Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  Then he snorted and stepped back from me so he could talk to all us women together in his normal rough hard voice.

  ‘Everyone listened to that talk before, didn’t they? All that stuff about how dear sweet Juicy John was our boy, how he was one of us, how we mustn’t hurt him. And look where it got us, eh? Four people dead who’d be living and breathing now if it wasn’t for him! Four people! And a baby inside its mum’s womb. Now get out of my way, and don’t talk to me about being sorry for people.’

  I ran forward and grabbed hold of his arms.

  ‘Listen to me, David Redlantern, I’ve known you since you were a little boy. I looked out for you. You know I did. I told you stories. I comforted you when the other kids teased you. I looked after you. So listen to me. You owe me that, and I’m not letting you go until you . . .’

  He turned and called over his shoulder.

  ‘Mike! Get her off me and keep her off me.’

  A hard young London boy called Michael came with his mate and dragged me roughly off David.

  ‘You’re in charge here until we get back, Mike,’ David said. ‘Meantime keep these blubbering oldmums out of our way so we can finish getting ourselves together and go.’

  David had his Guards divided into two groups. One group was to go with him up over Snowy Dark, with Mehmet Batwing as their guide. The other group – about twenty of them, all with spears and big clubs – was to stay back in Family with Michael London in charge, so as to hold us back and to keep us under control while he was gone. But of course all of this lot that had been told to stay and control us were men and newhairs that we’d known for wombs (as were the lot that went with David over to Dark), and quite a few of them were cousins and uncles and even brothers of the group of kids who’d gone over to John all those wakings ago.

  ‘Back off, all of you!’ shouted Michael London, prodding at us with the butt end of his spear. This silly self-important kid was no older than my Gerry. But he was determined that if he was going to miss all the excitement across Dark, he was going to have fun back here instead.

  ‘Back off or we’ll use these clubs on you!’

  And meantime David and the other lot of Guards – another twenty men and newhair boys – climbed onto their buckhorses with their weapons and their snow-wraps, two Guards on each buck, and started to head off Peckhamway.

  ‘David!’ I yelled after him. ‘David! Please stop!’

  He didn’t even look back.

  ‘Mehmet!’ I shouted then. ‘Don’t lead him to them! He wants to do for them all!’

  Mehmet Batwing did look round, and his face was strange strange because it was two things at the same time. He was trying to look cold and hard like David – and part of him really was enjoying the power he had – but part of him was troubled too. It was like he was only now really understanding what it was that he’d set loose, now that it was too late to stop. He had got a sort of power, a sort of importance, but he’d only got it by giving up having any real power at all.

  ‘Mehmet!’ I shouted, as he turned quickly away again. ‘You don’t want to do this, so don’t do it! We’ll back you up.’

  All the other mums were yelling now, and other people were still arriving from groups, and they were yelling too, calling out to David, calling to people they knew among the twenty Guards on buckback: ‘Johnny! Mike! Dixon! Mitch! Pete! Don’t go with them! Don’t go!’

  And some of the Guards looked back from the backs of their bucks, and some didn’t. But, either way, what could they do? They were in the same position as Mehmet. They’d gone too far. If one of them turned back, it would be him that the others would be spiking up next.

  We turned our attention to the Guards who were holding us back:

  ‘Let us go! Let us bloody go! They’re going after our boys and girls. They’re going after people that used to be your friends and your groupmates. They’re going to kill them! Is that really what you want?’

  They just shrugged. A few laughed mockingly but you could see a lot of them were troubled by what was happening. It made no difference, though. They still wouldn’t let us get past them. How could they? It was the same for them as it was for their mates riding out towards Snowy Dark on their bucks. If they didn’t do what they were told, they were at risk themselves. So they frowned and avoided our eyes and prodded us and hit us with clubs and spearbutts if we pushed forward or tried to get round them. And then, pretty soon, it was too late for us to catch up with the bucks anyway, so they shrugged and let us go.

