“I can’t slip with you until you’re my housewoman, and that won’t happen until we get to Edenheart.”
“Why? What will happen there that will make it okay?”
He couldn’t seem to understand the question. “You have to be made my housewoman first” was all he answered.
I lay back on the skins. A small chink had opened in the cloud above us and a bit of Starry Swirl shone through. I rolled onto my side and watched the ringmen, only a few feet away, digging and digging away, just as I’d dug through the water myself, not so long ago, in our rough little long-boat on the way to Veeklehouse.
“How come none of these men is a batface?”
“Holefaces can’t become ringmen.”
“Why not? Clawfeet I could understand, but why not batfaces?”
“It’s just one of our rules. Big people must be whole people, and so must their ringmen and their helpers.”
“My best friend is a batface.”
He looked uncomfortable at that. “I’m not saying they can’t be nice people. But their faces are broken, aren’t they? And they’re broken because Gela’s son, Harry, did a bad thing back at the beginning, and slipped with his own sisters. John hated it that Eden had begun like that, and he wanted to make things whole again.”
That just seemed stupid. What choice did Harry and his sisters have, and why was it batfaces’ fault any more than anyone else’s?
“I never asked you about the ring,” I said presently. “I guess you guys still have it?”
That made him laugh. “Of course we do!”
“So will I see it myself?”
“Of course. It’s on my father’s finger now.”
“He actually wears it? The ring from Earth? Gela’s heart!”
“He does for the moment, Starlight, but only because we don’t have a Ringwearer.”
“What’s a ringwearer?”
Now he laughed a lot. “Oh, Starlight, don’t think I’m making fun of you, but it seems so strange that you don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“Dear Starlight, as soon as you’re my housewoman, the Ringwearer will be you!”
I sat straight up, and a cold cold chill went through me. “What? I’ll wear Gela’s ring? The metal ring from Earth?”
He stopped laughing and reached out to touch my hand. “That’s right. You’ll wear it on your finger, and you’ll be a mother to everyone, just as Brightflame was.”
“Oh, Jeff’s eyes!”
I pulled my hand back from him and stood up, bracing myself against the rocking of the boat. “The actual ring in the story, you mean? The one with the writing inside?”
“That’s it, Starlight,” he said. “ ‘To Angela, with love from—’ ”
“I know what it says.”
I went to the front of the boat and sat there with my feet on the bit of the mother-boat that stuck out from under the boatfloor. Far far off in the blackness ahead of us, the tiny light of Chief Dixon’s boat appeared for a moment, then vanished again into darkness.
“Are you all right, Starlight?” said a voice next to me.
It was strange how easy it was to forget the ringmen in the daughter-boats on either side of me. I looked round and there was Snowleopard, only a few feet away.
“Yes, I’m all right. It’s just hard to get used to how different everything’s going to be.”
“They’re a strange lot, these Johnfolk. But if you ever need help, well, here I am, and there’s Blink and Spear on the boat behind us, all three of us your dad’s old mates.”
Presently, I went back to Greenstone. “I think I’ll try to sleep,” I said, curling up on the skins.
He laid another skin over me, gently gently, as if I were a child, and I closed my eyes and thought about the people back home on Knee Tree Grounds: Glitterfish, holding her little Mikey with his little squishy face against her breast; Dixon and Johnny bending together over a half-made boat; Angie with a fishing spear in the shallow water, her buckskin wrap high up round her middle and her sweet, ugly face frowning with concentration.
I’d lost them all, I suddenly realized. I hadn’t even reached the far side of the Pool, but the Starlight they’d known had already disappeared. As to the Starlight I’d become, a mother to all of New Earth, with Gela’s ring on her finger, what did that strange woman have to do with me? She didn’t even exist yet. So where did that leave me now, who was neither one nor the other? Who was I? Where did I belong?
Suddenly I felt like a huge stone was pressing down on me so hard that I couldn’t breathe, and I sat up again with a gasp.
“Are you all right, Starlight?” Greenstone asked.
Kind man. He was still sitting there quietly beside me. And knowing that, I found I could breathe again, and presently I sank down into sleep.
Luke Snowleopard
Three four wakings out we saw a little bit of ground sticking up out of Darkness in distance, with its own bright water round it, and its own shining forest. Hundreds of birds came out of it and circled over us, some weird kind of bird I’d never seen, with bellies so black you could barely see them against the sky, but backs that glowed pink like the water. I heard Greenstone telling the girl the place was called Middlehill, and that John Redlantern had rested there on his crossing, all those years ago (or all those hundredwakes, as the Johnfolk say) so they could fix their leaky boats and rest their aching arms.
“But we make better boats now,” he said proudly, and we carried straight on past and back into Darkness again, without stopping to see the place or the people who lived there.
“Headmanson can’t afford to hang around,” the bloke with the steerpole told me when I went to back in my rest time. “The chief’s gone ahead to stir up trouble.”
The chiefs weren’t going to like Starlight, apparently. She wasn’t the type they had in mind.
“Oh? What type did they want, then?” I asked him, though I could guess.
