‘That’s the best way, of course,’ he said. ‘A good clean kill. But it’s far from easy.’
‘Too damn right,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s hard hard. John only had a . . .’
‘It’s not that hard,’ John interrupted. ‘It just seems hard because it’s dangerous. It’s like balancing on a branch at the top of a tree. Really, when you think about it, that’s no harder than balancing on a branch near the ground, which anyone can do. The only difference is that you’re done for if you don’t get it right, and that makes it seem harder.’
I smiled. I liked what John had said, and I liked that he didn’t say it to pretend to be modest, but because he was annoyed with the smallness of Family that got so excited about a little thing like someone killing one lousy animal. But Gerry looked at him in dismay. Why was John cross that people were making a fuss of him? Why didn’t he like it that everyone said he was great? Poor Gerry, who no one noticed much at all, he just couldn’t figure it out.
‘John only had a second to get it right,’ he repeated. ‘Too early or too late and he’d have been done for.’
After they’d cut out its two big hearts, grownups tied wavyweed ropes round the leopard’s front legs and hauled it up into the meeting tree in middle of Redlantern group for everyone to see. They’d take its skin off later, and pull out its long black teeth and claws for knives, and then they’d dry its guts for string, and clean its bones for diggers and hooks and knives and spearheads (bone is better than tree spikes, though not as good as blackglass). And of course someone or other would eat its eyes: someone who was getting older and beginning to be scared of darkness coming, because people said a leopard’s eyes kept the blindness back, even though they tasted foul. The rest of a leopard’s meat was bitter bitter, enough to make you sick, so when Redlantern had taken the bones and skin and guts and everything else useful off that leopard, they’d have to take the meat itself back out of Family again and dump it a good distance off for the tree foxes and starbirds to eat up.
As to the big woollybuck that we’d done for at about the same time John and Gerry met the leopard, well, like I said, any other time people would have been pretty excited about that too. It would be good eating for many wakings, after all. It had a good big skin that would make a lot of wraps, feet you could melt down for a glue that was as good as boiled sap, and teeth you could use for seedgrinders (the best kind, which didn’t leave grit in the flour like stone seedgrinders do). Most times we could all have expected a bit of praise for getting it, and a few questions about who had done what in the hunt, but this time no one cared. Redlantern just settled down without any fuss at all to skin it, and cut off the tasty lantern on its head, and slice up its body into the Redlantern group portion and the portion that we Spiketrees would take back for our share. (One leg for us, five for them: that had been the deal.) But, all the time they were stripping down the buck, they were talking talking about the leopard whose useless meat was hanging in the tree above them.
‘How did you do it, John?’
‘Weren’t you scared?’
‘What did it feel like?’
‘Well done, our John,’ said Bella, the Redlantern group leader, who’d just come back from a meeting right over in Starflower. ‘Well done, our John. This will do us good at the next Any Virsry, my hunter boy. This will be to the credit of Redlantern among all the other groups.’
She was a clever woman, wiry and always a little bit weary-looking, who people from right across Family came to with problems and arguments. Lots of people said she was the best group leader in whole Family. She worked away waking after waking, not a bit like our lazy old Liz Spiketree, keeping things going, sorting things out, holding all kinds of boring stuff in her head that most people couldn’t be bothered to think about at all.
And John was close close to her, so I’d heard, though I’d heard other, weirder, things as well.
Then Lucy Lu spoke up.
‘The shadow of John’s grandmother was in that leopard,’ she told everyone in her sing-song voice, as if there could be no doubt about it at all, if you only could see the world through her special special eyes. ‘She wanted him to kill the leopard that she was trapped inside of and release her back to Starry Swirl.’
She never liked it when someone else was getting too much attention. She always wanted to make herself the one who knew best about whatever was going on.
‘I thought you said the Shadow People lived on the far side of Snowy Dark,’ John muttered.
I don’t think Lucy Lu heard him, but it made me laugh, and John glanced round at me and smiled.
