Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Tommy! Tommy!’ I shouted into John’s face. ‘I’ve lost it! I’ve lost my ring!’

  John screwed up his face. He really didn’t want to play. This was just timewasting to him, timewasting and unnecessary complication, and anyway he didn’t like the ring to be out of his hands.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll turn up,’ he said, without even trying to pretend to be Tommy.

  ‘What do you mean, you bloody idiot? What do you mean it’ll turn up, you useless lump? Help me look for it! Get it back for me. I’m not going to go on without it.’

  I glared round at Harry and Suzie and Lucy and Clare and Candy.

  ‘What are you idiots staring at? Michael’s names! Find the bloody ring for me, can’t you? Do something useful for once in your whole life!’

  So they began to look, some getting on their knees, some walking about. Clare and Candy began to cry. Harry was shaking all over and running about like he really did think it was lost.

  ‘I’ll find it for you, Gela, I’ll find it,’ he bellowed. ‘I’ll find it!’

  ‘Stop that racket, you snivelling kids,’ I yelled at them, ‘shut it now. I never wanted you, you know. I never wanted to be with him. I never wanted to touch him, never mind slip with him and have his kids . . . It’s my mum and dad and my friends on Earth I love, not any of you, not you stupid lot in this stupid dark dark Eden. And that ring, that ring was the only . . .’

  ‘Mum, please,’ went Clare, and she was really crying now.

  ‘Piss off, Clare. I can’t stand the sight of you. Do you know that? I can’t stand the sight of any of you . . .’

  Whew! I really let rip, I can tell you. I screamed and yelled till my face was red and the tears were pouring down, and I was sweating and shaking all over. All five of my so-called kids were crying – even though one of them was actually my big brother – and a lot of the people watching were crying too. And the babies were yelling, and the bucks were going eeeek! eeeek! eeeek! in their cave. Even John looked scared.

  It must have been scary scary that first time for those five kids, all those wombs and wombs ago, watching their mum fall apart like that and turn on them, when she and Tommy were all they had in the world. It must have been scary scary. Otherwise that story would never have kept going for so long, would it? Not when so many other things have been forgotten and lost, spreading out and out over the generations like the ripples from a stone chucked into a pool, getting smaller and fading away. And the weird weird thing about this story of Angela’s Ring was that it didn’t even have a point to it, no happy ending, no lesson to be learnt. It was like one person’s cry of pain, echoing out on and on and on through the generations, even after that person was long long dead.

  So why did we keep doing it? I’d wondered that sometimes, but now I found out. It was because doing it felt great!

  ‘As for you, Tommy,’ I said, turning on John. ‘As for you, you selfish arrogant bastard. You took me from my mum and dad, you took me from my friends, you took me from my lovely Earth, without letting me in on your plans, without giving me a choice, without thinking about my feelings. And now you can’t even find my ring. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you and I always always will.’

  But John just knelt down, picked up the ring and held it out to me.

  ‘Here it is, Gela, I’ve found it. I’ve found your ring for you after all this time.’

  That threw me, I must admit. I wasn’t expecting that move at all.

  ‘What do you mean? You never found the ring, Tommy. You never did anything that useful in your whole life.’

  ‘No,’ said John. ‘I’m not Tommy. I’m John. I’m John Redlantern. I’m your great-great-grandson and these are your great-great-grandchildren, trying to make our home in dark Eden, just like you did. I’ve found your ring, Gela. I’ve ended that story. You don’t need to tell that story any more.’

  ‘Give it back then. Give it back to me now.’

  But he had his answer to that as well.

  ‘No, Gela. You’re dead now. You’re dead and buried under a pile of stones, remember? The ring’s no good to you any more, is it? But I’ll look after it. We’ll look after it. We’ll take it with us over Dark and right to the other side, just where you want us to go.’

  And he put the ring back in the pocket in his wrap and came and put his arms round me. Tom’s dick and Harry’s, you’d got to hand it to him! He knew how to stay in control.

