Dark Eden

31 Tina Spiketree

How could he let himself cry like that then, when everyone needed him to be strong? Michael’s names! So many other times, when he could have shown his feelings a bit more and it would have helped, he hadn’t. But now, in this moment when we really didn’t need it at all, he’d let himself go. And what had made him cry anyway? He’d been like someone watching a story, like the ones who cried when I did Gela’s Ring. And people never just cried because of a story, did they? They always cried because it reminded them of real things. It reminded them of things they’d lost or never had, or times when they’d been found wanting, or times when other people let them down. So what did the story of the bat and the slinker do for John? What did it remind him of? The bat was him, I suppose, lonely and cold and proud up there. But what was the slinker?

The tree stood in a hole it had melted in the ice. I guess the hole was about ten yards across and three yards deep. The sides of it were steeply sloping smooth ice, glowing greeny blue in the light of the tree. But in one place they’d been trampled down by woollybucks into a sort of ramp of rough snow that we could climb down. At the bottom there was mud and big stones and trampled buck dung and puddles of water that drained into a little stream that trickled down into a hole under the ice and came out Gela knows where. The tree in middle was huge huge when you saw it close up. It’d take three people to get their arms right round it, and the trunk went up and up and up so high that it had reached four five times the height of a man before it had even started to put out branches.

It wasn’t going to do our footwraps any good trampling round in that mud, and John and me tried to tell everyone to step on the dry bits, but no one cared about that. Everyone was rushing forward to get the heat of the tree and drink the water from the puddles and the little stream. The woollybucks were snuffling and croaking with excitement. The human beings were fighting and squabbling for the warm bits of the tree. The babies, who’d been completely quiet while we walked and walked, like they’d sunk down with us into a sort of dream, now both began to scream and yell.

Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, went the tree, meanwhile, puffing out steam from the six seven airholes up and down its trunk, just like it must have been doing for wombtimes and wombtimes when it was all alone and there was nothing around it but ice and snow and stars.

‘Hey, everyone!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t push and fight over the tree. We’ll take it in turns, alright?’

I picked out people to go and take a turn with their backs to the tree, and got ten of them in there shoulder to shoulder in a circle against its warm trunk. They squatted down on their heels, and closed their eyes, and the warmth of the tree and the steady pulse of it against their backs was more than enough, after that long long walk, to send most of them straight off to sleep. Gerry was one of the ones I picked for the first turn. He said he wanted to stay awake with John, but I told him he’d help John better if he got some rest. Another I picked out was sweet Dix.

‘You come and rest too, Tina,’ he said, ‘you come in beside me. You’re tired tired.’

But I told him no, though I gave him a little secret thankyou smile.

John got Jane and Mike to be first lookouts. Jane to watch the tree, Mike to walk round the top of the ice, watching the snowy slopes around us. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a slinker of that size might decide to come down the tree to grab a human being if couldn’t catch a bat. (It couldn’t be that fussy about what it ate up here, not unless there was some other source of food for it down in Underworld.) And if there were giant bats and giant slinkers up here, how could we know what else there might be up here too?

The others that couldn’t get their backs to the tree used the embers we’d been carrying with us from Cold Path Valley to start two small fires — there were fallen twigs and buckdung to use as fuel — and they huddled around those until it was their turn against the trunk, using the time to mend footwraps with the spare skins we’d brought with us. Mehmet Batwing, Angie Blueside and Dave Fishcreek grouped round one fire, Gela Brooklyn, Harry and me by the other. Bucks don’t like flames, so Jeff stayed with Def and Whitehorse as far from the fires as possible, cuddled up between them. John moved restlessly about the little space around the tree, sometimes going up onto the ice with Mike, sometimes coming over to me.

‘It’s going well so far,’ he said at one point, squatting down beside me, Gela and Harry. ‘It really wasn’t so hard at all, was it?’

Not everyone else was so pleased, though.

