Daughter of Eden Read online

  Eight

  So I said goodbye to Knee Tree Grounds and crossed over to Mainground with Mary, sitting behind her in middle of an old log boat with four guards to paddle us across the bright water, two in front of us and two behind. Three other women had chosen to come with Mary too: Sue, Janny and Watershine. All three of them had been made pregnant by visiting guards and Mary had told them they should try and find their babies’ fathers, and let their children grow up as part of True Family. They sat in front of me, silent and tense, but I hardly to spoke to them at all on the way across, and I never saw them afterwards. I don’t know if they stayed on Mainground or went back again to Knee Tree.

  Mary leaned forwards so she could speak only to me.

  ‘I know we’ll work well together, Angie,’ she said, ‘I just know it. We’re two of a kind.’

  Two of a kind? I’d have been proud proud to think I was like her, but that wasn’t how it seemed to me. She was so strong and smart and certain. I didn’t feel alike to her in any way. And I was waking up now to just how much I’d left behind in Knee Tree Grounds: all my friends, my brothers, my sisters, my mother and my mother’s men, Starlight’s sister Glitterfish and her little boy, all the familiar places and things . . . And here I was, with this scary stranger, so smart and grownup and fierce, with nothing round us but ­glowing water, and Knee Tree Grounds just a patch of yellow-green light disappearing behind World’s Edge.

  ‘You’ve got sharp eyes,’ Mary told me. ‘I saw that at once. You’ll be able to notice the things I miss when I’m in middle of it all. You’ll be able help me, I know, even while you’re still learning. One waking you’ll come back to that little grounds of yours as a shadow­speaker yourself, I’m sure of that. And let’s hope you manage to bring all of your friends over there back to our Mother, and back to the real world.’

  I was terrified that she’d made a mistake, that she’d seen something in me that wasn’t really there at all, and that soon she’d find out the truth. I tried to think of an answer that wouldn’t show her how ordinary I really was.

  ‘What’s it like to hear the voice of Gela?’

  Mary turned to look at me. Most people’s eyes are brown but hers were grey, and that made them seem extra fierce and sharp, as they looked out at me from that big square face of hers. Those small sharp eyes could bore through stone! I was quite sure that if she hadn’t seen right through me already, she soon soon would.

  ‘You have to learn how to hear her, Angie. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll teach you, and when you’re ready, you can go up and stand in the Circle of Stones, and call on her to speak to you, so you can be a shadowspeaker too.’ She reached back and squeezed one of my hands in her own big mitt. ‘I’m sure she will speak to you, Angie, I’m sure our Mother will love you. I’m sure she’ll see your beauty just as I do.’

  ‘Stand in the Circle of Stones?’ I was trembling. We Kneefolk lived way out in the Pool, and none of us had been as far as the slopes that led up to Snowy Dark, never mind across the Dark to Circle Valley, but even we knew that ordinary people were forbidden to stand in the Circle. Even we knew that the punishment for anyone who stepped inside it was death.

  ‘That’s right. Shadowspeakers have always been allowed to stand there, going right back to the first shadowspeaker, Lucy Lu. Apart from the Head Guard and his family, we’re the only ones who can go into the Circle on our own. But we’re allowed to take others in there with us, if we think they’re ready to become shadow­speakers too.’

  She was still looking into my eyes and holding my hand in her own. Now she gave it a squeeze.

  ‘Our Mother’s voice is quiet quiet,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t shout at us. She speaks so softly you might think it was just your own thoughts. But if you try, if you really concentrate, if you shut out all your own worries and problems, if you live your life like she would want you to, then slowly slowly you’ll learn to hear her.’

  When we reached Nob Head, Mary put on another show. It was different to the one she’d done out on the Grounds, because these people were already Davidfolk. They knew the True Story as well as she did, and they believed it too (or at least if they didn’t, they kept that to themselves). So, instead of telling them they needed to come back to Family, Mary told them the ways they were letting Family down.

  ‘You lie and trick each other,’ she said, with tears running down her face. ‘You slip with the shelterwomen of other men. You hide things from the guards, and hold back from your guard leader the things he needs to keep you safe. How you hurt your Mother! How you disappoint her, when she worked so hard to make Family kind and strong, and works hard still, reaching out to you from across the stars.’