‘And she’s at peace now,’ cried Lucy Lu, ‘she’s at peace. And she won’t ever have to . . .’
But then a London boy called Mike came running over from Circle Clearing.
‘Hey, where’s John? Oldest want to see him. Oldest have heard about the leopard.’
Poor John. I could see he wasn’t going to get any time to himself for some while yet, so I drank down my drink, and picked up some of the meat to take back to Spiketree.
‘Never mind, John,’ I told him, before I headed off. ‘It’ll blow over in one two wakings, and then maybe we’ll meet up Deep Pool, yes?’
3
John Redlantern
And so we hauled that bloody old leopard down from the tree again and off we went, virtually all forty-odd of Redlantern group, with more joining in from other groups as we passed through them. People who’d normally be sleeping came out of shelters to look at us. Even people in boats on Long Pool waved as we went past.
‘It’s my cousin!’ Gerry kept calling out. ‘Only fifteen years old and he killed a big leopard. I saw him do it.’
He was pleased pleased about the glory I was getting. He was smiling smiling and kept looking round at me to check that I was smiling too.
I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I did my best to look pleased, but truth was I was getting tired tired of it, and fed up with this silly little world we lived in, where one boy doing for one animal could be the most exciting thing that happened for wakings and wakings. I mean, okay I took a risk, but it wasn’t that big a risk really, not if you kept your nerve and concentrated on what you had to do. It wasn’t such a small target, after all, a leopard’s gaping mouth.
You’re all of you hiding up in trees like Gerry did, I said in my head to all those friendly smiling people, and that’s the trouble with bloody Family. You eat and you drink and you slip and you quarrel and you have a laugh, but you don’t really think about where you’re trying to get to or what you want to become. And when trouble comes, you just scramble up trees and wait for the leopard to go away and then afterwards giggle and prattle on for wakings and wakings about how big and scary it was and how it nearly bit off your toes, and how so-and-so chucked a bit of bark at it and whatshisname called out a rude name. Gela’s tits! Just look at you!
And the thing was, the meat was starting to run out in Circle Valley. It was no good just hiding up a tree and giggling. Something was going to have to happen or a waking would come in the end when people in Family would starve. That’s assuming that there wasn’t another rock fall down by Exit Falls, in which case we might all drown instead.
Never mind drowning or starving from lack of food, though. I was going to starve inside my head long before that, or drown in boredom, if I couldn’t make something happen in the world, something different, something more than just this.
That’s what I was thinking about; but Gerry, who loved me so dearly, he didn’t see all this going on inside me at all. He was happy happy. I put on a smile and that was enough for him. It was enough for everyone else too.
Well, nearly everyone. Tina understood, and Jade could have seen I was faking it too, not because I was close to her – I wasn’t – but because I was like her. I was restless like she was. Restless and empty inside and hungry for something more than just ordinary things.
And there was one other person too that saw what was really going on f
or me. It was Gerry’s little clawfoot brother Jeff, who shared a sleeping shelter with Jeff and me. He was only fourteen fifteen wombtimes old, not even a newhair, a weird little kid with a gentle face and great big eyes, like Gerry’s big gentle eyes, but with something completely different going on inside them. He’d been hobbling along after us ever since I got to Redlantern area, and it was only when we reached Circle Clearing and stopped by the edge of it that he finally got close enough to speak to me.
‘You’re sad, aren’t you, John?’ he said to me.
I just shrugged, and stood there, and waited to be told when Oldest were ready to see me. And half of bloody Family stood there and waited with me.
They were sitting side by side on the edge of Circle Clearing like three empty skin bags: Gela, Mitch and Stoop. Their backs were propped up against a big old whitelantern trunk with several layers of bark and a woollybuck hide wedged in between them and it to stop them getting burnt by its heat. And, like always, women were fussing round them with food and wraps and scoops of water.
