Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  That was ten twenty wakings’ work for me right there, just getting all that stuff together.

  ‘I’ll dig a pit first,’ I decided. ‘Make a deep pit, line it with clay, and dig a fire trench round it in a circle.’

  Then I thought maybe I should look for another buck first. That way I’d get skins, grease, feet and something to eat.

  It suddenly struck me that there was a dip going on, and that Starry Swirl was shining down from most of sky. I’d been so busy thinking that I hadn’t noticed before that moment that the air was growing colder.

  ‘Yeah, another buck,’ I went on, ‘that makes sense. There’ll be woollybucks coming down now in the dip. I’ll go down into Cold Path Valley and look for them.’

  I went to get my spears, the good spear that Redlantern group had given me, and a spare. It was strange. Now I’d paused from all that thinking thinking, I remembered something else that I hadn’t noticed at the time. It was a sound I’d heard when I was down in forest getting in some starflowers: a drum and horns that started loud and faded, the sound of a funeral. And then I remembered hearing the hollowbranch horns two three other times too: two short blasts and a long. Family had been calling back wanderers. I’d let it all go past me. I’d shrugged it off. I’d not even wondered who it was that had died, or who was being called back and why.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I wondered. ‘Why didn’t I notice? Why didn’t it worry me?’

  And yet it still didn’t seem to worry me. I just felt restless restless, pacing up and down, slapping the shaft of my spear against my hand, trying to think what else I should look for while I was out hunting bucks, down in forest in Cold Path Valley. No, I didn’t feel worried, but I wasn’t at peace either. There was no peace in me at all.

  ‘Some clay,’ I muttered. ‘Some soft clay for the glue pit. And maybe some . . .’

  But then I heard a voice call my name.

  ‘John! Hey John! John! It’s me.’

  It was Gerry, I could tell that pretty much straight away, and it was weird weird, because at first I wasn’t pleased.

  Oh Harry’s dick, not Gerry, that was my first thought. I’m way too busy to bother with him.

  ‘Hey John! It’s Gerry and Tina and Jeff!’

  I had shut all my feelings away inside me these last wakings, I suppose, shut them down so they didn’t get in the way. But now a little glimmer stirred inside me of being pleased and grateful. I was about to go down and meet them but then I changed my mind.

  ‘No,’ I muttered, ‘no. That’s not the right way to start things off.’

  It needed to be them coming to me, not me going to them. I didn’t want to have to owe them anything, not when I had so many plans.

  I cupped my hands round my mouth and called down to them.

  ‘Hi there, I’m just up here by the caves.’

  I put my spears back in their place, and squatted down to wait for them in front of my game of chess.

  21

  Tina Spiketree

  John had made himself his own little camp up the slope of that rocky spur to left of Cold Path Neck. He’d got a couple of spears neatly propped up beside the mouth of a cave, one of them a real blackglass hunting spear that Redlantern had given him, plus wraps and skins and bags piled up neatly inside, and four stonebuck legs hanging on strings. He’d got a little fire going and had marked out a chessboard on the ground and – Gela’s tits! – when we got up to him he was calmly sitting there, playing chess against himself.

  Tom’s dick, I thought, what a poser. He’d been alone all those wakings and as far as he’d known, he was going to stay that way. Surely anyone would feel relieved to have friendly visitors in that situation? And anyone else would have come to meet us. Anyone else, for that matter, would have thought that maybe we’d need a hand with Jeff. But no, not John. He’d thought it all out carefully and he’d chosen to wait and be found there like that, playing chess by himself as if he was resting after a good waking’s work.

  Jeff stopped where he was, taking this all in, but Gerry disentangled himself from his little brother and went running straight up to John, giving him a big hug and kisses with tears running down his face. As for me, though I released myself from Jeff as well, I hung back, waiting for John, waiting to be given some attention. But it didn’t come. Considering all that we’d given up to be here with him, all that we’d quite possibly lost, John was so distant distant that it was just weird.

