‘We tell ourselves, Become like Earth !’ Luke said. ‘It’s written in big letters on the wall of my father’s house in Edenheart. It’s written all over the place. And that’s what we try and do. That’s why our ground is called New Earth. That’s how come we found metal, and figured out how to make windcatchers. That’s why our spears and arrows are so much better than yours. Because every waking we work and work at learning new things so we can find our way back to all the knowledge and power that people have on Earth. We’re even working at making lecky-trickity and jet planes. Did you know that? We have a competition every two hundredwakes, at a place called Winghouse, for the best plane. We already have guys who jump from the top of a high cliff with wings made of wood and buckskin and fly to far side of the valley. They just haven’t figured out yet how to fly up again.’

One of the guards gave a quiet little snort of laughter.

‘But we will,’ said Luke. ‘You can laugh, but we’ll figure it out, believe me. Just as we figured out metal. I guess you’d have laughed if you could have watched our people searching for rocks waking after waking, breaking them up, heating one kind after another in hot hot fire, over and over and over. But we got there, didn’t we? We found the one that gives us redmetal, and no one laughs at that.’

He pulled off his headwrap, showing his troubled face to the freezing freezing air, and rubbing the tired skin round his eyes.

‘But never mind that now. What I’m trying to say is that we want nothing more than to be like Earth, to live up to what Earth achieved. And yet Earth came back to you and not to us! That’s the part I can’t understand. We Johnfolk try so hard to be true to Earth, but Earth came back to that same Circle of Stones that John wanted to destroy.’

The guards refused to speak. They’d set out with Leader Harry to bring this man back to Circle Valley, and that’s what they were doing. No one had told them they had to talk to him.