Dark Eden

‘I’m sorry for those of you who’ve lost your kids,’ he said, ‘but didn’t I
tell
you we should have spiked that John up like Jesus? Didn’t I say it? “Spike him up until he burns,” I said. But you all said I was being too hard.’
    He said the same things again at one-sixty-five and I knew, I knew, I
knew,
he’d say the same things again now, at one-sixty-six: they were all dead up in Snowy Dark, they were fools for following John, we were fools for not doing for John when we had the chance.

    Anyway, here we were back in Circle Clearing in the space between the trees and the stones – the
new
stones: they’ve never seemed the same to me as the old ones – and there was Caroline inside Circle looking sort of tired and shrunken and old. Mitch was beside her, the last of Oldest, the last one of Tommy and Gela’s grandchildren, with his scrappy white hair and beard, and his blind eyes, and his hands that grabbed and groped around him all the time, like he was frightened he was sinking into the earth. Just outside Circle, Secret Ree stooped over her bits of bark.
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
The Council helpers were still blowing those old hollowbranch horns because the most important people hadn’t yet arrived and the meeting couldn’t start without them.
    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    Parp
–
parp
–
parp
–
parp!
came the reply at last, and then into the clearing rode David Redlantern, the Head of Guards, in all his ugliness, up on the back of the woollybuck they’d managed to train for him over the last year. He glared round at us, and behind him his Guards, thirty forty young men, grinned and smirked at each other with their big blackglass spears over their shoulders. And he led them right round the clearing, right round the edge of Circle, so we could all see who were really the ones that decided things around here: the ones that could arrive as late as they liked at Any Virsry and still everyone would wait for them and not complain, however long they took. It wasn’t tired old Caroline any more who was in charge.
    And then, when they’d made that point, they all stopped in a group together in the space between Circle and the rest of Family. Two of them helped David down from his buck, and they all squatted down, and David gestured to Caroline to carry on.
    Tom’s neck, how did he
get
all that power? Why did we let him take it? He was only a Redlantern boy after all. I remembered him when he was a little kid and I was a newhair. I didn’t like him much even then. He was sort of loveless from the start, but when I was little I used to keep an eye on him. We batfaces took a lot of stick and we had to stand up for each other. I didn’t expect him to grow up into anyone nice or special, and I was right: he didn’t. He grew up into a sour sarcastic lump of misery. But sour and sarcastic is one thing, this was another. Who could have imagined
this
?
    But anyway, it was time for the count. The leaders came out from their groups to report how many in their group were here now, and how many were out hunting or scavenging and all of that, and Secret Ree scratched the numbers down with a shaky hand, though she was nearly blind. Then we waited while they added up the group counts and worked out the count for whole Family. It went on and on, like it did every time. Harry’s dick, how hard can it
be
to add up the numbers from eight groups? Babies cried. Newhairs gave each other looks.
    Then at last Caroline stood up.
    ‘There are five hunded and eighty-one people in Family,’ she announced, ‘more than ever ever before!’
    My clever Jeff wasn’t in that count, was he? Nor my Gerry, nor Janny Redlantern, nor John. They weren’t part of it any more. And yet, even without them, the number had gone up. It was like they didn’t matter somehow, like they made no odds at all.
    Caroline yelled the number into old Mitch’s ear, and they levered him up to his feet, and he began to quaver on about rememfer this and rememfer that, and how a big round boat came down from sky, and how there were only thirty people when he was a kid, thirty in whole world.
    We were supposed to be impressed or feel sorry for them, for managing to keep going when they were so few. But there were only
twenty
with John that went up on Dark.
    How does David know they died? I thought. How could he really know? John believed it was possible to cross right over or he wouldn’t have led them there, and who’s to say he was