We just stood there, enduring this weird nonsense, waiting to learn if we really could carry on towards Davidstand, unharmed, with all our bucks, and all our kids, and all our stuff.
‘So tell me,’ said Teacher Gerry. ‘Who made the world? Who made the stars? Who made Eden and Earth?’
We looked at each other. What a thing to ask us now! And what kind of crazy question was it, anyway? No one made the world. How could anyone have made it? The world was what people were in.
‘You don’t know, do you?’ said Gerry. ‘And why should you? It’s not like it’s obvious. But we teachers, we think and we write down our thoughts, we read what teachers wrote who came before us, going all the way back to John, and slowly slowly we figure things out. And you know what, we’re starting to understand that President wasn’t just a man. He was there from the beginning. He made the world. He made all of this. He made Eden and Earth and all the stars.’
We stood there staring at him, some of us with our mouths wide open. Teacher Gerry laughed.
‘You look pretty surprised!’ he said, like he really believed that, right then, when we were frightened for our lives, we would be interested one way or the other in his weird ideas. ‘But what’s your explanation, eh? How did bats get here? Or trees, or woollybucks, or people? They can’t just have made themselves. No, President made everything. It all began in his head.’
Again he laughed cheerfully. He genuinely seemed to have no idea how scared we were. He was one of those people who likes everyone and just assumes that everyone will like him back. It didn’t seem to even occur to him that we might not feel too friendly towards ringmen who’d forced their way onto our ground, and driven us from our homes. It didn’t seem to strike him that some of those guards these ringmen had done for at Veeklehouse might have been the sons and dads and brothers of the people standing here in front of him now.
‘But you don’t have to take it from me,’ Teacher Gerry said, ‘because if you listen hard enough, President will speak to you himself. You can hear his voice, I promise you, if only you make your mind quiet enough. And if you think about it, that isn’t even surprising. It’s him that’s telling this whole story, after all, and if he fell silent, there’d be nothing left: no you, no me, no Eden, no Earth, no stars, no anything at all. Think about that. President is speaking all the time, but it’s like the pumping of the trees, the humming of forest round us. We don’t notice it because it’s always there.’
He smiled at us, and then glanced back at Luke, who smiled back at him yet again like they were remembering some private joke they’d shared lying side by side, when no one else was there.
‘But that’s enough from me, eh?’
‘More than enough, I’d say,’ said Luke, ‘if the faces of these poor people are anything to go by!’
Gerry laughed merrily at that, while Luke called out to his men. They backed away to the left and the right so as to open up a path between them.
We looked at each other, wondering if this was a trick, a weird cruel joke. Maybe they were just waiting for us to make a move, and then they’d laugh and take our bucks and our meat and our sleeping skins and knives, steal whichever kids of ours took their fancy, force their dicks on whichever women they liked, and do for everyone else. It seemed quite likely.
But what could we do? Tom looked at Clare again, and she shrugged. So then he shrugged too and began to walk. We all did – grownups, kids – pulling on the strings of our bucks to get them moving. Hardly daring to breathe, we passed in between those two high men with their happy smiles and then on through the ringmen in their cold shiny masks, which you couldn’t read any more than you could read the faces of bats, or leopards, or slinkers. In fact they could have been skulls, so empty were they of any sign of feeling, though sometimes we could see their eyes glinting in the treelight.
No one spoke a word, until suddenly little Candy called out.
‘Mum! Why have all these men got two faces?’
Twelve
After Veeklehouse, Mary and me headed up rockway with one smoothbuck to carry us both and all our stuff, while two guards rode with us to keep us safe and show us the way. We didn’t go along poolside this time, but went back across to Davidstand and turned up rockway there, zigzagging between the little forest clusters along the folds and slopes that slowly climb up to Snowy Dark, and from time to time swapping one lot of guards for another as we passed between the grounds of different leaders. Sometimes the guards rode with us and talked to us, but usually they went ahead of us, or hung back, so they could talk more freely to one another. The Davidfolk respect shadowspeakers, but they don’t feel at ease with them, and, though guards are men, and men usually enjoy the company of young women, they weren’t quite so keen when the young woman was a batface like me.
Mary worked hard hard. I wished the Kneefolk who laughed at shadowspeakers could have seen that. Even in the smallest clusters, places where as few as ten grownups came to hear her, and there was no way she was going to get a pile of presents or impress any of the high people, she worked every bit as hard as she’d done at Veeklehouse. To her, even one person brought closer to Mother Gela was worth her trying for with all her might, whether that person was high or low. And, just for that one man or one woman or one newhair, Mary was willing go right down to those lonely, scary places that made her weep and sweat and tremble. She made me feel silly and selfish by comparison, like she was a real grownup and I was only a child. For what had I done in my life except to try and keep on the right side of people, and have as much fun as I could?