  She looked round at the circle of Nob Head people who were watching her.

  ‘I see good people here,’ she said. ‘But I see foolish people too, who’ve forgotten to listen out for their own Mother, forgotten the sound of her voice.’

  She moved restlessly back and forth across the small circle of round stones laid out in middle of Nob Head, which, of all the people present, only she was allowed to enter. And in the light of the whitelanterns, her grey eyes searched the faces watching her, sizing up their fear and their desperate hope.

  ‘You’ve suffered a terrible loss,’ she told a short plump woman. The woman nodded, and tears flowed down from her big sad bulgy eyes. ‘A terrible loss, and not so long ago. A child of yours, maybe?’

  The woman sobbed.

  ‘My little boy, Davey.’

  ‘Davey,’ repeated Mary, her tear-filled eyes gazing at some distant place that no one else could see. ‘Davey. I see him now. He’s in the arms of our Mother, home and safe, happy and warm, waiting for the waking you can be with him again.’

  The woman grabbed hold of her hand, pressed trading sticks into it, and then squeezed it closed, so Mary couldn’t return them. ‘Thankyou thankyou thankyou.’

  Mary crossed the circle, stood in front of another woman, tall and slender, and looked up into her eyes.

  ‘But you, my dear, our Mother can’t reach. She calls out to you, but you turn away. She cries out to warn you, but you act like you don’t care. How you hurt poor Gela. She’s crying crying. But she doesn’t cry for herself, you know. She cries for you. She cries because she knows you have forgotten how to hear her, forgotten even that she was ever there. “Reach out to her, Mary!” she begs me. “Please reach out to her and teach her to listen, or her time will come and her shadow will be alone out there in the blackness, and I won’t be able to call her home.”’

  The tall woman looked down at her, her face unmoving. You shouldn’t have taken that one on, Mary, I thought to myself. You really shouldn’t have. No way will she bend for you, and now you’ll just look silly in front of everyone. But Mary didn’t look worried at all.

  ‘You’re hiding something,’ she told the tall woman. ‘You and I know what it is. Our Mother knows what it is. Do you want to tell it to everyone, or do you want to make peace with your Mother on your own?’

  Still the woman stared down at her coldly, and Mary’s big square face stared straight back up. It made me think of two men having an arm-wrestling contest, each one straining against the pressure of the other’s muscle. You’ve taken on more than you can handle, Mary, I thought again. But then quite suddenly the tall woman broke, covering her face with her hands and shaking with sobs. Mary put her arms round her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she murmured, holding the woman tightly. ‘It’s going to be okay. You’re back with your Mother again, and she’ll help you home.’

  People all round the circle were crying as they watched this, and some threw down trading sticks and blackglass arrowheads. It was part of my job to gather up these presents.

  ‘It isn’t just shadowspeakers who can hear Mother Gela,’ Mary told her listeners. ‘We hear her more clearly because we’re the ones she’s chosen to bring back the ones who
are lost, but everyone can hear her if they let her in. If only everyone would remember that. If only. Because when we all listen to our Mother, Family will be one again, and then we won’t even have to wait for our deaths to be able to go home, we won’t have to become shadows to return to Earth. No, when that waking comes, a starship will come and fetch us all.’

  The Kneefolk thought that the shadowspeakers were liars, just like Trueheart did. They thought shadowspeakers were just tricking people so as to make them hand over sticks and presents, sometimes by frightening them and sometimes by telling them things that they longed to hear. Well, I think there are some speakers out there who are like that, and Mary herself thought the same. ‘That woman’s only interested in how many presents she can get,’ she’d say of one two of the others. But I know Mary wasn’t lying. When she finished a show, she was shaking shaking all over. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t keep still, she couldn’t attend to what was going on round her. Each time it was like she’d stripped off her own skin, so there was nothing left between her and the people of Eden, nothing to protect her from their loneliness and fear, their greed and their stupidity.

