“I wonder how many other women on Grounds know it?” she said. “It’d be funny if it turned out we all did.”
“Yeah. If we all knew it, but we were all keeping it secret from one another.”
My sister looked straight at me. “I’m sorry I teased you and called you boring, Glits, for thinking about Mikey all the time. I mean, why would anyone care about this bloody ring, if being a mother wasn’t as important as you’ve always said it was?” Starlight turned the ring over in her hands. “And you’re right about Mum, too. We always fought for her love, didn’t we? She kept us hungry, and we were desperate to get whatever there was. And then I was jealous jealous of your love for little Mikey. But I can see now . . . Well, I’ve seen how much longing there is out there, how many hungry people there are in the world, trying to fill themselves up. And I can see that what you do for Mikey is at least as important as any work that people do anywhere.”
My sister stopped for a moment, playing absently with the ring on her finger, like it was just any old ring.
“You’ve worked and worked, haven’t you,” she said, “to fill your little boy up with love? So he won’t be hungry, so he’ll be happy and strong. But me . . . well, what have I done? I’ve bigged myself up for a short short while, like a flame that blazes up and then goes out, but what have I ever given to anyone? All I’ve done is cause harm.”
I was amazed. I couldn’t remember Starlight apologizing about anything before, not even once. And I couldn’t remember her ever admitting that there was anything I could do better than she could.
But she hadn’t even finished yet.
“Yes,” she said, “and I’m sorry sorry, too, that I didn’t listen to you when you told me not to go to Veeklehouse.”
I reached out to her, took hold of her hand. “You’d still go, though, wouldn’t you, Starlight dear? If you had the chance again, you’d still go. I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve realized I was wrong to try and hold you back, and wrong to think I could keep everything the same. I figure that these Grounds only ever stayed the same for as long as they did because smart, restless people like you always left them and went off somewhere else. People like me stayed, people who like things simple and safe. And people like Uncle Dixon. And people like Julie, who like to be quiet and on their own. But even so, sooner or later, something was going to happen that—”
“Listen, Glits,” Starlight interrupted me, “I . . .” Then she stopped. “Oh, Tom’s dick, I’m going to be sick,” she muttered and threw up over the sand. “I’ve been feeling sick for wakings and wakings. I thought a sleep and a bellyful of food would help, but . . .”
“Are you sore anywhere?”
“Yes, I ache all over. Even my breasts ache. How did you know?”
I laughed. “How long is it since you had a period, Starlight?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s so long since . . . What do you mean, Glits? Are you saying it’s . . . ?”
It was like she couldn’t even bear to say the word.
“Yes, a baby!” I hugged her and kissed her. “Why wouldn’t it be, Starlight dear? I’m guessing you and that Greenstone slipped together at least a few times? Men and women usually do!”
“Yes, but . . . Oh, Gela’s heart! I don’t think I can . . .”
“Of course you can. I’ll help you. We can be mums together. I’ve not told anyone else this yet, but I’ve got another baby coming, too.”
“I wish I could meet your new baby, Glits, I really do, and I wish my kid and your kids could grow up together, but I have to go again, and this time it will be for good. Even if I manage to send the ring back across the water, I can’t come back here. You see, it’s not just the ring that’s a danger to everyone. It’s me.”
And that was the cruelest thing. To find my sister, and then lose her again almost at once.
Part VII
Starlight Brooking
“Starlight?” murmured Julie. “I’m sorry to wake you, but do you think this is it?”
I opened my eyes, came back from my dreams into the world where Greenstone was dead and men with metal spears were coming for me in fast fast boats from across the Deep Darkness.
The others had stopped paddling, and were looking out over the water. Even the bats were looking. Ahead and to the left of us on Mainground, orange light lit up the smoke from many fires burning beside the water. Against it were the dark, square shapes of houses and shelters.
