the worst in Starlight’s whole life.
Dixon had taken her and her brother and sister out fishing on the bright water beyond the forest. They’d had a good catch and, best of all, they’d got a redfish, a big ugly redfish with huge, flat eyes and six clawed hands. It was almost as long as Starlight herself, but that didn’t stop her from standing up in the boat with it as they approached the Sand, and searching the beach for people to call out to.
What she didn’t know, what none of them yet knew, was that we’d been trying to find them for the last half waking. People had gone out through the forest in every direction—peckway, blueway, rockway, alpway—but somehow Dixon and the kids had missed all the people looking for them, and had managed to reach the Sand itself without learning what had happened while they were away.
I was one of the people waiting for them on the beach.
“Hey, Julie!” little Starlight bellowed out across the water. Her eyes were sharp and bright even then. “Look what we got! It was my spear that did for it! Uncle Dixon says it’s the biggest he’s ever seen!”
Her brother and sister were beaming proudly beneath her.
“Starlight,” I said as they pulled their kneeboat onto the beach. “Glitterfish. Johnny. I’m really sorry, but something bad’s happened. Something bad bad.”
I watched their smiles falter. Gela’s heart, my mouth was so dry I could hardly speak.
“A spearfish came,” I told them. “Your mum was in the water gathering nuts.”
“Did it bite her? Is she hurt?”
“I’m afraid it did bite, dear ones, but she’s not just hurt. I’m afraid it did for her. I’m so so sorry, but your mum is dead.”
Johnny had stared at me with an awful, meaningless smile. Glitterfish had shriveled like fishskin in a fire. But little Starlight had been different.
“No, she isn’t,” she’d told me firmly, her face dark with rage. “It’s not true. My mum isn’t dead at all.”
And it was that same firmness that was driving her forward now, it seemed to me: driving her, and driving the rest of us as well. This was a huge huge thing we’d taken on. Waking after waking we sat there with our paddles and worked and worked and worked. Waking after waking, we took it in turns to sleep, while the others kept on digging our way forward, scooping up pool water when we needed a drink, and clambering out on the poles of the out-boat when we needed a piss or a crap.
It was a huge huge thing. And Starlight was right. We wouldn’t be doing any of it if it wasn’t for her.
Starlight Brooking
“Look!” Angie cried out, her funny, squished-up face looking round at me excitedly. “There! Fires!”
We’d been paddling for nine wakings, and for the last five had been back over bright water again. Gela’s tits, we were tired tired! We ached from our necks to our feet, and we’d only kept going by sinking down into a rhythm and not talking for half a waking at a time. But when we looked up, there was an orange glow ahead of us on the clifftop, redder and brighter than the glow of lanternflowers from Wide Forest, a hot, burning light, with glowing smoke lying above it in a low, flat layer.
“Tina’s spiky hair! How many fires have they got over there?” muttered Delight.
We started to pass other boats—those big clumsy log-and-skin boats the Maingrounders used—and presently we made out shelters on the cliff ahead, big solid square things, way bigger and stronger than our little bark shelters back on the Sand.
There was rocky ledge below the cliff where we pulled our boats out of the water: the one we’d been sitting in so long, and the eight we’d been towing behind us.
“Remind me never to listen to your crazy ideas again, Starlight,” Angie said, stretching out her arms.
“Me, too,” said Julie, rubbing her sore bum.
Lucky was jumping up and down, Johnny rubbing his stiff shoulders with his hands.
I laughed. “You don’t fool me. You’re glad glad I made you come.”
Dixon drew lots to decide who’d have to stay and look after the boats, and Johnny and Lucky lost.
I grabbed my friend’s hand.
“Come on, Angie, let’s go!”
There were no trees at the top, no shining lanternflowers: They’d all been cleared away. All the light came from fires and from buckfat burning in big clay bowls. It was a feverish, restless sort of light, and what it lit up was people, people, people. There were more people in front of us than we’d seen in our whole lives, and they all looked different. Some had painted faces. Some had bat wings hanging from their ears. Some had noses pierced with pegs of wood or bone. Many wore fakeskin wraps in different colors, covering them from their shoulders to their knees. Most had skin wraps round their feet, again in different colors, which no one ever wore at all on our sandy Grounds.
I put my arm round Angie’s shoulders.
“This is going to be great,” I told her, and she laughed and gave me a big wet batface kiss.
