Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

Walking on snow now, and hoping that our footwraps would stay dry and not fall apart, we followed Cold Path Stream until we came to the snowslug that the stream flows out of (not a big big snowslug like Dixon Snowslug over at Blue Mountains, which comes right down into the top of forest, but big enough, the height of four men or more). Then we tied ourselves together with ropes, and got our spears ready, pointed end down, to hold us steady, and we scrambled up the slippery buck path that led along one side of the snowslug.

Harry tried to run up it and slipped. People laughed at him, of course, because they badly needed a laugh, but he hated hated being laughed at.

‘I’m stopping here, then,’ he said. ‘You go on if you bloody want. Harry’s not going with you lot if you’re just going to laugh at him.’

He began to cry. He was the oldest one of us, the only one of us you could really say was a grownup, but he cried like a little kid. It was embarrassing and frustrating but people should have made more allowances. They should have remembered that he’d done for someone too that waking, he’d killed John Blueside. And if I had a job getting all that through my head, it must have been much worse for Harry. He had a job getting anything through his head at all.

Tina went back to calm him down and coax him up the path and Gerry came up to walk beside me. He wanted to talk about the killings too. Poor kid, he’d really had the worst of it out of the three of us. I didn’t know Dixon Blueside personally and Harry didn’t know John Blueside hardly at all. But Gerry had done for a boy from his own group who he’d grown up with since he was a baby. Now he kept going over and over it, and I had to keep telling him over and over that we had no choice and that they’d have gone ahead and killed Jeff if we hadn’t got to them in time. They would have killed Jeff too, they really would, and they’d have done a cruel thing to Tina that didn’t even have a name.

‘And if they’d got away with that,’ I kept telling Gerry, ‘then it would have been the rest of us who’d have been next, one by one, or all together. There were only twenty-one of us at Valley Neck, remember, and five hundred-plus in Old Family.’

‘Yes, but I used to play with Met,’ Gerry would say. ‘He once swapped me a bit of blackglass he found for a big lump of stumpcandy.’

Or: ‘We got that slinker with him once, remember? That slinker you let him kill, remember? That time Jeff said he wondered what it felt like to be a slinker. We were friends with Met then, weren’t we? We were friends in the same group.’

‘Yes, Gerry,’ I’d say, ‘but he broke our friendship when he killed Brownhorse and did Jeff over, and stood and laughed while Dixon tried to slip Tina there in forest.’

‘That’s right,’ Gerry would say. ‘It was him that broke the friendship.’

And he’d think about it for a bit, looking relieved, and then suddenly he’d frown and come up with something else.

‘He was with us that first time we came up here with Old Roger, remember? He was our friend back then.’

And we’d have to go round the whole thing again.

Meanwhile the lights of forest disappeared behind us and we were truly up in Dark. All we could see was what was lit up by the headlantern of the buckhorse Def, up ahead of us with Jeff riding on its back. Rocks, snow, ice loomed up out of the blackness in the area close around us, and then disappeared again back into blackness again at the other end of the line, behind the second buck, Whitehorse.

Jeff had named his buck Def after the sky-boat Defiant that brought Angela and Tommy and the Three Companions from Earth and actually it was a good choice of name. When I saw that group of woollybucks up on Dark all that time ago, I thought for moment I was seeing a sky-boat up there, and Def and Whitehorse were pretty much like sky-boats for us. They might not be taking us across Starry Swirl but they were taking us across Dark and we couldn’t have done it without them. I had thought before of maybe finding some way of lighting our way with lights made of hollow branches or torches made of dry wavyweed dipped in grease, like people sometimes used back in Family when they wanted a bit of extra light. But the bucks were doing much more for us than just lighting our way. They knew the way. It was woollybucks that made Cold Path — it was them that made it a path at all — and now they found a new path for us, even when it was hidden by snow.

And I had to admit it: that part of the plan wasn’t down to me at all, it was down to Jeff, that weird little clawfoot kid riding out in front, a young boy whose new hairs had hardly begun to grow.

We walked for the length of a whole waking and then for another waking straight after that, because there was nowhere to sleep, and the only way of not freezing was to keep on going. Once in a while we did have to stop to get out some smoked meat or seedcakes to eat, or for Janny or Clare to give their babies a feed, or to fix new footwraps for someone whose own footwraps had got wet or fallen apart. (I didn’t want anyone getting the black burn up here like old one-legged Jeffo had done.) But whenever we stopped, everyone started getting cold and scared, and Tina and me had to go up and down the line to nip off any talk about us being lost, or us dying, or us never getting anywhere. It was specially bad around Mehmet Batwing and Angie and Julie and Candy Blueside, who all walked together, and all fell silent whenever me or Tina came near.

‘So where are we then, John?’ Mehmet finally asked me.

‘We’re following the buck path, Mehmet. You know that. That’s what we all agreed to do, remember? Remember how I gave you a choice and you chose this?’

‘Yeah, but where’s it leading us? We’re just going up and up all the time.’

That was true. We were going up and it got colder the higher we went. And there was some weird thing too about the air because you had to work harder and harder to get enough of it. I couldn’t help thinking about some of the old stories about Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions, and how they said there was no air at all up in Starry Swirl, and that air was like water, it stayed near the ground. Maybe the air sat in Circle Valley like water in a giant pool, and the buck Def was leading us up to a place where the air stopped and we wouldn’t be able to breathe?

But then I thought that bucks themselves must need air. You could hear them breathing, you could see the steam around their mouths the same as you could see the steam around ours.

‘We’re going up, yes,’ I said to Mehmet, ‘but we are going up between two mountains, not over the top.’

‘How do you figure that out?’

‘Well, you can see the slope of the mountain on our left, can’t you? You can see it sloping up in the lanternlight. And you can hear the mountain on the right.’

I lifted the front of my headwrap to give him a demonstration.

‘ Mehmet! ’ I yelled.

‘ Mehmet! ’ came back an echo from high high above us and to the right. It was far far higher than I’d imagined it would be, my own voice bouncing down from a rock somewhere up there in total darkness that quite probably no human being and no living thing would ever ever reach.

And then there were some fainter echoes, and the sound of stones rattling down bare rock.

‘See what I mean?’ I said, pulling the front of my wrap down again, my beard already full of ice.

‘Well, what a lot you know about Snowy Dark,’ Mehmet said bitterly.

I couldn’t win with him. If I said something wrong, that proved I was a fool. If I said something right, that meant I was trying to be clever.