I stood up in the boat. The houseplace looked similar in size to Veeklehouse, but it sat right down next to the water rather than at the top of a cliff. Immediately alpway of it there was a dark gap in the forest where a great river opened out into the Pool like an enormous mouth. And from out of the river came a river, a wide band of darkness, almost black in the middle but a glowing orange-brown round its cloudy edges, that split the bright water in two, all the way out to World’s Edge. Ahead of us a single boat, one of those heavy double log-boats that the Davidfolk used, was crossing from the bright water into this band of darkness.
A wave of nausea swept over me and I leaned, gagging, over the side.
Julie was with me, and Dixon, and Johnny, and three friends of Johnny’s called Peter, Jeff, and Talltree, who’d never been further than Nob Head. I watched them looking with bright and hungry eyes at the houses, the buckfat lanterns, the people in colored longwraps, just as me and Angie had once looked hungrily at Veeklehouse. But I’d seen many houseplaces now, and I scarcely even glanced at this one. I had other things I needed to think about, and what in the world looks interesting, anyway, when you’re feeling sick sick sick in your belly?
A young man came over to us. He had a wispy blond beard and a narrow face, and wore a green hat with a feather in it.
“You have to give me two stones if you’re going to leave your boat there, people,” he said in the odd, flat speech of Brown River. “That’s the Council rule. Two stones, and then one more for each waking you leave it there.”
“Stones?” grumbled Dixon. “What do you mean by stones?”
I sighed. “It’ll be like sticks in Veeklehouse, won’t it, Uncle?” I suggested as patiently as I could. “Or cubes in New Earth.”
The boy turned toward me. “You got it, Einstein,” he said as he coolly checked me out. “Like sticks or cubes. And I’ll take sticks or cubes instead, if you prefer.” He noticed the two bats standing behind me and his eyes brightened. “Hey! Cutbats! Where did you people get those?”
I ignored his question. “Listen,” I said. “We’ll give you a metal cube then, instead of two of your stones?”
We’d brought with us two of the bags of metal that Greenstone had given to Dixon back at Veeklehouse, and I took out a cube, just like the ones I’d once flung in handfuls to the small people of New Earth.
“Where do you people come from?” the boy persisted, quickly accepting the metal, which was obviously worth a good deal more to him than two stones. “This is New Earth metal, and those are New Earth bats and a New Earth boat. But look at you lot in your skin wraps, and listen to the way you talk! No way are you from New Earth. So how did you come by all this?”
Me and Julie had agreed on a story.
“We live in a little poolside place,” I told him, “rockway some distance from here. It’s called Stonepool, but you probably haven’t heard of it. Sometimes the waves bring in things from out in the Pool: bits of wood, dead fatbucks, drowned people. That’s how we found this boat and the stuff on it. And we found one two other things, too. Are there any New Earth traders here who’ll be going back soon across the Pool?”
The boy looked at me. First off, he’d just seen a pretty young woman who he could enjoy imagining slipping with, but now he was curious about me in another way. How come the others deferred to this woman, I could see him wondering, even the fat man and the clawfoot woman, who were more than twice her age?
“Yeah, I could introduce you to some people. Give me another one two of those cubes and I could sort you o
ut with most things.”
I nodded. “Later maybe,” I said, and as I spoke I checked the ring in its pocket on my skin waistwrap.
He laughed. “Yeah, okay. But what have you got that you think they’ll want?”
“That’s not your business, is it? We’ve given you a cube, and we’ll give you another later if you help us. Now leave us alone.”
He shrugged and walked off to meet another boat. I looked round at the others. The sickness was building up inside me to the point where soon I’d have to throw up again.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll get all the stuff we need, and then we’ll meet these New Earth traders.”
The story we’d agreed on was that, along with the boat, a dead woman who looked a lot like me had washed up on our Grounds. She had the ring on her finger.
“We’ll meet the traders, Starlight,” Julie said firmly. “But you won’t. You told me yourself that hundreds of people over there saw your face and heard you speak.”
