Greenstone didn’t tell me about the two being sent to the Rock until after First Horn, when we’d been bathed and wrapped by our helpers.
“I thought I wouldn’t tell you earlier,” he said, “so you wouldn’t have to think about it until you needed to. We have to be there, you see, so as to show that the punishment comes from all of New Earth. It’s the worst part of our job.”
I remembered how weirdly proud I once had been of how my dad had punished people in Mainground. It had made me feel hard and tough compared to the other kids in gentle, boring Knee Tree Grounds: the idea that my own dad had run people through with spears, or tied them to hot trees. Sometimes I’d even boasted about it, just as my mother boasted about it to me. But it all felt different now.
“We have to watch them fall?”
“We have to be there when it happens, and usually the Ringwearer says a few words so people can see that the mother consents to it, too.”
“I guess they scream when the moment comes?”
“Usually there’s something tied round their mouths so they don’t.”
“What must it be like, in those last moments, knowing that they . . . ?”
“I just hope we never find out.”
A distance came suddenly into Greenstone’s face, like he’d had a glimpse of the future. Then he shook himself back into the world. “You need to bear in mind,” he said, “that everyone in New Earth knows the rules and the punishments for breaking them. These women could have avoided this.”
“I suppose at least it’s people who’ve done something wrong, not just some poor chief’s son who might one waking want to be Headman.”
“Yes. It’s people who broke the rules, and it won’t be anyone we know.”
Greenstone had the car brought up for us. The Head Teacher had arrived from the Teachinghouse and, after he’d slobbered over the ring, two strong ringmen heaved his fat body up into the car and he rode with us down to Steam Fall.
“What did these people do, anyway?” I asked as we set off.
“They were whisperers, Ringwearer,” the Head Teacher told me. “The Rock is the punishment for all whisperers, and for anyone who listens to whispering without reporting it.”
“What’s a whisperer?”
Teacher Michael laughed. “I’m sorry, Ringwearer. It’s so easy to forget that you come from a different place. Whisperers are women who claim to have received a special secret message passed down from Mother Gela, which they themselves pass on to others. For that reason, it’s particularly important that you’re there so you can make quite clear that Mother Gela doesn’t . . .”
He went on talking and explaining things for some time after that, but I’d stopped being able to hear him. The car was bumping along the path. Trees were shining around us. Glitterbirds were most probably squabbling on the roof above. But I was no longer there.
“Are you all right, Starlight?” Greenstone asked me.
Hmmmph hmmmph hmmmph went the trees of the Great Cave forest, like this was no different from any other waking. My tongue was so dry that it seemed to be stuck to the roof of my mouth.
“I’ve . . . I’ve never seen a person being done for before,” I said.
“Never seen a person done for?” said the Head Teacher. “Well, it’s a good thing to see, if you know the person’s done wrong. It’s good to see New Earth being made stronger.”
I tried to moisten my mouth.
“It seems harsh to do for someone just for whispering some silly story.”
“Oh, really, Ringwearer!” the Head Teacher exclaimed. “It’s because the story is so silly that it must punished. John Redlantern was Gela’s truest son, we know that for certain. Gela guided him to the ring so he could lead the way out of Circle Valley—well, we wouldn’t be here otherwise, would we?—and, for her sake, he set himself to rebuild all Eden as a New Earth for Gela’s children. We are Gela’s people, and we can’t have these women confusing things with these lies.”
“It is harsh, I know, Starlight,” Greenstone said, “but you’ve got to remember that you’re new here. Everyone in New Earth knows that whispering is against the rules, and everyone knows the Rock is the punishment. So these women did have a choice. All they had to do was not whisper, and they’d not be where they are now.”
“Well, they might still be, actually,” Teacher Michael pointed out, “if we’d discovered in some other way that they’d been told the story and not reported it. It often happens when we catch a whisperer that she gives us the names of other people she’s whispered to. And of course we always question the daughters of every whisperer, because nine times out of ten, it’s her own daughters she’s told.”
“What, and then the ones she’s whispered to get thrown to the fire as well?”
“Certainly, if they failed to report it. How will we ever stamp out this stupid story otherwise?”
