Mother of Eden

by Chris Beckett

  “Well, obviously that’s something to think about later,” I said. “I guess one way would be to give up the plan to take back Old Ground. Then we wouldn’t need so much metal for spears and masks and arrowheads.”

  “But that would—”

  “I know. That would make the chiefs even angrier with me than they already are.”

  Earthseeker chuckled. “Yes, and you’ll probably have upset them enough for the time being. Only thing I will say is that you haven’t done anything yet to upset the teachers.”

  Not yet, I thought. Not until they hear that we’re no longer going to send whisperers to the Rock.

  But I didn’t tell him that. I felt that he’d also had enough for the time being.

  After I left Earthseeker, I went to see my friends Roger at Glass Cave and John at his dig out top. They both told me they agreed completely that we should give more power to the small people, and take some away from the biggest chiefs, but when I asked them for support in Council, they were careful careful not to commit themselves to anything that might make them unpopular with the other chiefs. Even Teacher Harry, back in Edenheart, who was maybe my best friend when I was little, said he’d rather not vote against all the other teachers in the Teachinghouse, seeing as he had to work alongside them every waking.

  “Truth is, Starlight,” I said when I got back to the Headmanhouse, “there are big people who like us, and there are certainly big people who don’t like Dixon and his friends, but no one wants a fight, and no one wants to risk the fire.”

  “Does it have to be a fight, though, Greenstone?” she said as we sat on her bed with a chessboard between us. “The chiefs need ringmen if they’re going to fight. We’ve already got all the ringmen in Edenheart, and we’ve got Earthseeker’s ringmen, and surely we can rely on your other friends at least not to send their ringmen against us, even if they don’t want to help? So now all we’ve got to do is persuade the other ringmen that it’s best to side with us or not take sides at all. I reckon we’re nearly there. Ringmen are small people, aren’t they, and the small people know we’re on their side. We just need to build on that by traveling round the caves and the ground up top, telling people what we’ll do for them if they help us.”

  “You make it sound so easy, Starlight dear, but I’m not looking forward to this Council one bit.”

  Starlight laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you what will help. Don’t look at them as scary chiefs and teachers; don’t look at them as your dad’s friends and enemies; look at them as funny pale little bearded creatures from a faraway place, hiding down a hole in the ground.”

  Lucy Johnson

  When Dixon came back from the Council in Edenheart, a bat was standing in his way with a jug of water, and he kicked the bat right across the floor. Then a helper asked him if he wanted anything and he bellowed at her that what he wanted was for stupid small people to leave him alone. He could be kind kind sometimes, but the whole house dreaded him when he was like this, and I dreaded it more than anyone. Sometimes he’d hit me. Sometimes he’d make me bend over for him so he could get rid of some of his tension with his dick, coldly and angrily shoving himself into me and then walking away, complaining that I was cold like stone, and why couldn’t I ever give him love?

  But they say it’s better to face a leopard than show it your back, so I went to him where he was sitting in his writingcave, slapping that stick of his against the palm of his hand.

  “Some bad person has annoyed my lovely, smart Dixon,” I whispered to him.

  I knew it comforted him to be made to feel big. He was like a child who must be told how strong he is when he lifts up some small stone, or what a brave brave hunter he is when he catches some little crawling creature: like a child, but big, and with muscles much stronger than mine.

  He glanced up at me. “Well done, Einstein,” he growled.

  He didn’t say anything else. It was my job to coax the rest out of him, so he could call me a fool if I guessed wrong and be sarcastic if I guessed right.

  “I guess maybe Greenstone?”

  “Of course bloody Greenstone, woman. That’s who I’ve just been to meet!”

  He slapped the stick fiercely against his hand. I wished he’d put it down. Once twice he’d used it to lash out at me.

