Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  “I am well-informed, Snowleopard, my friend, and I’d bear that in mind if you’re going to work for me. When I decide I need a listener in someone’s house, I always take on three four.”

  “That’s smart, Father. And am I right in thinking you won’t tell me who the others are?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “I understand, Father,” I said in my best sincere voice, “but you can trust me.”

  The chief laughed loudly at this, banging the end of his stick down on the stone floor. “I can trust you! You? Do you mean trust you like David Strongheart could trust you? Or like Firehand can trust you? Or do you perhaps mean like the Ringwearer can trust you, who I hear speaks of you as her special friend and protector?”

  I laughed. The chief was a funny guy. I’d never really noticed that before. “Well, now you put it that way . . .”

  “Now I put it that way, you agree you can’t be trusted.”

  “You see right through me, Father.”

  “Well, I hope you see through me, too, my friend, because if you do, you’ll know how I treat people who let me down.”

  “I do see that, Father. I see a man who doesn’t hesitate and doesn’t hold back.”

  “Tell me something from the Headmanhouse that I don’t know.”

  “When the Ringwearer came back from the Rock last waking, she threw up all over the floor of the Tall Cave.”

  “Ha! She likes kissing holefaces well enough, and letting slowheads try on the ring. But it seems this wasn’t so much fun.”

  “I guess not, Father, though I reckon her dad would have enjoyed it.”

  The chief wasn’t listening to me. “So she wants everyone to love her,” he said, looking down at the stick he was patting against his hand, “but she’s not so keen on the tough stuff. Pretty much like Greenstone. Well, that should make things easy.” He glanced up at my face with a faint little mocking smile. “Okay, good, I think we’re done here, Ringman Snowleopard. You know how to get hold of me, so make sure you do.”

  “Thank you, Chief Dixon, I will.”

  Part IV

  Julie Deepwater

  Me and Glitterfish took a boat out to gather nuts near the edge of forest. We waded waist-deep, feeling down for the little bumps on the stems of the wavyweed, plucking them off, and tossing them into a bowl that we floated between us like a tiny kneeboat. Just nearby, only a few yards away, shone the open water, pink and green, and behind the pulsing of the trees we could hear the sigh sigh sigh of small waves breaking up as they reached the shallow water of the Grounds.

  “I’m seriously thinking of moving over to Mainground,” Glitterfish said after a while. “Maybe try to be with that chap Tommy.”

  Tommy was one of the guards who had come over, that time Lucy did for the spearfish.

  “But Glits, it’s different between men and women over there. Here people slip together, make a baby, slip with other people, be friends. There, when you go with a guy you become his: his shelterkeeper, they call it over at Nob Head.”

  She shrugged. She was so much the opposite of me—she settled so easily for things I would never never accept, and she lived for motherhood, which I’d never wanted at all—yet in some ways we had a lot in common. We both liked quietness.

  “The way I figure it, Julie, if I’m going to have to live with guys with spears all round me, I may as well pick one of my own to protect me from the others. You said something not so different yourself. You said that if we ended up with guards here, you’d leave and go to Mainground.”

  “I did say that, but I didn’t mean that I’d become the woman of some guard!”

  Glits tossed a handful of nuts in the bowl and stood up straight to stretch her back.

  “Well, obviously not,” she said. “You don’t like to slip with men.”

  “But even if I did, Glits, I’d—”

  She didn’t let me finish. “If you went to Mainground, you’d have to live among guards. So you must have been thinking that you’d rather live among them there than here.”

  I combed my fingers through the shimmering weed.

  “Mainground’s a big big place,” I said. “There’s Davidfolk over much of it, but there’s Johnfolk, too, down alpway, and I’m quite sure there must be others who’ve kept themselves apart from all of that, just like us Kneefolk did. I just wouldn’t settle down until I’d found them.”

  “You could be wandering around all your life!”

  I laughed. “Well, that wouldn’t be so bad!” I took the bowl of nuts and tipped it into the bottom of the boat. “Glits,” I began in a completely different voice. “There’s . . . there’s something I meant to talk to you about. When my mum was alive she told me something, and she asked me to pass it on to my own daughter, but obviously I’m not going to—”

  I broke off because Glitterfish was laughing.

  “Are you going to tell me the Secret Story, Julie?”

  “You already know it?”

  “Oh, yes. My mum told it to me. She made quite a thing of it: how it made me special, how I mustn’t tell anyone at all, and specially not Starlight.”

  “And you still remember it?”

  “I do. Mum made me go over and over it. She was proud proud that she knew it.”

  “I thought she might, actually. She used to hint sometimes about something special she knew that other people didn’t.”

  “That sounds like Mum.”

  “So she heard it from her mum, and my mum heard it from hers, and . . . let’s see . . . you’d have to go right back to my great grandmother, your great-great grandmother, before you get to a woman who we both come from. It’s an old story, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s supposed to have come all the way from Gela.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t see why not. I guess it might have changed a bit after all that time.”

  “We should compare what we’ve heard. See if we heard the same. I think it comes from Gela, too. You must tell it to your daughters when you have them. Tell them from you and from me. There needs to be another story in the world, apart from the story about David and the story about John.”