‘Nice new place John’s found for us,’ Mehmet Batwing said to Angie and Dave as he got up to drop a bit more dung onto his fire. ‘Bit small maybe, bit damp, but well worth leaving Circle Valley for, don’t you reckon? Only thing is, I wonder what we’re going to do for food?’

He glanced over towards us. I looked at John. He looked back at me, then shrugged, stood up and went up onto the ice, without saying anything at all.

‘He’s in a right state!’ said Mehmet. ‘Talking to bats, crying . . . and this is the bloke who’s leading us into the unknown!’

‘You lead us then, Mehmet,’ said Gela stoutly in her strong deep voice. ‘Go on, Mehmet, you lead us. You seem to know better than John what to do. So you take over. You make the decisions from now on. Go on. Tell us now what your next move is going to be.’

For a moment there, Mehmet looked afraid. Then he smiled.

‘Oh no, oh no. You don’t get me that way, Gela. John got us into this. He can get us out of it.’

‘Oh I see,’ Gela said, ‘so you do trust him to see us alright, do you?’

‘John? No. He’s lost it. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘But you’d still rather follow him than decide things for yourself, just like you did before back at Cold Path Valley when John gave you the choice. That doesn’t make sense, Mehmet, and you know it.’

‘Why are you poking your nose in, Gela?’ demanded Angie Blueside.

Harry, beside me, gave a sort of groan. He was rocking on his heels and breathing hard, like he did when he was getting wound up and was going to start yelling. I stood up to try and calm things.

Then John came to the edge of the ice above Mehmet, looking down at all of us in our muddy hole. I thought he was going to join in the argument, but he didn’t say a word about it. He didn’t even seem to notice that it was going on.

‘Take over from Mike, Mehmet,’ he simply said. ‘Mike’s footwraps are all wet. He needs to sort that out.’

Mehmet gave Angie a look, but he obeyed.

Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, went the tree, sending out its puffs of steam into the frozen air.

One of the babies woke up and began to cry.

Four five hours later, when the second lot of people had taken their turn round the tree and we’d all eaten a little bit of meat, we put on all our wraps again — we made ourselves back into weird, shapeless animals — and got back up on the ice again, Jeff in front on the back of Def, then John, then the whole line of us with Whitehorse at the back being led on a rope by Jane. I walked in middle with Dix.

Gela’s tits, it was so cold when we went back out there again. And our wraps were damp, and we were tired, and both the babies were screaming, and we had no idea where we were going. But Def seemed to know, plodding along ahead of us down the snowy valley. We looked back at the tree sometimes, longingly, and for a short time its light shone on the snow around us and made it sparkle and glitter. It was strange strange how that lonely tree in its muddy hole, a tree that we knew had a horrible giant slinker hiding inside it, could still look welcoming and safe compared to where we were going now.

But pretty soon the valley turned, and we lost the tree and its light, and we were in complete darkness — even Starry Swirl was covered up again by cloud — with only the light from the woollybucks’ heads to guide us. Big fluffy flakes of snow began to fall into that pool of light from the dark sky, crowding in on us in their hundreds and thousands, settling all over us and over the bucks and over those heavy bark snow-boats that we were still dragging along behind us.

When you are really tired and miserable, I’ve noticed, one thing that comes to help you is rhythm. If you can only get into a rhythm then you can keep going, because it’s like a kind of sleep. But if someone talks, or someone stops, or something happens, and the rhythm’s broken, that’s when it becomes hard to bear. And so we trudged and trudged, and we didn’t say anything for a long long time.

We’d been going for one two hours, the babies quiet, no one talking, our feet scrunch-scrunch-scrunching in the snow, when Dix suddenly spoke.

‘What’s that sound?’

Oh shut up, was what I thought. I don’t care about any bloody sound. I just want to concentrate on the scrunch, scrunch, scrunch of my cold cold feet. But other people along the line had heard it too, and stopped, and some were talking and some were telling each other to shhhhhh so we could hear. The bucks stopped too. They both stopped dead, listening.