  ‘I thought I heard a funeral a couple of wakings ago,’ were his first words. ‘Is that right? Who was it that died,?’

  Gerry looked round at me to see if I was going to answer, but I gave a little shrug to let him know that he should do it. John might want to make me do all the hard work, but I wasn’t about to let Gerry do the same thing.

  ‘It was old Stoop,’ said Gerry. ‘Old Stoop finally bought it. But . . .’ He looked back round at me like I had the power to take the sting out of the news somehow. ‘But it wasn’t just Stoop, John, it was . . . well, it was Bella too.’

  At once John looked away from all three of us, out over Circle Valley. He kept his face still still, but his whole body tensed up tight.

  ‘Bella? You don’t mean our Bella? Not Bella Redlantern?’

  ‘Yes, ours,’ Gerry said, looking round at me yet again, hoping I’d help him out.

  ‘Did for herself, John,’ I said. ‘Hanged herself from a tree like Tommy did.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  He squatted down again by his chessboard and looked at the little carved pieces for a long time like he was considering his next move.

  ‘It wouldn’t have happened if I’d let her come with me, would it?’ he said after a time.

  ‘No, John,’ said Gerry, ‘but . . .’

  ‘It wouldn’t have happened if I’d not spoken out or destroyed Circle,’ he said. ‘She’d still be group leader then, wouldn’t she? Still leader, still best leader of the bunch.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have happened either, John,’ I said, ‘if she’d kept her hands off you. She might have been a good leader but no other leader in whole Family would ask a boy to slip with her that she’d helped to raise. Not even the worst of them.’

  ‘I didn’t slip with her,’ John began. ‘She just . . .’

  But then he broke off.

  ‘They write something on a stone for her?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘Yes. It said: “Bella Redlantern: group leader”,’ Gerry told him.

  John nodded and swept his hand over his chessboard, ending the game he’d been playing against himself.

  ‘You three hungry? I did for a little stonebuck the other waking, and I’ve still got a couple of legs. I’ll get this fire going a bit and you can eat.’

  So we ate, and then Gerry and Jeff went off to sleep in a cave about twenty yards off and John and I went into the cave where he’d been sleeping and kept his things. The walls and ceiling of all of these caves were covered in rocklanterns that glowed red, blue, green and yellow, so it was bright bright in there, brighter than outside in forest, and in all that light I saw his face in a different kind of way. I’d been intending to have a go at him for the way he treated me, but he looked so weary weary, and so worn down and wretched that I just didn’t have the heart for anything like that, though most probably I looked nearly as weary and worn down as he did.

  He didn’t seem to have the same problem with having a go at me, though.

  ‘You shouldn’t have brought Jeff,’ he said. ‘How can we cross Dark with him?’

  ‘What do you mean I shouldn’t have brought Jeff? According to whose plan? According to what agreement?’

  He looked up at me. He passed his hands over his face. I could see that we could go on and on with this or we could let it go, and I didn’t have the energy to go on and on. So, as a way of stopping things, I took his hand. Immediately he pulled me up against him and we were kissing and running our hands over each other, and ripping off each other’s bitswraps and pulling eac
h other down onto the sleeping skins he’d got down there on the sandy floor. And then we were sticking our tongues and things into each other, and licking each other, and he was pushing into me like he’d die if he didn’t get in there quick enough, and I was pulling him up inside like he was still taking far too long. And we rolled over each other and pulled each other this way and that way into every possible angle and every possible way of tangling our bodies together we could think of. And it was sort of a way of getting close, but at the same time it was a way of keeping apart and not having to be close at all. And it was sort of a way of feeling we were alive and in the world, and at the same time a way of shutting the world away completely.