  My eyes were full of tears and I didn’t know if they were my tears really or Angela’s, just like I didn’t know if I felt comfort in his arms in spite of everything, or whether I hated him more than ever.

  And then the story was over, and the decision was made and we were all busying about getting things ready to go up Cold Path into Dark and leave this place for good.

  30

  John Redlantern

  People tried to have things every which way, even smart honest people like Tina. They wanted the good bits and then they complained about the bad bits that had to go with the good bits. Well, the good bit about me was that I could make things happen, and that I stuck to a thing and didn’t ever give up or let go. That was the good thing that people got from me, along with all those other things people didn’t like.

  When we had that meeting, I’d just done for a man. I’d killed a man I’d seen around Family ever since I was a little kid. I didn’t feel guilty about it exactly because I knew he’d happily have done the same to me, and to Tina and probably to the others too. But, Gela’s eyes, I was shaken shaken by it. All that meeting it was running through my mind over and over, my spear sticking out of Dixon’s back, my spear stabbing back again into his belly, the squelch of it going in, the hiss of air, the blood bubbling out of his mouth. I hadn’t stopped to look at him longer than the time it took to pull my spear out of him, and for him to roll over to look up at me, and for me to shove the spear in again to finish him off – his two friends were still running from us, and Gerry and Harry might have needed my help – but those couple of seconds were so fixed in my mind that it was like they kept happening – really happening – over and over again.

  So I had that in my head, and I had all the practical things to remember, and at the same time I somehow had to make people believe in me, so that they’d accept being organized and they’d stay that way, and we’d have a chance of surviving. I had all that to think about – and there’s only so much a person can hold onto at one time – and then bloody Tina drops her little game with the Ring story on me, and – Tom’s dick! – I had to think about how to deal with that as well.

  She’d say that was my fault for keeping the ring a secret, but I did that for a reason. I did it because I always knew from the beginning that when I showed it to people, it would give me power over them, but I also knew that the power wouldn’t last. So I saved it up for the moment when that power was most needed, not just by me but by all of us. It was like when the leopard came at me. I knew I only had one shot at it, so I waited till the best moment and didn’t just chuck my spear at it the first chance I got. And I got that right. I got it exactly right, whatever Tina thinks. I took out the ring just when we really needed it most – and it worked!

  A couple of hours after I’d taken the ring back from Tina we were starting up Cold Path. There were twenty-one of us, plus two babies. The larger of the two bucks, Def, was in front with Jeff riding on it. After that came me and Tina, and then all the others, one by one, with the other buck, Whitehorse, at the end. Every one of us was covered up, except for our mouths and eyes, with buckskin wraps, so we didn’t really look like people, more like a herd of weird two-legged bucks. Every one of us had the greased buckskin footwraps that I’d been working and working on even before anyone came from Family to join me, with hard layers of skin and greasy glue on the bottom. Apart from Jeff on his buck, the two girls with babies (Clare and Janny) and the three girls carrying babies inside their wombs (Suzie, Gela and Julie), all of us were carrying things on our backs: rolls of rope, spare f
ootwraps, bags of blackglass, bundles of buckskin, things that I’d thought about and organized over the past ten periods. And we were taking it in turns to carry some big flat pieces of bark, smoothed and greased, which I called snow-boats, each one loaded with useful stuff like meat and skins and spare wraps, except for one, which was holding a pile of embers on a big flat stone. They were hard work to carry over dry ground, but once we were up on snow they’d slide easy easy over the surface, and it would only take one person to pull them along. They were my idea too.

  ‘None of this would have happened but for you, would it?’ Tina said to me, looking back at all this.

