Dark Eden

being organized and they’d stay that way, and we’d have a chance of surviving. I had
all
that to think about – and there’s only so much a person can hold onto at one time – and then bloody Tina drops her little game with the Ring story on me, and – Tom’s dick! – I had to think about how to deal with
that
as well.
    She’d say that was my fault for keeping the ring a secret, but I did that for a reason. I did it because I always knew from the beginning that when I showed it to people, it would give me power over them, but I also knew that the power wouldn’t last. So I saved it up for the moment when that power was most needed, not just by me but by all of us. It was like when the leopard came at me. I knew I only had one shot at it, so I waited till the best moment and didn’t just chuck my spear at it the first chance I got. And I got that right. I got it exactly right, whatever Tina thinks. I took out the ring just when we really needed it most – and it
worked
!
    A couple of hours after I’d taken the ring back from Tina we were starting up Cold Path. There were twenty-one of us, plus two babies. The larger of the two bucks, Def, was in front with Jeff riding on it. After that came me and Tina, and then all the others, one by one, with the other buck, Whitehorse, at the end. Every one of us was covered up, except for our mouths and eyes, with buckskin wraps, so we didn’t really look like
people
, more like a herd of weird two-legged bucks. Every one of us had the greased buckskin footwraps that I’d been working and working on even before anyone came from Family to join me, with hard layers of skin and greasy glue on the bottom. Apart from Jeff on his buck, the two girls with babies (Clare and Janny) and the three girls carrying babies inside their wombs (Suzie, Gela and Julie), all of us were carrying things on our backs: rolls of rope, spare footwraps, bags of blackglass, bundles of buckskin, things that I’d thought about and organized over the past ten periods. And we were taking it in turns to carry some big flat pieces of bark, smoothed and greased, which I called snow-boats, each one loaded with useful stuff like meat and skins and spare wraps, except for one, which was holding a pile of embers on a big flat stone. They were hard work to carry over dry ground, but once we were up on snow they’d slide easy easy over the surface, and it would only take one person to pull them along.
They
were my idea too.
    ‘None of this would have happened but for you, would it?’ Tina said to me, looking back at all this.
    ‘No,’ I said crossly. ‘It bloody wouldn’t.
I
brought you all to Cold Path Valley.
I
sorted out the agreement with Caroline so as to give us time.
I
worked out how to make the wraps to cover our bodies.
I
had the idea of the snow-boats and organized people to cut the bark and make the ropes to pull them.
I
went up Snowy Dark over and over again to work out how to live up there and what we’d need, even when you moaned at me for going away by myself all the time. And you all chose to come with me because you all know quite well that you wouldn’t have made this happen without me. None of you would, not even
you
, Tina, and certainly not your precious Dix down there. So how come
I
get to be Tommy in the story and you get to be Gela? I’m the Gela here. I’m the one holding it all together.’
    She shrugged.
    ‘It was how I felt, that’s all. It needed to come out somehow or I would’ve burst. Most people are like that, John. They just have to let things out sometimes, whether it’s right or wrong. Not many people can keep it all secret inside like you do. And, Gela’s eyes, it would be lonely lonely if we did.’
    We came to the place where all that time ago we’d come with Old Roger and seen those shining woollybucks, so high up in Dark that I’d thought at first they were a sky-boat from Earth. Then we went past it, and that was the end of being in Cold Path Valley and in Circle Valley where we were born. And for one moment I had the thought that perhaps I’d made a terrible mistake, perhaps we really did need to stay by Circle of Stones, perhaps Earth would come down from sky and Family would tell them that we’d all disappeared on Snowy Dark, and they’d return to Earth without us. But I pushed that thought out of my mind. There’s got to be a point where you choose your path and stick to it no matter what.
    Walking on snow now, and hoping that our