  “We should have stopped him being Headman in first place,” Dixon growled. “We should have faced him out that first Council after he came back with the fishing girl. Or pushed him out as soon as the old slinker died. But Gerry insisted on caution, didn’t he? ‘He’s no threat to us,’ he said. ‘He’s more of a woman than a man. We can walk all over him, and let him build his own grave.’ Stupid bloody Gerry.”

  “So . . . Greenstone has done something bad?”

  “Oh, well done, woman! John’s walk, you’re smart this waking. You are smart smart. Maybe you should be chief in my place?”

  He stood up suddenly—I tried hard not to flinch—but, to my relief, he didn’t come toward me, just paced about, still hitting that stick against his hand.

  “Yeah, he’s ‘done something bad.’ ” Dixon copied the way I’d said the words in a silly, dumb voice like a slowhead. “He’s got more of his dad in him than we thought. Which I warned Gerry about. ‘The Headman’s hat can change a man’ were my exact words. Mind you, I reckon the fishing girl has got a lot to do with it. Greenstone may be more of a man than we thought he was, but there’s no doubt that she’s tougher than he is, the little slinker. And of course she’s got Greenstone right where she wants him. All my listeners tell me about the noise she makes in bed when he shoves himself up her at the end of every bloody waking. And about the hours they spend there talking talking talking, too low for anyone to hear.”

  He paced about a bit more and then, without any warning, he snatched up the chair he’d been sitting on earlier and flung it against the stones of the wall. It was so sudden I just couldn’t help flinching this time. Dixon noticed this, and gave an ugly little grin.

  “Yeah, he’s done something bad,” he said. “Three things, in fact. First of all, he’s made bloody Earthseeker the Ground Chief, like I’m Pool Chief, in charge of organizing the ringmen in all the caves. We can get round that, of course—the old fool’s no match for me and Gerry—but it’s an insult and it will slow us down. Secondly, he’s had Earthseeker call a meeting of all the topmen in Edenheart, all of them: mine, Gerry’s, everyone’s. Which is outrageous. When has a Headman ever gone over the heads of the chiefs to their topmen? And thirdly, he’s called a stop again to us bringing in the forest people. He’s stopping it, he says, until he’s had time to give it some more thought. We can get round that, too, of course, but if he tells the topmen directly that they’re not to bring them in, it’s going to be awkward. They’ll have heard one thing from him and another from us, and we won’t be able to pretend to be doing what the Headman wants.” He stopped and looked straight at me, his eyes shining, and that ugly grin spreading on his face. “So is that bad enough for you, sweetheart? Or is old daddy Dixon just making a silly fuss?”

  I could see the change in the way he was looking at me. I could see he was thinking of some of that hard, cold slip. Mother of Eden, I hated that, I hated hated it. But it would be worth enduring, I told myself, all his anger would be worth enduring, if it drove him to throw down my cousin Greenstone and his fishing girl, who wore the hat and ring that should be ours.

  Starlight Brooking

  About fifty topmen came down to Headmanhouse, most of them bringing their housewomen, and we gathered them together in the Red Cave, and treated them like they were big people. Me and Greenstone and Earthseeker moved among them and asked them about their families and the places they came from. Helpers and bats brought them food and drink and handed out presents from the House’s store: a new plantstuff wrap for each housewoman, a new metal knife for each topman, with G for Greenstone cut into the blade. When we’d made them all welcome, a horn blew and Greenstone and Earthseeker went to the top of the cave and began t
o talk to them all together.

  “You work for all of New Earth,” Greenstone told the topmen. “You’re the ones who make sure our ringmen do their work properly every single waking and every single sleep. There’d be no New Earth without you!”

  They all cheered that, of course. Everyone likes to think they have a special place in the world. Even back on Grounds that was so.

  “The chiefs are the bosses in their own grounds,” Earthseeker told them. “But my job as Ground Chief is to help the Headman make sure that all the ringmen work together right across the caves and out top. Back in your chiefs’ own grounds, you must do what your own chiefs tell you, of course, just as you do now, but outside of your chiefs’ grounds, you must take instructions only from the Headman or from me.”

