Dark Eden

faces, this ordinary waking-by-waking routine of hunting and scavenging and cooking and mending spears and scraping skins. It didn’t leave him with any outlet for all that energy of his, squeezed tight up inside him, like sap inside a tree.

40

Sue Redlantern

    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    I’d just got off to sleep when the horns started for another bloody Any Virsry: one hundred and sixty-sixth. Of course I knew it was coming but, Michael’s names, I’d been dreading that sound. I didn’t care much how many years it was since Angela and Tommy came to Eden, but what I hated
hated
was that each Any Virsry was another year since my two boys Gerry and Jeff and all those others disappeared from Cold Path Neck and never came back.
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    I crawled out of my shelter to make sure everyone was moving, and to help the youngmums with the little kids. Fox was out there already hurrying people along. He was Redlantern group leader now. It had been David for a bit, but then he became Head of Guards, and he moved out of Redlantern and set up his own fires and shelters with the other Guards over beside Greatpool, like a group all of their own with only men in it, a group over all other groups.
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    ‘Come on, darling, don’t cry, mummy’ll be back out for you in a minute when she’s got your baby brother . . . Gela’s tits, Fox, give them a moment. Kids can’t wake up just like that. It takes them a bit of time . . . Here’s mummy look, darling, coming out of her shelter now . . .’
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    ‘Yeah, yeah. We know, we know, give us a break. It’s all fine and easy if you’re on London time, but we were deep asleep over this side . . . Come on, sweetheart, you can’t go back into your shelter now. Wait till we get to Any Virsry, eh, and then you can lie down and have a little kip again . . . Michael’s names, but you are a big big boy, Dixie, aren’t you? You look like you’re ready for a leopard hunt, mate, never mind an Any Virsry. What do you reckon? You could go out and do for a leopard easy easy, I’d say . . . Yes I know, Fox, but the Guards won’t kill you for giving the littles a few minutes to sort themselves out before they go.’
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    ‘Yes alright, Roger, you can lean on me. But don’t get any ideas, alright?’
    And off we went, whole Redlantern group – Fox, blind Old Roger, Lucy Lu, Jade, all of us – through Spiketree (who were still getting themselves together) and Brooklyn and across Stream’s Join to Circle Clearing. I was doing my usual job of jollying people along – Fox might be leader but he hadn’t got a clue about all that – but inside me all the time it was cold and empty and dark, because I knew too well what I was going to have to see and what I was going to have to hear and what I was going to have to swallow.
    There was a fug sinking down over us. It was warm and close and the rain was coming, just like it did that Strornry after one-sixty-three, when John destroyed the Stones. Such a terrible time that seemed then, the worst time, like everything was poisoned and spoiled: Gerry and Jeff and the others going off after John and Tina, Bella hanging herself like Tommy from a tree . . . But, looking back on it now, it wasn’t really
so
bad after that Strornry, not for about a wombtime. A lot of newhairs were outside of Family over Cold Path Valley way, it was true, and we missed them and things were tense. But we could still see them at Lava Blob and in forest round there, still see them and get news of them, and still look after them in a way.
    But then, not long before one-sixty-four, horrible Dixon Blueside went off with our Met and with John Blueside and the three of them never came back.
    Well, David obviously knew something that we didn’t know, something about where they went and what they meant to do. He and a bunch of his newhair boys – we didn’t call them Guards then, but that was what they were becoming – they all rushed off into forest with their spears and their clubs and their angry puffed-up faces. They found the bones that the foxes and starbirds had left –
this
side of Lava Blob, they all insisted,
this
side – and then they went on to the camp that John and the others had started over at the mouth of Cold Path Valley. They found all of them gone. It was obvious, David told us: they’d all gone up onto Dark to die of cold with Juicy John and Teasy Tina.