Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  The valley ended. There was a huge cliff right in front us, and in middle of it, beneath the black shadow of the Dark Mountains, was the opening of an enormous, shining cave, a hundred foot high and nearly as wide, the river flowing straight into it.

  “Tom’s dick!” I cried out. “That’s amazing!”

  It was the brightest place I’d ever seen, the most beautiful, the most full of trees and bats and birds. I craned forward in my seat, impatient to get inside.

  But, at the last moment, something made me look quickly up, while I still could, at the sky we shared with Earth.

  Greenstone Johnson

  People spoke in many different ways, told different stories, but apart from us everyone in Eden lived under the same black sky. Only we lived under the deep deep glow of rocklanterns, the reflected light of trees, the shimmery wings of the tiny glitterbirds that clung upside down on the roof in flocks of thousands, angrily chattering all at once as they licked the sweat from the rocklanterns’ glowing skin.

  “I guess you know the story,” I said, “about how our John and your Jeff found a hole in Tall Tree Valley that went straight down to Underworld?”

  “Yes, of course. And there were monkeys with wings that flew down into it.”

  “John never forgot that place. He always said that Underworld was the true heart of Eden, the place where life began when everywhere else was still just darkness and ice. After all, even the trees out top have to reach back down with their roots to get the warmth they need to live.”

  “But it’s not so hot here.”

  “Well, there are layers of Underworld. The fire is still below us.”

  The fire. I thought of the rage that would soon break over us. But Starlight wasn’t thinking about that at all. She leaned back and watched a long line of stalkerbirds passing a few feet below the rocky roof, their arms stretched straight out in front of them and their voices crying out with each wingbeat as if in pain. The little glitterbirds turned their heads and snapped at them as they passed beneath.

  Starlight laughed. “And look at that tree!” she cried out excitedly, spotting a rooftree up ahead. “It goes all the way from the floor to the roof. Oh, and look! A flying monkey! Just like in the story!”

  “Well, if you think that’s strange, look over there!” I said, pointing to a big cave slinker, as long as five men, lumbering slowly through the stripy treeshine on its hundred legs.

  Starlight laughed with delight. “You were right. This is way way better than smoky old Veeklehouse.”

  By the side of the path, a bunch of flowergatherers had stopped their work to stare at the Headmanson and the pretty woman with him in the car. I stood and called out to them.

  “I’ve been to the Old Ground across the water, and I’ve chosen a new Ringwearer for us. A new Mother for you, a new Mother for us all!”

  That ring had been too long on my father’s hand! As soon as they heard me, they cheered and shouted with delight.

  “Mother! Mother! Mother!”

  Luke Snowleopard

  “Marther! Marther! Marther!”

  Blink laughed at my imitation.

  “These Johnfolk aren’t stupid,” I said. “They find a good thing, they hide it from everyone else. This place is amazing, isn’t it?”

  The cave got bigger the further down we went, packed all the way with starflowers and fruit and bucks. And side caves kept joining it, some of them almost as big as the Great Cave itself, their streams swelling up the Great Cave river. One of the ringmen told me they got their metal from some of those side caves, and from the ground outside that they led up to.

  “A lot of greenstone digs out top there,” he said as our bucks splashed through the water of another side stream.

  I looked across at Blink. Greenstone! Green. No wonder we’d never found metal back on Mainground. Ever since he’d first seen the redmetal from New Earth, old Strongheart had had us search for stone that was red!

  Then we came to Edenheart itself. Tom’s dick, what a place! There weren’t just two three of those so-called houses here. There were one with windholes: six at the lower level, four at the level above, and two near the top, where the side cave was narrower.

  “He must have a lot of helpers and ringmen, then.”

  “He surely does,” said Topman Gerry proudly. “There’s chiefs who think they’ve got a lot of stuff, but the Headman always has more. You’re lucky to be one of his men.”

  Starlight Brooking

  Parp-parp! Parp-parp! Parp-parp-parp!

  A strange, hard cry came out to us from the great stone wall of the Headmanhouse. Men were blowing metal horns from the windholes, and the sound was hard and bright, nothing at all like the woody buzzing of the horns we used back on Grounds. I looked up at that huge huge wall, all covered with glowing red skin, and I felt afraid. Each windhole in itself was bigger than one of the rough bark shelters where we lay down to sleep on Knee Tree Grounds. It was hard to believe that people who could make such a thing were even the same kind of creature as us. Yet here was Greenstone beside me, and he was one of them.

  Down on ground level, there was another, much bigger opening in the stone wall, filled in with planks of wood bound together by strips of red, shiny metal. Now, as ringmen helped us climb down from the car, this great flat piece of wood split open in the middle, and the two halves of it swung outward, so that we could see a big whitelantern tree shining inside, with shadowy people standing in front of it.

  Out they came now, a row of ringmen first, and behind them an old old man, with a tall girl holding his arm to help him walk. Behind these two, and on either side, were two more men. One was fat and bald and wore a long, pale wrap stitched with letters. The other one I knew. It was Chief Dixon, with his blue wrap, and his gray hair, and his proud, cold, angry face.

