Dark Eden (2 page)

When we woke up, Starry Swirl was
still
bright bright in sky. We ate a bit of dry cake and off we went again, under redlanterns and whitelanterns and spiketrees, with flutterbyes darting and glittering all round us and bats chasing the flutterbyes and trees going
hmmph, hmmph, hmmph
like always, until it all blurred together into that
hmmmmmmmmm
that was the background of our lives.

After a few miles we came to a small pool full of shiny wavyweed and all us newhairs took off our wraps and dived into the warm water for crabfish and oysters to eat. All the boys watched Tina Spiketree diving in, and they all thought how graceful she was with her long legs, and how smooth her skin was, and how much they wanted to slip with her. But when she came up she swam straight to me, and gave me a dying oyster with the bright pink light still shining out of it.

‘You know what they say about oysters, don’t you, John?’ she said.

Tom’s neck, she was
pretty
pretty, the prettiest in whole of Family. And she knew it
well
well.

In another couple of hours we reached the place where Peckham Hills began to rise up out of forest of Circle Valley, and started to climb up through them by Monkey Path, which isn’t really a path, but just a way we know through the trees. The trees carried on up the slopes – redlanterns and whitelanterns and scalding hot spiketrees – and there were flickering starflowers growing beneath them, just like in the rest of forest. Streams ran through them down from darkness and ice, heading towards Greatpool, still cold cold but already bright and glittering with life. And small creatures called monkeys jumped from tree to tree. They had little thin bodies, and six long arms with a hand on the end of each. Handsome Fox shot one with an arrow, and was pleased pleased with himself, even though they were all bones and sinews and only give a mouthful of meat, because they move fast and are hard to aim at with those big blotches on their skin that flash on and off as they swing among the lanternflowers.

As we climbed up it got colder. The starflowers disappeared, the trees became smaller, and there weren’t any monkeys any more, only the occasional smallbuck darting away through the trees. And then the trees stopped and we came out from the top edge of forest onto bare ground. Pretty soon, when we’d climbed above the height of those last few little trees, we could see whole of Circle Valley spread out below us – whole of Eden that we knew, with thousands and thousands of lanterns shining all the way from where we stood on Peckham Hills to Dark shadow of Blue Mountains away in the distance, and from Rockies over the left, with the red glow of Mount Snellins smouldering in middle, to the deep darkness over to our right that was Alps. And above all of it the huge spiral of Starry Swirl was still shining down.

Of course, with no trees to give off light with their lanternflowers or to warm the air with their trunks, it was dark dark up there – you could only just barely make things out in the starlight and the light from the edge of forest – and it was
cold
cold, specially on our feet. But us newhairs dared each other to run up as far as the snow. The ice felt like it was burning, it was so cold, and most kids took ten twenty steps, yelled and came running down again. But I took Gerry right up to the ridge of the hill and then, ignoring Old Roger yelling at us to come back, went far enough down the other side so that the others couldn’t see us.

‘We’ve made our point now, haven’t we, John?’ Gerry said, shivering. We only had waistwraps on, and buckskins round our shoulders, and our feet were hurting like they’d been skinned. ‘Shall we go back down to rest of them now?’

My cousin Gerry was about a wombtime younger than me – his dad was giving his mum a slip, in other words, about the time that I was born – and he was devoted to me, he thought I was wonderful, he’d do just about anything I asked.

‘No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Be quiet and listen.’

‘Listen to what?’

‘To the silence, you idiot.’

There was no
hmmmmmmmm
of forest, no
hmmph, hmmph, hmmph
of pumping trees, no starbirds going
hoom, hoom, hoom
in the distance, no flutterbyes flapping and flicking, no
whoosh
of diving bats. There was no sound at all except a quiet little tinkle of water all around us coming out from under the snow in hundreds of little streams. And it was
dark
dark. No tree-light up there. The only light came from Starry Swirl.

We could barely make out each other’s faces. It made me think about that place called Earth where Tommy and Angela first came from, way back in the beginning with the Three Companions, and where one waking we would all return, if only we stayed in the right place and were good good good. There were no lanterntrees back there on Earth, no glittery flutterbyes or shiny flowers, but they had a big big light that we don’t have at all. It came from a giant star. And it was so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.

‘When people talk about Earth,’ I said to Gerry, ‘they always talk about that huge bright star, don’t they, and all the lovely light it must have given? But Earth turned round and round, didn’t it, and half the time it wasn’t facing the star at all but was dark dark, without lanterns or anything, only the light the Earth people made for themselves.’

‘What are you
talking
about, John?’ Gerry said, with his teeth chattering. ‘And why can’t we go back down again if you just want to talk?’

‘I was thinking about that darkness. They called it Night, didn’t they? I’m just thinking that it must have been like this. What you get up here on Snowy Dark: it’s what they would have called Night.’

‘Hey John!’ Old Roger was calling from the far side of the ridge. ‘Hey Gerry!’ He was scared we’d freeze to death or get lost or something up there.

‘Better go back,’ Gerry said.

‘Let him stew a minute first.’

‘But I’m freezing
freezing
, John.’

‘Just one minute.’

‘Okay, one minute,’ said Gerry, ‘but that’s it.’

He actually counted it out on his pulse, one to sixty, the silly boy, and then he jumped up and we both climbed back over the ridge. Gerry went running straight down to the others, but I stood up there for a moment, partly to show I was my own man and didn’t go scurrying back for Old Roger or anyone, and partly to take in how things looked from up there on top of the ridge: the shining forest, with darkness all around it, and above everything the bright bright stars. That’s our home down there, I thought, that’s our whole world. It felt weird to be looking in on it from outside. And though in one way the bright forest stretching away down there seemed big big, in another way it seemed small small, that little shining place with the stars above it and darkness looking down on it from the mountains all around.

