Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  Four five yards away, a little claw-bat swooped down to snatch up a fish from the surface of the water.

  “I suppose if John and his people didn’t drown, then they’d probably still have Gela’s ring,” Dixon said after a while. “Odd to think, isn’t it? That ring from the old story, still out there somewhere in the world.”

  “I’d love to see it!” I said. “Imagine seeing a ring that came from Earth itself, right there in front of you, as real as these trees or this water.”

  Uncle Dixon gave a grown-up laugh. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that.”

  “I’d hate to see it,” my big sister said quietly. “Think of all the grief it caused! Think of all the killing! I hope it’s down there on the bottom under Deep Darkness, out of the way for good.”

  We paddled on for a bit without talking. I hadn’t forgotten about Veeklehouse, and I wasn’t planning on letting it go—I never let go of anything once I made up my mind—but I knew it was best to give Uncle Dixon a little time. He was the kindest of men, but no one would claim he was the quickest.

  Sure enough, in due time, a new thought came to him.

  “There is the Veekle, though!” he said in a surprised-sounding voice. “If we went down to Veeklehouse, we’d see that. That comes from Earth, and it’s made of metal, and it’s a bloody great big thing as well. Not just some little ring.”

  “Yes, and it’s a bloody long way away, too,” Glitterfish said. “Old Candy went there once, and she nearly drowned.”

  Here it was again: the difference between her and me.

  “Come on, let’s go there!” I cried. “Please. Just once. Even if it is a long way. Please, Uncle, please!”

  Dixon thought about it for a few seconds.

  “We could get there in nine ten wakings, from what I’ve heard,” he said slowly, “if we went the straight way, right across the Tongue.”

  “But that would be stupid,” said Glitterfish. “It’d only take one of those giant waves to come along and you’d be done for, just like—”

  “It’d be a risk, certainly,” agreed Uncle Dixon. “But big waves like that are pretty rare.” He went quiet, frowning to himself as he paddled steadily along. “I suppose when we’ve got enough boats to trade,” he finally said, “we could take them down to Veeklehouse one time instead of across to Nob Head.”

  The boat nudged through some low-hanging branches, and we ducked to avoid the shining globes.

  “It wouldn’t be easy,” Dixon said. “Ten wakings alpway of hard paddling. And the same back, of course. It wouldn’t be easy at all. And we’d lose a lot of boat-making time as well.”

  “Exactly!” exclaimed Glitterfish. “Twenty whole wakings of hard hard work, half of it in the bloody dark. And, like you say, that would all be time when you could have been making new boats. It makes no sense. And it wouldn’t really be fair on the rest of us, either, when you think about it. Everyone else on Grounds would be getting on with useful work, while you’d just be paddling for no purpose at all.”

  I ignored her. “You’d go, wouldn’t you, Johnny?” I said.

  Johnny glanced guiltily at Glitterfish. “Yeah, I guess so. Why not? Just once.”

  Our sister snorted scornfully. “She only has to talk to you in that cute baby voice, doesn’t she?”

  “Go on Uncle, let’s do it,” I said. “Please. Eden is big big, and none of us has ever been anywhere apart from here and bloody old Nob Head.”

  Tom’s dick, whole of our little water forest was only two miles across, and even Nob Head was only ten miles away.

  “I would like to see that Veekle before I die,” Dixon said after a while. “I mean, Jeff’s eyes, that’s the boat that first brought people down from sky! It’s the sort of thing a person ought to see. Specially if you’re a boatmaker, like me.”

  He seemed to think the Veekle from Earth wasn’t so different from his bits of greased bark!

  “Might even learn a trick or two,” he said.

  The Sand where we lived was little dry patch in middle of our water forest of Knee Tree Grounds. The trees just continued right over it and back in on the other side, as if they saw no difference between dry ground and ground that was three feet below the water. And why would they, if their roots reached a mile down, as people said they did, to the fiery rock of Underworld?

  “So we’re going, then?” I pressed Uncle Dixon as we pulled the boats up onto the beach. “So we’re definitely going once we’ve made enough boats?”

  He said nothing as we took out the newly cut barks and carried them to his boat shelters, and he said nothing as we laid them carefully in a pile. It was only when we were making our way across to the Meeting Place that he finally made up his mind.

