Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘John says he talks to Gela too,’ Mehmet said.

Michael’s names, you should have seen how Lucy Lu changed when she heard that! All the dreaminess and weepiness disappeared in a moment. Her face went all twisty. She looked like she was crouching ready to pounce. She looked like a hunter about to make a kill.

‘Him?’ she snarled. ‘Him talk to Angela? Ha! Don’t make me laugh .’

‘Yes, but listen to this. He fools people because he’s got Gela’s ring !’

There was a gasp from whole Family.

‘What do you mean?’ demanded David. ‘What do you mean, her ring?’

‘The lost ring, like in the story. The one she lost and then cried and cried for wakings afterwards. I’ve seen it myself. You can tell it comes from Earth easy easy. It’s made of metal — it’s smooth smooth, and shiny — and it’s got tiny writing inside it: “ To Angela with love from Mum and Dad ”, that’s what it says. I’ve seen it myself. John found the ring in forest near here and told no one, kept it all to himself, and then he destroyed our Circle.’

‘You went over to him after he destroyed Circle, Mehmet,’ I called out. ‘Stop trying to pretend that you . . .’

But people yelled at me to shut up. They didn’t want to think about that. They didn’t want any complications. They wanted to think about the wonderful ring from Earth, the lost ring in the story, being found again, and they wanted to be angry angry with the arrogant newhair who’d destroyed Circle but kept the ring. He’d taken away our bit of the past without even asking us, and kept his own bit without even telling. He was my nephew and I loved him, but even I thought that was selfish and bad.

‘This is Gela’s Family,’ David said. ‘We’re her children. That ring belongs to us.’

‘Gela says we must get it back,’ Lucy Lu confirmed, rolling back her eyes so you could only see the whites of them. ‘I hear her now. Gela says we must get it back. Get the ring and punish wicked wicked John, who says he speaks in her name when he doesn’t, he doesn’t.’ Her voice rose into a shriek. ‘How dare he? He doesn’t! He doesn’t! He doesn’t! ’

She began to shake and tremble, like people do when they’re having a fit.

‘He must be killed. He must be killed like a slinker,’ she hissed. ‘Him and Gerry and Harry, all three of them. Kill them! Kill! Kill!’

Other people began to yell out the same thing, ‘Kill! Kill!’ and gradually it turned into a chant:

‘ Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! ’

Jade reached out her hand to me and we held onto each other while the crowd around us shouted for the death of our own sons.

‘ Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! ’

Mehmet had a strange look on his face. Standing there with his auntie’s arm still around him, he looked half-pleased by the effect he had had, half-scared by what he had set off. He had done a terrible thing, coming down from Dark, and feeding our fear and hate to serve his own ends. But all the same, you couldn’t deny — even I couldn’t deny — that it was John who’d started it, John who’d killed another human being for the first time ever in Eden. And that was like the spark that lights a fire. There would be no end to the killing now, no end, not unless it killed us all.

I’d destroyed Circle of Stones. I’d got a bunch of people over Dark. I’d proved that human beings didn’t have to live forever in Circle Valley. I’d done all those hard hard things, but what was left for me?

Did I do all that, I thought, just to live quietly quietly in our own little family, hunting and scavenging and raising up kids?

Everyone could hunt and build shelters and raise up kids, that was the thing, and some of the others could do all that a lot better than me. Dix was a better hunter. Harry was stronger. Gela was better at sorting out quarrels. Jeff was best at turning baby bucks into horses that would let us ride them. The one thing I was good at, the one special thing about me, which no one could do even half as well as me, was breaking out of something old and making something new. Was I going to accept that I’d never do any of that again, when I was only barely grown up, and that from now on other people were going to be better than me at doing everything?

Tom’s dick and Harry’s, no I wasn’t! I needed to make something else happen, and, what’s more, they needed me to do it too, even if they didn’t know it themselves, because otherwise they would get bored bored bored. That’s why people let me lead them, because I knew what they needed even before they did, and because I saved them from getting bored.

‘We should go further,’ I said to Tina, sitting at the end of a waking on the bank of L-pool. ‘We’ve been here for two wombs now, less than a waking’s walk away from bottom of Snowy Dark, with whole of Wide Forest out there waiting for us.’

‘We’re far enough from Family already, John,’ she said. ‘No one wants to go further than this from their friends and their mums and everyone.’

‘Okay, well, maybe we should go back to Family, then? Go back over and get some more of them to come and join us.’

‘John,’ Tina said, almost like she was explaining something to a kid. ‘You destroyed Circle, remember? You broke up Family. You did for Dixon Blueside. Okay, Family doesn’t know what happened exactly but they know something did, and they’re not going to forgive us for it, are they? David Redlantern isn’t, that’s for sure. Come on, you know that!’

‘Of course I know but . . . I reckon we could sneak up on Family without him knowing. See if more of them want to come and join us?’

Tina snorted. ‘Yeah, we could try, until it ended up being us with spears stuck through us and our heads cracked open. There’s a lot more of them than us, remember, John.’

I sat with my feet in the water, with tiny shining fishes nibbling at my toes. Three four yards out, beyond the trees that grew up out of the edge of the water, I could see pink oysters shining, and I thought of suggesting we dive for them like we’d done back at Deep Pool.

‘Or maybe David and his mates would decide not to do for all of us,’ Tina said. ‘Maybe they’d keep some of us girls, and do to each one of us what Dixon Blueside tried to do to me.’

She chucked a bit of stone out into the water.

‘Yeah,’ she added, glancing round at me, ‘and come to that, maybe they’d do to you what David first suggested they do. Remember? Tie you to a spiketree to burn, the way hunters cook meat.’

‘Yeah, well. It’s just something to think about, that’s all. Either going back to Circle Valley to get more of them to join us, or pushing forward ourselves. There’s no point in just sitting here.’

She didn’t even answer that. She pulled her feet out of the water and turned to face me. Her face was tired but she managed to smile.

‘So do you want a slip, then? Have a go at making another baby?’

I said yes, but, once she’d got my juice, all Tina wanted to do was go back to the shelters and sleep.

I couldn’t rest, though. I got my spears and my hunting bag and went out into forest alone. I’d often gone out on long trips, for two three four wakings. Sometimes Gerry came with me, sometimes Jeff came, riding on the back of Def, sometimes one two of the others, but often I went on my own. I’d scald my meat on a hot spiketree, and sleep between whitelantern roots with my spear ready in my hand.

Once, thirty forty wakings after we first came down into Wide Forest, I’d been been out on my own like that, a waking away from L-pool, when I woke up from a short sleep to hear a snuffling scrunching sound ahead of me. Thinking it would be bucks of some kind, I crept forward on my belly through starflowers to try and do for one of them. Buckmeat would be too heavy to carry, but I reckoned I could manage to take back a skin.