Dark Eden

by Chris Beckett

  For a moment, we felt it among us. We heard a girl scream, and then, a few yards off, we heard her give a choking sound and fall silent, and we knew that the leopard had dragged her out of the line and had done for her in dark there as it had done for Whitehorse.

  No one was sure who it was. Everyone was calling out for sisters and friends.

  ‘Tina, are you okay?’ went Dix, feeling for me with his hands.

  ‘Jane,’ I called out for my sister. ‘Jane, are you there?’

  ‘Lucy? Clare? Candy?’ other voices were calling, and other voices answering in the darkness, until someone called ‘Suzie!’ and no answer came from Suzie Fishcreek, that sharp clever girl, and we knew that if we could have seen anything at all out there it would have been her blood that would have been red on the snow, hers and the baby’s still inside her, and her lolling head hanging loose from her neck.

  Then John’s voice came bellowing out over all the crying and wailing:

  ‘Group together, now! Group together with your spears pointing out! Do you want the thing to get us all one by one? Together in a group with your spears out! Now! Do it! Quick!’

  32

  Jeff Redlantern

  Def ran and ran and I couldn’t hold him back. All I could do was hang on tightly tightly to his fur, lying down flat against his body. I knew that if I fell off in the dark and the snow, that would have been that, that would have been the end of me. The world would still have had lots of other eyes to see through, but not mine.

  Def ran on and on down that long dark snowy valley. His headlantern was pulsing and bright bright with fear, and he kept giving out a strange cry I’d never heard him make before: Ayeeee! Ayeeee! I heard the echoes come back from the rocks and mountains. Big snowflakes crowded towards me and rushed past. I got glimpses of huge rocks and cliffs and giant greenish hunks of ice jutting out from under the snow.

  When we’d been running for some time flat out, he slowed down a little bit. I could see that the snowy ground ahead of us was breaking up and tipping down, and there were more and more of those big twisted hunks of ice sticking up, and icy cracks opening up in the snow. It was a big snowslug we’d been on all this time, I realized. Up to now it had been covered up by packed-down snow, but here the ice was cracking and bending and sticking out through the snow, like splintered bones sticking out through a broken leg.

  Ayeeee! Ayeeee! went Def. He paused for a moment and then called out again: Ayeee! Ayeee! Suddenly he swerved to the left, and started climbing the rocky slopes above the snowslug, up up, until he came to the top of a ridge, and we could look down at the other side.

  There was light below us! There were thousands of lights, white and greeny-yellow. There was a little round valley full of shining trees, surrounded by Snowy Dark.

  Ayeee! Ayeee!, went Def.

  I put my hand on the soft lantern on his head and tried to make him turn round again so we could go back to tell the others. He had always let me guide him that way before. It was him that found the paths, but when we came to a choice of paths, he would pause and lift his head and snuffle and sniff at the air, and wave his feelers, and then I chose for him, by putting my hand on his lantern and turning his head in the direction I wanted him to go. Woollybucks could stay up on Snowy Dark for wakings and wakings, I figured, but we needed to get down the other side. So I made sure, as best I could, that we kept heading across Peckham Hills, and not along them.

  But now, on the top of the ridge, Def refused to do what I asked of him. I could turn his head all I liked but he wasn’t going to go back. I guess the leopard was still not far enough behind.

  He wasn’t going to stay still either. Ayeeee! he cried out again, and started straight down towards the lights of the valley. I pulled back on his headlantern to try and get him to at least stop still, but he took no notice at all. There was nothing I could do to make him change his mind, nothing I could do at all really, right then, except just to remind myself to keep my eyes open and to notice the world that I was in.

  ‘We are here,’ I whispered to myself, ‘we are really here.’

  I might never see the others again, I thought. I might die on my own, and no one would ever know what I’d seen. But that didn’t change the fact that right now I was seeing it. I was alive and seeing it, and it was really there.

  We came down into a strange forest, where the trees were as tall as that tree up in the snow with the bat and the slinker, and had trunks that went way way up before they even put out a single branch. It made me feel small small as we passed underneath them, even sitting up there on Def’s back, when their branches were so far above us. But their lanternflowers were as bright as any whitelantern back in Circle Valley, even if they were high over our heads, and the tree trunks were warm and made that same familiar sound that we’d all heard around us every waking and sleeping all our lives until we first went up onto Snowy Dark. Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, they went. And whole forest went hmmmmmmmmmm.

  A tree fox came running down one of the trunks, and peeked at us around the side of it with its flat blank eyes, sniffling with its long bendy snout. A bright coloured bird flew past, with its hands held out in front of it. And a monkey with six long arms gazed down at me from a high high branch, bigger than the monkeys we had in Circle Valley, and with loose flaps of skin hanging down between its arms.

  Everything seemed clear clear in my mind and I stared and stared, because the only thing I could do just then was to see and see and see, so I might as well do that as well as I possibly could. I felt myself grow calmer, and I could feel Def getting calmer too. His hearts weren’t beating so fast and his lantern had stopped pulsing and was settling into a steady glow. I pulled gently back on it to see if he would stop, and he stopped at once, without any fuss or trouble. I got off him, and led him to a stream, and rested my back against a tree while he gathered wavyweed into his mouth feelers, using his front legs as arms.

