Dark Eden (57 page)

Yes, we
could
be safe, I thought, but you won’t like that, John. You’ll get bored again. You’ll do something to make things more exciting, just as you’ve just done by going up to Tall Tree Valley and stirring up an ant’s nest, just like we feared would happen.

But I didn’t say that then. We needed to move. Tom’s dick, I did
not
want to be around when David Redlantern and his lot came over Dark, and I certainly didn’t want my little ones to be there to see what they did to us. We needed to move. And of course I had to admit John was good at getting things moving.

We started to pack stuff up, sort things out, figure out just how much we could carry on our backs or load onto the seven woollybucks we had now managed to turn into horses. It wasn’t all that much we could take with us when it came to it, not when Jeff had to ride on one buck, and we had twelve little ones to bring along with us, and we needed to take embers on a bark so we could make fires again without spending whole wakings trying to get a spark from twigs. Within a waking we had loaded up everything we could carry and were ready to leave our camp at L-Pool behind us, that big empty space inside John’s fence that we’d hardly begun to fill up.

‘The annoying thing is,’ said Gela, ‘that when David’s lot do come over the top they’ll find this place and make it their own. We’ve done all the work for them.’

It was probably true. From what John and Gerry and Jeff had heard up at Tall Tree, Family had been happy to steal all the ideas that John and the rest of us came up with, even though they condemned us for having them in the first place: they were turning bucks into horses over there now; they were making footwraps and headwraps and bodywraps. Why wouldn’t they start their own camp in Wide Forest?

But who cared, eh? We’d be long gone when they arrived here.

Hunting and scavenging as we went along, we moved slowly through forest. The trees went
hmmmmmmm
all around us. Starbirds called to each other. Two three times we heard a leopard singing in the distance. Once we passed two of those huge slow animals that John had named Nightmakers, and three four times we crossed the wide dark paths they made through forest as they slowly munched up every shining flower on the trees and the ground. You could tell how old the paths were by the number of flowers that had grown back.

We went slow slow. There was a lot to carry, including all the little kids except for Fox and Flower, who’d walk a little way, and then ride up together on a buck, and then walk a little more.

About three four hours into the second waking, I went up to the front with my little boy Peter riding on my back in a buckskin sling. John was up there already walking next to Jeff on Def, with Gerry following on just behind them. John had Star in his arms. She was fast asleep and he bent from time to time to kiss the top of her head. Now that things were moving on again for him, he seemed to have forgiven her for maybe being Mike’s kid and not his own, and he loved the sweet fresh smell of her hair.

‘Why do we need to stop in one place at all?’ I said to John. ‘We could just keep moving on slowly forever.’

John beamed round at me. He was in a
good
good mood, relieved relieved to get away from that little place we’d made for ourselves by L-pool. Tom’s neck, he’d worked for wakings and wakings on that big fence, scratching and cutting himself, wearing himself out, but now he’d left it behind without even a moment of regret. Moving was what he liked to do best.

‘Now you’re talking, Tina,’ he said laughing. ‘It
could
work, couldn’t it? Just going a few hours further on each waking, perhaps, so we had time to hunt and scavenge and rest. We’d just need a few more bucks to ride on and carry our stuff, and we’d be fine, we’d never need to stop anywhere.’

We walked on a bit.

‘You know,’ John said after thinking for a little while, ‘you really are right, Tina. It
would
be good to keep moving.’

I’d hardly ever heard him so willing to discuss anything that another person had suggested to him.

‘But not heading
away
all the time,’ he went on. ‘Sooner or later we need to turn and face them. When there’s a few more of us, I mean. When we’re stronger. When we’re ready. It’s not good just to keep running
away
.’

I shrugged. Why
should
we ever turn round? Why
should
we face them? Eight nine wakings’ journey from here, back in Circle Valley, Mehmet had probably already talked to David Redlantern. Now, or soon, David and his Guards would be gathering themselves together – their blackglass spears, their horsebucks, their bows and arrows, their knives, their clubs – and making their way up to Tall Tree Valley and on to the ridge beyond. And when they got there, they’d look down on Wide Forest as we had done. They’d be amazed amazed, like we’d been, and, for a while, their mouths would water at the thought of all that space and all that easy meat. But then they’d remember why they came, and they’d stop admiring Wide Forest for its own sake, and start searching searching searching for signs of us.

They’d have ridden on the backs of bucks, which was Jeff’s idea, and they’d have followed the route that no one would have taken if it wasn’t for John, but that wouldn’t make any difference to them. They’d use the things we’d found, to hunt us down for daring to find them.