  ‘How did I do, Angie?’ she’d ask me when we were on our way to the next cluster. ‘Do you think I got through to them?’ And sometimes: ‘Just hold me a moment, could you, Angie? Just hold me.’

  As she stood there in my arms, I could feel her heart pounding, I could smell the fresh sweat on her hot hot skin, I could feel the trembling in her limbs. It seemed strange that she asked me for comfort, when she seemed so much more grownup than me, like a mother asking for comfort from a child, but I felt proud that she wanted it from me, and I gave it as best I could.

  ‘It’s like beating and beating on a cliff of stone,’ she said, ‘trying to get through to these people, trying to get them to see.’ And I could see it was so. To Mary, putting on a show wasn’t just telling a story, or playing a part. It was a mighty struggle. It was a struggle against lies, a struggle against forgetfulness and laziness and selfishness, and it was hard hard work, because in her struggle she opened herself up to all the things that people normally want to push away from themselves.

  And as for the sticks and presents, well, she traded them for food for us, and for things we needed, but how else could she keep herself going? It wasn’t like she had a big shelter, or coloured wraps, or lots of helpers to run round after her. I was her only helper and she treated me as a friend.

  We travelled to Davidstand, and then along the little clusters along the bottom edge of Snowy Dark, where the paths go up to the High Valleys. All the way Mary talked about what she’d learned in her years of shadowspeaking, and answered my questions, and probed me again and again with questions of her own about my life among the Kneefolk. What was it like, she wanted to know, to be among people who pretended to themselves that they had everything they needed already, and that they didn’t need a mother or a home, except for the mothers they already had, and the little patch of sand they lived on?

  ‘So many people are like that,’ she said. ‘Not just your Kneefolk, but people all over the Davidfolk Ground. They’ve stopped believing there’s anything in the world but the things they see round them every waking. But those Kneefolk of yours – those Jeffsfolk – are the only ones who’ve made that into a story in its own right.’

  ‘It’s not quite like that,’ I tried to tell her. ‘I know you don’t like the idea, but we had the Watcher.’

  She wouldn’t have that, though.

  ‘But the Watcher was just something inside you,’ she’d say. ‘That’s the story you were told, isn’t it? Just something in your head. It was like you were trying to be mothers to yourselves.’

  We turned peckway about a waking short of the so-called White Streams that mark the end of the Davidfolk Ground and the beginning of the Brown River Ground, making our way through forest to the Pool, and then heading slowly slowly up rockway towards Veeklehouse, sometimes along poolside, sometimes turning away from it so as to take in tiny clusters back in forest, so that we wandered back and forth, blueway and peckway, blueway and peckway, while gradually moving rockway all the while. Guards always rode with us to keep us safe, but when we stopped to rest, they made their fire apart from us, and me and Mary were alone.

  ‘You and me are two of a kind, Angie,’ she told me again and again, as we cooked up our meat and flowercakes at the end of a waking, though I still had no idea how someone like her, so strong and certain and afraid of no one, could see any of herself in me. And then she’d put an arm round me as we lay down to sleep, so we’d lie together looking up at Starry Swirl and listening to the sounds of Eden.

  She wasn’t the shelterwoman of any man, and, as far as I know, she never slipped with a man, whole time I was with her. I decided after a while that she was probably one of those that prefer other women, like Julie Deepwater back on Knee Tree Grounds, though she never allowed that to herself either. In fact she would often warn people at her shows that it was bad bad for two women to go together like that, or for two men to do it, just like it was bad to slip the back way, or for a woman to say no to a man if she was his housewoman, or for a man to pull out of a woman before he was done. If Mother Gela or Tommy had done any of those things, she’d point out, none of us would even be here.

  There were times I wondered if she’d chosen a batface like me to be her companion, so I wouldn’t be too much temptation for her. Sometimes, when she hugged me, she would press her body up against mine, and then suddenly she’d pull back and look me straight in the face, look at the hole between my nose and my mouth and at my twisty gums and my teeth that stuck out all different ways. And it was like it calmed her down, turned her back into a shadowspeaker and me into her helper.

  ‘You are beautiful, Angie,’ she’d say. ‘You are beautiful beautiful.’

