And the Davidfolk’s story was a good one. It was a story about keeping family together, watching over the Circle, patiently waiting for Earth to come again. It was satisfying and comforting but felt real at the same time, and it had a good ending too, like all proper stories do. The ending was Earth, and the story was about staying together, no matter what, and keeping our way home clear in our minds until we finally got there. The Circle of Stones made us closer to Earth. It was something from the old stories that was still solid and real so we could see it right in front of our eyes. And all those other circles that we made in our clusters, or scratched on the forest floor, or drew in the snow on our way over, they made us closer to the Circle of Stones. So the Davidfolk didn’t just tell their story, they lived in it. They came back every waking to a circle that marked the end of their whole story. And that meant that, however far away from home they might seem to be, they were reminded all the time that it was still there waiting for them, and that it wasn’t so far as it might seem.
Trueheart wanted to scratch away at the Davidfolk story. She wanted to know if it was really true in the way that it might be true to say: ‘That’s a stone over there,’ or ‘That’s my mum,’ or ‘Last waking there was a fug.’ She wanted to know if it was real like a bat or a tree. She wanted to know what reason there was to think that the Davidfolk’s version of what happened at Breakup was really any truer than the Johnfolk’s.
But no one else looked at it that way. How can you ask if the story is true or not, if you’re in the story yourself ?
At last we’d reached the trees, the small trees that grew at the edge of the snow, casting their light over it, white and pink and blue, and making it glitter. We pulled off our headwraps and bodywraps, and our wet wet footwraps, and with our feet and shoulders bare again, we followed a little stream, already shining with waterweed, that was carrying cold water from the melting ice. Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph went the trees all round us, as we walked in the light of their lanterns. There were already bigger trees ahead of us.
‘There’s a monkey,’ said Fox, too tired to be excited, but just interested enough to speak.
We watched it spinning and whirling and wheeling through the warm trees, grabbing branches with whichever of its six hands happened to be in the right place, like it had no sense of which part of it was up and which down, and any way round was fine. Davidson put an arrow on his bow, but it was gone before he’d had a chance to aim.
Twenty-two
You’re still trying too hard, Angie,’ said Mary, holding onto my hands but not moving to hug me as she’d done the first time. ‘You’re still expecting too much. Our Mother doesn’t shout. She doesn’t wave her arms to get your attention. You need to have trust. You need to trust her, and trust yourself. But that’s enough for this waking. Some people have asked me to do a little show, so we’ll do that now, and then rest and sleep, and then you can come back to the Circle again.’
I noticed she didn’t tell me not to worry this time, or reassure me that I’d be fine. And I noticed that I didn’t tell her anything about how for a moment there, I’d doubted whether any of this was true. How could I? Mary heard Gela’s voice every waking, she cried for Gela in every show, she begged and pleaded and raged for Gela’s sake. How could I possibly tell her that, even just for a heartbeat, I’d doubted that voice was real?
We went and did the show. It was in a tiny cluster in forest about two miles out from Old Family and less than twenty people came, but Mary did one of the best shows I’d seen, sobbing, raging, pouring with tears and sweat, with the fug all round and a bunch of frightened low people watching us with their mouths open, and tears and sweat running down their own faces.
‘Gela loves you,’ she cried out. ‘Gela wants to help you more than anything else in the world. But what do you do in return? How do you show your gratitude? You steal from one another! You hold back from the guards the handovers you owe them for keeping you safe! You think bad thoughts!’
She walked up to a pretty young woman. ‘You, for example. What’s your name, my dear?’
‘I’m Gela.’
‘Gela. You even carry our Mother’s name, but yet look at what goes on in your head! You think angry thoughts. You long for men who aren’t your own. That’s what our Mother tells me. Is she right?’
The woman lowered her head in shame.
‘Of course she’s right,’ said Mary, and passed straight on to another woman. ‘You look guilty guilty. Wait! Let me listen. What’s our Mother saying? Is she saying you’re one of those that tell that so-called Secret Story? The story about things Gela’s supposed to have said to her daughters long long ago? Ah, I thought so. You silly silly girl. Why tell that foolish lie, when Mother Gela herself is alive and calling out to you?’
Many of them were crying now. ‘Yes, you might well weep,’ Mary told them. ‘Because if you don’t reach out to Gela, she won’t be able to reach you either, and you’ll be lost forever. Drifting, drifting, drifting. Shivering, shivering, shivering. All alone forever, all by yourself, in the cold cold blackness between the stars.’
She stood there, trembling and sweating, as she listened to Mother Gela whispering to her inside her head. ‘Yes, and no starship will ever come from Earth while you act like this. They’ll never come to bring us home. And all our children and our children’s children will have to live their lives out here in dark dark Eden.’
By now pretty much everyone was crying, thinking about their hard lives here in Eden, and about our lost home, full of light, far beyond our reach across the stars, where the Mother of all of us was born.
‘Gela is pleading with me,’ Mary told them, tears running down her own cheeks. ‘Our sweet sweet Mother is pleading with me. She knows what it is to live on Eden and long and long for Earth. “Make them understand, Mary!” she’s begging me. “Please, please make them understand!”’