  “Yeah, let’s do it. Why not?”

  I threw my arms round him. “Oh, thanks, Uncle Dixon. Oh, thanks, thanks, thanks! You’re the best uncle on Grounds.”

  He laughed and kissed me. “I’ll see if I can talk Julie into coming with us. It’s not for nothing she’s called Deepwater. She’s good out there, and I’d feel safer if she came along.”

  Glitterfish burst into tears. “Please don’t go, Uncle! Please!”

  Dixon laughed uncomfortably and tried to hug her, too, but she wouldn’t let him.

  “We’ll be careful Glits, I promise you.”

  “Please don’t go! Apart from the danger and the waste of time, why draw attention to us? We want Mainground to leave us alone, don’t we?”

  “People on Mainground already know we’re here, Glits,” Johnny pointed out.

  “Some do, yes, but why tell more of them? Why can’t you lot be happy with what you’ve got?”

  “It’s just for a visit,” Uncle Dixon said, trying again to reach out to her.

  She pushed him away. She was not going to help him feel okay about this.

  “All I want is for my little boy to have a peaceful life. We don’t need anything else. Why risk unsettling things for our kids?”

  Dixon and Johnny both hated upsetting people, and their instinct was always to try and smooth things over. But me, I was angry with my sister.

  “Tom’s dick, Glits,” I said. “Mikey’s not the only thing in the world.”

  “No, of course not, but I love him, and it’s my job to care for him. I know you don’t care about anyone like that, but I do.”

  As she walked quickly away from us, still crying, to find her darling boy, I told myself how boring she was for settling so readily for being a mum and nothing else. And I tried not to notice how jealous I felt of the love she gave that child.

  Julie Deepwater

  There were about seventy of us living in Knee Tree Grounds. We shared pretty much everything and, unlike over on Mainground, where there was always someone asleep and someone awake, we all kept the same sleeps so that we’d be able to come together at the end of every waking in the Meeting Place in middle of the Sand.

  I was already sitting there when my cousin Dixon came over to me. About half the Kneefolk had already arrived, and the others were coming in.

  “Me and Johnny and Starlight are thinking of taking a boat down to Veeklehouse,” Dixon said. “I was wondering if you’d be interested in coming along, too? You’ve been over to Mainground more than pretty much anyone, and you’ve been further out in Darkness, too. It would be interesting to go there just once, don’t you think? Plus, Johnny’s heard some story at Nob Head about the Johnfolk coming back across the water, and we could find out if it’s true.”

  I laughed. “Where did that idea come from, I wonder? Let me see if I can guess.”

  “It was Starlight.”

  “Well, what a surprise!”

  “Glits hates the idea,” Dixon said. “She’s angry angry with all of us.”

  I nodded. Glitterfish had her own reasons for wanting everything to stay the same, but she certainly wouldn’t be on her own. Most Kneefolk, including me, thought we should keep quietly to ourselves as much as possible. You could even say tha
t was whole point of Knee Tree Grounds. There’d been no killing among us since our great grandparents came to Knee Tree Grounds, no one speared or beaten or tied to scalding trees. It wasn’t just Glitterfish who remembered that.

  “Maybe,” I said to Dixon. “I’ll think it over.”

  I sat back and watched the people coming in. Some had been out in the forest, like Dixon. Some had been fishing or hunting fatbucks in the open water beyond the trees. Some had spent the waking on the Sand itself, washing wraps, looking after kids, or working on boats, like me.

  I saw Starlight arrive and find some friends to sit with. She was a strange girl. She didn’t quite know where she belonged, or who she belonged to, but her cleverness and her beauty and her uncle’s love had taught her to believe that, whatever she wanted, she could get: so different from her sister, Glitterfish, who was as smart and beautiful as Starlight, but settled so easily and so gratefully for the simplest and most ordinary things.

  “My uncle and my brother and me are going down to Veeklehouse,” I heard Starlight telling her friends in a loud voice. “Any of you want to come with me?”

  And then I saw Glitterfish arrive with her little baby, and the baby’s dad, Met. They settled down as far away from Starlight as they could, and I could see that Glits had been crying.