  Unless they were dumb dumb, those people must have figured out that the Headman was trying to take some power away from the chiefs, but we’d thought carefully about how to tell them our new rules in a way that wouldn’t make it seem too much like we didn’t trust their chiefs. The only way of doing it that we’d come up with was one that I didn’t like at all.

  “As you know, men,” Earthseeker said, “a waking will come when we cross the water to Old Ground to take back the Veekle and Circle Valley. In readiness for that, it’s important that we make sure that all the ringmen, and their topmen and chiefs, all work together as one. Each chief has his own ground, of course, but we are all one ground, really, the ground of New Earth, and, big or small, we’re all one people, too—the Johnfolk—and we must stay that way if we’re going to beat the Davidfolk.”

  We didn’t leave them to think about this for too long, because straight afterward, I stood up in front of them myself and told them how proud their mother was of them, and how much she relied on them to look after her other children, holding New Earth together so we could build and learn until we found our way back to Earth. And then I went out among them and made sure every topman had a chance to speak to me and kiss the ring and every housewoman had a chance to hold the ring and try it on her own finger.

  I could see that they loved me. I could see that for many of them, being this close to me was a bit like having someone from a dream come to life, or a character from some old story appear in the world and walk among them.

  “Oh, Mother,” one woman sobbed. “Never in all my life did I think I’d hold this ring in my own hand.”

  I overheard a few of them telling one another in awed voices that I was just an ordinary person like them—“Just as ordinary and natural as someone you might meet in your own cluster,” one woman said—but I knew quite well that my being “ordinary” didn’t really make me seem ordinary at all in their eyes, but was yet another thing that made me seem special and different and worthy of their love.

  That love had once felt quite wonderful to me, and part of me still found it so, still basked in it, still loved them back in gratitude, for I was still the daughter of Dream Brooking and Blackglass Lunnon, with the same longings, the same needs, the same holes and gaps inside myself, but I saw it more clearly now and understood it for what it was. These people didn’t know Starlight Brooking, and they had no idea what I was like when I wasn’t playing the part of the Ringwearer. This love of theirs wasn’t really like the love between a mother and a child. It was more like those lines of force you see in your mind when you’re playing chess, coming out from each piece and stretching across the board. Those lines are powerful, they can control or destroy, but they don’t really come from the pieces. They come from the game itself, and they only exist at all while the pieces are still on the board.

  Quietstream Batwing

  When I was a little girl, I lived through a dreadful time we called the Great Shaking. The only warning of it was that two three times we felt the rock move slightly under our feet, like Eden had an itch and was twitching its skin. We didn’t take much notice of that. It happened from time to time, and nothing had ever come of it before. But then suddenly Steam Fall gave out a great roar, which you could hear echoing through every single cave, as if some huge buck had been trapped in a corner and was turning to face its hunters. And the rock all round us shook so hard that people fell to the ground.

  Many houses crumbled, and huge pieces of stone came crashing down from the roofs of caves. Whole top end of Tree Cave was opened up to the black sky; part of the Great Cave path was covered in big lumps of stone, which took twenty wakings to clear; and in Gerry Cave a houseplace with fifty people in it was buried under a single piece of rock. A horrible smell spread everywhere, like the smell of rotten fish. All through the caves, it burned in our throats and made us gasp for breath, and down near the Fall, birds and bats fell dead to the ground and thirty forty people were suffocated.

  Later, when the roaring and shaking had stopped and fresh air had blown back into the caves from out top, I went with my mum down to the Fall and we found it had changed its shape. In some places big slabs had fallen from the cliffs; in others new dark rock had been thrust up from below, which looked smooth and soft like mud but rang out hard when we chucked stones down against it. There were hunks of that same dark rock lying in the river and on the ground, some of them still hot from the fire below.

