Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  ‘Think of the load a thing like that would carry!’ he said, looking round at me again to be sure that I was as excited about it as he was.

  I laughed and kissed him again, and then fell behind a bit to see Dix, and ask him to take a turn with Peter, who was getting big now and was hard to carry for too long.

  In two more wakings we reached Worldpool.

  I’d been to the edge of Worldpool three four times since John first found it, but just seeing it was a different thing from walking along next to it. This way you really got a sense of how big big it was. It was a pool that you could walk alongside all of one waking and still not reach or see the end of it, a pool with ripples on it half as tall as a grownup, like moving hills of shining water, which you could look into and see shining fishes swimming inside, before they came toppling over to swirl round the rocks in white bubbles that caught the light from the plants and creatures below. It was a pool that stretched away from us, softly shining into the distance, but didn’t reach another bank, like all the other water we’d ever seen, but stretched out instead to a far-off place where it seemed to touch the edge of the black black starry sky in a long straight line. But it wasn’t really touching sky. That line was Eden itself, our own dark Eden, curving down and away from us, hiding even more wonders from our sight.

  After we’d walked for half a waking, we came to a place where a river, thirty forty yards wide, had cut through the cliff and was pouring out into Worldpool over a shallow bed of stones. We and our bucks had to wade across it – it was waist deep in the middle – carrying our kids and all the stuff we had with us. Dix and Gerry carefully lifted the fire-bark above the water, with the embers glowing on their flat stone.

  ‘Hey, look at this!’ shouted Lucy Batwing in the middle of the stream.

  She’d noticed something that was floating by. She caught it and brought it to shore to show John. It was a little toy boat made of a dry fruit skin rubbed with grease, like the ones little kids used to play with back in Family. But, Michael’s names, how could a little thing like that end up here on the edge of Worldpool?

  ‘Well, this must be Main River,’ Jeff said. ‘This must be where Main River comes to from the bottom of Exit Falls.’

  It was strange strange to think that this exact same water had flowed down from Dixon Snowslug, and Cold Path Snowslug and all the other snowslugs and streams that fed into Circle Valley, strange to think it must have come through Deep Pool where me and John had dived for shining oysters, and through Longpool and Stream’s Join and Main Stream, and on through Greatpool. It was strange to think that some little kid in Family, some kid probably not even born when we were back there, had played with this little boat up there, just like we used to do, among all those old familiar places. It can’t even have been all that long ago. Grease or no grease, those little boats didn’t last many wakings before they turned to mush.

  ‘We’ll come back here one waking,’ John said, ‘and follow the water up towards Dark. Maybe this is another way back into Circle Valley. Maybe we could climb up Exit Falls from below.’

  Tom’s dick, did he never let up?

  There was a warm wind blowing in from Worldpool as we continued along the cliffs. It had a strange scent to it, rich and pungent, a bit like the way wavyweed smells when you spread it out on branches to dry it out for rope, but sweeter and more complicated. Birds and long-winged bats of kinds we’d never seen before gave out strange hoots and cries from little hiding places in the cliffs below us, and looked down at us from high high up under Starry Swirl.

  We came across a completely new kind of creature lying below us on the rocks beside the water. There were twenty thirty of them, as big as widebucks and with a buck’s mouth-feelers and big flat eyes, but they had no legs at all, only two little arms at the front with webbed hands on them like a duck, and four long fishy fins. They were slow slow when they were moving about on the rocks, just like a woollybuck or widebuck would be if it lost its legs and was trying to wriggle around without them. But in the water, among the wavy trees that swayed down there with their watery lanterns shining yellow and green, those great fat things swooped and dived as quickly and gracefully as bats hunting flutterbyes among the lantern trees in Circle Clearing.

  Dix shot one of the creatures with an arrow. What a screaming and a yelling it made! Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee! And then all of the other ones started up as well. Eeeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee! they screeched as they wriggled to the edge of the rocks, tipped themselves into the water and then shot off down into the depths like they’d suddenly become arrows themselves, shot from a powerful bow, heading down and down and down.