  She and Starlight shared the same mother—her name was Dream—but they had different dads. Glits’s dad was a boatmaker, like Dixon; Star’s was a guard from Mainground who Dream met in Nob Head. His name was Blackglass and I remembered him as a foolish, vain man who thought only about himself. He’d lied and boasted and strutted about the Grounds for a little while, then got bored and went back to Mainground before Starlight was even born. We heard later that he’d died in some kind of fight. Dream grieved horribly, and, for the rest of her life, she always insisted that he’d been the perfect man for her, and that the rest of us had driven him away to his death. And she’d always told Starlight that she was special, that she had Blackglass’s spark inside her.

  “Uncle Dixon!” called Starlight, looking toward us with her beautiful, sharp, restless eyes. “Angie says she wants to come, too!”

  Someone nearby told her to hush. The last people were arriving now—the last who would make it, anyway; there were always a few who were too far away—and we all settled down to be still and quiet. Later we’d eat the fatbuck that was roasting over a fire in middle of the Meeting Place. While we ate, we’d sort out worries or problems—Did we need more blackglass for tools? Who would do the next buck hunt?—but, ever since the time of First Jeff, we’d always started with silence.

  “We’re really here,” said a woman called Caroline, as someone always did.

  It was what First Jeff used to say, and his words were carved on the bark of a big knee tree on one side of the Meeting Place.

  we are reely hear, the letters said, though only a few of us could read them. Most people preferred their kids to learn more useful skills.

  The quietness deepened. People stopped looking at one another and let their eyes rest on their hands, their feet, the sand. They listened to the pulsing trees, the crackling fire, the waves breaking in the distance on the outer edge of forest.

  “I’m really here,” we were supposed to repeat to ourselves inside our heads, and I guess we all knew from experience, at least to some degree, that if we did, and really paid attention, then our worries and squabbles would fade, and we wouldn’t feel the lack of things anymore. And sometimes, if we managed to find that hard balancing point between concentrating properly and straining too hard, our eyes would cease to seem like our own, and become instead the eyes of the Watcher, the world looking out at itself, wanting for nothing, quietly observing itself unfold.

  But that wasn’t really Starlight’s thing at the best of times, and now she was in no mood for it at all. Her eyes were darting around, her fingers drumming on the ground.

  I thought about the stories at Nob Head about the Johnfolk coming back across the water. I’d heard a few myself, but I’d put them out of my mind. The Nob people were always trying to wind us Kneefolk up with stories like that, knowing how much we relied on them for news about the rest of Eden. I remember one time a bunch of Kneefolk came back from there all excited because they’d been told that people from Earth had arrived in Circle Valley!

  But maybe it was true that the Johnfolk had come back? They’d crossed the Dark of the mountains, after all, when no one else thought it was possible. Who was to say they couldn’t have crossed the Darkness in the Pool as well? And if they’d survived the crossing, I found myself thinking, then presumably they must still have the ring as well, the ring that so many had died for, that belonged to the mother of us all.

  We speak of a mother’s love, but we forget her power. Power over life. Power to give and to withhold. The Johnfolk and Davidfolk had fought over that ring like brothers and sisters vying for their mother’s favor, bitterly, desperately, and without any regard for the blood they spilled.

  But the ring had never held any power over our Jeff, whose own mother loved him with all her heart.

  “It’s just a ring,” he said. “Okay, it came from Earth, okay, it belonged to Gela, but it’s still just a ring.”

  Starlight Brooking

  Ordinary kneeboats aren’t so good for deep water, so Dixon got ready a long-boat, made of bark pegged onto a frame, with a little out-boat fixed onto its right-hand side so as to keep us steady.

  He worked away at it and me and Johnny worked with him, but, Jeff’s eyes, how the other Kneefolk fretted and worried about our plan! Did it make sense to stop boat-making for so long? Wasn’t it just silly to take such risks? Was it really a good thing to go down there and remind so many people about the existence of Knee Tree Grounds? Some people even compared us to the Three Foolish Men who stole the starship from Earth.

  Tom’s dick, what a crowd! I thought. But I made quite sure that Uncle Dixon wouldn’t even think of changing his mind.

