“But you’re the Headmanson! You’ve got all these ringmen and . . . Oh, Jeff’s ride, I don’t understand anything. What is a headmanson?”
“The son of the Headman,” I reminded her. “Do you remember I told you that up on the cliff there? My father is Headman of Edenheart and all New Earth. And I’ll be Headman after him.”
“So then I would be the Headman’s . . . what did you say? . . . I would be the Headman’s housewoman?”
“And you’d have lots of good things because of it: fine wraps, helpers . . .”
“Helpers?”
“People to do things for you, like . . . like my ringmen do for me here. And not just people, but—”
“Could I ever come back again? Could I ever come back across Worldpool?”
“No, of course not,” said Chief Dixon from behind me. “Never. You’d—”
But I cut him off. “I hope you’d never come back to live here. But you can see for yourself that I’ve been able to cross the water, so, yes, you could come back one waking and see your brother, Johnny, here, and your uncle, and . . .” I looked at her friend again—it struck me that she was a good friend, too—and made myself remember her name. “. . . and your friend Angie.”
“How much time do I have to decide?”
“Whatever you need, Starlight. The only thing is, my dad’s not been well, and I don’t want to leave him too long. And . . .”
I hestitated. She had no idea what kind of place I’d be taking her to, or the dangers that waited there for people like us who played the game of power, and I knew I ought to warn her, but I was scared scared of putting her off.
“Listen, Starlight, I don’t want to deceive you. It can be dangerous being with the Headman. You can make enemies, and . . .”
She glanced over my shoulder at Dixon for a moment, then turned back to me, her gray eyes looking straight into mine as she tried to understand. “It’s like with the Davidfolk, is that what you’re trying to say? People hurt one another? People do for other people they don’t like?”
“Yes, I guess that’s it,” I said, and I managed to persuade myself that she’d got it, and that I really had told her all she needed to know, though I hadn’t even mentioned the fire. “That’s just it,” I repeated. “It can be kind of tough.”
Starlight nodded. Then, without saying anything at all, she walked off a little way, back along the ledge and out of the light of the Johnfolk’s fires, and stood there in her long blue wrap, looking down first of all into the water, where it dropped down steeply from the edge of the ledge, then lifting her head and looking out to where World’s Edge divided Eden from Starry Swirl, her face lit up by the water’s glow.
Starlight Brooking
John Redlantern himself had once stood on that cliff up there, I remembered, soon after they first found the Veekle. He’d stood there playing with the metal ring and wondering whether to keep it or throw it into the water and get rid of it for good. And just as I was being watched now, he’d been watched by Jeff and Tina and Gerry and all the others who’d followed him down from Snowy Dark.
“I could hear the people from the future calling to me,” he once told Jeff. “Some of them were saying, ‘Throw it away!’ Others were saying, ‘Keep it! Keep it! Keep it!’ And it was like I was standing at the joining place of two whole worlds. Only one of those worlds could live and grow and become real. The other would fade away. And it was up to me.”
Right now it was like there were two different people, both called Starlight Brooking, but only one of them could have my body to live out her life in, and the other would end up as just a shadow. I couldn’t know what it would be like over there in New Earth, and that made this hard. But I did know what a life would be like on Knee Tree Grounds, I knew exactly, and I knew that if I went back to that, back to the bark ovals and the gatherings every waking on the Sand, I would wonder as long as I lived about the other life, beyond World’s Edge, that I could have lived.
I turned back to the rest of them. Everyone’s eyes were on me: Greenstone’s, Angie’s, Chief Dixon’s, and all those big, tough ringmen. Tom’s dick, there were even people watching from the top of the cliff.
And all those watching eyes changed me somehow, made me feel taller and stronger as I walked back to Greenstone. I wasn’t just Starlight anymore, but someone in a story.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come with you and be your housewoman.”
Sweet man. Tears came into his eyes at once. “But does your uncle not need to . . . I mean, don’t you . . . ?”
It was like he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
“My uncle knows this is my choice.”
“Oh, that’s good.” He sighed, like he’d been holding his breath for a long long time. “That’s good good!”
I leaned forward and kissed his cheek, and then I looked past him at Chief Dixon. I looked straight at that cold cold man, daring daring daring him to interfere. Jeff’s shining ride, he looked angry angry—he looked so angry he could kill—but he didn’t speak. He just snarled and turned away. It was obvious this wasn’t the end of it as far as he was concerned, but I’d stood up to him, whoever he was, and Greenstone had stood up to him, too, for the sake of being with me.
Greenstone turned toward the ringmen who were waiting by the fires and around the boats.
“This is Starlight,” he told them all in a loud voice. “And she will be my housewoman.”
I turned to them and waved, and they all stood and cheered.
“Greenstone,” I said. “I met three men up in Veeklehouse: big, tough men who protected me when this horrible guard attacked me. They want to come and be ringmen for you, and I’d really like that. They were friends of my dad’s, and I’d like to have people with us who came from my side of the Pool.”
“Well, of course we’ll bring them,” he said. “We’ll bring them to Edenheart, and then your dad’s friends will always be nearby.”
