Dark Eden

5 John Redlantern

When I woke up Gerry and Jeff were still both fast asleep, and so were all the rest of group. I chucked off the woollybuck skin I slept under and crawled outside. Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, went the old redlantern tree our shelter leaned against, as it pumped its sap down into hot hot Underworld, and pumped it up again. Hmmmmmmmmmm, went forest with all its thousands and thousands of shining trees that stretched all the way from Peckham Hills to Blue Mountains and from Rockies to Alps. No one else was awake in whole group, except for David who was on lookout, and he just grunted and walked off out of the clearing. I went to the food log in middle of our group, near the glowing embers of the fire, took the flat stone off the top of it and felt inside for a handful of dried starflowers and a bone to chew on. Aaaah! Aaaah!, went a starbird off in forest.

Over on Blueside, Starflower group were just starting to wake up. Meanwhile London, which was just inside of those two groups, were coming in from forest and getting their dinner on the go. Soon the smoky smell of roasting stonebuck was drifting through whole of Family.

I pulled a scrap of green fat off the woollybuck bone with my teeth and began to chew it. The air was warmer since last waking. The dip was ending. Cloud was coming back over sky like a big dark skin and only a little bit of Starry Swirl could still be clearly seen, way over by Alps. I looked round at our group’s little space among our redlantern and whitelantern trees, our circle of twenty little shelters made of bark laid over branches leaning against tree trunks. I looked at the glowing embers that we never let go out, the flutterbyes flipping and flapping around the lanternflowers, and at Old Roger snuffling and snoring on that skin he slept on out in the open because he didn’t believe in shelters. There were bones stacked in piles ready to be made into tools, and a little heap of blackglass (which Oldest called obsijan), and spears and axes and piles of logs and twigs for the fire. Over to one side was our old group boat that we sometimes used for fishing on Long Pool and Great Pool but we couldn’t use just now because the skins had begun to come off from one end of it and needed gluing on again. It all seemed small and boring after what I’d seen by the light of the woollybucks’ headlanterns. Whole Family seemed small and dreary and dull.

Redlantern grownups had decided I could have a no-work waking as a treat for doing for the leopard. The rest of the newhairs and men would go out foraging as usual but I could have whole waking to do whatever I wanted. What would I do with the time? I wondered as I chewed my breakfast off that bone. I wanted to go straight out into forest again and back to the edge of Dark. Or maybe down towards Exit Falls, that narrow gap between Blue Mountains and Rockies where Main River poured down all the water from all the streams in Circle Valley into whatever lay below. I was sort of interested in looking at it, because it was the only way out of Circle Valley apart from Snowy Dark. People of Old Roger’s age could just remember when it had been wider there, so that you could have climbed down from Circle Valley and found out for yourself what was below it. But no one did when they had the chance, and then there was a big rockfall. A great flat slab came sliding down on Rockieside of it, and now tons of water poured down between two sheer cliffs, and it wasn’t an exit at all.

But I’d only got one waking, and that wasn’t long enough to get to Exit Falls or anywhere else at the edge of the valley. And anyway I was sore sore and bruised in my chest from when the spear butt had hit me, so in the end I just stayed inside Family Fence.

I walked through Spiketree and over to Batwing. Batwing group woke before Redlantern and they were already on the go out there around their newly fallen tree, whacking at branches with blackglass axes. Glittery flutterbyes were flitting and flapping around the opening of the stump.

‘Hey John,’ called that strange smart boy Mehmet Batwing, with his thin face and his pointy beard, pausing with an axe in his hand. ‘Off to do for another leopard, eh?’

‘Think I’ll take a rest from leopard-killing for one two wakings, Mehmet. Leave a couple of them for the likes of you.’

‘Good candy?’ I asked a little clawfoot kid that was hanging round there.

He took a stick and banged it on the side of the stump to drive the flutterbyes away. Off they flittered, flashing their glittery wings.

‘Have a bit,’ he said, pleased to have a chance to give something to the big boy that did for the leopard, ‘see for yourself.’