  ‘Do what you want,’ said Michael London. ‘Just get out of Guards area and stop that bloody yelling. You’re making my head hurt.’

  And they turned their backs on us and walked off in different directions, pretending that they were busy and didn’t have time for our nonsense, but really just trying to get away from all of this, so as not to have to face us, or think about what they were doing.

  Some of the mums ran straight off into forest after David and his lot, but there was no point in that. People can’t run as fast as bucks, and David had made sure sure that no one in Family had horsebucks to use except only for Guards. So I ran instead after the two boys, Paul and Gerald Fishcreek, who’d come down with Mehmet from Tall Tree Valley and were now part of the group of Guards who’d been told to keep us under control.

  ‘What did you see up there? Who did you see? What did they tell you?’

  They looked at each other guiltily, and then looked round to see if anyone else was near.

  ‘John and your boys came up while we were there,’ Gerald said, with a silly fake shrug, pretending it was all nothing to him. ‘Gerry and whatsisname . . . Jeff.’

  ‘Gerry? Jeff? Both my boys?’

  I was shaking now. It was weird weird, to be talking to someone who’d seen my two sons only a few wakings ago, but there wasn’t much comfort in it, not with David and his lot riding towards them.

  ‘How were they?’ I asked him.

  Again Gerald looked at his groupmate. Then he shrugged again.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Pretty good. They’ve grown. Jeff’s a big bloke now, with a beard and all. Quite a looker, actually.’

  ‘Do you hate them?’

  Gerald glanced at Paul.

  ‘Well, no,’ he muttered. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘But yet you came back here with Mehmet Batwing to tell David about them, knowing how badly David wants to spike them up to die?’

  ‘We didn’t . . .’

  ‘Come on, Gerald. You knew David would be after them the moment he got the news. Don’t try and tell me you didn’t.’

  Gerald looked desperately at Paul. I looked at Paul too. I gave him the look I give to naughty children, and he looked guilty and scared for a moment and then straight away he frowned, making his face hard hard hard, a proper Guard’s face. It was like he was putting on a mask.

  ‘Back off, Sue Redlantern,’ Paul said. ‘Back off or I’ll use this club on you, alright?’

  ‘What?’ I hissed at him. ‘Club me for asking you why you want to do for my own sons?’

  He cowered like I’d just hit him, but held his club tight in his hand.

  I let them go, the silly weak kids. And then I cried and cried. I cursed First Tommy and First Dixon and First Mehmet for bringing human life to Eden. I cursed Tommy and Angela for deciding to stay here and slip together and so bring all of us from peaceful peaceful nothingness into this cruel dark world. This was a bad bad place. People weren’t meant to live here. People were meant to live on Earth where it’s fresh and bright and new as the inside of a lanternflower. This place was only good for creatures from dark dark Underworld, with flat eyes and green-black blood and six limbs with claws. Nothing good would ever come to us in this miserable dark Eden. Never. Never. Never. There would only ever be pain and misery and blood, blood, blood.

  ‘Sue,’ a voice whispered behind me. ‘Sue.’

  It was Gerald Fishcreek back again, without his brother, without his spear.

  ‘
Julie warned them, Sue. She slipped with Jeff up there, up at Tall Tree, and she warned him about David and Mehmet. She told him Mehmet would talk to David, and what David would do when he found out where they were.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I spoke to her. You’re right, I don’t hate John and your boys. In fact when we met them up there I really liked them, specially your Jeff. And after the three of them had gone and there was no one else near, I said to Julie that I wished I’d warned them what was going to happen. And she said, “Well, don’t worry, Gerald, because I did.”’

  Well, I hugged him, and then I hit him hard hard round the face, because if John and the others were saved by that warning from Julie, it would be no thanks to this cowardly little slinker, whose conscience only started to prick him after it was too late, so that he could reassure himself that he wasn’t really bad without the trouble of actually doing anything that was any good. And then I hugged him again anyway for telling me.

  He pulled away from me, looking round guiltily. And now he put on his hard Guard face too, just like his groupmate Paul had done.

