Dark Eden (56 page)

I told Gerry and Jeff I’d keep the first lookout, but none of the three of us had actually gone off to sleep when, after an hour or so, we heard someone creeping up. We grabbed our spears ready. But it wasn’t Mehmet or Dave or Johnny or the Fishcreek blokes, which I’d truly thought it might be, sneaking up on us with leopard tooth knives. It was Julie.

‘Hey, Jeff, do you want to slip with me?’

I suppose life wasn’t much fun for them up there. It was cold, and nothing happened, and, when they didn’t have visitors, each of them only had four other people to talk to, apart from the little kids.

‘That would be good, Julie,’ Jeff said.

And he did it with her, right there in the space beside the rock, slowly slowly and gently – and quietly quietly like you do when other people are near – and afterwards he held Julie in his arms on the sleeping skins and they talked, softly softly so as to let me and Gerry sleep if we wanted to. But I didn’t sleep. I lay there listening to the sound of their talking, while the strange tall trees hummed all around us.

Most of the time, it was too quiet for me to hear the words, but once Jeff raised his voice slightly, not in anger (he was hardly ever angry) but firmly to make a point.

‘They were protecting me and Tina, Julie!’ he said. ‘They didn’t just do it for no reason! You know that!’

I didn’t pick up any more of what they said after that but after a while I heard Julie begin to sob and Jeff comfort her. That’s why girls loved him, not only because of his beautiful eyes and his face and his golden hair and his long fine fingers and the way he could slip on and on until they’d had enough, but because he was kind.

Maybe an hour later a kid began to cry over in one of the stone shelters, and Julie recognized it as her own.

‘Michael’s names, Jeff,’ muttered Gerry enviously, after she’d gone. ‘How do you bloody
do
it?’

But Jeff had more worrying things to talk about.

‘John, Gerry, listen to this,’ he whispered. ‘Mehmet has been down to Family. It wasn’t so long after we left Tall Tree last time. Apparently David Redlantern is the only one who really decides what happens in Family now. He’s got a whole bunch of young guys called Guards, who make people do what he wants, and Caroline doesn’t matter any more. Julie says Mehmet’s done a deal with David to get the friendship of Family back. She doesn’t know what the deal is exactly, and she’s sure that Mehmet hasn’t told them whole story, but she reckons he’s promised he’ll help them to get to you. One thing Mehmet has told her and the other Tall Tree people is that David still wants to kill both of you two, and Harry as well. He still says he wants to spike you up to burn like Jesus, for killing Met and Dixon and John Blueside. And Julie says Mehmet’s told David about Gela’s ring. Apparently David hates you for that too, he hates you for keeping it for yourself.’

‘Bloody Mehmet Batwing,’ I said, taking my spear and jumping up. ‘That treacherous little slinker.’

In my mind I saw that giant bat on the top of the tree, with the slinker creeping up towards it through the steam.

‘I’ll go and do for him now,’ I said. ‘I’ll kill him before he can do any more harm.’

‘That won’t work,’ Jeff said. ‘Just killing another person won’t work.’

Well, no, I had to admit it wouldn’t. Not unless I killed
everyone
here: the two Fishcreek guys and Johnny and Dave and Angie and Julie and all their kids. Otherwise there’d still be someone left to tell Family that we’d been here and that our camp wasn’t so far away, somewhere just over the ridge.

‘Not all of Family is your enemy,’ Jeff reminded me. ‘And not all of these people here are either, not any more. But if you killed again you’d make
more
enemies, wouldn’t you? You’d make it easier and easier for everyone to see you as nothing but a killer, like a leopard that needs to be hunted down. You were the first one in Eden to kill a human being, after all.’

Gerry just sat on his sleeping skin looking up at us. This was outside of his reach. This was difficult grownup stuff between me and his little brother.

‘Gela’s eyes,’ I muttered, after I’d thought about it for a bit. ‘I’ve got it all wrong, haven’t I? Things weren’t perfect before I chucked those stones into the stream, but look at it now! I’ve taken Eden and broken it up into pieces.’

There are lots of different stories branching away all the time from every single thing that happens. As soon as a moment has gone, different versions of it start to be remembered and told about. And some of them carry on, and some die out, and you can’t know in advance which version will last and which won’t. It had never occurred to me before that the story of John Redlantern might end up as the story of a famous killer, the first one in Eden ever to do for another human being. But now that story suddenly took shape in my mind.

I could see it being acted out in the future.
John the Leopard-Man
; John who killed a leopard and ate its heart and somehow the heart crept into him and became his own; John who sang sweetly and treacherously like a leopard does, and promised wonderful things, and made people leave everything and walk towards him, but really all he did was to lead them to their deaths. Death followed after him. It spread out from him across the world like ripples across a pool, like evil ripples. But then at last brave David Redlantern hunted him down, just like you’d hunt down a leopard that had taken to prowling around outside the fence and watching the kids playing inside. Brave ugly David hunted him down with his Guards, and then the world was safe again and Family was whole once more.

‘No, John, you didn’t break it, you opened it up,’ Jeff said. ‘That was why we followed you. It needed to be opened up. It needed to happen.’

He looked at me with his big deep eyes, putting his hands on my shoulders. I’ll tell you, I was pretty near to crying.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘that’s not to say that you don’t sometimes make mistakes.’

