Chris Beckett: Dark Eden

‘ And he killed it cleanly in one go,’ Gerry told them all. ‘One single stab.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t be here to tell about it if he hadn’t, would he?’ said a Batwing boy about mine and John’s age. ‘It’s not like a leopard’s going to stand there and let you have a second go.’

The boy was called Mehmet. He was named, like a lot of people were, for Mehmet Haribey, who was one of the Three Companions. But, though the True Story said that Mehmet Haribey was friendly and kind, Mehmet Batwing didn’t look all that friendly. He had a narrow clever face and a little pointy yellow beard, and he was a sarky bugger who liked to find fault with people.

Well, I can be pretty sarky myself when I want to be, and I can deal with sarky people, no trouble, but Gerry didn’t know how to handle them at all. I saw him look at Mehmet and frown, but he really couldn’t work out what exactly Mehmet was getting at, so he shrugged and carried on.

‘A bloody great leopard,’ he yelled out again excitedly, turning away from Mehmet. ‘John says I can share the hearts. And it’s fully grown, not just a little one. It sang at him and everything. Sang like a woman, even when it was running towards him. You should have heard it. You should have heard. Like a lovely gentle woman it was, even when it was running at him with its jaws wide open. Fully grown it is. Have you ever seen such a big one? Biggest one ever, I’d say. John says I can have one of its hearts, because I was there too when the leopard came.’

We passed on through the group and into Redlantern group area, which came before Spiketree. And Redlanterns got out some fruit beer and passed it round in dried whitefruit shells for all us to drink and celebrate the double kill.

‘John, you idiot,’ said John’s mother Jade, with that smile of hers that was supposed to send men crazy. ‘Why couldn’t you climb a bloody tree like any normal person?’

I looked at her and wondered why men couldn’t see the emptiness inside her. It was like she was acting being a person, she was moving her pretty body around to make it seem alive, but inside she was lost lost.

‘Jade, Jade,’ said her sister Sue, laughing. ‘Your only son kills a leopard by himself and that’s all you can say?’

Sue Redlantern was Gerry’s mum and she was a batface, like David, and like my own sister Jane. She was as ugly ugly as John’s mum was beautiful, but she was kind and giving and everyone knew it, not only in Redlantern but across whole of our side of Family.

‘He’s a bloody fool,’ said Jade.

I looked at John. His face was still still, but Gerry was upset on his behalf.

‘Your son John is brilliant brilliant,’ he told Jade hotly. ‘He’s bloody brilliant. How many kids of twenty wombtimes have ever . . .?’

‘You should say years ,’ said Old Roger. ‘You should say fifteen years , not twenty wombtimes. You know what Oldest say: the world doesn’t come from a woman’s belly.’

‘How many kids of fifteen years ,’ Gerry said, ‘have ever done for a leopard on their own?’

‘He is a brave boy,’ said Roger, ‘even if he is rude to his elders.’

‘He’s a bloody lucky boy,’ said sour David, pursing his ugly batlips that split open right up into where his nose ought to be.

Little kids were crowding round with toy spears cut from whitelantern twigs.

‘How did you kill it, John? What was it like?’

There weren’t only kids from Redlantern around us now, but from my group Spiketree and from Brooklyn and even from London and Blueside, right across the other side of Family. Grownups had come over too.

‘Right down the throat, I hear,’ said an old Fishcreek guy called Tom. He was another batface and he had clawfeet too, poor bugger, so he couldn’t ever have been a hunter. But he was clever with making things out of wood and stone — spears, saws, axes, knives, boats — and he liked to talk about hunting. He liked to show that he knew about it.

‘That’s the best way, of course,’ he said. ‘A good clean kill. But it’s far from easy.’

‘Too damn right,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s hard hard. John only had a . . .’

‘It’s not that hard,’ John interrupted. ‘It just seems hard because it’s dangerous. It’s like balancing on a branch at the top of a tree. Really, when you think about it, that’s no harder than balancing on a branch near the ground, which anyone can do. The only difference is that you’re done for if you don’t get it right, and that makes it seem harder.’

I smiled. I liked what John had said, and I liked that he didn’t say it to pretend to be modest, but because he was annoyed with the smallness of Family that got so excited about a little thing like someone killing one lousy animal. But Gerry looked at him in dismay. Why was John cross that people were making a fuss of him? Why didn’t he like it that everyone said he was great? Poor Gerry, who no one noticed much at all, he just couldn’t figure it out.

‘John only had a second to get it right,’ he repeated. ‘Too early or too late and he’d have been done for.’

After they’d cut out its two big hearts, grownups tied wavyweed ropes round the leopard’s front legs and hauled it up into the meeting tree in middle of Redlantern group for everyone to see. They’d take its skin off later, and pull out its long black teeth and claws for knives, and then they’d dry its guts for string, and clean its bones for diggers and hooks and knives and spearheads (bone is better than tree spikes, though not as good as blackglass). And of course someone or other would eat its eyes: someone who was getting older and beginning to be scared of darkness coming, because people said a leopard’s eyes kept the blindness back, even though they tasted foul. The rest of a leopard’s meat was bitter bitter, enough to make you sick, so when Redlantern had taken the bones and skin and guts and everything else useful off that leopard, they’d have to take the meat itself back out of Family again and dump it a good distance off for the tree foxes and starbirds to eat up.

As to the big woollybuck that we’d done for at about the same time John and Gerry met the leopard, well, like I said, any other time people would have been pretty excited about that too. It would be good eating for many wakings, after all. It had a good big skin that would make a lot of wraps, feet you could melt down for a glue that was as good as boiled sap, and teeth you could use for seedgrinders (the best kind, which didn’t leave grit in the flour like stone seedgrinders do). Most times we could all have expected a bit of praise for getting it, and a few questions about who had done what in the hunt, but this time no one cared. Redlantern just settled down without any fuss at all to skin it, and cut off the tasty lantern on its head, and slice up its body into the Redlantern group portion and the portion that we Spiketrees would take back for our share. (One leg for us, five for them: that had been the deal.) But, all the time they were stripping down the buck, they were talking talking about the leopard whose useless meat was hanging in the tree above them.

‘How did you do it, John?’

‘Weren’t you scared?’

‘What did it feel like?’

‘Well done, our John,’ said Bella, the Redlantern group leader, who’d just come back from a meeting right over in Starflower. ‘Well done, our John. This will do us good at the next Any Virsry, my hunter boy. This will be to the credit of Redlantern among all the other groups.’

She was a clever woman, wiry and always a little bit weary-looking, who people from right across Family came to with problems and arguments. Lots of people said she was the best group leader in whole Family. She worked away waking after waking, not a bit like our lazy old Liz Spiketree, keeping things going, sorting things out, holding all kinds of boring stuff in her head that most people couldn’t be bothered to think about at all.