  Starlight Brooking

  The old story says that something changed inside Angela when she lost the ring. She’d been in Eden for many wombs by then. She’d had five kids. She’d understood that no one was going to come soon from Earth. She’d been making do with Tommy. You’d think, when she’d lost so much, that losing a little thing like that wouldn’t make so much difference. But she was like a boat that’s so low in the water that all it takes to sink it is one more stone.

  I had a moment like that, too, but it wasn’t such a small thing. It was the death of those two stonebreakers. The sight of them falling falling falling, that long long time they were still alive, still whole, but beyond the reach of anyone: It went round and round in my head. And I kept thinking about how I’d been used, like a little wooden Gela, and about how, when it came to it, I’d been ignored.

  Two three times on the way back to Edenheart, the Head Teacher tried to make cheerful conversation—“Rather fuggy in the Cave this waking, don’t you think, Ringwearer? Rather fuggy and warm”—but neither me nor Greenstone would answer him.

  “I really need to talk with you about this,” I said to Greenstone as we jumped down from the car.

  There must be more than one way to play old Firehand’s game, I kept thinking as I went back and forth through the House. There had to be some way for me and Greenstone to stay on top of things, without having to do for people who’d done nothing wrong.

  I had to keep moving. If I’d been on Grounds I’d have taken out a boat and paddled till I felt calmer, but here all I could do was go back and forth between the different wallcaves. I went into every single one of them that was on the ground and then—something I’d never done before—I began to climb one of the ladders to the floors above. Only ringmen and helpers normally ever went up there, and now they stared in a
mazement and dismay as I came up among them.

  “Can we help you, Mother?”

  “Have you lost your way?”

  On the top floor was the small cave where the Time Counter stood: two metal bowls, one above the other, their outer surfaces the shiny red of polished redmetal, their insides a pale, scabby green. The upper bowl was counting out the seconds into the lower one—drip—drip—drip—drip—while the Timekeeper sat beside them on a stool, watching the water level rise toward the mark of the Fourth Horn. He was a bald, middle-aged man who looked a bit like my uncle Dixon, and it took him a few heartbeats before he recognized me.

  “Ringwearer!” he gasped and, in his haste to kneel and kiss the ring, he tripped over his own metal horn, sending it clattering noisily across the stone floor.

  I smiled as his bald gray head bent over my hand. I had power. I had power in my own right. The big people of New Earth might think they could control me. They might think they could force me to tell their story for them, as if my arms and legs were made of nothing but wood and string, but every small person in Edenheart thought I was wonderful, every small person would happily do whatever Mother Gela asked.

  I patted the Timekeeper’s head.

  “Blow the horn!” I told him.

  “But Mother,” he exclaimed, “it’s not yet time!”

  “Blow it anyway. Blow the Fourth Horn. I’ll take responsibility for it.”

  Trembling, he picked up his metal horn and went to the windhole. He glanced back at me, thinking perhaps that I was only having a joke with him, or maybe that I’d gone mad, but I nodded to tell him to go ahead. He reluctantly lifted it to his lips.

  Parp.

  “Blow it properly. I promise you won’t be blamed.”

  He lifted the horn again.

  Paaaarp-Paaaarp-Paaaarp-Paaaarp! Paaarp-Paaarp-Paaarp-Paaarp!

  There was a silence beneath us for a few seconds, silence but for the humming of the Great Cave. And then, from down below in Edenheart, came an answering horn:

  Paaaarp-Paaaarp-Paaaarp-Paaaarp! Paaarp-Paaarp-Paaarp-Paaarp!

  I went to the windhole, leaned out, looked out at the houses of Edenheart laid out below me like little toys, and listened as the other horns, up and down the caves, repeated what the Headmanhouse had begun:

  Paaaarp-Paaaarp-Paaaarp-Paaaarp! Paaarp-Paaarp-Paaarp-Paaarp!

  The Timekeeper was listening to it, too, with his horn still in his hands. I winked at him, and his face suddenly broke into a grin, like a little boy whose mum has suddenly done some wonderful and outrageous thing.

  It was pointless, of course, and it changed nothing, but I felt a little stronger as I climbed back down the ladder, like I’d proved something to myself.

  Greenstone Johnson

  Soon as I’d finished with the chiefs, helpers came to tell me about Starlight. Whole House was fretting and running about like a nest of glitterbirds that have spotted a treefox.

  “We’re worried she’s unwell, Father!”

  “She’s been up the ladders, Father!”

  “She made the Timekeeper blow Fourth Horn way way too early!”

  I pretended to frown, but inside I laughed. Only Starlight would have thought of altering the flow of my dad’s precious time!

  “Well, why don’t you take me to her?”

  She was in the Writingcave, sitting at a table under one of the trees, pretending to read a bark under that big map of Eden. She’d sent away all the helpers.

  “Whole House is in a state, Starlight!” I told her. “No one knows which horn they’re in, or what they’re supposed to be doing!”