  ‘Don’t ever speak to me about it again, alright?’ he said. ‘Don’t ever tell anyone I spoke to you, because I’ll call you a liar if you do.’

  ‘Did they say what it was like over the other side?’

  He looked round again. He wanted to go. He was scared scared someone would see him talking to me.

  ‘Big,’ he said, ‘a big big forest. So big, they said, that you can’t even see where it ends. And there’s a pool there that’s just the same. You can’t see the ends of it. You can’t see across to the other side.’

  Off he ran. I sank down against a whitelantern trunk and cried some more. But it was a different kind of crying now. I was crying with relief. They still had a good chance of getting away from David, into that big big forest, which they knew and David didn’t.

  Yes, I thought, but it’s an odd thing, isn’t it, a sad sad thing, for a mum to be relieved that her sons can go further away from her, and hide in a place where she may never see them again?

  46

  John Redlantern

  We spent one two hours in there, just trying to get the talking face back on the screen. All the time people were pushing to get in, pushing each other out of the way, pushing the bloody little squares, pushing past the bones of the Three Companions like they were just dead twigs in forest.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing!’ I said. ‘You’ll knock the others’ heads off as well!’

  No one was even listening.

  ‘Try that one there!’ someone said.

  ‘No, try pushing the ones that Flower pushed!’

  ‘No, don’t do that! What’s the point of that? We’ve tried that a hundred times. Leave those alone and let me try this one.’

  ‘Hey! Back off and let me through, I’ve got some more lanterns here. Let’s get some light on this!’

  The strain in people’s faces! The desperation to get someone they didn’t know to appear for one moment more on that screen and speak words to them that they could hardly understand! That one thing, the screen with its voice, had taken over from all the other wonders here: the dead Companions, the Landing Veekle itself. Perhaps they just didn’t want to think about what all this really meant.

  I crawled back out through the hole and left them to it. Jeff and Harry and Gela were already outside. Gela and Jeff were looking after a couple of babies plus five six littles who didn’t want to stay in the sky-boat because they found it scary. And Harry agreed with them about that. He didn’t like the bones or the metal cave, and he’d hated hated the strange voice that spoke to us from the screen. Now he was pacing around and muttering and moaning to himself, wanting to get away.

  ‘Harry doesn’t like it. Harry wants to go.’

  Tina came out soon after me, then Janny, then Dix, all looking kind of shaken and a bit ashamed, like they’d let something bad come inside them and take them over, and now they regretted it.

  ‘I reckon we should stop this, ‘I said. ‘I don’t think the talking face will come back.’

  Tina nodded. I stood up.

  ‘Come out now! Everyone out!’

  No one argued with me. They all emerged one by one through the hole in the boat – Gerry, Lucy Batwing, Mike, Clare, Jane, little Flower, Clare . . . with Martha and Lucy London coming out last of all, both of them crying bitterly.

  ‘Listen up, everyone!’ I called out.

  They all went quiet quiet, standing there next to the Veekle under the bright whitelantern trees, with the smooth soft sheen of Worldpool nearby.

  I looked round at their faces, grownups and children, excited, scared, hungry for something that they didn’t even understand, and I tried to figure out what I ought to say. It was hard hard because I’d been excited too, and I’d felt that same hunger, and, like all of them, I was still dazed dazed by the face of Michael Name-Giver himself talking to us from the screen. (Who could believe that such a thing would ever happen to us?) But somehow I needed to help the others make some sense out of it, when I hadn’t really made sense of it myself.

  ‘So . . .’ I began. ‘So now we know how the story of the Three Companions ended. After all this time. After . . . all these wombs, and . . . and all these generations.’

  I talked without knowing what I was going to say, but something was creeping up into my thoughts. It was like when you first spot a leopard in forest. To start with you’re still not sure if it really is a leopard or if it’s only a patch of flowers, and then you’re pretty sure it is a leopard but you still can’t quite make out its exact shape. And then you see it.