  ‘No,’ I said crossly. ‘It bloody wouldn’t. I brought you all to Cold Path Valley. I sorted out the agreement with Caroline so as to give us time. I worked out how to make the wraps to cover our bodies. I had the idea of the snow-boats and organized people to cut the bark and make the ropes to pull them. I went up Snowy Dark over and over again to work out how to live up there and what we’d need, even when you moaned at me for going away by myself all the time. And you all chose to come with me because you all know quite well that you wouldn’t have made this happen without me. None of you would, not even you, Tina, and certainly not your precious Dix down there. So how come I get to be Tommy in the story and you get to be Gela? I’m the Gela here. I’m the one holding it all together.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘It was how I felt, that’s all. It needed to come out somehow or I would’ve burst. Most people are like that, John. They just have to let things out sometimes, whether it’s right or wrong. Not many people can keep it all secret inside like you do. And, Gela’s eyes, it would be lonely lonely if we did.’

  We came to the place where all that time ago we’d come with Old Roger and seen those shining woollybucks, so high up in Dark that I’d thought at first they were a sky-boat from Earth. Then we went past it, and that was the end of being in Cold Path Valley and in Circle Valley where we were born. And for one moment I had the thought that perhaps I’d made a terrible mistake, perhaps we really did need to stay by Circle of Stones, perhaps Earth would come down from sky and Family would tell them that we’d all disappeared on Snowy Dark, and they’d return to Earth without us. But I pushed that thought out of my mind. There’s got to be a point where you choose your path and stick to it no matter what.

  Walking on snow now, and hoping that our footwraps would stay dry and not fall apart, we followed Cold Path Stream until we came to the snowslug that the stream flows out of (not a big big snowslug like Dixon Snowslug over at Blue Mountains, which comes right down into the top of forest, but big enough, the height of four men or more). Then we tied ourselves together with ropes, and got our spears ready, pointed end down, to hold us steady, and we scrambled up the slippery buck path that led along one side of the snowslug.

  Harry tried to run up it and slipped. People laughed at him, of course, because they badly needed a laugh, but he hated hated being laughed at.

  ‘I’m stopping here, then,’ he said. ‘You go on if you bloody want. Harry’s not going with you lot if you’re just going to laugh at him.’

  He began to cry. He was the oldest one of us, the only one of us you could really say was a grownup, but he cried like a little kid. It was embarrassing and frustrating but people should have made more allowances. They should have remembered that he’d done for someone too that waking, he’d killed John Blueside. And if I had a job getting all that through my head, it must have been much worse for Harry. He had a job getting anything through his head at all.

  Tina went back to calm him down and coax him up the path and Gerry came up to walk beside me. He wanted to talk about the killings too. Poor kid, he’d really had the worst of it out of the three of us. I didn’t know Dixon Blueside personally and Harry didn’t know John Blueside hardly at all. But Gerry had done for a boy from his own group who he’d grown up with since he was a baby. Now he kept going over and over it, and I had to keep telling him over and over that we had no choice and that they’d have gone ahead and killed Jeff if we hadn’t got to them in time. They would have killed Jeff too, they really would, and they’d have done a cruel thing to Tina that didn’t even have a name.

  ‘And if they’d got away with that,’ I kept telling Gerry, ‘then it would have been the rest of us who’d have been next, one by one, or all together. There were only twenty-one of us at Valley Neck, remember, and five hundred-plus in Old Family.’

  ‘Yes, but I used to play with Met,’ Gerry would say. ‘He once swapped me a bit of blackglass he found for a big lump of stumpcandy.’

  Or: ‘We got that slinker with him once, remember? That slinker you let him kill, remember? That time Jeff said he wondered what it felt like to be a slinker. We were friends with Met then, weren’t we? We were friends in the same group.’

  ‘Yes, Gerry,’ I’d say, ‘but he broke our friendship when he killed Brownhorse and did Jeff over, and stood and laughed while Dixon tried to slip Tina there in forest.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Gerry would say. ‘It was him that broke the friendship.’

  And he’d think about it for a bit, looking relieved, and then suddenly he’d frown and come up with something else.

  ‘He was with us that first time we came up here with Old Roger, remember? He was our friend back then.’

  And we’d have to go round the whole thing again.

  Meanwhile the lights of forest disappeared behind us and we were truly up in Dark. All we could see was what was lit up by the headlantern of the buckhorse Def, up ahead of us with Jeff riding on its back. Rocks, snow, ice loomed up out of the blackness in the area close around us, and then disappeared again back into blackness again at the other end of the line, behind the second buck, Whitehorse.

