Dark Eden (29 page)

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.

John had made himself his own little camp up the slope of that rocky spur to left of Cold Path Neck. He’d got a couple of spears neatly propped up beside the mouth of a cave, one of them a real blackglass hunting spear that Redlantern had given him, plus wraps and skins and bags piled up neatly inside, and four stonebuck legs hanging on strings. He’d got a little fire going and had marked out a chessboard on the ground and – Gela’s tits! – when we got up to him he was calmly sitting there, playing chess against himself.

Tom’s dick, I thought, what a poser. He’d been alone all those wakings and as far as he’d known, he was going to stay that way. Surely
anyone
would feel relieved to have friendly visitors in that situation? And anyone else would have come to meet us. Anyone else, for that matter, would have thought that maybe we’d need a hand with Jeff. But no, not John. He’d thought it all out carefully and he’d chosen to wait and be found there like that, playing chess by himself as if he was resting after a good waking’s work.

Jeff stopped where he was, taking this all in, but Gerry disentangled himself from his little brother and went running straight up to John, giving him a big hug and kisses with tears running down his face. As for me, though I released myself from Jeff as well, I hung back, waiting for John, waiting to be given some attention. But it didn’t come. Considering all that we’d given up to be here with him, all that we’d quite possibly lost, John was so distant distant that it was just weird.

‘I thought I heard a funeral a couple of wakings ago,’ were his first words. ‘Is that right? Who was it that died,?’

Gerry looked round at me to see if I was going to answer, but I gave a little shrug to let him know that he should do it. John might want to make me do all the hard work, but I wasn’t about to let Gerry do the same thing.

‘It was old Stoop,’ said Gerry. ‘Old Stoop finally bought it. But …’ He looked back round at me like I had the power to take the sting out of the news somehow. ‘But it wasn’t just Stoop, John, it was … well, it was Bella too.’

At once John looked away from all three of us, out over Circle Valley. He kept his face still still, but his whole body tensed up tight.

‘Bella? You don’t mean
our
Bella? Not Bella Redlantern?’

‘Yes, ours,’ Gerry said, looking round at me yet again, hoping I’d help him out.

‘Did for herself, John,’ I said. ‘Hanged herself from a tree like Tommy did.’

‘Yes, but …’

He squatted down again by his chessboard and looked at the little carved pieces for a long time like he was considering his next move.

‘It wouldn’t have happened if I’d let her come with me, would it?’ he said after a time.

‘No, John,’ said Gerry, ‘but …’

‘It wouldn’t have happened if I’d not spoken out or destroyed Circle,’ he said. ‘She’d still be group leader then, wouldn’t she? Still leader, still best leader of the bunch.’

‘It wouldn’t have happened either, John,’ I said, ‘if she’d kept her hands off you. She might have been a good leader but no other leader in whole Family would ask a boy to slip with her that she’d helped to raise. Not even the worst of them.’

‘I didn’t slip with her,’ John began. ‘She just …’

But then he broke off.

‘They write something on a stone for her?’ he asked after a moment.

‘Yes. It said: “Bella Redlantern: group leader”,’ Gerry told him.

John nodded and swept his hand over his chessboard, ending the game he’d been playing against himself.

‘You three hungry? I did for a little stonebuck the other waking, and I’ve still got a couple of legs. I’ll get this fire going a bit and you can eat.’

So we ate, and then Gerry and Jeff went off to sleep in a cave about twenty yards off and John and I went into the cave where he’d been sleeping and kept his things. The walls and ceiling of all of these caves were covered in rocklanterns that glowed red, blue, green and yellow, so it was bright bright in there, brighter than outside in forest, and in all that light I saw his face in a different kind of way. I’d been intending to have a go at him for the way he treated me, but he looked so
weary
weary, and so worn down and wretched that I just didn’t have the heart for anything like that, though most probably I looked nearly as weary and worn down as he did.

He didn’t seem to have the same problem with having a go at
me
, though.

‘You shouldn’t have brought Jeff,’ he said. ‘How can we cross Dark with him?’

‘What do you mean I shouldn’t have
brought
Jeff? According to whose plan? According to what agreement?’

He looked up at me. He passed his hands over his face. I could see that we could go on and on with this or we could let it go, and I didn’t have the energy to go on and on. So, as a way of stopping things, I took his hand. Immediately he pulled me up against him and we were kissing and running our hands over each other, and ripping off each other’s bitswraps and pulling each other down onto the sleeping skins he’d got down there on the sandy floor. And then we were sticking our tongues and things into each other, and licking each other, and he was pushing into me like he’d die if he didn’t get in there quick enough, and I was pulling him up inside like he was still taking far too long. And we rolled over each other and pulled each other this way and that way into every possible angle and every possible way of tangling our bodies together we could think of. And it was
sort of
a way of getting close, but at the same time it was a way of keeping apart and not having to be close at all. And it was sort of a way of feeling we were alive and in the world, and at the same time a way of shutting the world away completely.

I didn’t want babies and he didn’t want them either, but he needed so badly to have someone he could be inside and not be alone, and I needed so badly to have someone fill up my emptiness, that we forgot all about that. He came inside me two times, the first time with a soft little groan and the second time with a big loud lonely cry, like a cry of pain. Pretty soon after that he was fast fast asleep. I guessed that he hadn’t slept much since he was chucked out of Family, however calm calm he’d pretended to be when we arrived, however cool cool.

Come to that I hadn’t slept much either, but I
still
couldn’t sleep now. I lay there for a long time looking up at the little shiny lumps of squishy rocklanterns on the roof of the cave with the little cave flutterbyes bumping and flapping around them, and I listened to John breathing and making little whimpering sounds in his sleep, and I wondered what would happen next.

Gela’s eyes, I thought. Family might have been bad – it was too small, it made me feel like I couldn’t breathe – but look at me now! I’d got myself into a world with just three other people in it, a world consisting of me and three boys: one of them cold and distant, one with no will of his own, and one who was just weird. You try to get away from something bad, and things just get worse and worse.