Starlight Brooking
Greenstone had been carefree back in Veeklehouse, carefree and cheerful and confident, but now he carried worry round on his back like a bag of stones, and whole wakings went by when he found it hard to smile. We had meals where he could hardly bring himself to eat, and some sleeps, when he reached out for me in bed, I felt like I had a little child there with me, a child seeking comfort, sucking my breasts like he really wanted milk, pushing into me like he was trying to get back inside. Had I known him at all? I sometimes wondered. Had I really seen Greenstone when I met him at Veeklehouse, or just some idea of a man that I had inside my head?
“What was he like when he was a little boy?” I asked Quietstream when she came to wash me.
“The Headmanson was always a good boy, Mother,” she said as she washed my back. “He always noticed everyone, and he was always kind. He never behaved like he thought the story was all about him, and—”
Gela’s heart! I knew why she broke off. I knew why her hand stopped moving. I knew she’d felt me tense up as she said those words that I’d only ever heard before from my mother, long ago and far away across the Pool.
I turned to look at her. “And what?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Mother. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.”
She began washing me again, but she was distracted, and there was a careless roughness in her movements.
“I heard it was a good thing for a man to think the story was all about him,” I said.
“Oh,
no
, Mother! It’s
.
.
.” She stopped, remembering that she was small and I was big. “I’m sorry, Mother, I didn’t mean to say you were wrong. I was just
.
.
.”
She knew the Secret Story! I knew she knew it. She knew I knew it. But we’d heard it saying different things. Somewhere in all the generations since Gela, someone had changed it, and a new version of the story had begun to spread alongside the old one.
“I’m sure I
am
right,” I said.
I said it firmly, but even as I spoke I remembered the look on my mother’s face when she told this part of the story, like a child who knows she’s being naughty but goes ahead anyway.
It was only some old story, Jeff Redlantern would have said, just like the ring was only a bit of metal, Earth was just a place, and Gela was only a human being. What did it matter which version of the Secret Story really came from her?
But it made me uneasy, knowing that Quietstream had heard a different version from me. It made the ground under my feet feel less solid than before. And later that waking, when the Head Teacher came to the Writingcave in the Headmanhouse to tell me more things I didn’t know, it seemed even harder than before to hold on to my own thoughts and ideas. I felt like I was a flimsy bark shelter and he was a strong, cold wind blowing in from Deep Darkness.
“You’re doing well, Ringwearer,” he said at the end of our time. “You’re not fighting so much against what I’m telling you. And that’s good. It’s not your fault that you come from a little patch of sand, but if you’re going to learn you’ve got to accept that we know stuff that you don’t. Just look at all the barks around you, and you can see that! And this is the Headmanhouse. As you know yourself, there are a hundred times this many barks back in the Teachinghouse!”
But you write the barks yourselves,
I wanted to say to him.
You write them, and then you read them and imagine they’re telling you something.
I didn’t speak, though, afraid he’d have some smart answer I hadn’t thought of.
“Speaking of your bit of sand,” he said. “We teachers might know a lot, but there is always more to learn. What’s it like on that waterhill of yours? And where is it, exactly?”
I felt myself tense.
“There’s not a lot to tell you, Head Teacher. Like you say, it’s a bit of sand, and around it a couple of miles of shallow water with a forest growing up out of it.”
Teacher Michael pointed to the wall of the cave. “Do you see that picture there? We call that a map.”
I knew what maps were—
we often drew them on the sand back in the Grounds, when we wanted to show one another where there were fish, or trees ready to be cut—
but I decided not to speak.
“It’s a picture of all the ground of Eden,” he said, like he was talking to a child. “Eden as it might look from a starship in the sky. There’s Worldpool in middle, you see. On the right is New Earth. On the left is Old Ground. Do you see Veeklehouse there? And Circle Valley? And there down at bottom, Brown River, where the Old Ground Johnfolk live. Do you know why it’s called that?”
