Dark Eden (54 page)

‘This is Gela’s Family,’ David said. ‘We’re her children. That ring belongs to us.’

‘Gela says we must get it back,’ Lucy Lu confirmed, rolling back her eyes so you could only see the whites of them. ‘I hear her now. Gela says we must get it back. Get the ring and punish wicked wicked John, who says he speaks in her name when he doesn’t, he doesn’t.’ Her voice rose into a shriek. ‘How
dare
he?
He doesn’t! He doesn’t! He doesn’t!
’

She began to shake and tremble, like people do when they’re having a fit.

‘He must be killed. He must be killed like a slinker,’ she hissed. ‘Him and Gerry and Harry, all three of them. Kill them! Kill! Kill!’

Other people began to yell out the same thing, ‘Kill! Kill!’ and gradually it turned into a chant:

‘
Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
’

Jade reached out her hand to me and we held onto each other while the crowd around us shouted for the death of our own sons.

‘
Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!
’

Mehmet had a strange look on his face. Standing there with his auntie’s arm still around him, he looked half-pleased by the effect he had had, half-scared by what he had set off. He had done a terrible thing, coming down from Dark, and feeding our fear and hate to serve his own ends. But all the same, you couldn’t deny – even I couldn’t deny – that it was John who’d started it, John who’d killed another human being for the first time ever in Eden. And that was like the spark that lights a fire. There would be no end to the killing now, no end, not unless it killed us all.

I’d destroyed Circle of Stones. I’d got a bunch of people over Dark. I’d proved that human beings didn’t have to live forever in Circle Valley. I’d done all those hard hard things, but what was left for me?

Did I do all that, I thought, just to live quietly quietly in our own little family, hunting and scavenging and raising up kids?

Everyone
could hunt and build shelters and raise up kids, that was the thing, and some of the others could do all that a lot better than me. Dix was a better hunter. Harry was stronger. Gela was better at sorting out quarrels. Jeff was best at turning baby bucks into horses that would let us ride them. The one thing I was good at, the one special thing about me, which no one could do even
half
as well as me, was breaking out of something old and making something new. Was I going to accept that I’d never do any of that again, when I was only barely grown up, and that from now on other people were going to be better than me at doing everything?

Tom’s dick and Harry’s, no I wasn’t! I
needed
to make something else happen, and, what’s more,
they
needed me to do it too, even if they didn’t know it themselves, because otherwise they would get bored bored bored. That’s why people let me lead them, because I knew what they needed even before they did, and because I saved them from getting bored.

‘We should go further,’ I said to Tina, sitting at the end of a waking on the bank of L-pool. ‘We’ve been here for two wombs now, less than a waking’s walk away from bottom of Snowy Dark, with whole of Wide Forest out there waiting for us.’

‘We’re far enough from Family already, John,’ she said. ‘No one wants to go further than this from their friends and their mums and everyone.’

‘Okay, well, maybe we should go back to Family, then? Go back over and get some more of them to come and join us.’

‘John,’ Tina said, almost like she was explaining something to a kid. ‘You destroyed Circle, remember? You broke up Family. You did for Dixon Blueside. Okay, Family doesn’t know what happened exactly but they know something did, and they’re not going to forgive us for it, are they? David Redlantern isn’t, that’s for sure. Come on, you know that!’

‘Of course I know but … I reckon we could sneak up on Family without him knowing. See if more of them want to come and join us?’

Tina snorted. ‘Yeah, we could try, until it ended up being
us
with spears stuck through us and
our
heads cracked open. There’s a lot more of them than us, remember, John.’

I sat with my feet in the water, with tiny shining fishes nibbling at my toes. Three four yards out, beyond the trees that grew up out of the edge of the water, I could see pink oysters shining, and I thought of suggesting we dive for them like we’d done back at Deep Pool.

‘Or maybe David and his mates would decide
not
to do for all of us,’ Tina said. ‘Maybe they’d keep some of us girls, and do to each one of us what Dixon Blueside tried to do to me.’

She chucked a bit of stone out into the water.

‘Yeah,’ she added, glancing round at me, ‘and come to that, maybe they’d do to you what David first suggested they do. Remember? Tie you to a spiketree to burn, the way hunters cook meat.’

‘Yeah, well. It’s just something to think about, that’s all. Either going back to Circle Valley to get more of them to join us, or pushing forward ourselves. There’s no point in just sitting here.’

She didn’t even answer that. She pulled her feet out of the water and turned to face me. Her face was tired but she managed to smile.

