‘Bloody Mehmet Batwing,’ I said, taking my spear and jumping up. ‘That treacherous little slinker.’
In my mind I saw that giant bat on the top of the tree, with the slinker creeping up towards it through the steam.
‘I’ll go and do for him now,’ I said. ‘I’ll kill him before he can do any more harm.’
‘That won’t work,’ Jeff said. ‘Just killing another person won’t work.’
Well, no, I had to admit it wouldn’t. Not unless I killed everyone here: the two Fishcreek guys and Johnny and Dave and Angie and Julie and all their kids. Otherwise there’d still be someone left to tell Family that we’d been here and that our camp wasn’t so far away, somewhere just over the ridge.
‘Not all of Family is your enemy,’ Jeff reminded me. ‘And not all of these people here are either, not any more. But if you killed again you’d make more enemies, wouldn’t you? You’d make it easier and easier for everyone to see you as nothing but a killer, like a leopard that needs to be hunted down. You were the first one in Eden to kill a human being, after all.’
Gerry just sat on his sleeping skin looking up at us. This was outside of his reach. This was difficult grownup stuff between me and his little brother.
‘Gela’s eyes,’ I muttered, after I’d thought about it for a bit. ‘I’ve got it all wrong, haven’t I? Things weren’t perfect before I chucked those stones into the stream, but look at it now! I’ve taken Eden and broken it up into pieces.’
There are lots of different stories branching away all the time from every single thing that happens. As soon as a moment has gone, different versions of it start to be remembered and told about. And some of them carry on, and some die out, and you can’t know in advance which version will last and which won’t. It had never occurred to me before that the story of John Redlantern might end up as the story of a famous killer, the first one in Eden ever to do for another human being. But now that story suddenly took shape in my mind.
I could see it being acted out in the future. John the Leopard-Man; John who killed a leopard and ate its heart and somehow the heart crept into him and became his own; John who sang sweetly and treacherously like a leopard does, and promised wonderful things, and made people leave everything and walk towards him, but really all he did was to lead them to their deaths. Death followed after him. It spread out from him across the world like ripples across a pool, like evil ripples. But then at last brave David Redlantern hunted him down, just like you’d hunt down a leopard that had taken to prowling around outside the fence and watching the kids playing inside. Brave ugly David hunted him down with his Guards, and then the world was safe again and Family was whole once more.
‘No, John, you didn’t break it, you opened it up,’ Jeff said. ‘That was why we followed you. It needed to be opened up. It needed to happen.’
He looked at me with his big deep eyes, putting his hands on my shoulders. I’ll tell you, I was pretty near to crying.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘that’s not to say that you don’t sometimes make mistakes.’
I nodded.
‘We’d better go then,’ I said. ‘Let’s just get straight on these bucks and go back over Dark.’
Gerry looked at his brother, his eyes big and as gentle as Jeff’s but without the depth, waiting to hear Jeff’s judgement. Jeff shook his head.
‘That won’t work, though, will it, John? That’ll tell Mehmet we know something. It will tell him that someone here has told us something that worried us enough to make us leave in a hurry. If we don’t want that, we should stay till everyone wakes. We should let them have the widebuck skins and the fruit we’ve brought for them, trade them for some of the blackglass they get from Family. And then we should tell them we’ll come up and see them again soon soon, and hug and kiss them, and say goodbye, and go.’
Gerry looked at me.
I laughed.
‘I didn’t know you were capable of being so devious, Jeff.’
To my surprise, Jeff hung his head. He really hated lies and tricks.
‘I know. But I don’t think we have a choice.’
We looked out at the strange tall trees, humming and shining, with the bats and flutterbyes diving and swooping among their high branches.
‘We are here,’ Jeff muttered, as if to remind himself of a truth that stayed true no matter how much we lied and tricked each other. ‘We really are here.’
I touched Gela’s ring on my little finger, felt its hardness, turned it round a bit. We were brothers and sisters really, all of us, that was the weird part. Me, Mehmet, David Redlantern: every one of us in Eden came from the same mother and the same father.
So when Mehmet and the others began to stir and poke up their fire and get things ready for another waking, we went down to them, pretending that nothing had changed.
‘We need to get back to our own people,’ I told Mehmet. ‘It took us a long long time to get here, and they might think a snow leopard has got us if we don’t show our faces soon. But maybe you’d like to trade with us a bit before we go? We’ve got these skins, look, like woollybuck skins but smooth. And fruit, like you get down in Circle Valley. What can you trade us for this lot?’
And then we were off again, up over Dark, till we came to the ridge looking out over the Wide Forest.
‘Look at that!’ I said. ‘Even from here you can see the smoke of our fire down there. They could easily find us.’
The air was still, and the smoke went straight up like a tree trunk, lit up clear and white by the lanternlight of Wide Forest.
‘Yes, and look at that!’ said Jeff, pointing back.