Back with the others, Gerry made a big thing about his freezing feet, asking some people to feel them and rub them, begging others to let him ride on their backs until he had warmed up, and generally hopping and skipping around like an idiot. That was how Gerry dealt with people. ‘I’m just a fool, I won’t hurt anyone,’ that was his message. But I wasn’t like that. ‘I’m not a fool by any means,’ was
my
message, ‘and don’t assume I won’t hurt you either.’ I acted as if I didn’t feel the cold in my feet at all, and pretty soon they were so numb anyway that I really didn’t. I noticed Tina watching me and smiling, and I smiled back.

On we went, just below the snow and along the top edge of forest, where there was a bit of light from the trees, Old Roger grumbling and moaning about how newhairs had no respect any more and things were different from how they used to be.

‘Old fool was scared he’d have to go back to Family and tell your mums he’d lost you,’ said Tina. ‘He was thinking of the trouble he’d be in. No more slippy for Old Roger.’

‘Like he gets it anyway,’ said dark-eyed Fox, who my mum had told me once with a shrug was like as not my father. (But then another time she said it could have been Old Roger – he wasn’t quite such a fool once apparently – or maybe a pretty little newhair boy from London she once slipped with. I wished I knew, but lots of people didn’t know for sure who their dad was.)

We came to Cold Path, which ran down beside a stream that carried meltwater from a big snowslug. Woollybucks made this path, and we crept up to it in case there were some on it now. There weren’t, but there were lots of fresh buck tracks coming down off the snow and onto the muddy ground beside the stream as it headed down to forest below. The bucks had come down already. The dip had brought them down from wherever it was up there they normally lived, and from whatever it was that they normally did up there.

‘I saw a big big bunch of them in this exact spot once,’ said Roger. ‘Coming down the path from the snowslug there. About ten fifteen wombs ago. There were ten twelve of them, plodding down in single file from up on Snowy Dark there and …’

I stopped listening then. I looked up into the blackness of Snowy Dark as he talked, and wondered. No one knew anything about that place up there except that it was high high and dark dark and cold cold
cold
, and that it was the source of all the streams and the great snowslugs (‘glay seers’, as Oldest called them), and that it surrounded our whole world.

But then I noticed a light high up there in sky: a little far-off patch of pale white light hovering up there in darkness.

‘Hey look! Up there!’

Normally when you see something that you don’t know what it is, it only takes a second or two before you
do
know, or at least can have a good guess. But this I couldn’t make out at all. I really had no idea what it could possibly be. I mean, there’s one source of light in sky: Starry Swirl. And there’s another source on the ground: living things, trees and plants and animals, plus the fires we make ourselves. But the only light I’d ever seen in between these two sources was from volcanoes like Mount Snellins, and they were red red like fire, not pale and white.

It sounds dumb but all I could think of for a moment was that it was a Landing Veekle, one of those sky-boats with lights on them that brought Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions down to Eden from the starship
Defiant
.

Well, we were always taught that it would happen sometime. The Three Companions had gone back to Earth for help. Something must have gone wrong, we knew, or the Earth people would have come long ago, but they had a thing with them called a Rayed Yo that could shout across sky, and another thing called a Computer that could remember things for itself. A waking would come when they’d find
Defiant
, or hear the Rayed Yo, and build a new starship and come for us, across Starry Swirl, through Hole-in-Sky, to take us back to the bright light of that giant giant star.

And for one sweet scary moment I thought it was finally happening now.

Then Roger spoke.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s them. That’s woollybucks alright.’

Woollybucks?

Well, of course that’s all it was! It was obvious now. That pale light wasn’t really in sky at all, it was up in the mountains, up on Snowy Dark, and it was just woollybucks. Michael’s names, I was glad I hadn’t said anything out loud. Woollybucks were the one thing we were supposed to be looking for, and I’d mistaken them for sky people from bloody Earth!

I felt a fool, but beyond that I felt
sad
sad, because for a few seconds I’d really thought that the time had finally come when we would find our way back to that place full of light and people, where they knew the answers to all the hard hard questions we had no idea how to solve, and could see things we can’t see any more than blind people …

But no, of course not. Nothing had changed. All we still had was Eden and each other, five hundred of us in whole world, huddled up with our blackglass spears and our log boats and our bark shelters.

It was disappointing. It was sad sad. But it was
still
amazing just to think the mountains up there were so high. I mean, you could see their shadows against the stars from back in Family, and you could see they must be big big, but you couldn’t see the mountains themselves, only the lower slopes where there were still trees and light, and you couldn’t really tell which were the mountains and which were the clouds above them. I’d only ever been to the lower hills before and I’d imagined that Snowy Dark behind them was maybe two three times higher than that ridge of hills that Gerry and I had run up to the top of. But I could tell now that it was ten twelve times that high.

And right up there – so high up, so far away, in a place so different from where we were now that it was more like looking into a dream than at a real place in the world – a row of woollybucks were moving in single file across the slope, and the soft white lanterns on the tops of their heads were lighting up the snow around them. Just for a moment as the bucks went past, the snow shone white, and then it became grey, and then it went back into blackness again. And though woollybucks are big beasts, two three times the weight of a man, they looked so tiny and alone up there in their tiny little pool of light that they might as well have been little ants. They might as well have been those little flylets that live behind the ears of bats.

And in the back of my mind a little thought came to me that there
were
other worlds we could reach that weren’t hidden away in Starry Swirl, or through Hole-in-Sky, but here on ground, in Eden. They were the places where the woollybucks went, the places they came from.