Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett Read Free Book Online Page B

the Dark with John.”
    For some reason Greenstone seemed pleased at this news, as if I’d solved a problem that had been worrying him.
    “Johnfolk, too, that’s good. I’d been thinking that—” But he broke off and asked me another question. “Your mum and dad   ... I don’t suppose either one of them is a holeface or a clawfoot or anything like that?”
    “Holeface?”
    “Or batface, as you people call them here.”
    “No.”
    He seemed relieved by this answer, too.
    “Angie here’s my best friend, though,” I reminded him, “and she’s a batface, as you can see.”
    He glanced toward Angie and looked a bit embarrassed, but before he could speak, a familiar voice called out from over in the flamelight.
    “Hey! Starlight! Angie!”
    It was Uncle Dixon with Johnny, Lucky, and Delight. Greenstone jumped up and bowed.
    “I can assure you, Uncle, that we’ve only been sitting in full sight of everyone. And   ... um   ... her friend here with us all the time, as well. My two ringmen also.”
    “Eh?”
    We all looked at him blankly. None of us had any idea what he was talking about.
    “A bloke gave us thirty sticks for our kneeboats,” Dixon said excitedly, turning back to me and Angie. “ Thirty! Good job we didn’t take twenty-five from that other fellow, eh?”
    “That’s good.”
    I wished he’d go. I wished they’d all go, even Angie, even those bloody ringmen, and leave me alone with Greenstone so I could touch him as I so badly wanted, and he could touch me.
    “Julie’s keeping an eye on the boat,” Dixon said. “She said she’d be happy down there by herself. You know how she likes her own company.”
    “We’re going to this place where they tell stories with little people made of wood,” Johnny said. “Why don’t you come with us?”
    Jeff’s ride, why couldn’t they leave me alone? Why did they insist on getting in the way?
    But Greenstone stepped in on their side.
    “You must go, Starlight. I’ve seen those wooden people myself and they were good good. And anyway, you should listen to your uncle. He wants you to go.”

Julie Deepwater
     
    On that long, low ledge where people pulled out their boats below the crumbly cliff, there was a band of shadow that was out of the light of Veeklehouse, but not so close to the water to be lit up by its glow. I sat there for some time, near our boat, watching jewel-bats swooping in low, again and again, over the stretch of water right in front of me, their fingertips trailing the bright surface.
    After a while I decided I’d go along the ledge a bit and look at the other boats that had been pulled out there. I wasn’t impressed. There were big boats and little ones, single ones and double ones, and even a couple of triples, but all of them, except for one old kneeboat, which someone must have traded from Nob Head, seemed to be made in that same dumb Mainground way, where they just scrape the muscle and tubes out of a length of tree trunk and then glue greased skins over the ends.
    I was about to turn back when I noticed some boats ahead that were different. They were further along than I’d meant to come—I was barely even in sight of our long-boat now—but I couldn’t resist going a bit closer for a look. There were three of them, and each was in three parts, the main body of the boat in the middle, and two big out-boats joined onto the main body by planks. That itself wasn’t so different from the Davidfolk’s triple log-boats, but what was new was the way the bodies were made. Neither the main bodies nor the out-boats were made of whole logs, and they weren’t sections of bark fixed on a frame, either, like our long-boat. Instead they were shaped from long, thin planks of wood, which had been fixed tightly together side by side somehow and then rubbed smooth. I could see these boats would cut through water like a knife through a lump of fat, not just better than those stupid log-boats with their flat ends, but better than any