Starlight Brooking
About fifty topmen came down to Headmanhouse, most of them bringing their housewomen, and we gathered them together in the Red Cave, and treated them like they were big people. Me and Greenstone and Earthseeker moved among them and asked them about their families and the places they came from. Helpers and bats brought them food and drink and handed out presents from the House’s store: a new plantstuff wrap for each housewoman, a new metal knife for each topman, with
G
for
Greenstone
cut into the blade. When we’d made them all welcome, a horn blew and Greenstone and Earthseeker went to the top of the cave and began to talk to them all together.
“You work for
all
of New Earth,” Greenstone told the topmen. “You’re the ones who make sure our ringmen do their work properly every single waking and every single sleep. There’d be no New Earth without you!”
They all cheered that, of course. Everyone likes to think they have a special place in the world. Even back on Grounds that was so.
“The chiefs are the bosses in their own grounds,” Earthseeker told them. “But my job as Ground Chief is to help the Headman make sure that all the ringmen work together right across the caves and out top. Back in your chiefs’ own grounds, you must do what your own chiefs tell you, of course, just as you do now, but outside of your chiefs’ grounds, you must take instructions only from the Headman or from me.”
Unless they were
dumb
dumb, those people must have figured out that the Headman was trying to take some power away from the chiefs, but we’d thought carefully about how to tell them our new rules in a way that wouldn’t make it seem
too
much like we didn’t trust their chiefs. The only way of doing it that we’d come up with was one that I didn’t like at all.
“As you know, men,” Earthseeker said, “a waking will come when we cross the water to Old Ground to take back the Veekle and Circle Valley. In readiness for that, it’s important that we make sure that all the ringmen, and their topmen and chiefs, all work together as one. Each chief has his own ground, of course, but we are all one ground, really, the ground of New Earth, and, big or small, we’re all one people, too—
the Johnfolk—
and we must stay that way if we’re going to beat the Davidfolk.”
We didn’t leave them to think about this for too long, because straight afterward, I stood up in front of them myself and told them how proud their mother was of them, and how much she relied on them to look after her other children, holding New Earth together so we could build and learn until we found our way back to Earth. And then I went out among them and made sure every topman had a chance to speak to me and kiss the ring and every housewoman had a chance to hold the ring and try it on her own finger.
I could see that they loved me. I could see that for many of them, being this close to me was a bit like having someone from a dream come to life, or a character from some old story appear in the world and walk among them.
“Oh, Mother,” one woman sobbed. “Never in all my life did I think I’d hold this ring in my own hand.”
I overheard a few of them telling one another in awed voices that I was just an ordinary person like them—
“Just as ordinary and natural as someone you might meet in your own cluster,” one woman said—
but I knew quite well that my being “ordinary” didn’t really make me seem ordinary at all in their eyes, but was yet another thing that made me seem special and different and worthy of their love.
That love had once felt quite wonderful to me, and part of me still found it so, still basked in it, still loved them back in gratitude, for I was still the daughter of Dream Brooking and Blackglass Lunnon, with the same longings, the same needs, the same holes and gaps inside myself, but I saw it more clearly now and understood it for what it was. These people didn’t know Starlight Brooking, and they had no idea what I was like when I wasn’t playing the part of the Ringwearer. This love of theirs wasn’t really like the love between a mother and a child. It was more like those lines of force you see in your mind when you’re playing chess, coming out from each piece and stretching across the board. Those lines are powerful, they can control or destroy, but they don’t really come from the pieces. They come from the game itself, and they only exist at all while the pieces are still on the board.
Quietstream Batwing
When I was a little girl, I lived through a dreadful time we called the Great Shaking. The only warning of it was that two three times we felt the rock move slightly under our feet, like Eden had an itch and was twitching its skin. We didn’t take much notice of that. It happened from time to time, and nothing had ever come of it before. But then suddenly Steam Fall gave out a great roar, which you could hear echoing through every single cave, as if some huge buck had been trapped in a corner and was turning to face its hunters. And the rock all round us shook so hard that people fell to the ground.
Many houses crumbled, and huge pieces of stone came crashing down from the roofs of caves. Whole top end of Tree Cave was opened up to the black sky; part of the Great Cave path was covered in big lumps of stone, which took twenty wakings to clear; and in Gerry Cave a houseplace with fifty people in it was buried under a single piece of rock. A horrible smell spread everywhere, like the smell of rotten fish. All through the caves, it burned in our throats and made us gasp for breath, and down near the Fall, birds and bats fell dead to the ground and thirty forty people were suffocated.
