Daughter of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  We walked round for a bit and Mary read out some of the names and words scratched on flat stones that were propped in front of the piles. The fug was round and above us, and we could see nothing at all beyond these dark piles that waited there silently in every direction, some of them close and clear, some further away and pale and shadowy. We were in a peaceful little world all on its own that had been set apart for the dead.

  ‘This is Wise Mehmet,’ said Mary, stopping in front of a ­middle-sized heap. ‘A lot of people love him, especially in Tall Tree Valley and up at Rockway Edge.’ She bent down to look at the small writing: ‘“Mehmet Batwing,” it says. “He showed the way back to Family.”’

  She had a soft spot for Wise Mehmet, and liked to tell people when she got the chance that she was his great-great-great-great-granddaughter. I guess it’s not surprising that Wise Mehmet would be a favourite for a shadowspeaker, whose work was all about finding the ones who’d wandered away and bringing them back again into True Family.

  ‘And look,’ she said. ‘Over here is Strongheart’s dad, Harry.’

  But though there were many dead people from generations ago who were still remembered, Gela’s pile rose high above them all. When we’d walked round all the others, we came back to it, and Mary read out the writing that had been scratched on her flat stone by Gela’s son, First Harry. ‘Angela Young,’ it said. ‘Orbit Police’. Mary took my hand and we both stood quietly looking at that great hill of stones.

  ‘You get back the love you give, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You only have to look at the size of this pile compared with all the others to see that our Gela is still pouring out her love, still reaching out to everyone, still making herself heard.’

  She gave my hand a squeeze. ‘And right now, my dearest, she’s reaching out specially to you.’

  She led me along the side of Longpool, where a couple of jewel bats were out hunting fish in spite of the fug, and back again to Circle Clearing. Mary asked the guard there to keep people out of the way for a while, because I was going back into the Circle and needed quietness. I was more scared this time round than I had been the first time, but Mary told me there was no need to worry, I should relax, I shouldn’t think of this as something I had to work at, I should just let it come.

  I nodded, and she hugged me, and then I made my way out into middle, stepping between the stones into that special place and squatting down once more by the five stones at the centre of the Circle.

  Round me the fug was thickening once more. At first the edge of the clearing was blurred, and the lanterns had rings of colour round them, but soon I couldn’t see the lanterns any more, just patches of different-coloured light, and I couldn’t make out the tree trunks at all. I couldn’t see Mary either. Even the stones of the Circle were half-hidden from me, though I was right there in middle of them. I was all by myself and no one could see me.

  ‘Mother, are you going to speak to me?’ I whispered.

  There was no answer. Nothing at all. Nothing that wasn’t either my own thoughts or the muffled sounds from the cluster and forest round me.

  Well, of course she doesn’t answer! I suddenly heard myself thinking. She’s dead, isn’t she? I’ve just been where her bones are. She’s just an old skeleton under a heap of stones!

  That was what the Kneefolk thought, after all. That was what we were always taught that Jeff Redlantern had said: Gela was simply a human being called Angela Young, who died a long time ago.

  As soon as I’d had that thought, I felt so ashamed that I felt the red blood rushing into my face. How could I? After seeing that huge pile of stones, that pile of love, bigger even than the pile over Great David himself, how could I come into middle of the Circle, this special special place that was closer to our home on Earth than anywhere in Eden, and think that thought? I’d been so so lucky – most people were never allowed to come here from the moment they were born to the waking they died – and this was how I showed my gratitude!

  I reminded myself what Mary had taught me about the Kneefolk. ‘Well, I suppose at least they’re harmless,’ she’d once said, when we were riding back to Veeklehouse from Rockway Edge. ‘They keep out of the way of the rest of us, I’ll give them that. But they’re overgrown babies really, aren’t they? They’re like silly newhairs who don’t want to grow up. They tell themselves they know everything already when really they know nothing at all. It’s quite funny, when you think about it. All they’ve ever seen is their little bit of sand, and those trees of theirs that bend over in middle, and maybe a few bats and fatbucks, and yet they say there is nothing but this.’

