Dark Eden

20 John Redlantern

‘It really wouldn’t be hard to make wraps that could keep our bodies and arms and legs warm up there,’ I said to myself.

Everyone knew you could wrap up in woollybuck skins, even in a deep deep dip, and they’d keep you warm, but you can’t keep loose skins from slipping and coming off if you’re walking. So I just needed to find a way of fixing them on around people’s arms and legs and bodies so they held tight and didn’t slip. Skins can be cut and sewed together with wavyweed string or dried gut, after all, and old pictures on trees round Circle Clearing showed Tommy and Angela in wraps that must have been cut just like that because they fitted tightly round them.

I scratched some shapes on a bit of bark. You could cut two T-shaped bits of skin for the front and back of the body, I figured out, and then sew them together, leaving a hole at the top for the head. Or you could cut two square shapes, sew them up with holes left for arms and legs, and then make separate tubes for arms. And to keep heads warm you could make something like those masks that grownups sometimes used when they acted out animal stories to kids: a skin wrap with little holes for eyes and mouth. You could even sew it onto the neck hole of a bodywrap to make things extra warm.

The hard thing, though, was figuring out how to make wraps for feet. You couldn’t just sew skins together round feet because they’d get soaking wet in the snow. And anyway, walking on them would wear them down and pull them apart. So you’d need to make them so they’d keep the water out and, at the same time, you’d need to make them extra strong and hard on the bottom.

The water part wasn’t such a problem, I thought. When people made lids to go on the end of storage logs, they rubbed them all over with buckfat. It was smelly smelly, but if it rained, the water just ran off. They did the same with the ends of boats, smearing buckfat on the hardened skins to keep water from getting into the glue.

‘We could use woolly buckskins with the fur inside and the outside greased and greased,’ I said to myself. ‘Or even two layers of greased skins. And as well as sewing the wraps into shape we could make them stronger by wrapping greased string round and round them, like you wind gutstring round the back end of a spearhead to hold it in place on the shaft.’

But how could we make that hard bit on the bottom? I remembered the Boots that were brought out with the other Mementoes at Any Virsries. Everyone agreed that the tops of them looked like they were made out of some sort of skin (though it wasn’t like buckskin at all) but on the bottom they had a thick flat layer of plastic to make them stronger to walk on. I thought about cutting a shape from bark and fixing it on, but I reckoned bark would crack after a while, or crumble when it got wet and soft from the snow. Then I thought about how old Jeffo made the ends of boats, by covering smooth stonebuck skins with glue made from redlantern sap, and sticking them together in layers, before putting a layer of grease on the outside. When they dried they were hard hard, so you could rap your knuckles on them, just the same as you could rap your knuckles on the log part of the boat.

‘Perhaps we could make the footwrap and grease it all over on the top,’ I muttered, ‘but on the bottom stick on layers and layers of buckskin and redlantern glue until it’s as hard hard as the ends of one of Jeffo’s boats, and then cover the glue with more grease.’

I thought and thought about this. I thought so hard about it that really and truly I forgot all about where I was, or what had happened, or the fact that I was alone. All I cared about was figuring out how to make a hard bottom on a footwrap.

In my mind I felt the skin ends of a log boat. They were hard hard, but after a time they did come off, and once they were off they were too stiff to be stretched over the end and glued on again, so they just got thrown away. I remembered playing with one of those thrown-away boat ends when I was a little kid. It was hard but it was brittle too: not hard and brittle in the way that blackglass was, because you could bend it a little bit, but if you bent it too far it would snap.

‘Harry’s dick,’ I muttered. ‘That’s no good.’

You didn’t want something brittle on the bottom of someone’s foot, did you? I walked up and down a bit, watching my feet. I could see that my feet bent and moved as I walked to fit the ground. It would be uncomfortable walking on something that didn’t bend like that, and anyway a thing that didn’t bend would surely snap after a while. I remembered how the hard bit at the bottom of the Boots was hard and bendy, which was exactly what was needed. But the hard bit of Boots was made of plastic, which came from under the ground on Earth. What could I use that would be like that?

I wondered about using buckfoot glue instead of redlantern sap, because buckfoot glue isn’t quite so brittle, which is why they used it on the ends of the best spears to hold the gutstring bindings in place: it didn’t crack away from the blackglass in the way that redlantern glue would do, if the spear hit something hard like a tree. But buckfoot glue isn’t so easy to get, because you have to melt a lot of hard bucks’ toes to get even a little bit of glue, whereas to get redlantern sap all you needed to do was look for dribbles of dried sap down the sides of trees, or hack a little hole in the side of a tree and let it run out. (Tom’s neck, I realized, whatever kind of glue I used, I’d need to make a pit to melt it in, like the one that Jeffo had down by Dixon Stream.) Yes, and even buckfoot glue was a bit brittle, and even good spears did fall apart.

I got up and paced around my little camp. I was thinking thinking. The fug had lifted and there was a dip straight after it. Sky over Circle Valley was opening up to Starry Swirl, birds were cheeping and screeching, bats were pouring down the hillside in flocks, but I hardly noticed the change coming on at all, just threw a woollybuck wrap over my shoulders to keep warm without really thinking about it. I’d got a set of chess pieces that Redlantern had given me — the dark pieces were blackglass and the white made of dry spiketree wood — and I’d marked out a board for myself on the dirt. I squatted down and played against myself for a few moves, then jumped up again and began to pace around, thinking thinking.

I thought about those scraps of buckskin that lay around when people had been cutting out shapes, and how after a while they became dry and hard, and I remembered how you could make them soft and bendy again by wetting them, or by rubbing grease into them. I wondered if you could mix grease with glue to make something that was hard and bendy like the plastic at the bottom of the Boots.

‘I need a glue pit. I need a load of redlantern sap. I need some buckfeet. I need some more skins. I need some grease.’

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.