Dark Eden (45 page)

It was my brother, of course, my clever brother. He hadn’t got lost at all!

‘I can see you now,’ he called down, while Def picked a way down the slope towards us. ‘I can just barely see you. Don’t go on any further, whatever you do.’

His voice echoed from rocks over the far side of the valley. We all strained to hear him.

‘The snowslug is all broken up down there,’ he called down. ‘Don’t go on that way. This is the way. Up here.’

He came weaving and zigzagging down the snowy slope.

‘There’s trees just over the far side of the ridge, and streams and lots of bucks. You’re walking right past them and you don’t know it.’

And some people started to laugh, and some to cry, and everybody to talk and talk.

‘Wait there, and I’ll come down to you,’ Jeff called.

‘Harry’s dick, Jeff,’ John said, as Jeff came up close, ‘are we glad
glad
to see you, mate. I thought we’d had it there, I must say. I thought we’d finally run out of luck.’

Jeff laughed.

‘Well, you haven’t. I’ve got a safe place to take you and it’s not far away. I’d have come sooner, but Def was too scared of the leopard and he refused to turn back. I had to let him rest and calm down and get a bit of sleep, and I needed to calm myself down too so that he’d feel safe with me, and let me lead him.’

I’d never seen Jeff like that. I’d always known he was smart smart, way more smart than me, but all the same he was just my little clawfoot brother, who stayed on the outside of everything and sometimes said weird things. But right now he was a leader, almost like John. He was barely even a newhair, but he’d become like a grownup man. And I saw that it wasn’t just his cleverness that was special about him, and not just those sharp sharp eyes of his that could see things other people missed: it was also that he was strong. He was
strong
strong, far far stronger than I’d ever be, and in a way even stronger than John.

‘Jeff!’ I yelled, rushing towards him.

I’d forgotten the ropes that still tied me, on one side to Janny Redlantern, on the other to Martha London. As I pulled out of the line, I fell. And then they fell, and then whole line fell toppling over into the snow in front of my brother on his horse.

Jeff laughed.

‘We are here,’ he said. ‘We really are here!’

We followed Jeff to the top of the ridge and looked down into a little forest at the bottom of a bowl. It was tiny tiny compared to Circle Valley forest, and it didn’t spread up the slopes like forest did back there. All the trees were down at the bottom, except for a few giant trees that stuck up out of the snow on their own, breathing out puffs of steam, and making little pools of light here and there on the steep snowy slopes around the little valley.

People cheered when they saw the lights of trees down there, and a few people shouted out thanks to Jeff, but we were too weary weary, and too sad, to talk much on the way down, and we stopped pretty much as soon as we were past the outside edge of forest. Tom’s neck, it was good to hear the sound of trees all round us and to have light to see by, but those tall straight trunks, and the lanterns, far out of our reach, high high above our heads, gave the place a lonely feeling. And there was no coloured light, no red or blue – all the lanterns were snow white or pale greeny-yellow – and it wasn’t warm in Tall Tree Valley. Even down at valley bottom where there were trees with warm trunks, you still needed to wear bodywraps.

But still, there was dry ground to stand on, and it wasn’t so cold that you had to cover up your head, so we pulled the wet wraps off our feet and heads, and we had faces again, and not just buckskin masks. People looked at each other and saw friends they’d known all their lives, and, like children do when they see a friendly face again after they’ve been lost on their own, most of them started to cry. Angie cried. Gerry cried. Tina cried. Big strong Gela Brooklyn cried. Even Mehmet cried. Harry bawled like a baby in his big man’s voice.

‘Harry’s sad, Harry’s sad sad,’ he sobbed, while Tina cuddled him to try and keep him calm.

And in middle of all of this, Dave and Johnny Fishcreek, in each other’s arms, began to wail out their grief for their sister Suzie, who’d been torn apart by that white leopard up on Dark.

The only ones I noticed that weren’t crying were Clare and Janny, who had to feed their babies, and Jeff, who was lifting the bags off the back of his precious Def and smoothing down its fur.

I wasn’t crying either. I felt sort of numb. I sat on a stone and rubbed my feet.

‘At least now there’ll be a story to tell,’ I said to myself.

If we’d all died up there on Dark, then the only story about us that would remain would be the story they’d tell about us back in Family, and what kind of story would that be? It’d be a story about a bunch of stupid kids who wouldn’t listen to Council and Oldest and their own mums, and walked away from Family and were never heard of again. And that would have been where it ended, like the story of the Three Companions ended when they said goodbye to Tommy and Angela. But now that wasn’t how it was going to be. It hadn’t looked that way for a bit, but our story was still going on.

