Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

So when Mehmet and the others began to stir and poke up their fire and get things ready for another waking, we went down to them, pretending that nothing had changed.

‘We need to get back to our own people,’ I told Mehmet. ‘It took us a long long time to get here, and they might think a snow leopard has got us if we don’t show our faces soon. But maybe you’d like to trade with us a bit before we go? We’ve got these skins, look, like woollybuck skins but smooth. And fruit, like you get down in Circle Valley. What can you trade us for this lot?’

And then we were off again, up over Dark, till we came to the ridge looking out over the Wide Forest.

‘Look at that!’ I said. ‘Even from here you can see the smoke of our fire down there. They could easily find us.’

The air was still, and the smoke went straight up like a tree trunk, lit up clear and white by the lanternlight of Wide Forest.

‘Yes, and look at that !’ said Jeff, pointing back.

I looked round. On the snowy slope behind us were three patches of light from the headlanterns of three woollybucks. It was Mehmet and a couple of the others. They’d been behind us all the way, following to see which way we’d go. They’d only need to come as far as this ridge we were on now to see Wide Forest below them, and the smoke rising up from our fire, all lit up by the firelight and by the lanterns all around it. And then Mehmet would know where we were living and he’d know we’d been lying when we said our camp was far away.

When he came back down from Tall Tree Valley John was full full of himself, like he hadn’t been for a long long time. He had all his authority back. He knew exactly what he was doing and how to carry everyone with him. And the funny thing was, he didn’t have good news at all. He had bad bad news, but he was happy happy happy. It was just like when the snow came down into Tall Tree Valley: he liked having trouble to deal with.

‘We need to leave this place,’ he told us. ‘David Redlantern and his lot could soon be down here after us. We need to get far enough away from here that they can’t see the smoke from our fire from the top of the ridge. Where we are now, they could be here within twenty wakings if they put their mind to it.’

He looked back the way the three of them had just come down. There was a dip going on and Starry Swirl was filling up sky, bright bright and big as whole world, with the black shadow of Snowy Dark sharp up against it.

‘We won’t always run from them,’ he told us. ‘Time will come when we’ll turn round and face them. And, if we need to, when that time comes, we’ll fight David and his lot and beat them. But we’re not ready for that now. There’s only sixteen of us here, not counting little kids, and he could bring maybe fifty sixty grownup men and newhairs with him over the ridge, with blackglass spears and bows and everything. We’re not ready for that. But a waking will come when there’ll be more of us, and we’ll have found our own blackglass, and then . . .’

‘And then,’ said Gela with a sigh, ‘there’ll be a lot more killing. There’ll be lots and lots more red red blood. Harry’s dick, John, you don’t have to apologize for telling us to run away! Surely there’s enough space in Eden for people who feel like doing for each other just to move apart and keep out of each other’s way?’

‘Yeah, and let’s stop talking about killing, if you don’t mind,’ Clare said. ‘What’s poor Fox and Flower going to make of it, eh?’

The two children were both listening intently, their faces stiff. Poor things. It was never like that when we were littles. We might have been scared of leopards or slinkers sometimes, we might even have felt scared of grownup people who were angry or unkind, but we never never thought that other people might come and do for us on purpose.

‘We need to take everything we can,’ John said, ‘skins, wraps, blackglass, spears, everything. Load it onto bucks, or carry it. We’ll go that way,’ he was standing facing Dark, and he pointed behind and to his left, ‘along between the hills and Worldpool, but making our way over towards Worldpool till we’re going along the edge of it. We’ll keep going for ten wakings. That’ll take us far enough from the ridge. After that we won’t have to move so fast, but we’ll still keep moving on every few wakings for a while, to get us a good long way away. We should be safe then for wombs and wombs, by Worldpool somewhere, far off from here. We could even make boats, if we wanted, make boats and figure out how to cross the water. Then we’ll have somewhere else to go to if we have to get away again.’

Yes, we could be safe, I thought, but you won’t like that, John. You’ll get bored again. You’ll do something to make things more exciting, just as you’ve just done by going up to Tall Tree Valley and stirring up an ant’s nest, just like we feared would happen.

But I didn’t say that then. We needed to move. Tom’s dick, I did not want to be around when David Redlantern and his lot came over Dark, and I certainly didn’t want my little ones to be there to see what they did to us. We needed to move. And of course I had to admit John was good at getting things moving.

We started to pack stuff up, sort things out, figure out just how much we could carry on our backs or load onto the seven woollybucks we had now managed to turn into horses. It wasn’t all that much we could take with us when it came to it, not when Jeff had to ride on one buck, and we had twelve little ones to bring along with us, and we needed to take embers on a bark so we could make fires again without spending whole wakings trying to get a spark from twigs. Within a waking we had loaded up everything we could carry and were ready to leave our camp at L-Pool behind us, that big empty space inside John’s fence that we’d hardly begun to fill up.

‘The annoying thing is,’ said Gela, ‘that when David’s lot do come over the top they’ll find this place and make it their own. We’ve done all the work for them.’

It was probably true. From what John and Gerry and Jeff had heard up at Tall Tree, Family had been happy to steal all the ideas that John and the rest of us came up with, even though they condemned us for having them in the first place: they were turning bucks into horses over there now; they were making footwraps and headwraps and bodywraps. Why wouldn’t they start their own camp in Wide Forest?

But who cared, eh? We’d be long gone when they arrived here.

Hunting and scavenging as we went along, we moved slowly through forest. The trees went hmmmmmmm all around us. Starbirds called to each other. Two three times we heard a leopard singing in the distance. Once we passed two of those huge slow animals that John had named Nightmakers, and three four times we crossed the wide dark paths they made through forest as they slowly munched up every shining flower on the trees and the ground. You could tell how old the paths were by the number of flowers that had grown back.

We went slow slow. There was a lot to carry, including all the little kids except for Fox and Flower, who’d walk a little way, and then ride up together on a buck, and then walk a little more.

About three four hours into the second waking, I went up to the front with my little boy Peter riding on my back in a buckskin sling. John was up there already walking next to Jeff on Def, with Gerry following on just behind them. John had Star in his arms. She was fast asleep and he bent from time to time to kiss the top of her head. Now that things were moving on again for him, he seemed to have forgiven her for maybe being Mike’s kid and not his own, and he loved the sweet fresh smell of her hair.