Greenstone Johnson
So I’ve walked for the last time, I’ve slept for the last time, I’ve spoken for the last time. I will never touch another person, or see another place but this, and no one will ever know the thoughts I’m having now. But I am still thinking, I’m still alive, my body still healthy and strong. And I can still see this place. I can still hear the booming roar. I can still make out the voice of Teacher Michael as he reads out the many reasons why I’m bad.
“.
.
. the hat that didn’t belong to him
.
.
. listened knowingly to
.
.
. ignored the advice of
.
.
. gave the ring to
.
.
.”
There’s a ringman standing right in front of me. A metal mask covers the top part of his face, but his long gray beard sticks down beneath it, and I can see that it’s streaked with white. He’s probably a grandfather many times over, and a great grandfather, too.
“Father,” he says, “some people prefer to be pushed, but others like to jump for themselves.”
No one but me can hear him or see his lips move. Unless he chooses to tell them, no one will ever know he spoke to me. His voice is kind, respectful. I imagine him with his little great grandchildren, smiling in his beard as he watches them running round him.
“Do you want to jump, Father?”
I nod my head, and I can see his whole body relax.
“Thank you, Father. I wouldn’t have liked being the one that did for you.”
Behind him, the Head Teacher is still telling the little crowd why I must die. Tiny tiny they are, with the great clouds of steam above them in the huge, bright cave: just little lost creatures from Earth, as Starlight used to say, hiding away in a hole in the ground and telling themselves that it’s the whole world, and that they are important and big.
The ringman is speaking to me again, quickly quickly because there’s so little time.
“The Head Teacher will finish soon, Father, and then it’ll be time, but I thought you’d like to know that the mother escaped from us, and so did her helper Quietstream. We think those Old Ground men have taken them over the water. Quietstream is a friend of mine; we come from the same cluster. We had to take her mother and daughters in for questioning, but they’ve told us nothing new. We think Quietstream got the story from a crazy old woman called Sue who used to live in our cluster—
she was sent here to the Rock long ago—
and we think she told no one except the mother herself.”
The Head Teacher has turned round to look at me as he says his final words, shaking his head sadly, like he is disappointed in me and had thought I could do better. Beyond him, in front of the crowd, stands tall Dixon, with his housewoman beside him: Lucy, my proud, sad, lonely cousin.
It’s strange strange. In two seconds I will jump, and there’ll be terror first, and then, for a few seconds, hideous pain. And then nothingness. But that’s still on the other side of a kind of wall. Right now I feel quite happy and at peace.
Starlight Brooking
I was in Deep Darkness. I could see the chief’s boat behind me, as clearly as ever out there in the bright water, and I knew that he’d still be able to see my pale windcatcher in the glow from the water behind me, but that soon even that light would be gone.
So what now? Should I turn in the direction of the wind and go faster? It was tempting, but if the chief expected that of me, then the extra speed would be of no use at all. Should I perhaps continue the line I was on, to the left and rockway of the wind, and hope they’d wrongly guess that I’d turn toward the wind? Or perhaps I should do the thing that would surely seem to them least likely: Turn right and alpway across the wind?
There was no way to know for sure. There were only those three choices, and shades in between them. The men on the other boats knew that as well as I did.
I glanced at my windcatcher, which I could still faintly see in the last of the light from the bright water, and made up my mind. I turned toward the direction of the wind, saw the catcher fill up, and felt myself pulled forward. After that I held the steerpole steady, watching the windcatcher and waiting until the light was so dim I could only just barely make it out. Then I turned right and alpway.
I looked back at the first boat as it came bumping through the strip of waves between the bright water and Deep Darkness. The last time they’d been able to see me, I would have been turning alpway of the wind, and I’d purposely left that turn to the last possible moment in the hope they’d decide I’d been trying to make them
think
I’d follow the wind, and had only snuck off alpway when I believed I was out of their sight.
Everything depended on their thinking that. Otherwise they could reach me in minutes. I watched the first boat. The windcatcher, the men, and a patch of water around them were all lit up by the orange glow from its firecage. And
.
.
. and, yes—
yes!
—it was turning alpway!
I watched the second boat and saw it continue straight ahead, then I turned sharply left, back across the wind again, and as far rockway as I could go without losing the wind completely. I would count out five hundred seconds, I told myself, and then, if the firecages still weren’t coming after me, I would turn blueway and let the wind take me straight out across the Pool.
One of the bats squeaked softly in the darkness.
“Be quiet!” I whispered to it. “Do you want to be sent down a metaldig to die?”
