Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  One of the bats squeaked softly in the darkness.

  “Be quiet!” I whispered to it. “Do you want to be sent down a metaldig to die?”

  They didn’t come after me. For a while I saw the orange lights going back and forth in the distance, but once they’d lost me, they had no way of finding me again.

  I turned the boat right until the catcher stopped flapping and filled up properly with air, and then went straight. It was good that I’d shaken off the ringmen, of course, but at the same time, losing them reminded me that I was completely alone. I had no companions in the darkness but the two bats: them and the cold stone inside me. And that was like the opposite of company. It was a hole where company had been.

  Water slapped against the side of the boat. The air was icy cold and I grabbed a buckskin to wrap myself in. Starry Swirl was covered over by cloud, and the blackness around me was complete. The boat rose and fell over big, invisible waves in a world I couldn’t see.

  I’d been Ringwearer in the bright caves of New Earth. I’d made bark boats in the greeny-yellow lanternlight of Knee Tree Grounds. I’d seen the Veekle that came from Old Earth, lit up by the red flames of burning buckfat. But through all those times, and in the long long times before, stretching back and back to Tommy and Gela and long long before, these waves had always been here, rising and falling, all by themselves, in the darkness.

  Part VI

  Julie Deepwater

  After the first visit from those Mainground guards, more guards came from time to time in little groups. We weren’t sure whether they were sent by their bosses, or whether they came of their own accord to collect their presents of kneeboats and to try their luck with these Knee Tree girls who were allowed to slip with anyone they liked. Traders came, too, with colored fakeskin wraps and rings made in Veeklehouse with metal from across the water. And then a shadowspeaker called Mary made the crossing from Nob Head in a new plank boat with four strong men to paddle it. We hadn’t asked for her to come, but a good half of the Knee people still gathered round to watch as she wailed and sobbed and rolled her eyes.

  “Mother Gela is crying! She is crying and crying. She’ll never stop crying until every one of her children turns away from wicked John and comes back to the True Family of Great David.”

  “We’re not Johnfolk!” called out a young girl named Sweetflower.

  The shadowspeaker turned on her. “Not Johnfolk?” she cried out, like the girl had stabbed her with a spear. “How you hurt our mother by saying that! How you wound her! Did your Jeff stay with David after John destroyed the circle? No, he went with John. Did he go back to David after John stole the ring? No, he stayed with John. Did he even go back to David after John did for the Three Good Men? No, he stayed with John! He always—” She stopped, holding up her hand for quiet, as if she’d heard something our ears wouldn’t be able to make out. Sweetflower was sobbing with shame. “I hear her now!” the shadowspeaker whispered. “I hear our mother! She’s begging me to try my hardest. She’s begging me to make sure that every single one of you turn away from bad bad Jeff and come back to her. Our kind kind mother can’t bear the thought that any one of you might lose the chance forever of returning to the dear white light of Earth, where everything will be made whole.”

  Four of our young women went back with her on her boat. Many others gave her presents to take away, believing or half believing what she’d told them: that a gift for her was a gift for Mother Gela, and would win them favor in the eyes of the Mother of Eden.

  About ten wakings later I was out with Lucky, cutting bark, when we heard a woman shouting out.

  “Another boat! Come quickly!”

  She sounded scared, and we quickly paddled out peckway toward where the shout had come from.

  We met four newhair girls who’d been out gathering waternuts when they’d seen a boat come crashing in through the trees. It was a two-bodied boat, and it had got itself stuck when it was still just a short way in from the edge of forest, banging up hard against a trunk. The girls were paddling away from it as fast as they could.

  “There are weird people on it,” they told us.

  “In what way weird?”

  “They were just standing there, staring at us: like people, but not people. They were like little men, but with blue skin and Eden eyes.”

  Lucky rubbed his pointy head and looked at me. “Should we go and check this out?”

  “Well, we can’t just leave it there, can we? You girls go back to Sand and bring as many people as possible with spears.”

  We soon saw the dark shape ahead of us. We couldn’t see anyone on it at first, but I noticed something that the girls wouldn’t have spotted: It was a New Earth boat.

  “Look! There!” whispered Lucky.

  They were sitting down and partly hidden by a tree trunk, but there they were: two small, thin people with bluish skin. A shiver of pure terror went through me—I’d never felt anything quite like it—but then, a moment later, they looked toward us, and I relaxed.

  “They’re only bats,” I said. “They’re just some kind of bat.”

  Lucky laughed with relief. “Of course! But they don’t seem to have any wings. And what’s that lying on the floor behind them?”

  “Jeff’s ride, it’s a person.”

  The weird wingless bats began to squeak and chatter as we drew near, scurrying up the pole in middle of the boat to get out of our way. But the body on the boat didn’t move, even when we drew right alongside and climbed up onto the floor. It was a woman lying there. She was wearing a wrap of plain fakeskin, like the ringmen had worn at Veeklehouse.

