Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

I was going to say Bella, but I stopped in time.

‘We should have new rules,’ he said. ‘New family rules about who slips with who. It was different on Earth. It hasn’t always been like how it is now in Family.’

‘We can talk about it,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘And as to building up a new family,’ he said, ‘well, we’ve got to, haven’t we? We can’t go back to the old one.’

He relaxed a bit and squatted down.

‘You shouldn’t sleep out here like this. There were three leopards near here only a couple of wakings past.’

‘Yeah. We heard them back in Family. David said they’d probably done for you.’

‘He should be so lucky.’

He examined the tip of his blackglass spear the way grownup hunters do, checking to see that the edge was still good.

‘We need to build up a new family and we need to find out how to get across Snowy Dark and find a new place for ourselves,’ he said.

I thought about this.

‘Well, we can probably find a few more kids who’ll come and join us. We could go back through forest, meet up with newhairs when they’re out alone, see if we can talk them into coming over.’

He nodded.

‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. There’ll be enough of them wanting to, I’m sure. Trouble is, the more that come over, the sooner we’re going to make Council so angry that they’ll want to stamp us out.’

‘How could they, though? In the end, how could they?’

‘They could kill us.’

‘Kill? I know people would like to kill us, but no one’s ever done for another person, have they, never even once on Eden.’

‘Things are different now,’ said John, the one who’d made things different whether we wanted him to or not. ‘Everything’s different and always will be from now on.’

Back up at the caves Gerry had woken up.

‘Jeff?’ he called out. ‘Tina? John?’

‘Down here!’ John called back.

He turned back to me.

‘I’ve started to think about how to cross Dark,’ he told me. ‘We need to begin building up a big supply of skins, and buckfeet. We won’t keep them all here, though. We’ll hide them in different places. People are going to come over here from Family sooner or later looking for us, and we don’t want them taking all our stuff. We’ll need a lot of skins and we’ll need to find ways of covering ourselves like they did on Earth, so as to keep warm. It can’t be that hard. The hardest bit is covering up our feet in a way that will keep out the snow. I’ve been thinking about how to make footwraps, with buckgrease to keep out the water and something hard on the bottom to stop them wearing through.’

He broke off, looking down at Jeff.

‘ He won’t be able to manage it, though, will he? I wish you hadn’t brought him. It won’t work with clawfeet.’

Jeff opened his big innocent eyes.

‘What about a horse?’ he said.

He must have been awake for a little while.

John snorted.

‘Horse? What are you talking about?’

‘Back on Earth they had animals called horses, remember? They were animals that could carry them anywhere they wanted to go.’

‘Yes, Jeff,’ I said, like a grownup talking to an annoying little child, ‘we know that, dear, but this isn’t Earth, is it? There aren’t horses in Eden.’

Jeff sat up.

‘I don’t think horses were a special kind of animal,’ he said. ‘I think they took baby animals and then raised them up so as to make them into horses. We could use woollybucks.’

‘Yes, Jeff,’ John said, ‘but the Earth animals weren’t like Eden ones, were they? They had eyes like our eyes, eyes that you could look into and see what they were feeling. They had feelings. They had one heart like us, and red blood, and four limbs. They were almost like people. You could understand them. You could teach them things.’

We none of us said anything for a bit after that. It was funny. I’d just assumed at first that it was Jeff being crazy as normal, but when I thought about it, it struck me that maybe this idea of his wasn’t as mad mad as it first seemed.

‘I suppose we could try and catch a baby woollybuck,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Why not? It’s worth a go.’

‘We could ride on their backs and then we’d have their headlanterns to light our way,’ Jeff said.

‘And they know the way, don’t they?’ I said. ‘Remember those ones we saw when we were here before, John? With Old Roger? High up on Dark? They were going somewhere, weren’t they? They weren’t just hanging around. And their lanterns were lighting up the snow.’

I looked at John.

‘Come to think of it, John, how else exactly did you think we were going to see our way? You couldn’t keep torches burning long up there, could you? And if you break a branch of lanterns from a tree, they only last half an hour tops before the light fades.’

John didn’t say anything to this.

‘What was your plan, then?’ I demanded. ‘Were you thinking we’d just feel our way across Dark?’

‘I haven’t bloody worked it all out yet, alright?’ he said.

I smiled because, for a moment there, after all his grownup plans, he was just a kid again, all bristly and red because someone had criticized him.

Gerry came up to us. He had his spike-headed spear in his hand.

‘What’s going on? What are you talking about?’

‘Jeff was saying we could catch a baby woollybuck, a little buckling, and make it into a horse to lead us through Dark,’ I said.

Gerry nodded. He knelt by the stream and scooped up some water to drink with cupped hands, then squatted down beside us.

‘A horse. You’ve often thought about that, haven’t you, Jeff? An animal that would be a helper.’

He looked proudly at me.

‘He’s got all kinds of ideas, my brother. He’s smart smart.’

I laughed and felt a bit fonder of these two weird boys than I had done before.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’ll bloody need them. Tom’s dick, we’ll need all the ideas we can get.’

I looked round at John, but he’d forgotten all about us and was sunk deep down inside himself.

‘Our Eden animals do have feelings,’ Jeff said. ‘A leopard has feelings, a woollybuck does, a bat does, a slinker does. They all do.’

‘He’s always said that,’ Gerry said, as if his little brother’s word was enough to make things true.

John stirred beside us.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we’ve got lots to sort out. We need to get all the skins we can as well as meat to eat. We need to try and catch a baby woollybuck alive . . .’

‘We could make a fence that would stop it running away,’ Jeff said.

‘Okay, you start making your fence then, Jeff, or thinking about how you’re going to do it. You couldn’t do a long hunting trip, anyway, even if your feet weren’t all done in like they are now. Gerry can stay and help you. Me and Tina will go towards Cold Path and see if there are any woollybucks still down there. We won’t be away more than a waking this time. In another waking or two we’ll go the other way, towards Family, and see who we can find.’

There was no choice about it, no asking us what we wanted. And though I really wasn’t scared of him, and I really could stand my ground against him when I felt I had to, and even get the better of him, it was just too much hard work to argue every time.

‘And some time soon,’ John said, ‘we’ll decide about new family rules.’

New family! Look at us! Three newhairs and one little clawfoot kid, sitting by a small pool below a few caves. But in John’s mind we were a new family already.

Come to think of it, that’s what gave him the power he had. He thought he could bring things into being just by believing in them, and he was so sure of it that it sometimes turned out to be true.