  People my age and older than me remember the Great Shaking and wonder when it will happen again, and whether this time it’ll be us who are done for by the poisoned air, or buried by a falling roof. And when the brothers fell out, Firehand and Harry, and the chiefs quarreled and their ringmen squared up to one another at the cave mouths, people said to one another that this was another kind of Shaking, another time when the world stopped working as it should, no one could tell what would happen next, and neither roof nor floor could be relied on to stay where they were.

  Now it was like that again. Whole of Headmanhouse was restless restless, like a tree of glitterbirds that have seen a slinker climbing toward them. Angry chiefs and teachers came and went, there was shouting in the Red Cave every waking, and ringmen arriving from other caves told us how their chiefs were scheming with one another, and how the Head Teacher was traveling in his car from one big house to another, his face purple with rage. The big people were there to protect us, or so we’d always been told. They might live in big houses, they might make us work hard, but they were there to organize things so we would be safe and get the things we needed. But if they fought among themselves, who was left to protect us, and what could we do to protect ourselves?

  Starlight Brooking

  The same waking the topmen and their women went back to their own grounds, me and Greenstone set out on our journey round the houseplaces. Sending ringmen ahead of us to announce we were on our way, we took our car and twelve ringmen and headed up Bat Cave, a bright bright side cave that was lined with one tall rooftree after another, filling the air from floor to roof with masses of shining pink flowers.

  We were heading toward a big metal ground out top and a place there called Batsky, and we were more than halfway there when a sturdy young man came bounding down toward us on the back of a big blue buck. He had tightly curled brown hair and was wearing a fine wrap in red and white with a necklace of polished metal.

  “Greenstone!” he bellowed as he wheeled round the car and drew up beside us. “Greenstone, you dick! What do you think you’re bloody playing at, coming up here without even telling me until last moment?”

  Four of the chief’s ringmen pulled up their bucks beside him.

  “Hello, Whiteblade,” Greenstone began. “I—”

  “What do you think you’re bloody playing at, Chief Whiteblade?” I demanded, rising to my feet in the car. “This is the Headman of New Earth you’re talking to!”

  I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly, but I was afraid that Greenstone would give too much ground. Our plan was to go right past the chiefs, not seeking their agreement, not discussing things with them, not seeking their support, but going straight to the small people and the ringmen. We knew it would upset the chiefs, of course, but we’d deal with t
hat later. First, we needed to prove to them that we had power of our own, power that didn’t just come from them. Second, we’d give some power to the ringmen and small people to balance the power of the chiefs. And only then would we talk to the chiefs, smooth them down as best we could, reward the ones who supported us, maybe punish a few who didn’t.

  That was the plan, but that didn’t mean it made any sense for me to shout at Whiteblade and make Greenstone look weak by standing up for him when he could perfectly well stand up for himself. The young chief looked at Greenstone and pulled a pretend-amazed face, as if what had happened was so strange that he almost doubted his own senses. Greenstone looked nearly as shocked as Whiteblade did, but he was loyal to me, as always.

  “She’s right, Chief Whiteblade,” he said. “You wouldn’t have called my dad a dick, and you don’t call me a dick, either.”

  “Oh, come on, Greenstone. We’re friends, right? We used to play football together. And chess. Remember how crap you were at chess? Remember how I always used to beat you?”

  “I’m the Headman of New Earth, Whiteblade. That means I stand where First John stood. And you’re just one of my ringmen. One of the chiefs of my ringmen, it’s true, but that’s still one of my ringmen.”

  “Tom’s fat cock, Greenstone, what are you bloody talking about? John Redlantern was my great-great granddad, the same as yours. You know that. Everyone knows that. He’s the granddad of just about all the chiefs and teachers. You’re the Headman, yes, okay, but New Earth belongs to all of us, all of us big people together.”

  Once again I got so angry that I butted in when I should have let Greenstone speak for himself. “Get off your buck, Whiteblade,” I told him. “This is Gela’s ring. You show it respect like everyone else does.”