Dark Eden (42 page)

I just hoped that Def was planning to go down to the tree and not stay on top of the ridge, because I wasn’t sure how I would manage to persuade all these tired scared people that it was okay to walk back into Dark without first getting the warmth and light and comfort of a tree.

Luckily the horsebuck
did
go down to the tree. It led us along the ridge to the right a bit, round the edge of the soft snow, and then down into the valley of snow where the tree grew. And as we went towards the tree we began to see that it was even bigger, and the valley much deeper, than we had first thought, because it took much much longer to reach it than we’d expected. That tree was
tall
tall, fifteen twenty times the height of a man. But just as we were getting near enough to get a sense of the real size of it, another strange thing happened that threw us out again, so we once more doubted whether we were seeing it right.

A bat dropped down from sky and landed at the top of the tree. It stood there like bats do, gently fanning its wings, rubbing its face with its hands and staring down at us with its head tipped slightly over to one side like it was weighing us up, with steam from an airhole ten feet below billowing up around it. But it was
much
bigger than any bat we’d ever seen before. The biggest bats you ever found in forest were redbats and they were maybe a foot and a half from head to toe. But this one must have been the height of a child of fifteen wombs or so, and the distance between the tips of its pale wings must have been six feet at least. And it was a weird thing because, even though it had wings, and knees that bent backwards, and claws for feet, and a bat’s face that was all twists and wrinkles, and no nose, it felt to me almost like it was a
person
up there looking down at us.

And then we all saw something that the bat didn’t see. Out of an airhole came the head of a slinker. It swayed from side to side for a moment, as slinkers’ heads do when they’re looking for bats and birds and flutterbyes. And then, pressing itself up close to the trunk, it began to creep up the tree, not straight up, but slowly winding round and round the trunk towards the bat. Harry’s dick, it was a
long
long slinker. It must have been fifteen foot long at least, I reckon, with dozens of little clawed feet all along it.

But the bat was still rubbing its face and watching us. We’d all stopped to stare at it except only for Jeff on the back of Def, which kept plodding along regardless. And the bat seemed to notice the fact that we weren’t moving any more and to wonder why that was, because it stopped rubbing its face, and lifted its head, and half-lowered its hands, like we’d got it worried, or puzzled, or maybe just interested. But it still hadn’t seen the slinker, whose head by now was only a yard beneath it.

I don’t know why, but suddenly I yelled out.

‘Watch out!’ I shouted. ‘Watch out!’

The people behind me laughed. Who ever heard of someone yelling a warning to an animal as if it was a person like us? But all the same a few of the others began to yell too, ‘Watch out, bat, that slinker’s going to get you!’

And the bat stiffened, and looked around itself, and passed its right hand once over its face, and stretched its wings out a bit, but didn’t move. And the slinker crept closer.

‘Watch out!’ I yelled again.

And finally, in the last second that it had left, the bat seemed to get the message. It leapt up into the air just as the slinker struck. Those spiny slinker jaws snapped, only missing the bat by a couple of feet, but the bat was safe, soaring up into the freezing air.

The slinker’s head, sticking up above the top of the tree, swayed from side to side, watching the bat, then twisting round to look down at us. And then the creature went backwards down the tree, spiralling down as it had spiralled up, and disappeared back into its steaming airhole.

Meanwhile the bat climbed up and up, still looking down at us, until it was just a little black shadow on the bright face of Starry Swirl. Finally it stopped climbing, turned and flew off with big slow wingbeats away over Snowy Dark.

‘John! John!’ people were calling me.

‘John,’ muttered Tina, who’d come up from middle of the line, ‘get yourself together and wipe your eyes.’

I looked round. I saw their faces in the light of the treelanterns, some smiling, some laughing, some looking scared.

I put my hands quickly up to my face and wiped away my tears.

How could he let himself cry like that then, when everyone needed him to be strong? Michael’s names! So many other times, when he could have shown his feelings a bit more and it would have helped, he hadn’t. But now, in this moment when we really didn’t need it at all, he’d let himself go. And what had
made
him cry anyway? He’d been like someone watching a story, like the ones who cried when I did
Gela’s Ring
. And people never just cried because of a story, did they? They always cried because it reminded them of real things. It reminded them of things they’d lost or never had, or times when they’d been found wanting, or times when other people let them down. So what did the story of the bat and the slinker do for John? What did it remind him of? The bat was him, I suppose, lonely and cold and proud up there. But what was the slinker?

The tree stood in a hole it had melted in the ice. I guess the hole was about ten yards across and three yards deep. The sides of it were steeply sloping smooth ice, glowing greeny blue in the light of the tree. But in one place they’d been trampled down by woollybucks into a sort of ramp of rough snow that we could climb down. At the bottom there was mud and big stones and trampled buck dung and puddles of water that drained into a little stream that trickled down into a hole under the ice and came out Gela knows where. The tree in middle was huge
huge
when you saw it close up. It’d take three people to get their arms right round it, and the trunk went up and up and up so high that it had reached four five times the height of a man before it had even started to put out branches.

