Dark Eden (43 page)

Four five hours later, when the second lot of people had taken their turn round the tree and we’d all eaten a little bit of meat, we put on all our wraps again – we made ourselves back into weird, shapeless animals – and got back up on the ice again, Jeff in front on the back of Def, then John, then the whole line of us with Whitehorse at the back being led on a rope by Jane. I walked in middle with Dix.

Gela’s tits, it was
so
cold when we went back out there again. And our wraps were damp, and we were tired, and both the babies were screaming, and we had no idea where we were going. But Def seemed to know, plodding along ahead of us down the snowy valley. We looked back at the tree sometimes, longingly, and for a short time its light shone on the snow around us and made it sparkle and glitter. It was strange strange how that lonely tree in its muddy hole, a tree that we knew had a horrible giant slinker hiding inside it, could still look welcoming and safe compared to where we were going now.

But pretty soon the valley turned, and we lost the tree and its light, and we were in complete darkness – even Starry Swirl was covered up again by cloud – with only the light from the woollybucks’ heads to guide us. Big fluffy flakes of snow began to fall into that pool of light from the dark sky, crowding in on us in their hundreds and thousands, settling all over us and over the bucks and over those heavy bark snow-boats that we were still dragging along behind us.

When you are really tired and miserable, I’ve noticed, one thing that comes to help you is rhythm. If you can only get into a rhythm then you can keep going, because it’s like a kind of sleep. But if someone talks, or someone stops, or something happens, and the rhythm’s broken, that’s when it becomes hard to bear. And so we trudged and trudged, and we didn’t say anything for a long long time.

We’d been going for one two hours, the babies quiet, no one talking, our feet scrunch-scrunch-scrunching in the snow, when Dix suddenly spoke.

‘What’s that sound?’

Oh shut up, was what I thought. I don’t care about any bloody sound. I just want to concentrate on the scrunch, scrunch, scrunch of my cold cold feet. But other people along the line had heard it too, and stopped, and some were talking and some were telling each other to shhhhhh so we could hear. The bucks stopped too. They both stopped dead, listening.

It was like a faint cry –
aaaaaaaah!
– from some dark rocks we could just make out in the bucklight up to our left.

Def and Whitehorse both started to snuffle and groan.

‘The Shadow People! Lucy Lu was right, it must be the Shadow People,’ someone muttered.

And there was a sort of moan up and down the line.

‘No, it’s not,’ called out John, ‘it’s some kind of leopard. Get your spears ready. Hold onto the bucks.’

Gerry and Gela ran forward to hold onto the buck that Jeff was riding on. Suzie and Dave grabbed hold of Whitehorse at the back. Both animals were tugging and straining to get free, and giving little thin squeaks of fear:
Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!

Aaaaaaaah!
came the cry again, high and lonely.

We all stood in a row, straining to see the thing in the faint light.

Then suddenly Mehmet called out.

‘No! It’s behind us! Turn!’

Wham!
It was on top of us. While we were looking the wrong way, a great white furry beast had been rushing silently towards us across the surface of the snow. Now it grabbed Whitehorse with its jaws and front claws, snatching the buck away from Suzie and Dave and dragging it and its light away across the snow, leaving a thin black trail of blood. Suzie and Dave tried to follow it, but off the path that Def had found for us the snow was soft and deep and they were in above their knees straight away. They couldn’t run over the top of snow like the leopard could.

So now the back end of the line no longer had its own light. Standing in the near darkness, we watched the snow leopard out there in the pool of light from Whitehorse’s head, ripping out Whitehorse’s throat. It was bigger than a forest leopard and covered with shaggy white fur like a woollybuck. Its four back feet were great flat things splayed out over the snow and, as well as two flat black eyes, it seemed to have a huge third eye on the top of its head, much bigger than the other two and kind of hollow, like a bowl. Seeing us watching it, it lifted its head from its meal and tipped it back slightly, like it was looking up at the mountainside. And then we heard a cry again –
Aaaaaaaah!
– and all of us looked round, because the cry didn’t seem to come from the leopard at all but from far away above and behind us.

Crunch! While our backs were turned, it bit the lantern off the top of the dead buck’s half-severed head, swallowed it, and so hid itself in darkness. And at that same moment, out at the front end of the line, Def gave a loud loud screech and pulled free of Gerry and Gela to belt off along the snowy valley with Jeff still clinging onto its back.

And that was the last of our light. It had been all we had left, that little pool of light moving through the falling snow, and now it was vanishing into the distance with the small shadow of Jeff’s back in middle of it, leaving us in total darkness.

Aaaaaaaah!
went the snow leopard’s voice again, remote and dreamy and far away behind us. And in the same moment the leopard itself – not remote and dreamy at all but huge and strong with deadly claws and teeth – was upon us again. A forest leopard kills just once, but I suppose it makes sense for a snow leopard to kill again and again, quickly biting off the headlanterns of bucks and then coming back for more until they’ve got a stash of frozen meat to keep them going till the next herd comes by.

