Dark Eden

might even have felt scared of grownup people who were angry or unkind, but we never never thought that other people might come and do for us on purpose.
    ‘We need to take everything we can,’ John said, ‘skins, wraps, blackglass, spears, everything. Load it onto bucks, or carry it. We’ll go that way,’ he was standing facing Dark, and he pointed behind and to his left, ‘along between the hills and Worldpool, but making our way over towards Worldpool till we’re going along the edge of it. We’ll keep going for ten wakings. That’ll take us far enough from the ridge. After that we won’t have to move so fast, but we’ll still keep moving on every few wakings for a while, to get us a good long way away. We should be safe then for wombs and wombs, by Worldpool somewhere, far off from here. We could even make boats, if we wanted, make boats and figure out how to cross the water. Then we’ll have somewhere else to go to if we have to get away again.’
    Yes, we
could
be safe, I thought, but you won’t like that, John. You’ll get bored again. You’ll do something to make things more exciting, just as you’ve just done by going up to Tall Tree Valley and stirring up an ant’s nest, just like we feared would happen.
    But I didn’t say that then. We needed to move. Tom’s dick, I did
not
want to be around when David Redlantern and his lot came over Dark, and I certainly didn’t want my little ones to be there to see what they did to us. We needed to move. And of course I had to admit John was good at getting things moving.
    We started to pack stuff up, sort things out, figure out just how much we could carry on our backs or load onto the seven woollybucks we had now managed to turn into horses. It wasn’t all that much we could take with us when it came to it, not when Jeff had to ride on one buck, and we had twelve little ones to bring along with us, and we needed to take embers on a bark so we could make fires again without spending whole wakings trying to get a spark from twigs. Within a waking we had loaded up everything we could carry and were ready to leave our camp at L-Pool behind us, that big empty space inside John’s fence that we’d hardly begun to fill up.
    ‘The annoying thing is,’ said Gela, ‘that when David’s lot do come over the top they’ll find this place and make it their own. We’ve done all the work for them.’
    It was probably true. From what John and Gerry and Jeff had heard up at Tall Tree, Family had been happy to steal all the ideas that John and the rest of us came up with, even though they condemned us for having them in the first place: they were turning bucks into horses over there now; they were making footwraps and headwraps and bodywraps. Why wouldn’t they start their own camp in Wide Forest?
    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