Mother of Eden (16 page)

Greenstone Johnson

Chief Dixon was there to meet us outside his big cavehouse, with my cousin Lucy and their daughter Candy: Lucy, tall and sad and already gray, though she wasn’t much more than twenty hundredwakes older than me, Candy with her sharp sharp eyes, always quick to notice weakness. A huge feast had been laid out for us to admire. There was a whole buck stuffed with sweetened flowerstems, a bowl of glitterbird hearts covered in stumpcandy, and a spearfish with its long long tail wrapped round and round its head. As soon as she saw the fish, Starlight turned to me in dismay, but before I had time to realize what this was about, Dixon had taken me off to his writingcave, leaving poor Starlight alone with his housewoman, and his daughter, and the fish that had killed her mum.

“Let’s speak honestly, Greenstone, shall we?” Dixon said as helpers and bats brought us drinks and plates of meat.

A small bright tree pulsed in a corner. Piled on tables around us were the barks he used for writing down the numbers of his bats and metal and helpers.

“Certainly,” I said. “It would be so much simpler.”

“Okay, then, well, I’ll set it out. Your family owes my family, and I expect you to recognize that when you become Headman. It’s not just what your father did, taking Lucy’s dad and brothers from her. It’s what you’ve done yourself. Turning down Candy, turning down the daughters of Lucy’s sisters, and going against my advice in front of all the chiefs and teachers.”

“I loved Lucy’s dad and her brothers, as Lucy well knows, and it wasn’t my choice they went to the Rock.”

Chief Dixon gave a weary sigh, like I was a tiresome child. “No, of course not, but you benefited from it.”

The truth was that no one would have been happier than me if Lucy’s dad, Harry, could have been Headman in place of my dad, and if her brother Roger could have been Headmanson instead of me, but of course I couldn’t say this. Bad as I was at winning games, I knew that it wasn’t a good idea to show that you’d rather not be playing at all. And anyway, Dixon wouldn’t have been able to understand, for he lived for power, like my dad.

“Yes, I’ve benefited,” I said, “and I know I need to make this up with Lucy and her sisters. As for my choice of housewoman, I didn’t do it to insult you, but I do know you
feel
it as an insult, and I’ll do what I can when I’m Headman to make things right with you.”

“Good. Well, you heard some of the things I want at Council. I need more bats, and I need more metaldiggers. I’m pleased you plan to get more forest people to work for us, but your plan won’t be quick enough. Never mind making them all give you a cube every hundredwake. Just divide the forest out top between the chiefs, and let us use our own ringmen to bring in the people we need.”

“Well, it’s an idea. I’ll discuss it with Dad.”

“Good. That would go some way to mending things between us. But there are other things, too. I want you to make a new job called First Chief—
someone who’ll lead all the other chiefs under you, and speak for them—
and I want you to give that job to me. You need someone between you and the chiefs. We can discuss the details.”

“I’ll talk to Dad.”

“Your dad won’t be here much longer, Greenstone. We all know the path that sickness takes, and we all know how far along it he’s already gone. Part of the reason why I suggest this idea of a First Chief is that it’ll give you some backup when you’re still learning.”

“It’s a good idea, but I need to think about the other chiefs and teachers and what they might think.”

“That was another thing I was going to say. You need to be firm on the teachers. They have no ringmen, and they don’t bring in any metal or plantstuff. All the stones for their houses, all the bark for them to write on, all the plantstuff for their wraps, it all has to come from us chiefs.”

“Well, First John did say that teachers must be equal to chiefs. Knowledge is as important as metal and stones.”

“Equal, yes, but if you take things from us to give to them, that’s hardly equal.”

Only last waking, when the Head Teacher had come for one of his visits to Starlight, he’d made a point of telling me how important it was that the Teachinghouse be made bigger, and that more bats be provided for the teachers. He’d made a big thing of it. John intended teachers to be as important as chiefs, he’d said, and all the teachers would be watching me closely to see if I’d carry out John’s wish. “And don’t forget, Headmanson,” he’d said as he left me, “teachers and their underteachers can get the attention of everyone in New Earth in a way that chiefs and ringmen can’t.”