“Yeah,” said Peter, tall, strong-shouldered, batfaced. “And these bloody bats will follow you wherever you go, and that’ll draw loads of attention. You should have left them behind.”
I didn’t answer him. I looked away from the Knee Tree group, at the shelters twenty thirty feet away, the people going back and forth, the stained orange flames of buckfat lamps. Nausea and grief and shame tainted everything, made it all seem false and futile.
“You should ask for a good trade for the ring,” I said. “If our story was true, we wouldn’t just give it away; we’d be looking to get as much as we could. Tell them you want metal. Don’t let them have it until they’ve agreed to give you a lot.”
I looked at Dixon, fat Uncle Dixon, standing there with his belly hanging over his skin waistwrap, his mouth slightly open as he listened and tried to understand. I looked at my big, shy brother, Johnny. I looked at the three young men who’d never been further than Nob Head. Even Julie had never been further than that, apart from that one trip to Veeklehouse.
“Do you get that?” I asked. “Does it make sense to you?”
Julie nodded. “We get it, Starlight. Don’t worry. We may not have seen as much of the world as you have, but we’re not dumb.”
I turned and walked to the edge of the river. On the far side, three hundred feet away, many different kinds of trees hung their branches down low over the water, laden with lanterns, lighting up the muddy water beneath them so brightly it was more orange than brown. But the water had no light of its own—there was too much mud in it for anything to shine up through it—and out in middle, where it was nearly dark, hundreds of little dim shapes were zipping fast and low over the surface. They were jewel-bats, skimming the river with their fingertips as they went back and forth, ready to snatch as soon as they felt the touch of a fish’s skin.
The two wingless bats had followed me, and now they stood next to me, staring out at those other bats that could fly so easily and so well. I took the ring out of my pocket and held it in the palm of my hand. I’d worn it for many wakings since I first saw it on the scarred finger of old Firehand Johnson. Many times I’d taken it off, turned it this way and that, held it up in front of white lanternflowers to read the tiny letters inside. But now, as I looked down at it—at those tiny letters, at the way the two metals joined without a gap or a crack—I felt I’d still never really seen it, never really noticed it at all. I should try, I decided. I should try to see it properly, just once, before I gave it away for good.
But what was it? What was I looking at? Didn’t you have to know what a thing was before you could really see it? (If you didn’t already know those shadows out there were bats, what would you see? Nothing but fast-moving blurs!) I knew lots of stories about it, like everyone did—it had been made on Earth, it had been found by John Redlantern, it had been snatched by Firehand out of that pot of boiling water—but they were just stories, stories that had been wrapped round it, not the ring itself. So now I tried and tried, until my head ached, to push them from my mind and simply look at the ring.
It was just a thing. I could see that. Just a small small thing. When it was first made on Earth, no one could have known where it would go or what it would come to mean. But it was impossible to hold on to that, impossible to hold away the stories that had made this little object seem so big. In fact, so big had it become that it kept pulling more stories around itself, and growing bigger still. For it hadn’t finished. If our plan worked out, there’d be another story soon, of how the ring had come back again from Mainground, how the fishing girl from across the Pool had tried to steal it and ended up drowning. What fun the teachers would have with that!
The sickness moved inside me like a slinker inside the airtubes of a tree, and the ring’s shiny smoothness suddenly seemed spoiled and tainted. It wasn’t too late, even now, I thought, for me to finish the job that John hadn’t been brave enough to complete. It would be easy easy to toss it into the muddy water. I closed my hand round it. I half lifted it. . . .
“We need to move, Starlight,” said Julie, coming up behind me. “People are staring at us. These bloody bats of yours are getting us way too much attention.”
I lowered my hand, but I didn’t turn away from the river. The shadowy little jewel-bats swooped and dived over the dark water, and, on the far bank, the treelanterns swayed slightly in the wind that blew across from New Earth.
“Come on, Starlight,” Julie’s voice was cross now. “You’re not being fair. You’re putting us all in danger.”
“Yes, I’m sorry.”