  I didn’t want babies and he didn’t want them either, but he needed so badly to have someone he could be inside and not be alone, and I needed so badly to have someone fill up my emptiness, that we forgot all about that. He came inside me two times, the first time with a soft little groan and the second time with a big loud lonely cry, like a cry of pain. Pretty soon after that he was fast fast asleep. I guessed that he hadn’t slept much since he was chucked out of Family, however calm calm he’d pretended to be when we arrived, however cool cool.

  Come to that I hadn’t slept much either, but I still couldn’t sleep now. I lay there for a long time looking up at the little shiny lumps of squishy rocklanterns on the roof of the cave with the little cave flutterbyes bumping and flapping around them, and I listened to John breathing and making little whimpering sounds in his sleep, and I wondered what would happen next.

  Gela’s eyes, I thought. Family might have been bad – it was too small, it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe – but look at me now! I’d got myself into a world with just three other people in it, a world consisting of me and three boys: one of them cold and distant, one with no will of his own, and one who was just weird. You try to get away from something bad, and things just get worse and worse.

  Well, they do get worse if you don’t think straight, I told myself. Look what you’ve bloody done. As if there wasn’t enough trouble to deal with already, you’ve come over here to the one person that’s made an enemy of everyone, and caused all the trouble in the first place. And he’ll cause more and more, you know he will, because he can’t leave a thing alone, he can’t bear anything that hasn’t got his personal mark on it.

  And then I thought of cruel cruel David back in Family, and cold Caroline, who refused even to consider whether John had a point, and bloody old stupid bossy Liz Spiketree and the creepy Secret Ree, and I thought, I hate this whole world. I hate Eden, this miserable dark place we’re all trapped in for bloody ever. We shouldn’t be here, that’s the real problem: it wasn’t the world we were made for. We were meant to live in light.’

  Pretty soon John started to snore and I couldn’t stand it in that lousy cave for a minute more.

  There was more air outside, but of course not the bright light of Earth. It was dark like Eden always is, darker even than in the cave: dark except for the lanterns and the stars. In fact, I thought, it was still a cave really out there, still a cave, only with stars instead of rocklanterns. That was what Eden was like. We were trapped inside a dark little cave with no way out of it. And even though I’d never known anything else, and probably never would do, I longed and longed for that different world that was full of light. I don’t mean just longed for it in a sad wistful way. I longed for it like a blind person must long to see. I longed for it like you’d long for air if you couldn’t breathe. I had to stop myself from screaming out.

  ‘What’s keeping you, Earth?’ I muttered. ‘When are you going to bloody come for us?’

  ‘Hello Tina, are you alright?’

  Weird Jeff was out there, sitting on a rock. He’d been looking out over forest of Cold Path Valley with the dark shadows of mountains all around it. A couple of starbirds were calling out to each other across it. Hoom! Hoom! Hoom! came from some way off and then, quite near, Aaaah! Aaaah! Aaaah! Two three monkeys were chasing through the trees below us, making their funny clicking noises, and flashing their bright blotchy skins.

  ‘Why are you up?’ I asked him, and it came out almost like I thought he’d done something wrong.

  He looked at me with his big round eyes.

  ‘My feet hurt,’ he said. ‘They hurt too much for me to sleep.’

  He wasn’t crying or anything – that wasn’t what Jeff was like – but he lifted up one of his twisted old feet to show me. It was all bloody and raw.

  ‘Michael’s names! That must hurt.’

  I looked around to find some water. Streams in the hills could be really cold because they came fresh down from Snowy Dark, but I found a small pool just a bit below the caves that was warmed by hot spiketree roots. Water came into one side of it cold cold from Dark, and trickled out the other side warm warm, as it made its way down to Cold Path Stream. I led Jeff down there and helped him bathe and get all the dirt off. Then I mashed up some starflowers, which they say help a bit with raw wounds like that, and smeared the mixture onto his twisted old clawfeet.