  Dix and me and John and Gerry put down the kids we were carrying and scrambled down the rocks to finish off the squirming thing with clubs and spears. We skinned it and cut it into pieces. We didn’t cook it on a fire, because we didn’t want to make smoke, but we cut the meat in strips and scorched it on a spiketree. It was rich fatty meat. It filled you up quickly and lay heavy in your stomach for a long time, and it made a couple of people get sick. But, Gela’s eyes, that was good thick fat, and, like John said, if you needed fat for snow-wraps or to seal up a boat, those creatures would be the place to go to get it. So we called them fatbucks.

  Next waking, John went out in front as usual, this time with Jeff and Gerry and Harry, excited and keen to find more new things. Pretty soon they were so far ahead of the rest of us that we could hardly see them at all. The brightness of Worldpool made the cliffs along its edge look dark by comparison and we could just barely make out the four of them – John, Jeff, Gerry and my big dumb brother – as little dark specks on top of that dark mass of rock, with the shining water on one side of them, and the shining forest on the other. Far off ahead of them – so far off you couldn’t tell if it was in forest or out in Worldpool or in Dark or what – a volcano was burning. You could see its dark red flame where Eden’s shadow met sky, and then, above that, the stain of black smoke trailing across Starry Swirl.

  The rest of us plodded along steadily behind for some time, until suddenly we realized that the ones in front were yelling and hollering. We couldn’t tell what they were saying, or whether they were excited or scared – the warm wind coming off the water was blowing in our ears and buffeting our faces – but John and Harry and Gerry were waving and jumping up and down on the cliff like they were crazy. Only Jeff was still calm, sitting up on the back of his buck and watching the others shout and yell.

  Gela’s tits, what was it? What could they have found?

  We began to run forward.

  As we drew nearer we saw they were standing in front of some big solid thing lying in the trees some ten fifteen yards back from top of the rocks. At first it looked like a boulder of some kind, a big big boulder, almost a hill. And then – Tom’s neck – as we got closer we began to see why their cries had sounded so strange. They didn’t know if they were excited or scared. They didn’t know if this was good good or bad bad, because it was something we’d never seen before. We’d never seen anything that was even a bit like it.

  You had to stand and stare at it a long long time before you could even get your eyes to tell you what sort of shape you were looking at. Even the stuff it was made of was something new, not wood or rock or earth or anything like that at all. It was smooth and shiny, like . . . like metal. But it was hard to believe so much metal could be all together in one place, because this thing wasn’t the size of the little metal ring on John’s finger, it was the size of Circle of Stones itself!

  It was that shape too. It was a huge huge circle of metal, tipped a little bit on its side with the lowest part of it sticking into dirt of the forest floor, all mashed and broken up. It was like this huge thing had somehow fallen there, or been thrown down hard into the edge of forest, like you’d throw a lump of stone. But what could possibly have thrown a thing as big as that?

  We went up to it. We gingerly touched it and then, when it didn’t sting or burn, we felt it all over. It
really was metal, hard like stone but colder, and smooth smooth all over, with no grain in it, no roughness, no texture, only from time to time straight lines that divided the surface up into square shapes, and straight rows of little round dots. But the metal was only the beginning of the strangeness of it. At the top of it, in middle, there was a smooth shape sticking out like a bowl that you might use for water but twenty thirty times the size and made of what looked like smooth ice, so clear that you could see Starry Swirl shining right through it.

  Dix was nimble. He climbed up there and touched it.

  ‘It’s not ice,’ he said. ‘It’s warm and dry. And it’s smoother even than metal, smooth smoo . . . Oh Gela’s tits!’

  He came scrambling and tumbling down like he had six leopards after him.

  ‘What is it? What is it?’ we were all yelling at him.

  ‘Faces,’ he said, ‘faces inside that ice thing looking out. White grinning faces with huge eyes!’