Later, when the roaring and shaking had stopped and fresh air had blown back into the caves from out top, I went with my mum down to the Fall and we found it had changed its shape. In some places big slabs had fallen from the cliffs; in others new dark rock had been thrust up from below, which looked smooth and soft like mud but rang out hard when we chucked stones down against it. There were hunks of that same dark rock lying in the river and on the ground, some of them still hot from the fire below.
People my age and older than me remember the Great Shaking and wonder when it will happen again, and whether this time it’ll be us who are done for by the poisoned air, or buried by a falling roof. And when the brothers fell out, Firehand and Harry, and the chiefs quarreled and their ringmen squared up to one another at the cave mouths, people said to one another that this was another kind of Shaking, another time when the world stopped working as it should, no one could tell what would happen next, and neither roof nor floor could be relied on to stay where they were.
Now it was like that again. Whole of Headmanhouse was restless restless, like a tree of glitterbirds that have seen a slinker climbing toward them. Angry chiefs and teachers came and went, there was shouting in the Red Cave every waking, and ringmen arriving from other caves told us how their chiefs were scheming with one another, and how the Head Teacher was traveling in his car from one big house to another, his face purple with rage. The big people were there to protect us, or so we’d always been told. They might live in big houses, they might make us work hard, but they were there to organize things so we would be safe and get the things we needed. But if they fought among themselves, who was left to protect us, and what could we do to protect ourselves?
Starlight Brooking
The same waking the topmen and their women went back to their own grounds, me and Greenstone set out on our journey round the houseplaces. Sending ringmen ahead of us to announce we were on our way, we took our car and twelve ringmen and headed up Bat Cave, a bright bright side cave that was lined with one tall rooftree after another, filling the air from floor to roof with masses of shining pink flowers.
We were heading toward a big metal ground out top and a place there called Batsky, and we were more than halfway there when a sturdy young man came bounding down toward us on the back of a big blue buck. He had tightly curled brown hair and was wearing a fine wrap in red and white with a necklace of polished metal.
“Greenstone!” he bellowed as he wheeled round the car and drew up beside us. “Greenstone, you dick! What do you think you’re bloody playing at, coming up here without even telling me until last moment?”
Four of the chief’s ringmen pulled up their bucks beside him.
“Hello, Whiteblade,” Greenstone began. “I—”
“What do you think
you’re
bloody playing at, Chief Whiteblade?” I demanded, rising to my feet in the car. “This is the Headman of New Earth you’re talking to!”
I shouldn’t have spoken so harshly, but I was afraid that Greenstone would give too much ground. Our plan was to go right past the chiefs, not seeking their agreement, not discussing things with them, not seeking their support, but going straight to the small people and the ringmen. We knew it would upset the chiefs, of course, but we’d deal with that later. First, we needed to prove to them that we had power of our own, power that didn’t just come from them. Second, we’d give some power to the ringmen and small people to balance the power of the chiefs. And only then would we talk to the chiefs, smooth them down as best we could, reward the ones who supported us, maybe punish a few who didn’t.
That was the plan, but that didn’t mean it made any sense for me to shout at Whiteblade and make Greenstone look weak by standing up for him when he could perfectly well stand up for himself. The young chief looked at Greenstone and pulled a pretend-amazed face, as if what had happened was so strange that he almost doubted his own senses. Greenstone looked nearly as shocked as Whiteblade did, but he was loyal to me, as always.
“She’s right, Chief Whiteblade,” he said. “You wouldn’t have called my dad a dick, and you don’t call me a dick, either.”
“Oh, come on, Greenstone. We’re friends, right? We used to play football together. And chess. Remember how crap you were at chess? Remember how I always used to beat you?”
“I’m the Headman of New Earth, Whiteblade. That means I stand where First John stood. And you’re just one of my ringmen. One of the
chiefs
of my ringmen, it’s true, but that’s still one of my ringmen.”
“Tom’s fat cock, Greenstone, what are you bloody talking about? John Redlantern was my great-
great granddad, the same as yours. You know that. Everyone knows that. He’s the granddad of just about
all
the chiefs and teachers. You’re the Headman, yes, okay, but New Earth belongs to all of us, all of us big people together.”
Once again I got so angry that I butted in when I should have let Greenstone speak for himself. “Get off your buck, Whiteblade,” I told him. “This is Gela’s ring. You show it respect like everyone else does.”
