Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  Presently, Johnny and Angie came running back. We tied the meat to the end of the boat, pushed out, and began to paddle blueway, listening all the time. Forest was strangely quiet but for the pulsing of trees. Then a whistle came from somewhere out on the edge between blueway and alpway. We started to paddle as fast as we could in its direction, searching the water ahead for a long, wriggling back.

  More whistles, nearly straight blueway this time. We turned, but we’d hardly done three digs in the new direction when we heard yelling and shouting, and then more whoops. Someone had done for the fish already.

  “Tom’s dick, that was quick,” muttered Angie.

  It was a relief, of course—sometimes we never found them, and could never be sure whether they were still in the Grounds or back out in the deeper water—but it was a bit of a disappointment, too, because spearfish hunts are fun. We stopped paddling, and waited for the people who’d done for the creature to come our way.

  “What’s keeping them?” Johnny said after a bit.

  When two three boats finally did appear, they were oddly quiet. People usually sang out and boasted—I certainly did the one time I did for a spearfish: I wanted everyone to know—but this lot were just paddling quietly through the trees. And then we saw they weren’t on their own. There was a big two-bodied log-boat paddling along after them.

  “Hey there, Julie,” called out a woman named Lucy Spytree on the boat in front. “We got the fish all right, and we met these blokes out on edge of forest.”

  “Yeah,” said one of the men on the log-boat. “We’ve come across from the Nob. We thought it was time to pay you guys a visit.”

  “Great,” I called back, trying my best to sound pleased. “Welcome to our grounds.”

  “Yeah, welcome,” muttered Johnny and Angie.

  There were four men on the log-boat. They had blackglass spears and white dots on their foreheads.

  Back on the beach, Lucy and her friends dragged the spearfish up onto the Sand. It was a big one, twenty foot long at least, and people came running to see it from the shelters and from the other boats pulling out after us: that big big head, that long, flat body without any arms or legs, that shining lump below its mouth that lit up the Deep Darkness for it and showed it its prey. But when they saw our company they didn’t shout and yell as they’d normally have done, they didn’t lift up Lucy and her mates on their shoulders to carry them round the Sand. Once they’d seen the four guards there, people barely looked at the fish at all.

  “Who’s the boss here?” one of the men asked.

  They knew we were afraid of them, standing there with their long fakeskin wraps, and their heavy spears, and their leopardtooth knives in their belts.

  “We don’t have a boss, exactly,” I answered him. “We kind of decide things together.”

  The oldest of the four of them gave a look at the others, like he’d warned them about this. “Okay,” he said, “well, we’re only paying a little visit. We wondered if you guys needed any help out here? Maybe you’d like a few guards to give you a bit of protection?”

  “Protection?” asked Lucy. “Against what?”

  “The Johnfolk, of course. The ones from across the Pool.”

  “Why would we worry about them?” demanded Glitterfish, coming forward with Mikey in her arms.

  She always wanted to know about any kind of threat.

  “Some of the ones that come over to Veeklehouse have been telling us stuff they probably shouldn’t,” the oldest one said. “Seems like the Johnfolk are planning to come over the Pool and make trouble. They think all Mainground should belong to them. And they could use a place like this to rest up after crossing the Pool, and get themselves ready to face us guards.”

  We all looked at one another. This was worrying news, of course, but we didn’t want to discuss it in front of these strangers. The oldest guard watched us with narrowed eyes.

  “But maybe it doesn’t bother you?” he said. “We’ve heard that a girl from here went over there with their headman’s son. So perhaps they’re mates of yours? You guys follow Jeff Redlantern, from what I’ve heard, and he was a cousin of John’s.”

  He was half smiling, almost like he was trying to say that he was only kidding really, but there was something else hidden inside that smile, like a fishhook in a piece of meat. And his eyes were cold.

  “We aren’t on any side,” Glitterfish said. “That’s the whole point of Knee Tree Grounds. To mind our own business, and not to get involved in the fight between you guys and the Johnfolk.”

