Dark Eden

the middle and a buckskin round the shoulders, and our feet were bare and cold.
    ‘Oh clever,’ said David, and he looked at Met with his smile that wasn’t really a smile, wind whistling in and out of his ugly hole of a face, with that other bit of mouth that went up where a nose should be and always seemed red and sore. ‘Stay up by all means, Met, but I don’t think I fancy a dose of gang green myself.’
    He was always a sarcastic bastard. But that, and hitting people, was about the nearest he got to being friendly.
    ‘Anyone want to freeze up here with Met, go ahead,’ David said. ‘Otherwise let’s get down out of the cold to where the woollybucks actually are, eh?’
    It was cold cold. Even if you put your back against a tree trunk it was cold, because they were only stumpy little trees up there and they didn’t give out heat like a big redlantern or whitelantern does down in the valley. But then again, I thought to myself, Met’s idea wasn’t so dumb. If we could only find a way of staying up there for a bit longer we could spear
loads
loads more bucks, because they always did come up and down these paths down from Dark around dips. So why didn’t we think about ways of keeping warm up there? Why didn’t we bring some more wraps with us, or make wraps that we could tie up round us? Why hadn’t we found a way of putting wraps round our feet? Why had we decided that it was too bloody cold and difficult up by Dark to even
try
and work out a way round it?
    But that was how it was. We walked down beside the stream again and pretty soon tall trees were all around us again, there were lanterns wherever we looked, white and red and blue, and that little crack in the hills had widened out into Cold Path Valley. It was a small place: in an hour you could walk right across it to the narrow little gap in the hills that led back into Circle Valley where we lived.
    ‘I wonder where the woollybucks go,’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s another forest they go to beyond the hills.’
    ‘Another forest?’ snorted Fox. ‘Don’t be daft, John. There
couldn’t
be anywhere else as big as Circle Valley.’
    ‘That’s wrong! When Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions first saw Eden, they saw lights all over . . .’
    ‘Beyond the hills the Shadow People live,’ Lucy Lu interrupted me in a loud slow dreamy voice.
    She was a woman with a round pale face and watery eyes who used to go round the other groups in Family and offer to talk to the shadows of their dead in exchange for bits of blackglass and old skins and scraps of food.
    ‘That’s crap,’ said Tina. ‘There’s no such thing as Shadow People.’
    I agreed with her. I’d got no time for things that people saw out of the corner of their eye, or in dreams. Harry’s dick, there were enough real things to look at face on! There were enough things you could put your hands on and hold.
    ‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw them like I do,’ said Lucy Lu in that dreamy voice, like she was only half in our world and half in a shadow world which only she could see.
    ‘Some people reckon sky is a huge flat stone,’ Gerry broke in suddenly, ‘and Starry Swirl is rocklanterns growing underneath it, like you get in caves. This big flat stone, it sits up there with its edges on the top of Snowy Dark. Dark is really there to hold it up.’
    ‘That is
really
crap,’ said Tina with her throaty laugh. ‘Boy, that
really
is. And no one else even says it either apart from you, Gerry. You made it up just now. Trying to be different like your hero John.’
    ‘No I didn’t!’ Gerry laughed.
    He was happy to have headed off an argument between me and Lucy Lu and Fox.
    ‘Of course you did,’ Tina told him. ‘It’s the most half-arsed thing I ever heard.’
    ‘Yes, and make sure you don’t say that sort of thing in front of Oldest either,’ said Old Roger. ‘They wouldn’t like it. How could Tommy and Gela have come down from Starry Swirl with the Three Companions if it was just rocklanterns on a stone?’
    ‘So Gerry can’t have his own ideas?’ I said. ‘But Oldest can make up any fairy story they like and then force us all to accept that it’s true?’
    ‘You watch it, John,’ said David. ‘You bloody watch what you say.’
    ‘Newhairs!’ complained Old Roger. ‘When I was young we showed respect to our Oldest. We’d never say the True Story was made-up.’
    I didn’t really think it
was
made up. I didn’t doubt that Tommy and