Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘Leave it, boy, we need to get on with the Genda.’

‘Shut up, newhair! It’s not your place to talk.’

But he still kept on.

‘Well, if we don’t try and get past the mountains, then why don’t we at least spread ourselves out a bit across forest? Send one group over to Cold Path Valley maybe. One up by Dixon Snowslug.’

Now Caroline lost her temper.

‘Be quiet, boy!’ she snapped. ‘Be quiet now . Whole Family is here, whole Family, and it’s not the business of one silly newhair to stand up and tell us what we should discuss.’

With a mighty effort, and the assistance of two helpers, old Mitch rose up to his feet.

‘What’s the newhair saying?’ he demanded to know.

‘He says we should send groups over to different parts of the valley,’ said Bella, ‘so as to make it easier to find food.’

‘No!’ blind Mitch cried out into the pitch darkness around himself. ‘No, no, no, no!’

Stoop and Gela were also getting up now, staggering to their feet with their helpers fussing round them.

‘We must stay here,’ Stoop cried, and then gasped for air. ‘This is where they’ll come to find us! This is where they’ll come! And we must remain one, one Family, that’s what Angela taught us. One Family that does things together.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Caroline said, putting a hand on Stoop’s shoulder. ‘No way are we going to ever break up Family. We have one mother and one father. We always have been one Family and we always will be. If we break up then things will turn bad, one group against another, that’s what Angela said. But it is not going to happen and that’s final. So no discussion. No argument. We — all — stay — here .’

David Redlantern was pushing grimly towards John through the Redlantern people.

‘But Family can’t go on growing and growing,’ called out John, ‘and . . .’

David grabbed his shoulder.

‘Enough!’ he hissed.

Caroline pretended she hadn’t heard.

‘So what other things do we have to put on the Genda?’ she asked briskly.

When Genda was set, that was the end of the first waking of Any Virsry, and everyone could go back to their groups to eat and sleep. The next waking Council would meet and talk about the Genda and then we’d all sleep again, and then there would be the final waking when we’d all be called back in and be told what Council had decided. After that Oldest would do the Earth Things, and we’d have the Show.

I was going to sneak off with Tina again, but David was still standing right behind me.

‘No you don’t, boy. You’re coming back to group with me. Bella needs to talk to you.’

‘What about?’ said Tina. ‘Is she going to tell him off for talking sense?’

David turned his angry red batface on her.

‘You keep out of Redlantern business, Tina Spiketree.’

I shrugged and pulled a face for Tina and followed David back to Redlantern, where the grownups were stirring up the embers of our fire and feeding it branches so we could cook. Everyone looked at me as I arrived in our clearing. People stopped halfway between the woodpile and the fire with firewood in their arms. People came out of their shelters.

‘I’m ashamed of you, John,’ began Old Roger. ‘People will say Redlantern can’t bring up their newhairs properly.’

Lucy Lu said that I hadn’t just shamed the living members of our group but the ones who’d died as well.

‘The Shadow People are crying,’ she said, ‘they’re begging me to make sure that Family is never broken up.’

Bella came out of her shelter.

‘You were rude rude there, John. Rude to Family and rude to me. What do you think other people will think if someone in my own group talks out like that without even letting me know that’s what they are going to do? If you had something you wanted saying, you could have raised it with me beforehand. We all knew Any Virsry was coming. As it is, you’ve made me look like a complete fool.’

Everyone watched her and watched me. How would I react? How would she follow on from what she’d said?

‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘I just thought it needed to be said. I hadn’t thought about it before. It just came out.’

I liked Bella. I was close close to her. And I respected her too. She wasn’t just our group leader, she was one of the cleverest people in whole Family.

Bella nodded. I thought I could see a tiny smile.

‘Alright, John. I’m tired and hungry. We all are. So we’ll eat now, and then afterwards you can come to my shelter for a proper talk about this. I want to know exactly what’s on your mind and I want your reassurance that you won’t show me up like that again. But we’ll talk later.’

Presently Fox and Lucy Lu, who were organizing the cooking, handed round smoked fish and whitefruit and crushed starflowers and bits of muddy, chewy slinker, and we all began to eat together round our fire. And all around us, all over the camp, we could hear the sounds of other groups eating too. (People’s talking sounds different when they’re eating. It rises and falls in a different way. More gently, more steadily.) You never normally heard that sound coming from all over Family at the same time because one group would be sleeping, one getting up, one returning from a waking’s scavenging. The only time we experienced it was when an Any Virsry was on.

Somewhere out over Peckhamway a leopard was singing to its prey.

‘What are you going to say to Bella in there?’ Gerry asked. ‘Are you going to tell her to stuff it, then, or what?’

I looked at him, meaning to answer him but all the time listening to the lonely deadly sound of the leopard out there, and how it sounded alongside the friendly gentle sound of Family eating and talking all around. And I was thinking, thinking, thinking, about Family and about how things were. Before I’d even begun to think of an answer to Gerry’s question, I’d already forgotten it. In fact I’d completely forgotten he was there.

Bella’s shelter was bigger than everyone else’s, and taller too, so that people could sit in there with her and have meetings. She had a pile of sleeping skins in the far right corner opposite the entrance hole, and more skins piled all round the edges for folk to sit on when she had meetings and talks. The shelter was built up against the warm trunk of a big whitelantern tree, and one branch of the whitelantern had been pulled down and held in place with ropes and rocks, so the branch was inside the shelter, with two or three lanterns usually shining at any one time. If she didn’t want light she’d cover over the lanterns with skins.

She was squatting over on the sleeping skins when I came in, thin bony Bella, with her narrow hips and tiny breasts and her clever weary shadowy face.

‘You are a silly boy, John Redlantern,’ she told me, ‘and I’m going to have to shout at you for a bit.’

I nodded.

‘Never, never speak out of turn at a meeting again, alright?’ she yelled. ‘Do you understand that, John? Do you understand? You’ve shamed me , you’ve shamed Redlantern, you’ve shamed yourself. And you’ve achieved nothing . Nothing at all. Do you really think Council’s view will be changed by a silly little newhair just because he got lucky with one bloody leopard out Cold Path way? Does that make you the big man of whole Family, do you think? Does that make you more important than your group leader or your Family Head? I don’t bloody think so, John. And don’t think I don’t know it was you and Tina Spiketree that started up that nasty laugh when Mitch forgot himself. Don’t imagine I didn’t notice that too.’