It was like a faint cry — aaaaaaaah! — from some dark rocks we could just make out in the bucklight up to our left.

Def and Whitehorse both started to snuffle and groan.

‘The Shadow People! Lucy Lu was right, it must be the Shadow People,’ someone muttered.

And there was a sort of moan up and down the line.

‘No, it’s not,’ called out John, ‘it’s some kind of leopard. Get your spears ready. Hold onto the bucks.’

Gerry and Gela ran forward to hold onto the buck that Jeff was riding on. Suzie and Dave grabbed hold of Whitehorse at the back. Both animals were tugging and straining to get free, and giving little thin squeaks of fear: Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!

Aaaaaaaah! came the cry again, high and lonely.

We all stood in a row, straining to see the thing in the faint light.

Then suddenly Mehmet called out.

‘No! It’s behind us! Turn!’

Wham! It was on top of us. While we were looking the wrong way, a great white furry beast had been rushing silently towards us across the surface of the snow. Now it grabbed Whitehorse with its jaws and front claws, snatching the buck away from Suzie and Dave and dragging it and its light away across the snow, leaving a thin black trail of blood. Suzie and Dave tried to follow it, but off the path that Def had found for us the snow was soft and deep and they were in above their knees straight away. They couldn’t run over the top of snow like the leopard could.

So now the back end of the line no longer had its own light. Standing in the near darkness, we watched the snow leopard out there in the pool of light from Whitehorse’s head, ripping out Whitehorse’s throat. It was bigger than a forest leopard and covered with shaggy white fur like a woollybuck. Its four back feet were great flat things splayed out over the snow and, as well as two flat black eyes, it seemed to have a huge third eye on the top of its head, much bigger than the other two and kind of hollow, like a bowl. Seeing us watching it, it lifted its head from its meal and tipped it back slightly, like it was looking up at the mountainside. And then we heard a cry again — Aaaaaaaah! — and all of us looked round, because the cry didn’t seem to come from the leopard at all but from far away above and behind us.

Crunch! While our backs were turned, it bit the lantern off the top of the dead buck’s half-severed head, swallowed it, and so hid itself in darkness. And at that same moment, out at the front end of the line, Def gave a loud loud screech and pulled free of Gerry and Gela to belt off along the snowy valley with Jeff still clinging onto its back.

And that was the last of our light. It had been all we had left, that little pool of light moving through the falling snow, and now it was vanishing into the distance with the small shadow of Jeff’s back in middle of it, leaving us in total darkness.

Aaaaaaaah! went the snow leopard’s voice again, remote and dreamy and far away behind us. And in the same moment the leopard itself — not remote and dreamy at all but huge and strong with deadly claws and teeth — was upon us again. A forest leopard kills just once, but I suppose it makes sense for a snow leopard to kill again and again, quickly biting off the headlanterns of bucks and then coming back for more until they’ve got a stash of frozen meat to keep them going till the next herd comes by.

For a moment, we felt it among us. We heard a girl scream, and then, a few yards off, we heard her give a choking sound and fall silent, and we knew that the leopard had dragged her out of the line and had done for her in dark there as it had done for Whitehorse.

No one was sure who it was. Everyone was calling out for sisters and friends.

‘Tina, are you okay?’ went Dix, feeling for me with his hands.

‘Jane,’ I called out for my sister. ‘Jane, are you there?’

‘Lucy? Clare? Candy?’ other voices were calling, and other voices answering in the darkness, until someone called ‘Suzie!’ and no answer came from Suzie Fishcreek, that sharp clever girl, and we knew that if we could have seen anything at all out there it would have been her blood that would have been red on the snow, hers and the baby’s still inside her, and her lolling head hanging loose from her neck.

Then John’s voice came bellowing out over all the crying and wailing:

‘Group together, now! Group together with your spears pointing out! Do you want the thing to get us all one by one? Together in a group with your spears out! Now! Do it! Quick!’