A little buck stopped for a moment in our path, turned its flat black eyes toward us, sampled the air with its feelers.
“I can’t see why anyone ever answers your questions, if it means they’re going to send their own mother or daughter to the Rock.”
The Head Teacher gave Greenstone a look like grown-ups give each other over the head of a child. “Well, the ringmen do help us with the questioning, Ringwearer. Most people are afraid of pain.”
“I don’t . . . What? Are you saying you hurt them on purpose?”
“Like the Headmanson said, people know they have a choice. They tell us what we need to know, or they get hurt.”
Again, I ran my tongue round inside my mouth, trying to moisten it.
“Well, I don’t think these people should go to the Rock. Killers I could understand, but not people who’ve just heard a story. And anyway, Gela has been dead a long long time. How does anyone really know which of the stories about her is true? Like our Jeff used to say, the past keeps changing. You guys have one version of the story of Eden. The Davidfolk have another. These women have another again. How can you be sure which one is right? How can you be sure their story doesn’t come from Gela?”
The Head Teacher’s face darkened, like it always did when I questioned whether he knew best. “Ringwearer, you must be careful careful what you say. Remember that you speak for Mother Gela, and people listen to every word. I hope you’re not suggesting that we teachers have got it wrong?”
Greenstone came in now. “Oh, come on now, Teacher,” he said firmly. “It’s a big big thing to do for a human being on purpose, and Starlight has never seen it before. You can’t expect her not to be uneasy about it! It wouldn’t be human.”
Teacher Michael shrugged and looked away. I’d been wishing that this journey could go on forever and never reach where it was going, but the dreadful edge of Steam Fall had already appeared ahead of us, and I could see the little shadowy shapes of thirty forty people there, black against the steam.
The Head Teacher turned stiffly toward me. “I’m sorry if I was too hard on you, then, Ringwearer. It’s not your fault that some of the things you’ve been taught are wrong, and I can see that death might seem a harsh punishment to one who doesn’t yet understand the damage these people do to John’s great plan. I don’t ask you to say you agree with the punishment if you’re not ready to do so, but I do ask you to make clear that these whisperers do not speak for the Mother of Eden.”
We climbed down from the car, and walked toward the people. There were about ten ringmen there, and a chief called Sky, and a bunch of small people come to watch, but I hardly noticed any of them because there in middle were two women with their hands tied behind their backs and pieces of plantstuff pulled tight across their mouths. One—her name was Brightflame—was an old stooped thing with white hair. The other, Sue, was about the same age as Glitterfish. She was a fat, dumpy little woman who looked like she might be a slowhead, and there were five fat little boys all around her, clinging to her and crying.
“They’re both stonebreakers in the digs at Gerry Cave,” the Head Teacher said, glancing down at one of his barks. “As you can see, the woman Sue has five sons but no daughters. She apparently decided to tell the so-called Secret Story to a niece whose dad was a ringman. The niece probably wouldn’t have told anyone, but someone had seen Sue talking to her and she was afraid of being reported, so she went and told her dad. The old woman is Sue’s mother. Sue tried at first to say that she’d heard the story from her great grandmother, who of course is conveniently dead, but they all do that, and we got the truth out of her in the end.”
I could see the cuts and bruises on the younger woman’s head.
“You need to let go of your mum now, boys,” a ringman told the children in a gentle voice, but they took no notice, and he and the other ringmen had to peel them off her one by one, while they kicked and scratched and screamed.
When the two women were standing on their own, I walked forward. I touched their arms and then, although I hadn’t planned to do it, I kissed each of them on the cheek. As soon as I’d done it, I felt I’d done a horrible, stupid thing, though I couldn’t think what else I might have done.
“Right then, you two,” the first ringman said to them. “Time to get you up on top, I’m afraid.”
He spoke kindly to them, just as he’d spoken to their children, as if a kind voice could somehow make this right. The women shuffled forward and were gently helped up onto the top of that black rock by two more ringmen, who climbed up after them.
“We watch from here, Starlight,” Greenstone said, pointing to a place on the edge, where a long branch had been set up to prevent us from falling over.