“No, but I—”
“It’s a big, slow river full of muddy water. The mud goes far far out into Worldpool, like a brown cloud darkening the water, right out to the edge of the bright water. The river itself comes right through Snowy Dark, and somewhere up there beyond the mountains is a place called Half Sky—
there it is on the map, look—
where Tina Spiketree went off to after John came across the Pool. They don’t seem to have come to much. As you’d expect, of course, from a ground led by a woman.” He beamed kindly at me. “So where is that little waterhill of yours? Where is Knee Tree Grounds?”
There was Nob Head sticking out into the Pool, up rockway from Veeklehouse. It was easy easy to see where our Grounds were, but no way was I going to tell him.
I
might have chosen New Earth, but the people I’d left behind wanted the world to leave them alone.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know,” I lied. “My uncle did all the steering, and the maps, and the looking at stars.”
It was never difficult to persuade the Head Teacher that there was something I didn’t understand.
“Never mind, my dear, never mind,” he purred, as he knelt to cover the ring with his wet wet kisses.
Greenstone Johnson
At the little sheltercluster where Starflower Cave joined the Great Cave, people were waiting to welcome us, with flowers shimmering in their hands.
“Mother! Mother!”
Starlight stood in the car, held her hands above her head, pointed to the ring. Up to now, when she’d met the small people, she’d been so thrilled by their welcome that she couldn’t keep herself from laughing, but I noticed that this time, though she still smiled warmly, she let some sadness into her face. It made me sad myself to see it, but the small people loved it. People want a mother to smile at them, I thought, and they want her to be beautiful, but they want her to share their sadness, too.
And now she did another new thing. She had the ringmen help her down from the car, and walked among the people themselves outside the little bark shelters they’d made at the base of a great rooftree. A good half of them were holefaces or clawfoots or slowheads, and not one of them, man or woman, was as tall as she was. So when she stood among them in the bright pink light of the tree, it was like they really were her children, her funny, broken children, gazing up into her lovely, perfect face and reaching out for her touch.
She showed them the ring, too. In my mum’s time, they’d seldom have seen more than a glimpse, but Starlight let them touch it, took it off so they could see the writing inside, pointed to the tiny words as she read them out. Gela’s heart, the gratitude in their faces! The tears! The love as they bent to kiss her hand! But she still had more to give. Just before she turned back to the car, she stooped down and gently kissed an old, blind, holefaced woman on the cheek.
“Did I do all right?” she asked me when the last child running after us had finally been left behind.
“You did brilliantly, Starlight. They absolutely love you.”
She shrugged. “They only love me because of this,” she said, pointing to the ring on her finger.
“They would love you anyway, Starlight, as I loved you before you ever put it on.”
“You wouldn’t have loved me if I didn’t have a pretty face, though. If I’d had a batface like Angie, you’d never even have given me a glance.”
Of course that was true, but it seemed to me unfair. “Plenty of chief’s daughters have pretty faces, but I chose you.”
She frowned and looked away from me.
“Tom’s dick, Starlight, what do you
want
me to say? I might as well ask if you would have noticed me if I hadn’t had a big lump of metal in my hand and been wearing fancy wraps?”
The answer I hoped for, I guess, was
I would have loved you whatever you were wrapped in,
but Starlight didn’t say that. Starflower Cave was bright bright all around us—
some people said it was the brightest of all the caves—
but a shadow seemed to have fallen over her.
“Well, maybe no one really loves anyone,” she said, looking away from me at the drifts of glittery starflowers under the trees, the rocklanterns climbing over one another on the walls. “No, actually, that’s not true. My sister, Glitterfish, really loves her little boy, and she’d love him the same whoever he was, and whatever he looked like, even if he was a batface, or a clawfoot, or a slowhead, or all three together.”
I shrugged, while the ringmen around us tried hard to pretend they hadn’t noticed the Mother of all Eden having some sort of tiff with the Headmanson.
“Well, I guess all mothers love their kids.”