  She glanced down for a moment at the fish, which lay at the feet of the four guards as if it had been them that had done for it. She feared the creatures horribly. None of the three of them—Glitterfish, Starlight, or Johnny—had ever touched spearfish meat since their mum died.

  “That girl who went over with them,” Glitterfish said, not mentioning that it was her own sister, “it was her own choice. We didn’t want her to go. We don’t want to have anything to do with those people.”

  “Lots of our girls and boys go over to Mainground as well and settle among you Davidfolk,” I pointed out. “This is a little grounds, and there’s only so many of us it can support.”

  “Nice place, though,” observed one of the guards who hadn’t spoken yet, looking out at the lanterns in the forest. “Pretty pretty. And decent fishing, I’m sure.”

  “You make good little boats here as well,” the oldest guard said. “Useful. We could do with better boats ourselves, now the Johnfolk have those new ones that follow the wind.”

  I smiled and shrugged. “Yeah, well, we wish we could make those, too. Best we can do here are kneeboats and long-boats, I’m afraid. You guys can take a kneeboat back if you like.”

  “That’s nice of you,” the oldest guard said, turning his cold eyes on me and giving me his half smile.

  I looked down at the dead spearfish, lying there forgotten on the sand. “We’re going to cook this fish now,” I said. “Will you stay and share it with us before you head back?”

  The oldest guard glanced at his friends. “That would be good. We love a bit of spearfish, don’t we, guys? And while we eat, we can talk a bit more about the protection you might need.”

  He grinned round at us, enjoying our fear.

  “Come on, kids,” Lucy said. “Who’s going to pull this big fish up to the Meeting Place? We need to show these nice men the way.”

  Glitterfish hung back with me and Johnny and Angie.

  “Bloody Starlight,” she muttered. “I told her she was going to bring trouble.”

  “All three of us here went to Veeklehouse,” Johnny said, as we’d all said many times before. “So if anyone’s to blame, then we are, too.”

  “Yes, but you three didn’t head off across Pool with the Johnfolk, did you?”

  This had also been said before, and Johnny ignored it.

  “Maybe we should agree to have some guards over here. That way we’ll have some protection against the Johnfolk if they come over, and—”

  I wasn’t having that! “Jeff’s eyes, Johnny, your sister is with their headman’s son! Why would they want to harm us?”

  Glitterfish looked at me, her eyes as sharp and fierce as Starlight’s. “So Starlight being there makes the Johnfolk our friends, does it, Julie? That’s what you’re saying. And that’s exactly how it looks to the Davidfolk. You heard what that guard said. I think Johnny’s right, we should agree to some guards here. Not to protect us from the Johnfolk, but to prove we’re not on the Johnfolk’s side.”

  “No!” I said firmly. “Guards or ringmen, it makes no difference. They’re exactly the same thing, apart from their names. And as soon as we have either of them here, that will be the end of Knee Tree Grounds.”

  “Oh, so we just have to sit here as helpless as babies, do we?” Johnny asked. He was almost never angry, but I could hear the anger now. “We have to sit here naked and just wait until one or other of them decides to reach out and push us a
side?”

  “Maybe we need guards of our own,” said Angie.

  “Tom’s dick, no!” I told her. “No, no, no! That’s where all the trouble starts. If we have guards here—any kind of guards—then I’m off to Mainground for good.”

  Then I looked up and saw one of the four men. He was one who hadn’t spoken yet, a young guy about Angie’s age. He was standing there watching us with a smile.

  Starlight Brooking

  We came to Steam Fall at Second Horn. The Great Cave was wide wide here, and the river in middle of it flowed fast and shallow under the trees until suddenly up ahead it reached a line, like World’s Edge, and disappeared over it into whatever it was that lay below. Beyond that line there was nothing but swirling steam. There was steam above us, too—it hid the high roof most of the time—and steam blew through the trees, making circles of pink and white and blue that came and went round their lanterns. We couldn’t hear the trees at all. Their pulsing was drowned out by the roaring roaring roaring of the Fall.

