Dark Eden

he was a kid in other ways.) Dixon gave me one look, one weird blank look – it was as if, just for a moment there, he was actually wondering if he could ask me for my help – and then he was off too, running through forest on his big fat heavy legs.
    ‘No you bloody don’t!’ said John, and he and Gerry and Harry were straight off after him.
    But my Dix stopped, my gentle Dix, and he squatted down between me and Jeff.
    ‘Tina? Jeff? Are you okay?’
    Jeff was sitting up. He was all bruised and bloody and trembling, but not badly hurt. He crawled to his Brownhorse.
    ‘Poor old Brownhorse,’ he murmured, and he made a soft little buck noise in his mouth. ‘Poor old Brownhorse.’
    The creature was pretty much dead already. It wasn’t moving its limbs, just trembling a bit all over, but Jeff gently stroked its wool and went on talking to it like maybe its mother would have talked to it:
Hrum
,
hrum
,
hrum
.
    And while Jeff stroked Brownhorse, Dix put his arm round my shoulder and gently stroked
me
. I really wasn’t badly hurt at all, just had a few scratches and bruises, and my hurt arm aching badly again like it had done when I first fell: nothing more than that. But something horrible had nearly happened to me, something that we didn’t even have a name for. I was shaking shaking all over, my teeth rattling together. And I leant my head on Dix’s shoulder and let him comfort me, while little Jeff tried to comfort the dying animal.
    And pretty soon, back came John and Gerry and Harry.

    As soon as we saw them we knew something big had happened. They’d
changed
. They’d changed completely. They were trembling worse than me, they were shaking all over, and their faces were all blotchy and twisted and puffed up, so you couldn’t tell if they were scared or angry or excited or ashamed or what, but you could see that whatever it was, it was
big
big big.
    ‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What? Gela’s heart, what have you done?’
    ‘Yeah, what’s happened?’ Dix asked, gently releasing me, and jumping to his feet.
    John stared at him, like he was having difficulty seeing he was there.
    ‘We . . . er . . .’ he began, and then stopped.
    ‘You . . . er . . . what? Gela’s heart, John,
tell
us?’
    ‘We . . . we . . . did for them,’ he said.
    He turned to me, then to Jeff, then to me again with weird wide staring eyes that he couldn’t keep still.
    ‘You what? You
did
for them? No, no, you couldn’t have. That wouldn’t . . . What? You
did
for them? You mean . . . What? . . . Like animals, you mean? All three? Like animals?’
    We were the fifth generation of Eden, the fifth generation after Father Tommy and Mother Angela. But no one had ever killed another human being. No one, not ever.
    ‘Yeah, all three,’ said John. ‘I did for Dixon with my spear while he ran.’
    His voice came out all jerky and strange.
    ‘Then . . . Then Harry did John Blueside. He turned to try and face us with his spear, but . . . Harry . . . Harry was on top of him with his club before he could throw it, and he did for him too. He cracked his head open. And . . . and . . . Met . . . well, Gerry did for him, didn’t you, Gerry? He did for him with his spear, like I did Dixon.’
    John held up his own blackglass spear with his shaking hand, like it would do the rest of the talking for him. He touched the tip with his finger and held it out to show me the blood. Not greeny-black Eden blood, not blood born down in Underworld, not the blood you see when a spear comes out of a buck or a starbird or a bat, but real red blood that came down from sky. Real red blood from Earth.
    ‘We
are
here,’ said Jeff, like he’d been thinking carefully all this time about what dead Met had jeered at him, and was finally agreeing with him. ‘Yes, we really are here.’

28

John Redlantern

    We didn’t have hollowbranch horns like they had in Family, but we’d made ourselves a drum out of a length of trunk and a bit of stonebuck skin. As soon as we’d got back to our camp – Gerry and Dix carrying Jeff between them to speed things up, and Harry and me carrying the dead buck Brownhorse – we got out the drum and Harry began to beat it, as hard and fast as he could.
    BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG . . .

    He was
frantic
frantic. His eyes were staring, he was panting like he couldn’t get enough air, his face was pouring with sweat, and he banged that drum so hard he nearly broke through the skin.
    ‘Easy, Harry. That’s