Starlight played with the ring on her finger. “I’m not sure mine did. Or not like that, anyway. She certainly
thought
she loved us, but I don’t think she really understood what love was. She saw it as something she could give out as a reward when we were nice to her, and take away again when we weren’t. Did your mum love you?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. I’d been about to say, “Yes, of course,” in a cross way, like it was obvious and a silly thing to even ask, but when I thought about it, I wasn’t sure. Mum worried all the time about keeping me safe, that was certainly true, but she didn’t really notice me all that much. I guess that was partly because she was busy being Ringwearer, and partly because she was pregnant over and over again, and then the babies died or had to be taken away, and she couldn’t talk about them ever again.
“Actually, I think it was Quietstream who
.
.
.” I began.
But then there were shouts and cries up ahead of us. We’d reached another cluster, and I watched Starlight as she changed her own face into the face of the Mother of Eden. She might have been cold with me, she might have said there was no such thing as love, but to these people she would always be kind kind, beautiful beautiful, sad sad.
Starlight Brooking
We’d come up Starflower Cave to visit Chief Earthseeker and thank him for his support. He was a big warm man
, big
big, with great strong arms and a huge white beard. I liked how he introduced his helpers to me by name. I liked the way he listened when I talked. Greenstone had told me about happy times he’d had with the chief when he was a kid, hunting bucks and wing-
monkeys in the forest out top, and I could see how Greenstone thrived in his presence, becoming cheerful and confident, just like he’d been back at Veeklehouse.
I liked Earthseeker’s daughters, too: Lucy, Gela, Mary, Cavebright, Tina. (Their mother had died, Greenstone had told me, trying to give birth to a baby that would have been the chief’s first son.) All of them old enough to be my mum, they were as warm and welcoming as their dad, and when they asked about Knee Tree Grounds, I felt they were really interested, and not just trying to find out how small or big our people were.
“So you’re on the water most of the time?”
“I’d say more than half the time we’re either in a boat or wading through forest.”
“It couldn’t be more different from here, could it? We don’t see sky or Worldpool for hundredwakes on end, and we have rock above us and below us and on every side, but there you were with no rock at all, and nothing around you but water and sky.”
Earthseeker’s helpers had made us a big and fancy meal: glitterbirds stuffed with starflower seeds, whitelantern fruits fried in buckfat, tender meat from a young cave slinker whose bony shell had not yet grown. As we finished eating we heard the far-
off sound of the third timehorn, blowing from down the cave in Edenheart:
Parp-
parp-
parp! Parp-
parp-
parp!
One of the helpers rushed off to find a metal horn and pass the message up the cave.
“Greenstone’s dad likes to keep us all on our toes,” Earthseeker said, with a wink at Greenstone.
Greenstone smiled. “You’re not kidding. Dad makes sure that no one ever forgets him.”
I looked between those two faces, Greenstone’s and the chief’s, and I saw that this had been one of the nice things for Greenstone about their hunting trips out top: the fact that the old guy could laugh at Firehand. It seemed to me that Earthseeker had figured that out for himself and decided it was something he could do for Greenstone. And that was love, I thought. That really was love, and just being in its presence melted the coldness that had been growing inside me since I climbed back in the car after that first cluster.
Greenstone noticed this. He caught my eye across Chief Earthseeker’s table and smiled at me, and I smiled back, knowing that, when we lay down in our bed at the end of the waking, we’d be able to touch each other again and feel like we both wanted the same thing.
Later on, Earthseeker asked me if I’d like to see his bats, something Greenstone had apparently always asked to do when he came on a visit as a kid.
“Of course, I’m a flower chief, really, Starlight,” he said (he didn’t bother to call me Ringwearer), “but I do raise a few bats for our own use.”
Earthseeker and his daughters walked with us to a little side cave, which they said brought water straight down from a snow slug in the mountains above. It was so narrow that there were only a few trees in it and the main light came from the dim rocklanterns that wound all over the walls, dividing and dividing like the branches of a tree.
Bats greeted us with deafening noise. Hundreds of baby greatbats rattled and fluttered against the crisscrossed wooden poles that trapped them in holes in the rock, their flat black eyes staring out at us, their little bony hands reaching through, their high, raspy voices merging into a single, continuous wail.
