Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  But then I noticed a light high up there in sky: a little far-off patch of pale white light hovering up there in darkness.

  ‘Hey look! Up there!’

  Normally when you see something that you don’t know what it is, it only takes a second or two before you do know, or at least can have a good guess. But this I couldn’t make out at all. I really had no idea what it could possibly be. I mean, there’s one source of light in sky: Starry Swirl. And there’s another source on the ground: living things, trees and plants and animals, plus the fires we make ourselves. But the only light I’d ever seen in between these two sources was from volcanoes like Mount Snellins, and they were red red like fire, not pale and white.

  It sounds dumb but all I could think of for a moment was that it was a Landing Veekle, one of those sky-boats with lights on them that brought Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions down to Eden from the starship Defiant.

  Well, we were always taught that it would happen sometime. The Three Companions had gone back to Earth for help. Something must have gone wrong, we knew, or the Earth people would have come long ago, but they had a thing with them called a Rayed Yo that could shout across sky, and another thing called a Computer that could remember things for itself. A waking would come when they’d find Defiant, or hear the Rayed Yo, and build a new starship and come for us, across Starry Swirl, through Hole-in-Sky, to take us back to the bright light of that giant giant star.

  And for one sweet scary moment I thought it was finally happening now.

  Then Roger spoke.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s them. That’s woollybucks alright.’

  Woollybucks?

  Well, of course that’s all it was! It was obvious now. That pale light wasn’t really in sky at all, it was up in the mountains, up on Snowy Dark, and it was just woollybucks. Michael’s names, I was glad I hadn’t said anything out loud. Woollybucks were the one thing we were supposed to be looking for, and I’d mistaken them for sky people from bloody Earth!

  I felt a fool, but beyond that I felt sad sad, because for a few seconds I’d really thought that the time had finally come when we would find our way back to that place full of light and people, where they knew the answers to all the hard hard questions we had no idea how to solve, and could see things we can’t see any more than blind people . . .

  But no, of course not. Nothing had changed. All we still had was Eden and each other, five hundred of us in whole world, huddled up with our blackglass spears and our log boats and our bark shelters.

  It was disappointing. It was sad sad. But it was still amazing just to think the mountains up there were so high. I mean, you could see their shadows against the stars from back in Family, and you could see they must be big big, but you couldn’t see the mountains themselves, only the lower slopes where there were still trees and light, and you couldn’t really tell which were the mountains and which were the clouds above them. I’d only ever been to the lower hills before and I’d imagined that Snowy Dark behind them was maybe two three times higher than that ridge of hills that Gerry and I had run up to the top of. But I could tell now that it was ten twelve times that high.

  And right up there – so high up, so far away, in a place so different from where we were now that it was more like looking into a dream than at a real place in the world – a row of woollybucks were moving in single file across the slope, and the soft white lanterns on the tops of their heads were lighting up the snow around them. Just for a moment as the bucks went past, the snow shone white, and then it became grey, and then it went back into blackness again. And though woollybucks are big beasts, two three times the weight of a man, they looked so tiny and alone up there in their tiny little pool of light that they might as well have been little ants. They might as well have been those little flylets that live behind the ears of bats.

  And in the back of my mind a little thought came to me that there were other worlds we could reach that weren’t hidden away in Starry Swirl, or through Hole-in-Sky, but here on ground, in Eden. They were the places where the woollybucks went, the places they came from.

  ‘There were about twelve thirteen bucks that time I was telling you about,’ Old Roger said. ‘They came down here and we did for four of them before the rest ran away back up the hill where we couldn’t follow. You know old Jeffo London, the bloke with one leg that makes the boats? Well, he had two legs back then and he got a bit overexcited and went after the other seven eight bucks. He got lost up there in Dark. We waited as long as we could, but pretty soon we were freezing too, so we went down the path a bit and waited there for him. No one thought he’d make it back but, just before we were about to head back to Family with the bucks, he bloody did! He came stumbling down the path with these kind of white burns on his toes and his leg. It turned to black after a while – a black burn, though they call it gang green for some reason – and that’s why he’s only got one leg. We had to cut off the other one, saw it off with a blackglass knife. Harry’s dick! You should have heard him yell. But the rest of us, well, we were pretty happy to be going back with all that buckmeat. And we were popular when we got back, I can tell you. We were happy. Slippy all round, I reckon. I know I . . .’

