Dark Eden

sister and your brother
really
going to waste your lives up on Dark?’
    Gela had always seemed like a grownup, even when she was little, but now she hung her head like a little kid.
    ‘I think John is right about needing to find more space,’ she mumbled quietly quietly, so we could barely hear what she said.
    Caroline shrugged.
    ‘Well, suit yourself, but I’m disappointed in you, and your mum will never get over it.’
    All this while Secret Ree had been writing down everything we agreed, scratching it on a piece of bark with a leopard’s tooth, her tongue sticking out with concentration.
    THEY STICK TO LAWS
    THEY NO A.V. OR STRORN
    NOT PAST BLOB
    5 WAKES THEN NO MORE JOIN
    1 SKND BUCK EACH PRD
    WE 2 GLSS OR 2 SKNS
    ‘You scratch your name on that, John,’ Caroline said, ‘to show you agree.’
    I didn’t look at Tina. I knew she wasn’t going to like me agreeing to things like this without talking to her and to everyone else first, and I didn’t want to give her a chance to make little angry signs at me that Caroline’s lot would be bound to notice. She might not like me taking charge but this was just how it was going to have to be. And that was why I didn’t go down to meet her and Jeff and Gerry when they first came over. I wanted to be quite clear that
they
were joining
me
. And it was the same for all the rest over here at Neck. None of the others would be here if it wasn’t for me.
    ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but Secret Ree’ll have to write another bark out for us with
your
name on it.’
    ‘Oh
honestly
, John!’ Caroline said.
    But all the same she didn’t refuse. I’d won that one easily and I thought to myself, now was the moment to act like we were the
big
ones.
    ‘Why don’t you come up and see our buckling?’ I said. ‘We can give you some meat and fruit to eat before you walk back. You’d be welcome. Gela, could you run up and get the fire going?’
    And that was the agreement made between us and Family. I could imagine the story already:
John and Caroline Agree.

27

Tina Spiketree

    ‘That’ll never last,’ I told John. ‘She won’t be able to control David and his lot that long. I’m not sure she even means to keep the deal herself.’
    ‘Of course it won’t last,’ he said shortly, ‘but it’ll hold for a bit, and that’ll give us some time.’
    He looked tired. He looked tired
tired
.
    ‘And we
need
time,’ he said. ‘We need all the time we can get, if we’re going to get ourselves ready for Snowy Dark.’
    I took his hand, sort of expecting that he’d shake me off again, but funnily enough he didn’t. He squeezed my hand back and later on, when we went to lie down on our skins under the cavelanterns, we reached out to one another and had a little slide together, not like we’d done before, all panting and sweating and grabbing, not like newhairs normally do at all, but slow and quiet like you sometimes see grownups doing in the starflowers, grownups who’ve known each other and been friends for a long time, having a little slip and a little chat and a little cuddle before going back to their groups again.

    John was right about that agreement. We stuck to our side of it – we even sent a few kids back that tried to come over to us after those first five wakings – and it did give us some time. In fact it lasted ten periods or so, more than a whole wombtime, and in that time we got two more little bucklings, and the first one grew big, and we made all three of them into horses that would let us put things on their backs, and would come when we called them and would nuzzle up against us with their cool dry feelers when they wanted us to feed them.
    And we got more skins, and we made wraps for all of us (there were twenty-one of us now, including five more girls who came over in those five wakings after the agreement: Martha and Lucy London, Julie, Angie and Candy Blueside). And some of the girls got pregnant, and Janny and Clare had babies, the first born outside Family. And John went up many times to Snowy Dark, usually with Gerry, sometimes with me, sometimes with others, and stayed up there often for a whole waking and a whole sleeping above the line of the ice and snow, figuring out how to keep alive up there, how to make the footwraps better, how to use spears point down in the snow to stop from slipping over, and how to tie people together with ropes so if one began to slip the others could hold them back. In fact he’d often hardly got down to