Mother of Eden (36 page)

Lucy Johnson

People always used to find me rather sad and gray. “Poor Lucy,” the other chiefswomen used to say, and then they’d find someone more fun to talk to. But now, as I rode in my car through the bright caves and out into the digs beyond, I couldn’t help myself from laughing out loud as I thought about the way things had turned out. For so long, all that I’d dared to even hope for was that one of my daughters would be the housewoman of Firehand’s son. Yet now it was me who wore the ring myself, me who the small people were cheering as we bumped into the first little dig cluster, me whose son would wear the Headman’s hat when Dixon had finally gone.

I waved to the small people—
those diggers
did
have hard lives—
and threw them a specially big handful of cubes. And then, as the car rolled on up the path, and the excited children finally fell behind, I half closed my eyes and remembered, yet one more time, the waking that Dixon came back from Brown River. It was the happiest waking in my life.

I was still sleeping when he came in.

“Lucy? Are you awake? I’m back.”

I opened my eyes. He was still in the wrap he’d been wearing on the boat, stinking of smoke from the firecage.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” Dixon said, holding out his closed hand.

I assumed it would be some little present he’d got me from Old Ground, hoping to sweeten me a bit before he told me the bad news. He knew I liked the bracelets those Brown River people make, with the pretty colored stones.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t wait till First Horn,” I sighed. “Now I’m going to be tired all waking.”

Dixon just smiled and opened his hand. It was a moment before I realized what was there.

“Oh, Gela’s heart, Dixon! Oh, Gela’s sweet sweet heart! You really found it!”

“Put it on. Let me see it where it belongs.”

It fitted like it had been made for me, and he bent down and kissed me on the mouth.

“We’d hardly put our feet down in Brown River,” he told me, “when a trader came running up with it.

“ ‘Perhaps it’s only a copy, Father,’ she said, ‘but it looks real enough, and the metal’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.’ ”

Dixon had put on a funny Brown River voice to make me laugh: “Prerbly it’s ernly a kerpy, Ferther.” Now he kissed me again.

“It’s incredible,” I told him. “It’s like Mother Gela herself had it all planned.”

He smiled. “Well, that’s certainly how it looks, isn’t it? Mother Gela telling us that she wants me to be Headman, and you to be Ringwearer. Mother Gela telling us that we Johnfolk really are the ones she wants to be in charge. We can make good use of this story, Lucy. We can make good good use of it.”

I laughed.

“Maybe we can,” I told him, “but that’s for after the horn blows. Come on now, my smart smart man, what are you waiting for? Come and lie down! Come and lie down with the Mother of Eden!”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Huge thanks are due to Sara O’Keeffe and Julian Pavia, my editors respectively at Corvus in the UK and Broadway in the US. Between them they encouraged/goaded me into transforming this book into the novel I had really wanted to write. I’m very grateful also to Barbara and Tony Ballantyne, who published the original prototype of this story, under the title “Gela’s Ring,” in their online magazine,
Aethernet.
Thanks, too, to my brilliant agent, John Jarrold, for getting my work out there where it can be seen, and to the Clarke Award judges and everyone else who enjoyed my previous foray into Eden. And thanks to my dear wife, Maggie, for pretty much everything.