We started down the mountain. In a couple of hours we were walking by a stream with trees humming all around us, and their lanterns lighting our way, white, blue, pink, yellow. Herds of stonebucks lifted up their heads from the shining starflowers and watched us pass. They didn’t even try to run away.
39
Tina Spiketree
So now we’d crossed Snowy Dark and found Wide Forest, the wide wide space that John had always insisted would be there. And in some ways life was easy easy, easier than it had ever been back in Circle Valley. There was so much fruit and so many birds and bucks — stonebucks and woollybucks and a new kind of buck we called a widebuck, big like a woollybuck, but with smooth smooth skin — that we could get together the food for a waking in just an hour or two. You didn’t need to have everyone working working all waking long just to get enough to eat, like we used to have to do back in Family. John said we should start School again when our children were a bit bigger, and teach everyone to write and do sums. He said we should use all that extra time to learn things and find out new things, like they did on Earth.
We found a place to stop, a quarter waking’s walk from bottom of Dark. It was next to a long warm shining pool that bent round like a knee or a letter L, so we called it L-pool. It was full of fish and oysters and ducks. Trees grew round the edge of it and out into it too, waist-deep, and their big bright lanterns hung down over the water, white and green and yellow, giving out a thick sweet scent. The water gave us protection from leopards on two sides, and we quickly made a short fence out of branches near where the two sides of the L joined, so as to make ourselves a little safe triangle. Inside this fence we built a half-circle of shelters, and two big fire holes in middle, deep deep so as to be sure that there’d always be red embers glowing there.
‘Right,’ said John, as we sat round the fire inside our newly finished triangle fence. ‘We’re safe from leopards now, so let’s start building a proper fence.’
He wanted to enclose a big big space, big as whole of Family area back in Circle Valley, so that it would give us enough room to grow as big as Family itself, and he wanted us to help him build a huge L-shaped fence so as to make a square with the two whole sides of L-pool.
‘But why do we need that, John,’ Gela asked him, in her sensible way, ‘when there are only fourteen of us plus a couple of babies?’
‘This is a new family,’ John said. ‘This is a beginning again, free of all the bad things that happened in Old Family. Clean and fresh and new. Without Oldest. Without Circle. Without Council. Without David Redlantern and his crew. Without Any Virsries where only Council can speak.’
He looked round at us.
‘A new family without all those things, yes, but still one that will grow as big and strong as Family itself. Bigger, even. Stronger.’
Harry jumped up and danced a silly jig. He could tell that John wanted us to be excited about his idea and he was trying in his own way to get us going.
‘Harry’s happy! Harry’s happy!’
I suppose it looked cute when he was a little boy, before I was born, and I guess back then everyone laughed and encouraged him, but it didn’t look cute now, not when he was older than anyone else there. No one joined in and no one laughed.
And we weren’t so crazy, either, about that ‘fresh and new’ thing of John’s any more. We helped work on his big fence from time to time, to keep him happy and because it wasn’t such a bad idea to stop leopards from coming in too close to the little fence around our shelters, but mostly we just got on with doing the ordinary things we needed to do to keep ourselves going.
Life was easy in one way, but in another way it had turned out hard. Sometimes I felt lonely lonely. There were so few of us. Okay, there was my Dix, and his mate Mike, and my good friend Gela, and my batface sister Jane, and little sharp Clare, and cheerful Janny, who was always up for a laugh and a joke. And Gerry was alright, I suppose, boring but alright, and so, in his own funny way, was clever weird Jeff. And bloody old John was okay too, at least some of the time, and I guess I cared about my brother Harry, or I felt responsible for him anyway, though it drove me nuts having to sort things out for him when he annoyed people with his noisy stupidness. I even got on alright with Lucy Batwing, and the two London girls.
But that wasn’t a lot of people to fill a whole world with, not when there was forest forest forest stretching away on both sides of us for miles and miles and miles. Thousands and thousands of trees shining and pumping — hmmph, hmmph, hmmph — thousands of flutterbyes and bats and bucks and treecats and slinkers and leopards, all with their flat eyes and their two hearts and their greeny-black Eden blood, taking no notice of us, carrying on with the things they’d been doing for hundreds and thousands of wombs, ever since they first came up from Underworld: it was lonely lonely when you thought too much about it. So much space, so much life going on that didn’t know or care we existed — and then us, just us, us few human beings, by ourselves in the middle of it all.
We made babies as quickly as we could. Even I worked on making babies, though I was never that keen on being a mum. I slipped with Dix, I slipped with John, I even slipped with Mike once twice. And often I found myself doing it like a broody oldmum back in Family, not really thinking about the thing itself and what it felt like, just waiting for the job to be done, and then laying back after the bloke was finished, whichever one it was, and trying to keep his juice inside me. All the girls did the same.
‘Slipping should be a special thing,’ John said one time, when a bunch of us were together by the fire, scraping buckskins clean. ‘Not just something you do with anyone you feel like, or anyone needing a bit of juice. We should go back to how it was on Earth. One man just slips with one woman, so he knows which kids he was the dad of, and a kid knows which bloke is his dad. This way of doing things we’ve got into on Eden, where everyone slips with everyone: it only began here on Eden in First Harry’s times, when there was only one man in the world and it was him.’
He looked straight at me as he said it. He hated that I slipped with Dix, and he knew I knew that he hated it. And in a way I understood what he felt, because I didn’t used to like it much either when he slipped with the oldmums back in Family. Back then I wanted him for myself, and now he wanted me to be just his alone. But how could I agree to that with a bloke like him, who wanted to slip with me one waking and then, for wakings and wakings after that, wasn’t even interested in even telling me anything, let alone touching me?
‘How would that work, though, John,’ Janny Redlantern asked, practically, ‘when there are eight girls here and only six blokes?’
‘Yeah,’ said Clare, lowering her voice and looking round to make sure my brother was out of earshot, ‘and out of the six of us that did get a bloke, how would we decide which one got bloody old Harry?’
They all laughed at that, though a couple of them looked guiltily at me and my sister Jane.
Even John laughed.
‘You’ve got a point there, Janny,’ he said. ‘I admit you have a point.’
Five six wakings later I came across him in forest with ugly merry Janny Redlantern, giving her a slip from behind, while she chattered away to him, just like some oldmum back in Family. He looked up and spotted me. Gela’s heart, I could tell how much he hated that I’d seen him. And soon afterwards he took his spear and a leopard tooth knife and a rope, and went off into Wide Forest on one of his long lonely trips.