I looked round. On the snowy slope behind us were three patches of light from the headlanterns of three woollybucks. It was Mehmet and a couple of the others. They’d been behind us all the way, following to see which way we’d go. They’d only need to come as far as this ridge we were on now to see Wide Forest below them, and the smoke rising up from our fire, all lit up by the firelight and by the lanterns all around it. And then Mehmet would know where we were living and he’d know we’d been lying when we said our camp was far away.
44
Tina Spiketree
When he came back down from Tall Tree Valley John was full full of himself, like he hadn’t been for a long long time. He had all his authority back. He knew exactly what he was doing and how to carry everyone with him. And the funny thing was, he didn’t have good news at all. He had bad bad news, but he was happy happy happy. It was just like when the snow came down into Tall Tree Valley: he liked having trouble to deal with.
‘We need to leave this place,’ he told us. ‘David Redlantern and his lot could soon be down here after us. We need to get far enough away from here that they can’t see the smoke from our fire from the top of the ridge. Where we are now, they could be here within twenty wakings if they put their mind to it.’
He looked back the way the three of them had just come down. There was a dip going on and Starry Swirl was filling up sky, bright bright and big as whole world, with the black shadow of Snowy Dark sharp up against it.
‘We won’t always run from them,’ he told us. ‘Time will come when we’ll turn round and face them. And, if we need to, when that time comes, we’ll fight David and his lot and beat them. But we’re not ready for that now. There’s only sixteen of us here, not counting little kids, and he could bring maybe fifty sixty grownup men and newhairs with him over the ridge, with blackglass spears and bows and everything. We’re not ready for that. But a waking will come when there’ll be more of us, and we’ll have found our own blackglass, and then . . .’
‘And then,’ said Gela with a sigh, ‘there’ll be a lot more killing. There’ll be lots and lots more red red blood. Harry’s dick, John, you don’t have to apologize for telling us to run away! Surely there’s enough space in Eden for people who feel like doing for each other just to move apart and keep out of each other’s way?’
‘Yeah, and let’s stop talking about killing,
if you don’t mind,’ Clare said. ‘What’s poor Fox and Flower going to make of it, eh?’
The two children were both listening intently, their faces stiff. Poor things. It was never like that when we were littles. We might have been scared of leopards or slinkers sometimes, we might even have felt scared of grownup people who were angry or unkind, but we never never thought that other people might come and do for us on purpose.
‘We need to take everything we can,’ John said, ‘skins, wraps, blackglass, spears, everything. Load it onto bucks, or carry it. We’ll go that way,’ he was standing facing Dark, and he pointed behind and to his left, ‘along between the hills and Worldpool, but making our way over towards Worldpool till we’re going along the edge of it. We’ll keep going for ten wakings. That’ll take us far enough from the ridge. After that we won’t have to move so fast, but we’ll still keep moving on every few wakings for a while, to get us a good long way away. We should be safe then for wombs and wombs, by Worldpool somewhere, far off from here. We could even make boats, if we wanted, make boats and figure out how to cross the water. Then we’ll have somewhere else to go to if we have to get away again.’
Yes, we could be safe, I thought, but you won’t like that, John. You’ll get bored again. You’ll do something to make things more exciting, just as you’ve just done by going up to Tall Tree Valley and stirring up an ant’s nest, just like we feared would happen.
But I didn’t say that then. We needed to move. Tom’s dick, I did not want to be around when David Redlantern and his lot came over Dark, and I certainly didn’t want my little ones to be there to see what they did to us. We needed to move. And of course I had to admit John was good at getting things moving.
We started to pack stuff up, sort things out, figure out just how much we could carry on our backs or load onto the seven woollybucks we had now managed to turn into horses. It wasn’t all that much we could take with us when it came to it, not when Jeff had to ride on one buck, and we had twelve little ones to bring along with us, and we needed to take embers on a bark so we could make fires again without spending whole wakings trying to get a spark from twigs. Within a waking we had loaded up everything we could carry and were ready to leave our camp at L-Pool behind us, that big empty space inside John’s fence that we’d hardly begun to fill up.
‘The annoying thing is,’ said Gela, ‘that when David’s lot do come over the top they’ll find this place and make it their own. We’ve done all the work for them.’
It was probably true. From what John and Gerry and Jeff had heard up at Tall Tree, Family had been happy to steal all the ideas that John and the rest of us came up with, even though they condemned us for having them in the first place: they were turning bucks into horses over there now; they were making footwraps and headwraps and bodywraps. Why wouldn’t they start their own camp in Wide Forest?
But who cared, eh? We’d be long gone when they arrived here.
Hunting and scavenging as we went along, we moved slowly through forest. The trees went hmmmmmmm all around us. Starbirds called to each other. Two three times we heard a leopard singing in the distance. Once we passed two of those huge slow animals that John had named Nightmakers, and three four times we crossed the wide dark paths they made through forest as they slowly munched up every shining flower on the trees and the ground. You could tell how old the paths were by the number of flowers that had grown back.
We went slow slow. There was a lot to carry, including all the little kids except for Fox and Flower, who’d walk a little way, and then ride up together on a buck, and then walk a little more.