‘So do you want a slip, then? Have a go at making another baby?’

I said yes, but, once she’d got my juice, all Tina wanted to do was go back to the shelters and sleep.

I couldn’t rest, though. I got my spears and my hunting bag and went out into forest alone. I’d often gone out on long trips, for two three four wakings. Sometimes Gerry came with me, sometimes Jeff came, riding on the back of Def, sometimes one two of the others, but often I went on my own. I’d scald my meat on a hot spiketree, and sleep between whitelantern roots with my spear ready in my hand.

Once, thirty forty wakings after we first came down into Wide Forest, I’d been been out on my own like that, a waking away from L-pool, when I woke up from a short sleep to hear a snuffling scrunching sound ahead of me. Thinking it would be bucks of some kind, I crept forward on my belly through starflowers to try and do for one of them. Buckmeat would be too heavy to carry, but I reckoned I could manage to take back a skin.

I was almost on top of the creatures before I saw them, and realized they weren’t bucks at all. They were tall as trees, standing on four legs that were each the height of a man, and black all over,
black
black like leopards. They had long long necks, and at the top of their necks, just below their big long heads, they had two strong arms with hands. Two of the animals were slowly feeding from the trees, pulling the branches towards their mouth feelers with their hands and biting off the shining lanternflowers. A third one had its neck bent down to the ground, and was pulling up starflowers in armfuls and feeding them to its slowly scrunching mouth.

I put an arrow on my bow, but I found I couldn’t bring myself to shoot. It seemed wrong somehow to try and do for something that had grown so big. And anyway, what could one person do with a thing that size? So I lowered my bow and, instead of shooting, I called out to the creatures.

‘Hey, big guys! Look at me!’

All three of them stopped. The one with its head down lifted it a bit, the two with their heads up lowered them, and the three of them together stared at me with their round, flat, flickering eyes, snuffling and blowing and chewing. One of them gave a belch – I could smell the sour stink from where I lay – and then all three of them just carried on eating as if I wasn’t there.

I found that they’d left a wide strip of darkness stretching away through forest where they’d been. It was twenty thirty yards wide, a wide dark strip with no lanterns or starflowers growing in it. Even flutterbyes left it alone. I followed it for half a waking, further away still from L-pool and all the others, thinking to myself that this was what it would be like on Earth to walk in a forest at Night.

But then, ahead and over to the right, I saw a new light shining through the trees, smooth and soft like the light of pools and streams. I knew straight away that it was that smooth watery light we’d seen from the ridge, and ran towards it.

Gela’s sweet heart, I came to the edge of the trees, and there it was: a huge shining pool, so big you couldn’t see the other side, and deep deep, with giant wavyweed shining down there, like another Wide Forest under the water.

I stood there for a long long time, looking down on it from a low cliff. Fishes swam through its branches like bats and birds. Little hills of water moved steadily across it until they toppled over on the shore. I couldn’t see the ends of it to the left or the right.

‘You can’t see the other side!’ I shouted to the others as soon as I got back. ‘You can’t see the ends of it! It’s like that C back on Earth. Worldpool, we should call it. It’s another whole world, like Forest, or Dark, or Underworld! Think of that! Maybe we should leave this place, move over there, make strong boats and go and see what’s on the other side!’

But Gela just laughed.

‘All that work you put into building that wide fence here, John, and now you want to leave it all when you haven’t even finished.’

‘And how would Earth find us when they came?’ asked Dix.

It had been two three wakings before I’d even managed to persuade any of them to come over to Worldpool and look.

Remembering that made me feel me feel angry and sad as I headed away from L-pool and back to Worldpool again. I must have been there twenty thirty times since my first visit.

Somehow I needed to get them all to move again. And at some point, somehow, we’d need to get back in contact with Family. Okay, Tina was right, we might end up being speared, or spiked up on a tree, but everyone had to die some time. People drowned, and got eaten by leopards, and died from infected slinker bites, and cancer, and sap-burns. Babies got born that couldn’t suck, and starved while their mothers’ breasts ached with milk.
Everyone
had to die, and death was usually nasty nasty, but there were still choices in life, it could still be better or worse.

I slashed out at a jewel bat swooping down in front of me.

‘Tom’s neck, I didn’t split up dozy Old Family just to make another dozy Family on the other side of Dark. I did it to make things
new
.’

But the only one of the others that was still trying to make new things happen was Jeff with his baby bucks.