36
John Redlantern
I didn’t like Tall Tree Valley one bit. I knew that when we first followed Jeff down from Snowy Dark. I knew it when me and Tina and Harry and Dix sat up trying to get a fire going. I knew it when I lay down to sleep with Tina. And I still knew it when I woke up again on my own.
There was a smell of roasting buckmeat, and I could hear people already awake, but first thing I did was walk up the slope a bit, up near the bottom of the snow, so I could see out over the valley.
‘No,’ I said out loud as I looked down at this little bit of forest with Dark high high above it on every side, ‘there is no chance that I’m going to settle for this place.’
Tall Tree Valley wasn’t anything like a good enough trade for Bella’s death, and for bringing killing into the world. It might make us feel tiny tiny like ants under those big trees, but it was small small itself. You could walk from one side to the other in one two hours. And how many people could a place that size support, when there was hardly enough meat in whole of Circle Valley to feed Family? There might be lots of bucks here now — I could see five six of them just standing where I was — but there’d been lots back in Circle Valley too, hadn’t there, before Family did for most of them.
And anyway, who wanted to stay in a place where you had to cover up your skin just to keep warm?
I walked back down towards the others. They were already busy. Tina and Gela had been giving people jobs to do. Someone had done for a little buck and roasted two of its legs, and Jane Spiketree was cutting off strips of greeny meat with a leopard tooth knife, and tossing them onto a bark plate that Harry was holding out for her. Mike Brooklyn and Candy Blueside and Gerry were dragging branches over for a simple fence. Dave and Johnny Fishcreek, with those awful shadowy faces people have when someone they love has just died, were slowly slowly spreading out a pile of fading starflowers to dry, with Angie and Julie helping them. Jeff was sitting in front of Def, offering it handfuls of wavyweed from a heap he’d gathered from a pool. The woollybuck prodded and stroked each handful with its feelers before it gulped the stringy stuff down.
Sound carried a long way in the empty space under the trees, and I could hear them all talking when I was still ten twenty yards away.
‘There’s bucks everywhere in this place, aren’t there?’ said Janny. ‘Getting meat is going to be easy easy from now on.’
‘We’ll just wear a few more wraps than we used to and it’ll be fine,’ said Tina’s sister Jane.
‘Yeah,’ said Gela, ‘and we should be able to make shelters a bit stronger than usual to keep out the cold.’
‘Plenty of starflowers everywhere, I must say,’ said Julie Blueside.
‘But fruits are too high to reach, though, aren’t they?’ worried Lucy London, looking up at the trees with her bulging eyes.
‘Yeah,’ said Tina in a bright bright voice that didn’t sound like her normal way of speaking at all, ‘but we can use ropes, or make nets, can’t we? We’ll have plenty of time for jobs like that, when meat is so easy to get.’
That was the story they were telling each other: Tall Tree Valley was going to be fine fine. And if one of them started to tell another story, then someone else would straightaway put them right.
‘Whole time we’ve been here I’ve not heard one leopard,’ Janny said. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’
‘We’re going to miss Family,’ sighed Lucy London. ‘I wish we weren’t so far from them.’
‘But we’ve got each other, haven’t we?’ Jane said quickly. ‘We’ve got each other. And we’re nearly grownups after all, aren’t we?’
‘Do you reckon those snow leopards come down here?’ asked Lucy Batwing. ‘I couldn’t cope with them again.’
‘I don’t see why,’ Gela told her, in the same bright bright voice that Tina had used. ‘They didn’t ever come down into Circle Valley, did they? Not even as far down as the hills. If they did, we would have known about them before, wouldn’t we? And like Janny said, we haven’t even heard an ordinary forest leopard here, and you’d think we would have done by now, if there were any, wouldn’t you?’
‘I like it here,’ Tina said firmly. ‘I like these tall tall trees.’
‘Yeah. And did you see those flying monkeys?’ asked Mike, coming over from his work on the fence to get some meat.
‘I’m scared about having my baby here,’ said Julie Blueside, ‘with no oldmums near to help.’
‘We’ve got Clare and Janny,’ Gela said in that bright bright voice. She had a baby inside her too, and so she must have been worried about the same thing. ‘They might not be oldmums, but they’ve been through it, haven’t they? They’ll know what to do.’
‘But they had help from their mums over by Lava Blob, didn’t they?’
‘Try this buckmeat, Mike,’ Jane said loudly, ‘it’s good good.’
‘Harry loves it! Harry loves it! It’s the best meat ever.’
Of course they could all see just as well as I could that Tall Tree Valley was small and cold and lonely, but they didn’t want to let thoughts get into their heads about setting out again for somewhere else, not after what had happened up in Dark. So they were trying to squash each other’s doubts and fears, and talk themselves into feeling at home. But it was thin thin, this hopeful talk of theirs. It was thin thin thin. Just underneath the surface of it was the memory of that horrible cold dark place where Suzie Fishcreek died, and where they’d all almost died, groping their way like blind oldies through darkness and ice. Harry’s dick, they’d have talked themselves into any damn thing rather than face that again.
I walked up to the fire.
‘Hey there, John,’ said Tina and some of the others, but Mehmet busied himself with sharpening the tip of his spear and didn’t look up.
‘Yeah, we can definitely make something of this place,’ he said, carrying on with the talk they’d been having as if I hadn’t arrived. ‘We were lucky lucky to stumble on it.’
I fetched some starflowers and buckmeat for my breakfast, and sat myself on a stone next to Janny, whose baby Flower was sucking at her breast, almost hidden away inside the buckskin bodywrap that she’d made specially with an opening at the front. When I’d swallowed down the flowers and the meat I stood up.
‘We need to find out more about this valley,’ I said. ‘We need to see if there are ways out of it, and what lives here, and we need to check out the possibilities and the dangers before we dig in too deep in this one spot. I know we can’t spare many people from the jobs we’ve got on here. But I’m going to walk once round the edge of this place.’
I saw Tina look at me, wondering if I was going to ask her to go with me, and hoping hoping I wouldn’t. I saw Gerry looking at me too, part of him wanting me to ask him to come, but a bigger part hoping I wouldn’t take him away from the rest of them.
But I’d already made up my mind to take Jeff.
Me and Jeff took a spear, and a bow and some arrows, and we went up the slope a bit so we could get a view and then made our way round the valley at that level, me walking, him riding beside me on his buck. It felt weird being just with Jeff. He’d always come as a pair with Gerry. And it felt awkward because of course he knew quite well that I’d chosen to go with him alone for a reason.
‘There must be an exit from this valley,’ I said after a bit. ‘Or all this water from the snow would have turned it into a giant pool.’
I looked out over Tall Tree forest, with its white and yellow lanterns shining at the bottom of that steep dark bowl. Clouds of fug were rising up from middle of it, lit up by the lanternlight. Here and there the odd bird or bat was flying above the trees.