  ‘Yeah alright, Roger,’ David interrupted. He didn’t like it when people laughed and joked about having a slip. ‘Alright Roger, that’s interesting I’m sure, but that lot’s not coming down, are they?’

  Old Roger peered up at Snowy Dark and pretended to look. He was at that age when folk start going blind: eighty wombtimes old or thereabouts. He didn’t want us to know how bad it had got in case we decided he shouldn’t be the head huntsman for our group any more – which he really shouldn’t have been – so no way was he going to let on that all he could really see was a blur. ‘No, I suppose,’ he said, ‘it’s . . . um . . . always hard to tell with woollybucks.’

  This is nuts, I thought, letting this old man lead us. Food was getting scarcer in our group and Family in general. Not really scarce, but we all went a bit hungry some wakings. And yet who did we send out to lead a woollybuck hunt for our group? This blind old fool!

  ‘They’re headed away from us,’ David said coldly. ‘So we’d better get down again and try and get the ones that came down earlier.’

  ‘How do you know that lot up there aren’t the same ones that came down?’ asked Met. He was a big tall boy who wasn’t all that bright, and didn’t often speak. ‘Maybe they’ve been down already and now they’re going up again?’

  ‘Look at the tracks, Met,’ said David, poking Met hard in the arm. ‘Look at the bloody tracks. They’re all going downhill, aren’t they? There’s none coming up. Look at the way the toes are pointed, Einstein. So that means a bunch of them are still down there, doesn’t it? And I’d say they’ll stay down there too while Starry Swirl is still out.’

  ‘Couldn’t we wait here until they come back up again?’ asked Met.

  It was a stupid suggestion. All the wraps we had to cover ourselves with were our bitswraps round the middle and a buckskin round the shoulders, and our feet were bare and cold.

  ‘Oh clever,’ said David, and he looked at Met with his smile that wasn’t really a smile, wind whistling in and out of his ugly hole of a face, with that other bit of mouth that went up where a nose should be and always seemed red and sore. ‘Stay up by all means, Met, but I don’t think I fancy a dose of gang green myself.’

  He was always a sarcastic bastard. But that, and hitting people, was about the nearest he got to being friendly.

  ‘Anyone want to freeze up here with Met, go ahead,’ David said. ‘Otherwise let’s get down out of the cold to where the woollybucks actually are, eh?’

  It was cold cold. Even if you put your back against a tree trunk it was cold, because they were only stumpy little trees up there and they didn’t give out heat like a big redlantern or whitelantern does down in the valley. But then again, I thought to myself, Met’s idea wasn’t so dumb. If we could only find a way of staying up the
re for a bit longer we could spear loads loads more bucks, because they always did come up and down these paths down from Dark around dips. So why didn’t we think about ways of keeping warm up there? Why didn’t we bring some more wraps with us, or make wraps that we could tie up round us? Why hadn’t we found a way of putting wraps round our feet? Why had we decided that it was too bloody cold and difficult up by Dark to even try and work out a way round it?

  But that was how it was. We walked down beside the stream again and pretty soon tall trees were all around us again, there were lanterns wherever we looked, white and red and blue, and that little crack in the hills had widened out into Cold Path Valley. It was a small place: in an hour you could walk right across it to the narrow little gap in the hills that led back into Circle Valley where we lived.

  ‘I wonder where the woollybucks go,’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s another forest they go to beyond the hills.’

  ‘Another forest?’ snorted Fox. ‘Don’t be daft, John. There couldn’t be anywhere else as big as Circle Valley.’

  ‘That’s wrong! When Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions first saw Eden, they saw lights all over . . .’

  ‘Beyond the hills the Shadow People live,’ Lucy Lu interrupted me in a loud slow dreamy voice.