The chief of Bat Cave stared at me in amazement—
real amazement this time, not jokey or put on—
and then looked sharply at Greenstone, as if to ask him when he was going to control his crazy housewoman. But again Greenstone backed me up.
“Yes, get down, Whiteblade. Kiss the ring. You’ve insulted me in front of my men and yours, so it’s the least you can do to make up.”
The young chief hesitated while his bucks and ours stood with their heads lowered, their mouth-
feelers sampling the moist cave air. He glanced sideways at his ringmen. He didn’t want his small people to see him being made to bow, but he couldn’t have them thinking he didn’t respect the ring, either. Finally, with a snort of disgust, he climbed off his own buck, came to the side of the car, and bent his head, just for a moment, over my hand.
“We’re going to show the ring in Batsky,” Greenstone told him.
“I don’t agree with that, Greenstone.”
“You should call me Headman now, Chief Whiteblade.”
“Gela’s tits, what’s got
into
you? Okay, I don’t agree with it,
Headman.
You shouldn’t talk to my small people without getting my agreement first. Are you trying to take
all
the power away from the chiefs?”
“Not trying to take your power away, Whiteblade, but reminding everyone that this is one New Earth, and it’s all one ground, not a whole lot of different grounds with their own headmen.”
“Well, you’re not welcome,” Whiteblade said, and he turned his buck and led his ringmen off up the cave, too fast for us to keep up in our clumsy car.
Bats swooped and wheeled above us as we emerged from the top end of Bat Cave. It was always a shock, after the brightness of the caves, to be out again under the black black sky. There was still light, of course—
trees still shone, and in many places on the slopes on either side of us, firelight glared out from the hungry mouths of greenstone ovens—
but the background to every light out top was always blackness: the black sky, the black branches, and, when I looked back the way we’d come, the huge black shadows of the mountains above the caves.
Batsky was ahead of us, its few houses softly lit by pale pruned whitelanterns, which gave it a sad, colorless look compared to the bright forest that surrounded it. A row of ringmen appeared ahead of us, standing in a line across the path, with metal masks over their faces.
“Okay, stop the car,” Greenstone said.
One of our own ringmen jumped down from his buck to help us down from the car, and we walked out in front of it.
“I’m the Headman of New Earth, men,” Greenstone said, “and I’m asking you to get out of our way.”
With their faces hidden we couldn’t tell what they were thinking, and of course we had no idea what Whiteblade might have told them. They didn’t move. Greenstone frowned, and I could see he was going to say something sterner, but I put my hand on his arm to still him.
“Hello there, men,” I called out to them, gently but at the same time firmly, like I’d heard mothers talk to overexcited children back on Grounds.
Behind us the bucks sniffed and snuffled as the car and our ringmen moved slowly forward.
I held my right hand out in front of me. “Here I am for you,” I called to them again, gentle but firm. “Here I am with the ring on my finger for all of you to see. And this is your Headman with me. Mother Gela is with him, just as she was with his great-
great grandfather John when he led the way out of Circle Valley and over Snowy Dark, all those hundreds of hundredwakes ago.”
The blank metal faces stared at me, not smiling, not frowning, not even blinking.
“Come forward, boys. I’ve brought you the ring from Earth, where President lived and Gela and Tommy were born. Come and see it. Come and touch it. You’re ringmen, after all, you’re the men of the ring, and we’ve brought it here specially for you and your people.”
The men looked at one another uncertainly. Then one of them lifted off his metal mask. Underneath it was a lined, wary middle-aged face: the face of someone’s granddad. He laid down his spear and came forward, slowly slowly, like he was stalking a leopard, to kneel in front of me and kiss the ring.
“Thank you, my friend,” I said. “Thank you for trusting me.”
He’d been avoiding my eyes, but now he looked up at me with a gap-
toothed smile, all the wariness suddenly gone.
“A long long life to you, pretty Mother.”
Other men came then, taking off their metal masks one after another, kissing the ring, muttering awkward little words to me and then kneeling in front of the Headman, too.
“Come with us, blokes,” Greenstone said. “You and the men we’ve brought with us can take us through to your meeting ground. Perhaps one of you is a fast runner who could go ahead of us and make sure everyone knows to come there? We want everyone to come. Rockwomen, stuffmakers, flowergatherers, bat keepers.”
A young ringman ran off, and the rest of them formed a circle round us as we passed through the little shelters propped up against trees where Batsky’s small people lived.
“Follow us!” I called out as folk came running toward us.