  Lucy and Clare and Mike grabbed their kids and started to run. The little ones began to scream. But John and me climbed up the top and looked in. It was dark inside, but there was just enough light from forest and stars for us to make out two white faces staring up at us, with big dark eyes and toothy gaping mouths.

  ‘They’re just skulls,’ said John, ‘that’s all. They’re just human bones.’

  Human bones weren’t something we saw too often because we always used to bury dead people back in Circle Valley under stones. In fact I’d only ever seen the clean white bones of a person once before, when a bunch of us found the remains of an old Batwing bloke called Johnny in forest when I was a little kid. (He’d been out there scavenging by himself and he’d died for some reason – maybe a heart attack or something – and had the flesh eaten off him by starbirds.) I looked through the smooth hard icy stuff at the faces looking out at us. Their mouths hung open like they were roaring with laughter. Ugh!

  ‘Just bones,’ John called out. ‘They can’t hurt us.’

  The others who’d scattered in panic came reluctantly back to the metal thing.

  ‘Hey, look here!’ Gela called. ‘There’s a hole under here. You could get inside.’

  John and me jumped down to look. It was only a small hole, but certainly big enough to crawl through. John wriggled straight in there, with faithful Gerry following him and then me and Jeff. The rest of them seemed to think it was our special job, mine and Gerry’s and Jeff’s, to be the first to follow John into strange and scary places.

  There was a hollow cave in there under the hard ice-like stuff, a tilted-over cave that smelt like a kind of mud. Three skeletons were sitting in there on special seats made of some soft dark crumbly stuff that we’d never seen before. We hadn’t noticed the third skeleton from outside because its skull had fallen off its neck and had rolled down to the bottom edge of the cave with its skull eyes looking away from us. The skulls and bones stood out because they were white, but it was too dark to make out much else. I went back to the opening and called for someone to pull down some branches of whitelanterns for us to see by.

  When I went back inside to the other three, I reached out for their hands. We were all shaking. I don’t honestly know if it was fear or what. We really didn’t know what to think or feel.

  Then Gela crawled in with three four bright whitelanterns on a bit of branch, and now we began to see just what a weird weird kind of cave this was. All round us were strange brown surfaces covered with rows of little shapes. They reminded us of the Kee Board and the Screen that Oldest brought out to show us on Any Virsries, but there must have been thousands of those little square shapes here, dozens of different screens. We didn’t really know what to do next, so we began to touch the little springy squares, pushing them in and out like we used to push them in and out on the Kee Board as little kids when Oldest’s helpers carried round the Mementoes at Any Virsries.

  More people were trying to get inside now. Mike was crawling in, and Clare, and even little Flower, and the metal thing rocked slightly with the weight of us all moving around inside it, and creaked like a tree does in the wind.

  ‘It’s the Three, isn’t it?’ John said. ‘It’s the Three Companions. This is Dixon and Mehmet and Michael. The first Dixon, I mean, the first Mehmet. And Michael . . .’ He could hardly bring himself to say it, and when his words came they were all shaky and wobbly. ‘And Michael Name-Giver.’

  We didn’t answer him out loud.

  ‘And this is their sky-boat,’ Jeff said after a while. He spoke quietly, but more calmly than John. He was interested interested in everything, but he didn’t easily get excited or upset. ‘This is the Landing Veekle. They never made it back to Defiant at all.’

  In the fading light from the branch of whitelanterns, we could see the three skeletons more clearly and we could see that they still wore wraps around them, wraps to cover their whole bodies, like Tommy and Angela’s wraps that Oldest still kept bits of in the hollow log. The two skeletons with heads had white wraps, the headless skeleton had a blue one. And there was writing on the wraps. Gela’s eyes, once we’d got some fresh whitelanterns in to give us more light, we could see their names written there – Mehmet Haribey, Dixon Thorleye, Michael Tennison – names from that old old story which was so old that, though we believed it was true, we didn’t really believe it happened in the same world as us. But here they were, not in a story world at all, but right in front of us.