She raised her hands to the black black sky, where Earth was hiding somewhere, as everyone knew, in the great cold spiral of Starry Swirl. ‘Oh Mother, Mother, Mother,’ she begged. ‘Please don’t cry! I can’t bear to hear you cry!’ Then she fell to the ground, writhing about and sobbing. Everyone was scared and horrified, but of course they were excited too by being so close to our Mother. Earth might be far away but right in front of them was a woman who was hearing Gela’s voice.
‘Listen to our Mother,’ she told them. ‘Don’t imagine she’ll come to you with bright lights and fancy wraps. She is our Mother, don’t forget. Her voice will be as ordinary and familiar as your own mother’s. As familiar as the pumping of the trees.’
She broke off, and for a few heartbeats all we could hear was the sound of the trees round us: hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph.
The fug was beginning to clear as we walked back to the cluster again and returned to the shelter where shadowspeakers stayed. Mary didn’t talk much. I felt I was getting on her nerves, and she didn’t seem to want me to hug her and soothe her down as she usually did after a show. I was sure she was disappointed in me, and I feared she might be angry too, but when I asked her she insisted it wasn’t so, reassuring me in a loud bright voice that I’d done nothing wrong at all.
Back at the shelter, I stirred up the ashes and fed the embers with dry twigs, then cooked up flowercakes and a couple of sweetbats whose meat, I knew, Mary especially liked. She rested for a bit after that – she always needed to settle herself after a show – and then went off for a while to see the guard leader, Harry, Strongheart’s second son, who’d asked to see her. I walked about a bit by myself, but not for long because I wanted to be sure to be there when Mary came back. I couldn’t bear the thought of letting her down, this strong woman who’d chosen me, Angie Redlantern, out of all the hundreds of people who came to her shows in every part of the Davidfolk Ground! She’d always told me she’d seen something in me that was different to anyone else, and I was terrified that she’d change her mind.
&nbs
p; It was some time before she came back, but when she did she was in a more relaxed mood. It often cheered her up like that, I noticed, when one of the high people had asked for her. They wanted her advice sometimes about difficult things, like whether or not the baby of one of their shelterwomen was really their own, and it felt good to her that these important people were interested in what she had to say.
‘Fug’s almost gone now,’ she said. ‘Good job too. I don’t like it when it gets like that. Get some sleep now, Angie, and we’ll have another go when we wake.’
I didn’t sleep so well, but Mary seemed to, snoring away steadily in her corner. (Mary did everything firmly and loudly: even sleep.) When she woke and we came out of the shelter, the fug had cleared completely, Starry Swirl was blazing down, and bats were once again hunting the flutterbyes that flipped and flapped between the lanterns and the airholes of the trees.
‘This is a good waking for you, Angie,’ she said, as I brought her a flowercake and some dried fish. ‘Everything is lovely and clear.’
She pulled off a strand of the tough green meat and began to chew on it.
‘We’ll go to the Circle as soon as we’ve finished eating,’ she said. ‘And let’s see if this time you can get the hang of it.’
Twenty-three
Circle Valley might be small compared with Wide Forest, but it was still big. The Michael’s Place people took another two long wakings to get down into the Valley and across forest to the big Old Family cluster that sprawled round the Circle itself. When we did finally reach it, the place was strangely quiet.
‘The Virsry has not long finished,’ explained an old guard who was keeping lookout by the gate in the leopard-fence. ‘Everyone’s been keeping the same wakings and the same sleeps, and now they’re all resting.’
I’d heard about this before. During a Virsry, when whole Valley came together to hear the Laws and watch the Show, everyone in the Valley had to keep the same wakings, just like people did in small clusters like Knee Tree Grounds or Michael’s Place. That continued for some while afterwards, because everyone felt tired about the same time. But, little by little, different families and groups would begin to follow different rhythms until things went back to how they were in other big places like Veeklehouse or Davidstand where, at any moment, there were always some people sleeping and some waking, some getting up while others were lying down. And then the time would come round again when the three oldest people in the Valley – the ones they just call Oldest – decided that three hundred and sixty-five wakings had gone by (or days as some call them in the Valley) and there’d be another Virsry and the whole thing would start over once more.
When the old guy and his friends had satisfied himself we were proper Davidfolk, we passed through the gate and found ourselves a place to rest inside the fence in the pink light of a group of redlantern trees. We were tired tired, but for all our worry and grief about what we’d left behind, it was good to be back in treelight, with starflowers shimmering round us, and the hum of life, and warm trunks to rest our backs against. We lit a small cooking fire with the embers we’d brought with us, and heated some of the few flowercakes we hadn’t yet eaten. Flame and Clare bent worriedly over little Suzie. Her whole shoulder was swollen up to double its proper size, and she was still crying weakly all the time.
‘Should we go and see the Circle before we settle down?’ Kate asked, but everyone was too tired. So we drew our own circle in the dirt like we usually did, as if the real Circle was still far away across the Dark, and sang ‘Come Tree Row’. And then we settled the little kids down – they were all so tired that it didn’t take long – and most of us curled up to sleep.
