Mother of Eden (20 page)

Greenstone Johnson

Soon as I’d finished with the chiefs, helpers came to tell me about Starlight. Whole House was fretting and running about like a nest of glitterbirds that have spotted a treefox.

“We’re worried she’s unwell, Father!”

“She’s been up the ladders, Father!”

“She made the Timekeeper blow Fourth Horn way way too early!”

I pretended to frown, but inside I laughed. Only Starlight would have thought of altering the flow of my dad’s precious time!

“Well, why don’t you take me to her?”

She was in the Writingcave, sitting at a table under one of the trees, pretending to read a bark under that big map of Eden. She’d sent away all the helpers.

“Whole House is in a state, Starlight!” I told her. “No one knows which horn they’re in, or what they’re supposed to be doing!”

She ignored what I’d said completely. “I’ve been figuring it all out, Greenstone. There are two sorts of power in the world: the sort that comes from force, and the sort that comes from love. You might say the first sort is man’s power, and the second sort is woman’s power, not that women can’t be forceful or men can’t be loving, not that some men aren’t kinder than some women, or that some women aren’t more forceful than some men. But men are usually stronger and bigger than women, and only women have breasts and wombs. And
 
.
.
.”

I could see why she’d worried the helpers so much. She was talking at double the normal speed, her brain running so fast that her mouth could hardly keep up.

A helper brought food, and I told her to leave it for us and wait outside the door to make sure no one disturbed us.

“Starlight, dear,” I said. “Did you not want us to talk about what happened at the Rock?”

Anger flashed in her eyes. “I
am
talking about that, Greenstone. That’s
exactly
what I’m talking about. What happened at the Rock this waking is two women were thrown to the fire for daring to listen to words that came to them from women and not from men.”

“Yes, but—”

She held up her hand to stop me. “No! Wait! Let me say what I have to say. I don’t know if the story those women told was true, but it’s certainly older than your New Earth stories about President being a man, or President being Gela’s dad.”

Mother of Eden, this was dangerous stuff. I looked round to make sure that the helper was out of hearing.

“How do you figure that out?”

“Because no one outside of New Earth thinks that President was a man, but there are whisperers on both sides of the Pool.”

“Really? I’ve never heard of—”

“Well, I have. So it figures, doesn’t it? The story that whisperers tell goes back to before the time when your precious John crossed the water. The story about President being a man only began after the crossing.”

“Well, that doesn’t mean their story is true and ours isn’t. We’ve discovered how to make metal since then, we know all sorts of things that people didn’t used to know over on Old Ground.”

“Never mind which story is true. What I want to know is why you New Earth men think it’s so terrible for women to hear a story that men didn’t tell them?”

Again I looked round at the door.

“Speak more quietly, dear,” I told her, putting my hand on hers. “I am listening, I promise, and I’m interested, but please please speak more quietly.”

“The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men’s power has won out over women’s power, just like it’s done on Mainground. But men still fear women’s power. No one ever forgets their mother’s power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don’t forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child’s craving for the comfort of women’s bodies.”

“Slow down, Starlight, slow down. You’re talking so so fast.”

“Mothers have great great power, Greenstone, and Gela was the mother of everyone. So what you guys have done is to capture Gela and make her say what you want her to say, just like you capture leopards, and cage them, and make them sing. That’s what the Ringwearer is, isn’t she? The power of women in a cage. Well, I’m not doing it anymore. You can threaten to chuck me from the Rock, if you like, but even so, I won’t do it.”

She was close to tears. My hand still lay over hers and I squeezed it gently. “Don’t make me into your enemy, Starlight. Remember I loved you because you were different? It’s hard hard to change things in a ground like this, but we can—”

“It’s just an excuse, Greenstone, to say it’s hard to change things.”

“No, it’s a fact. To change things you need power and, as my dad told me so many times, if you’re going to hold on to power, then you have to play the power game, give up everything
except
the game, and throw away whatever might get in the way of winning. If you start thinking about anything other than winning, someone will come along who’s willing to play the game harder than you. And that makes it difficult to—”

“What’s the point of power, if you have to give up everything else to get it?”

