Dark Eden

25 Tina Spiketree

Dix went off for some hot embers from one of our back-up fire holes and got our main fire going again. He felt badly that he’d not been there when David Redlantern’s lot arrived, and he kept apologizing to us all. Personally, I reckoned it was lucky that he hadn’t been there. If he hadn’t come running down the hill when David’s lot weren’t expecting it, he wouldn’t have been scary enough. He was a nice boy, a lovely boy, and nicely built too, but he really wasn’t that big or scary. If he’d been there all along, maybe they’d never have let themselves be driven away.

We took John’s leopard tooth knife and hacked off a leg from the little buckling’s dead mum, then we cooked it up with whitelantern fruit that the others had gathered while we’d been away. Janny cried a bit. She had some nasty bruises too from where the men had grabbed her. Gela and Clare cried a bit as well, and that made Gela’s brother Dix start up again about how sorry he was for not being there.

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s, Dix,’ I told him, ‘will you give it a bloody rest? You weren’t on lookout or anything, were you? So you didn’t do anything wrong going up the hill looking for stuff to eat, no more than we did anything wrong looking for bucks.’

‘Lookout?’ Dix said. ‘Why don’t I go on lookout now? It was supposed to be Janny now but I reckon she could do with a rest. I’ll do the first watch and let you lot get some sleep.’

(Of course we didn’t have groups of people sleeping and waking at different times in our camp like in Family. We were just one group and we all slept and woke up more or less together.)

‘Yeah, alright,’ I said. ‘Harry can be lookout with you, can’t you, Harry? I mean there’s no way you’re going to calm down, is there, Harry mate, for several hours at least? I reckon you could do with walking up and down a bit on lookout, to work off some of that tension.’

Pretty soon all the rest of us except for Jeff lay down and tried to rest. Not that it was easy to rest with everything that had happened going through our heads and that bloody little buckling screaming and screaming in its cave.

After a couple of hours Dix and Harry came to get me and John to take over their watch. John went down the hill to keep an eye on the path up to our camp from forest. I went up the hill, above the caves, to look out over the main valley, and to make sure no one came sneaking down from above.

I was so tired tired, what with the hunt and everything, that I had to keep moving around to stop myself from falling off to sleep. Even so I did nod off for a bit, right there on my feet. It wasn’t for long, I don’t think, but when I woke up I could tell straight off that there was something different. Something had changed.

Well, then I really woke up. It’s a bad bad lookout that goes to sleep and misses some new thing until after it’s already started happening. Like the saying goes, ‘It’s too late to yell leopard if it’s already inside the fence.’

But what was it that was different? I listened and listened until I felt as if my ears were sticking out of my head on stalks like a buck’s feelers. The world sounded different in some way and yet when I listened to each separate sound on its own, I could only hear ordinary things, things you heard all the time: bird calls and the little gabbling cries of bats, streams trickling over stones as they came down from Snowy Dark, hmmph, hmmph, hmmph from nearby trees, the steady hmmmmm of forest . . . Just ordinary familiar Eden things, things that were there all the time, like the lanterns shining away below.

‘John?’ I called softly. ‘John?’

I wanted to ask him if he’d noticed anything or if he could figure out what was different, but he was too far off to hear me and I didn’t want to shout too loudly. And anyway just then I finally realized what the difference was. It wasn’t a new sound at all. It was a sound missing. The buckling had gone quiet. It had finally stopped its screaming. Maybe it’s died, I thought, though I can’t say I cared that much. My main thought was thank Gela it wasn’t some new attack that I’d missed! And I looked forward to going back down to my sleeping skin and getting off to sleep without that bloody noise going on and on.

All the same, when my watch was done and I went down to wake Jane to take over from me, I passed by the buckling’s cave to see what had happened. Jeff wasn’t lying outside on his skin any more so I guessed he must have gone back to sleep with Gerry like he normally did, and I looked over the fence to see what had happened to the buck. The little animal wasn’t dead. It was lying asleep on the ground with its headlantern softly glowing. But the big surprise was Jeff. He was in there too, lying there with it, with one arm draped over its woolly back, just like it was Gerry, just like him and Gerry usually lay together on their sleeping skins.

Two brothers on a skin was one thing, though. A woollybuck and a human being was something else. A little clawfoot boy and a creature with flat glinting eyes that never shut, lying down together! Well, it just seemed so weird weird that I had to get John just to show him. I was so amazed amazed, it was almost like I needed John to tell me that what I saw was really there.

‘Looks like he’s got his horse then,’ John whispered.

‘I’d honestly never never have thought such a thing could happen,’ I whispered back to him. ‘Mind you, I’d never have thought that someone would destroy Circle of Stones either or break up Family into two pieces.’

I put my arm round John’s waist, feeling sort of proud of what he’d managed to make happen, admiring the strength that made it possible. But he didn’t respond. He had never once reached out for me, this bloke I’d given up my Family for, not once since that time when me and Jeff and Gerry first came over.

