PAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrp! PAAAAAaaaaaaaaaarrp!
BOOM BOOM BOOM, went the tiny Secret Ree on her great big drum, and then she stopped and put her hands on the tight buckskin to silence it, and Caroline stood up and did the Funeral Speech about what fine people they both had been in spite of their faults, and how Bella’s and Stoop’s bones would now rest here peacefully until Earth finally came.
‘And then at last they will be taken home to Earth,’ she said, ‘and buried there to rest peacefully under the bright bright Sun in the world where human beings were meant to be.’
She paused, and looked around at all of us. The fug was still pressing in on us, and the sweat was pouring down our faces.
‘And let us all remember,’ she said, ‘that even if we die here on Eden before Earth comes, we will all still return, just so long as we do what we were asked to do, and stay here together in Family, next to Circle of Stones.’
That was the end of the funeral, and we all picked our way through the heaps of stones and hurried away from that horrible place with that stale and musty smell of death that crept out through the gaps between the stones.
On the way back to Family I caught up with Gerry Redlantern and his weird little brother Jeff. Gerry was in a bad bad state. He’d barely slept or eaten since John went away.
‘I can’t stand this,’ he muttered. ‘I’m going to go out and find him. I know where he’ll be. He’ll have gone out Cold Path way. There’s a place just inside main valley, Alpway from Cold Path Neck, near where he did for that leopard. He said it would be a good place to live. And he’s been on about Cold Path since we went up there. He’s been on about how the woollybucks get up and out of the valley that way, and over Dark, and how if they can do it so could we.’
‘If you go you’ll be chucked out of Family, same as he was,’ I said.
‘I don’t bloody care,’ he began, ‘I’ll . . .’
Then he broke off because we heard a familiar sound coming from Peckhamway: a sound like women singing, like beautiful beautiful women’s voices singing a sad sad song. It was leopards of course, and not just one leopard this time, but two three of them, singing in harmony. They don’t often hunt together, but once in a while they do, usually when there’s a specially good catch. And of course Peckhamway is the direction of Cold Path Neck.
David Redlantern came by with a couple of newhairs trailing behind him. All three of them had blackglass spears.
‘Sounds like those leopards have found something yummy to eat,’ said David, grinning his horrible cold batfaced grin at us. ‘What can it be, I wonder? Not by any chance our old friend Juicy John, do you think? What do you reckon? He did for one leopard, alright – credit where it’s due – but how would he cope if three of them came at him at once?’
The boys with him laughed loudly.
‘I reckon that’d be a bit much even for John, Dave,’ said one of them. ‘Looks like poor old Juicy John might have ended up as a leopard’s dinner.’
It was Met Redlantern, a stupid big empty-headed kid I’d often seen out with John and the other Redlantern newhairs, scavenging or hunting in forest.
‘You piece of shit, Met!’ Gerry hissed at him. ‘John was your friend. Only a few wakings ago he let you get the glory for that slinker when he could have had the glory himself!’
Met looked sort of uncomfortable but he laughed that same loud laugh that he’d done before.
‘Glory for a slinker?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so, Gerry. What glory does anyone get for a lousy slinker?’
‘He’d have let you be the one to do for it even if it had been a buck,’ said Gerry hotly. ‘You know he would.’
‘What? Like he shared that leopard glory with you?’ said Met.
‘He let me have one of the hearts!’
‘Well, who wants to eat two?’
‘You three are arseholes,’ I told David and his little friends. ‘John is better than all of you put together, and what’s more you know that yourselves, if only you had the guts to admit it.’
They laughed again, that horrible laugh. And all this time those leopards were singing that beautiful dreamy song. And of course for all we knew it really could be John out there, trapped between them, not knowing which one of them to face while they circled round him.
‘Arseholes, eh?’ said David, still grinning, and he looked straight at me. ‘That’s good good, coming from a silly little girlie who likes it up the arse as everyone knows. You’re going to have to change your tune one of these wakings, Tina Spiketree, and it won’t be so long now. It won’t be so long at all.’
