Dark Eden

footwraps would stay dry and not fall apart, we followed Cold Path Stream until we came to the snowslug that the stream flows out of (not a
big
big snowslug like Dixon Snowslug over at Blue Mountains, which comes right down into the top of forest, but big enough, the height of four men or more). Then we tied ourselves together with ropes, and got our spears ready, pointed end down, to hold us steady, and we scrambled up the slippery buck path that led along one side of the snowslug.
    Harry tried to run up it and slipped. People laughed at him, of course, because they badly needed a laugh, but he
hated
hated being laughed at.
    ‘I’m stopping here, then,’ he said. ‘You go on if you bloody want. Harry’s not going with you lot if you’re just going to laugh at him.’
    He began to cry. He was the oldest one of us, the only one of us you could really say was a grownup, but he cried like a little kid. It was embarrassing and frustrating but people should have made more allowances. They should have remembered that he’d done for someone too that waking, he’d killed John Blueside. And if
I
had a job getting all that through my head, it must have been much worse for Harry.
He
had a job getting anything through his head at all.
    Tina went back to calm him down and coax him up the path and Gerry came up to walk beside me. He wanted to talk about the killings too. Poor kid, he’d really had the worst of it out of the three of us. I didn’t know Dixon Blueside personally and Harry didn’t know John Blueside hardly at all. But Gerry had done for a boy from his own group who he’d grown up with since he was a baby. Now he kept going over and over it, and I had to keep telling him over and over that we had no choice and that they’d have gone ahead and killed Jeff if we hadn’t got to them in time. They
would
have killed Jeff too, they really would, and they’d have done a cruel thing to Tina that didn’t even have a name.
    ‘And if they’d got away with that,’ I kept telling Gerry, ‘then it would have been the rest of us who’d have been next, one by one, or all together. There were only twenty-one of us at Valley Neck, remember, and five hundred-plus in Old Family.’
    ‘Yes, but I used to play with Met,’ Gerry would say. ‘He once swapped me a bit of blackglass he found for a big lump of stumpcandy.’
    Or: ‘We got that slinker with him once, remember? That slinker you let him kill, remember? That time Jeff said he wondered what it felt like to be a slinker. We were friends with Met then, weren’t we? We were friends in the same group.’
    ‘Yes, Gerry,’ I’d say, ‘but he broke our friendship when he killed Brownhorse and did Jeff over, and stood and laughed while Dixon tried to slip Tina there in forest.’
    ‘That’s right,’ Gerry would say. ‘It was him that broke the friendship.’
    And he’d think about it for a bit, looking relieved, and then suddenly he’d frown and come up with something else.
    ‘He was with us that first time we came up here with Old Roger, remember? He was our friend back then.’
    And we’d have to go round the whole thing again.
    Meanwhile the lights of forest disappeared behind us and we were truly up in Dark. All we could see was what was lit up by the headlantern of the buckhorse Def, up ahead of us with Jeff riding on its back. Rocks, snow, ice loomed up out of the blackness in the area close around us, and then disappeared again back into blackness again at the other end of the line, behind the second buck, Whitehorse.
    Jeff had named his buck Def after the sky-boat
Defiant
that brought Angela and Tommy and the Three Companions from Earth and actually it was a good choice of name. When I saw that group of woollybucks up on Dark all that time ago, I thought for moment I was seeing a sky-boat up there, and Def and Whitehorse were pretty much like sky-boats for us. They might not be taking us across Starry Swirl but they were taking us across Dark and we couldn’t have done it without them. I had thought before of maybe finding some way of lighting our way with lights made of hollow branches or torches made of dry wavyweed dipped in grease, like people sometimes used back in Family when they wanted a bit of extra light. But the bucks were doing much more for us than just lighting our way. They
knew
the way. It was woollybucks that made Cold Path – it was them that made it a path at all – and now they found a new path for us, even when it was