The rest of us went hunting and scavenging. There weren’t any bucks that we could find, but there were starflower seeds to grind up, and the odd bat or fish or slinker. Davidson shot one of those ducks out on the water, but like most birds its meat was too tough and bitter to eat, however hungry we might be. We eyed the bucks that had carried us across the Dark, and wondered whether to start on them. Sometimes we saw other people eyeing them too.

From time to time a horn would blow to let people know that they could get some food from David Strongheart’s stores, and then a long long line would form under the whitelantern trees outside Strongheart’s shelter in Brooklyn, a line of thin sad hungry people, and a bunch of guards would hand out little pieces of dried buckmeat and hard hard flowercakes that could crack your teeth, baked that way so they wouldn’t go bad. If the people had trading sticks or blackglass, they’d hand them over as a trade. If not, one of the guards would scratch down their names and where they came from on squares of bark, so that Strongheart could come to them later and take something back from them. Maybe he’d take a daughter to be one of his helpers, or a bunch of young guys to build a new shelter for him.

I stood in that line myself one time, waiting for maybe a quarter of a waking for a few scraps, and giving the guard one of my precious cubes of metal. All round me there was a sour smell of fear and suspicion. People accused each other of pushing in. Valley folk muttered about outsiders taking their food. Outsiders snarled back that it was their food in first place: the Valley folk had been living for way too long on meat and fruit and flowercakes brought in for them across the Dark. Once a Valley man and a man from Davidstand started to push and shove each other, and guards had to come over and pull them apart.

‘Come on, you guys!’ a woman just in front of me called out to them. ‘Earth has come, remember! Earth is here! What reason is there now to fight among ourselves?’