It wasn’t the story I’d been expecting, though, because when we came down into Tall Tree Valley, it wasn’t me that was leading everyone, it was Jeff. That was how things had turned out, and that was how the story would be told in the future. People whose parents and grandparents weren’t yet even born would hear how the little clawfoot boy on his shining buckhorse came over the ridge to save his friends. They’d laugh and cheer when, up on some silly pretend mountainside, someone appeared on a pretend buck, playing the part of Jeff.

When Jeff had smoothed down Def’s fur, he led it to the stream where it could graze, and then hobbled back to be among the others.

‘Oh Jeff, Jeff, you did
brilliant
brilliant!’ one after another of them told him. Even the Fishcreek brothers thanked him through their tears.

‘Thankyou thankyou, Jeff! We’d all have died up there like Suzie did, if you hadn’t come.’

I’d lost something, and Jeff had gained something, that was obvious. They’d all heard me get scared. They’d all heard me admit that I’d taken the wrong direction. They’d all been there in Dark where I’d led them, and known that I had no idea where to take them next. Jeff had come and saved them.

And now of course they were all over him, praising him, kissing him, hugging him, shaking his hand, patting his back. He’d probably never had so much attention before in his life, but he looked like he wasn’t sure he really liked it. I think maybe he felt a bit like I’d done that time we brought the dead leopard back into Family through Batwing gate.

It was quite some time before anyone thought about me, sitting there by myself on my stone, watching them and rubbing my feet. But after a bit, Gela Brooklyn looked over and noticed me, and she came over and gave me a hug.

‘You did good good too, John, to get everything together,’ she said. ‘You worked hard hard for a long time back at Valley Neck, when none of the rest of us really believed we’d ever have to come up here.’

Gela was one of those people who seem like grownups even when they’re little kids, and now she made me feel like a kid who a grownup’s being kind to.

‘
And
you figured out how to drive away the leopard too,’ she said.

Tina saw Gela talking to me, and she came over and gave me a hug too, though it was a hug just like Gela’s, like the hug people give each other when they are just friends or groupmates.

More of them came to talk to me after that. Dix shook my hand. Jane kissed me. Silly Martha London threw her arms round me and sobbed and sobbed. But some of them stayed away. Mehmet didn’t come near me, and nor did Dave and Johnny Fishcreek, whose sister had died because of my plan, nor Angie Blueside, whose cousin would never have been clubbed to death by Harry if I hadn’t split Family in two, nor her groupmates Julie and Candy.

Even the ones who did talk to me soon walked away again, all except for Gerry, who squatted down and stayed by my side. And even with him things were different now. He knew I’d lost something too, but he was letting me know he’d stand by me anyway. He was always a kind boy, but he’d never had to show
me
that sort of kindness before, except maybe that time when I came out of Bella’s shelter, and most of Redlantern looked the other way.

‘I know you feel bad bad about what happened to Suzie and about us getting lost,’ he said, ‘but you did get us up on Dark. You got us sorted back at Valley Neck. You made sure we got all the stuff together.’

‘Yes, I did get us up on Dark, but it was your little brother that got us down.’

And even while I was saying that to Gerry, half my mind was already thinking and thinking about how I should deal with Jeff.

Weird clever Jeff: I’d known him since he was born, and me and him and Gerry had shared a sleeping shelter back in Redlantern for wombs and wombs. He’d never been a trouble to me (at least not apart from his clawfeet) but now he suddenly was. I was tired tired of solving problems, but he’d become yet another problem that I had to figure out how to fix.

I don’t mean I thought Jeff would try to take over from me. He wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t even be interested in playing the part I played. But people were going to listen to him more from now on, and they might quite easily decide that what he said was worth more than what I said. And that wouldn’t just be a problem for me, it would be a problem for everyone, because they needed me to bring things together and make things happen, and to do that I needed them to go on believing in me.

But how could I get that back? Apart from having saved us all, Jeff had another advantage over me, which actually came from the fact that he wasn’t interested in doing what I did. To do my job, you had to wear a mask and hide your feelings, you had to choose carefully what you said and what you kept inside. People could see that, and it made them wonder what it was that you were holding back. But Jeff could just be himself, and no one would ever doubt that what he said was what he really meant. So not only had he saved them all after I’d got them lost, but he’d always seemed easier to know, and gentler, and more genuine than me. Tom’s dick, how could I compete against
that
?

I couldn’t fight him, that was for sure. I couldn’t push him away. I couldn’t put him down. I couldn’t turn the others against him.