  And she was right. I remembered how ashamed I’d felt that time when me and Starlight and the others went down to Veeklehouse from Knee Tree Grounds. The flamelight, the trading sticks, the traders with all their wonderful things spread out in front of them, the people with bright feathers in their hair, and coloured fakeskin wraps, and batwings dangling from their ears . . . The Davidfolk had done so many things there, had learned so much, had been so busy. And what had we done out on Knee Tree Grounds meanwhile, other than catch fish and gather waternuts, and cut bits of bark from trees?

  ‘Mother, please, I’m sorry,’ I whispered to Gela. ‘I know it’s only your bones under those rocks. I know it’s only the old bones you don’t need any more, like an old wrap that’s worn through. I know your shadow flew to Earth, and put on new bones and new flesh and new skin. I know you’re alive. I know you speak to Mary. I know . . .’

  Tears were running down my face, along with the sweat and the moisture from the fug.

  ‘Please, Mother, I beg you, speak to me. Just tell me you’re there, and then I’ll be able to reach out to you better, and get to know you, and learn what you want of me.’

  But still there was nothing. I couldn’t hear Gela, I couldn’t feel her presence at all. In fact quite the opposite. Out there in that strange little patch of ground, surrounded by softly glowing fug, Gela’s absence sat beside me like a big cold person-shaped hole.

  There’s no such thing as a shadow that leaves us when we die, Jeff Redlantern had said. We are the shadows. We’re the thin flimsy things that fade away. What carries on after us is the thing that’s always there, deep down inside us: the secret awakeness, the Watcher, looking out of our eyes, as we’d look out through the eyeholes of a buckskin headwrap, or through a mask.

  Gela’s heart, how awful if that was true! One set of eyes, one single being, all alone, picking up one mask after another, putting it on for a while, then throwing it away again to try another.

  I ran out of the Circle.

  ‘Mary? Mary? Are you still there?’

  ‘Of course I am, dearest, I’m right here.’

  And there she was, her solid shape appearing out of the fug.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mary, but I still can’t hear her, and I don’t dare stay there any more because all kinds of bad thoughts are coming to me. All kinds of bad thoughts and doubts.’

  She didn’t hug me this time, but she took my hands and stood there for a moment looking into my eyes: me and Mary alone there, surrounded by nothing but the softly glowing fug.

  Twenty-one

  Once we saw a single tree with shining white flowers, much much taller than the whitelantern trees you see in forest. It was standing by itself at the bottom of a valley of snow, and steam was rising from its airholes towards the stars. It was the only tree we’d seen the whole way across.

  ‘That’s the Crying Tree,’ said Tom, and I remembered Mary telling me the same. When John Redlantern’s people came this way, the story went, they’d seen a big bat the size of a child, standing right at the top of it. As the bat looked around and cooled its wings, the way bats do, a long long slinker had come out of one of the tree’s airholes and begun winding up round the trunk towards it. But suddenly, for no reason, John Redlantern had started to shout and cry out, and the bat had heard him
and jumped into the air to fly away just before the slinker reached it.

  We had a similar story on Knee Tree Grounds, but our story came from Jeff, while it was Wise Mehmet who told the story to the Davidfolk. Mehmet always said, apparently, that this was the moment when he first properly admitted to himself that he’d been a fool to put his trust in Juicy John.

  We looked down at the tree, alone in its bowl of light, and carried on back into the darkness, baby Suzie’s thin weak cry carrying on all the while.

  Tom was out front as usual with the woollybuck, and he saw Circle Valley first. ‘There it is!’ he yelled out, and the rest of us hurried to join him, our cold cold feet sloshing in the trampled snow that had been seeping through our footwraps more and more over the last waking, in spite of all their layers of greased skins. We were tired tired, we were cold all the time, and all the grownups had been worrying for miles that the cold would get too much before we reached the warmth of trees again. A couple of our oldies had completely shut themselves down, like they were giving up the fight to stay alive, and getting ready to merge themselves back into the coldness and darkness all round us. Little Suzie’s shoulder was badly swollen now. She was hot hot to the touch, and she kept up a continuous crying for hours and hours, while Flame wept and Clare muttered little gruff reassurances, which she herself didn’t really believe. All of us, including Flame, knew how dangerous the poison fever was.