  She was a woman with a round pale face and watery eyes who used to go round the other groups in Family and offer to talk to the shadows of their dead in exchange for bits of blackglass and old skins and scraps of food.

  ‘That’s crap,’ said Tina. ‘There’s no such thing as Shadow People.’

  I agreed with her. I’d got no time for things that people saw out of the corner of their eye, or in dreams. Harry’s dick, there were enough real things to look at face on! There were enough things you could put your hands on and hold.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw them like I do,’ said Lucy Lu in that dreamy voice, like she was only half in our world and half in a shadow world which only she could see.

  ‘Some people reckon sky is a huge flat stone,’ Gerry broke in suddenly, ‘and Starry Swirl is rocklanterns growing underneath it, like you get in caves. This big flat stone, it sits up there with its edges on the top of Snowy Dark. Dark is really there to hold it up.’

  ‘That is really crap,’ said Tina with her throaty laugh. ‘Boy, that really is. And no one else even says it either apart from you, Gerry. You made it up just now. Trying to be different like your hero John.’

  ‘No I didn’t!’ Gerry laughed.

  He was happy to have headed off an argument between me and Lucy Lu and Fox.

  ‘Of course you did,’ Tina told him. ‘It’s the most half-arsed thing I ever heard.’

  ‘Yes, and make sure you don’t say that sort of thing in front of Oldest either,’ said Old Roger. ‘They wouldn’t like it. How could Tommy and Gela have come down from Starry Swirl with the Three Companions if it was just rocklanterns on a stone?’

  ‘So Gerry can’t have his own ideas?’ I said. ‘But Oldest can make up any fairy story they like and then force us all to accept that it’s true?’

  ‘You watch it, John,’ said David. ‘You bloody watch what you say.’

  ‘Newhairs!’ complained Old Roger. ‘When I was young we showed respect to our Oldest. We’d never say the True Story was made-up.’

  I didn’t really think it was made up. I didn’t doubt that Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions had come down from sky. We had the Mementoes after all, we had the Earth Models, we had old writing and pictures scratched on trees. We had all kinds of reasons for believing it was true. I just didn’t like the way that some people were allowed to take that old story and keep it for themselves and make it say what they wanted it to say.

  Pretty soon Old Roger divided us up into pairs and had us spread out across Cold Path Valley, looking for woollybucks. I was in a pair with Gerry. We were sent to the narrow gap called Neck, which went through into Circle Valley proper.

  ‘Right up to Neck, mind,’ Old Roger said, ‘but not beyond. That way you should spot any bucks that try and run that way from the rest of us.’

  We walked over to Neck, and squatted down with our spears to wait for bucks. There was a place above us that I’d visited once twice on the spur of hill that formed the right hand side of Neck as you looked back towards Family, and I pointed it out to Gerry.

  ‘There are five six good dry caves up there,’ I told him, ‘with a bit of open ground in front of them so you could sit there and look out over forest. And a bit below them there’s a pool, ten twelve foot across, warm warm from spiketree roots.’

  Gerry glanced up where I was pointing and shrugged.

  ‘It would be a good place for Family to live,’ I told him. ‘Much better than where we live now. It’s got everything you need: a pool, caves. It’s handy for woollybucks. Blackglass too, I dare say, if you looked hard enough.’

  Gerry laughed.

  ‘You say weird weird things sometimes, John. What do you mean a good place for Family? Family is a place!’

  ‘It’s a place, and it’s a bunch of people,’ I said. ‘The people could move, couldn’t they? Or some of them. The people and the place don’t have to be the same thing. Family could move and this would be just the place to move to.’

  ‘But we’ve got to stay by Circle!’ Gerry protested. ‘Otherwise Earth won’t be able to find us when they come back for us! Come on, John, you . . .’

  Then he broke off, and laughed like he’d realized I was joking, but I’d fooled him just for a moment.

  I wasn’t sure myself if it was a joke or not.

  ‘Let’s go out into the big forest,’ I said.

  Gerry shrugged. He’d do whatever I wanted. He was one of those that need other people to tell him what to do and what to be.