It wasn’t going to do our footwraps any good trampling round in that mud, and John and me tried to tell everyone to step on the dry bits, but no one cared about that. Everyone was rushing forward to get the heat of the tree and drink the water from the puddles and the little stream. The woollybucks were snuffling and croaking with excitement. The human beings were fighting and squabbling for the warm bits of the tree. The babies, who’d been completely quiet while we walked and walked, like they’d sunk down with us into a sort of dream, now both began to scream and yell.

Hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
, went the tree, meanwhile, puffing out steam from the six seven airholes up and down its trunk, just like it must have been doing for wombtimes and wombtimes when it was all alone and there was nothing around it but ice and snow and stars.

‘Hey, everyone!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t push and fight over the tree. We’ll take it in turns, alright?’

I picked out people to go and take a turn with their backs to the tree, and got ten of them in there shoulder to shoulder in a circle against its warm trunk. They squatted down on their heels, and closed their eyes, and the warmth of the tree and the steady pulse of it against their backs was more than enough, after that long long walk, to send most of them straight off to sleep. Gerry was one of the ones I picked for the first turn. He said he wanted to stay awake with John, but I told him he’d help John better if he got some rest. Another I picked out was sweet Dix.

‘You come and rest too, Tina,’ he said, ‘you come in beside me. You’re tired
tired
.’

But I told him no, though I gave him a little secret thankyou smile.

John got Jane and Mike to be first lookouts. Jane to watch the tree, Mike to walk round the top of the ice, watching the snowy slopes around us. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a slinker of that size might decide to come down the tree to grab a human being if couldn’t catch a bat. (It couldn’t be that fussy about what it ate up here, not unless there was some other source of food for it down in Underworld.) And if there were giant bats and giant slinkers up here, how could we know what else there might be up here too?

The others that couldn’t get their backs to the tree used the embers we’d been carrying with us from Cold Path Valley to start two small fires – there were fallen twigs and buckdung to use as fuel – and they huddled around those until it was their turn against the trunk, using the time to mend footwraps with the spare skins we’d brought with us. Mehmet Batwing, Angie Blueside and Dave Fishcreek grouped round one fire, Gela Brooklyn, Harry and me by the other. Bucks don’t like flames, so Jeff stayed with Def and Whitehorse as far from the fires as possible, cuddled up between them. John moved restlessly about the little space around the tree, sometimes going up onto the ice with Mike, sometimes coming over to me.

‘It’s going well so far,’ he said at one point, squatting down beside me, Gela and Harry. ‘It really wasn’t so hard at all, was it?’

Not everyone else was so pleased, though.

‘Nice new place John’s found for us,’ Mehmet Batwing said to Angie and Dave as he got up to drop a bit more dung onto his fire. ‘Bit small maybe, bit damp, but well worth leaving Circle Valley for, don’t you reckon? Only thing is, I wonder what we’re going to do for food?’

He glanced over towards us. I looked at John. He looked back at me, then shrugged, stood up and went up onto the ice, without saying anything at all.

‘He’s in a right state!’ said Mehmet. ‘Talking to bats, crying … and this is the bloke who’s leading us into the unknown!’

‘You lead us then, Mehmet,’ said Gela stoutly in her strong deep voice. ‘Go on, Mehmet,
you
lead us. You seem to know better than John what to do. So you take over. You make the decisions from now on. Go on. Tell us now what your next move is going to be.’

For a moment there, Mehmet looked afraid. Then he smiled.

‘Oh no,
oh
no. You don’t get me
that
way, Gela. John got us into this. He can get us out of it.’

‘Oh I see,’ Gela said, ‘so you
do
trust him to see us alright, do you?’

‘John? No. He’s lost it. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘But you’d still rather follow him than decide things for yourself, just like you did before back at Cold Path Valley when John gave you the choice. That doesn’t make sense, Mehmet, and you know it.’

‘Why are you poking your nose in, Gela?’ demanded Angie Blueside.

Harry, beside me, gave a sort of groan. He was rocking on his heels and breathing hard, like he did when he was getting wound up and was going to start yelling. I stood up to try and calm things.

Then John came to the edge of the ice above Mehmet, looking down at all of us in our muddy hole. I thought he was going to join in the argument, but he didn’t say a word about it. He didn’t even seem to notice that it was going on.

‘Take over from Mike, Mehmet,’ he simply said. ‘Mike’s footwraps are all wet. He needs to sort that out.’

Mehmet gave Angie a look, but he obeyed.

Hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
, went the tree, sending out its puffs of steam into the frozen air.

One of the babies woke up and began to cry.