  Starlight Brooking

  For ten eleven wakings—it was impossible to know exactly—I’d been in darkness. And all that time I’d been trying to make myself stay awake so I could listen to the wind in the catcher and make sure it was still blowing from behind. But even when I was awake, in that total darkness and with no one for company but bats, it didn’t feel like being awake. I kept hearing metal horns and angry voices behind the flapping of the windcatcher and the slopping of waves against the boat, and, again and again, I thought I heard the faint faint slap of wet hands reaching up out of the water. Each time I took my paddle and prowled round the floor in the darkness, feeling round the edge to make sure no one was there.

  After a while—I don’t know how many wakings—the bats came and huddled up on either side of me. It was for warmth, I suppose, and I let them stay there because it warmed me, too. It was a strange feeling, touching them and sensing their lives moving inside them. I’d never really touched a living animal before, apart from animals I’d been about to do for, and that one buck I’d ridden on with Snowleopard from Edenheart to the Pool.

  Deep Darkness went on and on. After a while it felt like this was all there ever had been or would ever be: the blackness, the flapping and slopping of wind and waves, the slow rise and fall over invisible hills of water, with sleep sucking me down and fear waking me up again. . . .

  But then something new happened. A slit of white light, narrow as a single hair, appeared across the blackness ahead of me, silent and still, dividing black water from dark sky. It was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.

  Slowly the whiteness separated into pinks and greens, into moving shapes, into waves moving over an edge below the surface that divided the dark depths and the bright shallows. My boat was moving quickly toward it now. I saw the waves ahead of me toppling as they reached the bright water, I heard them slop and splash, and then suddenly I’d reached it, too, was on top of it, was passing over it, the boat bumping and rolling as it left the hidden world behind and came bobbing out into the world that could be seen.

  The two batlings climbed up the windtree. I could see them in the waterlight, clinging to the top of it, chirruping and chattering, their shriveled, bluish faces (if you could call them faces) peering out over the water while ripples of pale gray swept restlessly back and forth across their eyes. Far above them Starry Swirl was b
reaking through the cloud. And at once I began to search along World’s Edge for the Home Star and the dark shapes of the mountains of Snowy Dark.

  “Come on!” I muttered.

  I needed to see the mountain called Tommy’s Cup if I was going to find the line to the Home Star that would take me back to the Grounds. Otherwise I’d have no choice but to head straight on to Mainground. But almost as soon as the sky had cleared, more cloud came creeping back over it from out peckway, threatening to hide mountains and Home Star both.

  “Come on!”

  A quarter of the sky was covered in cloud before the ridge of Snowy Dark finally appeared, rising above World’s Edge and biting like sharp black teeth into the brightness of Starry Swirl. Tommy’s Cup was way down alpway, so far down to my right that at first I didn’t even recognize it. I knew I needed to turn right and alpway myself until star and mountain lined up, so I steered as far right as it was possible to go while still keeping at least some wind in the catcher. The boat tipped and rocked and splashed and groaned as it cut sideways through the waves.

  It was more than half a waking later that a patch of yellow-green light appeared above World’s Edge to my left, in front of the distant black ridge of Snowy Dark. The bats had come down from the windtree and were sitting beside me as I turned the boat toward that familiar light. They creaked and whistled, the waterlight playing over the restless surfaces of their eyes, the catcher puffed out again as it filled up with air, and the boat pulled forward as if it were impatient to reach its destination. But I looked out blankly at the little forest in the middle of the bright water and felt nothing at all except for a terrible tiredness and a creeping nausea that had been slowly growing inside me for some time.

  A branch snagged on the windtree with a loud crack, tearing away half of the catcher. A second branch caught it again and swung the whole boat round so that it was heading straight toward the big, stooping trunk of a kneetree. I pulled the steerpole round to try and avoid it, but then there were two more trunks ahead of me, too close together to pass between. I was paddling furiously backward when the boat smashed into one of the trees and I fell face-first onto the floor.

  Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph.

  Greeny-yellow lanterns shone above me, below me, and on every side. There was an oval cut into the bark of a nearby tree where it bent over toward Mainground, and a row of little wooden pegs banged into the trunk. A clawbat swooped down to snatch a fish from the water.

  “I’m home,” I tried saying to myself. “I’m back.”

  But all I could feel was sickness and weariness.

  I’ll just sleep, I thought. I’ll just sleep for a few minutes, before I do anything else.

  Julie Deepwater

  “Starlight?” I whispered, touching her arm.

  I was afraid she was dead. She was so still and so pale, so thin thin that her bony face was hardly her own at all.

  “Starlight?” I tried again.

  Those weird, wingless bats were peering down at us from the pole.

  “Starlight?”

  She jerked awake with a cry, her eyes wide with terror, snatching at a spear that lay beside her hand and backing away from us across the floor. Gela’s heart, what had happened to her? Who did she think we were?

  “It’s just us, Starlight. It’s Julie and Lucky. You’re back home. You’re back on Knee Tree Grounds!”

  The fear faded from her eyes, but she still didn’t smile. I went to sit beside her. She was stiff stiff in my arms.

  “Have you crossed the Pool all by yourself?” Lucky asked her.

  “I wasn’t on my own at first. There were three—” She broke off. “It doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Of course, dear, of course. You’re tired tired.”

  She tried to smile, passing her trembling hands over her face.

