Starlight Brooking
As soon as I started paddling, I realized how dumb I’d been to think I could have done this by myself. It was always hard work paddling a kneeboat on your own—
you have to keep passing the paddle from side to side—
and the river made it harder: For every three feet I paddled forward, it must have carried me at least one foot back. I was aching, I was sick, I was weary. How could I have ever believed I could make my own way to Snowy Dark?
I didn’t want Julie to miss me, so I paddled slowly along, close to the bank, where the muddy water was bright with the light of the lanternflowers that hung down over it. But this meant that everyone on the bank could see me, and the two strange creatures with me. People washing wraps peered out at us with unsmiling faces from under the trees. Naked children stared at us from the shallow water where they were gathering wavyweed. Some of them shouted, some laughed and jeered. Some came swimming out after the boat.
“Ugh! Big bats! What you doing with them, weirdy girl?”
In the light of the trees—
white, pink, blue, and yellow—
I could see the bats as the children saw them, sitting right in front of me in the boat and staring staring staring at me with their blank, flat eyes, their blue skin folded in ridges round their mouths and breathing holes. You couldn’t really call those things faces. They never smiled, or frowned. They were more like masks.
“Good question,” I said to them. “What
am
I doing with you? I don’t even like you. And you’ll draw attention to me wherever I go.”
“Go,” repeated one of them.
But what could I do? They couldn’t fly. They were in a strange ground, among people who would jeer and throw stones at them. And I couldn’t just forget they’d been company of some sort when I was all alone out in Deep Darkness.
Without thinking about it, I felt for the ring and had a moment of panic when I found it wasn’t there.
Julie came sooner than I thought she would, hobbling and wobbling along on a little path that people had made as they went back and forth along the riverbank.
“Hey, come over! It’s me!” she called out as I paddled slowly along.
I brought the boat in to the bank. Above us and around us, the big trees hummed and throbbed as they drank in the rich, muddy water. Julie climbed into the front of the boat, so the bats were between us. As we pushed out, there was a loud, angry screech from the nearby trees. But it was only a starbird, rattling its glittery tail as it watched us, and nibbling with its beak at its long black claws.
“Is everything okay, Julie?”
She grabbed a paddle and started digging hard into the water. “Yes, of course, but let’s get moving.”
“You managed to get rid of that ring?”
“Yes, I did. To a Brown River trader. She knew what it was, all right, and she’ll know what to do when the New Earth people come asking for it.”
“I thought we were going to give it to traders from New Earth?”
“Well, this seemed like a better plan. Less likely to ask awkward questions, eh? Come on, Starlight, get digging. It’s a long way to go.”
“Bat people! Bat people!” yelled some children on the bank.
Julie glanced back anxiously over her shoulder. “Let’s get out in middle of the water.”
“You sure everything’s okay?”
“Yes, it is, Starlight, but these bloody bats make everyone stare at us. I don’t know why you can’t just set them loose.”
Julie Deepwater
I felt a bit calmer after we’d been going for an hour or so. No one seemed to be following us and, out in middle, the river was shadowy and quiet. We could see everything clearly clearly on the banks—
boys leading smoothbucks down to drink, fishing people wading waist-
deep with nets, men and women mending boats by the light of the trees—
but all they could see of us was a dim shadow on the water, one of many that went back and forth all the time. The only other people who came close to us were on other boats, some of them simple log-
boats, some bigger boats with floors, and they were just shadows as well, dark and shadowy shapes with shadowy voices speaking softly in the dimness, as if each boat was a different world.
“The reason I rushed you, Starlight,” I said after a while, “and the reason I didn’t take the time to find traders from New Earth, is that another boat came in more or less at the same time as you started out. That tall guy was on it, that Chief Dixon.”
“Oh, Gela’s heart!”
She started paddling harder herself now, digging and digging away at the water like she was in a race.
“I don’t think he’s after us,” I said. “I’m sure that trader will figure out she’s got something he wants. That should keep him busy for a while, don’t you think? Who knows, he may even believe our story.”
Starlight relaxed a bit. “Headman Dixon, he is now,” she said. “It shows how much the ring means to him that he’s risked leaving Edenheart to come over here himself.”
We reached a place where another river came down to join Brown River. The new water was completely clear. It cut into the cloudy mud like a knife of light and tugged and pulled at us as we crossed over it. All around us, little jewel-
bats swooped and swerved, sometimes so close that we could almost have reached out and caught one with our hands, while over on the bank three huge black animals paused from scooping up the clear bright water with their hands, stretched out their long long necks, and peered at us with great round eyes. And then we were back again into the safety of the darkness, with the huge, dark shapes of Snowy Dark looming up ahead of us against the spiral of Starry Swirl.
“I’m grateful, Julie,” Starlight said. “I’m grateful grateful that you’ve given up so much to come with me.”
“You know me, Starlight. I don’t really belong in Knee Tree Grounds, or anywhere else. This is where I feel most at home: out on a boat in middle of water, where I can watch the world all around me, but no one can really see me.”
