Dark Eden

30 John Redlantern

People tried to have things every which way, even smart honest people like Tina. They wanted the good bits and then they complained about the bad bits that had to go with the good bits. Well, the good bit about me was that I could make things happen, and that I stuck to a thing and didn’t ever give up or let go. That was the good thing that people got from me, along with all those other things people didn’t like.

When we had that meeting, I’d just done for a man. I’d killed a man I’d seen around Family ever since I was a little kid. I didn’t feel guilty about it exactly because I knew he’d happily have done the same to me, and to Tina and probably to the others too. But, Gela’s eyes, I was shaken shaken by it. All that meeting it was running through my mind over and over, my spear sticking out of Dixon’s back, my spear stabbing back again into his belly, the squelch of it going in, the hiss of air, the blood bubbling out of his mouth. I hadn’t stopped to look at him longer than the time it took to pull my spear out of him, and for him to roll over to look up at me, and for me to shove the spear in again to finish him off — his two friends were still running from us, and Gerry and Harry might have needed my help — but those couple of seconds were so fixed in my mind that it was like they kept happening — really happening — over and over again.

So I had that in my head, and I had all the practical things to remember, and at the same time I somehow had to make people believe in me, so that they’d accept being organized and they’d stay that way, and we’d have a chance of surviving. I had all that to think about — and there’s only so much a person can hold onto at one time — and then bloody Tina drops her little game with the Ring story on me, and — Tom’s dick! — I had to think about how to deal with that as well.

She’d say that was my fault for keeping the ring a secret, but I did that for a reason. I did it because I always knew from the beginning that when I showed it to people, it would give me power over them, but I also knew that the power wouldn’t last. So I saved it up for the moment when that power was most needed, not just by me but by all of us. It was like when the leopard came at me. I knew I only had one shot at it, so I waited till the best moment and didn’t just chuck my spear at it the first chance I got. And I got that right. I got it exactly right, whatever Tina thinks. I took out the ring just when we really needed it most — and it worked!

A couple of hours after I’d taken the ring back from Tina we were starting up Cold Path. There were twenty-one of us, plus two babies. The larger of the two bucks, Def, was in front with Jeff riding on it. After that came me and Tina, and then all the others, one by one, with the other buck, Whitehorse, at the end. Every one of us was covered up, except for our mouths and eyes, with buckskin wraps, so we didn’t really look like people, more like a herd of weird two-legged bucks. Every one of us had the greased buckskin footwraps that I’d been working and working on even before anyone came from Family to join me, with hard layers of skin and greasy glue on the bottom. Apart from Jeff on his buck, the two girls with babies (Clare and Janny) and the three girls carrying babies inside their wombs (Suzie, Gela and Julie), all of us were carrying things on our backs: rolls of rope, spare footwraps, bags of blackglass, bundles of buckskin, things that I’d thought about and organized over the past ten periods. And we were taking it in turns to carry some big flat pieces of bark, smoothed and greased, which I called snow-boats, each one loaded with useful stuff like meat and skins and spare wraps, except for one, which was holding a pile of embers on a big flat stone. They were hard work to carry over dry ground, but once we were up on snow they’d slide easy easy over the surface, and it would only take one person to pull them along. They were my idea too.

‘None of this would have happened but for you, would it?’ Tina said to me, looking back at all this.

‘No,’ I said crossly. ‘It bloody wouldn’t. I brought you all to Cold Path Valley. I sorted out the agreement with Caroline so as to give us time. I worked out how to make the wraps to cover our bodies. I had the idea of the snow-boats and organized people to cut the bark and make the ropes to pull them. I went up Snowy Dark over and over again to work out how to live up there and what we’d need, even when you moaned at me for going away by myself all the time. And you all chose to come with me because you all know quite well that you wouldn’t have made this happen without me. None of you would, not even you, Tina, and certainly not your precious Dix down there. So how come I get to be Tommy in the story and you get to be Gela? I’m the Gela here. I’m the one holding it all together.’

She shrugged.

‘It was how I felt, that’s all. It needed to come out somehow or I would’ve burst. Most people are like that, John. They just have to let things out sometimes, whether it’s right or wrong. Not many people can keep it all secret inside like you do. And, Gela’s eyes, it would be lonely lonely if we did.’