I peered down into the stump. Its pipes had emptied themselves of sap in one last convulsion, and the soft pipeflesh had shrivelled up like it does when the sap has gone, so now there was nothing inside the hollow trunk but air, hot, moist, sickly-sweet air coming up from far below. I could feel the heat of it on my face. I picked up a small stone and dropped it in, putting my ear to the opening to hear it rattling down and down and down into the fiery caves of Underworld, where all life began: all life except our own.

‘Don’t you want any stumpcandy?’ the kid asked, banging the stump again to stop the flutterbyes from settling back down on it.

I looked back in. There were a few crystals of sugar forming inside, already smeared with flutterbye droppings and bat dung with bits of flutterbye wing in it. It wasn’t much of a candyfeast, not like you get with an old tree that’s fallen of its own accord. But I picked off a couple of crystals, wiped off the batcrap on my waistwrap and stuck them in my mouth to suck.

A wailing started up in one of the shelters. It was that little kid who’d got burnt when the sap spouted up. He’d been quiet for a little while — I supposed a time comes when you’re so exhausted that even pain doesn’t keep you awake — but now he was off again and I could feel whole Batwing group wincing around me. They were all worn out by it. They’d had enough. The little clawfoot kid beat his stick forlornly on the stump. The grownups and newhairs lowered their axes, looked up wearily, and then began hacking away even harder at the tree. The more noise they made, the less they’d have to hear that kid’s screams of pain.

Me, though, I didn’t have to be in Batwing at all, so I wandered off. But that screaming kid, it didn’t matter where in Family I was, I could still hear him. And even way over Blueside, as far away as you could get from Batwing and still be in Family, people were talking about it:

‘Boy called Paul, apparently, twelve wombs or so, burnt all down one side of his face and his chest. Sticky redlantern sap all over the place and those dumb Batwings didn’t even have a pot of water on hand to douse him down. You should always have cold water ready when you take down a hot tree.’

‘Yes, and wear skins all over, and keep kids out of harm’s way.’

‘Paul his name is. Nasty sap-burn. Batwings getting a bit careless lately, I reckon, a bit cocky and careless. They had something like that coming to them for a while, I’m sorry to say. Not that it was the kid’s fault of course. I blame the grownups.’

‘Tree coming down and no one keeping an eye on the kids! I ask you. But that’s Batwing for you, isn’t it? Not that the kid deserved it. Paul his name was, apparently.’

That was what Family was like. You couldn’t get away from other people’s feelings and thoughts about everything that happened. Gela’s tits, every bloody little thing that happened, in no time everyone in Family was talking talking about it and poring over it and prodding it and poking at it and clucking their tongues over it. Everyone was deciding who to give credit to and who to feel sorry for and who to blame, like these three boring questions were the only ones there were. I wished I’d just gone out bloody scavenging with all the rest and not even taken a no-work. At least then I would have been outside Family.

Still, I made the best of it. I got given some roasted birds stuffed with candy by the youngmums over in Blueside in exchange for telling them about the leopard. I got some dried fruits to chew in Brooklyn. I had a swim in Greatpool, and some little kids came and showed me their little toy boats made of dry fruit skins greased with buckfat.

In London everyone was in their shelters in mid-sleep, except for just the lookout, a big slow boy called Pete about a womb older than me, who was leaning on a bark rest against a tree stump and chewing the end of a twig from a spiketree.

‘Alright there, John?’

‘Not bad.’

‘Heard you did for a leopard, eh?’

‘Yes, up Cold Path way.’

‘Long way off then. You can’t get much further than that.’

‘No.’

‘Only maybe Exit Falls. That’s further, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s nearer, but of course there’s also whatever’s below Falls, as well. And whatever’s across Dark.’

‘Below Falls? I’ve never heard of that. Are you sure . . . ?’

Then a slow smile spread over his face.

‘Below Falls! Michael’s names, you’re winding me up aren’t you, you slinker? There’s no such place as Below Falls, is there? You had me for a minute there.’

‘Well, of course there’s something below it, Pete. Where do you think the water goes? You could even climb down next to it once, until that big slab slid down on Rockieside, and Fall Pool filled up.’

Pete shuddered.

