Dark Eden

don’t you think? If it works with bucks, why wouldn’t it work with leopards too?’
    He wasn’t expecting it but I put my arm round his neck and kissed him. And he let me this time. He relaxed and laughed and kissed me back.
    ‘And another idea me and Jeff had was about
cars
,’ he told me. ‘Do you remember that model Car that Oldest kept back in Family, with its four wheels? I reckon we could figure out how to make a kind of snow-boat with wheels that we could get bucks to pull along with our stuff on, even if there wasn’t any snow.’
    And then he talked about catching a baby nightmaker and turning that into a horse.
    ‘Think of the load a thing like that would carry!’ he said, looking round at me again to be sure that I was as excited about it as he was.
    I laughed and kissed him again, and then fell behind a bit to see Dix, and ask him to take a turn with Peter, who was getting big now and was hard to carry for too long.

    In two more wakings we reached Worldpool.
    I’d been to the edge of Worldpool three four times since John first found it, but just seeing it was a different thing from walking along next to it. This way you really got a sense of how
big
big it was. It was a pool that you could walk alongside all of one waking and still not reach or see the end of it, a pool with ripples on it half as tall as a grownup, like moving hills of shining water, which you could look into and see shining fishes swimming inside, before they came toppling over to swirl round the rocks in white bubbles that caught the light from the plants and creatures below. It was a pool that stretched away from us, softly shining into the distance, but didn’t reach another bank, like all the other water we’d ever seen, but stretched out instead to a far-off place where it seemed to touch the edge of the black black starry sky in a long straight line. But it wasn’t really touching sky. That line was Eden itself, our own dark Eden, curving down and away from us, hiding even more wonders from our sight.
    After we’d walked for half a waking, we came to a place where a river, thirty forty yards wide, had cut through the cliff and was pouring out into Worldpool over a shallow bed of stones. We and our bucks had to wade across it – it was waist deep in the middle – carrying our kids and all the stuff we had with us. Dix and Gerry carefully lifted the fire-bark above the water, with the embers glowing on their flat stone.
    ‘Hey, look at this!’ shouted Lucy Batwing in the middle of the stream.
    She’d noticed something that was floating by. She caught it and brought it to shore to show John. It was a little toy boat made of a dry fruit skin rubbed with grease, like the ones little kids used to play with back in Family. But, Michael’s names, how could a little thing like that end up here on the edge of Worldpool?
    ‘Well, this must be Main River,’ Jeff said. ‘This must be where Main River comes to from the bottom of Exit Falls.’
    It was strange strange to think that this exact same water had flowed down from Dixon Snowslug, and Cold Path Snowslug and all the other snowslugs and streams that fed into Circle Valley, strange to think it must have come through Deep Pool where me and John had dived for shining oysters, and through Longpool and Stream’s Join and Main Stream, and on through Greatpool. It was strange to think that some little kid in Family, some kid probably not even born when we were back there, had played with this little boat up there, just like we used to do, among all those old familiar places. It can’t even have been all that long ago. Grease or no grease, those little boats didn’t last many wakings before they turned to mush.
    ‘We’ll come back here one waking,’ John said, ‘and follow the water up towards Dark. Maybe this is another way back into Circle Valley. Maybe we could climb up Exit Falls from below.’
    Tom’s dick, did he
never
let up?

    There was a warm wind blowing in from Worldpool as we continued along the cliffs. It had a strange scent to it, rich and pungent, a bit like the way wavyweed smells when you spread it out on branches to dry it out for rope, but sweeter and more complicated. Birds and long-winged bats of kinds we’d never seen before gave out strange hoots and cries from little hiding places in the cliffs below us, and looked down at us from high high up under Starry Swirl.
    We came across a completely new kind of creature lying below us on the rocks