  “Look at you, you’re shaking shaking! You’ve got a fever. Why don’t you get in my boat and we’ll take you back to the Sand?”

  “The bats will have to come, too,” she said.

  Lucky eyed them doubtfully. “Tom’s dick, they’re ugly,” he said, though his own batface was every bit as twisted as theirs. “Are they good to eat? Is that why you cut off their wings?”

  “No. I didn’t . . . I mean they’re not—”

  Again she broke off. I felt that she’d weep if we asked her one more thing. Weep, or perhaps be sick.

  “Time for talking later, eh?” I said. “Of course we can bring those bats if you want.”

  Starlight stepped down into the boat, then turned and reached out toward the bats. “Come on! In you get. You can’t stay there.”

  I glanced uneasily at Lucky.

  “Are you sure they understand English, Starlight?” he asked her, trying to make a joke of her weird behavior.

  “They’re learning.”

  Lucky looked at me. Was Starlight right in the head? But the bats came cautiously forward to the edge of the boatfloor, hesitated, then hopped down into our boat. I backed away from them as far as I could. The only bats I’d ever touched were either dead or about to be.

  “You talk differently, Starlight,” I said as we pushed away from the big boat and began to paddle through the trees.

  Other boats were coming toward us, boats and wary people, some paddling slowly, some clutching spears.

  “It’s all right!” I called out. “It’s just Starlight. It’s just Starlight Brooking.”

  “Starlight?” called out a big man’s voice. “Did you say Starlight?”

  “That’s right, Dixon. It’s your beautiful niece, come back to us from across the water.”

  Starlight Brooking

  John’s walk, it was so small, that little patch of dry sand, with its ring of so-called shelters that were really no more than bits of bark held up with sticks, or propped against the trunks of trees. In the Meeting Place, some youngmums and oldies had been working together on the job of scraping fatbuck skins they’d stretched out over frames made of sticks, and little naked children had been playing around them on the sand. The mums and oldies were nearly naked, too, with bare feet and bare breasts, and bits of buckskin tied round their middles. The tools they used were just sharpened bones and rough chips of stone.

  Uncle Dixon was so excited he didn’t know what to do.

  “Get the horns out!” he shouted. “It’s Starlight! Our Starlight! It’s our Starlight, back again from across the Pool! Blow the horns! Get everyone back here! It’s our Starlight!”

  “She’s tired, Dix, she needs to rest . . .” Julie told him, placing a hand on his arm.

  Dixon looked at her distractedly without really hearing her, and carried on calling out excitedly to the people coming from across the Sand and out in forest, his arm round my shoulders all the while.

  “Look! It really is her! It’s our Starlight, back again!”

  Here was my brother, Johnny, coming over from the shelters where they stored the half-made boats. Here was Glitterfish with her little boy. Here were Lucky, Delight, Caroline, Greenlantern, Gela, Flame. . . . And of course I knew them all, apart from the small babies. I knew their names, and who they were friends with, and what they were like to be with. But even that familiarity seemed strange. Strange that these oldies had watched over me when I was a little toddler myself. Strange that these youngmums had been my playmates, and that I’d run around naked with them like these little children were doing now, shrieking and yelling with excitement without really knowing why.

  Someone began to blow a horn. Paaaarp-paaaarp! Paaaarp-paaaarp! It was a fuzzy, blurry, friendly sound, a little sound, quite different from the hard, bright call of the metal horns of Edenheart as they echoed up and down the Great Cave.

  “You just want to sleep, don’t you?” said Glitterfish.

  I’d been a bit afraid of my sister before I left, however much I tried to tell myself it wasn’t so. But she seemed younger now, somehow, and smaller. I remembered that she’d never been anywhere in the
world but Knee Tree Grounds and Nob Head, and that even Veeklehouse had seemed way too far away for her to even think of going there.

  “What’s it like over there?” asked Delight.

  “Is it true there’s metal everywhere instead of stone?” asked a little slowhead woman called Flame.

  “Too many questions, eh, Star?” said Johnny. “You’ll sleep soon, and then when you wake, it’ll all seem easier.” But even he couldn’t resist a question of his own. “I suppose . . . I suppose it’s like Veeklehouse there, is it? Big shelters and buckfat lamps?”

  Boats were still being pulled out of the water, and more people were running over.

  “What happened to that guy Greenstone?”

  “It’s our Starlight! It really is her!”

  “How did you get back?”

  “Do they have trees and fatbucks over there?”

  “You look tired tired!”

  “How far away is it?”

  “Oh, Jeff’s eyes, look at her!”

  “How do they get that metal from under the ground?”

  Nausea twisted inside me like a slinker inside a tree. And behind the nausea, I felt a deep deep dread. These people might be pleased to see me, but it was only because they didn’t know why I’d come, and what I’d left behind, and who would be coming after me.

  “Is it really true that fellow of yours had forty men just to paddle him?”

  “What happened to him, anyway?”

  Uncle Dixon, his belly hanging out over his skin wrap, kept beaming at me and squeezing my shoulders and giving me big, beardy kisses. It was my sister who noticed the trouble in my face, and began calling on people to let me have some space.

  “Give her a break, eh? She’s just crossed Worldpool by herself!”