I nodded.

‘We’d better go then,’ I said. ‘Let’s just get straight on these bucks and go back over Dark.’

Gerry looked at his brother, his eyes big and as gentle as Jeff’s but without the depth, waiting to hear Jeff’s judgement. Jeff shook his head.

‘That won’t work, though, will it, John? That’ll tell Mehmet we know something. It will tell him that someone here has told us something that worried us enough to make us leave in a hurry. If we don’t want that, we should stay till everyone wakes. We should let them have the widebuck skins and the fruit we’ve brought for them, trade them for some of the blackglass they get from Family. And then we should tell them we’ll come up and see them again soon soon, and hug and kiss them, and say goodbye, and go.’

Gerry looked at me.

I laughed.

‘I didn’t know you were capable of being so devious, Jeff.’

To my surprise, Jeff hung his head. He really hated lies and tricks.

‘I know. But I don’t think we have a choice.’

We looked out at the strange tall trees, humming and shining, with the bats and flutterbyes diving and swooping among their high branches.

‘We are here,’ Jeff muttered, as if to remind himself of a truth that stayed true no matter how much we lied and tricked each other. ‘We really are here.’

I touched Gela’s ring on my little finger, felt its hardness, turned it round a bit. We were brothers and sisters really, all of us, that was the weird part. Me, Mehmet, David Redlantern: every one of us in Eden came from the same mother and the same father.

So when Mehmet and the others began to stir and poke up their fire and get things ready for another waking, we went down to them, pretending that nothing had changed.

‘We need to get back to our own people,’ I told Mehmet. ‘It took us a long long time to get here, and they might think a snow leopard has got us if we don’t show our faces soon. But maybe you’d like to trade with us a bit before we go? We’ve got these skins, look, like woollybuck skins but smooth. And fruit, like you get down in Circle Valley. What can you trade us for this lot?’

And then we were off again, up over Dark, till we came to the ridge looking out over the Wide Forest.

‘Look at that!’ I said. ‘Even from here you can see the smoke of our fire down there. They could easily find us.’

The air was still, and the smoke went straight up like a tree trunk, lit up clear and white by the lanternlight of Wide Forest.

‘Yes, and look at
that
!’ said Jeff, pointing back.

I looked round. On the snowy slope behind us were three patches of light from the headlanterns of three woollybucks. It was Mehmet and a couple of the others. They’d been behind us all the way, following to see which way we’d go. They’d only need to come as far as this ridge we were on now to see Wide Forest below them, and the smoke rising up from our fire, all lit up by the firelight and by the lanterns all around it. And then Mehmet would know where we were living and he’d know we’d been lying when we said our camp was far away.

When he came back down from Tall Tree Valley John was full full of himself, like he hadn’t been for a long long time. He had all his authority back. He knew exactly what he was doing and how to carry everyone with him. And the funny thing was, he didn’t have good news at all. He had
bad
bad news, but he was happy happy happy. It was just like when the snow came down into Tall Tree Valley: he liked having trouble to deal with.

‘We need to leave this place,’ he told us. ‘David Redlantern and his lot could soon be down here after us. We need to get far enough away from here that they can’t see the smoke from our fire from the top of the ridge. Where we are now, they could be here within twenty wakings if they put their mind to it.’

He looked back the way the three of them had just come down. There was a dip going on and Starry Swirl was filling up sky, bright bright and big as whole world, with the black shadow of Snowy Dark sharp up against it.

‘We won’t always run from them,’ he told us. ‘Time will come when we’ll turn round and face them. And, if we need to, when that time comes, we’ll fight David and his lot and beat them. But we’re not ready for that now. There’s only sixteen of us here, not counting little kids, and he could bring maybe fifty sixty grownup men and newhairs with him over the ridge, with blackglass spears and bows and everything. We’re not ready for that. But a waking will come when there’ll be more of us, and we’ll have found our own blackglass, and then …’

‘And then,’ said Gela with a sigh, ‘there’ll be a lot more killing. There’ll be lots and lots more red red blood. Harry’s dick, John, you don’t have to apologize for telling us to run away! Surely there’s enough space in Eden for people who feel like doing for each other just to move apart and keep out of each other’s way?’

‘Yeah, and let’s stop talking about killing, if you don’t mind,’ Clare said. ‘What’s poor Fox and Flower going to make of it, eh?’

The two children were both listening intently, their faces stiff. Poor things. It was never like that when
we
were littles. We might have been scared of leopards or slinkers sometimes, we might even have felt scared of grownup people who were angry or unkind, but we never never thought that other people might come and do for us on purpose.

‘We need to take everything we can,’ John said, ‘skins, wraps, blackglass, spears, everything. Load it onto bucks, or carry it. We’ll go that way,’ he was standing facing Dark, and he pointed behind and to his left, ‘along between the hills and Worldpool, but making our way over towards Worldpool till we’re going along the edge of it. We’ll keep going for ten wakings. That’ll take us far enough from the ridge. After that we won’t have to move so fast, but we’ll still keep moving on every few wakings for a while, to get us a good long way away. We should be safe then for wombs and wombs, by Worldpool somewhere, far off from here. We could even make boats, if we wanted, make boats and figure out how to cross the water. Then we’ll have somewhere else to go to if we have to get away again.’