BooksBarbecue
Back Daughter of Eden Save as PDF
Chapters (68)
  1. Title page
  2. Dedication
  3. Part I
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 20. 20:25 MT.
  30. Part II
  31. Twenty-six
  32. Twenty-seven
  33. Twenty-eight
  34. Twenty-nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-one
  37. Thirty-two
  38. Thirty-three
  39. Thirty-four
  40. Thirty-five
  41. Thirty-six
  42. Thirty-seven
  43. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 22. 20:05 MT.
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine
  46. Forty
  47. Forty-one
  48. GAIA YOUNG. SUBJECTIVE IMPRESSIONS.MISSION DAY 25. 15:30 MT.
  49. Forty-two
  50. Forty-three
  51. Forty-four
  52. Forty-five
  53. Forty-six
  54. Forty-seven
  55. Forty-eight
  56. Forty-nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-one
  59. Fifty-two
  60. Fifty-three
  61. Fifty-four
  62. Part III
  63. Fifty-five
  64. Fifty-six
  65. Fifty-seven
  66. Fifty-eight
  67. Also by Chris Beckett
  68. Copyright page

They were still singing when helpers arrived from Strongheart’s shelter to invite the Earth people to come and talk to the high people. The rest of us settled down to wait for their return, happy happy still, but full of questions, and some of us beginning to sense that, however wonderful this all felt, the ground we stood on was falling away beneath our feet.

I thought about Leader Harry on the back of his buck. He was getting near to the edge of the Dark. The headlantern of his buck was starting to light up the ground round him, and monkeys were jumping and wheeling away from him, and up into those last few trees before the snow.

Thirty-three

Mary probably saw monkeys too as she rode down into Tall Tree Valley with her guards and helpers, but if so they’d have been the special flying kind that you get in the High Valleys, the ones with the flaps of skin that stretch out between their six arms, and let them glide between those big trees as if they had wings. Tall Tree Valley is a little steep bowl in middle of darkness and you can easily see from one side to the other. As her buck climbed down the path, there was a row of little white patches of light moving slowly down far side of the valley. It was more frightened people climbing down from David’s Path.

Of course I didn’t know until later that Mary was at Tall Tree at that time, but she was in my thoughts all the same. The truth was that, even after eight years, and even though I hadn’t seen her once since the time she turned her head away from me in Circle Valley and told her guards to keep me away from her, I still thought about her every waking. And she was particularly in my thoughts when something new happened, something unexpected, because, even after all this time, I would still ask myself, What would Mary say? What would Mary’s opinion be? How would Mary sort this out? However unkind she’d been to me, the fact was that her views were much more interesting than the views of anyone I’d met since. I guess that was because she didn’t just think about the world we can see with our eyes, like most people did in Michael’s Place, but about the greater world that hid behind it, the wider story, in which each person’s own little life is only just one thread.