Dark Eden

hoped he’d be out on the water in one of his boats but he wasn’t. He was sitting on a bit of log below a whitelantern tree, working on a new one. He was a big man of about sixty wombtimes with a soft weak face, no teeth, and that one leg of his missing below the knee. He’d got a three-yard length of split trunk from a redlantern tree that he was working on. He’d already scraped the dried old tubes out of it, cut the ends straight with a blackglass saw and smoothed off them off with roughstone. He’d got a special fire place for boiling down redlantern sap into glue. There was a deep hole in middle full up with a hot sticky sludge of boiled sap, and round it a circular trench filled with redhot embers. He was scooping the sludge out with a bark spoon and smearing it onto the pieces of buckskin he’d stretched tight over the open ends of the log. The skins had dried hard hard from when he first glued them on, and now he was spreading more glue all over them, ready to stick on another layer of skins.
    ‘How long you’ve been working on that one, Jeffo?’
    ‘Oh twenty wakings at least, I’d say.’
    ‘How many boats you reckon you’ve made?’
    ‘Oh thirty, forty. They don’t last that long, you know, boats. It doesn’t matter how much glue you use, sooner or later the ends come off and then down they go and it’s, “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you glue the ends back on this one?”. “No I can’t,” I tell them. “You’ll need new soft skins that can be stretched, and if the wood’s soaked at the ends at all, you’ll need to start again with a new log.” And then of course it’s “Jeffo! Jeffo! Can you make us a new one then?”’
    ‘Don’t you get bored?’
    ‘Well, if I do, I can go fishing in my own boat. That’s like going for a walk for me, going out on my boat. Move as fast on the water as you can with your legs on the ground, I can. Faster, in fact. No one beats old Jeffo in a boat. And anyway I
like
making boats. It’s good work. Tommy and Gela themselves taught it to us. Make boats, they said, and a waking will come some time when you’ll figure out how to build a boat like the one that brought us here with the Three Companions. And then you’ll get back to Earth.’
    ‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s,’ I thought, that’s the trouble with us! That’s what’s wrong with the way we are. We live as if Eden wasn’t where we really lived at all but just a camp like hunters make when they stay out in forest for a few wakings. We’re only waiting here to go back to where we really belong.
    ‘Don’t you think we’d need something a bit more than an old tree-trunk with skins glued onto it, Jeffo, to get to Earth?’ was what I said aloud. ‘I mean, think about it. Things that fly aren’t heavy like your boats, are they? Bats and flutterbyes and birds, they hardly weigh a thing. But your boats take two or three people just to carry them down to the water.’
    ‘Do you think the Landing Veekle was light like a flutterbye? It was as big as Circle of Stones, remember,’ Jeffo snorted. ‘And it was made of metal that’s heavy like stone. Nah, they found a way to make heavy things fly, like heavy things can float on water.’
    I guessed it was true. Somehow the Earth people must have found a way of making heavy things fly. But how? Well, I had no more idea than Jeffo or anyone else. I was no different from the rest. We knew so little, and Earth knew so so much. We might as well be blind for all we understood about things. No wonder we longed for Earth. No wonder we pined and pined for that waking when Earth would finally come. No wonder old Jeffo told himself he’d make a sky-boat one waking out of a bloody old log so we wouldn’t even have to wait for them. No wonder Lucy Lu with her big weepy eyes could get blackglass and skins from all over Family with her stories about how our own shadows would fly off to bright bright Earth when our heavy old bodies had died.
    ‘You got lost on Snowy Dark once, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘We were up the edge there two wakings back, up on Cold Path, and Old Roger told the story of it. But what I don’t get about it is how
did
you get lost?’
    He looked away and I thought at first he was going to refuse to answer me.
    ‘Bloody woollybucks led me on, didn’t they?’ he said after a bit. ‘I kept following their headlanterns and then when I lost them, there was nothing left to see at all. I mean
nothing
. Couldn’t even see my own hand if I