  ‘We were supposed to stay in Cold Path Valley,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Yes, but we’ll just go a little way.’

  It was pretty soon after we went through Neck and into Circle Valley forest that we met the leopard.

  We were in one of those openings you get in whitelantern forest, where an old group of trees has died and crumbled and no new ones have come up yet from Underworld. All around us were whitelanterns and spiketrees with flowers shining white and blue, with flutterbyes feeding on the lanterns, and starflowers growing beneath the trees. But right here, in this open space, there were only little tiny starflowers growing close to the ground, and Starry Swirl was plain to see high above us, with no branches and lanterns in the way.

  I was just kneeling down to get a drink from a stream when I saw it.

  ‘Look Gerry, there!’ I whispered, scrambling back up to my feet.

  ‘What?’

  A group of starflowers among the trees shone out for a moment and then faded again. And then the same thing happened among another lot of trees over to the left of the first lot, flowers appearing and fading. And then the same again, a bit further on.

  ‘Gela’s tits!’ Gerry says. ‘Quick! Get up a tree!’

  I didn’t move. Another lot of flowers appeared and disappeared. Meanwhile Starry Swirl shone down and flutterbyes fluttered and sparkled, and the trees went hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, and forest went hmmmmmmm, like always.

  More flowers lit up and disappeared, and this time we could see the dark shadow of the leopard itself, almost invisible behind those shiny, shimmery starflowers on its skin that slide back towards its tail as it goes forward, so they seem to stay in one place. It was circling round us, like leopards do, circling round and round: pure silent darkness, slipping behind the bright flowers that rippled across its skin.

  ‘We could make it to that whitelantern just there,’ Gerry whispered. ‘It couldn’t run that fast.’

  Both of us were watching that dark shadow moving through the trees, each of us slowly turning round and round so as to always be facing it. (We must have looked weird, standing there side by side and turning round together.) I glanced quickly at the tree Gerry was talking about and I saw he was r
ight. We could easily make it, just so long as we didn’t trip up on something while we ran. Of course the leopard would stop circling as soon as it saw us make a move. It would stop circling and attack, but if we chose our moment right we could be over at the tree and pulling ourselves up into the safety of its branches before it reached us. And then all we’d have to do is yell and wait and pretty soon Old Roger and David and Fox and all the rest would arrive hollering with their spears and bows and arrows, and the leopard would disappear back into forest. Grownups would tell us off for not staying in Cold Path Valley but we’d have a good story to tell, so they wouldn’t really mind, specially if we spiced it up a little bit: the leopard’s jaws snapping at our feet as we swung up into the branches, its cold eyes peering up at us . . . all that stuff that people always put in to make things seem more exciting than they really were.

  But then again, I thought, a story like that might be fine and good but it wouldn’t reflect on us specially, would it? People would enjoy the story for a waking or two but it wouldn’t make them think better of Gerry and me. We’d only have done what anyone would have done: spot a leopard, look for a tree, run.

  ‘You run if you want,’ I whispered – both of us were still slowly turning and turning round on the spot so as to be facing that dark dark creature circling round us – ‘you run.’

  ‘What? You . . .’

  But Gerry was too scared to stand and argue and so he ran, belting as fast as he could go across the clear space to the tree.

  Well, I saw the leopard stop. I saw it turn. I saw its eyes flicker as it steadied itself to sprint towards him.

  ‘Here,’ I yelled. ‘Over here!’

  It turned its head back to look at me. Gerry scrambled into the lower branches of the tree and began to climb up to the top. The leopard crept slowly forwards in my direction and then stopped and watched me. Now that the beast was still, the spots down its sides stopped moving backwards and just flickered where they were like real starflowers do. Beneath them its skin was black black. Not black like black hair, not black like the feathers on a starbird, not black like a charred bit of wood. None of those are really black. But a leopard’s skin has no fur or hair or feathers or scales. It doesn’t catch the light. It doesn’t have contours. It doesn’t have different shades in it. It’s black black like sky behind Starry Swirl. It’s black black like a hole that goes right through to the bottom of everything, like Hole-in-Sky.