I looked into his eyes and I could see the rest of his thoughts as surely as if he spoke them aloud. A time was soon coming, he was thinking, when I would have to call him whatever he told me to call him, and treat him however he wanted to be treated: a time when he would do to me whatever he pleased and whenever he felt like it, with whichever bit of my body he chose.
The time of men was coming, I could see. Women had run things so far, when there was just one Family, but that was over now, and in this new broken-up world it would be the men that would get ahead.
And right there and then I finally made up my mind. I didn’t want to be in Family any more, not this Family, not with the likes of David rising up to the top.
‘Let’s go out and find John,’ I said to Gerry, when David and his two little shadows had moved away.
I said it to Gerry and not to his little brother Jeff. Jeff had always made me feel uneasy, and anyway he was a clawfoot and I didn’t reckon he could walk that far.
Gerry looked at me like I’d saved his life. He’d been longing to go after John ever since John left, and talking about going after him too, but he was one of those people that just can’t do a thing all on their own, but need someone to follow, someone to give them permission, someone to show the way. His whole face changed and he laughed out loud.
‘Harry’s dick,’ he said, ‘I so want to do that.’
Then he glanced guiltily at his little brother.
‘You’ll have to tell mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her I love her and that, and that I’ll be alright.’
Jeff looked up at him with his big naked eyes.
‘But I’m coming too.’
Probably me and Gerry could have done the walk in one long long waking, but with his little brother hobbling along with us, we took three wakings and had to stop every hour to let him rest. Towards the end of each waking, we carried him between us, Jeff holding on with an arm round each of our necks, or me or Gerry would take a turn carrying him on our backs.
We didn’t have any proper hunting stuff, no bags or string or bows or anything, only the simple spiketip spears we’d had with us when we went to Stoop and Bella’s funeral, so all we could get to eat were a few bits of fruit and stumpcandy and one grey old groundrat. (It had made a tunnel into an ant’s nest, and I got Gerry to dig with his hands on the opposite side to where it had gone in until it panicked and scuttled back out of its hole, all covered in flashing red ants. Then I did for it with my spear.) We couldn’t even cook the rat properly, only scorch it in a hollow in a spiketree, like hunters do when they don’t want to take fire with them on a trip.
Most of the time the fug stayed down. Sometimes it moved away a bit, and we could see twenty thirty yards of space under the trees. Sometimes it was like we were stuck in a tiny world a few yards wide, with nothing in it but us and a few trees and the odd starflower, and nothing beyond but white shining fug. And then it was sticky and hot, and it was hard hard to walk and carry Jeff.
Once, we heard the hollowbranch horns back in the camp, like the sound of another world: parp parp paaaaarp, parp parp paaaaarp. Two short one long: it was the special sound for getting wanderers to return, when there wasn’t a Strornry or an Any Virsry. They were ordering the three of us to come back. We heard it again at the end of that waking when we were trying to get some sleep. And a couple of times we heard hunters in forest around us, talking and grum
bling as they looked for us.
‘Bloody newhairs. Why can’t we just let them go?’
‘Leopards might have done for them already for all we know.’
But we kept still and quiet and waited, and they passed on.
Third waking, the fug lifted and, quite unusually, there was a dip again straight away. Starry Swirl was bright in a black black sky, the air was cold and sharp, and ahead of us we saw the lights of forest rising up into Peckham Hills, the great black shadow of Snowy Dark looming up against the stars behind them.
‘Do you two realize what we’ve done?’ I said. ‘Have you actually got it through your heads? We’ve left behind our mums and our sisters and our brothers. We’ve left our friends and our aunties and our uncles, maybe for good.’
I stopped and looked back into forest we’d come through, though all there was to see was branches and lanterns and starflowers and flutterbyes.