  Michael Tennison was the one whose head had fallen off. I picked it up now, that hard hollow thing with its white stony mouth that had first spoken the names of the animals and plants of Eden, all that long long time ago.

  ‘Just think,’ I said. ‘When we say “Michael’s names” this and “Michael’s names” that, this is the Michael we’re talking about!’

  People had got tired of pushing on the little squares by now and most had stopped doing it, but little Flower was still at it. She pushed in a square and suddenly – Tom’s dick, it was hard to believe – suddenly there was a voice speaking to us and a face looking out at us from a screen. Flower screamed, everyone shouted and yelled and jumped back, and the sky-boat rocked back and forth once again.

  ‘Be quiet!’ John yelled furiously. ‘Gela’s eyes, be quiet and listen!’

  It was a man’s face, a man with fair hair and tired grey eyes but no beard at all, his shoulders covered in a bright blue wrap.

  ‘ . . .Tennison,’ his voice was saying, but it sounded all thin and strange, like he was half-buried in the ground, and he spoke his words in a funny way that we could hardly understand, like he was speaking right up at the front of his mouth. ‘Michael Tennison. I’m afraid it looks as if the Landing Veekle must have been damaged when we . . .’

  And then the voice stopped, and the face disappeared, and the screen went black like all the others. And we pushed every one of those hundreds of little squares over and over again, over and over and over. We even got Flower to push them all again, in case there was something about her touch that made a difference, but we could not get the face or the voice to come back again, however hard we tried.

  45

  Sue Redlantern

  I was grinding up seeds to make some cakes for dinner when a Batwing kid came running into Redlantern area, shouting out that Mehmet Batwing had come down again from Dark. He’d come down with two Fishcreek boys, Paul and Gerald, who’d been the latest two sent up by David across Dark to the place called Tall Tree Valley where Mehmet and his lot lived. Mehmet, Paul and Gerald had gone straight to Guards up along Greatpool, without walking through the rest of Family at all. But one of the Guards had told his sister about it, and news was spreading from her across Family about what had happened. Apparently Paul and Gerald had met John up there: our John, John Redlantern! He’d been visiting Tall Tree too, but from the other direction, from some other place on the far side of Dark, some other forest.

  Harry’s dick, how many different places were there in the world?

  Not that I was worryi
ng about that just then. As soon as I heard the news I knew something bad bad was going to happen and I ran straight over towards Guards, yelling out the news on my way to everyone I saw.

  ‘They’ve found out where John and his lot are!’ I called out. ‘They’ll go over after them unless we stop them! Go after our boys and girls. Spread it about! Quickly! Come over to Guards now!’

  It was already busy busy in Guards. They were getting out warm wraps for the snow and rolling them up. They were tying up bunches of arrows. They were taking out their strongest blackglass spears and their best leopard tooth knives.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I bellowed at them. ‘What in Gela’s name is going on?’

  Guards laughed and went on gathering their things together and tying them onto their backs with string and buckskin straps.

  ‘Get out of our way,’ David said, stuffing some wraps into a bag. ‘We’re busy. We’ve got a job to finish, and we’ll have no time spare until it’s done.’

  Mehmet was there beside him, already up on the back of his woollybuck, ready to lead the way back up Dark.

  ‘What job?’ Jade asked David.

  I looked round, surprised. There were ten eleven mums there, and Jade had come running up with the rest of them.

  ‘You know what job, Juicy John’s mum,’ David told her. ‘You know perfectly well what job. We’ve found out where your juicy boy is hiding out with his chums, and we’re going to do what we should have done long ago.’

  ‘They’re our boys and girls,’ I told him. ‘They’re Family’s. They’re not yours to do what you like with!’

  David came over to me and sneered into my face.

  ‘They’re our boys,’ he simpered in a fake little whiny whiny voice. ‘They’re part of Family. They’re not yours to do what you like with.’