  Greenstone had the car splash through a side river that came down from John Cave—that was where we were going: the cave where Chief Dixon had his ground—and then we stopped, climbed down, and walked over to that line until we were standing with our toes almost touching the edge, but when I looked down all I could see was steam.

  “Wait,” Greenstone said. “The mist will clear.”

  In just a few heartbeats, it did.

  “Oh, Gela’s heart!” I cried, backing away at once.

  I would never have imagined that such a drop existed in the world.

  “Come on! Come back and look! I’ll hold your hand.”

  “Big help that would be if I fell. I’d just drag you down with me.”

  “Why would you fall? Have you ever in your life fallen over when you were just standing still?”

  I went to the edge again, refused Greenstone’s hand, and looked down.

  I’d seen the cliffs at Veeklehouse, the cliffs at Nob Head, the cliffs in that steep valley outside the Great Cave. They’d seemed big at the time, but now I could see they were nothing more than the tiny grooves on the surface of a person’s skin. This was an opening into Eden’s living flesh. I thought I’d found the bottom of it, and then I glimpsed another bottom far below it. I thought that was the real bottom, and then I found an orange glow that was far far deeper still. Rocks thrust out from the sides of the drop, new caves opened far below this one, the drop itself divided as it went down, but there seemed no end to the depth of it. There was life down there—far below me, ten times deeper down than the cliff at Veeklehouse, there were still trees and rocklanterns clinging to the rocky walls, with bats and glitterbirds circling around them—but at the bottom there seemed only to be fire. And into this fire all the water of the Great Cave river was pouring, dividing and bursting as it fell.

  More steam came blowing up from below with a great blast of heat and I stepped back gratefully from the edge. Then, almost straight away, a cool gust of wind blew the steam aside again, and I saw a huge wall of rock in front of us, maybe two hundred feet away. Covered in winding rocklanterns and dotted with small trees, it extended to the full height and width of the cave and seemingly beyond it, too.

  “It’s like a crack across Eden,” Greenstone said. “Earthseeker took me up onto the snow once to look at it from above. It was amazing: a huge glowing crack through the icy darkness, like a deep wound, stretching for miles in either direction. Have you seen enough? We should be going.”

  We climbed back into the car, and the man at the front of it poked the bucks with a stick.

  “Um . . . that’s what we call the Rock,” Greenstone said, pointing back as we began to move toward John Cave.

  I saw a dark lump of stone, surrounded by steam, that stuck out from the cliff on the far side of the river.

  “The Rock?”

  “That’s where they do for people who’ve done bad things.”

  “What? On top of it?”

  “No, not on top of it. They throw them off.”

  “What? They throw them into . . . ? Oh, Jeff’s eyes.”

  My palms went slippery with sweat just at the thought of that terrible drop. And yet I found it a bit exciting, too, like the stories Mum used to tell me about Dad and the cruel things he had to do as a guard on Mainground. And I wondered for a moment if these big big places with all their wonders—Mainground, New Earth, Earth itself—could only work if people were willing to do things that were wicked and cruel. Maybe that was the trade you had to make, if you didn’t want to spend your whole life catching fish and cutting bark.

  “They brought my cousins there and pushed them over the edge. I have dreams about it even now. Dad says it was nothing personal. He says if Harry had been Headman, he’d have done the same thing to Dad and me. But I don’t think so.”

  We reached the opening of John Cave. We could see it stretching ahead of us, its shining forest, its walls crisscrossed with colored light, its glowing roof. Just inside its mouth a flock of stalkerbirds were fishing in the stream. Their hundred flat eyes looked up at us. Their hundred arms reached out toward us. Now what? they seemed to be asking. Are you humans never going to leave us in peace? And they all rose shrieking into the air.

  “Did Harry only have two kids, then?” I asked.

  “No, he had seven. Five daughters as well.”

  “So . . . did . . . did your dad do for them, too?”

  “Oh, no! They’re all alive. We’re going to see one of them now. My cousin Lucy is Chief Dixon’s housewoman.”

  Then we came to some shelters and I had to play the part of Mother Gela.