  Presently he lay down on the ground beside me and slept.

  ‘In a way I was the leader, not John,’ I said to myself, stroking Def’s woolly back and thinking about how it had been me that made the horses and chose the paths.

  ‘I was the real leader,’ I said. It made me laugh.

  Of course I wasn’t a leader in the way John was. I couldn’t be, and I wouldn’t want to be either, not at all, not even one little bit. My life was different different from John’s because I was a clawfoot, and no one expected me to become a man. Other boys ran and fought and kicked balls (even batfaces, however much they got teased), but if you were a clawfoot they left you out of all that. Other boys became men by putting on the masks of men, and shutting out of their heads all the things that didn’t fit with their masks, but if you were a clawfoot no one expected you to wear that mask, or to shut those things out of your head. That was why I saw things that other people didn’t see.

  ‘That’s why it was me that worked out how to make horses,’ I said to myself sleepily, running my hands through Def’s fur. ‘Because there was something about animals I saw but no one else did.’

  What I’d seen was that it didn’t make any difference whether you were an Earth animal or a human being or an Eden animal. You still had the same thing inside you looking out of your eyes, the same awakeness. It was knowing that about woollybucks that kept me going when I was teaching them to be horses. It was knowing that they weren’t really so different from us. Most boys couldn’t have had that thought because they were too busy being tough hunters.

  I felt peaceful peaceful, and I felt warm and safe between Def’s body and the tree trunk.

  Not that I’d ever worried in the way most people did, about whether I lived or died. I knew quite well that, even when someone died, the secret awakeness that had been looking out of their eyes would always still be there.

  Pretty soon I was fast asleep too.

  33

  Gerry Redlantern

  I’d always loved my cousin John and I’d always trusted him to know what to do, ev
en if I couldn’t always understand his reasons for thinking what he did. But this was where he’d led us: my brother Jeff lost all on his own out in the snow, and the rest of us bunched up in a circle, in a place so dark that it was the same as being completely blind, waiting for that leopard to strike and kill again.

  It was dark dark dark. But out in that darkness that made us blind, near near, with nothing between us and it, was an animal that wasn’t blind at all, and could run silently over the surface of the snow. We all had our spears pointing outwards and were waving them from side to side to try and stop it sneaking in between. But spears are only bits of wood, and most of ours didn’t even have proper blackglass heads. That huge white leopard could knock them aside like twigs.

  ‘Remember it’s never met humans before,’ John called out. ‘It doesn’t know what we are. It can’t possibly know that we can’t see it. Let’s try and scare it. Shout! Scream! Yell as loud as you can!’

  Well, we didn’t want to do that at all. If you can’t see, you certainly don’t want to stop being able to hear as well. What we wanted was perfect perfect silence, so we could listen, listen, listen.

  But John started yelling, and then Tina. So I joined in, and then more and more people began screaming and yelling and shouting. And of course that made the babies yell too, and the echoes from all of us came back from the rocks on both sides of us, so it soon felt like the biggest thing in whole world was that screaming and screaming and screaming all around us. And the weird thing was that once we’d started, we didn’t want to stop. The screaming said how we felt. The screaming filled up the world with our feelings. And even though those feelings might be ones of fear and misery, they were so big big that they pushed away the ice and darkness, and made them seem far away.

  But even all that screaming couldn’t completely blot out our own thoughts. We all knew the leopard was only the beginning of our troubles. Even if we drove it away, what was going to happen next? How could we ever get ourselves out of this when we had no light to guide us and no idea where we were or where we were trying to get to?

  ‘What are we going to do?’ yelled some people in middle of our screaming. ‘What are we bloody going to do?’

  And some just cried, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’

  But no one’s mum was going to come, were they? Nobody’s mum could put this right.

  ‘Alright!’ yelled John. ‘It’s gone! It’s gone! Shut up now and listen!’

  So the crying and yelling stopped, but slowly slowly, because now we’d started we were just as afraid to face the silence again as we had been afraid in the first place to cover the silence up. We’d found a sort of comfort in all that noise.

  ‘How do we know it’s gone?’ came Clare’s voice in the darkness, when we’d finally quietened down.

  ‘Because it would have attacked by now if it was still here,’ John said. ‘We’ve scared it off. We’ve showed it we’re not like bucks, we’re not like anything it knows.’

  ‘So what will we do now?’

  ‘Where are the snow-boats?’ John asked. ‘Who’s got the fire? I’ve got strings dipped in buckgrease we can light up to show us the way. We can follow Def’s tracks over the snow.’

  So people lowered their spears and began groping around in Dark. The ones pulling snow-boats had let go of them when the leopard struck, and no one knew where they were. Someone ran into someone else’s spear and cursed. Someone knocked someone else over. But we found a bark snow-boat with a pile of skins on it, and another one with smoked meat and cakes, and then . . . and then we heard Gela Brooklyn give a sort of low wail.