  But still, we’d made it across. There it was below us, the shining forest, surrounded on every side by the huge black shadows of mountains against the stars. We could even just make out smoke in the distance. Lit by the flames, it rose up from the fires of Old Family cluster, the first home of people on Eden.

  I pulled off my headwrap to get some air. At once the icy coldness hit me. We might be able to see the light of forest down there, but up here it was as cold as ever.

  I’d been in this place before, of course. I’d stood in this exact spot with Mary – ‘There it is, dearest,’ she’d said. ‘Just think! When we come back this way, we’ll be two shadowspeakers together’ – but most of the Michael’s Place people had never seen Circle Valley until now. They’d heard story after story about the place. In stories and songs, and acted out in shows, they’d heard how the Veekle had first come down there and how Tommy and Gela had laid out the stones in Circle Clearing. Over and over, they’d heard how Juicy John threw the stones into a stream, and how Great Lucy, the first shadowspeaker, had found them and put them back. But now the real thing was right in front of them. It wasn’t in a story any more. It didn’t lie on far side of the mountains. It was right in front of them, right there where the smoke was rising.

  Trueheart’s eyes were dry, I noticed, peering out of the holes in her headwrap, but most people’s eyes were shining in the light from our buck’s headlantern. One guy called Big Dixon – he was wide as two of me – pulled off his headwrap so as not to soak it with his tears. All their lives, these people had lived beside circles on the ground that were copies of that Circle down there in forest. Every guard they met had a circle of dots painted on his forehead in memory of it. Each time they went into Veeklehouse they’d seen the traders offering those little bags of dirt, which were supposed to have been scraped up from the ground of Circle Clearing. (‘Only ten sticks,’ the traders would call out, ‘for a whole lifetime of health and good luck!’) In the minds of Davidfolk just to be near that special Circle that they weren’t allowed to step inside was like being a bit nearer to Earth. They might never have been there but the Circle of Stones was still a kind of home.

  That thought brought tears to my eyes too. I’d thought I had a home in Michael’s Place, where we’d looked after ourselves and bothered no one, but now the Johnfolk had driven us from it. I’d thought I’d had a home at Knee Tree Grounds far out in Worldpool, but no one lived there now but fatbucks. I’d even thought I had a kind of home with Mary, but me and her had fallen out. Deep down I longed, like everyone, for a real home that couldn’t be taken away.

  So I cried. But Trueheart still held out against tears. She frowned down at the little lights of all those thousands of trees at the bottom of the great bowl of darkness, and refused to be impressed while her dad Tom pointed out to her the Blue Mountains opposite, the Alps to the right, the Rockies to the left. ‘And of course the bit of the Dark we’ve been crossing is called the Peckham Hills,’ he said, proud of his knowledge and of having been here before. ‘Which is why we say peckway, blueway, rockway and alpway when we’re telling people which direction something is in. It all started here.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep moving blueway, then,’ Trueheart said with a shrug, ‘before our feet turn to ice.’

  Ahead and below us we could see the light of the first small trees, shining their coloured light over the rocks and the bare ground that was beginning to appear down there from under the snow. There’d been a little group of people ahead of us for the whole of the last waking. We’d seen the light of their single woollybuck as it made its way round rocks and over the crossing places, up and down, left and right, showing us little pale glimpses of the path we ourselves would soon be treading. Now we glimpsed them briefly again among the trees, until they turned a corner and were out of our sight.