One time we met a little group of Hiding People, people who didn’t even live in a cluster but just wandered naked through the trees like animals do, eating whatever they could find, resting wherever they were when they felt tired, and hiding away from guards and Davidfolk. There were just five grownups and a bunch of kids, but Mary sat down with them for the rest of the waking, finding out what stories they told one another, so she should figure out how to talk to them and what it was that they needed to know. They spoke about a great Leopard Man they must feed with burnt meat to keep him happy, and a Slinker Man with a thousand bony claws, who’d crawl into their dreams and steal their shadows if they didn’t repeat certain words at the end of every waking, and rub ash into their skin.
‘Who looks after you, then?’ asked Mary. ‘If Leopard Man and Slinker Man are after you, who’s there to care for you in this dangerous world?’
‘The Great Mother,’ said the oldest of their women.
‘She’s like a bat that’s as big as the sky,’ a younger woman ex-plained. ‘Sometimes she flies across the stars, but mostly she lives deep down under the ground, using her big big wings to fan the fire.’
Their stories seemed so weird and childish that I had a job not to laugh at them, but Mary didn’t so much as smile. ‘What fire is that?’ she asked, like she really wanted to understand.
‘The one that warms the roots of the trees, of course,’ the old woman said. ‘The one that makes them grow. Without the Great Mother there’d be no heat or light. There’d be no food. There’d be no animals or starflowers. There’d be nothing alive at all.’
‘And where do your shadows go when you die?’ asked Mary.
The old woman laughed. ‘When we die, this dream ends and we wake up. No one knows in their dreams where they’ll be when they wake up. If they knew that, they wouldn’t really be dreaming in first place.’
As we travelled round the Davidfolk Ground, I’d heard folk laughing at Hiding People and saying they were no better than animals. I’d even heard of guard leaders who rounded them up like bucks, and made them work for them. Certainly the two guards who were with us now couldn’t believe we were wasting our time on these people. They didn’t even try to hide their feelings, sometimes sniggering, sometimes sighing with boredom, and one of them made the other laugh by pulling scary faces at Hiding People who looke
d in his direction. But Mary insisted we stay with those folk for two whole wakings, while she patiently taught them the True Story, and warned them about false stories they might hear: the stories of the Johnfolk who said that President was a man, and claimed that Gela had chosen John over David, and the so-called Secret Story, which women whispered because they didn’t dare speak such nonsense out loud.
Their own stories, though, she listened to carefully and with so much respect that I felt ashamed for wanting to laugh at them.
‘Who knows?’ she told them. ‘You may well be right about some of this stuff. But the thing you’ve got to remember is that there are two kinds of life in Eden. There’s the life that came up from the warmth of Underworld, like trees and bats and bucks and leopards, and there’s the kind that came down from the stars, which is us human beings. Maybe there is a Great Mother in Underworld – I don’t know – but if so, she’s not our mother, she’s mother of the bats and leopards.’
She drew a circle on the ground. ‘This is the way back to Earth,’ she said. ‘It’s all you need. You mustn’t step inside it until you’re called, but draw a circle like this at the end of every waking, and you’ll be able to go to sleep knowing that your true home is near near, close enough for your true Mother to whisper to you and for you to hear.’
When we were on our way again, and the Hiding People were out of hearing distance, I asked Mary how come she’d paid so much attention to their strange stories.
‘Well,’ she said. She was riding at the time, and I was walking beside her. ‘We don’t know how life began on Eden, do we? We know it came from Underworld, as Michael Namegiver taught us – and you notice the Hiding People knew that too – but we don’t know how it came into being down there in first place. So who am I to call those people liars?’ She laughed, and pointed out two little sweetbats watching us from the branch of a tree. ‘And if there was a mother of all the creatures in Eden, I reckon it would be a bat, don’t you? I’m sure they’re the smartest of the animals. I mean, look at those two. It’s like they’re curious about us, isn’t it? It’s like they’re trying to figure us out. None of the other creatures are like that.’
‘I’ve heard there are bats in New Earth that can be trained to speak.’
Mary shrugged. ‘Well, maybe, but you’ve got to bear in mind that those Johnfolk are liars. Did you know they even claim to have real cars ?’
Presently the path became strangely dark, and we knew there must be nightmakers not far ahead of us, reaching up with their long black necks to bite the lanternflowers from the trees, and bending down to chew up the starflowers.
‘Why did you warn those people about the Secret Story?’ I asked.
Mary turned and looked back the way we came, though the Hiding People had been out of sight for a while. ‘Well, I reckon people like that are easy easy to fool, and I just don’t want them to be fooled like that. Like I said in Veeklehouse, Gela is alive. She speaks to us now. So, even if the Secret Story was true, even if it really was a thing Gela said to her children long ago when she was young, why would we need to pass it on when we can still hear her now? What would be the point?’
The nightmakers had done a thorough job. With no starflowers or lanterns left along the path, all the light that was left to us came from behind the trees along the path, instead of from them or from beneath them. I could see the big square shape of Mary’s head, but I could barely make out her face.
‘And of course it’s not true, anyway,’ she said. ‘Gela hates it. You can’t yet read our Mother’s heart like I can, Angie dear – though you will one waking, and you’ll be brilliant at it – but take it from me that Gela hates it that people can speak that nonsense in her name.’