  As the row of ringmen parted, Greenstone fell to his knees, bowing his head down almost to the ground. I had no idea why he did that, but I thought I’d better do the same, and so we knelt there, looking down at the dirt and the stones, while the old man came slowly forward to stand in front of us. Then there was a long silence. All we could hear was the humming of trees and the old man’s wheezy breath.

  After a while he coughed, a long, painful hacking. I couldn’t see his face, only his feet in their skin wraps, and his hands, and his longwrap made of thin strips of white and yellow fakeskin, but what I noticed straight away was that the skin on his right hand was horribly scarred and twisted, and that on one finger of it was the ring. It was like no ring I’d ever seen, made of shiny metal in two different colors, joined together like the stripes in his wrap. And my head swam with the weirdness of the thought that it came all the way from Earth.

  “So this is your choice of housewoman?”

  There was no “Hello, Greenstone” or “Good to see you again, son.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  He put a finger under my chin and yanked my face upward so that I was looking straight at him. John’s spear! If coldness had its own kind of fire, then that would be what was burning there. Headman Firehand was sick sick—you could see that straight away—and his eyes were watering with the effort of holding in more coughs, but they still blazed with pure, cold power.

  There was no “Nice to meet you, Starlight.” He just released my chin again and turned back to Greenstone.

  Greenstone Johnson

  Dad was waiting in the Red Cave on his big stone chair under the tree, with the empty seat next to it where my mother, Jane, once sat. Beside him stood his latest favorite helper, a tall girl called Purelight, holding a jug of water and some fakeskin wipes. The rest of the cave, though it could hold two hundred or more, stood empty but for the ringmen by the doors. Its walls smoldered red.

  Dad dismissed Purelight with a flick of his scarred fingers, and I braced myself for the shouting to begin. But his voice stayed calm.

  “So you decided not only to cross the water for a housewoman, but to cross the line between big people and smal
l people?”

  “She’s not really a small person, Dad. Where she comes from there are no—”

  “Dixon tells me that when you met the girl, her tits were bare, and all she had on was a piece of raw buckskin. Is that right?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “And he tells me that her father’s dead but her uncle lives by making little boats out of bark. Is he telling the truth?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “He says her uncle had bare feet, too, and walked about naked except for a bit of rough buckskin over his dick.”

  “Yes. But, Dad, Starlight’s great-great grandfather was Jeff Redlantern, John’s cousin.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? We’re all descended from the same two people, aren’t we? Everyone in Eden. Does that make me as small as some little holefaced stonebreaker up at Metal Cave, or him as big as me?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Some of us are born big and some are born small, just as some are born men and some women. And you chose a small woman.”

  “But Dad . . .” I began.

  His eyes burned into mine and I bent my head and was silent. Now, surely, I thought, the shouting would start.

  But there was no sound at all but his labored breathing, and the pulsing of the tree, and the trickle of the little stream flowing through its stone channel at the back of the cave.

  “Lift your head so that I can look at you.”

  Reluctantly, I did as he asked. His fierce eyes bored into me, poking and flicking through my mind like he was looking for some small object he’d mislaid in a pile of trash.

  “Well,” he said at last. “You’ve finally done one brave thing.”

  “Please don’t play with me, Dad. Be as angry as you like, but please don’t play with me.”

  “I’m not playing with you.” His eyes held mine, refusing to let me go. “Haven’t I always said that a Headman needs to be able to say a thing, and mean it, and stick to it, no matter how much his chiefs and teachers might wail and whine? But you’ve always been so gentle and kind and worried about making enemies. You’ve always been your mother’s boy.”

  He gave a little backward jerk of his head and bared what were left of his old black teeth. It was a kind of laugh.

  “But this time, boy, you acted like your dad. You decided what you wanted, and you stuck to it, in spite of Dixon, who scares you, fail, and if I failed, not this waking, not next, but sometime in the future, they’d turn on me and . . . Well, I could almost feel the drop as it opened up beneath me, feel my skin blister in the heat. And of course Dad was right. It wouldn’t just be me but Starlight, too, Starlight who could have lived safely all her life in her little waterhill across the Pool.

  “I understand, Dad. Once you start you can never stop. You’ve always said this is the price we pay for power.”

  Tears began to stream down my dad’s cheeks, and for a moment I had the crazy notion that they were tears of pride or love, but of course they just came from the effort of holding in his cough.

  “Go and put on a clean wrap. Most of the chiefs are here in the House, and nearly all the teachers. We are going to have a Council, and you’re going to have to defend yourself. You’ve never really played the game before, Greenstone, but this is where you start.”

  Starlight Brooking

  “Let me help you off with that wrap, Mother,” said the helper Quietstream.

  “I can take it off myself.”

  I could have folded it myself as well, but she took it from me.

  “Would you like to wash now, Mother?”

  “In a moment.”

  I stood there naked, looking round at the cave I’d been given to sleep in. I’d been rushed through so many places that waking, crossed so many times from somewhere that was strange to me into somewhere even stranger, that most of it was just a muddle of shapes in my head: a picture on a rock, an animal with a hundred legs, faces looking down at me from far above . . . But, Jeff’s eyes, I was going to look properly at this place, at least. I was going to take the time to really see it.