We came to the place where all that time ago we’d come with Old Roger and seen those shining woollybucks, so high up in Dark that I’d thought at first they were a sky-boat from Earth. Then we went past it, and that was the end of being in Cold Path Valley and in Circle Valley where we were born. And for one moment I had the thought that perhaps I’d made a terrible mistake, perhaps we really did need to stay by Circle of Stones, perhaps Earth would come down from sky and Family would tell them that we’d all disappeared on Snowy Dark, and they’d return to Earth without us. But I pushed that thought out of my mind. There’s got to be a point where you choose your path and stick to it no matter what.

Walking on snow now, and hoping that our footwraps would stay dry and not fall apart, we followed Cold Path Stream until we came to the snowslug that the stream flows out of (not a big big snowslug like Dixon Snowslug over at Blue Mountains, which comes right down into the top of forest, but big enough, the height of four men or more). Then we tied ourselves together with ropes, and got our spears ready, pointed end down, to hold us steady, and we scrambled up the slippery buck path that led along one side of the snowslug.

Harry tried to run up it and slipped. People laughed at him, of course, because they badly needed a laugh, but he hated hated being laughed at.

‘I’m stopping here, then,’ he said. ‘You go on if you bloody want. Harry’s not going with you lot if you’re just going to laugh at him.’

He began to cry. He was the oldest one of us, the only one of us you could really say was a grownup, but he cried like a little kid. It was embarrassing and frustrating but people should have made more allowances. They should have remembered that he’d done for someone too that waking, he’d killed John Blueside. And if I had a job getting all that through my head, it must have been much worse for Harry. He had a job getting anything through his head at all.

Tina went back to calm him down and coax him up the path and Gerry came up to walk beside me. He wanted to talk about the killings too. Poor kid, he’d really had the worst of it out of the three of us. I didn’t know Dixon Blueside personally and Harry didn’t know John Blueside hardly at all. But Gerry had done for a boy from his own group who he’d grown up with since he was a baby. Now he kept going over and over it, and I had to keep telling him over and over that we had no choice and that they’d have gone ahead and killed Jeff if we hadn’t got to them in time. They would have killed Jeff too, they really would, and they’d have done a cruel thing to Tina that didn’t even have a name.

‘And if they’d got away with that,’ I kept telling Gerry, ‘then it would have been the rest of us who’d have been next, one by one, or all together. There were only twenty-one of us at Valley Neck, remember, and five hundred-plus in Old Family.’

‘Yes, but I used to play with Met,’ Gerry would say. ‘He once swapped me a bit of blackglass he found for a big lump of stumpcandy.’

Or: ‘We got that slinker with him once, remember? That slinker you let him kill, remember? That time Jeff said he wondered what it felt like to be a slinker. We were friends with Met then, weren’t we? We were friends in the same group.’

‘Yes, Gerry,’ I’d say, ‘but he broke our friendship when he killed Brownhorse and did Jeff over, and stood and laughed while Dixon tried to slip Tina there in forest.’

‘That’s right,’ Gerry would say. ‘It was him that broke the friendship.’

And he’d think about it for a bit, looking relieved, and then suddenly he’d frown and come up with something else.

‘He was with us that first time we came up here with Old Roger, remember? He was our friend back then.’

And we’d have to go round the whole thing again.

Meanwhile the lights of forest disappeared behind us and we were truly up in Dark. All we could see was what was lit up by the headlantern of the buckhorse Def, up ahead of us with Jeff riding on its back. Rocks, snow, ice loomed up out of the blackness in the area close around us, and then disappeared again back into blackness again at the other end of the line, behind the second buck, Whitehorse.

Jeff had named his buck Def after the sky-boat Defiant that brought Angela and Tommy and the Three Companions from Earth and actually it was a good choice of name. When I saw that group of woollybucks up on Dark all that time ago, I thought for moment I was seeing a sky-boat up there, and Def and Whitehorse were pretty much like sky-boats for us. They might not be taking us across Starry Swirl but they were taking us across Dark and we couldn’t have done it without them. I had thought before of maybe finding some way of lighting our way with lights made of hollow branches or torches made of dry wavyweed dipped in grease, like people sometimes used back in Family when they wanted a bit of extra light. But the bucks were doing much more for us than just lighting our way. They knew the way. It was woollybucks that made Cold Path — it was them that made it a path at all — and now they found a new path for us, even when it was hidden by snow.