  ‘And that means, doesn’t it, that they . . . That means they never got back to Defiant. And . . . that . . . means . . .’

  Oh Gela’s heart, that meant . . .

  I looked at their faces. I could see some of them getting it too: Gela, Tina, Dix, the quicker, stronger ones. I took a deep breath to try and get control over my voice.

  ‘And that means that Defiant never left Eden at all. I . . . I suppose it must still be up there in sky somewhere, too high up for us to see. All this time, we’ve imagined it somewhere far out across Starry Swirl, but it’s been up there all the while. And that means . . .’

  ‘That means they’ll never come for us,’ wailed Lucy London. ‘Never, never, never!’

  Pretty well everyone was crying – grownups, kids, men, women – crying and crying for that old old dream that would never never come true. Tina was crying, Gela was crying, Gerry was crying, Martha London was wailing wailing and rocking back and forth like a mum that’s lost a child. And there were tears running down my face too, even while I tried to get us past this. Only Jeff wasn’t crying. I think he’d understood what this meant from the moment we saw the Veekle, and now he was calmly watching everyone with his gentle interested eyes.

  (Right behind him, on a whitelantern branch, a bat was watching too. Its head tipped slightly on one side, it watched, and fanned its wings and scratched its ear thoughtfully with a single thin black finger.)

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It means we have to give up on the idea that we’re waiting for Earth folk to come for us and take us back again to . . . back to . . .’

  It took me three tries to get out the words, I was so sad sad. And yet it was me that that had destroyed Circle, me that had said we shouldn’t just sit and stew in Circle Valley, waiting for help from Earth.

  ‘ . . .back to that place where the light comes down from sky, bright as the inside of a whitelantern, and where they see clearly when we’re blind, and know about all those things that we have to try so hard hard hard to figure out.’

  I was getting some control of myself now. I was pleased about that. And I could see them all looking at me, waiting for me to make it better for them, and I was pleased about that too.

  ‘But listen, everyone. We’re no worse off than we were before we found this thing. We’ve still got each other. We’ve stil
l got fruit and meat to eat. We’ve still got Eden, just the same as it was last waking and all the wakings before, for all those generations. Nothing has changed except for one thing, and in a way it’s a good thing. Now we know for sure we can just get on with things and don’t have to wait around for Earth.’

  I looked at Tina, and that reminded me of something she’d said to me once by Deep Pool, when we were newhairs back in Family.

  ‘It’s like when a kid gets lost in forest. The kid’s mum can’t rest, can’t get on with anything but searching and crying and searching, until they find the bones. And when they do find the bones and bring them to her, she’s sad sad, and she screams and cries and rocks and tears her wraps. But at least she knows there’s no point in searching any more, and slowly slowly she gets back to her life as it was before, and back to her other kids, knowing there’s no need to look out any more for the one that’s gone. We’ve always known that Earth might never come. We’ve always known that, even if Earth did come one waking, it probably wouldn’t be while we were alive. I mean, that’s what decided Tommy and Angela to stay here in the first place, isn’t it? But we’ve always deep down secretly hoped that Earth would come soon and carry us away from all our sadness and trouble, even if the odds were against it, and even though we knew – don’t forget this either – even though we knew that Earth had bad bad troubles of its own. We just couldn’t help it. We didn’t fully give ourselves to Eden because we were dreaming about that other place full of light. But now we can really be here.’

  Jeff recognized that I’d got that last bit from him, and he gave me his funny little smile. Tina nodded. And Gerry, even though he was still crying crying, looked proud of me, and that always felt good. I nodded to myself. I thought I’d done well. I was pretty sure I’d got through to most of them.

  I wiped tears from my own eyes and finished what I had to say.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ I told them, ‘we’re still too close to Tall Tree ridge. And we can’t take this sky-boat with us. So we’ll just have to leave it behind us here. But it’s good that we found it. It’s good good. Those three have been sitting in there all this time like they were still trying to cross sky and finish their story, but now we’ve found them, that’s all over. They’re back in our story again and we can let them rest.’