Angie touched my shoulder. She was crying and, as I kissed her squishy face and squeezed her hands, the tears finally came from my own eyes.
“You need to go back and be with your people for a bit,” Greenstone said. “Take whatever time you need.”
I shrugged. “Why not get the boats ready now?” I said, feeling Angie’s grip tightening as I spoke. “No point in hanging around.”
Julie Deepwater
Tall Chief Dixon stood on the first boat, with a row of strong ringmen kneeling in the out-boats on either side of him, pulling quickly away from the ground. Starlight and Greenstone were to ride in the second boat, and the ringmen brought it up to the ledge so they could step onto it without getting wet.
Starlight had changed when she came back to us from meeting Greenstone. She seemed taller, somehow—even taller than she was already—and more grown-up. But now, in this last moment, she was her old self, and she cried as she said good-bye to us.
“I will come back,” she kept saying. “I promise I’ll come back.”
She kissed me, and she kissed Lucky and Delight. She gave her brother, Johnny, a bigger kiss, and an even bigger one to her uncle Dixon, who was sobbing like a child. But the biggest and longest kiss was the one she gave to her friend Angie, right in middle of that funny, twisty bat mouth that Starlight had been kissing since before she could even walk. On and on the two of them clung together, still wearing the wraps that Greenstone had given them, Angie’s green and Starlight’s blue. Then quite suddenly Starlight let go, took Greenstone’s hand, and stepped onto the boat, never looking back as the men pushed away from the rock and began to paddle out into the bright bright water.
When the third boat had set out, and Starlight’s boat was so far away that we could no longer make her out, we walked back along the ledge and loaded up our own rough long-boat with the things we’d traded for those sticks: blackglass spearheads, leopardtooth knives, woollybuck skins. It was a good load, and if Starlight had still been with us we’d have been pleased pleased, but none of us s
miled now, and none of us joked, and none of us looked forward to getting home.
“I shouldn’t have let her go,” Dixon said. “I’ve let her down, and I’ve let Dream down. I’ve let down everyone on Grounds.”
“She’s a grown-up now,” I told him. “We couldn’t make her come with us.”
Angie was crying.
“She won’t ever come back,” she said, wiping the tears from her face with the back of her hand. “I know she won’t. She won’t even want to, once she’s there. What have we got to offer compared with them?”
No one could answer that.
“I don’t know what to do with these,” Dixon said after a while, holding up one of the bags of metal Greenstone had given him.
“Nor do I,” I said, “but I know what people will say about them back on Grounds.”
“Yeah, I do, too,” said Johnny. He’d hardly spoken in all the time since his sister set out across the water. “And specially I know what Glitterfish will say. She’ll say we traded her sister. She’ll say we traded Starlight for a bag of shiny things that we don’t even know how to use.”
We all knew he was right. Whole of Grounds would grieve when our boat came back with one less person in it, but, just like Johnny, what I dreaded most was the grief and anger of Starlight’s sister.
“But think of the trade we can do with it,” Delight pointed out. “Think of the things we could get for everyone on Grounds.”
Lucky nodded his pointy head. “Or maybe a special thing, that we’ll badly need one waking, that we don’t even know about now.”
We’d left Veeklehouse and its fiery light behind us, and had been paddling and paddling across the bright water for two three hours when something occurred to Angie.
“None of you went to see the Veekle, did you? No one except me and Starlight.”
Dixon gave an empty laugh. “No. And that was supposed to be the whole point of going down there in first place!”
Angie looked away from us over the water, at the glow of Wide Forest along the distant cliff.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s a horrible thing, and it stinks stinks of death.”
Part II
Greenstone Johnson
As we bumped and swayed through the rough waves at the edge of the bright water, I thought about my dad. I’d done what he’d told me to do, but not at all in the way he would have wanted.
“No more putting it off, Greenstone,” he’d croaked, hunched in his big stone seat back at Edenheart. “Find yourself a housewoman! Do your duty! Behave like a son of John!”
I wasn’t short of choices. All the chiefs and teachers and their housewomen had been busily pushing their daughters toward me for many hundredwakes, each one hoping to bind me to their houses like you’d bind a speartip to a spear.
“I’m sick of all of them. They just want to use me for power.”
His eyes glittered at me. “Well, of course they do! What did you expect? But what does that matter if you can show their fathers you’re still the boss?”
“You know I don’t find that easy.”
“Who said it was easy? It’s hard hard. It’s the hardest game of all. Only way you can hope to win is to give up your whole life to it. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
It was useless to tell him I’d rather not play at all. “I’d prefer a woman who was outside of this particular game.”
His eyes were turning watery and red like they did when he was building up to another bout of coughing. “Well, bloody find one, then! Go over to Old Ground if you want and find a woman there, but, Tom’s stinking dick, get a move on. Another hundredwake and these lungs of mine will have done for me.”
He was thinking I’d find some woman among the Old Ground Johnfolk, down at Brown River, but when I got there I didn’t meet one woman who was thinking of anything when she smiled at me but metal and power for her family.
“I don’t like any of them,” I told Chief Dixon. “I may as well go back across the Pool and settle for someone there.”