And I had to admit it: that part of the plan wasn’t down to me at all, it was down to Jeff, that weird little clawfoot kid riding out in front, a young boy whose new hairs had hardly begun to grow.

We walked for the length of a whole waking and then for another waking straight after that, because there was nowhere to sleep, and the only way of not freezing was to keep on going. Once in a while we did have to stop to get out some smoked meat or seedcakes to eat, or for Janny or Clare to give their babies a feed, or to fix new footwraps for someone whose own footwraps had got wet or fallen apart. (I didn’t want anyone getting the black burn up here like old one-legged Jeffo had done.) But whenever we stopped, everyone started getting cold and scared, and Tina and me had to go up and down the line to nip off any talk about us being lost, or us dying, or us never getting anywhere. It was specially bad around Mehmet Batwing and Angie and Julie and Candy Blueside, who all walked together, and all fell silent whenever me or Tina came near.

‘So where are we then, John?’ Mehmet finally asked me.

‘We’re following the buck path, Mehmet. You know that. That’s what we all agreed to do, remember? Remember how I gave you a choice and you chose this?’

‘Yeah, but where’s it leading us? We’re just going up and up all the time.’

That was true. We were going up and it got colder the higher we went. And there was some weird thing too about the air because you had to work harder and harder to get enough of it. I couldn’t help thinking about some of the old stories about Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions, and how they said there was no air at all up in Starry Swirl, and that air was like water, it stayed near the ground. Maybe the air sat in Circle Valley like water in a giant pool, and the buck Def was leading us up to a place where the air stopped and we wouldn’t be able to breathe?

But then I thought that bucks themselves must need air. You could hear them breathing, you could see the steam around their mouths the same as you could see the steam around ours.

‘We’re going up, yes,’ I said to Mehmet, ‘but we are going up between two mountains, not over the top.’

‘How do you figure that out?’

‘Well, you can see the slope of the mountain on our left, can’t you? You can see it sloping up in the lanternlight. And you can hear the mountain on the right.’

I lifted the front of my headwrap to give him a demonstration.

‘Mehmet!’ I yelled.

‘Mehmet!’ came back an echo from high high above us and to the right. It was far far higher than I’d imagined it would be, my own voice bouncing down from a rock somewhere up there in total darkness that quite probably no human being and no living thing would ever ever reach.

And then there were some fainter echoes, and the sound of stones rattling down bare rock.

‘See what I mean?’ I said, pulling the front of my wrap down again, my beard already full of ice.

‘Well, what a lot you know about Snowy Dark,’ Mehmet said bitterly.

I couldn’t win with him. If I said something wrong, that proved I was a fool. If I said something right, that meant I was trying to be clever.

Then Suzie Fishcreek cried out that she felt funny and she thought her baby was on the way. It wasn’t true luckily, but we had to give her some attention and calm her down before we could get going again, and meanwhile everyone got colder and wearier and more scared, and everyone looked round for someone to blame for their feeling like this, and I guess pretty well all of them chose me.

And then, when we’d gone on for another four hours or so and even I was starting to think it was no good, we found we’d reached the top of a ridge. And there, below us, was something, something other than just more blackness and more snow. There was a source of light.

It wasn’t the other side of Snowy Dark, though. It was a single tree, growing up out of a hole in the snow down there that its hot trunk had melted, just like the first tree must have done, coming up to the cold surface of Eden from the hot caves of Underworld when everywhere in Eden was like Snowy Dark. It was a huge tree, with a long straight smooth trunk, high wide branches, and white lanterns that shone out over the snowy ground all around it. Clouds of steam, lit up by the lanterns, came out from the airholes in its sides in short rhythmic puffs, and streamed upwards round the trunk. We could even hear it faintly. Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph: that old familiar sound.