We passed a group of strange, stooping birds, fifty sixty of them, tall as people. They were stalking in the shallows under the trees on long, thin legs with their clawed hands held out in front of them. As the boat came past, they all stood up straight to watch us go by, waves of gray rippling over their flat black eyes.
“Birds,” Starlight told the bats.
“Birds,” one of them said—
or something like it.
For a moment I could see the black thornlike teeth inside its mouth, and a green forked tongue.
“What are you going to do with them?” I asked her.
“Just keep them with me, I guess. Unless their wings grow back so they can fly away. They do sometimes grow back, apparently, if you cut them off when they’re still young.”
Later we lay down on the bank to rest, near enough to the scalding trunk of a spiketree to feel its warmth, while the bats watched and waited in the tree’s blue light.
“I’m glad I’ll have Greenstone’s baby,” Starlight told me as we lay there waiting for sleep.
A starbird called out from the forest nearby. Another one answered from the far side of the river. And stars shone down from the black black sky.
Starlight Brooking
After two wakings on the river, the slopes of shining trees began to climb steeply on either side toward great blocks of darkness. Soon the mountains weren’t just ahead of us but around us, too, until all that was left of the sky was a strip of Starry Swirl straight overhead. Brown River didn’t go round Snowy Dark, or flow down from it, but passed right
through
it, cutting it in half, picking up water all the time from the streams coming down from the ice and snow.
We passed a group of little children sitting on a smooth rock at the edge of the water: forest people, just like in New Earth. Julie called out to them gently, but as soon as they saw the bats, they ran shrieking back into the trees.
After that the slopes began to get even steeper, the forest trees only climbing a short distance up them before they gave way to bare rock and a darkness that was broken only by an occasional giant mountain tree, summoning up its own little tiny world of light: a patch of cliff, a few stones lying on a ledge, a glittery waterfall. . . .
We passed a small group of woollybucks gathering up wavyweed by the water’s edge in the pink light of redlantern trees and the glow of their own white headlanterns. Five of them fully grown and two of them babies, they were using their front legs as arms to lift great clumps of the stringy glowing stuff and bring it to their eager mouth-
feelers. They paused, armfuls of weed suspended between the water and their mouths, and watched us warily as we went by.
What we could see, though, and they couldn’t, was that they themselves were being watched. There was a great white animal on a rock above them at the edge of the darkness, its splayed front feet resting on the cliff edge, its head lowered between its wide shoulders—
a strange strange head with a great hole at the top of it, like a bowl tipped on its side. And now it noticed us, too, so that all those flat, round Eden eyes together were watching Julie and me: the leopard, the bucks, even the two bats in the boat, watching these strange, pale creatures who came down to Eden from the sky.
The leopard’s cry came just as we reached a turn in the river. We could see it lift its head, but the cry itself came from the empty rocks on the opposite side of the gorge.
“I didn’t mean to harm Greenstone,” I said as we paddled round the corner.
Julie nodded but said nothing. If Uncle Dixon had been there, he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from talking talking talking, but she was good at being silent. In fact, she was silent for hours at a stretch, letting me think, letting me go over and over in my mind what had happened back there in New Earth.
We came to an even darker place between the mountains. The ground was solid rock and there were no forest trees or starflowers. The only light came from a few huge mountain trees that stood far apart from one another in their own small worlds of rock and stones, surrounded by darkness. Steam rose up from their airholes toward the black sky and the stars.
We were tired tired, and when, after another hour of paddling, we saw there was still no end to this lonely place, we pulled the boat out of the water and huddled up for warmth against one of those tree trunks, the two bats creeping up beside us.
Julie Deepwater
“I’m glad I’m pregnant,” Starlight said after we’d been sitting for a while against the big, warm trunk, listening to the sound of the river lapping against the bank and the steady pulsing of the tree. “I’m glad there’s something inside me apart from this
.
.
. this cold cold stone.”
“Stone?”
“I guess really it’s just emptiness where something warm used to be. It felt the same when Mum died, but she
.
.
.”
She stopped.
“But she what, Starlight?”
“You didn’t like Greenstone, Julie, I know, but he cared about me more than she ever did.”
“I would have liked him, then, if I’d got to know him better.”
Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph
went the tree. We could feel it throbbing against our backs. Twenty feet above us, an airhole released a little cloud of steam with a gentle sigh.
Starlight was quiet for so long that I thought she’d fallen asleep, but then she spoke again.
“I had to do something, though, Julie. I couldn’t just do nothing at all.”
“You couldn’t, and like I said before, no one can really know what the consequences will be of anything they do or don’t do.”
“No, they can’t.”
Once again she fell silent, and I was more than halfway to sleep when she spoke once more.
“It’s quiet quiet here, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“When we saw that snowleopard and those bucks, it was weird. Just for a moment I felt like it wasn’t just me looking at them. It was
.
.
. Well, we had those quiet times every waking in the Meeting Place, I know, but I guess I’d never completely got the point of them until now. Whoever we are, we’re really just the world looking out at itself, aren’t we?”