Dixon was delighted. He’d been nagging away at me to hurry up, but now, when I suggested we go up to Veeklehouse before heading home, he was happy happy to agree. No doubt he thought if he was nice enough to me I might go for his girl Candy after all.
“Good idea, Headmanson. Good good idea.”
I really wasn’t looking for a housewoman anymore, just for a bit of an adventure before I settled down to a life I didn’t want, but then I saw Starlight standing tall tall in front of that trader’s place, like she had no idea that anyone in the world could be bigger than her. She wasn’t a chief’s daughter or a teacher’s daughter, but she wasn’t a small person, either, even if she did have bare feet and a buckskin wrap round her middle. That seemed quite wonderful to me. And of course she was beautiful, as beautiful as the sky of Earth.
Chief Dixon told me I was letting down my dad. I was letting down the big people of New Earth. I was even letting down the small people, by not choosing a Ringwearer they could look up to and admire. (Like they’d look up to his Candy, I suppose, with her colored wraps and her metal rings and her bitter bitter eyes.) He was angry angry, and I was afraid of him, but I managed to stand my ground.
This surprised him, and it surprised me, too. I was the Headmanson of New Earth, and I’d spent all my life with helpers round me who’d run and fetch me anything I asked for, but all the same I’d always found it hard to want things for myself, and carry on wanting them even when other people told me I was wrong. But I knew I wanted Starlight.
It had been easy to be brave when I was far away from New Earth, though. Now, as we moved forward into the blackness of Deep Darkness, I was growing more and more anxious about what lay ahead.
“Who was this Brightflame you talked about?” Starlight asked me as we sat on our pile of warm skins in the red glow of the firecage.
The boat rose and fell in the darkness. There was a chessboard between us, and we’d just finished a game. Starlight, as usual, had won.
“She was my great-great grandmother. John Redlantern met her when he was still back on Old Ground. There’d just been a terrible fight with the Davidfolk, and many of his best men had died. He was sitting fishing in Brown River, thinking about his next move, when a young woman came by with a pile of skins to wash in the water.
“ ‘You look like you’re thinking hard,’ she says to him.
“ ‘I am,’ he says. ‘I’m making plans.’
“ ‘Plans for what?’ she asks.
“ ‘Plans to cross Worldpool,’ John says. ‘Most of my chiefs think I’m nuts. They say we’d all drown and then the Davidfolk would have won. But I reckon David’s people will have won anyway if we have to spend all our time fighting them and have no time for anything else.’
“Brightflame laid down her pile of skins and sat down beside him on the riverbank. ‘From what I’ve heard,’ she says, ‘people said you were nuts when you decided to cross Snowy Dark, but here we are, look, living on the other side of the mountains! Even the Davidfolk do, though they punished you for even suggesting it!’
“John nodded.
“ ‘I wonder how many will follow me this time, though.’
“ ‘Well, I will!’ Brightflame says straight away. ‘I’ll definitely come.’
“He was an old man and she was a young young woman, but the story tells us that, right in that moment, he loved her. So much so that he gave her the ring itself to wear on her finger, though he’d never trusted anyone else before to take it out of his sight. She was the fire that finally warmed him. He told her she was a new Gela, a new Mother of Eden. They made the Crossing and John worked hard hard until he died to build up New Earth, but when he was with her, so the stories say, he was happy and carefree like a child.”
Starlight Brooking
There was no light at all out there, and even the sky was covered in black cloud, but we carried a kind of metal cage—Greenstone called it a “firecage”—which had a
bowl of buckfat always burning in it. Its orange glow made a little pool of light. In middle of it were me and Greenstone, and the warm skins on which we sat, and the chessboard between us with its beautiful carved pieces. On the edge of the light on either side we could see the men toiling away, their skins shining with sweat, but from the water beyond them we only saw the odd glint, the odd dim streak of foam, and sometimes a little orange speck, in front or behind, when one of the other boats happened to find itself at the same time as us on top of one of those huge, invisible waves. Chief Dixon was a long way ahead now.
“So I’m your Brightflame, am I?” I asked him, after a few seconds.
I wasn’t sure if I liked the idea or not.
“That’s how it feels to me,” Greenstone said, looking straight at me.
“And you’re my John Redlantern?”
He smiled sadly and looked away. I hadn’t seen this sadness when we were back in Veeklehouse.
One of the ringmen came and took the chessboard away. There were always a couple of them taking a rest from paddling, and they’d fetch things for us, bring more buckfat when the fire grew dim, and even make a little shelter for us if there was too much spray, by stretching a rope from the top of the windtree and laying a skin over it.
“Well,” Greenstone said, when the man had moved away, “my dad has always told me, as far back as I can remember, that I should be like John. But I’m afraid John Redlantern was one of a kind.”
I wondered what he meant but I didn’t ask.
“Well, I like you as you are,” I told him. “John was a bit of a cold one, if the stories we heard are true.”
Greenstone nodded. “Our stories say that as well.”
“I want to touch you,” I told him.
He laughed. “I’d like that, too, believe me. I can hardly wait. But we’ll have to leave it for now.”
“Couldn’t we get the men to put up that shelter again?”
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