“Let me speak for a moment, Starlight. I said it was difficult, but I didn’t say we shouldn’t try. I just beg you—”

I stopped because a helper had come running in.

“It’s your father, Headmanson. He’s asking for you. Purelight says he’s not got long to go.”

Quietstream Batwing

I was visiting my grandchildren upcave when the mother decided to bring forward the Fourth Horn. We all felt worried when we heard it. We all knew it was blowing too early. We all wondered what it meant.

“I’ll go back,” I said to my daughters. “There must be something wrong.”

I’d hardly got inside the Headmanhouse when I was told that the Headmanson had been called to his father and that he’d asked me to go to the Ringwearer in the Writingcave.

“The Headman is dying,” the other helpers told me, “and the mother’s gone crazy.”

I ran straight to her. She was sitting at a table by herself under a tree, food in front of her that she hadn’t touched. Beautiful beautiful, she looked, all alone in that pure white light, like a woman from Earth.

“Mother, is everything all right with you? The Headmanson thought you could do with company.”

She’d turned impatiently toward me when I came in, but as soon as she saw it was me, all the irritation went from her face.

“Oh, Quietstream! I’m so glad it’s you!”

She wasn’t far from tears, and I could tell that what she really

Greenstone Johnson

One moment it had been my dad, struggling fiercely like he always did, all on his own. Next moment it was a pale damp slab of meat. Purelight was there, and a healer, and they both looked round at me to see how I would react, but my eyes were dry and the doors of my heart had closed up tightly, like the big doors of the Headmanhouse. I didn’t feel anything at all for that pale thing lying on the bed.

Mother of Eden, I’d wished for his death
many
many times, but as much as I’d wanted it, I’d also dreaded it because of the burden that would fall on me from that moment on. Well, that moment was now here. I was Headman of Edenheart and New Earth, and I decided I’d start by being as hard and cold as the old man himself.

“Get the body washed and made ready for the funeral,” I told Purelight, “and have the topman send riders out to the chiefs and teachers with the news.”

Purelight bowed her head, but she still hung back, peeking slyly at my face. I had a reputation among the helpers for being soft, for showing my feelings as my father never did. No doubt she was expecting, if not tears, then a trembling lip or a wobbly voice, which she could report to the other helpers.

“Hurry up, please,” I told her. “And have someone find the Ringwearer. I’ll meet her in the Red Cave, and she and I are to be left alone.”

“Headman,” the healer said as Purelight went out—
and it was strange strange to hear that word—
“Headman, can I help you in any way? Sometimes the grief—”

No doubt the old fool had some cure for grief in his bag that worked just as well as his cures for the lung sickness. Luckily, I had no need for it. My heart was as still and cold as the Dark Mountains above us, where the snowleopards waited for their prey.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “You can leave now. I’ll have the topman give you your metal later this waking.”

I stood by myself in front of my father’s corpse, enjoying the feeling of not feeling anything, and enjoying, too, the knowledge that helpers and ringmen would be peeking at me from the doors right now and
seeing
me not feeling anything. It made me feel powerful.

When Starlight came to find me, I was sitting in my father’s stone seat, or the seat that
had
been my father’s. She frowned as she studied my face from across the cave, dismissing the helper who’d brought her to me with a backward wave of her hand. How quickly she’d grown used to ordering people about! How good at it she’d become!

“Have the ringmen at the doors make sure that no one disturbs us,” she called back as she advanced toward me, watching my face all the time.

I smiled. “Here, Starlight, you can sit beside me. These are our seats now. We can use them whenever we want.”

She nodded and, still not taking her eyes off mine, she took the seat that had been empty since my mum’s death.

“Everyone expects to see me grieve for the old slinker,” I said, “but why would I? He showed me no love at all.”

“Not even once?”

I wished she hadn’t asked me that, because straight away I realized that there was one time. I’d cherished it over many many hundredwakes, turning it over wonderingly in my mind. It was when I was a little boy, walking across some stony ground beside the river with my mother and father, whereabouts exactly I couldn’t say, but I think it was near the Fall.

“Look, Greenstone!” my mother said. “There’s a bluefish come out onto the rocks. If you run you might catch it.”