“One of their own, of course. Someone who sees the world like they do. They don’t want some fishing girl putting on the ring.”
Of course my ears pricked up at that. “What ring?”
The steerman laughed. “Well, I guess I can tell you now. Old Firehand himself made us promise not to speak of it back there on Old Ground. It’s the ring of course, mate. The one all the fighting was about.”
“So are you actually telling me that young Starlight there will put on Gela’s ring?”
“That’s right, and it’ll drive our chiefs crazy. You should have heard the way old Dixon talked. And he’s one powerful guy. If the Headmanson isn’t careful, he could be in real trouble, and your little girlie, too.”
Well, that was interesting. That was interesting interesting. I looked across at Starlight, sitting there tall tall like she always did, as she played chess with the Greenstone fellow. The blokes said she won every game.
“Trouble?”
He shrugged. “He wouldn’t be the first headman to burn.”
Greenstone Johnson
When we reached bright water again, Chief Dixon was already out of sight. There was nothing between us and World’s Edge but shining water.
“Tom’s neck,” I muttered to myself as I sat at front of the boat, watching the watertrees pass beneath me and dreading what lay ahead. “Tom’s snapped neck, this is going to be hard hard hard.”
Starlight came and sat beside me. “We’re here,” she said quietly, like she was speaking to herself. “We really are here.”
“Hey! That’s what your Jeff used to say in the stories!”
“We still say it every waking on Grounds.”
A shoal of fish wandered through the softly swaying branches beneath us, and shining water, pink and green, stretched away all around us until it met the black black sky.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I said.
“I guess.”
“I suppose you see this all the time in your Grounds?”
“Not from the Sand, bu
t when we’re out in our forest, we can see the bright water shining through the trees.”
“And you just spend your wakings going back and forth in your boats, fishing and cutting bark and gathering fruit?”
“That’s right.”
“No guards, no chiefs, no headman? No one telling anyone what to do?”
“That’s it.”
I laughed. “I should have gone back with you, Starlight, not you with me. It sounds like . . . I don’t know . . . like Eden was supposed to be.”
Starlight shrugged, looking away from me over the water. I had the feeling that she was disappointed in me. “It’s boring, though,” she said. “It’s boring boring. And—” She broke off. “Hey, look at those bats! They’re huge!”
I looked up. It was just a bunch of greatbats circling above us against the huge wheel of Starry Swirl.
“Oh, you’ll see lots of those in New Earth. You don’t really get them much on your side of the Pool, do you? Though they say John met one on Snowy Dark.”
She nodded, still watching the bats above us, their wings lit faintly by the glow from the water.
“I know that story. A huge bat landed on a tree, and he shouted out to it to save it from a giant slinker. And then he cried because it made him think of himself.”
“Really? I never heard he cried.”
Starlight Brooking
New Earth was just a thin line at first, a different kind of light along World’s Edge. And then it was a strip, and then gradually it became a ground, a new ground, on the far side of Darkness, rising up in shining folds, one above another.
As we came closer, we saw a place called Brightrest. There was row of big, solid shelters with square windholes—Greenstone said they were called “houses,” like those models from Earth—and, at the edge of the water, there was a kind of ledge made of wood that stuck out into the Pool. People were standing there waiting for us, men and women and kids, some in fakeskin longwraps and some just in buckskin bitswraps like we used to wear on the Grounds.
“Welcome back, Headmanson,” they called out as hands reached down to help us off the boat.
Everyone stared at me. Chief Dixon had arrived before us, but he obviously hadn’t told anyone about me.
“Hello, I’m Starlight!” I said. “I’m Starlight from Knee Tree Grounds across the Pool, and I’ll be the one who wears the ring.”
Their faces changed. Some looked puzzled, like they hadn’t understood; some smiled. But the really weird thing was that a few of them burst into tears.
“Mother!” a woman suddenly called out from behind me.
I turned and saw a thin, pinch-faced little creature with shriveled breasts. She was old enough to be my grandmother, but the way she was looking at me, with tears running down her face, was like I really was her mother, come back again when she thought I’d gone for good.
My own eyes filled with tears. I knew what it was to dream about a mother coming back.
“Everybody!” Greenstone called out. “This is Starlight. She comes from the Jeffsfolk across the water. I know her speech is hard to understand at first, but what she said is right. When we reach Edenheart, she’ll put on the ring.”
“Mother!” someone else called out. “Mother!”
And then more of them joined in.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just smiled and waved and turned slowly round so they’d all get a chance to see me. It felt good to have this welcome, when I’d left all my own people behind. Even the ringmen from the boat watched and laughed and cheered, and Snowleopard gave me a little thumbs-up, as if to say that Blackglass’s girl was doing well.
“Mother! Mother!” everyone shouted, and I felt like I was feeding on their love like the trees of Earth are said to feed on light. I felt myself growing stronger.
