Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

I stood up, hastily brushing off angry ants with their bodies flashing red in warning that they planned to sting. I felt a fool, but I could have completely explained myself and satisfied all of them — even miserable Candice — if I’d only shown them the ring. It was a find that Family would value more highly than ten stonebucks, and any one of the others would have admitted straight away that they’d have been just as distracted from the hunt as I’d been if they’d been the one that found it.

I would have liked to show it to them too. I didn’t want them to think of me as a wake-dreamer, or as someone that didn’t pay attention in a hunt: it wasn’t the idea of me I wanted people to have, and it wasn’t true either. But you’ve got to think about where you are trying to get to in the future, that was my rule, that was my leopard rule, not just try and make things easy and comfortable right now, and I decided in that moment that it would be better not to show the ring to anyone just now. So I closed my hand around it — it had a lovely smooth cool feeling — and I smiled and shrugged and said nothing. I had sewed a little pocket on the edge of my waistwrap as a place to put small useful things like bits of blackglass and stumpcandy and whitelantern seeds, and I slipped the ring in there when no one was watching me, and kept quiet, and we carried on hunting and scavenging.

‘You’ve gone all weird since that leopard, I reckon,’ Candice said. ‘I mean, speaking out in Any Virsry, talking about going across Snowy Dark, what was that really all about? Don’t give me all that about not enough food, and Exit Falls and all that. That’s not for us to sort out, and you know it. I reckon you just like the attention.’

‘He’s been weird since he’s been slipping that Tina Spiketree, you ask me,’ Janny said.

Met looked at me. Gerry looked at me. Was I really going to let these two girls take the piss out of me like this? But I didn’t say anything. We walked on. Pretty soon we came across David, who was out with Fox. He had just killed a stonebuck with his long blackglass-tipped spear and was looking mighty pleased about it.

‘Hey, that was my buck!’ exclaimed Candice. ‘I spotted that and we would have killed it too if John had just been paying attention.’

David gave a bark of laughter and repeated the old saying: ‘It’s not your buck unless your spear’s in it.’

He looked at me.

‘Not paying attention, eh, John? Too much slip if you ask me. Slip with Martha London, slip with Tina Spiketree, slip with bloody Bella Redlantern herself. This boy must think that’s all he’s here for, making juice for women. Juicy John, that’s what we should call him. Juice is all he’s bloody good for.’

There was so much hate and envy in his ugly bitter batface. I remembered how he’d looked when I crawled out of Bella’s shelter and I thought to myself that, if he could have driven his spear into me now as he’d just driven it into that stonebuck, if he could have done it without being blamed for it, well, he could have done. He would have done it gladly.

On Earth that had sometimes happened, the stories said. One human being would sometimes do for another like we did for bucks and slinkers. In fact sometimes whole groups would turn on one another like when Hitler and the Jar Men turned on the Juice. It was said it had happened there because Family on Earth had split apart, with groups moving away from one another and acting like each one was a Family on its own. It was even said that the White people had once taken the London people — whose skins were black like Angela’s — and tied them up with ropes and traded with them like we in Family traded blackglass and buckskins and leopards’ teeth between the groups. (That was history , and it was one of the things that kids used to learn when we had a School.)

And when I saw that look on David’s face and saw what it was that he would like to do to me, I had a glimpse of what would happen to us if Family was broken apart. I had an image come into my mind of a big old tree being pulled down, a big old tree that gave warmth and light and fruit and bark for shelters, and I saw the deadly scalding sap that comes spurting up from Underworld when the trunk first breaks.

‘Making juice for women that should know better than go with a silly boy who’s got nothing to him but a pretty face,’ David said. ‘That, and trying to break up Family, that’s all John here is good for. Oh, and getting big ideas just because he was lucky enough to have some leopard run right onto his spear.’

He gave me a horrible smile.

‘Tell the truth, Johnny boy. You didn’t plan that at all, did you? You didn’t plan to do for the leopard. You were just so bloody scared you were frozen to the spot.’

Gerry stood up for me at once.

‘That’s crap, David. He could easily have run like I did, but he . . .’

Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!

David broke off. We all broke off the ugly little play we were acting out to listen to the horns from over Circle Clearing. They weren’t calling us back to Circle, just telling us that the Council had finished the Genda and that we should finish what we were doing soon and go back to our groups and eat and sleep.

‘I’ll be watching you, John,’ David told me, ‘when Any Virsry starts again, so don’t try any more of your tricks.’

His speech was always a bit spluttery, like all batfaces’ speech, but his anger and his hate made it even more so. He was spitting his words out like they were poison. I had to wipe them off my face.

‘And don’t think you can get away with whatever you want just because you’re Bella’s little darling and her little slip-buddy, because you won’t. She may be group leader but that doesn’t mean the rest of group will go along with whatever she wants, nor the rest of Family. And anyway a waking will come soon when she sees through you too. Slippy might make people go silly and lovey-dovey, but lovey-dovey doesn’t last forever, Johnny boy. It doesn’t last long at all.’

Met had his stupid mouth wide open. Gerry had tears in his eyes. Candice looked sour. Janny looked like she was trying to see the funny side but couldn’t.

David pulled his spear out of the dead buck and transferred it to his left hand. Then with his right he took the animal’s back feet and slung the warm carcase over his muscly shoulder in one single move.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I must be going. I’ve got some food to take back.’

‘Looks like you’ve met your match, Mr Leopard Killer!’ said Janny when he was out of hearing.

I shrugged. David scared me, it’s true, and I was scared by the thought of whole Family turning against me, with Bella no longer able to protect me. But David hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.

‘We’ll see about that,’ I said. ‘The play’s not finished yet.’

We went back to Redlantern with our scraps of food, and we accepted our small share of David’s buck. He smirked at us as we laid out our sorry little haul of bats and grubby stumpcandy.

Bella looked strained and distant. She wasn’t supposed to tell us what she’d been talking about in Council until we were all together again in Any Virsry, but there was more to her distantness than that. She avoided my eye and slipped off early to her shelter, after ordering us all to stay in group for that sleep and not go wandering.

But I went to the group latrines that we’d dug in middle of a clump of starflowers and I took out the ring from the pocket at the edge of my wrap and I held it up close to a flower.

It felt smooth smooth, but it wasn’t just smooth. On the outside was a little wavy line that ran right round it where the metal was a different colour, and on the inside, Gela’s heart, there was tiny tiny writing. Not many newhairs could read, but Bella had taught me the letter sounds and I knew how to put them together to make words. I could read a lot of the old names and words that were carved onto the trees round Family. And I could certainly read the name inside the ring, written in tiny tiny letters with a neatness no one in Eden, scratching on trees or stones or bits of bark, could ever hope to equal, and no one over about thirty forty wombs, with their fading eyes, could ever hope to read. It was just about the best-known name in all of Family.