I ran, but I tripped up almost at once, grazing my hands and my knees and even my nose. I didn’t cry, because I knew my father didn’t like tears. I just picked myself up. Of course the fish had heard me and dived into the water, so I turned back to my mum and dad.

“Good boy,” my dad said. “That’s a brave little man.”

There must have been hundreds of people who’d shown me more kindness than that, yet as soon as I remembered it, the doors inside me swung open and the tears came.

Starlight Brooking

The Headmanhouse was made by building a wall across the opening of a side cave. At the back of it, there was another wall, and beyond that, the side cave went back without walls for maybe half a mile to the hole in the roof where the water came down from the mountains above. There were no bucks or other animals still living there except for the odd small bat that came down from out top, but trees and starflowers still grew on the banks of the stream, making the cave warm and light. It was here that the Headmen and Ringwearers of New Earth were buried, not under piles of stones as they buried people on Mainground, but under big square slabs of rock that were built round them like a kind of box, with their names scratched on the top. There was a whole row of these stone boxes, stretching away upcave from the boxes of John Redlantern and Brightflame, which were bigger than all the others, and painted in bright colors.

Now all the chiefs and teachers gathered there, and their housewomen and sons and daughters, and the ringmen and helpers from the Headmanhouse. There were a bunch of underteachers, too, and a hundred or so small people the chiefs had brought in from their grounds. Four ringmen carried Firehand’s body out from the Headmanhouse to the box that had been prepared for him next to Greenstone’s mother. Pale as a dead spearfish, he was lying on a wooden bed in a blue longwrap sewn with many metal badges, and on his head was the Headman’s hat.

I’d never seen the hat before, and I’d expected polished metal and colored plantstuff, but it was just a dried old buckskin cap, black with age. It didn’t need metal and fancy colors, though, because its power came from being a thing out of an old story, like the ring, or the Veekle, or the Circle of Stones. It was the same hat that John Redlantern had been wearing when Brightflame met him beside Brown River.

In front of the stone box the ringmen paused, and the Head Teacher took the hat from the old man’s head before they lowered him into it. A hornman in red blew a long, low note.

“Firehand goes to meet President,” called out the Head Teacher in a weird singsong voice.

The hornman blew another blast.

“.
.
. and Harry and Tommy,” called out the Head Teacher.

Another blast.

“.
.
. and Mother Gela and John.”

Now all the chiefs and teachers came forward to take hold of the heavy stone lid of the box and lift it over the top of the old man. And that was the end of Firehand’s time in the light of Eden, and the beginning of his time in darkness. Almost all the small people were crying—
I suppose to them Firehand himself was something out of a story—
but the chiefs’ and teachers’ eyes were dry.

When Firehand was under the stone, we all went down to the Meeting Ground, where a crowd of people was already gathered and, on the raised-
up floor in front of the whitelantern trees, the Head Teacher placed the Headman’s hat on Greenstone’s head and Greenstone promised to carry on the work of his great-
great grandfather John, be a good son to Mother Gela, and protect New Earth and its rules. Everyone cheered and clapped.

“The new Headman of Edenheart and New Earth!” the Head Teacher called out, and three hornmen blew loudly together.

Greenstone had told me I had to speak now, both as his housewoman and as the Ringwearer, the mother of all of them, even Greenstone himself. I went to the front of the wooden floor and raised my hands for quiet.

“This is a good man,” I told them. “He will do his best to look after you. And you must all do your best to help him, as I’ll try to help him, too. You must all listen carefully to what he says, and what he asks of you.”

There was a big cheer. The small people loved me, but they liked Greenstone, too: He had a reputation for being friendly and kind. There was power here, I thought as I stepped back so that Greenstone could speak. We had power, just from being ourselves, that me and him could build on.

There was more feasting after that, more music and dancing and leopards in cages. When we lay down at last in our bed, it was already more than halfway to First Horn, but I couldn’t help myself from speaking to the new Headman about the things I’d been holding inside my head.

“If we get our power from the chiefs, and they get their power from the small people, then our power comes from the small people, too. We just need to find a way of reaching out to the small people over the heads of the big ones. It shouldn’t be too hard. You always say how impossible it is to please the chiefs and teachers because they already have so much and yet still always want more. But it should be easy to please the small people, because they have