Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

We came down into a strange forest, where the trees were as tall as that tree up in the snow with the bat and the slinker, and had trunks that went way way up before they even put out a single branch. It made me feel small small as we passed underneath them, even sitting up there on Def’s back, when their branches were so far above us. But their lanternflowers were as bright as any whitelantern back in Circle Valley, even if they were high over our heads, and the tree trunks were warm and made that same familiar sound that we’d all heard around us every waking and sleeping all our lives until we first went up onto Snowy Dark. Hmmph , hmmph , hmmph , they went. And whole forest went hmmmmmmmmmm .

A tree fox came running down one of the trunks, and peeked at us around the side of it with its flat blank eyes, sniffling with its long bendy snout. A bright coloured bird flew past, with its hands held out in front of it. And a monkey with six long arms gazed down at me from a high high branch, bigger than the monkeys we had in Circle Valley, and with loose flaps of skin hanging down between its arms.

Everything seemed clear clear in my mind and I stared and stared, because the only thing I could do just then was to see and see and see, so I might as well do that as well as I possibly could. I felt myself grow calmer, and I could feel Def getting calmer too. His hearts weren’t beating so fast and his lantern had stopped pulsing and was settling into a steady glow. I pulled gently back on it to see if he would stop, and he stopped at once, without any fuss or trouble. I got off him, and led him to a stream, and rested my back against a tree while he gathered wavyweed into his mouth feelers, using his front legs as arms.

Presently he lay down on the ground beside me and slept.

‘In a way I was the leader, not John,’ I said to myself, stroking Def’s woolly back and thinking about how it had been me that made the horses and chose the paths.

‘I was the real leader,’ I said. It made me laugh.

Of course I wasn’t a leader in the way John was. I couldn’t be, and I wouldn’t want to be either, not at all, not even one little bit. My life was different different from John’s because I was a clawfoot, and no one expected me to become a man. Other boys ran and fought and kicked balls (even batfaces, however much they got teased), but if you were a clawfoot they left you out of all that. Other boys became men by putting on the masks of men, and shutting out of their heads all the things that didn’t fit with their masks, but if you were a clawfoot no one expected you to wear that mask, or to shut those things out of your head. That was why I saw things that other people didn’t see.

‘That’s why it was me that worked out how to make horses,’ I said to myself sleepily, running my hands through Def’s fur. ‘Because there was something about animals I saw but no one else did.’

What I’d seen was that it didn’t make any difference whether you were an Earth animal or a human being or an Eden animal. You still had the same thing inside you looking out of your eyes, the same awakeness. It was knowing that about woollybucks that kept me going when I was teaching them to be horses. It was knowing that they weren’t really so different from us. Most boys couldn’t have had that thought because they were too busy being tough hunters.

I felt peaceful peaceful, and I felt warm and safe between Def’s body and the tree trunk.

Not that I’d ever worried in the way most people did, about whether I lived or died. I knew quite well that, even when someone died, the secret awakeness that had been looking out of their eyes would always still be there.

Pretty soon I was fast asleep too.

I’d always loved my cousin John and I’d always trusted him to know what to do, even if I couldn’t always understand his reasons for thinking what he did. But this was where he’d led us: my brother Jeff lost all on his own out in the snow, and the rest of us bunched up in a circle, in a place so dark that it was the same as being completely blind, waiting for that leopard to strike and kill again.

It was dark dark dark. But out in that darkness that made us blind, near near, with nothing between us and it, was an animal that wasn’t blind at all, and could run silently over the surface of the snow. We all had our spears pointing outwards and were waving them from side to side to try and stop it sneaking in between. But spears are only bits of wood, and most of ours didn’t even have proper blackglass heads. That huge white leopard could knock them aside like twigs.

‘Remember it’s never met humans before,’ John called out. ‘It doesn’t know what we are. It can’t possibly know that we can’t see it. Let’s try and scare it. Shout! Scream! Yell as loud as you can!’

Well, we didn’t want to do that at all . If you can’t see, you certainly don’t want to stop being able to hear as well. What we wanted was perfect perfect silence, so we could listen, listen, listen.

But John started yelling, and then Tina. So I joined in, and then more and more people began screaming and yelling and shouting. And of course that made the babies yell too, and the echoes from all of us came back from the rocks on both sides of us, so it soon felt like the biggest thing in whole world was that screaming and screaming and screaming all around us. And the weird thing was that once we’d started, we didn’t want to stop. The screaming said how we felt. The screaming filled up the world with our feelings. And even though those feelings might be ones of fear and misery, they were so big big that they pushed away the ice and darkness, and made them seem far away.

But even all that screaming couldn’t completely blot out our own thoughts. We all knew the leopard was only the beginning of our troubles. Even if we drove it away, what was going to happen next? How could we ever get ourselves out of this when we had no light to guide us and no idea where we were or where we were trying to get to?

‘What are we going to do?’ yelled some people in middle of our screaming. ‘What are we bloody going to do?’

And some just cried, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’

But no one’s mum was going to come, were they? Nobody’s mum could put this right.

‘Alright!’ yelled John. ‘It’s gone! It’s gone! Shut up now and listen!’

So the crying and yelling stopped, but slowly slowly, because now we’d started we were just as afraid to face the silence again as we had been afraid in the first place to cover the silence up. We’d found a sort of comfort in all that noise.

‘How do we know it’s gone?’ came Clare’s voice in the darkness, when we’d finally quietened down.

‘Because it would have attacked by now if it was still here,’ John said. ‘We’ve scared it off. We’ve showed it we’re not like bucks, we’re not like anything it knows.’

‘So what will we do now?’

‘Where are the snow-boats?’ John asked. ‘Who’s got the fire? I’ve got strings dipped in buckgrease we can light up to show us the way. We can follow Def’s tracks over the snow.’

So people lowered their spears and began groping around in Dark. The ones pulling snow-boats had let go of them when the leopard struck, and no one knew where they were. Someone ran into someone else’s spear and cursed. Someone knocked someone else over. But we found a bark snow-boat with a pile of skins on it, and another one with smoked meat and cakes, and then . . . and then we heard Gela Brooklyn give a sort of low wail.

‘It’s turned over, John. Must have been when the leopard came at us. It’s turned over and the fire stone’s gone. We haven’t got any fire.’