“I’ll think about it,” I told Chief Dixon, which was just what I’d said to Head Teacher Michael.

“That can’t be your answer to everything, Greenstone: ‘I’ll think about it.’ A Headman’s task is to decide.”

“Yes, Dixon, and I’ve decided to think.”

He could see I was angry, and that made him angry, too, or at least stirred up the anger he already felt.

“I hope you understand the position you’ve chosen to put yourself in, Greenstone. You could have ended that old division, that old dispute between two brothers, but you chose not to. There have always been some who’ve whispered that Harry was the true Headman, not Firehand, and now—”

“And now Firehand is about to die, so it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered, Headmanson, if you’d made a different choice, but now the question will keep coming up again and again, every time you disappoint the chiefs of New Earth. You know the kind of things people ask. What kind of test was it to throw the ring into boiling water? How come we still accept the decision of a Head Teacher who went crazy soon after? How come Greenstone and his sons get to be Headmen, if his dad shouldn’t have been Headman in the first place? I don’t think that way myself, of course, but plenty of people do. It’s going to be quite a problem for you.”

He smiled at me, but it wasn’t a smile of friendliness. No. If they ever ended up throwing
me
from the Rock, that would be his smile as he watched me fall.

Lucy Johnson

Me and Candy stood at the top windhole of our house, watching Greenstone and his girl heading off in their car with Dixon riding behind them.

“I don’t really blame the girl,” I said, “but my cousin I can’t forgive. He knows what I’ve been through. He knows how I’ve suffered. And yet he couldn’t even do the one thing that would have helped.”

“People say he just doesn’t understand what it is to be Headmanson.”

Candy seemed so young to me, repeating those stale phrases that went round the young chiefswomen like they were interesting new thoughts:
Greenstone doesn’t understand what it is to be Headmanson, Greenstone was spoiled by his mum, Greenstone spent too much time with women.
I was way younger than Candy when Firehand did for my dad and brothers, barely more than a newhair, but I had to grow up fast, containing my grief so as to help my mother and sisters with theirs. Dixon was kind to me back then—
he was much older than me, of course, and even though I was his housewoman, he became a sort of second dad—
but I had to put up with him meeting with Firehand, like nothing had happened, for chats about metal and ground and bats and whatever other bloody things chiefs talk about. Gela’s heart, sometimes I had to bow my own head to the killer. My mother, too, until it finally sent her crazy.

I stayed sane myself, but ever since the waking my dad and brothers died, the world had seemed cold and dark to me. I could be in the warmest and brightest part of the caves, but inside myself I was always on my own, in my own little patch of snow and ice.

“I trusted Greenstone,” I said to Candy. “Everyone said he was a kind boy and not a cold leopard like his dad, and I believed them. After all, my brothers were his friends, and he grieved for them as well, so he knew how we felt. Surely he’d want to put things right! But then this. This slap in the face. This shrug. This—”

“Try not to get yourself in a state, Mum. It’s not as if I would have
enjoyed
being his housewoman.”

“I’m not saying what his father did was Greenstone’s fault. He was only a young newhair himself when it happened: younger than me, younger even than my brothers. But here was a chance to heal the wound. Here was the perfect chance. He would make you his housewoman, and then your son would be Firehand’s grandson and Harry’s grandson both. That old fight would be over, no one would have won or lost, and we could have laid it aside and got on with other things. It would have been so so easy.”

“Like I say, Mum, I would have liked the ring, of course, and I would have liked to have been the mother of the next Headmanson, but—”

“If he didn’t want to be with you, he could have chosen one of your sisters or cousins. I would have preferred it to be you, of course, and so would your dad, but Greenstone could have chosen any of Harry’s granddaughters and we would both have been quite content. But no, he had to do
this!
He had to go with this fishing girl from across the water.”

“Well, she’s as pretty as they all say she is, you have to give her that. And she seemed to me to be
smart
smart. She was interested in everything about our house and—”

“I just can’t believe Greenstone could have thought only of himself, when the peace of all New Earth was at stake, and peace between the children of First John. Didn’t he think of the pain he’d cause me and my sisters? Didn’t he know how long we’d been waiting?”

