Dark Eden

his brother straight away. He wasn’t going to leave Tall Tree Valley and that was that. And as soon as he’d spoken, the three Blueside girls, one by one, said the same. And then the six of them – Mehmet and his five followers – looked around at the rest of us, hoping for more support. But everyone else stayed silent. Hunched under our buckskins, we peered up at the falling snow and
wished
wished we were somewhere else. And John was telling us we
could
be.
    ‘I’m getting tired of living in this little patch of trees up in Snowy Dark,’ John said. ‘I’m going to try and get down the other side to a proper forest, and if anyone wants to join me they can. It’ll mean going through more snow, I admit, but look around you. We’re in the snow already!’
    Mehmet jumped to his feet.
    ‘Harry’s dick, John. Don’t pretend this is the same as it is up on Dark. We can still
see
here! We can still find things to
eat
! We can still make
fires
! There’s firewood everywhere! And if we just built bigger and stronger shelters we wouldn’t even need to get wet.’
    I looked across the fire at Tina. I knew she’d be annoyed with John for once again springing a whole new plan on everyone, but when I mouthed the question to her ‘Will you go?’, she nodded, and I nodded back to say ‘Me too’. Then I looked at my sister Clare and asked her the same thing, and she nodded as well. So did Lucy Batwing. So did Janny and Jane and Mike.
    Aaaaaaaah!
cried the leopard again, not so far up above us. Lucy and Martha London started crying again and said they couldn’t bear to live any more in this cold snowy place. I looked at John and saw the old slinker was having a job not to smile.

    Something came into my mind then that my mum made me learn when I was fourteen fifteen wombs old. It was a secret thing that I wasn’t to talk about. It was words that had passed from mother to daughter all the way down from First Angela, who I was named for. And Mum said I should remember the words exactly and pass them on in turn when I was older to any of my own daughters who would be able to remember them carefully, and keep them to themselves.
    ‘It’s not that these things are such a
big
big secret,’ my mum said. ‘But if everyone were to tell these words to each other all the time, they wouldn’t stay the same. They’d change in the telling in the way that the True Story does, and we wouldn’t remember any more what Angela actually said.’
    There were a lot of words from Angela that Mum taught me, but the ones I remembered now, as John and Mehmet were fighting over whether we should stay in Tall Tree Valley or whether we should go, were these:
    ‘Some men want the story to be all about
them
.’
    It was so true of John, I thought. As soon as things got quiet, and everyone was just getting on with things, he got uneasy because life stopped being a story about anyone in particular, and certainly not about him.
    But it was true of Mehmet too.

    ‘John doesn’t know the way to another forest,’ Mehmet hissed now, his face all blotchy with anger. ‘He doesn’t know it any more this time than he did before. Michael’s names, what’s the matter with all of you? This snow here won’t kill us, but
that
snow will.’
    It would have been nice nice, I thought, if this didn’t have to be about John
or
Mehmet, and could just be about deciding the right thing to do, but there weren’t any other choices apart from what the two of them were offering. It was the same when I first came over to John at Cold Path Neck: only that time the choice was him or ugly old David Redlantern.
    ‘We can stay up here in middle of Dark until we die,’ said John, ‘or we can finish off the job we started and find a place on the other side. Do we want to live the rest of our lives in the warm wide forests that we know are over there, or do we want to huddle up forever in this small cold place?’
    Aaaaaaaah!
came the cry again from the slopes up to Dark.
    For a few seconds everyone was silent. Then Mehmet spoke.
    ‘And what about leopards, John? Want to explain to us why it makes sense to go up there among those white leopards all over again?’
    John laughed.
    ‘What makes you think they’re up there, Mehmet? They can throw their voices, remember? Tom’s dick, it was you that first figured that out! They could be down here in forest now. They could be just a few yards away. We’re
in
Snowy Dark, remember. We’re still in it, and we