For a moment, we felt it among us. We heard a girl scream, and then, a few yards off, we heard her give a choking sound and fall silent, and we knew that the leopard had dragged her out of the line and had done for her in dark there as it had done for Whitehorse.

No one was sure who it was. Everyone was calling out for sisters and friends.

‘Tina, are you okay?’ went Dix, feeling for me with his hands.

‘Jane,’ I called out for my sister. ‘Jane, are you there?’

‘Lucy? Clare? Candy?’ other voices were calling, and other voices answering in the darkness, until someone called ‘Suzie!’ and no answer came from Suzie Fishcreek, that sharp clever girl, and we knew that if we could have seen anything at all out there it would have been her blood that would have been red on the snow, hers and the baby’s still inside her, and her lolling head hanging loose from her neck.

Then John’s voice came bellowing out over all the crying and wailing:

‘Group together, now! Group together with your spears pointing out! Do you want the thing to get us all one by one? Together in a group with your spears out! Now! Do it! Quick!’

Def ran and ran and I couldn’t hold him back. All I could do was hang on tightly tightly to his fur, lying down flat against his body. I knew that if I fell off in the dark and the snow, that would have been that, that would have been the end of me. The world would still have had lots of other eyes to see through, but not mine.

Def ran on and on down that long dark snowy valley. His headlantern was pulsing and bright bright with fear, and he kept giving out a strange cry I’d never heard him make before:
Ayeeee! Ayeeee!
I heard the echoes come back from the rocks and mountains. Big snowflakes crowded towards me and rushed past. I got glimpses of huge rocks and cliffs and giant greenish hunks of ice jutting out from under the snow.

When we’d been running for some time flat out, he slowed down a little bit. I could see that the snowy ground ahead of us was breaking up and tipping down, and there were more and more of those big twisted hunks of ice sticking up, and icy cracks opening up in the snow. It was a big snowslug we’d been on all this time, I realized. Up to now it had been covered up by packed-down snow, but here the ice was cracking and bending and sticking out through the snow, like splintered bones sticking out through a broken leg.

Ayeeee! Ayeeee!
went Def. He paused for a moment and then called out again:
Ayeee! Ayeee!
Suddenly he swerved to the left, and started climbing the rocky slopes above the snowslug, up up, until he came to the top of a ridge, and we could look down at the other side.

There was light below us! There were thousands of lights, white and greeny-yellow. There was a little round valley full of shining trees, surrounded by Snowy Dark.

Ayeee! Ayeee!
, went Def.

I put my hand on the soft lantern on his head and tried to make him turn round again so we could go back to tell the others. He had always let me guide him that way before. It was him that found the paths, but when we came to a choice of paths, he would pause and lift his head and snuffle and sniff at the air, and wave his feelers, and then I chose for him, by putting my hand on his lantern and turning his head in the direction I wanted him to go. Woollybucks could stay up on Snowy Dark for wakings and wakings, I figured, but we needed to get down the other side. So I made sure, as best I could, that we kept heading
across
Peckham Hills, and not along them.

But now, on the top of the ridge, Def refused to do what I asked of him. I could turn his head all I liked but he wasn’t going to go back. I guess the leopard was still not far enough behind.

He wasn’t going to stay still either.
Ayeeee!
he cried out again, and started straight down towards the lights of the valley. I pulled back on his headlantern to try and get him to at least stop still, but he took no notice at all. There was nothing I could do to make him change his mind, nothing I could do at all really, right then, except just to remind myself to keep my eyes open and to notice the world that I was in.

‘We are here,’ I whispered to myself, ‘we are really here.’

I might never see the others again, I thought. I might die on my own, and no one would ever know what I’d seen. But that didn’t change the fact that right now I
was
seeing it. I was alive and seeing it, and it was really there.

We came down into a strange forest, where the trees were as tall as that tree up in the snow with the bat and the slinker, and had trunks that went way way up before they even put out a single branch. It made me feel small small as we passed underneath them, even sitting up there on Def’s back, when their branches were so far above us. But their lanternflowers were as bright as any whitelantern back in Circle Valley, even if they were high over our heads, and the tree trunks were warm and made that same familiar sound that we’d all heard around us every waking and sleeping all our lives until we first went up onto Snowy Dark.
Hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
, they went. And whole forest went
hmmmmmmmmmm
.

A tree fox came running down one of the trunks, and peeked at us around the side of it with its flat blank eyes, sniffling with its long bendy snout. A bright coloured bird flew past, with its hands held out in front of it. And a monkey with six long arms gazed down at me from a high high branch, bigger than the monkeys we had in Circle Valley, and with loose flaps of skin hanging down between its arms.

Everything seemed clear clear in my mind and I stared and stared, because the only thing I could do just then was to see and see and see, so I might as well do that as well as I possibly could. I felt myself grow calmer, and I could feel Def getting calmer too. His hearts weren’t beating so fast and his lantern had stopped pulsing and was settling into a steady glow. I pulled gently back on it to see if he would stop, and he stopped at once, without any fuss or trouble. I got off him, and led him to a stream, and rested my back against a tree while he gathered wavyweed into his mouth feelers, using his front legs as arms.

Presently he lay down on the ground beside me and slept.