Eeeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!
They all jumped. Caroline and Tom and Candy and Secret Ree and the three young London blokes, they all jumped together. It was the little buckling starting off on one again, behind us up on the hill. They were all fascinated, we could see, but they didn’t want to show it. The four of us couldn’t help smiling at each other.
‘This is that baby buck we’ve heard about, is it?’ Caroline asked stiffly.
One of our lot must have met someone from Family out in forest and told them about it.
‘You caught it alive, apparently. You’re keeping it in a cave behind a fence,’ Caroline said.
She wanted to look like she didn’t care but she couldn’t completely contain her curiosity.
‘Why?’ she asked, with a cold puzzled smile.
Well, she’d let her mask slip a little here, and I let mine slip too, because I felt angry angry with her for even having to ask the question.
‘Gela’s heart, Caroline! What’s the point of going on and on every Any Virsry about remembering the Earth Things if we don’t try and learn anything from them? We’re making a horse, like they did back on Earth. I should have thought that would be obvious obvious.’
She gave a contemptuous snort.
‘A horse! Gela’s sake, John, the animals on Earth weren’t like ours! Everyone knows that. They were more like people. Their eyes were . . .’
‘Well, we’ll see, won’t we? We thought it was worth a try. But anyway, you were saying you wanted us not to take any more newhairs?’
‘John, we can’t agree to that!’ Tina broke in.
I touched her again to show I knew what I was doing.
‘I’ll tell you what, Caroline,’ I said, ‘let’s say that for next five wakings, just five wakings, any newhairs that want to come over to us can come. That way you’ll get rid of the ones that will just make trouble for you if they stay. After that, okay, no more. We’ll send them back.’
I purposely didn’t look at Tina.
Caroline nodded.
‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘If you’re going to be doing all the hunting this side of Lava Blob, then we’ll miss out on bucks. You’ll have to give us some.’
‘You’ve got whole of the rest of forest!’ Gela objected. ‘We’ll miss out on bucks there.’
But I had my own idea.
‘Okay, Caroline, but there are things we need too. Let’s say we give you one skinned buck every period — we do have to keep the skins for ourselves — and you’ll have to give us something in exchange. Two fists of blackglass, or two buckskins.’
‘Oh that’s far too much!’ Caroline said.
But it was the deal we got in the end. One skinned buck to be handed over at Lava Blob each period, and skins or glass in exchange.
‘That’s until we leave you,’ I told her, ‘until we go over Snowy Dark and find our own forest.’
‘Go over Snowy Dark and freeze to death, you mean,’ Caroline said, with a grim chuckle.
Then she looked sharply at Gela, who was after all her own Brooklyn groupmate.
‘I’m surprised at you, though, Gela. I always thought you were a sensible girl. In fact, I had you down for Brooklyn group leader in twenty thirty wombs’ time. Are you and your sister and your brother really going to waste your lives up on Dark?’
Gela had always seemed like a grownup, even when she was little, but now she hung her head like a little kid.
‘I think John is right about needing to find more space,’ she mumbled quietly quietly, so we could barely hear what she said.
Caroline shrugged.
‘Well, suit yourself, but I’m disappointed in you, and your mum will never get over it.’
All this while Secret Ree had been writing down everything we agreed, scratching it on a piece of bark with a leopard’s tooth, her tongue sticking out with concentration.
THEY STICK TO LAWS
THEY NO A.V. OR STRORN
NOT PAST BLOB
5 WAKES THEN NO MORE JOIN
1 SKND BUCK EACH PRD
WE 2 GLSS OR 2 SKNS
‘You scratch your name on that, John,’ Caroline said, ‘to show you agree.’
I didn’t look at Tina. I knew she wasn’t going to like me agreeing to things like this without talking to her and to everyone else first, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to make little angry signs at me that Caroline’s lot would be bound to notice. She might not like me taking charge but this was just how it was going to have to be. And that was why I didn’t go down to meet her and Jeff and Gerry when they first came over. I wanted to be quite clear that they were joining me. And it was the same for all the rest over here at Neck. None of the others would be here if it wasn’t for me.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but Secret Ree’ll have to write another bark out for us with your name on it.’
‘Oh honestly, John!’ Caroline said.
But all the same she didn’t refuse. I’d won that one easily and I thought to myself, now was the moment to act like we were the big ones.
‘Why don’t you come up and see our buckling?’ I said. ‘We can give you some meat and fruit to eat before you walk back. You’d be welcome. Gela, could you run up and get the fire going?’
And that was the agreement made between us and Family. I could imagine the story already: John and Caroline Agree.
27
Tina Spiketree
‘That’ll never last,’ I told John. ‘She won’t be able to control David and his lot that long. I’m not sure she even means to keep the deal herself.’
‘Of course it won’t last,’ he said shortly, ‘but it’ll hold for a bit, and that’ll give us some time.’
He looked tired. He looked tired tired.
‘And we need time,’ he said. ‘We need all the time we can get, if we’re going to get ourselves ready for Snowy Dark.’
I took his hand, sort of expecting that he’d shake me off again, but funnily enough he didn’t. He squeezed my hand back and later on, when we went to lie down on our skins under the cavelanterns, we reached out to one another and had a little slide together, not like we’d done before, all panting and sweating and grabbing, not like newhairs normally do at all, but slow and quiet like you sometimes see grownups doing in the starflowers, grownups who’ve known each other and been friends for a long time, having a little slip and a little chat and a little cuddle before going back to their groups again.
John was right about that agreement. We stuck to our side of it — we even sent a few kids back that tried to come over to us after those first five wakings — and it did give us some time. In fact it lasted ten periods or so, more than a whole wombtime, and in that time we got two more little bucklings, and the first one grew big, and we made all three of them into horses that would let us put things on their backs, and would come when we called them and would nuzzle up against us with their cool dry feelers when they wanted us to feed them.
And we got more skins, and we made wraps for all of us (there were twenty-one of us now, including five more girls who came over in those five wakings after the agreement: Martha and Lucy London, Julie, Angie and Candy Blueside). And some of the girls got pregnant, and Janny and Clare had babies, the first born outside Family. And John went up many times to Snowy Dark, usually with Gerry, sometimes with me, sometimes with others, and stayed up there often for a whole waking and a whole sleeping above the line of the ice and snow, figuring out how to keep alive up there, how to make the footwraps better, how to use spears point down in the snow to stop from slipping over, and how to tie people together with ropes so if one began to slip the others could hold them back. In fact he’d often hardly got down to where there were warm trees and bright lanternflowers and people to talk to, before he started busying about again, looking for dry wraps and rope and spears to take up once more to icy Dark.