‘And we’ve left the warm fires in our groups,’ I said, ‘and the old blokes playing chess, and the kids kicking footballs, and the grownups acting out the old stories like Hitler and Jesus and Angela’s Ring and The Big Row, and boats fishing out on Great Pool, and one-legged Jeffo boiling up redlantern glue, down there by Dixon Stream. We’ve left behind Family, maybe forever. Think of that. Maybe we’ll never lie in our shelters again and hear other groups getting up and coming home. Maybe we’ll never eat with our groupmates again around the fire.’
Jeff stopped. His twisted feet were all cut up with walking and, even now the dip had come and the air was cool, his face was still pouring with sweat. It was from pain as much as anything, I reckoned, but there was a bit of fever in there too.
He stood there looking round, taking it all in. Starry Swirl shone down above us, so bright bright that it gave a faint light of its own on the branches and the forest floor, over and above the light from the flowers. All round us birds were squawking and squeaking and peeping and pooting like they do when a fug ends, and flutterbyes were everywhere, and bats were coming down from the hills in big flocks, swooping and diving to catch the feast. And it was like Starry Swirl had called them all out of their hiding places, like Starry Swirl ruled over us all.
‘We’re here!’ he said. ‘This is happening. We really are here!’
‘You’re a nutter, aren’t you, Jeff?’ I said, and I swiped him across the head, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to show he was annoying me. ‘Why do you have to keep saying that all the time? Don’t you know how weird it sounds?’
He shrugged and rubbed his head.
‘I say it to remind myself,’ he said, and started to hobble forward again. ‘Otherwise I’d forget.’
On we went with our slow slow walk. Two three hours later we came to Neck of Cold Path Valley, where Cold Path Stream comes out between two spurs of the mountains into Circle Valley.
Gerry and me were supporting Jeff between us, but now Gerry released himself from Jeff’s arm and began to run ahead, leading the way to the bottom of left hand spur of Cold Path Neck.
‘John!’ he called out. ‘Hey John! John! It’s me. It’s Gerry. It’s Gerry and Tina and Jeff!’
Tom’s dick, Gerry,’ I told him, ‘come back here and help me with Jeff. I can’t carry him up there all by myself.’
20
John Redlantern
‘It really wouldn’t be hard to make wraps that could keep our bodies and arms and legs warm up there,’ I said to myself.
Everyone knew you could wrap up in woollybuck skins, even in a deep deep dip, and they’d keep you warm, but you can’t keep loose skins from slipping and coming off if you’re walking. So I just needed to find a way of fixing them on around people’s arms and legs and bodies so they held tight and didn’t slip. Skins can be cut and sewed together with wavyweed string or dried gut, after all, and old pictures on trees round Circle Clearing showed Tommy and Angela in wraps that must have been cut just like that because they fitted tightly round them.
I scratched some shapes on a bit of bark. You could cut two T-shaped bits of skin for the front and back of the body, I figured out, and then sew them together, leaving a hole at the top for the head. Or you could cut two square shapes, sew them up with holes left for arms and legs, and then make separate tubes for arms. And to keep heads warm you could make something like those masks that grownups sometimes used when they acted out animal stories to kids: a skin wrap with little holes for eyes and mouth. You could even sew it onto the neck hole of a bodywrap to make things extra warm.
The hard thing, though, was figuring out how to make wraps for feet. You couldn’t just sew skins together round feet because they’d get soaking wet in the snow. And anyway, walking on them would wear them down and pull them apart. So you’d need to make them so they’d keep the water out and, at the same time, you’d need to make them extra strong and hard on the bottom.
The water part wasn’t such a problem, I thought. When people made lids to go on the end of storage logs, they rubbed them all over with buckfat. It was smelly smelly, but if it rained, the water just ran off. They did the same with the ends of boats, smearing buckfat on the hardened skins to keep water from getting into the glue.
‘We could use woolly buckskins with the fur inside and the outside greased and greased,’ I said to myself. ‘Or even two layers of greased skins. And as well as sewing the wraps into shape we could make them stronger by wrapping greased string round and round them, like you wind gutstring round the back end of a spearhead to hold it in place on the shaft.’
