Dark Eden

enough, that’s enough,’ I told him. ‘We don’t want them guessing back in Family that something bad’s up.’
    I didn’t feel much different from Harry myself, though. Every few seconds I heard the squelchy thud of my spear in Dixon Blueside’s back, the hissing noise of the air coming out from his lungs, the way he rolled over when I pulled it out, the choking gurgle when I shoved it right back again into his belly. But unlike Harry, I knew I had to get back in control of myself, or we’d all be done for.
    ‘They won’t miss Dixon and the others for another waking or two,’ I told everyone back at the caves.
    Tall, grownup Gela Brooklyn was there, and her small little sister Clare with her baby on her hip, and Mike, and Suzie Fishcreek, and batfaced Janny, and Tina’s sister Jane, and Dave Fishcreek and Julie Blueside.
    ‘Not for another waking or two,’ I said. ‘And even then, they won’t know what’s happened. That’s why we had to do for all three of them, otherwise they’d have run straight back to David, and he’d have sent a whole lot more of them after us at once. We really had no choice. We really didn’t.’
    I looked round at their shocked faces – Gela, Suzie, Janny, Dave, all of them – daring anyone to disagree.
    ‘As it is,’ I said, ‘we’ve got two wakings before anyone starts to worry, and by then a leopard or a fox will have got to the bodies, and then starbirds after that, so they won’t be able to tell any more that it was spears and a club that did for them. They’ll just be scattered bones.’
    ‘Yes, but their mates will guess, won’t they?’ Dix said. ‘David Redlantern and all of them.’
    He had his arm round Tina. She was shaking shaking. I was shaking too.
    ‘Yeah, they will. They’ll know it was to do with us, because they’ll know that Dixon and Met and John Blueside came over this way and that the three of them came past Lava Blob on purpose to make trouble. David planned it with them, I’m sure. Maybe he hoped to get us to chase back after them into their part of forest. He’ll have been wanting to make trouble for a long time. He’ll have been wanting to be able to go to Caroline and Family and say the agreement wasn’t working.’
    ‘So if they know it was to do with us,’ said Gela in her slow deep voice, ‘they’ll still come after us when the three of them don’t come back. Even if they pretend to Family that they’re just trying to find out what happened.’
    ‘Yes of course. So we haven’t got much time. We need to get ourselves together and go.’
    ‘Go
where
?’ Dix asked.
    Gela’s tits, where had he
been
all this time? What did he think this whole business was all
about
?
    ‘Over the top, of course. Over Snowy Dark. Like we’ve been planning, yeah? Like we’ve been planning
ever since we came here
.’ I looked round at their faces, and I realized that it wasn’t just Dix. Tom’s dick and Harry’s! None of them had really believed this was ever going to happen. Not one. It was always going to be somewhen off in the future, never ever now.
    Still, it was too late for talking and explaining. They were just going to have to get it through their heads by themselves.
    I started going through all the things we’d need to get together.
    ‘Gela, you sort out wraps for everyone. Mike, get all our spare skins and blackglass and rope. Dave, we need all our meat and stumpcandy and seedcakes. Clare, can you sort out some embers . . .’

    In a couple of hours, the drum had called everyone back. All twenty-one of us were there, plus Janny and Clare’s babies, and we had the meeting, a sort of Strornry, our last in Circle Valley. It was a dark dark time. No one had ever argued with me about whether we would really go over the mountains, not once, but I suppose they’d all privately hoped that it would never really get to that. We had the agreement with Family written on bark after all, and for ten periods it had seemed to work. Family had handed over blackglass and skins to us as they’d agreed. We’d had plenty of meat to spare to keep our side of the deal. I suppose they’d all persuaded themselves that things would just go on in the same way forever with our own little family at Cold Path Neck, Old Family going its own way on the far side of Lava Blob and a bit of toing and froing going on between us here and our mums and friends and groupmates over there. Most of them seemed to have decided that going across Snowy Dark