  Jeff had named his buck Def after the sky-boat Defiant that brought Angela and Tommy and the Three Companions from Earth and actually it was a good choice of name. When I saw that group of woollybucks up on Dark all that time ago, I thought for moment I was seeing a sky-boat up there, and Def and Whitehorse were pretty much like sky-boats for us. They might not be taking us across Starry Swirl but they were taking us across Dark and we couldn’t have done it without them. I had thought before of maybe finding some way of lighting our way with lights made of hollow branches or torches made of dry wavyweed dipped in grease, like people sometimes used back in Family when they wanted a bit of extra light. But the bucks were doing much more for us than just lighting our way. They knew the way. It was woollybucks that made Cold Path – it was them that made it a path at all – and now they found a new path for us, even when it was hidden by snow.

  And I had to admit it: that part of the plan wasn’t down to me at all, it was down to Jeff, that weird little clawfoot kid riding out in front, a young boy whose new hairs had hardly begun to grow.

  We walked for the length of a whole waking and then for another waking straight after that, because there was nowhere to sleep, and the only way of not freezing was to keep on going. Once in a while we did have to stop to get out some smoked meat or seedcakes to eat, or for Janny or Clare to give their babies a feed, or to fix new footwraps for someone whose own footwraps had got wet or fallen apart. (I didn’t want anyone getting the black burn up here like old one-legged Jeffo had done.) But whenever we stopped, everyone started getting cold and scared, and Tina and me had to go up and down the line to nip off any talk about us being lost, or us dying, or us never getting anywhere. It was specially bad around Mehmet Batwing and Angie and Julie and Candy Blueside, who all walked together, and all fell silent whenever me or Tina came near.

  ‘So where are we then, John?’ Mehmet finally asked me.

  ‘We’re following the buck path, Mehmet. You know that. That’s what we all agreed to do, remember? Remember how I gave you a choice and you chose this?’

  ‘Yeah, but where’s it leading us? We’re just going up and up all the time.’

  That was true. We were going up and it got colder the higher we we
nt. And there was some weird thing too about the air because you had to work harder and harder to get enough of it. I couldn’t help thinking about some of the old stories about Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions, and how they said there was no air at all up in Starry Swirl, and that air was like water, it stayed near the ground. Maybe the air sat in Circle Valley like water in a giant pool, and the buck Def was leading us up to a place where the air stopped and we wouldn’t be able to breathe?

  But then I thought that bucks themselves must need air. You could hear them breathing, you could see the steam around their mouths the same as you could see the steam around ours.

  ‘We’re going up, yes,’ I said to Mehmet, ‘but we are going up between two mountains, not over the top.’

  ‘How do you figure that out?’

  ‘Well, you can see the slope of the mountain on our left, can’t you? You can see it sloping up in the lanternlight. And you can hear the mountain on the right.’

  I lifted the front of my headwrap to give him a demonstration.

  ‘Mehmet!’ I yelled.

  ‘Mehmet!’ came back an echo from high high above us and to the right. It was far far higher than I’d imagined it would be, my own voice bouncing down from a rock somewhere up there in total darkness that quite probably no human being and no living thing would ever ever reach.

  And then there were some fainter echoes, and the sound of stones rattling down bare rock.

  ‘See what I mean?’ I said, pulling the front of my wrap down again, my beard already full of ice.

  ‘Well, what a lot you know about Snowy Dark,’ Mehmet said bitterly.

  I couldn’t win with him. If I said something wrong, that proved I was a fool. If I said something right, that meant I was trying to be clever.

  Then Suzie Fishcreek cried out that she felt funny and she thought her baby was on the way. It wasn’t true luckily, but we had to give her some attention and calm her down before we could get going again, and meanwhile everyone got colder and wearier and more scared, and everyone looked round for someone to blame for their feeling like this, and I guess pretty well all of them chose me.