‘Who’d want to climb down? There might be anything there. And we’ve got everything we need right here in Circle Valley.’

A woman in one of the shelters heard us speaking and stuck her head out, a plump big-breasted grownup woman two three times my age with, I guessed, five six kids sleeping there in the shelter with her.

‘You’re John, aren’t you? The boy that did for the leopard out there?’

Out she came smiling. She didn’t have her wrap on.

‘I’m Martha,’ she said. ‘Would you like a little slide, my dear?’

Pete looked away politely and began to hum.

‘We could go over there in the starflowers,’ Martha said, pointing to a big bright clump growing over beside the stream.

A lot of women thought if you did a slip with a young guy who was fit and healthy, it would stop you having batface babies, or clawfeet. Us young guys didn’t argue.

‘Yeah, okay,’ I said.

We went over to the clump of starflowers and she knelt down so I could give it to her from behind. This wasn’t about pleasure for her. She didn’t move or moan, only gave the odd tiny little sigh for the sake of politeness. And we could hear that kid over in Batwing all the while we did it, wailing and crying in pain.

‘Kid called Paul, apparently,’ she said while I was still pushing in and out of her. ‘Nasty sap-burn when they got down that big old redlantern tree.’

She considered this while I kept on humping away behind her.

‘Wouldn’t happen here in London. We keep our kids under control. No way would a London kid be let near a tree that was about to come down. And we’d always have a pot of water ready just in case as well.’

‘Keep the littles under control, eh? It’s got to be the . . .’ I muttered but then I came in her with a shudder, and she rolled over on her back among the flowers, lifting her knees and cupping her hand over herself to keep the juice that she hoped would make her another well-behaved London kid with straight lips and unclenched feet to live its life out in that particular little trampled clearing called London, among those particular bark shelters and that particular little group of people, who liked to think there was something different about them from everyone else in Family.

And there were differences, I thought, kneeling above her but looking away across Family towards Batwing on the far side, and thinking about the groups between here and there. For example, the names. Blueside just means the group that’s furthest over Blueway, the side nearest Blue Mountains, Redlantern just means we’ve got a big bunch of Redlantern trees (which we’re slowly cutting down and replacing by chucking whitelantern seeds down the stumps). But London and Brooklyn were proud proud of the fact that their names came from across Starry Swirl, from Earth. The Earth folk had a big big Family, with many many groups in it. Angela’s group was called London and the people there had black faces like Angela did. Tommy’s group was called Brooklyn, though some people called them the Juice. (As for the Three Companions, who took Defiant back across Starry Swirl, leaving Tommy and Angela in Eden, we don’t know the group names of Dixon and Michael, but they say Mehmet’s group was called Turkish, even though his last name was Haribey. I don’t why.)

So, yes, London were different from Blueside, Blueside were different from Batwing, Batwing were different from Redlantern. Each Family group woke at a different time, slept at a different time, had its own particular way of doing things and deciding things, its own little things they were proud of about themselves (like London and Brooklyn being the names of groups on Earth), its own particular combination of strong people and weak people, kind people and selfish people, batfaces and clawfeet. But the differences were so small, I thought, and so dull dull dull. Really we were all alike. In fact, we were so on top of one another, so in each others’ lives and in each others’ heads, we were hardly separate from one another at all. Like Oldest always banged on and on about, we were all one. It was really true: one Family, all together, all cousins, all from one single womb and one single dick.

‘I’ve got some milk if you want some,’ Martha said, cupping her hands under her breasts.

‘Yeah, okay,’ I said, and I bent down while she held one of them for me to kneel and suck the warm sweet stuff.

‘That’s better,’ she said after a bit. ‘They were beginning to hurt.’

She stroked my hair briefly, without much interest.

‘Had a new baby die on me,’ she explained. ‘Twenty thirty sleeps ago. Little batface baby. Really bad batface, poor little thing. His little face was practically split open from top to bottom, and he couldn’t suck, no matter how hard I tried to help him. In the end he just . . .’

I felt her shaking as she began to cry. That was the reason she’d been awake. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t think of anything else but the dead baby. That was what it was like for mums when a baby died. They couldn’t think of anything except the gap where the baby had been. Martha London didn’t know how to fill up the time. She didn’t know how to let the baby go.