They didn’t come after me. For a while I saw the orange lights going back and forth in the distance, but once they’d lost me, they had no way of finding me again.
I turned the boat right until the catcher stopped flapping and filled up properly with air, and then went straight. It was good that I’d shaken off the ringmen, of course, but at the same time, losing them reminded me that I was completely alone. I had no companions in the darkness but the two bats: them and the cold stone inside me. And that was like the opposite of company. It was a hole where company had been.
Water slapped against the side of the boat. The air was icy cold and I grabbed a buckskin to wrap myself in. Starry Swirl was covered over by cloud, and the blackness around me was complete. The boat rose and fell over big, invisible waves in a world I couldn’t see.
I’d been Ringwearer in the bright caves of New Earth. I’d made bark boats in the greeny-
yellow lanternlight of Knee Tree Grounds. I’d seen the Veekle that came from Old Earth, lit up by the red flames of burning buckfat. But through all those times, and in the long long times before, stretching back and back to Tommy and Gela and long long before, these waves had always been here, rising and falling, all by themselves, in the darkness.
Part VI
Julie Deepwater
After the first visit from those Mainground guards, more guards came from time to time in little groups. We weren’t sure whether they were sent by their bosses, or whether they came of their own accord to collect their presents of kneeboats and to try their luck with these Knee Tree girls who were allowed to slip with anyone they liked. Traders came, too, with colored fakeskin wraps and rings made in Veeklehouse with metal from across the water. And then a shadowspeaker called Mary made the crossing from Nob Head in a new plank boat with four strong men to paddle it. We hadn’t asked for her to come, but a good half of the Knee people still gathered round to watch as she wailed and sobbed and rolled her eyes.
“Mother Gela is crying! She is crying and crying. She’ll never stop crying until every one of her children turns away from wicked John and comes back to the True Family of Great David.”
“We’re not Johnfolk!” called out a young girl named Sweetflower.
The shadowspeaker turned on her. “Not Johnfolk?” she cried out, like the girl had stabbed her with a spear. “How you hurt our mother by saying that! How you wound her! Did your Jeff stay with David after John destroyed the circle? No, he went with John. Did he go back to David after John stole the ring? No, he stayed with John. Did he even go back to David after John did for the Three Good Men? No, he stayed with John! He always—” She stopped, holding up her hand for quiet, as if she’d heard something our ears wouldn’t be able to make out. Sweetflower was sobbing with shame. “I hear her now!” the shadowspeaker whispered. “I hear our mother! She’s begging me to try my hardest. She’s begging me to make sure that every single one of you turn away from bad bad Jeff and come back to her. Our kind kind mother can’t bear the thought that any one of you might lose the chance forever of returning to the dear white light of Earth, where everything will be made whole.”
Four of our young women went back with her on her boat. Many others gave her presents to take away, believing or half believing what she’d told them: that a gift for her was a gift for Mother Gela, and would win them favor in the eyes of the Mother of Eden.
About ten wakings later I was out with Lucky, cutting bark, when we heard a woman shouting out.
“Another boat! Come quickly!”
She sounded scared, and we quickly paddled out peckway toward where the shout had come from.
We met four newhair girls who’d been out gathering waternuts when they’d seen a boat come crashing in through the trees. It was a two-
bodied boat, and it had got itself stuck when it was still just a short way in from the edge of forest, banging up hard against a trunk. The girls were paddling away from it as fast as they could.
“There are weird people on it,” they told us.
“In what way weird?”
“They were just standing there, staring at us:
like
people, but not people. They were like little men, but with blue skin and Eden eyes.”
Lucky rubbed his pointy head and looked at me. “Should we go and check this out?”
“Well, we can’t just leave it there, can we? You girls go back to Sand and bring as many people as possible with spears.”
We soon saw the dark shape ahead of us. We couldn’t see anyone on it at first, but I noticed something that the girls wouldn’t have spotted: It was a New Earth boat.
“Look! There!” whispered Lucky.
They were sitting down and partly hidden by a tree trunk, but there they were: two small, thin people with bluish skin. A shiver of pure terror went through me—
I’d never felt anything quite like it—
but then, a moment later, they looked toward us, and I relaxed.
“They’re only bats,” I said. “They’re just some kind of bat.”
Lucky laughed with relief. “Of course! But they don’t seem to have any wings. And what’s that lying on the floor behind them?”
“Jeff’s ride, it’s a person.”