“Harry’s dick, what a racket!” Greenstone laughed. “I’ve been here hundreds of times, but I never get used to it.”
“How did you make all those little holes in the stone?” I asked the chief.
“We didn’t make them. They were already there. Bats dug them out somehow, long before people ever came here. They used to make little marks, too. Bat writing, some people call it, though it’s really just rough little marks. I’ll see if I can find you some. Rocklanterns tend to cover it up.”
We walked up to one of the cages. It had four bats in it, already half my height, clinging to the cage poles with their little blue-
black hands, their weird wrinkly faces peering out at us, their flapping half-
closed wings making gusts of wind that blew my hair about.
“Nearly time to cut them,” the old chief said. “It’s important not to do it too early. The wings just grow back again then, or the arms grow into wings in their place. But these guys are nearly old enough.”
The baby bats screeched and wailed. I wondered if they were calling for their mothers, as human babies would.
“I feel sorry for them,” I said.
The chief laughed. “I guess it
must
hurt, but if so it’s soon over, and then they can come out of the cages.”
“But if they can write and talk, it doesn’t seem—”
I wished I hadn’t said it, because the chief’s face became darker and colder at once, and I hated the idea of losing his friendship. Apart from helpers, who had to do what they were told, and the small people, who saw me as Mother Gela, he was one of only a few in all these caves who’d made me feel welcome.
Greenstone put an arm round my shoulders.
“Starlight’s got some interesting ideas about animals. She thinks the same kind of thing looks out of their eyes as looks out of ours. Apparently it’s an idea that comes from Jeff Redlantern.”
Earthseeker relaxed. “Ah. Well, the stories do say he had a soft spot for animals.”
“Not only Jeff, but John, too,” I said, seeing as the chief now seemed interested rather than annoyed. “Remember how he saved that bat from the slinker, when they first crossed Dark?”
The chief laughed. “I think that story’s just meant to be a way of speaking isn’t it? The slinker’s supposed to be David, I think. Isn’t that right, Greenstone? And the bat is John’s dream for Eden’s future, or some such.” He shrugged. “But that’s teacher stuff,” he said. “I tend to let them get on with it.
.
.
. Ah! Here we are, look! Not really what you’d call writing, but it does look a
bit
like it.”
“I’ll tell you what it looked like,” I told Greenstone later in the car. “It looked like how writing seemed to me before I learned to read.”
He shrugged. “Well, I guess writing
is
just little scratches until you know better.”
The car bumped on down the path toward Edenheart, the ringmen’s bucks around us, each with its six legs padding along steadily in that strange smooth way they had.
“It’s so lonely, your New Earth story about the world,” I said suddenly. “No one looking out of your eyes but you yourselves, and the one watching you so separate and far away. Our Watcher was near near. We
were
the Watcher, all of us, when we managed to be quiet enough to notice it.”
I’d tried to explain it to him before, and he’d tried to understand, but this time he just laughed at me, perhaps paying me back for my coldness earlier.
“Honestly, Starlight! You ask how we know President was a man, and yet you guys on your little waterhill made up this whole Watcher thing that no one else in Eden has heard of!”
“But we don’t make it up. We just notice it’s there.”
That was what we always said on Grounds, anyway, but now, secretly, I had doubts. What did we really mean when we said we noticed the Watcher? And how often did it really happen?
“I guess everyone feels lonely sometimes,” Greenstone said, “and that’s what’s so important about the Ringwearer. It means Mother Gela is here, not far away across sky, like President, but right here, with the ring on her finger, the loving mum everyone wishes they had.”
I looked down at the ring, then slipped it off so I could see the tiny writing. I knew what it said, of course—
I’d known it since I was a child—
but it was different different now I could read it myself.
to angela, with love from mum and dad.
My mum and dad were dead. Greenstone’s mum was dead. Mother Gela’s bones lay under a pile of stones far away in Circle Valley. But yet here were Gela’s own parents whispering to me, from far away and long long ago.