“Well, yes, I think that’s what Jeff Redlantern meant by the Watcher.”
“You’ve always got that, haven’t you, Julie? You’re always so quiet, taking it all in, when everyone else is fussing or squabbling or
.
.
. or
.
.
. I don’t know
.
.
.
showing off
. ”
“Yes, I think I have always got it. It comes easily to me. I go out in my boat by myself, and pretty soon I’ve pretty much forgotten that I’m Julie Deepwater from Knee Tree Grounds. I’m just the waterlight and the stars and the waves.”
“If I’d been better at doing that, maybe I wouldn’t have felt the need to go charging off into the world, messing about with things I didn’t understand.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t have done. But you know what, Starlight? I don’t think that being someone like me is any better than being someone like you. Jeff understood the Watcher—
he understood a lot of things—
but he still followed John, didn’t he? He still needed John. And look at me now—
I’m following you. I’m glad glad I came here, I really am, but I would never have done it without you.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Yes, I do, dear. You don’t know your own power. And you don’t know your own worth, either.”
She didn’t say anything more after that, but she pressed herself up against me and I knew she really had gone to sleep this time when she started to snore.
I was properly awake now myself, though, and stayed so for some time, listening to the sound of the river and the tree, and wondering why it was that I liked so much to be alone and silent, watching but not taking part. The warmth of the tree against my back was wonderfully soothing and so was the
hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph
of the big muscles moving inside it, bringing up heat from Eden’s heart. It was like being a baby in the arms of her mother, in the arms of Mother Eden.
A cold, rasping cry startled us both awake.
“What was that?”
We looked all around us, but could see nothing in the pale treeshine but the rock floor and the scattered stones. Beyond the pool of light there was almost complete darkness until the next tree, in its own separate pool of light, its own separate world, maybe two hundred feet away. Starlight’s two bats were screeching loudly, though, and they were wriggling to free themselves from the buckskin we’d pulled over them and us.
“Could it have been a leopard?”
I felt for my spear and gripped it firmly. “It didn’t sound like one.”
Then Starlight laughed. “Look! There! Above us!”
A huge bat was standing right at the top of the tree, its trembling wings still half-
open, and it was looking straight down at us, like the bat in that old story about John and Jeff and Tina.
And now we saw there were three more of them, wheeling slowly round the tree on their huge wings. They cried out again—
the bat in the tree and the three in the air—
and Starlight’s bats stood up on the rocky ground and answered them, tipping their heads back and opening their mouths to show those rows of spiny teeth.
The bat at the top of the tree gave another cry, spread its wings, and joined the others as they descended, in wide, slow circles, until they reached the ground some thirty feet from us. I’d never seen bats even half their size—
if we’d stood beside them, they’d have come up to our shoulders, and their great wings were seven eight foot across—
but they stood there lightly lightly on the ground, quivering slightly on their backward-
pointing knees, with their wings still unfolded and ready to take to the air again at any moment. One by one, they opened their mouths and released a rapid stream of squeaks and clicks.
After that, for a few seconds, there was no sound but the pumping of the tree and the river splashing against the stones along its bank, until suddenly Starlight’s bats responded with rapid squeaks and clicks of their own. And then the other bats joined in so they were all squeaking and clicking at once.
A strange thought came to me then, so strange that just holding it in my mind took a huge effort, like carrying a heavy heavy weight that you know you’ll soon have to drop. Was it possible, I thought, that this was a kind of talking, and that these sounds were a bit like words or names? But straight away I doubted myself. How could that be? People spoke a bit differently in different places, that was true, but it was always still English. How could there be a way of naming things that wasn’t like English at all?
Starlight seemed to think it was possible, though. She’d walked forward a few paces so that she was standing between her own wingless young bats and the four adults, and now she squatted down on the ground, sideways to both groups, so she could watch them all.
“I’m Starlight,” she said to the adult bats. “I’ve been looking after these two.”
All six bats fell silent for a moment, turning their wrinkly blue masklike faces toward her, and then they turned back to one another and began once again their stream of clicks and creaks. It went on for a long time, so long that Starlight walked back to me and we stood together with our backs against the tree for warmth. And as we stood there waiting for the bats to finish, Starlight noticed something else on a boulder over to our right, at the edge of the tree’s pool of light.
“Do you see those marks, Julie? You see them in New Earth as well. They call it bat writing. It’s—”
But a louder cry made us both turn back to the bats. Two of the winged adults had taken hold of one of the young bats under its arms and were lifting it clear of the ground. They spread their wings and ran forward. As soon as they were in the air, the other two adults did the same with the second wingless bat, picking it up and rising rapidly up up up until all six bats were just little black dots against that narrow band of bright stars between the dark mountains.
A boat was coming by, a big clumsy Mainground trading boat, with three men paddling it down either side.
“You guys okay there?” one of them called out to us.
“We’re fine, thanks,” Starlight answered them. “We’re fine fine.”