Mother of Eden (31 page)

Julie Deepwater

“Starlight?” I whispered, touching her arm.

I was afraid she was dead. She was so still and so pale, so thin thin that her bony face was hardly her own at all.

“Starlight?” I tried again.

Those weird, wingless bats were peering down at us from the pole.

“Starlight?”

She jerked awake with a cry, her eyes wide with terror, snatching at a spear that lay beside her hand and backing away from us across the floor. Gela’s heart, what had happened to her? Who did she think we were?

“It’s just us, Starlight. It’s Julie and Lucky. You’re back home. You’re back on Knee Tree Grounds!”

The fear faded from her eyes, but she still didn’t smile. I went to sit beside her. She was stiff stiff in my arms.

“Have you crossed the Pool all by yourself?” Lucky asked her.

“I wasn’t on my own at first. There were three—” She broke off. “It doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Of course, dear, of course. You’re
tired
tired.”

She tried to smile, passing her trembling hands over her face.

“Look at you, you’re shaking shaking! You’ve got a fever. Why don’t you get in my boat and we’ll take you back to the Sand?”

“The bats will have to come, too,” she said.

Lucky eyed them doubtfully. “Tom’s dick, they’re ugly,” he said, though his own batface was every bit as twisted as theirs. “Are they good to eat? Is that why you cut off their wings?”

“No. I didn’t
 
.
.
. I mean they’re not—”

Again she broke off. I felt that she’d weep if we asked her one more thing. Weep, or perhaps be sick.

“Time for talking later, eh?” I said. “Of course we can bring those bats if you want.”

Starlight stepped down into the boat, then turned and reached out toward the bats. “Come on! In you get. You can’t stay there.”

I glanced uneasily at Lucky.

“Are you
sure
they understand English, Starlight?” he asked her, trying to make a joke of her weird behavior.

“They’re learning.”

Lucky looked at me. Was Starlight right in the head? But the bats came cautiously forward to the edge of the boatfloor, hesitated, then hopped down into our boat. I backed away from them as far as I could. The only bats I’d ever touched were either dead or about to be.

“You talk differently, Starlight,” I said as we pushed away from the big boat and began to paddle through the trees.

Other boats were coming toward us, boats and wary people, some paddling slowly, some clutching spears.

“It’s all right!” I called out. “It’s just Starlight. It’s just Starlight Brooking.”

“Starlight?” called out a big man’s voice. “Did you say Starlight?”

“That’s right, Dixon. It’s your beautiful niece, come back to us from across the water.”

Starlight Brooking

John’s walk, it was so
small,
that little patch of dry sand, with its ring of so-
called shelters that were really no more than bits of bark held up with sticks, or propped against the trunks of trees. In the Meeting Place, some youngmums and oldies had been working together on the job of scraping fatbuck skins they’d stretched out over frames made of sticks, and little naked children had been playing around them on the sand. The mums and oldies were nearly naked, too, with bare feet and bare breasts, and bits of buckskin tied round their middles. The tools they used were just sharpened bones and rough chips of stone.

Uncle Dixon was so excited he didn’t know what to do.

“Get the horns out!” he shouted. “It’s Starlight! Our Starlight! It’s our Starlight, back again from across the Pool! Blow the horns! Get everyone back here! It’s our Starlight!”

“She’s tired, Dix, she needs to rest
 
.
.
.” Julie told him, placing a hand on his arm.

Dixon looked at her distractedly without really hearing her, and carried on calling out excitedly to the people coming from across the Sand and out in forest, his arm round my shoulders all the while.

“Look! It really is her! It’s our Starlight, back again!”

Here was my brother, Johnny, coming over from the shelters where they stored the half-
made boats. Here was Glitterfish with her little boy. Here were Lucky, Delight, Caroline, Greenlantern, Gela, Flame.
.
.
. And of course I knew them all, apart from the small babies. I knew their names, and who they were friends with, and what they were like to be with. But even that familiarity seemed strange. Strange that these oldies had watched over me when I was a little toddler myself. Strange that these youngmums had been my playmates, and that I’d run around naked with them like these little children were doing now, shrieking and yelling with excitement without really knowing why.

Someone began to blow a horn.
Paaaarp-
paaaarp! Paaaarp-
paaaarp!
It was a fuzzy, blurry, friendly sound, a
little
sound, quite different from the hard, bright call of the metal horns of Edenheart as they echoed up and down the Great Cave.