I turned round and, slowly, reluctantly, opened my fingers. “It’s weird. I wanted to throw it in the river just a moment ago, but now I don’t want to give it up at all. I mean, look at it, Julie! This is Gela’s ring!”
Julie said nothing, just held out her hand beneath mine. And then suddenly it was Julie holding the ring and me looking down at it, knowing I’d never touch it again. It was like when I came to the Great Cave and looked up at the black sky for that one last time before we passed into the light under the mountains.
Julie closed her hand. The ring had gone. The way it looked and felt was already only a memory.
Julie Deepwater
“So now I get rid of this,” I said, “and you take those bats with you in the kneeboat and head off up the river by yourself. Is that the plan?”
It had seemed possible back at Grounds—Starlight was so changed, so full of knowledge that we had no inkling about—but looking at her now, it just seemed crazy. She was pregnant, she’d crossed whole of Worldpool by herself, then almost at once come on another long, hard Pool journey all the way down here. And now she was planning to set off by herself again, paddling against the river’s flow.
“I’m going to come with you,” I decided. “You take the kneeboat and the bats upriver for a mile, and wait for me on the bank. I’ll come along as soon as I can.”
“But Julie, I can’t ask you to—”
“There’s no time for talking now. Take the boat and go.”
We’d pulled a kneeboat behind us all the way from Grounds. Now we took it down to the water and loaded it with food and some warm skins and a bag of those metal cubes. Starlight called the bats over to her, and said good-bye again to her uncle and her brother.
“Okay, Dix,” I said as she paddled slowly off up the river, and before he had a chance to start crying. “Let’s go find that guy with the—”
I broke off because I’d spotted something over his shoulder. It was a new boat arriving from out in Pool. As it caught the orange light of the fires and lamps of Brown River, I saw that it was another New Earth boat, and a big one, with men paddling down either side, naked down to their waists. And at the front of it was a tall man with thick gray hair and a long, dark wrap.
“Okay, change of plan,” I told the others. “You need to go, you need to go right now, and I need to get rid of the ring. We do not want to meet that guy.”
“But Julie—” began Dixon.
&nb
sp; “Look over there, Dixon. Don’t you remember him? The bloke with the same name as you? Did Starlight not tell you that it was him that ended up doing for Greenstone, him that wanted her beaten and thrown down into a fire?”
It was obvious that Starlight hadn’t told him. His eyes widened in horror, and, though his mouth moved, no words came.
“Get the boat in the water now, Dixon,” I told him, speaking slowly and clearly, like he was a child. “Head straight out into middle of the river where it’s dark, turn toward the Pool, and then keep paddling hard for at least a waking before you think of stopping. I’ll deal with this ring and then go after Starlight.”
Another New Earth boat had appeared behind the first one. I had no doubt about it: They’d come after the ring, just as Starlight had said they would, and, not knowing where to start, they’d come to their friends at Brown River to seek their help.
I quickly kissed Dixon and the others good-bye, and then turned and headed back to the shelters while they were pushing their boat out onto the water. I found a woman who was trading in things made of redmetal—knives, brooches, rings—and told her the story of the dead woman thrown up on poolside by the waves.
I wasn’t much of an actor. When people had done those old stories back on the Grounds—“Gela’s Ring,” “Michael’s Names,” “Jeff’s Shining Ride”—I’d never offered to play a part. But now I had no choice.
“It looked like there’d been a fight or something,” I said. “Her wrap was all ripped up, and she had a big old spear hole in her belly. No sign of who’d done it. There wasn’t anyone else on the boat, alive or dead; only two weird bats in a cage. But anyway, she had this ring on her finger.”
As I handed her the ring, I watched the woman’s face changing from barely polite to interested interested interested.
“I didn’t know metal came in these colors,” I told her. “I thought all metal was red. And it’s got writing inside it, too. Look how tiny it is! Those New Earth people are smart smart, aren’t they? I don’t know what it says, but it makes me think of Gela’s ring in that old story.”
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