  She ignored what I’d said completely. “I’ve been figuring it all out, Greenstone. There are two sorts of power in the world: the sort that comes from force, and the sort that comes from love. You might say the first sort is man’s power, and the second sort is woman’s power, not that women can’t be forceful or men can’t be loving, not that some men aren’t kinder than some women, or that some women aren’t more forceful than some men. But men are usually stronger and bigger than women, and only women have breasts and wombs. And . . .”

  I could see why she’d worried the helpers so much. She was talking at double the normal speed, her brain running so fast that her mouth could hardly keep up.

  A helper brought food, and I told her to leave it for us and wait outside the door to make sure no one disturbed us.

  “Starlight, dear,” I said. “Did you not want us to talk about what happened at the Rock?”

  Anger flashed in her eyes. “I am talking about that, Greenstone. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. What happened at the Rock this waking is two women were thrown to the fire for daring to listen to words that came to them from women and not from men.”

  “Yes, but—”

  She held up her hand to stop me. “No! Wait! Let me say what I have to say. I don’t know if the story those women told was true, but it’s certainly older than your New Earth stories about President being a man, or President being Gela’s dad.”

  Mother of Eden, this was dangerous stuff. I looked round to make sure that the helper was out of hearing.

  “How do you figure that out?”

  “Because no one outside of New Earth thinks that President was a man, but there are whisperers on both sides of the Pool.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard of—”

  “Well, I have. So it figures, doesn’t it? The story that whisperers tell goes back to before the time when your precious John crossed the water. The story about President being a man only began after the crossing.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean their story is true and ours isn’t. We’ve discovered how to make metal since then, we know all sorts of things that people didn’t used to know over on Old Ground.”

  “Never mind which story is true. What I want to know is why you New Earth men think it’s so terrible for women to hear a story that men didn’t tell them?”

  Again I looked round at the door.

  “Speak more quietly, dear,” I told her, putting my hand on hers. “I am listening, I promise, and I’m interested, but please please speak more quietly.”

  “The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men’s power has won out over women’s power, just like it’s done on Mainground. But men still fear women’s power. No one ever forgets their mother’s power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don’t forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child’s craving for the comfort of women’s bodies.”

  “Slow down, Starlight, slow down. You’re talking so so fast.”

  “Mothers have great great power, Greenstone, and Gela was the mother of everyone. So what you guys have done is to capture Gela and make her say what you want her to say, just like you capture leopards, and cage them, and make them sing. That’s what the Ringwearer is, isn’t she? The power of women in a cage. Well, I’m not doing it anymore. You can threaten to chuck me from the Rock, if you like, but even so, I won’t do it.”

  She was close to tears. My hand still lay over hers and I squeezed it gently. “Don’t make me into your enemy, Starlight. Remember I loved you because you were different? It’s hard hard to change things in a ground like this, but we can—”

  “It’s just an excuse, Greenstone, to say it’s hard to change things.”

  “No, it’s a fact. To change things you need power and, as my dad told me so many times, if you’re going to hold on to power, then you have to play the power game, give up everything except the game, and throw away whatever might get in the way of winning. If you start thinking about anything other than winning, someone will come along who’s willing to play the game harder than you. And that makes it difficult to—”

  “What’s the point of power, if you have to give up everything else to get it?”

  “Let me speak for a moment, Starlight. I said it was difficult, but I didn’t say we shouldn’t try. I just beg you—”

  I stopped because a help
er had come running in.

  “It’s your father, Headmanson. He’s asking for you. Purelight says he’s not got long to go.”

  Quietstream Batwing

  I was visiting my grandchildren upcave when the mother decided to bring forward the Fourth Horn. We all felt worried when we heard it. We all knew it was blowing too early. We all wondered what it meant.

  “I’ll go back,” I said to my daughters. “There must be something wrong.”

  I’d hardly got inside the Headmanhouse when I was told that the Headmanson had been called to his father and that he’d asked me to go to the Ringwearer in the Writingcave.

  “The Headman is dying,” the other helpers told me, “and the mother’s gone crazy.”

  I ran straight to her. She was sitting at a table by herself under a tree, food in front of her that she hadn’t touched. Beautiful beautiful, she looked, all alone in that pure white light, like a woman from Earth.

  “Mother, is everything all right with you? The Headmanson thought you could do with company.”

  She’d turned impatiently toward me when I came in, but as soon as she saw it was me, all the irritation went from her face.

  “Oh, Quietstream! I’m so glad it’s you!”

  She wasn’t far from tears, and I could tell that what she really

  Greenstone Johnson

  One moment it had been my dad, struggling fiercely like he always did, all on his own. Next moment it was a pale damp slab of meat. Purelight was there, and a healer, and they both looked round at me to see how I would react, but my eyes were dry and the doors of my heart had closed up tightly, like the big doors of the Headmanhouse. I didn’t feel anything at all for that pale thing lying on the bed.

  Mother of Eden, I’d wished for his death many many times, but as much as I’d wanted it, I’d also dreaded it because of the burden that would fall on me from that moment on. Well, that moment was now here. I was Headman of Edenheart and New Earth, and I decided I’d start by being as hard and cold as the old man himself.