“Please don’t cry, Mum. We’ll find another way. Dad cares about this as much as you do, don’t forget. He’ll find a way to get back what’s ours, one way or another. He might just be Dad to us, but to the chiefs and teachers Chief Dixon’s a powerful powerful man.”

“I’d just hoped so much that—”

“He says he and his friends will just keep pushing and pushing Greenstone for things he can’t give, until in the end all the chiefs get fed up with him, and find a reason to toss him down to the fire. Maybe then they’ll give the Headman’s hat to Dad, eh? He comes from John, after all, just as much as Greenstone does. And then
you’d
get to wear the ring, Mum. Imagine that. That would be even better than me wearing it!”

Poor girl. It was natural she should put a brave face on it, but she’d looked forward so much to putting on that ring. Couldn’t Greenstone have thought of that, if nothing else? Couldn’t he have thought of the shame for poor Candy, who everyone had agreed was bound to be chosen?

I remembered that thing my crazy mum told me not long before she died, that silly dangerous Secret Story that was supposed to come from Gela. I tried to make her stop, but she wouldn’t, and in the end I decided there’d be no harm in listening, as long as I
 
told no one else. It was ridiculous stuff, of course—
“Never forget
 
that women are as good as men. Don’t ever treat people dif
ferently because of the color of their skin”—
and most of it I put out of my mind at once, but there was just one bit that stayed with me, for some reason: “Don’t trust men who think the story’s all about them.”

And that was Greenstone, wasn’t it? Like all headmen, he’d only be remembered for what he’d done or not done for New Earth. Yet he thought his own life, his own happiness, his own little pleasures, were more important. Gela’s heart, even Firehand knew better than that.

Starlight Brooking

“That was a strange, sad house,” I said to Greenstone as our car moved on at last from that gloomy wall of stone. “They smile and ask questions and offer nice things, but there’s so much anger behind their eyes.”

“Lucy has always been bitter, ever since her dad and her brothers died. It can’t be easy for her, having us here. Or for Candy, either.”

“How do they know what happened to my mum?”

“Your
mum
?”

“Yes, my mum, Dream. How do they know how she died?”

“What makes you think they do?”

“That spearfish. They’d had it brought specially from the Pool in a box of snow. Why go to all that trouble if it wasn’t to mock me or warn me?”

“Oh, Starlight, lots of chiefs go to that trouble. I don’t like the taste of spearfish, myself, or I might do the same.”

“But someone has to go up into the dark to collect the snow. Someone has to take a car to poolside and back again. Someone has to go out in a boat with meat on a string, and fishing spears, and risk being dragged into the water and eaten themselves. And all that just to bring a fish to the table of one chief? If they want fish, there are fish in the rivers that taste as good!”

“Chiefs and teachers like to show off how many people they have working for them. It’s a sort of competition between them to see who’s got the most. That’s why they always want things from the Headman. They have all they need to be comfortable—
they have it many times over—
but they can never have enough to be sure that they’re better than anyone else, because the others are busy getting more as well. And that means they’re always hungry.”

John Cave narrowed at the top end until the path climbed out of the brightness of Underworld into a strange, dark valley beneath the huge shadows of the mountains. The reason it was dark was that for every tree standing, twenty had been cut down. The empty holes of tree stumps were all around us, and, without tree roots to feed on, there were hardly any starflowers, either. But up on the slopes, red flame glinted in the mouths of huge dirt ovens, and in the gloomy light I saw enormous piles of stones lying in front of holes in the rock. There was a dry stink of dust and ash.

“Welcome to Johndigs,” Greenstone said. “It’s one of the biggest metaldigs in New Earth.”

Chief Dixon came up beside us on his buck. “The people are waiting for you at the cluster over there, Ringwearer. A word from the Ringwearer always encourages them, so please do tell them that Mother Gela wants them to work harder, so that we get the metal we need to build up New Earth. And remind them, too, to have as many children as they can. Remind them it’s against our rules for women to refuse to slip, or slip the back way. Too many of them still do that, but we need more diggers, and we need more ringmen.”

“Do that for him, Starlight,” Greenstone said to me as Dixon rode off ahead. “He needs a sign from us that we’re willing to work with him.”