I felt numb. It was like when you’ve been lying on your arm and it’s gone to sleep, but it wasn’t my arm but my mind that was all thick and useless. I walked with him to the edge. I looked down. It was one of those moments when the steam had blown aside and I could see straight away, I could numbly see, exactly why they used this particular spot, for there were none of those rocks sticking out from the side, and the drop went straight on down all the way to that brilliant orange fire.
“Ringwearer?” I heard a voice saying, and I realized that someone nearby had been trying to get my attention.
“Starlight?” said Greenstone. “Can’t you hear? Teacher Michael is asking you to speak. It only needs to be a few words and, like he said, you don’t have to say you agree with the punishment.”
“Speak?”
I looked round and saw the ringmen and the little boys and all the other people behind them waiting for me.
“It’s . . . It’s silly to believe a story just because it’s been passed down to you,” I began.
“You need to speak louder, Starlight,” Greenstone murmured, “or no one will know you’re speaking at all.”
I’d shrunk down inside myself, I realized, and my voice had shrunk with me. Now I stood up taller, took a deep breath, and made myself speak in the strong voice of the Ringwearer. At once my head cleared and words came.
“It’s silly to pass on a story just because it’s been passed down to you from the past. You can’t really know if it comes from where it says it comes from, and you can’t know who may have changed it over the generations. The only way you can be sure a thing is true is . . .”
I hesitated here. How could you be sure anything was true? And, Gela’s heart, why was I talking about this, anyway, when those poor women were standing there with that awful drop beneath them, and those little boys were waiting?
“You often can’t be sure at all,” I said. “All you can do is decide for yourself whether a story is likely to be true. So I think these two women have been silly, but looking at them now, I’m not sure they’re all that smart. I’m quite sure they haven’t had a chance to read any of those barks full of knowledge the teachers have in the Teachinghouse, and I think maybe they just made a mistake. So . . . well, I’m the Ringwearer. I try to speak as Mother Gela would speak if she was here, and I try to remember that she’s the mother of us all: Johnfolk and Davidfolk, big people and small people, smart people and foolish people. And what I think is that she’d want her children to be given another chance, if she knew they weren’t too smart and had done a silly thing. That’s why I’m asking the ringmen here kindly to let these women get down from the Rock. If they promise never to whisper those stories again, I think we should let them go.”
The little boys’ eyes were shining with hope, and though you couldn’t make out the two whisperers’ faces properly with that plantstuff round their mouths, I could see them relax and breathe. Even the ringmen looked relieved.
I glanced toward Greenstone. He opened his mouth, but the Head Teacher spoke first.
“Push them over, men.”
And they did. They pushed them with the blunt ends of their spears, and the women fell backward over the edge.
“Mum!” screamed one of the little boys.
It was so loud, so piercing, that even through the roaring of that huge waterfall, it seemed to fill up the cave.
I looked round at the boys’ faces—I guess they were like my face that time I came back to the Sand and learned what had happened to my mum—and then I looked down. Far far below us, those two women were still falling, already tiny, already far beyond the reach of anyone else, but still whole, still alive and thinking. And then suddenly, one after the other, they burst into flames.
The sight of it made me throw up. My sick fell down after them through the steam.
“How can the Head Teacher . . . ?”
Greenstone was pale and trembling, and his hands gripping that branch were white white. “I . . .” he began.
But the man himself was right behind me. “I’m afraid the rules are the rules, my dear. They can only be changed in Council. But you did well well, Ringwearer, for a first try at a difficult job. You made clear how foolish these stories are, and you made at least some attempt to explain why the knowledge of the Teachinghouse is superior. Even that bit at the end, well, we do want our mother to plead for mercy, don’t we? We do want her to be distressed. We want it, even if mercy can’t be given. So I think it was a nice touch, well judged even.”
I was like one of those little wooden people we’d seen at Veeklehouse: a little wooden Gela with strings pulled this way or that to suit the big men of New Earth. But, just like those poor dead women, I’d heard a story long ago that, however twisted and worn down it had become over the generations, might well have begun with Gela herself, the real Gela, the living woman called Angela Young, who came from a real place on Earth.
That little boy was still screaming.