“I’ll think about it,” I told Chief Dixon, which was just what I’d said to Head Teacher Michael.
“That can’t be your answer to everything, Greenstone: ‘I’ll think about it.’ A Headman’s task is to decide.”
“Yes, Dixon, and I’ve decided to think.”
He could see I was angry, and that made him angry, too, or at least stirred up the anger he already felt.
“I hope you understand the position you’ve chosen to put yourself in, Greenstone. You could have ended that old division, that old dispute between two brothers, but you chose not to. There have always been some who’ve whispered that Harry was the true Headman, not Firehand, and now—”
“And now Firehand is about to die, so it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered, Headmanson, if you’d made a different choice, but now the question will keep coming up again and again, every time you disappoint the chiefs of New Earth. You know the kind of things people ask. What kind of test was it to throw the ring into boiling water? How come we still accept the decision of a Head Teacher who went crazy soon after? How come Greenstone and his sons get to be Headmen, if his dad shouldn’t have been Headman in the first place? I don’t think that way myself, of course, but plenty of people do. It’s going to be quite a problem for you.”
He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a smile of friendliness. No. If they ever ended up throwing me from the Rock, that would be his smile as he watched me fall.
Lucy Johnson
Me and Candy stood at the top windhole of our house, watching Greenstone and his girl heading off in their car with Dixon riding behind them.
“I don’t really blame the girl,” I said, “but my cousin I can’t forgive. He knows what I’ve been through. He knows how I’ve suffered. And yet he couldn’t even do the one thing that would have helped.”
“People say he just doesn’t understand what it is to be Headmanson.”
Candy seemed so young to me, repeating those stale phrases that went round the young chiefswomen like they were interesting new thoughts: Greenstone doesn’t understand what it is to be Headmanson, Greenstone was spoiled by his mum, Greenstone spent too much time with women. I was way younger than Candy when Firehand did for my dad and brothers, barely more than a newhair, but I had to grow up fast, containing my grief so as to help my mother and sisters with theirs. Dixon was kind to me back then—he was much older than me, of course, and even though I was his housewoman, he became a sort of second dad—but I had to put up with him meeting with Firehand, like nothing had happened, for chats about metal and ground and bats and whatever other bloody things chiefs talk about. Gela’s heart, sometimes I had to bow my own head to the killer. My mother, too, until it finally sent her crazy.
I stayed sane myself, but ever since the waking my dad and brothers died, the world had seemed cold and dark to me. I could be in the warmest and brightest part of the caves, but inside myself I was always on my own, in my own little patch of snow and ice.
“I trusted Greenstone,” I said to Candy. “Everyone said he was a kind boy and not a cold leopard like his dad, and I believed them. After all, my brothers were his friends, and he grieved for them as well, so he knew how we felt. Surely he’d want to put things right! But then this. This slap in the face. This shrug. This—”
“Try not to get yourself in a state, Mum. It’s not as if I would have enjoyed being his housewoman.”
“I’m not saying what his father did was Greenstone’s fault. He was only a young newhair himself when it happened: younger than me, younger even than my brothers. But here was a chance to heal the wound. Here was the perfect chance. He would make you his housewoman, and then your son would be Firehand’s grandson and Harry’s grandson both. That old fight would be over, no one would have won or lost, and we could have laid it aside and got on with other things. It would have been so so easy.”
“Like I say, Mum, I would have liked the ring, of course, and I would have liked to have been the mother of the next Headmanson, but—”
“If he didn’t want to be with you, he could have chosen one of your sisters or cousins. I would have preferred it to be you, of course, and so would your dad, but Greenstone could have chosen any of Harry’s granddaughters and we would both have been quite content. But no, he had to do this! He had to go with this fishing girl from across the water.”
“Well, she’s as pretty as they all say she is, you have to give her that. And she seemed to me to be smart smart. She was interested in everything about our house and—”
“I just can’t believe Greenstone could have thought only of himself, when the peace of all New Earth was at stake, and peace between the children of First John. Didn’t he think of the pain he’d cause me and my sisters? Didn’t he know how long we’d been waiting?”
“Please don’t cry, Mum. We’ll find another way. Dad cares about this as much as you do, don’t forget. He’ll find a way to get back what’s ours, one way or another. He might just be Dad to us, but to the chiefs and teachers Chief Dixon’s a powerful powerful man.”
“I’d just hoped so much that—”
“He says he and his friends will just keep pushing and pushing Greenstone for things he can’t give, until in the end all the chiefs get fed up with him, and find a reason to toss him down to the fire. Maybe then they’ll give the Headman’s hat to Dad, eh? He comes from John, after all, just as much as Greenstone does. And then you’d get to wear the ring, Mum. Imagine that. That would be even better than me wearing it!”
Poor girl. It was natural she should put a brave face on it, but she’d looked forward so much to putting on that ring. Couldn’t Greenstone have thought of that, if nothing else? Couldn’t he have thought of the shame for poor Candy, who everyone had agreed was bound to be chosen?