“You just want to sleep, don’t you?” said Glitterfish.

I’d been a bit afraid of my sister before I left, however much I tried to tell myself it wasn’t so. But she seemed younger now, somehow, and smaller. I remembered that she’d never been anywhere in the world but Knee Tree Grounds and Nob Head, and that even Veeklehouse had seemed way too far away for her to even think of going there.

“What’s it like over there?” asked Delight.

“Is it true there’s metal everywhere instead of stone?” asked a little slowhead woman called Flame.

“Too many questions, eh, Star?” said Johnny. “You’ll sleep soon, and then when you wake, it’ll all seem easier.” But even he couldn’t resist a question of his own. “I suppose
 
.
.
. I suppose it’s like Veeklehouse there, is it? Big shelters and buckfat lamps?”

Boats were still being pulled out of the water, and more people were running over.

“What happened to that guy Greenstone?”

“It’s our Starlight! It really is her!”

“How did you get back?”

“Do they have trees and fatbucks over there?”

“You look tired tired!”

“How far away is it?”

“Oh, Jeff’s eyes, look at her!”

“How do they get that metal from under the ground?”

Nausea twisted inside me like a slinker inside a tree. And behind the nausea, I felt a deep deep dread. These people might be pleased to see me, but it was only because they didn’t know why I’d come, and what I’d left behind, and who would be coming after me.

“Is it really true that fellow of yours had forty men just to paddle him?”

“What happened to him, anyway?”

Uncle Dixon, his belly hanging out over his skin wrap, kept beaming at me and squeezing my shoulders and giving me big, beardy kisses. It was my sister who noticed the trouble in my face, and began calling on people to let me have some space.

“Give her a break, eh? She’s just crossed Worldpool by herself!”

A tiny, stooped old blind woman called Jane was reaching up to touch me. “Why did you bring those bats with you? Are they good to eat?”

The bats! Where were they? For the first time, I noticed that another small crowd had formed a little way off, a shrieking, squealing, jeering crowd of children and newhairs, gathered in a circle around some hidden thing, daring one another to go up close to it.

“You leave them alone!” I roared, pulling myself away from Dixon.

Everyone looked scared. Everyone stepped back to let me pass. The batlings were standing back to back, hissing and holding their hands out in front of themselves, while the little half-
healed stumps on their shoulders worked up and down as if the creatures thought they could still fly if only they tried hard enough.

“No one is to touch them! Do you hear?” I said, not just to the children but to all the people of Knee Tree Grounds. “No one is to touch them or tease them or do anything to them at all!”

They all stared at me, eyes wide, mouths open. I’d always been known for my temper, and people had always been wary about upsetting me, but they were seeing something else now. I wasn’t just Starlight Brooking anymore. I wasn’t just the little girl who used to run around on the Sand, or the young woman who used to help her uncle with his boats. They had no idea, of course, that I’d been the Ringwearer, accustomed to adoring crowds, and silence when she chose to speak, and helpers who’d bring her anything she desired. But they could see I’d become something new. They could see I’d grown
big
.

Julie came forward and took me by the hand. “They meant no harm, Starlight dear. It’s just that none of us has ever seen such creatures before.”

“I don’t see what she wants them for,” muttered a woman called Greenlantern.

“She can’t expect us not to be curious about them,” grumbled an oldmum called Watershine.

“No one is to touch them, and no one is to hurt them,” I repeated. “Do you understand that?”

I glared round at them, challenging them to defy me. And everyone whose gaze I met, from little children to their great-
great grandparents, cringed and bowed their heads, just as helpers had done in the Headmanhouse at Edenheart.

In the silence, the two bats ran quickly to a tree and climbed to its highest branches.

I felt sick inside. I could hardly stand for weariness.

we are reely hear
, said Jeff’s writing on the tree. I’d always known what the words said, of course, but now that I could read them for myself, I felt like they were shouting at me inside my head.

I wasn’t really here. I wasn’t really anywhere at all.

“Come on, Starlight,” said Julie. “Let me take you to my shelter. We can get you something to eat, and then you can sleep.”

I’d annoyed the Kneefolk by scolding them like children, but Julie speaking to me like that had turned me back into a child myself, and they were ready to be kind to me again.

