Dark Eden (35 page)

Two brothers on a skin was one thing, though. A woollybuck and a human being was something else. A little clawfoot boy and a creature with flat glinting eyes that never shut, lying down together! Well, it just seemed so weird
weird
that I had to get John just to show him. I was so amazed amazed, it was almost like I needed John to tell me that what I saw was really there.

‘Looks like he’s got his horse then,’ John whispered.

‘I’d honestly never never have thought such a thing could happen,’ I whispered back to him. ‘Mind you, I’d never have thought that someone would destroy Circle of Stones either or break up Family into two pieces.’

I put my arm round John’s waist, feeling sort of proud of what he’d managed to make happen, admiring the strength that made it possible. But he didn’t respond. He had never once reached out for me, this bloke I’d given up my Family for, not once since that time when me and Jeff and Gerry first came over.

But at least now I had some good friends with me apart from him and weird Jeff and empty Gerry.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said after a time, ‘it’s a good job we hid our stuff when we did. They only got a few old stonebuck skins, and none of the good woollyskins at all. We need every bit of woollyskin we can get.’

Then we heard voices coming up from below.

‘John? Tina? Gerry?’

It was three more kids come from Family to join us, three Fishcreek kids, a sister and brothers: Suzie, Johnny and Dave. They were friends of mine too, specially little Suzie with her clever sharp tongue.

That little buck, it might have shut up for a few hours, but that wasn’t the end of the noise. It woke up a bit later, found Jeff lying beside it and began to scream and thresh about as much as ever. He tried to calm it down even though it was scratching and kicking him, but in the end he had to scramble out over the fence and let it do what it wanted, which was to go on yelling and kicking away in its fence, on and off, for waking after sleeping after waking.

Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!

‘Gela’s tits!’ said Suzie Fishcreek. ‘Can’t we put it out of its misery and eat it? It’d be doing
everyone
a favour.’

But of course John wasn’t having that, and nor was Jeff, though he was covered in cuts and bruises that the creature had given him with its hard claws and its bony head. John had kids go down to the pool to fetch back fresh wavyweed for it, and fill up its bowl with water. He had more kids go and find fruit. But it didn’t eat a thing. It sipped a bit of water and that was all, and you could see it getting thinner and weaker.

‘Face it, Jeff, it’s going to die anyway,’ said Mehmet Batwing. ‘Why not eat it while there’s still a bit of meat left on it?’

But he may as well have been talking to a stone.

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

I woke up to the sound two three wakings after Dixon Blueside and David’s attack. It was one of the times when the buckling was quiet and a lot of us had gone to sleep. I was lying in the cave, with John on his own sleeping skin on the far side of it.

Not
now
, I thought, not
another
bloody Strornry! And then of course I remembered – and we all remembered, I suppose – that we weren’t in Family. The hollowbranch horn was coming from far away, from a place where we didn’t belong any more, and the meeting wasn’t for us but for them.

And it was funny because we always hated Strornries and Any Virsries, and we always groaned and moaned about having to go, but now that we couldn’t go to Strornry, we sort of missed it. It felt sad to be left out.

‘What do you reckon they’re talking about back there?’ I asked John, when I saw that he’d been woken too. ‘What are they deciding?’

‘That’s easy,’ he said, his frowning face all blotchy with the different colours of the glowing rocklanterns. ‘They’re talking about
us
. They’re trying to decide what to do about us.’

He shrugged.

‘They’ll spend a waking talking,’ John said, ‘and then, if they decide to come over, they’ll spend at least a waking and a sleep getting here. So I reckon we needn’t worry about them for a bit.’

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

‘But what then?’ I asked. ‘We know that David’s going to say we should all be spiked up like Jesus. And, okay, we know Caroline and Council won’t agree to anything like that. But what
will
they decide? After all, even Caroline said when they chucked you out that it was okay to hunt you like an animal. And how much longer will she be in charge anyway? How long before David calls all the shots?’

John stood up.

‘A while yet, I should have thought. And no one has ever done for another human being, not since the Beginning. Even David is scared to be the one that changes that. After all he’s got to live among our mums and aunties and uncles and groupmates.’