Soon a little crowd was walking with us, swallowing up the car and the ringmen.
There were more than a hundred people waiting for us when we reached the Batsky meeting ground. I’d heard the sound of them in the distance, the yammering of excited voices. But as we entered that pale, tree-
lit space, word that we were there spread across it in seconds and the yammering was buried by a big, excited roar that went on and on. Ringmen cleared a path for us and we continued forward, smiling and waving at the people around us. Greenstone was beside me, and it was good to know he was there, but I could give him no attention, not even a single glance, because everything inside me was focused on the role I had to play. Our lives could depend on me getting this right.
“Don’t hold them too far back,” I murmured to the ringmen. “Let them touch the ring.”
“Let them touch the ring,” I heard Greenstone’s voice repeating, somewhere out there in the world. “Don’t keep them at such a distance.”
These were New Earth people, I reminded myself, people who had no sense of a Watcher looking out of their eyes. The source of things, the spring from which everything came, seemed to them quite separate from themselves, remote and beyond their control. They longed for it, like all people do, they longed for it to touch them and end their aloneness, but they thought they had to rely on others to bring it to them.
I smiled at faces, I stroked hands and cheeks, I looked into shining eyes. Here and there in the dark sky above us, the huge wheel of Starry Swirl was peeking between the clouds, making little patches of light in the blackness, like far-
off rocklanterns on the roof of an enormous cave. I felt fingers and hands brushing me as I walked forward, a blur of touch.
“I’m here,” I murmured gently, like a mother soothing a crying child. “I’ve come to bring you the ring.”
There were tearful women, tearful men, tearful children. All the ringmen had removed their metal masks, had ordinary eyes again instead of black, unblinking holes, and in the presence of the Mother of Eden, they were pushing their way forward with a strange tenderness, like loving grown-
ups gently lifting aside the little limbs of over-
boisterous children.
A large car, normally used for carrying lumps of greenstone from the digs, had been pulled into the middle of the square, and a ladder propped up against it. A ringman helped me climb up and, as I rose above the level of the crowd, a moment came when, for the first time, everyone could actually
see
me. Another great roar rose up and burst, like big waves from Deep Darkness breaking at the outer edge of Knee Tree Grounds. And a chant began to form itself out of the noise, a simple rhythm.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
The rhythm grew stronger and firmer as it drew in more and more voices, until it was the only sound that could be heard at all.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
I could see out of the corner of my eye that Greenstone was climbing up after me, and I reached back to him to bring him to stand beside me.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
I waved at them, and the rhythm broke up at once into another roar. I raised my right hand, as high as I could reach, and pointed to the ring with my left forefinger. There was another, even louder, roar. What a strange strange sound it was, in a way like the roar of waves, or the roar of the river at Steam Fall, yet so different, so different from anything else in all of Eden.
For a moment I hesitated, wondering whether to take the next step I’d planned. But then, with a tiny nod to myself, I did it. I took off my longwrap so that all I was wearing was a plain buckskin waistwrap, like most of the men and women in front of me. Oh, how they roared!
After a little while, I raised my hands again. A complete hush descended at once on the entire crowd, and all that could be heard was the
hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph
of the whitelanterns round the edge of the meeting ground. I let the silence hang there for one—two—
three—
four seconds, and then I spoke.
“
This
is what Angela Young wore when she lived and walked in Eden. And this is what I wore, too, until I came here across the Pool.”
Once more they roared and roared, as I’d known they would, for the more like them I made myself, the more special and different I became in their eyes. “She’s one of us,” they’d say to one another, but they knew just the same that I could have chosen to be as different from them as any chief’s daughter, so that my being like them was a gift.
“On the waterhill where I come from there are
no
big people and
no
small people,” I told them. “Only people!”
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
“When Tommy cut starflowers and Angela sewed wraps, who was the big person then?”
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
“And Tommy and Gela’s kids—
Angie, Clare, Lucy, Candice, Harry—
which of
them
were big people, and which were small?”
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
“And aren’t we all their kids, every one of us? Big people. Small people. Johnfolk. Davidfolk. We all come from one father and one mother.”
“Mother! Mother! Mother!”
Is this real?
I wondered.
Am I really here?
Could I really have come, in such a short short time, from where I once was to
this
? I felt as if the world itself had dissolved and become part of me, a thing inside my head, a dream. I felt that, if I wanted, I could reach out and touch the houses and shelters round the edge of the meeting ground, and pluck the stars from the sky like waternuts.