  “We make more boats than most people, anyway,” I pointed out. “And who knows what we’ll find down there that would be useful for everyone?”

  There were seven of us in the end: Uncle Dixon; Johnny; me; tall Julie with her strong, clever face and her twisted feet; my friend Angie, born the same exact waking as me; and two more of Dixon’s friends: Lucky, with his pointy head, and short, fat Delight. It was slow and awkward getting that boat through the trees with that out-boat on one side of it and eight kneeboats trailing behind it in two stacks, but we did it eventually, crossing the breaking waves at the edge of the shallow forest and emerging onto the bright water that stretched out ahead of us, glowing pink and green, until it met the black sky at World’s Edge. After that we could move more quickly, with seven of us paddling together in a steady rhythm, and it wasn’t long before the little water forest was just a patch of light behind us on that long straight line between bright bright water and black black sky.

  And then even that was gone.

  “We’re on our way!” I yelled out. “We’re going to Veeklehouse.”

  “Yeah! And we’re going to see the Veekle!” shouted Angie, her funny batface lit from below by the glow, changing constantly from pink to green and back to pink again, that came up from the lanterns of watertrees twenty feet below us.

  “What sort of people will they be in Veeklehouse?” Angie asked, after we’d been paddling quietly for a little while.

  With no trees near us, the only sound now was the splash of our paddles and the water slapping against our boat. Angie’s voice sounded strange in so much silence and so much space, like something breaking through from another world.

  “All sorts, I suppose,” Uncle Dixon said vaguely. “Same as anywhere.”

  “What I mean is, on Mainground some places have Davidfolk living in them, and some have Johnfolk. So which are they at Veeklehouse?”

  “It was John and Jeff and their lot that first found the Veekle, wasn’t it?” offered Johnny.

  “Yeah, bu
t it’s Davidfolk who live there now,” Julie said impatiently.

  When she walked on solid ground, Julie’s clawfeet made her hobble and sway, but when she was in a boat she sat up taller and straighter than anyone, except maybe for me.

  “Come on, guys,” she said, “you know that. The Davidfolk took over there long long ago, when they first came over from Circle Valley. The only Johnfolk still living on Mainground are way down alpway at Brown River.”

  Angie was still confused. “But aren’t we going alpway?”

  “Yes, but you’d have to go way way further than Veeklehouse to get to Brown River. All the rest of Mainground is full of Davidfolk, except for the odd trader passing through.”

  “I never really get the difference between Davidfolk and Johnfolk,” said Delight.

  “Oh, you must do,” Julie said. “The Johnfolk think that John Redlantern saved us all when he led the First Followers out of Circle Valley. The Davidfolk blame him for breaking up Old Family, and—”

  “Oh, of course I know all that. But what’s the difference now? What do they do that’s actually different? Why do they hate each other so much?”

  “That’s harder to say,” admitted Julie. “I’ve met lots of Davidfolk, and I’ve met a few Johnfolk from Brown River, but they seem pretty much the same to me. More alike to each other, anyway, than either is like us. Yet they do still hate each other.”

  “They won’t bother too much with all that stuff in Veeklehouse, though,” said batfaced Lucky, nodding his pointy head. “They’re traders down there, and traders will deal with anyone, Johnfolk or Davidfolk or whatever else.”

  “Just don’t talk about Mother Gela and her ring,” advised Julie, in her slow, deep voice.

  We all chuckled at that, because one thing we did know about the Davidfolk was that they hated John Redlantern for taking the ring.

  “Yeah,” agreed Lucky. “Nobody’s to even mention that bloody thing.”

  Four five hours later we passed from the shallow, bright water into the tongue of Deep Darkness that reached in between the end of Nob Head and the rest of Mainground. (We just knew it as the Tongue.) Suddenly, with no watertrees beneath us to give light, everything went completely dark. Even the stars were covered up by cloud, so the sky was black as well, and all that was left of the light of Wide Forest, over on Mainground to our left, was a faint pink glow on the clouds above it. Soon there wasn’t even a World’s Edge anymore, no way of knowing where black water ended and black sky began. We could feel ourselves rising in the darkness to the tops of hills made of water, and sinking back down again into deep valleys, but we couldn’t see any of it at all. We couldn’t even make out one another’s faces.