He pulled his bitswrap round his waist, picked up a pile of snow-wraps, and went out, without giving any explanation as to where he was going or what he was doing, like he wasn’t connected to me at all.

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

I couldn’t sleep then, not with those hollowbranch horns going, and not in that lonely cave that John and me were supposed to share but didn’t. After a bit I got up too and went outside. Mehmet Batwing, that wiry little guy with the little pointy yellow beard, was sitting by the fire hole, sharpening his spear-spike with a stone.

‘Did you see where John went?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘Off into forest that way. After bucks, perhaps.’

Mike Brooklyn was humming to himself on lookout on the shelf above the caves. Lucy Batwing was on the path below.

‘Yeah, John went up into forest with a bundle of those snow-wraps of his and his blackglass spear and some embers on a bark,’ Lucy told me. ‘Did you two have a fight or something?’

She watched me with narrowed eyes. She was a great one for wheedling secrets out of people and then passing them on.

But I didn’t say anything. I went back up the slope. Along from the cave where John and me slept, Jeff was inside the fence in the buckling’s cave. It was taking wavyweed from his hand.

‘Jeff! It’s finally eating!’

He was totally absorbed with the animal and he jumped slightly when I spoke to him. Then he looked round at me with his big eyes and smiled.

‘This is really happening,’ he whispered. ‘We really are here!’

In another little cave a bit further on, Dix slept with Mike Brooklyn.

‘Hey Dix,’ I whispered, ‘are you awake?’

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
came the horn again, from over by the fake Circle in Circle Clearing.

Dix came out and I put my arms straight round him. I wanted to be with someone for a bit: someone that was kind.

I was torn torn all the time. We weren’t going to be safe where we were forever. We had to move as soon as we could, and that meant finding a way over Dark. So I was desperate desperate all the time to get up there, and I was working working all the time on how to do it, how to make better wraps, how to light our way. But at the same time, and for the same reason, we had to watch out for attack from Family. We had to make sure that all of us were protected, and none of us were left alone. So I needed to be up on Dark as much as I could, and yet I also needed to be keeping an eye as much as I could on our little group at Valley Neck.

So of course as soon as I knew it would be three wakings at least before anyone came over from Family again, I went straight off to Snowy Dark. I didn’t have time to talk to Tina about it. As soon as I knew, I was hurrying hurrying up to the ice. And then I put on new footwraps stuck together with a new mixture of glue, and I lit up the new light I’d made, with a wet hollow branch packed with buckgrease – my idea was that the grease would burn but the branch would stay in one piece – and I walked up into Dark, until all I could see was the orange circle of snow around my light, and the steam from my breath, and all I could hear were the sounds I made myself echoing from walls of rock that I couldn’t see but only hear.

But then the flame began to sputter, and I had to turn round. By the time I’d got back off the ice my footwraps were getting wet again, and the wood of the hollow branch had dried out and was starting to burn. And what I wanted to do was put another set of footwraps on that I’d made with a different glue mixture, and light up another torch, this time lined with wet clay, and try again. We had so little time to get this sorted.

But I knew I needed to get back to Neck to be ready for whatever it was that Family had decided to do.

As it turned out, I didn’t need to hurry back so fast. I’d been back at the caves for a whole waking and a sleep after that and then half a waking again, before we heard a thing from Family.

Most of our lot were out hunting, and I was with Tina, Jeff, Gela and Clare in front of our caves, grinding seeds and sewing up buckskin wraps, when Mike called down from top lookout that six seven people were coming. He’d glimpsed them out there crossing a gap in the trees. Pretty soon, Dix called up from lower lookout that he’d just seen them too.

Well, it could have been kids coming over to us like before, but we’d never had that many come all in one go, so it sounded more like David and his lot were coming back with their clubs and spears. We hid our buckskins and all our other things in our various hiding places, then me, Tina and Gela grabbed our own spears and clubs and went down the path, leaving Mike, Dix and Jeff by the caves, while Clare went after the others to let them know what was happening.