But who cared, eh? We’d be long gone when they arrived here.
Hunting and scavenging as we went along, we moved slowly through forest. The trees went hmmmmmmm all around us. Starbirds called to each other. Two three times we heard a leopard singing in the distance. Once we passed two of those huge slow animals that John had named Nightmakers, and three four times we crossed the wide dark paths they made through forest as they slowly munched up every shining flower on the trees and the ground. You could tell how old the paths were by the number of flowers that had grown back.
We went slow slow. There was a lot to carry, including all the little kids except for Fox and Flower, who’d walk a little way, and then ride up together on a buck, and then walk a little more.
About three four hours into the second waking, I went up to the front with my little boy Peter riding on my back in a buckskin sling. John was up there already walking next to Jeff on Def, with Gerry following on just behind them. John had Star in his arms. She was fast asleep and he bent from time to time to kiss the top of her head. Now that things were moving on again for him, he seemed to have forgiven her for maybe being Mike’s kid and not his own, and he loved the sweet fresh smell of her hair.
‘Why do we need to stop in one place at all?’ I said to John. ‘We could just keep moving on slowly forever.’
John beamed round at me. He was in a good good mood, relieved relieved to get away from that little place we’d made for ourselves by L-pool. Tom’s neck, he’d worked for wakings and wakings on that big fence, scratching and cutting himself, wearing himself out, but now he’d left it behind without even a moment of regret. Moving was what he liked to do best.
‘Now you’re talking, Tina,’ he said laughing. ‘It could work, couldn’t it? Just going a few hours further on each waking, perhaps, so we had time to hunt and scavenge and rest. We’d just need a few more bucks to ride on and carry our stuff, and we’d be fine, we’d never need to stop anywhere.’
We walked on a bit.
‘You know,’ John said after thinking for a little while, ‘you really are right, Tina. It would be good to keep moving.’
I’d hardly ever heard him so willing to discuss anything that another person had suggested to him.
‘But not heading away all the time,’ he went on. ‘Sooner or later we need to turn and face them. When there’s a few more of us, I mean. When we’re stronger. When we’re ready. It’s not good just to keep running away.’
I shrugged. Why should we ever turn round? Why should we face them? Eight nine wakings’ journey from here, back in Circle Valley, Mehmet had probably already talked to David Redlantern. Now, or soon, David and his Guards would be gathering themselves together — their blackglass spears, their horsebucks, their bows and arrows, their knives, their clubs — and making their way up to Tall Tree Valley and on to the ridge beyond. And when they got there, they’d look down on Wide Forest as we had done. They’d be amazed amazed, like we’d been, and, for a while, their mouths would water at the thought of all that space and all that easy meat. But then they’d remember why they came, and they’d stop admiring Wide Forest for its own sake, and start searching searching searching for signs of us.
They’d have ridden on the backs of bucks, which was Jeff’s idea, and they’d have followed the route that no one would have taken if it wasn’t for John, but that wouldn’t make any difference to them. They’d use the things we’d found, to hunt us down for daring to find them.
I didn’t doubt, now Caroline was out of the way, that David Redlantern really would stick John onto a spiketree if he could, and let his skin burn off on its scalding bark, just as he’d always said he would. And I didn’t doubt that if he got hold of me, he would do to me what Dixon Blueside would have done if John and the others hadn’t come back to stop him. He’d hold me down and force himself up me and spurt his juice inside me, just to show how much power he had, and how little I had, however pretty I might be and however horrible and ugly he was. And if there was no one to stop him he wouldn’t just do it once. He’d do it again and again and again, until he’d used me up, and he could chuck me aside, like the empty husk of a whitelantern fruit with its sweet flesh eaten away.
Why should we face all that, any more than we would choose to stick our arms down an airhole with a slinker hiding in it or pick up a piece of shit and force it down our throats? No, I thought, we should just go on and on and on. I even began to think that I’d go along with paddling out across Worldpool, if that’s what it took to keep us safe. In fact I could see myself agreeing to any plan at all that would distract John from his idea of turning round and facing David.
But then my mood changed, and I thought that the further away we travelled from Circle Valley, the further we left behind all those other human beings too, the nice ones, like my mum, and nice batfaced Sue Redlantern, and all those others back in Family who weren’t like David Redlantern at all. And even though we hadn’t seen any of them since we left Cold Path Neck, it was sad to think that we might go so far far from them that there stopped being any possibility of contact again.
Yes, and there was Earth to think about too of course. It was dreadful dreadful to think of Earth coming for us and not being able to find us because we’d gone too far, so that David and all the others went back to that world of light, and we few were left behind here like Tommy and Angela had been, all alone in dark dark Eden.
And now I understood why John wanted to turn and face them. It wasn’t just about fighting and killing. That was part of it, but it wasn’t whole thing. It was also about staying connected. Even fighting was.
‘Jeff was just saying that maybe we could get some baby leopards somehow and train them up like bucks to protect us,’ John said, looking round at me for my opinion. ‘Sounds worth a go, don’t you think? If it works with bucks, why wouldn’t it work with leopards too?’
He wasn’t expecting it but I put my arm round his neck and kissed him. And he let me this time. He relaxed and laughed and kissed me back.
‘And another idea me and Jeff had was about cars,’ he told me. ‘Do you remember that model Car that Oldest kept back in Family, with its four wheels? I reckon we could figure out how to make a kind of snow-boat with wheels that we could get bucks to pull along with our stuff on, even if there wasn’t any snow.’
And then he talked about catching a baby nightmaker and turning that into a horse.
‘Think of the load a thing like that would carry!’ he said, looking round at me again to be sure that I was as excited about it as he was.
I laughed and kissed him again, and then fell behind a bit to see Dix, and ask him to take a turn with Peter, who was getting big now and was hard to carry for too long.
In two more wakings we reached Worldpool.
I’d been to the edge of Worldpool three four times since John first found it, but just seeing it was a different thing from walking along next to it. This way you really got a sense of how big big it was. It was a pool that you could walk alongside all of one waking and still not reach or see the end of it, a pool with ripples on it half as tall as a grownup, like moving hills of shining water, which you could look into and see shining fishes swimming inside, before they came toppling over to swirl round the rocks in white bubbles that caught the light from the plants and creatures below. It was a pool that stretched away from us, softly shining into the distance, but didn’t reach another bank, like all the other water we’d ever seen, but stretched out instead to a far-off place where it seemed to touch the edge of the black black starry sky in a long straight line. But it wasn’t really touching sky. That line was Eden itself, our own dark Eden, curving down and away from us, hiding even more wonders from our sight.