The weird wingless bats began to squeak and chatter as we drew near, scurrying up the pole in middle of the boat to get out of our way. But the body on the boat didn’t move, even when we drew right alongside and climbed up onto the floor. It was a woman lying there. She was wearing a wrap of plain fakeskin, like the ringmen had worn at Veeklehouse.
Starlight Brooking
For ten eleven wakings—
it was impossible to know exactly—
I’d been in darkness. And all that time I’d been trying to make myself stay awake so I could listen to the wind in the catcher and make sure it was still blowing from behind. But even when I was awake, in that total darkness and with no one for company but bats, it didn’t feel like being awake. I kept hearing metal horns and angry voices behind the flapping of the windcatcher and the slopping of waves against the boat, and, again and again, I thought I heard the faint faint slap of wet hands reaching up out of the water. Each time I took my paddle and prowled round the floor in the darkness, feeling round the edge to make sure no one was there.
After a while—
I don’t know how many wakings—
the bats came and huddled up on either side of me. It was for warmth, I suppose, and I let them stay there because it warmed me, too. It was a strange feeling, touching them and sensing their lives moving inside them. I’d never really touched a living animal before, apart from animals I’d been about to do for, and that one buck I’d ridden on with Snowleopard from Edenheart to the Pool.
Deep Darkness went on and on. After a while it felt like this was all there ever had been or would ever be: the blackness, the flapping and slopping of wind and waves, the slow rise and fall over invisible hills of water, with sleep sucking me down and fear waking me up again. . . .
But then something new happened. A slit of white light, narrow as a single hair, appeared across the blackness ahead of me, silent and still, dividing black water from dark sky. It was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.
Slowly the whiteness separated into pinks and greens, into moving shapes, into waves moving over an edge below the surface that divided the dark depths and the bright shallows. My boat was moving quickly toward it now. I saw the waves ahead of me toppling as they reached the bright water, I heard them slop and splash, and then suddenly I’d reached it, too, was on top of it, was passing over it, the boat bumping and rolling as it left the hidden world behind and came bobbing out into the world that could be seen.
The two batlings climbed up the windtree. I could see them in the waterlight, clinging to the top of it, chirruping and chattering, their shriveled, bluish faces (if you could call them faces) peering out over the water while ripples of pale gray swept restlessly back and forth across their eyes. Far above them Starry Swirl was breaking through the cloud. And at once I began to search along World’s Edge for the Home Star and the dark shapes of the mountains of Snowy Dark.
“Come
on
!” I muttered.
I needed to see the mountain called Tommy’s Cup if I was going to find the line to the Home Star that would take me back to the Grounds. Otherwise I’d have no choice but to head straight on to Mainground. But almost as soon as the sky had cleared, more cloud came creeping back over it from out peckway, threatening to hide mountains and Home Star both.
“Come on!”
A quarter of the sky was covered in cloud before the ridge of Snowy Dark finally appeared, rising above World’s Edge and biting like sharp black teeth into the brightness of Starry Swirl. Tommy’s Cup was
way
down alpway, so far down to my right that at first I didn’t even recognize it. I knew I needed to turn right and alpway myself until star and mountain lined up, so I steered as far right as it was possible to go while still keeping at least some wind in the catcher. The boat tipped and rocked and splashed and groaned as it cut sideways through the waves.
It was more than half a waking later that a patch of yellow-green light appeared above World’s Edge to my left, in front of the distant black ridge of Snowy Dark. The bats had come down from the windtree and were sitting beside me as I turned the boat toward that familiar light. They creaked and whistled, the waterlight playing over the restless surfaces of their eyes, the catcher puffed out again as it filled up with air, and the boat pulled forward as if it were impatient to reach its destination. But I looked out blankly at the little forest in the middle of the bright water and felt nothing at all except for a terrible tiredness and a creeping nausea that had been slowly growing inside me for some time.
A branch snagged on the windtree with a loud crack, tearing away half of the catcher. A second branch caught it again and swung the whole boat round so that it was heading straight toward the big, stooping trunk of a kneetree. I pulled the steerpole round to try and avoid it, but then there were two more trunks ahead of me, too close together to pass between. I was paddling furiously backward when the boat smashed into one of the trees and I fell face-
first onto the floor.
Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph
.
Greeny-
yellow lanterns shone above me, below me, and on every side. There was an oval cut into the bark of a nearby tree where it bent over toward Mainground, and a row of little wooden pegs banged into the trunk. A clawbat swooped down to snatch a fish from the water.
“I’m home,” I tried saying to myself. “I’m back.”
But all I could feel was sickness and weariness.
I’ll just sleep,
I thought.
I’ll just sleep for a few minutes, before I do anything else.