  Greenstone Johnson

  Chief Dixon was there to meet us outside his big cavehouse, with my cousin Lucy and their daughter Candy: Lucy, tall and sad and already gray, though she wasn’t much more than twenty hundredwakes older than me, Candy with her sharp sharp eyes, always quick to notice weakness. A huge feast had been laid out for us to admire. There was a whole buck stuffed with sweetened flowerstems, a bowl of glitterbird hearts covered in stumpcandy, and a spearfish with its long long tail wrapped round and round its head. As soon as she saw the fish, Starlight turned to me in dismay, but before I had time to realize what this was about, Dixon had taken me off to his writingcave, leaving poor Starlight alone with his housewoman, and his daughter, and the fish that had killed her mum.

  “Let’s speak honestly, Greenstone, shall we?” Dixon said as helpers and bats brought us drinks and plates of meat.

  A small bright tree pulsed in a corner. Piled on tables around us were the barks he used for writing down the numbers of his bats and metal and helpers.

  “Certainly,” I said. “It would be so much simpler.”

  “Okay, then, well, I’ll set it out. Your family owes my family, and I expect you to recognize that when you become Headman. It’s not just what your father did, taking Lucy’s dad and brothers from her. It’s what you’ve done yourself. Turning down Candy, turning down the daughters of Lucy’s sisters, and going against my advice in front of all the chiefs and teachers.”

  “I loved Lucy’s dad and her brothers, as Lucy well knows, and it wasn’t my choice they went to the Rock.”

  Chief Dixon gave a weary sigh, like I was a tiresome child. “No, of course not, but you benefited from it.”

  The truth was that no one would have been happier than me if Lucy’s dad, Harry, could have been Headman in place of my dad, and if her brother Roger could have been Headmanson instead of me, but of course I couldn’t say this. Bad as I was at winning games, I knew that it wasn’t a good idea to show that you’d rather not be playing at all. And anyway, Dixon wouldn’t have been able to understand, for he lived for power, like my dad.

  “Yes, I’ve benefited,” I said, “and I know I need to make this up with Lucy and her sisters. As for my choice of housewoman, I didn’t do it to insult you, but I do know you feel it as an insult, and I’ll do what I can when I’m Headman to make things right with yo
u.”

  “Good. Well, you heard some of the things I want at Council. I need more bats, and I need more metaldiggers. I’m pleased you plan to get more forest people to work for us, but your plan won’t be quick enough. Never mind making them all give you a cube every hundredwake. Just divide the forest out top between the chiefs, and let us use our own ringmen to bring in the people we need.”

  “Well, it’s an idea. I’ll discuss it with Dad.”

  “Good. That would go some way to mending things between us. But there are other things, too. I want you to make a new job called First Chief—someone who’ll lead all the other chiefs under you, and speak for them—and I want you to give that job to me. You need someone between you and the chiefs. We can discuss the details.”

  “I’ll talk to Dad.”

  “Your dad won’t be here much longer, Greenstone. We all know the path that sickness takes, and we all know how far along it he’s already gone. Part of the reason why I suggest this idea of a First Chief is that it’ll give you some backup when you’re still learning.”

  “It’s a good idea, but I need to think about the other chiefs and teachers and what they might think.”

  “That was another thing I was going to say. You need to be firm on the teachers. They have no ringmen, and they don’t bring in any metal or plantstuff. All the stones for their houses, all the bark for them to write on, all the plantstuff for their wraps, it all has to come from us chiefs.”

  “Well, First John did say that teachers must be equal to chiefs. Knowledge is as important as metal and stones.”

  “Equal, yes, but if you take things from us to give to them, that’s hardly equal.”

  Only last waking, when the Head Teacher had come for one of his visits to Starlight, he’d made a point of telling me how important it was that the Teachinghouse be made bigger, and that more bats be provided for the teachers. He’d made a big thing of it. John intended teachers to be as important as chiefs, he’d said, and all the teachers would be watching me closely to see if I’d carry out John’s wish. “And don’t forget, Headmanson,” he’d said as he left me, “teachers and their underteachers can get the attention of everyone in New Earth in a way that chiefs and ringmen can’t.”