Dark Eden (38 page)

‘Get off me!’ I screamed.

‘So how do you like it when the power is the other way round, eh, Tina? How do you like it when fat old Dixon Blueside has the power?’

He looked at the boys.

‘Slip or no slip, eh? Slip or no slip with pretty pretty Tina? Which is it going to be, eh, my mates, now
we’re
the ones who’ve got the choice? Pretty Tina, who isn’t even in Family any more so the Laws don’t apply. Slip or no slip? Hmmm, let me see. Let me see. What’s it going to be?’

Michael’s names, I could feel his fat dick hardening under his wrap.

‘Slip her one, Dixie,’ said Met.

‘Yeah, slip her,’ said John Blueside, with his nasty little eyes all shiny with hate.

Dixon started to pull at my wrap. Well, I screamed and screamed and screamed and suddenly –
blam!
–
my
boys were back: John, Gerry, my Dix, my Harry, bursting out from the trees, yelling and shouting and waving spears and clubs.

‘Gela’s tits!’ went Met and John Blueside and off they ran, back towards Family as fast as they could, while Dixon was still clambering to his feet.

Dixon’s mouth was hanging open. He wasn’t smiling any more. He could see he was all alone against three angry boys and one
big
big angry man that was my brother Harry. (And Harry
was
a big man when it came to a fight, even if he was a kid in other ways.) Dixon gave me one look, one weird blank look – it was as if, just for a moment there, he was actually wondering if he could ask me for my help – and then he was off too, running through forest on his big fat heavy legs.

‘No you bloody don’t!’ said John, and he and Gerry and Harry were straight off after him.

But my Dix stopped, my gentle Dix, and he squatted down between me and Jeff.

‘Tina? Jeff? Are you okay?’

Jeff was sitting up. He was all bruised and bloody and trembling, but not badly hurt. He crawled to his Brownhorse.

‘Poor old Brownhorse,’ he murmured, and he made a soft little buck noise in his mouth. ‘Poor old Brownhorse.’

The creature was pretty much dead already. It wasn’t moving its limbs, just trembling a bit all over, but Jeff gently stroked its wool and went on talking to it like maybe its mother would have talked to it:
Hrum
,
hrum
,
hrum
.

And while Jeff stroked Brownhorse, Dix put his arm round my shoulder and gently stroked
me
. I really wasn’t badly hurt at all, just had a few scratches and bruises, and my hurt arm aching badly again like it had done when I first fell: nothing more than that. But something horrible had nearly happened to me, something that we didn’t even have a name for. I was shaking shaking all over, my teeth rattling together. And I leant my head on Dix’s shoulder and let him comfort me, while little Jeff tried to comfort the dying animal.

And pretty soon, back came John and Gerry and Harry.

As soon as we saw them we knew something big had happened. They’d
changed
. They’d changed completely. They were trembling worse than me, they were shaking all over, and their faces were all blotchy and twisted and puffed up, so you couldn’t tell if they were scared or angry or excited or ashamed or what, but you could see that whatever it was, it was
big
big big.

‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What? Gela’s heart, what have you done?’

‘Yeah, what’s happened?’ Dix asked, gently releasing me, and jumping to his feet.

John stared at him, like he was having difficulty seeing he was there.

‘We … er …’ he began, and then stopped.

‘You … er … what? Gela’s heart, John,
tell
us?’

‘We … we … did for them,’ he said.

He turned to me, then to Jeff, then to me again with weird wide staring eyes that he couldn’t keep still.

‘You what? You
did
for them? No, no, you couldn’t have. That wouldn’t … What? You
did
for them? You mean … What? … Like animals, you mean? All three? Like animals?’

We were the fifth generation of Eden, the fifth generation after Father Tommy and Mother Angela. But no one had ever killed another human being. No one, not ever.

‘Yeah, all three,’ said John. ‘I did for Dixon with my spear while he ran.’

His voice came out all jerky and strange.

‘Then … Then Harry did John Blueside. He turned to try and face us with his spear, but … Harry … Harry was on top of him with his club before he could throw it, and he did for him too. He cracked his head open. And … and … Met … well, Gerry did for him, didn’t you, Gerry? He did for him with his spear, like I did Dixon.’

John held up his own blackglass spear with his shaking hand, like it would do the rest of the talking for him. He touched the tip with his finger and held it out to show me the blood. Not greeny-black Eden blood, not blood born down in Underworld, not the blood you see when a spear comes out of a buck or a starbird or a bat, but real red blood that came down from sky. Real red blood from Earth.