Beside Oldest was the hollow log in which they kept the Mementoes, and someone had opened it up for them and taken out the Model Sky-Boats, which Tommy Schneider, the father of all of us, is supposed to have made himself: the big starship Defiant, the little Landing Veekle, and the Police Veekle, in which Angela and Michael chased after Defiant when Tommy, Dixon and Mehmet tried to take it away from Earth. The three Models now lay at their feet, dark and shiny with the buckfat that had been rubbed into them for generations to stop the old wood from shrinking and cracking.
But Oldest had got bored of the Models, and now they were arguing between themselves, while Caroline Brooklyn, the tall grey woman who was Family Head, squatted beside them and tried to soothe things down.
‘Each Any Virsry was supposed to be three hundred and sixty-five days after the last one,’ old Mitch was saying.
‘I know that, you stupid old man,’ said old Gela. ‘We all know that. But what I’m telling you, if you’d only bloody listen, is that you count the days all wrong.’
‘I’m sure we can come to an agreement,’ purred Caroline.
‘I don’t get them wrong, you lazy old woman,’ Mitch told Gela. ‘You just get behind in your count because your fat heart beats so slow and you sleep too much.’
‘Yes, she’s behind alright,’ said bent old Stoop, ‘but you’re behind as well, Mitch. You’re days and days behind the true time.’
‘No I’m not,’ said Mitch, ‘your heart beats way too fast, and it always has done. And anyway I’m oldest of Oldest, and you should listen to me. I’m a hundred and twenty years old, you know, and I’m closest to the beginning, and that means my wakings are the true days like they had back on Earth.’
‘Don’t talk rot,’ spat fat old Gela, ‘you’re just a muddled-up old . . .’
Caroline laid her hand on Gela’s arm.
‘Here he is,’ Caroline said in that special kind voice that people used with Oldest, half respectful, and half like they were talking to a little kid. ‘Here they all are: the boy John Redlantern who did for the leopard and most of Redlantern with him by the look of it, plus a whole lot of other folk besides.’
All three Oldest peered towards us with their blind blind eyes. You don’t get much past Old Roger’s age without losing your sight, and our Roger was forty fifty wombs younger than any of these three.
‘Hello Oldest,’ I said.
Caroline gestured to me to approach.
‘And the leopard too,’ she instructed. ‘Bring it forward. My, will you look at that!’
Reluctantly I squatted down in front of the three Oldest. They reached for me with their thin and shaky hands, and I crawled closer as I knew I was supposed to do, and guided their bony old fingers so they could feel my face and my hair and my shoulders, prodding me and pinching me like I was some bloody thing and not a person at all.
‘John Redlantern, you say?’ queried Stoop. ‘Who are you, boy? Who was your grandmother?’
‘Yes, come on boy, spit it out. Who are you?’ complained old Mitch.
‘My mother’s mother is Star.’
‘Never heard of her,’ said Gela, who was named for the first Gela – Angela – the mother of us all. ‘Who was her mother?’
‘Star’s mother was Helen.’
I looked at the Models that were still lying there. Defiant is a tube covered in long spikes. The real one was longer than Greatpool, more than a hundred fifty yards, and so wide that the Landing Veekle could hide inside it. When it set out from Earth those long spikes would start to burn with purple fire, until suddenly the Single Force would open up Hole-in-Sky and let Defiant fall through from one side of Starry Swirl to the other. It was like jumping across Greatpool without crossing the water in between.
‘Helen Redlantern?’ Stoop gave a wheezy little laugh. ‘That cheeky minx. Gave me a bit of a slip once or twice way back. Gave me a nice little slippy slide. She still alive, is she?’
‘No, Oldest. Cancer ate her, four five wombs . . . I mean four five years ago.’
‘Four or five wombtimes is not the same as four or five years,’ muttered old Mitch, giving me a weak slap across the face. It didn’t hurt, but I dare say he intended it to, the vicious old sod. ‘And you should count properly in years as befits all true children of the planet Earth. Don’t you forget it, young man.’