I couldn’t sleep, though. There was just too much going through my head. Coming back to the Valley had stirred up all kinds of restless and painful feelings, on top of the grief and worry of losing our home and leaving behind so many people we knew. Dave was snoring away as usual, so I checked Candy and the boys were sleeping peacefully, spoke for a little while to Flame who was standing and rocking her poor sick baby, then got up and walked back over to the gate, thinking I’d talk to the guards there for a little while. But when I got there, they were busy with three new guards who’d just come in on buckback from over the Dark.
‘They’ve gone crazy,’ I heard one of these new guys saying. ‘They’re doing for everyone they get their hands on. And—’
He stopped and looked across at me.
‘Can we help you?’ asked one of the gate guards.
‘Who’s gone crazy?’ I asked.
‘This news isn’t for you,’ said the guard who’d been speaking. ‘This is guard business.’
‘Do you mean the Johnfolk?’ I pressed him. ‘Have they got Davidstand now?’
‘I can’t tell you,’ the guard said. The three bucks were in quite a state, their eyes rippling constantly, their mouth feelers wriggling and blowing out green foam. They’d obviously been ridden hard hard. But the guard and his friends jumped back onto them and drove them forwards through the trees so as to give their news to the high men further inside the cluster. ‘You’ll hear soon enough, and you’ve got nothing to worry about here.’
The Johnfolk in Davidstand, stabbing and burning people we’d only lately been with. I felt sick sick at the thought of it. But of course there was nothing I could do. It was just one more thing to keep me awake. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep now. I decided I’d go over and look at the Circle, the place where my time with Mary had finally ended.
As I was heading off that way, Trueheart came running after me.
‘Where are you going, Auntie?’
‘I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d have a look round.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Okay dear, but keep your voice down. Everyone else here is asleep. Those Virsries are pretty tiring, from what I’ve heard.’
We walked through the shining trees until we came to the shelters in the place called Brooklyn where the high people always stayed. They were solid and square like the ones in Veeklehouse, and the biggest one had guards all round it. Strongheart himself was inside, apparently, and so was Headman Newjohn of Brown River and the Head Woman of Half Sky.
Right at that moment, in fact, as I’d find out later, Strongheart and his son Harry were busy talking to those two. Those guards I’d seen at the gate had brought bad bad news. The New Earth Johnfolk were winning the fight not only at Davidstand but in many different places across Wide Forest. And suddenly Headman Newjohn in particular was finding he had a lot of power, because Strongheart was desperate to persuade the Riverfolk to come over to his side and not join their fellow Johnfolk from across the Pool. He was offering to give Newjohn more ground, including all those little clusters I’d visited with Mary along the White Streams. He was even offering two of his own daughters to be the Headman’s shelterwomen. But Newjohn, more than anything, wanted to make sure that he backed the winning side, so he was holding back from choosing until there was more news about the fight.
I didn’t know about any of that then, though, and I wasn’t much interested in Strongheart’s shelter, because we were near the Circle, and that was completely filling my mind. We only had to cross the bridge over the stream and we’d be in Circle Clearing, and it would be there right in front of us.
My heart was pounding pounding pounding. Now I was so close I dreaded seeing those stones again. But I needed to see them too, so I went on anyway, and Trueheart followed after. We crossed the bridge and there it was: the big Circle first laid by our Mother and Father, Gela and Tommy, four hundred years ago, with the group of five stones in middle where once I’d squatted down to listen for Gela. It was hard to believe now that someone like me could ever have been in such a place.
Trueheart stared in silence. Once again, I think, she was trying not to be impressed, but this time she wasn’t succeeding. There were so many s
tories about this place that it was like a hundred different places all packed together into one single spot. And you could feel the pressure of that, you could feel all those squeezed-in stories straining and bursting out. It was a wonder the clearing could hold them at all.
‘You can look but you mustn’t touch,’ murmured a guard with a blackglass spear. He was the only other person in sight, and he was another old guy, like the guard at the peckside gate: I guessed the young ones had been sent to fight the Johnfolk. ‘You mustn’t touch and you mustn’t step inside the Circle.’
I nodded. Only the sons of David could invite people inside the Circle, only them and the shadowspeakers. I’d had my moment there, and it wouldn’t come back.
Twenty-four
The third time I went into the Circle there was no fug to hide behind. I could clearly see Mary there waiting at the edge of the clearing. I could see the guard. I could see other people moving round through the trees. And I couldn’t pretend that I was in a world apart. I was in Eden, plain ordinary Eden, with its lanterns and its bats and its people. Even the Circle seemed more ordinary than it had done before. It might be a place full of stories, but still, what was it but a bunch of round white stones that you could find any waking in a stream? I remembered how, back on Knee Tree Grounds, I’d been told that these weren’t even the original stones laid here by Tommy and Gela. Everyone knew that John Redlantern had thrown the whole Circle into the stream, but only the Davidfolk believed that Mother Gela had guided the hands of Lucy Lu, so that she found the exact same stones again, and returned them to the exact same places.
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