Ringmen were bringing bucks down to the edge of the water for our ringmen to ride: funny-looking creatures, smooth and bluey-colored, scratching themselves with their middle legs and snuffling at the air with long long feelers. And then something else came toward us, like some kind of weird square boat but on four big wheels, like the wheels on those toys called cars that people made for kids, and with two bucks pulling it along.
“There’s our car,” said Greenstone.
Ringmen helped us climb up into it so that we were looking down on the people round us, like you’d look down from a boat at creatures on the bottom. They waved and shouted and cheered down there, until we’d passed beyond the houses of Brightrest and were heading uphill into the forest, ringmen around us on those snuffling bucks.
“So you like New Earth so far?” Greenstone asked me, leaning forward to look into my face. “You’re glad you came?”
“I really am.”
He smiled his sweet smile, but behind it he looked tired and full of care. I’d seen the first signs of it far out in the bright water, and the closer we’d got to the ground of New Earth, the more obvious it became that some burden was weighing down on him.
“Something’s troubling you. You keep saying there isn’t, but I can see there is.”
“Oh, no, it’s nothing, really. It’s just that I don’t much like arguments, and there’ll be an argument when we get to Edenheart.”
“About me?”
“Well, you noticed Chief Dixon wasn’t too friendly, I guess?”
“He doesn’t like me, and he doesn’t think I should be with you. I get that. But the people in Brightrest seemed to like me well enough.”
“They surely did, and I was proud proud of you, but they’re just small people. We’ve got to live among the big people and, like my dad keeps telling me, that’s like playing an endless game of chess. Every move you make has to work in your favor, or it’ll become an opportunity for others to bring you down.”
I remembered what Julie had told me about Chief Dixon’s threat of fire, and I almost asked him what it meant. But why scare myself? I was here now and, whatever lay ahead, I’d just have to figure out how to deal with it.
“Well, I’m good at chess,” I told him. “Always have been. The best on Grounds.”
Our path climbed up through trees that hummed and pulsed and shone, with great drifts of glittering starflowers feeding beneath them on their roots. Strange sparkling birds watched us from branches as they smoothed down their feathers with their hands, then clattered off screeching through the forest. Bats swooped and swerved through the treelight.
“We’re nearly at the top now,” Greenstone said. “Have a look back. It’s the last chance to see Worldpool.”
We’d reached a spot where the ground was too hard and rocky for trees to push through, so there was nothing to get in the way of the view. Ahead of us, those folded hills, covered in shining trees, stretched away until they reached the huge, dark shadows of distant mountains against the stars, like the dark shadows of Snowy Dark on Mainground. I looked back the way we’d come and saw, far below, the soft, smooth glow of water, stretching away, pink and green, until it met the black sky.
Big as it was, it was the same Worldpool that Uncle Dixon splashed into to cool down after working on a tree, the same one Angie waded through to gather waternuts and Glitterfish knelt by to wash her Mikey’s skin.
Then the car rolled down the other side, and it was gone.
At the bottom of the hill the path began to run along beside a stream, and little naked children came running after us, shouting “Big people! Big people! Big people!”
We followed the stream for several miles, watching it grow as smaller streams came running into it from the hills on either side, churning the water into a pale foam that was lit up in many colors by the overhanging trees.
“How come the stream is running away from the Pool?” I asked Greenstone after a while.
He smiled. “I wondered when you’d notice that.”
“It seems to be flowing straight toward those mountains. Does a tongue of the Pool come in between here and there? Or maybe thi
s valley bends round and the stream doubles back?”
“No. It carries on straight to Edenheart. No pool between here and there.”
Soon there were steep slopes on either side of us, and rocks and cliffs, but the stream and the path kept dropping lower.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
But he just laughed and told me I’d figure it out soon enough.
Bigger streams, coming down other steep valleys, joined our stream and swelled its waters, glinting and flashing blue and pink and white and yellow as they tumbled onward, drowning the forest hum with their roar. There were still trees everywhere, not just beside the stream and on the slopes, but pushing out of cracks on cliffs above us to crisscross the rocks with many-colored shadows. And here and there weird, flat trees Greenstone said were called rocklanterns crawled over the stone, clinging against it and spreading sideways like a glowing skin, some of it blue and some red.
“Here’s Gela and the Three Fathers,” Greenstone said, pointing to a picture scratched onto a large patch of bare cliff.
It was a big circle with a woman in middle of it and three men around her like a triangle. Greenstone looked quite shocked when I told him I didn’t know who they were.
“Well, that’s Tommy at the bottom left, Tommy who was father of all of us, and then there’s Harry, his son: First Harry, the lawmaker, who was also father of all of us because—”
“Yes, I know about him, of course. And at the top . . . ?”
“At the top is President. Who was father of all of us, too, of course.”
“What? The President of Earth? That was a woman, Greenstone!”
He laughed uncomfortably. “A woman? No, that’s not right, Starlight. That’s not right at all. The story must have got a bit muddled on your side of the water. President was a man, and he was Gela’s dad.”
How could it be our story that was wrong, I thought, when it must have come from our side of the Pool in first place? I would have pointed that out, except that just then we turned a corner, and I finally understood where Edenheart was.
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