  Still in the darkness ourselves, we began to move, a straggly line of people and bucks heading down a path that woollybucks had made, long long ago, before people came to Eden. Little Metty needed to sleep and Candy wasn’t letting him, so I took my little wriggly daughter in my arms for a while to give Dave a chance to settle him down. My brave Fox walked beside me. He was only seven years old, his feet were cold as anyone’s and he was tired tired tired, but he didn’t complain or cry.

  ‘There are lots of monkeys in those trees down there, Foxy,’ I told him. ‘I saw them when I came down this way with Mary. You better keep your eyes open and you might see one.’

  He didn’t react at first, but after trudging along for sixty seventy heartbeats he asked me how many I’d seen.

  ‘I’d say nine ten at least.’

  ‘That’s not lots,’ he said, and that was the end of that.

  ‘I’m cold cold,’ grumbled Candy, still squirming restlessly in my arms. ‘I’m cold cold cold.’

  ‘I know, darling, but soon we’ll be down among the trees, and they’ll warm us up again. And perhaps lower down we’ll find a nice warm pool next to a tree root.’

  In front of us, Tom was talking to Trueheart.

  ‘When I was in Circle Valley before, it made me proud proud to be one of the people who looked after the Circle and stayed by it, not one of the ones who tried to wreck it and then walked away.’

  ‘Yes, Dad, but if you’d happened to have been born in Brown River, or over in New Earth, you’d be telling me now how proud you were of being one of the Johnfolk.’

  Tom stopped in his tracks. ‘What? ’ He just couldn’t understand why she kept coming back at him when he’d shouted at her so often, and beat her so many times. How was he supposed to get some sense into her? Do for her? ‘What are you talking about, girl? How could I ever be proud of being one of the Johnfolk? They took the stones from the Circle and threw them in the water! They broke up Family! They stole Gela’s ring! How could I ever be proud of that? Tom’s neck, Trueheart, how could you think for a moment I could be?’

  ‘Do you really think all Johnfolk are mean and bad, Dad? Do you really think they don’t love their kids like you do? Do you think they don’t—?’

  ‘They’re attacking us right now, Trueheart! They’ve driven us from our home! They’re doing for our people. Your own brothers are fighting them. How can you—?’

  ‘Yes but be fair, Dad, we would have attacked them if we thought we could win, wouldn’t we? In fact we Davidfolk did attack them once, didn’t we? It was the Johnfolk who first found Wide Forest after all, but Great David wouldn’t let them stay there. He came over and pushed them right down to Brow
n River.’

  Tom pulled off his headwrap. ‘Because they told lies, because they broke up Family, because—’

  ‘That’s our story about them, I know, but I bet they have a story about us too, don’t you think? And their own story about themselves? How can we know for sure that our story’s true and not theirs? I mean, we can’t know what really happened all those years ago, can we? All we can know for certain is that everyone born where we come from believes one version of the story, and everyone born across the Pool believes another. In other words, people believe the story they’re brought up with. It’s stupid saying that people believe such-and-such story because they’re good or they’re bad.’

  Tom was quivering with fury.

  ‘Are you questioning the True Story? You want to be careful careful, girl, or you could find yourself—’

  Clare came striding down the path.

  ‘Leave it, Tom!’ she hissed. ‘I can’t believe you’re arguing now, when your little daughter Suzie there is burning up with poison fever.’

  That stopped him. He turned to go to Flame. But he hadn’t quite finished with Trueheart.

  ‘Just remember, girl,’ he threw back at her. ‘Just remember that Suzie would be fine if it wasn’t for that dirty slinker from New Earth, shooting an arrow at her little shoulder.’

  Trudging wearily down the wet zigzag path with Candy heavy heavy in my arms, clambering over cold stones, I thought about what Trueheart had said. Stories were important, that was the part she didn’t understand. They were so important that we told them to ourselves inside our heads, every time we went to sleep. They were how we joined together all the things that happened to us into a shape that made some kind of sense. They were how we made the best of things in this sad, lonely place, where babies can burn up with fever, and enemies can come from across the water, and people can be born with clawfeet and batfaces, and be teased and left out, and can’t do anything about it.