About three four hours into the second waking, I went up to the front with my little boy Peter riding on my back in a buckskin sling. John was up there already walking next to Jeff on Def, with Gerry following on just behind them. John had Star in his arms. She was fast asleep and he bent from time to time to kiss the top of her head. Now that things were moving on again for him, he seemed to have forgiven her for maybe being Mike’s kid and not his own, and he loved the sweet fresh smell of her hair.
‘Why do we need to stop in one place at all?’ I said to John. ‘We could just keep moving on slowly forever.’
John beamed round at me. He was in a good good mood, relieved relieved to get away from that little place we’d made for ourselves by L-pool. Tom’s neck, he’d worked for wakings and wakings on that big fence, scratching and cutting himself, wearing himself out, but now he’d left it behind without even a moment of regret. Moving was what he liked to do best.
‘Now you’re talking, Tina,’ he said laughing. ‘It could work, couldn’t it? Just going a few hours further on each waking, perhaps, so we had time to hunt and scavenge and rest. We’d just need a few more bucks to ride on and carry our stuff, and we’d be fine, we’d never need to stop anywhere.’
We walked on a bit.
‘You know,’ John said after thinking for a little while, ‘you really are right, Tina. It would be good to keep moving.’
I’d hardly ever heard him so willing to discuss anything that another person had suggested to him.
‘But not heading away all the time,’ he went on. ‘Sooner or later we need to turn and face them. When there’s a few more of us, I mean. When we’re stronger. When we’re ready. It’s not good just to keep running away.’
I shrugged. Why should we ever turn round? Why should we face them? Eight nine wakings’ journey from here, back in Circle Valley, Mehmet had probably already talked to David Redlantern. Now, or soon, David and his Guards would be gathering themselves together – their blackglass spears, their horsebucks, their bows and arrows, their knives, their clubs – and making their way up to Tall Tree Valley and on to the ridge beyond. And when they got there, they’d look down on Wide Forest as we had done. They’d be amazed amazed, like we’d been, and, for a while, their mouths would water at the thought of all that space and all that easy meat. But then they’d remember why they came, and they’d stop admiring Wide Forest for its own sake, and start searching searching searching for signs of us.
They’d have ridden on the backs of bucks, which was Jeff’s idea, and they’d have followed the route that no one would have taken if it wasn’t for John, but that wouldn’t make any difference to them. They’d use the things we’d found, to hunt us down for daring to find them.
I didn’t doubt, now Caroline was out of the way, that David Redlantern really would stick John onto a spiketree if he could, and let his skin burn off on its scalding bark, just as he’d always said he would. And I didn’t doubt that if he got hold of me, he would do to me what Dixon Blueside would have done if John and the others hadn’t come back to stop him. He’d hold me down and force himself up me and spurt his juice inside me, just to show how much power he had, and how little I had, however pretty I might be and however horrible and ugly he was. And if there was no one to stop him he wouldn’t just do it once. He’d do it again and again and again, until he’d used me up, and he could chuck me aside, like the empty husk of a whitelantern fruit with its sweet flesh eaten away.
Why should we face all that, any more than we would choose to stick our arms down an airhole with a slinker hiding in it or pick up a piece of shit and force it down our throats? No, I thought, we should just go on and on and on. I even began to think that I’d go along with paddling out across Worldpool, if that’s what it took to keep us safe. In fact I could see myself agreeing to any plan at all that would distract John from his idea of turning round and facing David.
But then my mood changed, and I thought that the further away we travelled from Circle Valley, the further we left behind all those other human beings too, the nice ones, like my mum, and nice batfaced Sue Redlantern, and all those others back in Family who weren’t like David Redlantern at all. And even though we hadn’t seen any of them since we left Cold Path Neck, it was sad to think that we might go so far far from them that there stopped being any possibility of contact again.
Yes, and there was Ear
th to think about too of course. It was dreadful dreadful to think of Earth coming for us and not being able to find us because we’d gone too far, so that David and all the others went back to that world of light, and we few were left behind here like Tommy and Angela had been, all alone in dark dark Eden.
And now I understood why John wanted to turn and face them. It wasn’t just about fighting and killing. That was part of it, but it wasn’t whole thing. It was also about staying connected. Even fighting was.
‘Jeff was just saying that maybe we could get some baby leopards somehow and train them up like bucks to protect us,’ John said, looking round at me for my opinion. ‘Sounds worth a go, don’t you think? If it works with bucks, why wouldn’t it work with leopards too?’
He wasn’t expecting it but I put my arm round his neck and kissed him. And he let me this time. He relaxed and laughed and kissed me back.
‘And another idea me and Jeff had was about cars,’ he told me. ‘Do you remember that model Car that Oldest kept back in Family, with its four wheels? I reckon we could figure out how to make a kind of snow-boat with wheels that we could get bucks to pull along with our stuff on, even if there wasn’t any snow.’
And then he talked about catching a baby nightmaker and turning that into a horse.
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