We rode for a while in silence beneath those strange dark trees.
‘I suppose the high people must hate that story especially,’ I said, ‘because it says that women are as good as men, and—’
I couldn’t see her clearly in the darkness the nightmakers had made, but I could see enough to tell she’d grown suddenly tense, and had turned to peer in my direction.
‘How do you know what it says, Angie?’
Tom’s dick and Harry’s, I was glad of that darkness right then! ‘Oh you know, people talk about it sometimes, don’t they? It’s never been completely a secret.’
She relaxed and turned away again. ‘Well, you shouldn’t listen to them, dearest. It’s just stuff some silly woman or other made up long ago, wanting to make herself feel important. No doubt some of it makes sense: well, of course it does, or no one would believe it, would they? Any story that lasts at all has some truth in it somewhere. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a big big lie, or that it’s wicked for people to pretend to speak for our Mother when they really don’t.’
I didn’t argue any more, but it stuck in my mind what she said about stories and how no one would believe them unless they made some sense. I’d never thought about it that way before, but it seemed to me that what she said was true. The stories that lasted had to fit in in some way with what we knew the world was like, or at least with what we longed for, otherwise why would anyone listen to them, or bother to pass them on? But I couldn’t help myself from thinking that the stories that could be spoken out loud had to fit in with something else as well: they had to fit in with what the high people wanted.
Presently we caught up with the nightmakers. There were four of them, huge huge creatures tall as trees, with four thick legs the height of men, and skin that was black as a forest leopard’s, black like the sky between the stars. Three of them were reaching high up into the treetops with their long long necks and noisily gulping down the lanternflowers, pulling the branches towards their mouth feelers with those thick muscly arms. The fourth one was lying comfortably on the ground, its neck half-hidden in a big drift of twinkly starflowers that it was pulling up in great big armfuls and cramming into its mouth. It lifted its head above the flowers to watch us as we passed, and rubbed its face with its hands, but it still kept munching all the while. So did the other three, peering down at us from above with their big flat flickering Eden eyes as they crunched and chewed.
And then we were past them, and back under trees that gave out light.
‘They were named after a place on Earth, apparently,’ said Mary, her face friendly and familiar once again. ‘A place called Night. The light of Earth’s star never shines there, and there are no lanterns or flowers either, so it’s dark dark.’
‘I guess the Earth people have lecky-trickity to help them, don’t they?’ I said. ‘They use it to make light of their own.’
Out on Knee Tree Grounds, where there were only water creatures and bats, we used to love hearing stories about the big animals on Mainground, like nightmakers and leopards and woollybucks. We were always told that nightmakers were named by John Redlantern, and that he’d named them, not after a place, but after a kind of enormous shadow that swept across the Earth each waking, hiding it from its star for a while. When the shadow passed, the light came back again, pouring down from the sky like it does on Earth. And weren’t nightmakers just like that? They made a big shadow as they passed through forest, but then new lanterns grew in a waking or so, and the shadow passed.
But I didn’t talk about that to Mary. Any mention of John Redlantern or the Johnfolk always made her cross, and I didn’t like it when she reminded me that my old friends were Johnfolk too.
I remembered when I was first told the Secret Story by my aunt Sue back there on the Grounds. She was a bit embarrassed about it, not because she thought it was bad in any way, but more because the way we lived back then, a lot of it seemed so obvious:
‘Always remember that women are just as good as men . . . Just because someone thinks they’re special doesn’t mean they’re really better than anyone else, and nor does having a big shelter, or a fancy wrap . . . Don’t treat people like they’re things that
belong to you . . .’
Obvious obvious all this had seemed back then! Who could possibly disagree? But there were also odd bits that made no sense at all, like: ‘Don’t ever treat someone differently because of the colour of their skin.’
The colour of their skin? If you really thought about it, it was true that some people’s skin was a lighter shade of yellowy-brown than others. But who would ever think of making something out of that?
Thirteen
I’m just saying, Dad,’ said Trueheart, ‘that if the Johnfolk are really as wicked as you’ve always said they are, how come they let us go without hurting us or even taking any of our stuff ?’
The two of them had been arguing for some time, and Tom had been getting crosser and crosser. Now his face was red, his breathing fast, his eyes bulging. He was almost too angry to speak.
‘I can’t believe you could even think of saying a thing like that,’ he spluttered, ‘when your own brothers are fighting them right now. Tom’s dick and Harry’s, girl, for all we know your brothers are dead – have you thought of that? – and one of those slinkers back there in metal masks may have been the ones who did for them!’
‘I love my brothers, Dad, but they might equally well have done for some of those guys’ brothers or those guys’ mates.’
‘So you take the side of the Johnfolk, do you? I can’t believe it! Gela’s tits, I never thought I’d ever hear my own daughter taking the side of the ringstealers, but least of all when those slinkers are over here, doing for our young men, and wrecking our clusters.’
‘I’m not taking their side. I’m just saying that maybe they aren’t quite as bad as we think. Those guys were fair with us, weren’t they? And one of them was the son of their Headman.’
Daughter of Eden Page 8