But how could we make that hard bit on the bottom? I remembered the Boots that were brought out with the other Mementoes at Any Virsries. Everyone agreed that the tops of them looked like they were made out of some sort of skin (though it wasn’t like buckskin at all) but on the bottom they had a thick flat layer of plastic to make them stronger to walk on. I thought about cutting a shape from bark and fixing it on, but I reckoned bark would crack after a while, or crumble when it got wet and soft from the snow. Then I thought about how old Jeffo made the ends of boats, by covering smooth stonebuck skins with glue made from redlantern sap, and sticking them together in layers, before putting a layer of grease on the outside. When they dried they were hard hard, so you could rap your knuckles on them, just the same as you could rap your knuckles on the log part of the boat.
‘Perhaps we could make the footwrap and grease it all over on the top,’ I muttered, ‘but on the bottom stick on layers and layers of buckskin and redlantern glue until it’s as hard hard as the ends of one of Jeffo’s boats, and then cover the glue with more grease.’
I thought and thought about this. I thought so hard about it that really and truly I forgot all about where I was, or what had happened, or the fact that I was alone. All I cared about was figuring out how to make a hard bottom on a footwrap.
In my mind I felt the skin ends of a log boat. They were hard hard, but after a time they did come off, and once they were off they were too stiff to be stretched over the end and glued on again, so they just got thrown away. I remembered playing with one of those thrown-away boat ends when I was a little kid. It was hard but it was brittle too: not hard and brittle in the way that blackglass was, because you could bend it a little bit, but if you bent it too far it would snap.
‘Harry’s dick,’ I muttered. ‘That’s no good.’
You didn’t want something brittle on the bottom of someone’s foot, did you? I walked up and down a bit, watching my feet. I could see that my feet bent and moved as I walked to fit the ground. It would be uncomfortable walking on something that didn’t bend like that, and anyway a thing that didn’t bend would surely snap after a while. I remembered how the hard bit at the bottom of the Boots was hard and bendy, which was exactly what was needed. But the hard bit of Boots was made of plastic, which came from under the ground on Earth. What could I use that would be like that?
I wondered about using buckfoot glue instead of redlantern sap, because buckfoot glue isn’t quite so brittle, which i
s why they used it on the ends of the best spears to hold the gutstring bindings in place: it didn’t crack away from the blackglass in the way that redlantern glue would do, if the spear hit something hard like a tree. But buckfoot glue isn’t so easy to get, because you have to melt a lot of hard bucks’ toes to get even a little bit of glue, whereas to get redlantern sap all you needed to do was look for dribbles of dried sap down the sides of trees, or hack a little hole in the side of a tree and let it run out. (Tom’s neck, I realized, whatever kind of glue I used, I’d need to make a pit to melt it in, like the one that Jeffo had down by Dixon Stream.) Yes, and even buckfoot glue was a bit brittle, and even good spears did fall apart.
I got up and paced around my little camp. I was thinking thinking. The fug had lifted and there was a dip straight after it. Sky over Circle Valley was opening up to Starry Swirl, birds were cheeping and screeching, bats were pouring down the hillside in flocks, but I hardly noticed the change coming on at all, just threw a woollybuck wrap over my shoulders to keep warm without really thinking about it. I’d got a set of chess pieces that Redlantern had given me – the dark pieces were blackglass and the white made of dry spiketree wood – and I’d marked out a board for myself on the dirt. I squatted down and played against myself for a few moves, then jumped up again and began to pace around, thinking thinking.
I thought about those scraps of buckskin that lay around when people had been cutting out shapes, and how after a while they became dry and hard, and I remembered how you could make them soft and bendy again by wetting them, or by rubbing grease into them. I wondered if you could mix grease with glue to make something that was hard and bendy like the plastic at the bottom of the Boots.
‘I need a glue pit. I need a load of redlantern sap. I need some buckfeet. I need some more skins. I need some grease.’
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