Dark Eden

hidden by snow.
    And I had to admit it:
that
part of the plan wasn’t down to me at all, it was down to Jeff, that weird little clawfoot kid riding out in front, a young boy whose new hairs had hardly begun to grow.

    We walked for the length of a whole waking and then for another waking straight after that, because there was nowhere to sleep, and the only way of not freezing was to keep on going. Once in a while we did have to stop to get out some smoked meat or seedcakes to eat, or for Janny or Clare to give their babies a feed, or to fix new footwraps for someone whose own footwraps had got wet or fallen apart. (I didn’t want anyone getting the black burn up here like old one-legged Jeffo had done.) But whenever we stopped, everyone started getting cold and scared, and Tina and me had to go up and down the line to nip off any talk about us being lost, or us dying, or us never getting anywhere. It was specially bad around Mehmet Batwing and Angie and Julie and Candy Blueside, who all walked together, and all fell silent whenever me or Tina came near.
    ‘So where are we then, John?’ Mehmet finally asked me.
    ‘We’re following the buck path, Mehmet.
You
know that. That’s what we all agreed to do, remember? Remember how I gave you a choice and you chose this?’
    ‘Yeah, but where’s it leading us? We’re just going up and up all the time.’
    That was true. We
were
going up and it got colder the higher we went. And there was some weird thing too about the air because you had to work harder and harder to get enough of it. I couldn’t help thinking about some of the old stories about Tommy and Gela and the Three Companions, and how they said there was no air at all up in Starry Swirl, and that air was like water, it stayed near the ground. Maybe the air sat in Circle Valley like water in a giant pool, and the buck Def was leading us up to a place where the air stopped and we wouldn’t be able to breathe?
    But then I thought that bucks themselves must need air. You could hear them breathing, you could see the steam around their mouths the same as you could see the steam around ours.
    ‘We’re going up, yes,’ I said to Mehmet, ‘but we are going up between two mountains, not over the top.’
    ‘How do you figure that out?’
    ‘Well, you can see the slope of the mountain on our left, can’t you? You can see it sloping up in the lanternlight. And you can
hear
the mountain on the right.’
    I lifted the front of my headwrap to give him a demonstration.
    ‘
Mehmet!
’ I yelled.
    ‘
Mehmet!
’ came back an echo from high high above us and to the right. It was far far higher than I’d imagined it would be, my own voice bouncing down from a rock somewhere up there in total darkness that quite probably no human being and no living thing would ever ever reach.
    And then there were some fainter echoes, and the sound of stones rattling down bare rock.
    ‘See what I mean?’ I said, pulling the front of my wrap down again, my beard already full of ice.
    ‘Well,
what
a lot you know about Snowy Dark,’ Mehmet said bitterly.
    I couldn’t win with him. If I said something wrong, that proved I was a fool. If I said something right, that meant I was trying to be clever.
    Then Suzie Fishcreek cried out that she felt funny and she thought her baby was on the way. It wasn’t true luckily, but we had to give her some attention and calm her down before we could get going again, and meanwhile everyone got colder and wearier and more scared, and everyone looked round for someone to blame for their feeling like this, and I guess pretty well all of them chose me.
    And then, when we’d gone on for another four hours or so and even
I
was starting to think it was no good, we found we’d reached the top of a ridge. And there, below us, was
something
, something other than just more blackness and more snow. There was a source of light.

    It wasn’t the other side of Snowy Dark, though. It was a single tree, growing up out of a hole in the snow down there that its hot trunk had melted, just like the first tree must have done, coming up to the cold surface of Eden from the hot caves of Underworld when everywhere in Eden was like Snowy Dark. It was a huge tree, with a long straight smooth trunk, high wide branches, and white lanterns that shone out over the snowy ground all around it. Clouds of steam, lit up by the lanterns, came out from the airholes in its sides in short rhythmic puffs, and streamed upwards round