  My wallcave was about twenty foot long, its roof made of wood and its walls of blocks of stone that were covered over with a deep blue skin of rocklantern. (I walked over to touch it: It was smooth and quite firm, like the skin of fatbuck, and just a little bit moist.) At one end of the cave, a small whitelantern tree gave out its pure white light. In front of the tree there was a little pool, with a tiny stream trickling into it along a groove in the stone floor, and another stream trickling out of it on the other side, to leave the cave through a small hole at the bottom of the wall.

  Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph whispered the little tree.

  At the far end of the cave, there was a bed: a pile of skins raised up above the cold floor on a kind of big low table made of wood. On the wall above the bed the rocklantern skin had been cut away, and there yet again was a circle with a little Gela inside, surrounded by three little fathers.

  “You guys seem to like that picture.”

  Quietstream bowed her head, but not before I’d seen her smile.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Oh, Mother, forgive me,” she said. “I’ve never heard anyone speak as you do.”

  “Why do you keep calling me ‘Mother’? You’re old enough to be my mum! My mum’s mum, even!”

  She hesitated. “I’m a helper, Mother. We call all the big people Mother or Father. I’m sure you use different words where you come from, but I don’t know what they are.”

  “Where I come from we just call people by their names. You can call me Starlight.”

  She didn’t answer that. “Why not get in the pool, Mother?” she suggested.

  I stepped into the water. The roots of the tree had made it warm.

  “It will relax you, Mother. You’ve had a long journey from Brightrest. And across the Pool before that. You must be tired tired.”

  “We just call people by their names,” I repeated as I settled down into the water, “and there are no big people or small people.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. Sometimes I can’t follow how you speak. I’ll get used to it soon, I’m sure.”

  She knelt by the pool and began to rub my back with a piece of soft fakeskin.

  “I said there are no big people or small people where I come from.”

  I looked round at her face. It was a kind face, but it looked . . . well, not exactly dumb—she didn’t strike me as a stupid person—but like someone who felt she had to pretend to be dumb. You’d have thought she’d have found it interesting to hear about a ground she’d never been to that was so different from her own, but she said nothing, asked nothing, just waited for me to speak.

  “We don’t have helpers, either,” I told her. “The only people who get help with taking their wraps off are little kids and old old people who can’t see.”

  “Different from here, then, Mother,” Quietstream said in a way that gave no clue as to whether she approved or not, and she continued to gently rub my shoulders and the back of my neck.

  “Greenstone said you were an old friend of his.”

  She laughed at that. “Oh, yes, Mother. I’ve known the Headmanson since the waking he was born. It was me who looked after him when he was little. He was a good, kind boy.”

  “When did his mother die, then?”

  “It was four five hundredwakes past, Mother.”

  “Oh, so she was still alive when he was a kid. Why didn’t she look after him herself?”

  Quietstream poured warm water over my hair. “She was the Ringwearer, Mother. She was often away and busy.”

  I closed my eyes. No one had washed me like this since I was a little girl, and it felt so soothing that I was beginning to slip down into sleep when I was suddenly woken by a strange sound from the direction of the door. It was almost like a voice.

  “Dries,” it seemed to creak.

  I sat straight up. “Tom’s dick, what’s—”

  Standing in the door tha
t joined my cave to the next was a little blue man. He was about the height of a child of fifteen wombs and had big, flat eyes like a buck or a fish. The skin on his face was all wrinkled, without a proper nose, and his thin arms—they were holding some folded fakeskin—came out of him at a funny angle, just below his shoulders.

  “It’s just a bat, Mother,” Quietstream said with a puzzled smile. “Don’t you have bats where you come from?”

  “Where are its wings?”

  “They’ve been cut off, Mother. It’s a cutbat. It’s just a cutbat, here to help the helpers.”

  Now that she’d told me I could see it for myself. The creature’s face was folded and wrinkled like all bats’ faces, and when it opened its mouth there were those little black thorns that bats have for teeth. I could even see the wing stumps, squirming and wriggling like they still hoped somehow to fly.

  “Dries,” it said again.

  “It can speak words!”

  “They can say a few words, Mother, but I wouldn’t call it speaking.”

  “Make it leave.”

  Quietstream turned toward the creature. “Give me the dries and go,” she told it.

  Her voice lost its gentleness and took on a coldness and harshness that didn’t fit at all with what I’d seen of her. The bat left with an odd, stiff, jerky walk, and Quietstream wrapped the dry fakeskin gently round me as I climbed out of the pool, and rubbed me all over.

  “Now we’ll get you a clean longwrap, Mother, and some nice soft footwraps. Then you’ll be ready.”

  Greenstone Johnson

  They were waiting in their stone seats along the walls: teachers on the left in their lettered wraps, chiefs on the right in their bright colors, each one trying to outdo the others with the fineness of their rings and wraps and beard-bows. At the far end, in the brightest part of the cave near the tree, a young underteacher stood waiting beside the two big empty chairs, with clean barks under his arm and a pot of writing juice. Ringmen stood beside the doors. Bats waited between the seats with jugs of water.