  ‘It’s turned over, John. Must have been when the leopard came at us. It’s turned over and the fire stone’s gone. We haven’t got any fire.’

  It was so bad now that no one said anything, not even Mehmet. There was a long silence. And when John finally spoke you could hear the fear in his voice, however hard he tried not to let it show.

  ‘Okay . . . Well . . . we’ll . . . we’ll have to . . . to feel our way forward, then. I’ll go in front and feel for Def’s tracks. The snow’s stopped falling, hasn’t it, so at least the tracks won’t fill in. It’ll be slow, but we’ll manage.’

  Well, there wasn’t any other choice, was there? We left the snow-boats behind and John went in front, feeling with his wrapped fingers for the dents in the snow where Def’s six feet had trod. He had to do it slowly slowly – Def’s wide feet didn’t make big holes like a human’s feet – and we had to hope that it wouldn’t start snowing anytime soon and fill them in. Slowly slowly we moved forward in a line, tied together by ropes, but most of the time holding hands with each other as well to make sure. Shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait. We were cold cold. You couldn’t get warmed up going so slowly. We knew it was only matter of time before we started getting the black burn and then the gang green like old Jeffo London did. We knew that most probably in another waking’s time we’d all be lying out here as dead as poor Suzie Fishcreek, meat for leopards just like she’d been. Tom’s dick, we didn’t even know that Def’s tracks were leading us anywhere we’d want to go. He might have taken Jeff right up to the top of one of the mountains, for all we knew. Woollybucks weren’t like people, were they? They were meant to live in Dark.

  Shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait.

  From near the back of the line Gela Brooklyn started to sing, an old song that they say was brought from Earth by Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions.

  ‘Row, row, row the boat, gently down the stream,’ she sang in her deep voice, ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream . . .’

  And gradually everyone joined in, not loudly, not like we were singing round a fire, but like we were all muttering the song to ourselves inside our own heads.

  ‘Row, row, row the boat’ – shuffle forward, stop – ‘gently down the stream’ – shuffle forward, stop – ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily’ – shuffle forward, stop – ‘life is but a dream.’

  That went on for one two three hours. One time someone in middle – it was Dave Fishcreek – slipped sideways into some sort of hole or crack in the ice, and we would have lost him if he hadn’t been tied on with ropes to the people in front and behind him. But they just hauled him back out, and muttered to the people following them to go a bit to the left, and shuffled forward again, taking up the song like nothing much had happened.

  Another time, we heard the cry of a snow leopard, and it sounded far off – though how can you tell with snow leopards how near or far they are, or which direction? – but we just lifted up our spears a bit, and raised up our voices a bit more and kept on singing.

  ‘Row, row, row the boat . . .’ –shuffle forward, stop . . .

  And then, some time later, John suddenly yelled out from the front.

  ‘Stop! Don’t come forward! Don’t push!’

  So we all stopped and the song died out.

  ‘I think there’s an ice crack across our path,’ John called back. ‘I think I nearly fell down it. Let me just test.’

  We waited. Some of us heard a faint splash.

  ‘Yes,’ called John, and, no matter how he tried to cover it up, his voice was all wobbly and scared. ‘It’s a . . . It’s quite a big crack. I just made a ball of snow and chucked it down. It’s a big crack there, with a stream down at the bottom of it. Five yards down, maybe. We can’t cross over it.’

  Everyone waited.

  ‘I think,’ John said, ‘I think I must have taken a wrong turn a bit back there. I must have mistaken some other dent in the snow for Def’s tracks. I think we need to go back a bit and . . . I’ll try and find the place where I went wrong.’

  Go back over snow that twenty people had trampled over and find where the shallow footprints of a woollybuck had branched off? In darkness? Who was he kidding?

  But we all stood there, waiting.

  ‘U
nless someone has a better idea?’ John said.

  Lie down on the snow and sleep, I thought. Sink down into a dream and never wake up.

  I knew if I lay down I’d soon be quite numb, and then I wouldn’t feel cold any more and I could dream I was back with Jeff and Sue all my other brothers and sisters and friends back in Family, cuddled by a warm fire.

  ‘No suggestions?’ John tried again. Normally he’d ask a question like that to shut up any complainers, but this time you could hear he was hoping that someone would say yes.

  But no one said anything. Not Tina. Not Mehmet. Not anyone.

  It was cold cold.

  ‘I’ll . . . I’ll walk back to the other end of the line,’ John said. ‘The rest of you just turn round, and then you can follow me the other way . . .’

  No one said anything. No one moved. John walked down the line. Poor John, I thought. He’s failed us all and he knows it. I touched his arm as he went past. I felt disappointed in him – bitter bitter disappointment – but I felt sad sad for him too. He couldn’t just sink down into a dream and fade away. Not when it was him that had brought us to this. He’d have to struggle and struggle right up to the end.

  And anyway he wasn’t like the rest of us: he had no one back in Family he could cuddle up with in his dreams. He never had any choice but to keep going.

  ‘Okay,’ he called when he’d reached the far end. ‘Now this is going to be a lot slower because I’m going to try to . . .’

  He broke off. There was a cry from above and to our left.