Dix was nimble. He climbed up there and touched it.
‘It’s not ice,’ he said. ‘It’s warm and dry. And it’s smoother even than metal, smooth smoo . . . Oh Gela’s tits!’
He came scrambling and tumbling down like he had six leopards after him.
‘What is it? What is it?’ we were all yelling at him.
‘Faces,’ he said, ‘faces inside that ice thing looking out. White grinning faces with huge eyes!’
Lucy and Clare and Mike grabbed their kids and started to run. The little ones began to scream. But John and me climbed up the top and looked in. It was dark inside, but there was just enough light from forest and stars for us to make out two white faces staring up at us, with big dark eyes and toothy gaping mouths.
‘They’re just skulls,’ said John, ‘that’s all. They’re just human bones.’
Human bones weren’t something we saw too often because we always used to bury dead people back in Circle Valley under stones. In fact I’d only ever seen the clean white bones of a person once before, when a bunch of us found the remains of an old Batwing bloke called Johnny in forest when I was a little kid. (He’d been out there scavenging by himself and he’d died for some reason — maybe a heart attack or something — and had the flesh eaten off him by starbirds.) I looked through the smooth hard icy stuff at the faces looking out at us. Their mouths hung open like they were roaring with laughter. Ugh!
‘Just bones,’ John called out. ‘They can’t hurt us.’
The others who’d scattered in panic came reluctantly back to the metal thing.
‘Hey, look here!’ Gela called. ‘There’s a hole under here. You could get inside.’
John and me jumped down to look. It was only a small hole, but certainly big enough to crawl through. John wriggled straight in there, with faithful Gerry following him and then me and Jeff. The rest of them seemed to think it was our special job, mine and Gerry’s and Jeff’s, to be the first to follow John into strange and scary places.
There was a hollow cave in there under the hard ice-like stuff, a tilted-over cave that smelt like a kind of mud. Three skeletons were sitting in there on special seats made of some soft dark crumbly stuff that we’d never seen before. We hadn’t noticed the third skeleton from outside because its skull had fallen off its neck and had rolled down to the bottom edge of the cave with its skull eyes looking away from us. The skulls and bones stood out because they were white, but it was too dark to make out much else. I went back to the opening and called for someone to pull down some branches of whitelanterns for us to see by.
When I went back inside to the other three, I reached out for their hands. We were all shaking. I don’t honestly know if it was fear or what. We really didn’t know what to think or feel.
Then Gela crawled in with three four bright whitelanterns on a bit of branch, and now we began to see just what a weird weird kind of cave this was. All round us were strange brown surfaces covered with rows of little shapes. They reminded us of the Kee Board and the Screen that Oldest brought out to show us on Any Virsries, but there must have been thousands of those little square shapes here, dozens of different screens. We didn’t really know what to do next, so we began to touch the little springy squares, pushing them in and out like we used to push them in and out on the Kee Board as little kids when Oldest’s helpers carried round the Mementoes at Any Virsries.
More people were trying to get inside now. Mike was crawling in, and Clare, and even little Flower, and the metal thing rocked slightly with the weight of us all moving around inside it, and creaked like a tree does in the wind.
‘It’s the Three, isn’t it?’ John said. ‘It’s the Three Companions. This is Dixon and Mehmet and Michael. The first Dixon, I mean, the first Mehmet. And Michael . . .’ He could hardly bring himself to say it, and when his words came they were all shaky and wobbly. ‘And Michael Name-Giver.’
We didn’t answer him out loud.
‘And this is their sky-boat,’ Jeff said after a while. He spoke quietly, but more calmly than John. He was interested interested in everything, but he didn’t easily get excited or upset. ‘This is the Landing Veekle. They never made it back to Defiant at all.’
In the fading light from the branch of whitelanterns, we could see the three skeletons more clearly and we could see that they still wore wraps around them, wraps to cover their whole bodies, like Tommy and Angela’s wraps that Oldest still kept bits of in the hollow log. The two skeletons with heads had white wraps, the headless skeleton had a blue one. And there was writing on the wraps. Gela’s eyes, once we’d got some fresh whitelanterns in to give us more light, we could see their names written there — Mehmet Haribey, Dixon Thorleye, Michael Tennison — names from that old old story which was so old that, though we believed it was true, we didn’t really believe it happened in the same world as us. But here they were, not in a story world at all, but right in front of us.
Michael Tennison was the one whose head had fallen off. I picked it up now, that hard hollow thing with its white stony mouth that had first spoken the names of the animals and plants of Eden, all that long long time ago.
‘Just think,’ I said. ‘When we say “Michael’s names” this and “Michael’s names” that, this is the Michael we’re talking about!’
People had got tired of pushing on the little squares by now and most had stopped doing it, but little Flower was still at it. She pushed in a square and suddenly — Tom’s dick, it was hard to believe — suddenly there was a voice speaking to us and a face looking out at us from a screen. Flower screamed, everyone shouted and yelled and jumped back, and the sky-boat rocked back and forth once again.
‘Be quiet!’ John yelled furiously. ‘Gela’s eyes, be quiet and listen!’
It was a man’s face, a man with fair hair and tired grey eyes but no beard at all, his shoulders covered in a bright blue wrap.
‘ . . .Tennison,’ his voice was saying, but it sounded all thin and strange, like he was half-buried in the ground, and he spoke his words in a funny way that we could hardly understand, like he was speaking right up at the front of his mouth. ‘Michael Tennison. I’m afraid it looks as if the Landing Veekle must have been damaged when we . . .’
And then the voice stopped, and the face disappeared, and the screen went black like all the others. And we pushed every one of those hundreds of little squares over and over again, over and over and over. We even got Flower to push them all again, in case there was something about her touch that made a difference, but we could not get the face or the voice to come back again, however hard we tried.
45
Sue Redlantern
I was grinding up seeds to make some cakes for dinner when a Batwing kid came running into Redlantern area, shouting out that Mehmet Batwing had come down again from Dark. He’d come down with two Fishcreek boys, Paul and Gerald, who’d been the latest two sent up by David across Dark to the place called Tall Tree Valley where Mehmet and his lot lived. Mehmet, Paul and Gerald had gone straight to Guards up along Greatpool, without walking through the rest of Family at all. But one of the Guards had told his sister about it, and news was spreading from her across Family about what had happened. Apparently Paul and Gerald had met John up there: our John, John Redlantern! He’d been visiting Tall Tree too, but from the other direction, from some other place on the far side of Dark, some other forest.