“Yes, you go with Julie,” said Caroline. “We won’t disturb you, and we’ll make sure those bats of yours are safe. You can tell us later why they’re important to you.”

Julie kissed me on the cheek and then, stroking my fingers gently gently with her own, she began to lead me across the Sand, the people around us stepping back to let us pass, and Dixon, Glitterfish, and Johnny following after.

“There’s no hurry,” Julie said, still stroking my fingers. “There’s no hurry at all. Sleep as long as you want. We don’t mean to make things hard for you. We just can’t help being excited to—”

She broke off because she’d found the hard, cool smoothness of the ring. Gela’s heart, I should have hidden it! It was pure luck that someone hadn’t found it already and shouted their mouth off to all the Grounds! I snatched my hand away from her, pulled off the ring, and stuck it in a pocket on my wrap.

“I’d better bring the bats,” I said.

I turned back toward the people of Knee Tree Grounds, who’d all begun to talk about me to one another. Everyone fell silent.

“Hey, it’s me,” I called up to the bats. “It’s Starlight. Come down, and you can sleep next to me.”

The bats peered down at me from among the lanterns. Around me, there were stifled laughs.

“Come on, come down,” I repeated firmly, while the people giggled and muttered to one another.

But the two wingless bats crept headfirst down the tree and stood side by side at its base, looking up at me with their flat eyes flickering.

“Well,” said a woman called Lucy, loud enough for everyone to hear, “I never thought I’d see a—”

But she never finished what she was going to say, because another voice interrupted her.

“Come on, come down,” it said, and there was a low groan from the watching Kneefolk.

Everyone had heard that voice, and everyone knew that it came from one of the bats.

I was startled myself, but at least I already knew that greatbats
could
speak words. No one else here had ever heard of such a thing. I turned round again and led the way to Julie’s shelter, the batlings behind me, and my uncle and brother and sister following after them with scared, strained faces. And as we passed between the shelters at the edge of the Meeting Place, someone called out after us, cruelly mimicking the raspy voice of the bat.

“Kerm ern, kerm down,” she called, and everyone laughed.

Julie gave me some waternuts and fish and a flowercake and I gobbled them down.

“Where’s Angie?” I asked when I’d finally eaten enough.

“She’s gone, Starlight. She went to live on Mainground. It was only ten wakings ago, so you’ve only just missed her. Such a shame. She would have so loved to have seen you.”

For the first time since they’d found me out in forest, tears came from my eyes. I dashed them impatiently away.

“Why did she go?”

“A woman came over from Nob Head. She was one of those shadowspeakers. She did the usual routine, rolling her eyes and talking to dead people and Mother Gela. But when she went back to Mainground, Angie went with her.”

“Angie? With a
shadowspeaker
? But she used to laugh at them when we saw them over at Nob Head! And at the people who were fooled by them as well.”

“I know she did. And she told me herself that she’d only come to see this Mary woman for fun. But everything changed when the woman suddenly came over and spoke to her. ‘You’re beautiful’ was all the woman said, but I guess no one had ever said that to Angie before.”

“I wish I’d been here. I’d have talked her out of it.”

“Maybe you could have done, Starlight, but Angie wasn’t the only one. Two three others went with her. Things have changed here on Grounds, things don’t hold together like they once did.”

“If only I’d been here, I
 
.
.
.”

But I couldn’t go on. I was just too tired, and this was just more cold stone inside me when there was so much of it there already. I crawled into Julie’s shelter to sleep.

Once—
I guess it was many hours later—
I heard Julie outside, telling someone in a whisper to go away and leave me alone.

Once the bats disturbed me with their clicking and creaking.

Three four times my own dreams jolted me awake. Dreams of falling. Dreams of fire. Dreams of cold hands reaching up from dark dark water.

“Everything’s all right, Starlight, everything’s all right,” came my brother Johnny’s voice from outside the shelter.

They were taking turns to watch over me.

“It’s only a dream, Starlight,” murmured my uncle Dixon another time. “I’m here, and you’re safe and among your friends.”

Beyond him and not far away I could hear many voices talking, and there was a smell of roasting fatbuck. It was waking’s end on Knee Tree Grounds, and folk were gathering yet again to remind themselves who and where they were.

I sank down again into sleep.

And then, quite suddenly, many hours later, I was properly and finally awake,
wide
awake, with no more sleep left inside me.