I remembered that thing my crazy mum told me not long before she died, that silly dangerous Secret Story that was supposed to come from Gela. I tried to make her stop, but she wouldn’t, and in the end I decided there’d be no harm in listening, as long as I told no one else. It was ridiculous stuff, of course—“Never forget that women are as good as men. Don’t ever treat people differently because of the color of their skin”—and most of it I put out of my mind at once, but there was just one bit that stayed with me, for some reason: “Don’t trust men who think the story’s all about them.”
And that was Greenstone, wasn’t it? Like all headmen, he’d only be remembered for what he’d done or not done for New Earth. Yet he thought his own life, his own happiness, his own little pleasures, were more important. Gela’s heart, even Firehand knew better than that.
Starlight Brooking
“That was a strange, sad house,” I said to Greenstone as our car moved on at last from that gloomy wall of stone. “They smile and ask questions and offer nice things, but there’s so much anger behind their eyes.”
“Lucy has always been bitter, ever since her dad and her brothers died. It can’t be easy for her, having us here. Or for Candy, either.”
“How do they know what happened to my mum?”
“Your mum?”
“Yes, my mum, Dream. How do they know how she died?”
“What makes you think they do?”
“That spearfish. They’d had it brought specially from the Pool in a box of snow. Why go to all that trouble if it wasn’t to mock me or warn me?”
“Oh, Starlight, lots of chiefs go to that trouble. I don’t like the taste of spearfish, myself, or I might do the same.”
“But someone has to go up into the dark to collect the snow. Someone has to take a car to poolside and back again. Someone has to go out in a boat with meat on a string, and fishing spears, and risk being dragged into the water and eaten themselves. And all that just to bring a fish to the table of one chief? If they want fish, there are fish in the rivers that taste as good!”
“Chiefs and teachers like to show off how many people they have working for them. It’s a sort of competition be
tween them to see who’s got the most. That’s why they always want things from the Headman. They have all they need to be comfortable—they have it many times over—but they can never have enough to be sure that they’re better than anyone else, because the others are busy getting more as well. And that means they’re always hungry.”
John Cave narrowed at the top end until the path climbed out of the brightness of Underworld into a strange, dark valley beneath the huge shadows of the mountains. The reason it was dark was that for every tree standing, twenty had been cut down. The empty holes of tree stumps were all around us, and, without tree roots to feed on, there were hardly any starflowers, either. But up on the slopes, red flame glinted in the mouths of huge dirt ovens, and in the gloomy light I saw enormous piles of stones lying in front of holes in the rock. There was a dry stink of dust and ash.
“Welcome to Johndigs,” Greenstone said. “It’s one of the biggest metaldigs in New Earth.”
Chief Dixon came up beside us on his buck. “The people are waiting for you at the cluster over there, Ringwearer. A word from the Ringwearer always encourages them, so please do tell them that Mother Gela wants them to work harder, so that we get the metal we need to build up New Earth. And remind them, too, to have as many children as they can. Remind them it’s against our rules for women to refuse to slip, or slip the back way. Too many of them still do that, but we need more diggers, and we need more ringmen.”
“Do that for him, Starlight,” Greenstone said to me as Dixon rode off ahead. “He needs a sign from us that we’re willing to work with him.”
Clare Bluesigh
We spent twenty wakings opening up that hole: me, my brother, my three biggest boys, two of my girls, and my brother’s girls. For twenty wakings we crawled in the mud under a two-foot roof, breathing in rock dust and the smoke from our buckfat lanterns, scraping our backs and our elbows, working away from before First Horn to long after Fifth—not that we could hear the bloody things in there—hacking away at the stone, dragging it out. And then, when we finally hit green and thought we were getting somewhere at last, the roof fell in.
Thank the Mother, no one was in the hole at the time. We had old Johnny Fourfingers and his blokes as our ringmen, who are pretty fair as ringmen go, and they’d let us have a half-waking rest after we found the green, to give us a chance to go and see the rest of our family, and check on my old mum. (She’s got the lung sickness. The same sickness the Headman has, if you believe the talk from the ringmen.) If it wasn’t for that, we’d all have been down there.
As it was, though, all we lost were six bats. Three of them must have died straight off when the rocks came down on them—they were completely mashed up when we found them—but three were still alive. Tom’s dick, you should have heard them shrieking as they lay there under the rock. It nearly drove us crazy, having to listen to that racket as we worked and worked to clear the hole, but we had to put up with it for a whole long waking, because a lot of the rock had come down in big chunks that needed breaking up before we could move it, and of course we didn’t have the bats to help shift the rubble. Anyway, we got to them in the end and shut them up with spears. After that we were another two wakings clearing the rest of the hole until we were back at the greenstone.
“Get one car load of green out,” Johnny Fourfingers said, “and then we’ll say you’re done for this waking.”
He didn’t come right down the hole, of course—they never do—but he had a fair idea what we were up against because his mum was a metaldigger over Batsky.
