Dark Eden

that would let us ride them. The one thing I was good at, the one special thing about me, which no one could do even
half
as well as me, was breaking out of something old and making something new. Was I going to accept that I’d never do any of that again, when I was only barely grown up, and that from now on other people were going to be better than me at doing everything?
    Tom’s dick and Harry’s, no I wasn’t! I
needed
to make something else happen, and, what’s more,
they
needed me to do it too, even if they didn’t know it themselves, because otherwise they would get bored bored bored. That’s why people let me lead them, because I knew what they needed even before they did, and because I saved them from getting bored.
    ‘We should go further,’ I said to Tina, sitting at the end of a waking on the bank of L-pool. ‘We’ve been here for two wombs now, less than a waking’s walk away from bottom of Snowy Dark, with whole of Wide Forest out there waiting for us.’
    ‘We’re far enough from Family already, John,’ she said. ‘No one wants to go further than this from their friends and their mums and everyone.’
    ‘Okay, well, maybe we should go back to Family, then? Go back over and get some more of them to come and join us.’
    ‘John,’ Tina said, almost like she was explaining something to a kid. ‘You destroyed Circle, remember? You broke up Family. You did for Dixon Blueside. Okay, Family doesn’t know what happened exactly but they know something did, and they’re not going to forgive us for it, are they? David Redlantern isn’t, that’s for sure. Come on, you know that!’
    ‘Of course I know but . . . I reckon we could sneak up on Family without him knowing. See if more of them want to come and join us?’
    Tina snorted. ‘Yeah, we could try, until it ended up being
us
with spears stuck through us and
our
heads cracked open. There’s a lot more of them than us, remember, John.’
    I sat with my feet in the water, with tiny shining fishes nibbling at my toes. Three four yards out, beyond the trees that grew up out of the edge of the water, I could see pink oysters shining, and I thought of suggesting we dive for them like we’d done back at Deep Pool.
    ‘Or maybe David and his mates would decide
not
to do for all of us,’ Tina said. ‘Maybe they’d keep some of us girls, and do to each one of us what Dixon Blueside tried to do to me.’
    She chucked a bit of stone out into the water.
    ‘Yeah,’ she added, glancing round at me, ‘and come to that, maybe they’d do to you what David first suggested they do. Remember? Tie you to a spiketree to burn, the way hunters cook meat.’
    ‘Yeah, well. It’s just something to think about, that’s all. Either going back to Circle Valley to get more of them to join us, or pushing forward ourselves. There’s no point in just sitting here.’
    She didn’t even answer that. She pulled her feet out of the water and turned to face me. Her face was tired but she managed to smile.
    ‘So do you want a slip, then? Have a go at making another baby?’
    I said yes, but, once she’d got my juice, all Tina wanted to do was go back to the shelters and sleep.
    I couldn’t rest, though. I got my spears and my hunting bag and went out into forest alone. I’d often gone out on long trips, for two three four wakings. Sometimes Gerry came with me, sometimes Jeff came, riding on the back of Def, sometimes one two of the others, but often I went on my own. I’d scald my meat on a hot spiketree, and sleep between whitelantern roots with my spear ready in my hand.

    Once, thirty forty wakings after we first came down into Wide Forest, I’d been been out on my own like that, a waking away from L-pool, when I woke up from a short sleep to hear a snuffling scrunching sound ahead of me. Thinking it would be bucks of some kind, I crept forward on my belly through starflowers to try and do for one of them. Buckmeat would be too heavy to carry, but I reckoned I could manage to take back a skin.
    I was almost on top of the creatures before I saw them, and realized they weren’t bucks at all. They were tall as trees, standing on four legs that were each the height of a man, and black all over,
black
black like leopards. They had long long necks, and at the top of their necks, just below their big long heads, they had two strong arms with hands. Two of the animals were slowly feeding from the trees, pulling the branches towards their mouth feelers with