‘Ten kids I’ve had in all,’ she said. ‘All but two of them were batfaces. And, well, you love them anyway, but . . .’

She released the breast she was holding and scooped up the other one for me.

‘Only three of my kids are still alive,’ she said. ‘Three girls. All the rest died. All my boys died. Last three all died as babies.’

I sat up.

‘Well, maybe your luck will turn now.’

She nodded, lying there under the flickering starflowers, her face all smeary with tears. The flowers were so bright that their stems made little lines and shadows, always moving and changing, all over her body. Her hand was still cupped between her legs to hold in my lucky juice.

‘If I have another boy a wombtime from now,’ she said, ‘I’ll call him after you.’

Those slips with oldmums were funny things. When you thought about it later, you got hard all over again and you remembered your dick going in and out of her, and you wanted to do it some more. And when you heard other boys boasting to each other about the grownup women that had asked them for a slide, you worried that maybe they were getting more of it than you, or maybe that they were getting something better than you’d had. And the batface boys who oldmums never wanted to slip with, they listened to rest of us and thought to themselves, It’s not fair. Why can’t that happen to me? (But they didn’t say it, because they knew us smoothfaces would just laugh at them and say, ‘It’s because you’re ugly, Einstein. Ugly ugly. The clue’s in the name. It’s because you’ve got a face like a bloody bat.’)

But straight afterwards, you felt sort of empty, like the spark had been taken out of you along with your juice, and nothing meant anything at all. That was what it actually felt like afterwards, but that feeling didn’t last long, and seeing as that part of it wasn’t fun to think about or talk about, you soon pushed it out of your mind, you forgot about it till next time, and no one ever spoke about it at all.

I didn’t want to walk through Circle Clearing and maybe get tangled up with bloody Oldest, so I walked along by Dixon Stream where it flows down towards Stream’s Join and the log bridge. The only trouble with going that way was there was a place down along the stream where that one-legged London bloke Jeffo made boats, and he was boring boring and hard to get away from.

‘Hey! Who’s that? Aren’t you that John Redlantern that did for that leopard?’

Damn. I’d hoped he’d be out on the water in one of his boats but he wasn’t. He was sitting on a bit of log below a whitelantern tree, working on a new one. He was a big man of about sixty wombtimes with a soft weak face, no teeth, and that one leg of his missing below the knee. He’d got a three-yard length of split trunk from a redlantern tree that he was working on. He’d already scraped the dried old tubes out of it, cut the ends straight with a blackglass saw and smoothed off them off with roughstone. He’d got a special fire place for boiling down redlantern sap into glue. There was a deep hole in middle full up with a hot sticky sludge of boiled sap, and round it a circular trench filled with redhot embers. He was scooping the sludge out with a bark spoon and smearing it onto the pieces of buckskin he’d stretched tight over the open ends of the log. The skins had dried hard hard from when he first glued them on, and now he was spreading more glue all over them, ready to stick on another layer of skins.

‘How long you’ve been working on that one, Jeffo?’

‘Oh twenty wakings at least, I’d say.’

‘How many boats you reckon you’ve made?’

‘Oh thirty, forty. They don’t last that long, you know, boats. It doesn’t matter how much glue you use, sooner or later the ends come off and then down they go and it’s, “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you glue the ends back on this one?”. “No I can’t,” I tell them. “You’ll need new soft skins that can be stretched, and if the wood’s soaked at the ends at all, you’ll need to start again with a new log.” And then of course it’s “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you make us a new one then?”’

‘Don’t you get bored?’

‘Well, if I do, I can go fishing in my own boat. That’s like going for a walk for me, going out on my boat. Move as fast on the water as you can with your legs on the ground, I can. Faster, in fact. No one beats old Jeffo in a boat. And anyway I like making boats. It’s good work. Tommy and Gela themselves taught it to us. Make boats, they said, and a waking will come some time when you’ll figure out how to build a boat like the one that brought us here with the Three Companions. And then you’ll get back to Earth.’