But at least now I had some good friends with me apart from him and weird Jeff and empty Gerry.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said after a time, ‘it’s a good job we hid our stuff when we did. They only got a few old stonebuck skins, and none of the good woollyskins at all. We need every bit of woollyskin we can get.’

Then we heard voices coming up from below.

‘John? Tina? Gerry?’

It was three more kids come from Family to join us, three Fishcreek kids, a sister and brothers: Suzie, Johnny and Dave. They were friends of mine too, specially little Suzie with her clever sharp tongue.

That little buck, it might have shut up for a few hours, but that wasn’t the end of the noise. It woke up a bit later, found Jeff lying beside it and began to scream and thresh about as much as ever. He tried to calm it down even though it was scratching and kicking him, but in the end he had to scramble out over the fence and let it do what it wanted, which was to go on yelling and kicking away in its fence, on and off, for waking after sleeping after waking.

Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!

‘Gela’s tits!’ said Suzie Fishcreek. ‘Can’t we put it out of its misery and eat it? It’d be doing everyone a favour.’

But of course John wasn’t having that, and nor was Jeff, though he was covered in cuts and bruises that the creature had given him with its hard claws and its bony head. John had kids go down to the pool to fetch back fresh wavyweed for it, and fill up its bowl with water. He had more kids go and find fruit. But it didn’t eat a thing. It sipped a bit of water and that was all, and you could see it getting thinner and weaker.

‘Face it, Jeff, it’s going to die anyway,’ said Mehmet Batwing. ‘Why not eat it while there’s still a bit of meat left on it?’

But he may as well have been talking to a stone.

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

I woke up to the sound two three wakings after Dixon Blueside and David’s attack. It was one of the times when the buckling was quiet and a lot of us had gone to sleep. I was lying in the cave, with John on his own sleeping skin on the far side of it.

Not now, I thought, not another bloody Strornry! And then of course I remembered — and we all remembered, I suppose — that we weren’t in Family. The hollowbranch horn was coming from far away, from a place where we didn’t belong any more, and the meeting wasn’t for us but for them.

And it was funny because we always hated Strornries and Any Virsries, and we always groaned and moaned about having to go, but now that we couldn’t go to Strornry, we sort of missed it. It felt sad to be left out.

‘What do you reckon they’re talking about back there?’ I asked John, when I saw that he’d been woken too. ‘What are they deciding?’

‘That’s easy,’ he said, his frowning face all blotchy with the different colours of the glowing rocklanterns. ‘They’re talking about us. They’re trying to decide what to do about us.’

He shrugged.

‘They’ll spend a waking talking,’ John said, ‘and then, if they decide to come over, they’ll spend at least a waking and a sleep getting here. So I reckon we needn’t worry about them for a bit.’

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

‘But what then?’ I asked. ‘We know that David’s going to say we should all be spiked up like Jesus. And, okay, we know Caroline and Council won’t agree to anything like that. But what will they decide? After all, even Caroline said when they chucked you out that it was okay to hunt you like an animal. And how much longer will she be in charge anyway? How long before David calls all the shots?’

John stood up.

‘A while yet, I should have thought. And no one has ever done for another human being, not since the Beginning. Even David is scared to be the one that changes that. After all he’s got to live among our mums and aunties and uncles and groupmates.’

He pulled his bitswrap round his waist, picked up a pile of snow-wraps, and went out, without giving any explanation as to where he was going or what he was doing, like he wasn’t connected to me at all.

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

I couldn’t sleep then, not with those hollowbranch horns going, and not in that lonely cave that John and me were supposed to share but didn’t. After a bit I got up too and went outside. Mehmet Batwing, that wiry little guy with the little pointy yellow beard, was sitting by the fire hole, sharpening his spear-spike with a stone.

‘Did you see where John went?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘Off into forest that way. After bucks, perhaps.’

Mike Brooklyn was humming to himself on lookout on the shelf above the caves. Lucy Batwing was on the path below.

‘Yeah, John went up into forest with a bundle of those snow-wraps of his and his blackglass spear and some embers on a bark,’ Lucy told me. ‘Did you two have a fight or something?’

She watched me with narrowed eyes. She was a great one for wheedling secrets out of people and then passing them on.

But I didn’t say anything. I went back up the slope. Along from the cave where John and me slept, Jeff was inside the fence in the buckling’s cave. It was taking wavyweed from his hand.

‘Jeff! It’s finally eating!’

He was totally absorbed with the animal and he jumped slightly when I spoke to him. Then he looked round at me with his big eyes and smiled.

‘This is really happening,’ he whispered. ‘We really are here!’

In another little cave a bit further on, Dix slept with Mike Brooklyn.

‘Hey Dix,’ I whispered, ‘are you awake?’

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp! came the horn again, from over by the fake Circle in Circle Clearing.

Dix came out and I put my arms straight round him. I wanted to be with someone for a bit: someone that was kind.