  I liked her saying that, of course, but it seemed to me that it was a kind of discipline for her. Like she was making herself say what her head believed to be true, even though her body doubted it. I guess it was a bit like what mothers of batfaced kids have to do as they force themselves through the disappointment and grief, so they can give their ugly babies the love they need. I was to go through it myself, years later, when Candy and Metty were born.

  One time, in a little cluster on poolside, a trader came up to Mary after she’d done a show, a man who took bracelets and necklaces made with coloured stones from one cluster to another, and asked her if she could help him. He was a big guy with a big black beard that came halfway down his chest, but it was obvious he was full full of tears. His little daughter back home was sick sick, he said, and he couldn’t bear the thought that when she died she’d be lost forever among the stars and never have anyone to care for her.

  ‘Where do you come from, dear?’ Mary asked him gently, taking one of his hands.

  ‘Brown River, mother,’ he told her, as his tears began to flow.

  I could see Mary tense slightly, but she didn’t let go of his hand. ‘So you are one of the Johnfolk?’

  ‘Yes, mother, and I know you think that’s wrong, but we love Mother Gela too, you know, in our own way. It’s just that we don’t have shadowspeakers as you do here who can help us to reach her. Only storytellers that wander round and remind us of the old ­stories. I thought perhaps you could—’

  ‘My dear, I can’t help you unless you turn away from John the ringstealer. I know you Johnfolk think you love Gela as we do, but you really don’t. What you love is John’s idea of Gela, his childish dream of a mother who will tell him that whatever he chooses to do is right, and that whoever tries to stop him is bad and wrong. That’s not really Gela at all. It’s just something that came from John’s head.’

  ‘But I live in Brown River. If I was to follow David, I’d be driven out. Surely I can—’

  ‘Unless you turn away from John, I can’t help you. If you want your little girl’s shadow to find her way back to E
arth, you need to teach her about the true Gela, and not the Gela that John dreamed up to make it seem alright that he stole the ring from True Family.’

  The man became angry then. ‘Tom’s dick, it was hard enough for me to speak to you at all!’ He pulled his hand away from her. ‘Have you got any idea what people at home would say, if they knew I’d asked the advice of a shadowspeaker? But I came to your show, and I thought you were a wise kind woman who could see past all those old stories. I guess I was wrong.’

  Mary just shrugged. ‘Unless you turn away from John, I can’t help,’ she told him as he turned his back and walked away.

  I was shocked by this. The man had been so desperate, and it seemed obvious to me that it must have been hard hard hard for him to approach her at all.

  ‘He can’t help coming from Brown River, Mary,’ I said. ‘He can’t help it that he grew up with the Johnfolk stories. Surely we could have helped him just a bit?’

  Mary snorted. ‘I did help him, Angie. I told him exactly what he needs to know. What else could I have done?’

  ‘But he can’t do what you said, Mary! Someone in Brown River can’t follow David, any more than someone in Davidstand could follow John.’

  Mary studied my face for a moment with her small grey eyes. ‘Suppose someone was to come up to us now and ask the way to Veeklehouse,’ she said, ‘what would we tell him?’

  ‘We’d say to head rockway along poolside.’

  ‘And what if he said he didn’t want to go rockway because all his friends would be angry with him, and he’d prefer to get there by going alpway?’

  ‘Well, we’d tell him . . .’ I laughed, seeing how her story had trapped me. ‘I guess we’d tell him he could go whichever he liked, but if he went alpway from here he’d never get to Veeklehouse.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mary.

  ‘Please don’t be angry with me, Mary, for saying this, but how can we be sure it works like that? Surely the way to Gela depends where you start from, doesn’t it? I mean . . .’ I struggled to think of a little story to explain what I meant that would be as smart as hers. ‘I mean, if you started off from Nob Head, you would need to go alpway to get to Veeklehouse. And don’t the Johnfolk start in a different place from us? Yes, and anyway, please don’t be angry with me, Mary, but you said the Gela the Johnfolk believe they love is just an idea in their heads. But how can we be sure that the Gela we think we know isn’t just an idea in ours ?’