Dark Eden

backwards down the tree, spiralling down as it had spiralled up, and disappeared back into its steaming airhole.
    Meanwhile the bat climbed up and up, still looking down at us, until it was just a little black shadow on the bright face of Starry Swirl. Finally it stopped climbing, turned and flew off with big slow wingbeats away over Snowy Dark.
    ‘John! John!’ people were calling me.
    ‘John,’ muttered Tina, who’d come up from middle of the line, ‘get yourself together and wipe your eyes.’
    I looked round. I saw their faces in the light of the treelanterns, some smiling, some laughing, some looking scared.
    I put my hands quickly up to my face and wiped away my tears.

31

Tina Spiketree

    How could he let himself cry like that then, when everyone needed him to be strong? Michael’s names! So many other times, when he could have shown his feelings a bit more and it would have helped, he hadn’t. But now, in this moment when we really didn’t need it at all, he’d let himself go. And what had
made
him cry anyway? He’d been like someone watching a story, like the ones who cried when I did
Gela’s Ring
. And people never just cried because of a story, did they? They always cried because it reminded them of real things. It reminded them of things they’d lost or never had, or times when they’d been found wanting, or times when other people let them down. So what did the story of the bat and the slinker do for John? What did it remind him of? The bat was him, I suppose, lonely and cold and proud up there. But what was the slinker?

    The tree stood in a hole it had melted in the ice. I guess the hole was about ten yards across and three yards deep. The sides of it were steeply sloping smooth ice, glowing greeny blue in the light of the tree. But in one place they’d been trampled down by woollybucks into a sort of ramp of rough snow that we could climb down. At the bottom there was mud and big stones and trampled buck dung and puddles of water that drained into a little stream that trickled down into a hole under the ice and came out Gela knows where. The tree in middle was huge
huge
when you saw it close up. It’d take three people to get their arms right round it, and the trunk went up and up and up so high that it had reached four five times the height of a man before it had even started to put out branches.
    It wasn’t going to do our footwraps any good trampling round in that mud, and John and me tried to tell everyone to step on the dry bits, but no one cared about that. Everyone was rushing forward to get the heat of the tree and drink the water from the puddles and the little stream. The woollybucks were snuffling and croaking with excitement. The human beings were fighting and squabbling for the warm bits of the tree. The babies, who’d been completely quiet while we walked and walked, like they’d sunk down with us into a sort of dream, now both began to scream and yell.
    Hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
, went the tree, meanwhile, puffing out steam from the six seven airholes up and down its trunk, just like it must have been doing for wombtimes and wombtimes when it was all alone and there was nothing around it but ice and snow and stars.
    ‘Hey, everyone!’ I yelled. ‘Don’t push and fight over the tree. We’ll take it in turns, alright?’
    I picked out people to go and take a turn with their backs to the tree, and got ten of them in there shoulder to shoulder in a circle against its warm trunk. They squatted down on their heels, and closed their eyes, and the warmth of the tree and the steady pulse of it against their backs was more than enough, after that long long walk, to send most of them straight off to sleep. Gerry was one of the ones I picked for the first turn. He said he wanted to stay awake with John, but I told him he’d help John better if he got some rest. Another I picked out was sweet Dix.
    ‘You come and rest too, Tina,’ he said, ‘you come in beside me. You’re tired
tired
.’
    But I told him no, though I gave him a little secret thankyou smile.
    John got Jane and Mike to be first lookouts. Jane to watch the tree, Mike to walk round the top of the ice, watching the snowy slopes around us. It wasn’t hard to imagine that a slinker of that size might decide to come down the tree to grab a human being if couldn’t catch a bat. (It couldn’t be that fussy about what it ate up here, not unless there was some other source of food for it down in Underworld.) And if