I didn’t doubt, now Caroline was out of the way, that David Redlantern really would stick John onto a spiketree if he could, and let his skin burn off on its scalding bark, just as he’d always said he would. And I didn’t doubt that if he got hold of me, he would do to me what Dixon Blueside would have done if John and the others hadn’t come back to stop him. He’d hold me down and force himself up me and spurt his juice inside me, just to show how much power he had, and how little I had, however pretty I might be and however horrible and ugly he was. And if there was no one to stop him he wouldn’t just do it once. He’d do it again and again and again, until he’d used me up, and he could chuck me aside, like the empty husk of a whitelantern fruit with its sweet flesh eaten away.

Why
should
we face all that, any more than we would choose to stick our arms down an airhole with a slinker hiding in it or pick up a piece of shit and force it down our throats? No, I thought, we should just go on and on and on. I even began to think that I’d go along with paddling out across Worldpool, if that’s what it took to keep us safe. In fact I could see myself agreeing to any plan at all that would distract John from his idea of turning round and facing David.

But then my mood changed, and I thought that the further away we travelled from Circle Valley, the further we left behind all those other human beings too, the nice ones, like my mum, and nice batfaced Sue Redlantern, and all those others back in Family who weren’t like David Redlantern at all. And even though we hadn’t seen any of them since we left Cold Path Neck, it was sad to think that we might go so far far from them that there stopped being any possibility of contact again.

Yes, and there was Earth to think about too of course. It was dreadful dreadful to think of Earth coming for us and not being able to find us because we’d gone too far, so that David and all the others went back to that world of light, and we few were left behind here like Tommy and Angela had been, all alone in dark dark Eden.

And now I understood why John wanted to turn and face them. It wasn’t just about fighting and killing. That was part of it, but it wasn’t whole thing. It was also about staying
connected
. Even fighting was.

‘Jeff was just saying that maybe we could get some baby leopards somehow and train them up like bucks to protect us,’ John said, looking round at me for my opinion. ‘Sounds worth a go, don’t you think? If it works with bucks, why wouldn’t it work with leopards too?’

He wasn’t expecting it but I put my arm round his neck and kissed him. And he let me this time. He relaxed and laughed and kissed me back.

‘And another idea me and Jeff had was about
cars
,’ he told me. ‘Do you remember that model Car that Oldest kept back in Family, with its four wheels? I reckon we could figure out how to make a kind of snow-boat with wheels that we could get bucks to pull along with our stuff on, even if there wasn’t any snow.’

And then he talked about catching a baby nightmaker and turning that into a horse.

‘Think of the load a thing like that would carry!’ he said, looking round at me again to be sure that I was as excited about it as he was.

I laughed and kissed him again, and then fell behind a bit to see Dix, and ask him to take a turn with Peter, who was getting big now and was hard to carry for too long.

In two more wakings we reached Worldpool.

I’d been to the edge of Worldpool three four times since John first found it, but just seeing it was a different thing from walking along next to it. This way you really got a sense of how
big
big it was. It was a pool that you could walk alongside all of one waking and still not reach or see the end of it, a pool with ripples on it half as tall as a grownup, like moving hills of shining water, which you could look into and see shining fishes swimming inside, before they came toppling over to swirl round the rocks in white bubbles that caught the light from the plants and creatures below. It was a pool that stretched away from us, softly shining into the distance, but didn’t reach another bank, like all the other water we’d ever seen, but stretched out instead to a far-off place where it seemed to touch the edge of the black black starry sky in a long straight line. But it wasn’t really touching sky. That line was Eden itself, our own dark Eden, curving down and away from us, hiding even more wonders from our sight.

After we’d walked for half a waking, we came to a place where a river, thirty forty yards wide, had cut through the cliff and was pouring out into Worldpool over a shallow bed of stones. We and our bucks had to wade across it – it was waist deep in the middle – carrying our kids and all the stuff we had with us. Dix and Gerry carefully lifted the fire-bark above the water, with the embers glowing on their flat stone.

‘Hey, look at this!’ shouted Lucy Batwing in the middle of the stream.

She’d noticed something that was floating by. She caught it and brought it to shore to show John. It was a little toy boat made of a dry fruit skin rubbed with grease, like the ones little kids used to play with back in Family. But, Michael’s names, how could a little thing like that end up here on the edge of Worldpool?

‘Well, this must be Main River,’ Jeff said. ‘This must be where Main River comes to from the bottom of Exit Falls.’

It was strange strange to think that this exact same water had flowed down from Dixon Snowslug, and Cold Path Snowslug and all the other snowslugs and streams that fed into Circle Valley, strange to think it must have come through Deep Pool where me and John had dived for shining oysters, and through Longpool and Stream’s Join and Main Stream, and on through Greatpool. It was strange to think that some little kid in Family, some kid probably not even born when we were back there, had played with this little boat up there, just like we used to do, among all those old familiar places. It can’t even have been all that long ago. Grease or no grease, those little boats didn’t last many wakings before they turned to mush.

‘We’ll come back here one waking,’ John said, ‘and follow the water up towards Dark. Maybe this is another way back into Circle Valley. Maybe we could climb up Exit Falls from below.’