Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  It still seemed wrong to me that the Secret Story could be spoken out loud—and by a man as well—but I didn’t really care that much anymore. I was just so relieved to know that my kids and my mum were safe.

  Teacher Harry climbed up on the log so everyone could see him, and started talking to the forest people.

  “Dear good people,” he said, “the best people of this ground, the ones who’ve had the sense to keep away from Edenheart and ringmen and teachers, I’ve come to you with a message from Mother Gela. I’m sure some of you women already know it, but the time has come to tell it to everyone, before it’s buried by the lies that Edenheart puts into Gela’s mouth.”

  I looked round at all the people standing there in their little skin wraps. Some of the women looked worried, and I guessed they’d heard the Secret Story before and were as uneasy as I was to think of it being shared like this.

  “And the other thing I want to tell you,” said Teacher Harry, “is that Mother Gela herself is alive and well, and here in Eden. She was here in New Earth, until the cruel new Headman drove her away.”

  He started talking about Starlight, how she was a small person like they were—a forest person even—and how she was kind and smart and beautiful, and how she’d traveled back and forth over all of New Earth, sharing the true words of Mother Gela, until the chiefs and teachers got together and stopped her.

  “But here’s the amazing part of it,” he told us. “Here’s the proof that she was truly Mother Gela herself reborn, and not just the housewoman of some chief, like all the other Ringwearers.” He picked up some of the barks he had with him. “I’m going to read you some stories,” he said. “These are stories that are being passed round by small people down in the caves and out in the digs. I didn’t make them up; I just wrote them down. There are simply too many for them all to be false.”

  He looked down at his barks and read to us about a woman at Johndigs who couldn’t walk until Mother Starlight touched her with the ring, and an old man at Batsky who’d been blind but suddenly could see when the mother reached out to him.

  “And then there was a little girl called Brightflame from Edenheart,” he said, “who’ve I’ve actually met and talked to myself. She had a cut on her hand that wouldn’t heal. Mother Starlight didn’t even touch her, just looked across at her and smiled. Next waking—would you believe it?—that cut had closed up and begun to heal.”

  He read out six seven more of these stories.

  “Remember she hasn’t died, friends. She’s still alive, and she isn’t somewhere far away on Earth, but here in Eden. And she’ll come back one waking and heal us all.” He looked across at me, his eyes shining. “I’ll finish with the most amazing story of all,” he said. “It’s about a little boy at Narrowdig. He’d just died of the lung sickness, but his mother had six strong men carry his little body to a place where Mother Starlight was speaking from the back of a car, and she leaned down and touched him with her ring. He’d been dead, remember, dead of the lung sickness, but straight away he opened his eyes, and that same waking he sat up again and took some food.”

  He told the stories well, and the forest people loved stories. Quite a few of them were crying.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him, or Mehmet, or anyone else, that the woman he was talking about wasn’t the Starlight I actually knew. It’s not that I didn’t love her, it’s not that she wasn’t special, but I knew her as a tough young woman, and not the sweet and gentle thing that shy Teacher Harry had imagined as he watched her from a distance with those dark, sad eyes.

  As for those stories, well, I’d touched the mother every single waking, all the time she lived in the Headmanhouse. I’d touched her back, her head, her legs, her shoulders. I’d even touched her hand with the ring. But I’d had aching in my fingers before I met her, and, in all that time of touching the Mother of Eden, the pain never went away.

  Lucy Johnson

  People always used to find me rather sad and gray. “Poor Lucy,” the other chiefswomen used to say, and then they’d find someone more fun to talk to. But now, as I rode in my car through the bright caves and out into the digs beyond, I couldn’t help myself from laughing out loud as I thought about the way things had turned out. For so long, all that I’d dared to even hope for was that one of my daughters would be the housewoman of Firehand’s son. Yet now it was me who wore the ring myself, me who the small people were cheering as we bumped into the first little dig cluster, me whose son would wear the Headman’s hat when Dixon had finally gone.

  I waved to the small people—those diggers did have hard lives—and threw them a specially big handful of cubes. And then, as the car rolled on up the path, and the excited children finally fell behind, I half closed my eyes and remembered, yet one more time, the waking that Dixon came back from Brown River. It was the happiest waking in my life.

  I was still sleeping when he came in.

  “Lucy? Are you awake? I’m back.”

  I opened my eyes. He was still in the wrap he’d been wearing on the boat, stinking of smoke from the firecage.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” Dixon said, holding out his closed hand.

  I assumed it would be some little present he’d got me from Old Ground, hoping to sweeten me a bit before he told me the bad news. He knew I liked the bracelets those Brown River people make, with the pretty colored stones.

  “I don’t know why you couldn’t wait till First Horn,” I sighed. “Now I’m going to be tired all waking.”

  Dixon just smiled and opened his hand. It was a moment before I realized what was there.

  “Oh, Gela’s heart, Dixon! Oh, Gela’s sweet sweet heart! You really found it!”

  “Put it on. Let me see it where it belongs.”

  It fitted like it had been made for me, and he bent down and kissed me on the mouth.

  “We’d hardly put our feet down in Brown River,” he told me, “when a trader came running up with it.

  “ ‘Perhaps it’s only a copy, Father,’ she said, ‘but it looks real enough, and the metal’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.’ ”

  Dixon had put on a funny Brown River voice to make me laugh: “Prerbly it’s ernly a kerpy, Ferther.” Now he kissed me again.

  “It’s incredible,” I told him. “It’s like Mother Gela herself had it all planned.”

  He smiled. “Well, that’s certainly how it looks, isn’t it? Mother Gela telling us that she wants me to be Headman, and you to be Ringwearer. Mother Gela telling us that we Johnfolk really are the ones she wants to be in charge. We can make good use of this story, Lucy. We can make good good use of it.”

  I laughed.

  “Maybe we can,” I told him, “but that’s for after the horn blows. Come on now, my smart smart man, what are you waiting for? Come and lie down! Come and lie down with the Mother of Eden!”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Huge thanks are due to Sara O’Keeffe and Julian Pavia, my editors respectively at Corvus in the UK and Broadway in the US. Between them they encouraged/goaded me into transforming this book into the novel I had really wanted to write. I’m very grateful also to Barbara and Tony Ballantyne, who published the original prototype of this story, under the title “Gela’s Ring,” in their online magazine, Aethernet. Thanks, too, to my brilliant agent, John Jarrold, for getting my work out there where it can be seen, and to the Clarke Award judges and everyone else who enjoyed my previous foray into Eden. And thanks to my dear wife, Maggie, for pretty much everything.