  I’m not someone who likes to look after people all that much. I never played mummies when I was a kid. I never wanted to help look after the littles back in group like some young girls do. I never looked forward to the time when I’d have kids of my own. But it felt good to have something to do. And after I had dried his feet off as best I could, I put my arm round him and we lay down by the pool there and pretty soon, what with the trickling trickling water and everything, we both went off to sleep.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I was really scared for a moment. Someone was standing over us with a spear.

  Then I saw it was John.

  ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  Jeff was still asleep but I released my arm from around him, rubbed it a bit because it had gone numb, and sat up. I don’t know how long we’d been there, but the dip had passed and sky was grey-black again like it normally was, with Starry Swirl hidden away again until the next dip. I didn’t want to wake up. I’d been having that lovely dream that everyone has, the dream about Earth, where there isn’t darkness behind everything but only light, light, light.

  ‘I don’t want women slipping with young boys in my new family.’

  What? Gela’s eyes, there were so many different things wrong with that single statement that it was hard to know where to start!

  ‘I’m not slipping with him, you idiot. He’s a little kid, for Gela’s sake! His feet were hurting, I came down here with him to help him wash them, and we fell asleep . . . And another thing, I’m a kid too. I’m a newhair, like you are, not a woman. And another thing, what do you mean your new family? A new family? Yours?’

  He opened his mouth to answer but I hadn’t finished.

  ‘Yes, and what business is it of yours who I slip with anyway? You didn’t ask me when you went with Martha London or with . . .’

  I was going to say Bella, but I stopped in time.

  ‘We should have new rules,’ he said. ‘New family rules about who slips with who. It was different on Earth. It hasn’t always been like how it is now in Family.’

  ‘We can talk about it,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  ‘And as to building up a new family,’ he said, ‘well, we’ve got to, haven’t we? We can’t go back to the old one.’

  He relaxed a bit and squatted down.

  ‘You shouldn’t sleep out here like this. There were three leopards near here only a couple of wakings past.’

  ‘Yeah. We heard them back in Family. David said they’d probably done for you.’

  ‘He should be so lucky.’

  He examined the tip of his blackglass spear the way grownup hunters do, checking to see that the edge was still good.

  ‘We need to build up a new family and we need to find out how to get across Snowy Dark and find a new place for ourselves,’ he said.

  I thought about this.

  ‘Well, we can probably find a few more kids who
’ll come and join us. We could go back through forest, meet up with newhairs when they’re out alone, see if we can talk them into coming over.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. There’ll be enough of them wanting to, I’m sure. Trouble is, the more that come over, the sooner we’re going to make Council so angry that they’ll want to stamp us out.’

  ‘How could they, though? In the end, how could they?’

  ‘They could kill us.’

  ‘Kill? I know people would like to kill us, but no one’s ever done for another person, have they, never even once on Eden.’

  ‘Things are different now,’ said John, the one who’d made things different whether we wanted him to or not. ‘Everything’s different and always will be from now on.’

  Back up at the caves Gerry had woken up.

  ‘Jeff?’ he called out. ‘Tina? John?’

  ‘Down here!’ John called back.

  He turned back to me.

  ‘I’ve started to think about how to cross Dark,’ he told me. ‘We need to begin building up a big supply of skins, and buckfeet. We won’t keep them all here, though. We’ll hide them in different places. People are going to come over here from Family sooner or later looking for us, and we don’t want them taking all our stuff. We’ll need a lot of skins and we’ll need to find ways of covering ourselves like they did on Earth, so as to keep warm. It can’t be that hard. The hardest bit is covering up our feet in a way that will keep out the snow. I’ve been thinking about how to make footwraps, with buckgrease to keep out the water and something hard on the bottom to stop them wearing through.’

  He broke off, looking down at Jeff.

  ‘He won’t be able to manage it, though, will he? I wish you hadn’t brought him. It won’t work with clawfeet.’

  Jeff opened his big innocent eyes.

  ‘What about a horse?’ he said.

  He must have been awake for a little while.

  John snorted.

  ‘Horse? What are you talking about?’