Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s,’ I thought, that’s the trouble with us! That’s what’s wrong with the way we are. We live as if Eden wasn’t where we really lived at all but just a camp like hunters make when they stay out in forest for a few wakings. We’re only waiting here to go back to where we really belong.

‘Don’t you think we’d need something a bit more than an old tree-trunk with skins glued onto it, Jeffo, to get to Earth?’ was what I said aloud. ‘I mean, think about it. Things that fly aren’t heavy like your boats, are they? Bats and flutterbyes and birds, they hardly weigh a thing. But your boats take two or three people just to carry them down to the water.’

‘Do you think the Landing Veekle was light like a flutterbye? It was as big as Circle of Stones, remember,’ Jeffo snorted. ‘And it was made of metal that’s heavy like stone. Nah, they found a way to make heavy things fly, like heavy things can float on water.’

I guessed it was true. Somehow the Earth people must have found a way of making heavy things fly. But how? Well, I had no more idea than Jeffo or anyone else. I was no different from the rest. We knew so little, and Earth knew so so much. We might as well be blind for all we understood about things. No wonder we longed for Earth. No wonder we pined and pined for that waking when Earth would finally come. No wonder old Jeffo told himself he’d make a sky-boat one waking out of a bloody old log so we wouldn’t even have to wait for them. No wonder Lucy Lu with her big weepy eyes could get blackglass and skins from all over Family with her stories about how our own shadows would fly off to bright bright Earth when our heavy old bodies had died.

‘You got lost on Snowy Dark once, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘We were up the edge there two wakings back, up on Cold Path, and Old Roger told the story of it. But what I don’t get about it is how did you get lost?’

He looked away and I thought at first he was going to refuse to answer me.

‘Bloody woollybucks led me on, didn’t they?’ he said after a bit. ‘I kept following their headlanterns and then when I lost them, there was nothing left to see at all. I mean nothing . Couldn’t even see my own hand if I held it up in front of my face. Tom’s neck, it was cold cold . There was nothing to see, nothing to touch, nothing at all but coldness. It’s an evil place up there, boy. They say all Eden was like that until life came up from Underworld and we came down from sky. Just darkness and ice and rock everywhere. All I can say is if that really is so then it doesn’t bear thinking about. It’s bad bad.’

He shook his head.

‘Anyway I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know why I couldn’t hear the others yelling for me. Of course I yelled myself, but all I could hear was the echoes coming back from high up there above me. Echoes, and echoes of echoes, and echoes of echoes of echoes, so I could tell there was more and more of it up there, more ice and rock, colder and higher, and . . . and . . .’

Ugh. He sounded like he might start crying like a kid if he carried on like that, so I butted in quickly.

‘So how could we ever hope to survive in a boat that went all the way up to Starry Swirl, Jeffo, if it’s so cold and dark even just up above the edge of forest? Think how cold it must be right up out there among the stars.’

He looked at me resentfully.

‘They had a way, didn’t they? Tommy and Angela and the Companions, they had a way. They knew stuff that we don’t know about, like metal and plastic and lecky . . .’ he stumbled on the word, ‘and lecky-tricktity. They knew how to fly and they knew how to keep warm. If we keep on building boats, we’ll find a way too.’

So he said, but meanwhile he was angrily smearing glue onto an animal skin at the end of a log, exactly as he’d done with every other boat he’d ever made. He wasn’t trying anything new, and he never had done, not once in all those thirty forty boats he’d made.

‘How did they get your leg off?’ I asked.

‘Sawed it off with a blackglass knife, the bastards. Didn’t Roger tell you that? You ask a lot of questions, young man, I must say. A lot of rude questions. I don’t want to talk about it, alright? It’s not a thing I like remembering. Would you, if you were me? You get on now, John, and leave me to finish this boat off in peace.’

Smiling a little bit to myself for my cleverness in getting away, I made my way back through Brooklyn and Spiketree and finally back to Redlantern, where the hunters and scavengers were just coming back from forest with a chewy old starbird and a couple of bags of fruit. Not enough, nothing like enough for forty-odd people. If we hadn’t still had three legs of that woollybuck left over, we’d have all been hungry that sleep.

At the end of a waking, two sleeps after he did for that leopard, me and John Redlantern walked up along Dixon Stream. We climbed the rocks beyond London and Blueside fence until Deep Pool was there below us, shining with wavyweed and water lanterns and bright beds of oysters.

‘It’s like there’s another forest down there, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Another little Circle Valley, with the rocks around it like Snowy Dark. Only difference is that this forest is under water.’

It even had a narrow little waterfall at its lower end, where the water poured down on its way to Greatpool, just as all the water of Circle Valley poured out down that narrow gap at Exit Falls.

‘Yeah,’ said John, with a snort. ‘And if there’s ever another big rockfall over Exit Falls, whole of Circle Valley forest could end up under water too.’

People didn’t come up to Deep Pool much and there was no one else there. We climbed down to the edge of the water, took off our waistwraps and dived in. The water was clear like air and warm warm as mother-milk. The stream that fills Deep Pool comes down icy cold straight off Dixon Snowslug over in Blue Mountains, but the tree roots and water lanterns heat it up.

‘So that was pretty brave of you,’ I said, when we’d come up to the surface by the water’s edge, ‘killing a leopard all by yourself.’

We grabbed hold of warm roots and faced each other, close close, with the warm warm water up to our shoulders.

‘Most people tell me that,’ John said, with a little laugh, ‘but you make it sound like a question.’

I nodded. It was a question. I was trying to get the measure of him. He looked nice, no doubt about it, he looked beautiful, and it was obvious obvious why he was a favourite with oldmums looking for baby juice. Plus he was quick and clever, and other kids respected him. And he was a big name in Family too now, one of the names that everyone knew. It was all good good, but I still didn’t completely get him. No one did. There was something about himself that he held back.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think sometimes people just do one brave thing, and then that’s it. Or sometimes people are brave in just one way.’

He shrugged.

‘Yeah, it’s true. One brave thing doesn’t mean much. And sometimes people do brave things when they just haven’t got time to think.’

‘Is that what happened with you?’

He thought about this.

‘It’s true I didn’t have much time to think when the leopard was circling round us. But I knew I had a choice, and I knew no one would blame me if I ran. So, no, I didn’t just stand there because I couldn’t think of anything else.’

‘Why then? It was only a bloody leopard. It’s not even as if we can eat the things.’

‘I did it because . . . Well, I’d never really understood about those moments before and I reckon a lot of people never really do get to understand them, but what I realized then was that I wasn’t just deciding what I wanted to do, I was deciding what kind of person I wanted to be . So I made my choice on that basis. And from now on, whenever I have a decision to make, I’m always going to make it in that same way.’