Then Dixon came puffing up behind us, with Delight panting after him and Julie hobbling at back. I loved my uncle Dix—he had cared for me for half of my life—and I loved Julie, too, but in that moment, seeing them standing there, looking all worried and out of place, with their bare bellies and their bare feet and their simple skin waistwraps, I was so ashamed of them that it almost felt like hate, and I couldn’t even bring myself to meet their eyes. Without saying a word, I tightened my hand round Angie’s, turned back into Veeklehouse, and strode on, leaving Dixon and Julie and Delight to decide for themselves whether or not they wanted to try and keep up with us.
Angie laughed uncomfortably. “That was a bit hard on your uncle, Star. He did make a boat specially to bring us here. And take a lot of nagging from folk who thought we shouldn’t come.”
“I did him a favor. He’s always wanted to come here, but without me he’d never have got round to it, not in a thousand wombs.”
I was starting to make sense of the place. Veeklehouse had two rings of big square shelters, one inside the other. Inside the inner ring was a high fence, where the Veekle must be. Between the inner and outer rings of shelters was a path, busy busy with people. I say shelters, but they were nothing like the ones on Grounds, which were just a few flat strips of bark propped up at a slope on a frame of branches. These were taller than the height of a grown man and had flat roofs, so you could walk around inside them without having to stoop. A few even had another whole floor made of wood which people could climb up to by a ladder and stand on as if it was more ground! We’d never seen anything like them, except for those little mod
els of Earth houses that folk gave to children, with their doors and windholes.
But it was what was inside them that most interested us. All of the shelters were open at the front, and had things laid out on tables. There were black leopard teeth cut into knives and axes, and feathers sorted by size and color, and carvings of animals made from wood and stone. There were pins and pegs in many colors for pierced ears and noses. There were spears and arrows. There was a great stack of cages in which stood little sweet-bats, gripping the wooden bars with their wrinkly hands and clicking their tongues as they gazed out at the people going by.
“Come on, people, get yourself a little House or a Car with wheels,” shouted a woman standing behind a table piled with models of things from Earth. “It’ll bring you close to Earth, my dears,” she called out to us in the odd, flat Veeklehouse way of speaking. “Close to dear bright Earth and dear dear Mother Gela.”
“Get your fresh-killed batmeat here! Delicious sweet-bat. Done for and cooked on the spot.”
“Come on over, my friends! Best feather wraps in Vee!”
“New spears! Best blackglass!”
“Just for you, my darling! Rings and bracelets. Touched by the heart of Mother Gela.”
Angie took hold of my arm and gave me another kiss.
So many things! So much to see!
“Hey, wait for us, you two,” panted Dixon as he came up behind us. “Don’t just go running off again. Julie can’t walk as fast as the—”
He broke off as an enormous black-skinned animal came by. It was four times the height of a man, with its long long neck topped with a big head and a pair of muscly arms. But it was being led along by a small boy all by himself, and no one else so much as glanced at it.
“Hey, you heard of kneeboats?” Dixon asked a trader. “We got eight ten-foot ones to trade. All new-made. Know anyone who might want them?”
The trader wore a longwrap of woollybuck skin, his gray hair tied in a ponytail and decorated with feathers. Paddles and nets lay in piles in front of his shelter.
“Eh? Kneeboats, did you say? Slow down, mate. You talk funny. Where do you come from, anyway?”
“We’re Kneefolk. We the ones who make those boats.”
“Kneefolk? John’s spear, I’ve met all sorts, but I never met one of you lot before. I get my kneeboats from a bloke called Dave up Nob Head way. They’re new-made, these boats of yours? I’d need to see them, of course, but I could probably give you twenty sticks or so for the lot of them. Maybe twenty-two twenty-three, if they’re really good.”
Big, gentle Dixon glanced back at me and Angie and Delight and Julie and gave what he thought was a superior smile. “We don’t need sticks, buddy. We’ve got all the sticks we need back on Grounds. And if we did want sticks, we’d want a few more than twenty for eight boats.”
The trader shook his head sadly. “This isn’t some little swapping place like Nob Head, mate. People trade here from all over Eden, and they always always trade for sticks.”
“Why? What do they want sticks for?” I asked, pushing forward before Dixon could say something dumb.
The man laughed. “Mother of Eden! You people don’t have a clue, do you? They want sticks to trade with, of course.” He reached under his table and produced five short lengths of wood. “There you are, look. I’m a fool, but I’ll offer you twenty-five for your eight boats, if they seem all right to me when I take a look.”
He held them out to Dixon.
“We don’t want” began Dixon, then he broke off. “That’s not twenty-five sticks! Jeff’s shining ride! We might not know much about how you do things here, but we know how to bloody count!”
The trader sighed. “These are each worth five sticks,” he explained slowly, as if he was talking to a little child. “That’s what these marks here mean, look. Just one of these would get you four good blackglass spears.”