Everyone started to talk at once, and to hurry down the snowy slope towards it to get to the heat of its trunk. Harry rushed out in front and sank in snow right up to his neck. Lucy Batwing sank to her armpits, Dave Fishcreek to his waist. All the excited chattering and shouting turned to screams of fear and I had to yell to everyone to stop and wait and calm down while we threw a rope to each of the three of them and hauled them out.

‘Now keep following Def, alright?’ I yelled to everyone. ‘It knows the way across this stuff. We don’t.’

I just hoped that Def was planning to go down to the tree and not stay on top of the ridge, because I wasn’t sure how I would manage to persuade all these tired scared people that it was okay to walk back into Dark without first getting the warmth and light and comfort of a tree.

Luckily the horsebuck did go down to the tree. It led us along the ridge to the right a bit, round the edge of the soft snow, and then down into the valley of snow where the tree grew. And as we went towards the tree we began to see that it was even bigger, and the valley much deeper, than we had first thought, because it took much much longer to reach it than we’d expected. That tree was tall tall, fifteen twenty times the height of a man. But just as we were getting near enough to get a sense of the real size of it, another strange thing happened that threw us out again, so we once more doubted whether we were seeing it right.

A bat dropped down from sky and landed at the top of the tree. It stood there like bats do, gently fanning its wings, rubbing its face with its hands and staring down at us with its head tipped slightly over to one side like it was weighing us up, with steam from an airhole ten feet below billowing up around it. But it was much bigger than any bat we’d ever seen before. The biggest bats you ever found in forest were redbats and they were maybe a foot and a half from head to toe. But this one must have been the height of a child of fifteen wombs or so, and the distance between the tips of its pale wings must have been six feet at least. And it was a weird thing because, even though it had wings, and knees that bent backwards, and claws for feet, and a bat’s face that was all twists and wrinkles, and no nose, it felt to me almost like it was a person up there looking down at us.

And then we all saw something that the bat didn’t see. Out of an airhole came the head of a slinker. It swayed from side to side for a moment, as slinkers’ heads do when they’re looking for bats and birds and flutterbyes. And then, pressing itself up close to the trunk, it began to creep up the tree, not straight up, but slowly winding round and round the trunk towards the bat. Harry’s dick, it was a long long slinker. It must have been fifteen foot long at least, I reckon, with dozens of little clawed feet all along it.

But the bat was still rubbing its face and watching us. We’d all stopped to stare at it except only for Jeff on the back of Def, which kept plodding along regardless. And the bat seemed to notice the fact that we weren’t moving any more and to wonder why that was, because it stopped rubbing its face, and lifted its head, and half-lowered its hands, like we’d got it worried, or puzzled, or maybe just interested. But it still hadn’t seen the slinker, whose head by now was only a yard beneath it.

I don’t know why, but suddenly I yelled out.

‘Watch out!’ I shouted. ‘Watch out!’

The people behind me laughed. Who ever heard of someone yelling a warning to an animal as if it was a person like us? But all the same a few of the others began to yell too, ‘Watch out, bat, that slinker’s going to get you!’

And the bat stiffened, and looked around itself, and passed its right hand once over its face, and stretched its wings out a bit, but didn’t move. And the slinker crept closer.

‘Watch out!’ I yelled again.

And finally, in the last second that it had left, the bat seemed to get the message. It leapt up into the air just as the slinker struck. Those spiny slinker jaws snapped, only missing the bat by a couple of feet, but the bat was safe, soaring up into the freezing air.

The slinker’s head, sticking up above the top of the tree, swayed from side to side, watching the bat, then twisting round to look down at us. And then the creature went backwards down the tree, spiralling down as it had spiralled up, and disappeared back into its steaming airhole.

Meanwhile the bat climbed up and up, still looking down at us, until it was just a little black shadow on the bright face of Starry Swirl. Finally it stopped climbing, turned and flew off with big slow wingbeats away over Snowy Dark.

‘John! John!’ people were calling me.

‘John,’ muttered Tina, who’d come up from middle of the line, ‘get yourself together and wipe your eyes.’

I looked round. I saw their faces in the light of the treelanterns, some smiling, some laughing, some looking scared.

I put my hands quickly up to my face and wiped away my tears.