We set to then, but we’d barely shifted half a load when Johnny started yelling down the hole again.
“Hey, you can stop and come out now. The Ringwearer’s on the way! She’ll be down at the cluster soon. Cubes and everything.”
Well, I was as excited as a little kid. Last time I saw the Ringwearer it was back in the time of Jane, and I never thought I’d see this new one so soon. We crawled backward along the hole as quick as we could and came out into the blue light of the single spiketree that grew near the hole’s mouth.
“Never mind sorting out the stone now,” said old Fourfingers when he saw me looking at the broken rock on the ground. (The chief is fussy fussy about his stone, and there’s trouble if you send your green to the ovens with anything else mixed up in it.) “Leave it here for next waking, and go and get your kids and your mum ready. Ringwearer won’t be here long.”
I’d hurt my knee on a stone and it was sore sore, but I still ran all the way back to the cluster. Luckily Mum had managed to stir herself enough to get the littles more or less ready, so I splashed water on my face and hands to wash away the bat blood and the worst of the stone dust, and we all took up places by the path: a big crowd of us—there must have been better part of a hundred people—chatting away excitedly all at once. And then someone saw the car coming, and we all started to scream.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
Oh, Gela’s heart, the power of it! I’d only shouted it out three four times before the tears came running down my face. Life is so hard and so scary and so full of trouble, but here was the beautiful mother of us all.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
Oh, and she was beautiful. She was beautiful beautiful. I guess she wasn’t even as old as my oldest daughter, Sue, but all the sadness of the world was in her face, and all the gentleness and kindness of the world’s mothers.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
She stopped right in front of us, sitting there in a car next to the Headmanson, who I must say had a kind face, too. There were ringmen from Edenheart riding round them, and the chief behind them, looking out at us suspiciously, as he always did, like he thought we never worked at all. But who cared about Chief Dixon when she was here?
And then a ringman got off his buck and helped her down. I could hardly believe it. She was standing on the same ground as us, as near to me as my shelter is to my sister Tina’s, and she was looking straight into our faces: me, my mum, my kids and grandkids around me. She had sharp sharp eyes. It felt like she could see into our lives and our thoughts, like she knew our griefs and our worries and our longings.
“What’s your name?” she asked me.
I told her Clare. Her speech was strange strange but, apart from that, she was as natural and ordinary as anyone you might meet.
“And this is your mum?”
“Yes, this is my mum, Caroline.”
“You look like people who have to work hard hard.”
People said the Ringwearer came from somewhere beyond the Pool, a ground with water all round it. And I guess that was the reason her speech was so strange that I could only just make out the words. But it was kind of musical—her voice went up and down like a song—and one thing I liked about it specially was that it wasn’t at all the way the chiefs and teachers talked. It might be strange speech, but it wasn’t Big Speech at all.
“We do work hard, Mother.”
“I’ve never been down a metaldig, but I do know what it’s like to work hard with your hands. We used to cut bark from trees where I come from, and make it into boats.”
Everyone around us was quiet quiet, listening to the Ringwearer talking to me.
“This is Gela’s ring, look,” she said. “Would you believe that? This is the ring from the story. I’m still getting used to it, I must admit.”
She held out her hand to me and there it was, the lovely ring made of strange metals that were shiny like our redmetal, but not red at all. I could hardly believe I was really seeing it up close with my own eyes, but that was only the beginning of it, because then she took the ring off and handed it to me. Gela’s heart, I was just a metaldigger from Johndigs who slept in a bark shelter and could barely read, but I was holding our mother’s ring in my own hand, I was holding the ring from Earth.
“Try it on your finger if you like!”
So I slipped it on. I was trembling all over. I just couldn’t believe I’d lived to experience this, or t
hat something this wonderful could be happening to me. And I suppose my feelings were just too much to hold inside because suddenly, though I couldn’t have said why exactly, I began to sob and sob, and the Ringwearer reached out and hugged me as a mother hugs a crying child.
“Just think,” she said, as she took back the ring, “there must have been metaldiggers like you on Earth who dug up the metal to make this.”
Then she kissed me, right on my ugly twisty old batface, which most big people won’t even look at.
“It was good to meet you, Clare,” she said.
Simple as that! Just like anyone you might meet.
Later she stood up on her car with the Headmanson and the chief beside her, and made a speech about how hard we all worked, and how grateful she was, because metal had made New Earth great and would make it greater still, until one waking we’d be like Old Earth, where Mother Gela was born, with cooking boxes and everything.
“And who knows?” she said. “Maybe we’ll even find the starship up in the sky that brought Tommy and Gela here from Earth, and then we can go home at last, after all these generations alone here in dark dark Eden.”
We all shouted and cheered.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
“So keep working hard, everyone!” she told us. “Keep on digging! The faster you work, the quicker we’ll get there. And keep on having babies: The more kids you have, the more people you’ll have to share the work with.”
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