Dark Eden

Towards the end of each waking, we carried him between us, Jeff holding on with an arm round each of our necks, or me or Gerry would take a turn carrying him on our backs.
    We didn’t have any proper hunting stuff, no bags or string or bows or anything, only the simple spiketip spears we’d had with us when we went to Stoop and Bella’s funeral, so all we could get to eat were a few bits of fruit and stumpcandy and one grey old groundrat. (It had made a tunnel into an ant’s nest, and I got Gerry to dig with his hands on the opposite side to where it had gone in until it panicked and scuttled back out of its hole, all covered in flashing red ants. Then I did for it with my spear.) We couldn’t even cook the rat properly, only scorch it in a hollow in a spiketree, like hunters do when they don’t want to take fire with them on a trip.
    Most of the time the fug stayed down. Sometimes it moved away a bit, and we could see twenty thirty yards of space under the trees. Sometimes it was like we were stuck in a tiny world a few yards wide, with nothing in it but us and a few trees and the odd starflower, and nothing beyond but white shining fug. And then it was sticky and hot, and it was hard hard to walk and carry Jeff.
    Once, we heard the hollowbranch horns back in the camp, like the sound of another world:
parp parp paaaaarp, parp parp paaaaarp.
Two short one long: it was the special sound for getting wanderers to return, when there wasn’t a Strornry or an Any Virsry. They were ordering the three of us to come back. We heard it again at the end of that waking when we were trying to get some sleep. And a couple of times we heard hunters in forest around us, talking and grumbling as they looked for us.
    ‘Bloody newhairs. Why can’t we just let them go?’
    ‘Leopards might have done for them already for all we know.’
    But we kept still and quiet and waited, and they passed on.
    Third waking, the fug lifted and, quite unusually, there was a dip again straight away. Starry Swirl was bright in a black black sky, the air was cold and sharp, and ahead of us we saw the lights of forest rising up into Peckham Hills, the great black shadow of Snowy Dark looming up against the stars behind them.
    ‘Do you two realize what we’ve done?’ I said. ‘Have you actually got it through your heads? We’ve left behind our mums and our sisters and our brothers. We’ve left our friends and our aunties and our uncles, maybe for good.’
    I stopped and looked back into forest we’d come through, though all there was to see was branches and lanterns and starflowers and flutterbyes.
    ‘And we’ve left the warm fires in our groups,’ I said, ‘and the old blokes playing chess, and the kids kicking footballs, and the grownups acting out the old stories like
Hitler and Jesus
and
Angela’s Ring
and
The Big Row
, and boats fishing out on Great Pool, and one-legged Jeffo boiling up redlantern glue, down there by Dixon Stream. We’ve left behind Family, maybe forever. Think of that. Maybe we’ll never lie in our shelters again and hear other groups getting up and coming home. Maybe we’ll never eat with our groupmates again around the fire.’
    Jeff stopped. His twisted feet were all cut up with walking and, even now the dip had come and the air was cool, his face was still pouring with sweat. It was from pain as much as anything, I reckoned, but there was a bit of fever in there too.
    He stood there looking round, taking it all in. Starry Swirl shone down above us, so bright bright that it gave a faint light of its own on the branches and the forest floor, over and above the light from the flowers. All round us birds were squawking and squeaking and peeping and pooting like they do when a fug ends, and flutterbyes were everywhere, and bats were coming down from the hills in big flocks, swooping and diving to catch the feast. And it was like Starry Swirl had called them all out of their hiding places, like Starry Swirl ruled over us all.
    ‘We’re here!’ he said. ‘This is happening. We really are here!’
    ‘You’re a nutter, aren’t you, Jeff?’ I said, and I swiped him across the head, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to show he was annoying me. ‘Why do you have to keep saying that all the time? Don’t you know how weird it sounds?’
    He shrugged and rubbed his head.
    ‘I say it to remind myself,’ he said, and started to hobble forward again. ‘Otherwise I’d forget.’
    On we went with our slow