Dixon took one of the lengths of wood from him, then gave it to Julie. I held my hand out so she would pass it on to me.
The wood was super-smooth and shiny, and had five deep grooves carved across it, each groove stained bright purple with some kind of dye. As I frowned at the thing, trying to understand, I felt a flush of shame spreading across my face. What fools we must look, standing here with our mouths open in our silly buckskin bitswraps, trying to figure out something that was obvious to everyone else there.
“So what you’re saying—” began Dixon slowly.
I cut him off. “So instead of trading the boats for blackglass or skins, we just trade them for these sticks,” I said, “and then . . . what? Other traders will take the sticks in exchange for the things we want?”
I was taller than the trader, and I looked straight down into his eyes. I was not going to let him get the better of me.
“You’ve got it, Einstein,” he said, trying hard to hold my gaze. “It means you can still trade with someone even if they haven’t got anything you want.”
I thought about this, trying to shake off the stupidness that came from living on a little patch of sand where no one came and nothing ever happened.
“But why couldn’t someone just cut more sticks like these and use them for trading?”
“Three reasons. One: You can’t ‘just cut’ these sticks. The wood comes from far side of Snowy Dark, and the dye from right up rockway. Two: We traders are pretty sharp at spotting the sticks that haven’t been properly made. Three: If anyone is caught trying to copy them, guards smash their fingers flat with a big rock, and then they don’t copy anything ever again.”
We knew they had cruel punishments on Mainground, but it was still a shock to hear about them like this. If someone did something bad on the Grounds we all told them so, and that was about as far as it went. But I could see that wouldn’t work in a place like Veeklehouse, where people came and went who didn’t know or care about one another. They’d had to find another way. And it was the same with the system of sticks, the same with the play-acting of the traders who coaxed in strangers with words that only pretended to be friendly. Veeklehouse was hard and cold compared to Knee Tree Grounds. But that was how it came to be so bright and big and full of wonderful things.
“I reckon what we need to do,” Julie suggested, “is ask some of the other traders here how many sticks they’d give us for our boats. That’s how we work out if we’re getting a good deal. It’s not so different, really, from how we trade at Nob Head. It’s just that there’s a sort of gap between the giving and the taking.”
The trader shrugged and we’d started to walk off when another voice spoke from behind us, a young man’s voice, speaking in yet another strange new way, which none of us had ever heard.
“Hey there, trader, what will you give me for this?” it said.
He wore an amazing colored wrap that reached down to his feet. He was a bit older than me, but still young. And he was absolutely beautiful.
Julie Deepwater
Starlight caught his eye straight away, that was obvious, and it was even more obvious that she was instantly fascinated.
He was about ten wombtimes older than her. He had bright, cheerful eyes, and his red hair and beard were cut and greased so they stuck out from his head in little spikes, each one tied with a little string of dyed buckskin. He wore green footwraps, too, and a full-length wrap like nothing any of us had ever seen, made from three different colors of that stuff made with plants that the Maingrounders call fakeskin. Two older men were with him. They were carrying spears and wearing wraps of the same sort, but their wraps were shorter and made in a single shade of brown.
“Well . . . um . . . let’s see . . .” began the trader. He couldn’t quite hide his amazement at the fist-sized object the man had unwrapped in front of him.
“You can use it for knives or spears,” said the cheerful man, and, for some reason, he turned back toward us Kneefolk and winked, as if we were in on his secret.
“I know what you can use metal for,” said the trader shortly. “I’ll give you
eighty sticks.”
We stared at the lump in the young man’s hands—it was reddish, but flecked with pale green—and slowly took in what the trader had said. That thing was worth three times more to him than all our eight boats.
“Eighty sticks,” the trader repeated.
The young man just laughed.
“It’s those Johnfolk from across the Pool,” muttered a man behind us. “Ring-stealers. I don’t know why Strongheart lets them come over here.”
“That’s the reason right there in his hand,” a woman observed sourly.
She hadn’t meant for the man in the three-colored wrap to hear her, but he did, and he looked round at her and laughed.
“It is the reason,” he said, “but this guy here doesn’t seem to know that.”
“Ninety sticks,” the trader muttered grudgingly.
“You’re having a joke with me, buddy,” the young man said, glancing back at us again and giving us, and specially Starlight, another wink. “I’ll take a hundred and twenty, but even that’s way less than it’s worth.”
I noticed now that the brooch that held his wrap together at his throat was made of the same red metal, polished to a shine and with a smooth blue stone set in it. The men with him had badges made of the stuff—they were circles with triangles inside—and their spears had long metal tips. No way could you cut blackglass into a shape like that. It would shatter the first time it was used.
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