‘We
are
here,’ said Jeff, like he’d been thinking carefully all this time about what dead Met had jeered at him, and was finally agreeing with him. ‘Yes, we really are here.’

We didn’t have hollowbranch horns like they had in Family, but we’d made ourselves a drum out of a length of trunk and a bit of stonebuck skin. As soon as we’d got back to our camp – Gerry and Dix carrying Jeff between them to speed things up, and Harry and me carrying the dead buck Brownhorse – we got out the drum and Harry began to beat it, as hard and fast as he could.

He was
frantic
frantic. His eyes were staring, he was panting like he couldn’t get enough air, his face was pouring with sweat, and he banged that drum so hard he nearly broke through the skin.

‘Easy, Harry. That’s enough, that’s enough,’ I told him. ‘We don’t want them guessing back in Family that something bad’s up.’

I didn’t feel much different from Harry myself, though. Every few seconds I heard the squelchy thud of my spear in Dixon Blueside’s back, the hissing noise of the air coming out from his lungs, the way he rolled over when I pulled it out, the choking gurgle when I shoved it right back again into his belly. But unlike Harry, I knew I had to get back in control of myself, or we’d all be done for.

‘They won’t miss Dixon and the others for another waking or two,’ I told everyone back at the caves.

Tall, grownup Gela Brooklyn was there, and her small little sister Clare with her baby on her hip, and Mike, and Suzie Fishcreek, and batfaced Janny, and Tina’s sister Jane, and Dave Fishcreek and Julie Blueside.

‘Not for another waking or two,’ I said. ‘And even then, they won’t know what’s happened. That’s why we had to do for all three of them, otherwise they’d have run straight back to David, and he’d have sent a whole lot more of them after us at once. We really had no choice. We really didn’t.’

I looked round at their shocked faces – Gela, Suzie, Janny, Dave, all of them – daring anyone to disagree.

‘As it is,’ I said, ‘we’ve got two wakings before anyone starts to worry, and by then a leopard or a fox will have got to the bodies, and then starbirds after that, so they won’t be able to tell any more that it was spears and a club that did for them. They’ll just be scattered bones.’

‘Yes, but their mates will guess, won’t they?’ Dix said. ‘David Redlantern and all of them.’

He had his arm round Tina. She was shaking shaking. I was shaking too.

‘Yeah, they will. They’ll know it was to do with us, because they’ll know that Dixon and Met and John Blueside came over this way and that the three of them came past Lava Blob on purpose to make trouble. David planned it with them, I’m sure. Maybe he hoped to get us to chase back after them into their part of forest. He’ll have been wanting to make trouble for a long time. He’ll have been wanting to be able to go to Caroline and Family and say the agreement wasn’t working.’

‘So if they know it was to do with us,’ said Gela in her slow deep voice, ‘they’ll still come after us when the three of them don’t come back. Even if they pretend to Family that they’re just trying to find out what happened.’

‘Yes of course. So we haven’t got much time. We need to get ourselves together and go.’

‘Go
where
?’ Dix asked.

Gela’s tits, where had he
been
all this time? What did he think this whole business was all
about
?

‘Over the top, of course. Over Snowy Dark. Like we’ve been planning, yeah? Like we’ve been planning
ever since we came here
.’ I looked round at their faces, and I realized that it wasn’t just Dix. Tom’s dick and Harry’s! None of them had really believed this was ever going to happen. Not one. It was always going to be somewhen off in the future, never ever now.

Still, it was too late for talking and explaining. They were just going to have to get it through their heads by themselves.

I started going through all the things we’d need to get together.

‘Gela, you sort out wraps for everyone. Mike, get all our spare skins and blackglass and rope. Dave, we need all our meat and stumpcandy and seedcakes. Clare, can you sort out some embers …’

In a couple of hours, the drum had called everyone back. All twenty-one of us were there, plus Janny and Clare’s babies, and we had the meeting, a sort of Strornry, our last in Circle Valley. It was a dark dark time. No one had ever argued with me about whether we would really go over the mountains, not once, but I suppose they’d all privately hoped that it would never really get to that. We had the agreement with Family written on bark after all, and for ten periods it had seemed to work. Family had handed over blackglass and skins to us as they’d agreed. We’d had plenty of meat to spare to keep our side of the deal. I suppose they’d all persuaded themselves that things would just go on in the same way forever with our own little family at Cold Path Neck, Old Family going its own way on the far side of Lava Blob and a bit of toing and froing going on between us here and our mums and friends and groupmates over there. Most of them seemed to have decided that going across Snowy Dark was nothing more than a weird dream of mine. Some of them had never even given it any thought.