‘Where’s this leopard, then?’ Stoop demanded, and all three of them withdrew their hands from me and gazed greedily beyond me with their sightless eyes.
‘Tell the boy to pay his respects,’ they said, as if I couldn’t hear them for myself. ‘Tell him to pay his respects to Circle while we examine the beast.’
So I walked out by myself into middle of the clearing where Circle of Stones was laid out: thirty-six round white stones, as big as baby’s heads, in a circle thirty feet across, marking where the Landing Veekle had rested when it came down to Eden, with five stones in middle of it representing Tommy and Angela, the parents of all of us, and their Three Companions who’d tried to return to Earth. You weren’t supposed to go nearer to Circle than a couple of yards. Some people even said that if anyone were to touch the stones or go inside Circle, other than Oldest and Council and those they chose, then that person would surely die before their next sleep. I didn’t believe that, but I knew the rules, so I stopped three yards from Circle and, as I was supposed to do, bowed my head slightly slightly towards the five stones in middle.
Those stones were the centre of everything. Everyone knew that we had to remain here in Family, in our groups packed in close around Circle, because this was where the Earth people would head when they came back to find us.
But as I finished paying my respects and turned away again from the stones, a thought came to me.
‘If they had crossed sky and found their way right across Starry Swirl,’ I said to myself, ‘they would surely look a little more widely for us than just this one place.’
And then I felt a bit scared by what I’d just thought, like a little kid might feel if he had wandered too far out into forest and, just for a moment, wasn’t sure of the way back.
We ate well in Redlantern at the end of that waking, and when I finally lay down in the shelter with Gerry and Jeff, sleep didn’t come to me for a long time. The leopard’s heart was heavy heavy in my belly and the leopard’s life, its echo, kept prowling prowling through my mind, like a blackness slipping by behind the little steady lights of my thoughts, singing its tricksy song. Every couple of minutes it was there in front of me again, about to strike. Every couple of minutes I lunged out at it again with my spear.
4
Mitch London
When that boy John had gone away with his dead leopard, Stoop and Gela went straight off to sleep, the dozy old fools. Those two were more dead than alive. But I felt out of sorts and I couldn’t settle. It was that Redlantern boy that had done it. He’d pretended to show us respect because we were Oldest, and because Caroline and the others made
sure all our visitors acted polite, but he didn’t like us and he made sure sure he showed it, the little slinker.
You’d have thought the young ones would be interested in us. You’d have thought they’d want to know the things that only Oldest had got to tell, but they didn’t, the little fools. They didn’t want to know anything that came out from our blind old wrinkly heads, even if it was the story of their own Family.
Bloody Redlantern boy. But he wasn’t there for me to moan at, so I shouted at the women instead, telling them to take away the starship and the Veekles.
‘Leave them lying there, and someone will trip over them and do them damage. I’ve told you that before.’
‘Okay, Mitch dear, we’ll put them away,’ they went, as if they were talking to a little kid rather than the oldest one in whole Family. ‘Gela and Stoop are resting now. Aren’t you going to take a nap too?’
‘I don’t feel like it.’
‘What do you want to do then, love? What are we going to do with you?’
‘Get out Earth Models for me,’ I told them. ‘I want to make sure they’re being properly looked after. Last time I checked some fool had let water get to them.’
‘They’re dry now. We got a nice new log, remember? A nice dry log for them. And Jeffo London made a new greased lid to cover up the end.’
‘That one-legged fool. He probably broke the Models when he was shoving them back in with those clumsy hands of his.’
‘Oh dear, Mitch! We are out of sorts, aren’t we?’
They brought House over and put it into my hands so I could feel its funny square shape and its smooth sticky surface, and the door, and the little holes that Tommy called Wind Ohs. I held it up to my nose to smell the grease and sweat in it, going back to the times before anyone alive was born.
Not that I could smell anything much now. It wasn’t just my eyes that had gone. It was all my bloody senses.
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