Dark Eden (41 page)

‘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.’