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s,’ I thought, that’s the trouble with us! That’s what’s wrong with the way we are. We live as if Eden wasn’t where we really lived at all but just a camp like hunters make when they stay out in forest for a few wakings. We’re only waiting here to go back to where we really belong.

‘Don’t you think we’d need something a bit more than an old tree-trunk with skins glued onto it, Jeffo, to get to Earth?’ was what I said aloud. ‘I mean, think about it. Things that fly aren’t heavy like your boats, are they? Bats and flutterbyes and birds, they hardly weigh a thing. But your boats take two or three people just to carry them down to the water.’

‘Do you think the Landing Veekle was light like a flutterbye? It was as big as Circle of Stones, remember,’ Jeffo snorted. ‘And it was made of metal that’s heavy like stone. Nah, they found a way to make heavy things fly, like heavy things can float on water.’

I guessed it was true. Somehow the Earth people must have found a way of making heavy things fly. But how? Well, I had no more idea than Jeffo or anyone else. I was no different from the rest. We knew so little, and Earth knew so so much. We might as well be blind for all we understood about things. No wonder we longed for Earth. No wonder we pined and pined for that waking when Earth would finally come. No wonder old Jeffo told himself he’d make a sky-boat one waking out of a bloody old log so we wouldn’t even have to wait for them. No wonder Lucy Lu with her big weepy eyes could get blackglass and skins from all over Family with her stories about how our own shadows would fly off to bright bright Earth when our heavy old bodies had died.

‘You got lost on Snowy Dark once, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘We were up the edge there two wakings back, up on Cold Path, and Old Roger told the story of it. But what I don’t get about it is how did you get lost?’

He looked away and I thought at first he was going to refuse to answer me.

‘Bloody woollybucks led me on, didn’t they?’ he said after a bit. ‘I kept following their headlanterns and then when I lost them, there was nothing left to see at all. I mean nothing. Couldn’t even see my own hand if I held it up in front of my face. Tom’s neck, it was cold cold. There was nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing at all but coldness. It’s an evil place up there, boy. They say all Eden was like that until life came up from Underworld and we came down from sky. Just darkness and ice and rock everywhere. All I can say is if that really is so then it doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s bad bad.’

He shook his head.

‘Anyway I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know why I couldn’t hear the others yelling for me. Of course I yelled myself, but all I could hear was the echoes coming back from high up there above me. Echoes, and echoes of echoes, and echoes of echoes of echoes, so I could tell there was more and more of it up there, more ice and rock, colder and higher, and . . . and . . .’

Ugh. He sounded like he might start crying like a kid if he carried on like that, so I butted in quickly.

‘So how could we ever hope to survive in a boat that went all the way up to Starry Swirl, Jeffo, if it’s so cold and dark even just up above the edge of forest? Think how cold it must be right up out there among the stars.’

He looked at me resentfully.

‘They had a way, didn’t they? Tommy and Angela and the Companions, they had a way. They knew stuff that we don’t know about, like metal and plastic and lecky . . .’ he stumbled on the word, ‘and lecky-tricktity. They knew how to fly and they knew how to keep warm. If we keep on building boats, we’ll find a way too.’

So he said, but meanwhile he was angrily smearing glue onto an animal skin at the end of a log, exactly as he’d done with every other boat he’d ever made. He wasn’t trying anything new, and he never had done, not once in all those thirty forty boats he’d made.

‘How did they get your leg off?’ I asked.

‘Sawed it off with a blackglass knife, the bastards. Didn’t Roger tell you that? You ask a lot of questions, young man, I must say. A lot of rude questions. I don’t want to talk about it, alright? It’s not a thing I like remembering. Would you, if you were me? You get on now, John, and leave me to finish this boat off in peace.’

Smiling a little bit to myself for my cleverness in getting away, I made my way back through Brooklyn and Spiketree and finally back to Redlantern, where the hunters and scavengers were just coming back from forest with a chewy old starbird and a couple of bags of fruit. Not enough, nothing like enough for forty-odd people. If we hadn’t still had three legs of that woollybuck left over, we’d have all been hungry that sleep.