The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy)

by Peadar O'Guilin

  "But Whistlenose would have been dead without me!"

  "If they'd had slings and aimed one at you, the whole Tribe would be dead. They would have surrounded us in the night while praising their Ancestors for sending them an idiot like you to deliver us into their bellies."

  "Perhaps you should make an example of him," said Aagam. "Does he have a wife?"

  "Shut up," said the Chief. "You were the one who told us we would be safe in the forest. Half the journey, you said!"

  "Then you should have left the day I told you! Things have changed. The Diggers are on the move. The more their population grows, the more food they need. The edges of their territory must be expanding exponentially. If we'd left at once, like I wanted—"

  Whistlenose pulled Browncrack away and left them to argue. He didn't know why the Chief let Aagam talk to him like that, but it was beyond his power to change.

  All he wanted now was to see Ashsweeper. But as soon as they were out of earshot of Wallbreaker's circle, he put one hand on each of Browncrack's young shoulders and looked him in the eye. "They're right, you know? You should have left me."

  The boy nodded, a tight movement, almost a jerk of the chin.

  Then Whistlenose pulled him into a tight, trembling embrace. "Bless you, boy. You are Tribe to me now."

  "Thank you."

  "Oh! And you have wet your spear. I can't call you 'boy' any more, can I?"

  A dozen heartbeats later, he was back with his family. Ashsweeper sat him down without a word and sponged him off with water from a deliciously cold pool at the centre of the camp.

  "He sends you out every day," she said, her voice a whisper. Everybody was speaking in the same tone so that it felt like they were surrounded by a constant, gentle hiss. "And you get all the most dangerous missions. You and Laughlong who displeased him."

  "We're older than everybody else. You should know that."

  Of course she knew. Hidden in her pack, she would have the tally stick on which she marked off his days. She recorded her own too. Only the boy, happily stalking mossbeasts around a rotted tree trunk, remained ageless and without a Tally of his own.

  "How happy he must be," Whistlenose muttered. "We fight so hard to get him named, and yet, from that moment on, his every heartbeat will be numbered."

  "Don't be sad," she said.

  He shook his head. "It has passed again already, my bride." He hugged her. He would have to get up again now, he realised, to seek out the families of the men who had died.

  Wallbreaker's orders for the Tribe to pack up arrived shortly after that. They moved backwards half a day's travel to a chest-high ring of crumbling old walls. Everybody tried to fit inside, so that whole families lay squashed in, one atop the other. They stayed there for two swelteringly horrible days, while women dug pits and every man who could lift a spear struggled through undergrowth, poking each rock for fear it should spring up at him.

  The new beasts—people had begun calling them "Jumpers"—followed on. Their patrols sparred with humans. Hunters died in a contest of equals, and sometimes the bodies of heroes were carried back to feed the Tribe.

  Small victories were won: ambushes that brought tangy green flesh to silent cheers and congratulations. But as the days passed, the Chief's agitation only grew worse. "How can I study them?" he raged, "if I can't get one alive? How can I make a plan?"

  "Haven't the Ancestors told you what to do?" asked Laughlong, making sure there were plenty there to hear him. For all his Tally must be full by now, he was still a brawny man with enough tattoos that his words could not be ignored. "Or maybe you could go out on patrol yourself and bring the Talker with you?"

  Wallbreaker sent the man on more and more missions, but Laughlong always found his way home to the Tribe without so much as a scratch.

  Whistlenose, however, earned plenty of scratches. When he returned from patrol, he would bring his boy to the centre of the camp, stepping over families that joked with him or asked him how things were "out there." The boy had friends too and they called him "Blackie" for his tangled mop of hair that Ashsweeper tried in vain to keep tidy with decorative bones. The children waved to each other, but the boy refused to be parted from his father when Whistlenose was in camp.

  "Why can't we play the tracking game any more, dada?"

  "Because you're too good for me. But don't worry, when we get to our new home, we'll play every day."

  "But I want to play now!"

  A woman saved the boy from a scolding, "Ooh, there's a handsome little man."

  "Thank you, Hightoes." Whistlenose smiled. The young woman, being with child, and therefore holy, got to sit in the centre of everything. The pregnant women received a constant stream of visitors asking for blessings and dream readings. Hightoes grinned again at the boy. "I hope my first child is as beautiful as you, little man."

  The boy squirmed. "As fierce as him, Hightoes. That's what you meant, wasn't it?" Whistlenose said.

  "Why yes, of course!" She grinned. Her husband, the young Fearsflyers, was out right now, tracking down the Jumpers. She let none of her worry show. Instead, she said to the boy, "Why are you here? You need another story? Didn't I just tell you one yesterday?"

  Whistlenose enjoyed the tales as much as anybody, and it was right here, at the centre of the camp, that they came to life. No more than two paces behind Hightoes, an enormous roll of furs held the oldest tally sticks from the House of Honour back in Centre Square. Many had been lost or damaged during the fight against the Armourbacks and Flyers, but Wallbreaker, to his credit, had ordered them packed up again. "We need them more than ever now," he'd said. How right he had been! Somewhere in the bulging furs, were sticks that had belonged to the Traveller, to John Spearmaker, to Treatymaker and other heroes of the Tribe. And many heroines too, thought Whistlenose, thinking sadly of poor Watersip. As a man, he dared not touch them, but he could feel their power from where he stood. It made his knees tremble.

  The Tribe had worked for days to build extra sleds for the Tallies, despite Aagam's protests.

  Now Whistlenose pointed to them. "You see the furs, son? You know what's in them?" A nod. "This is ManWays. Not the streets we left behind. This. This is us."

  Beyond that large sack, lay another series of sleds that carried the tribe's food supply—mostly Hairbeast flesh and that of a dozen Clawfolk for whom he himself had been exchanged, back when he'd Volunteered.

  "Half gone," he muttered. "And we've travelled less than five days from home."

  "What was that, hunter?" asked Hightoes. She had been on the point of launching into a story for the boy.

  He had no time to answer. A shout went up—shocking, when most people spoke in whispers. Men were running for the walls, hopping over and lunging past family groups, weapons held above their heads. "Mind him for me, please, Hightoes!"

  He didn't bother going back to Ashsweeper for his spear, knowing there'd be weapons waiting at the wall.

  Laughlong had returned from patrol. He had a wild look about him and there was no sign of the rest of his pack. There should have been others, five healthy men.

  "The Chief has brought us into a trap!" he cried. "Let me through! We need to run for home! The Ancestors have abandoned us!"

  And he must have been telling the truth, because something horrible happened then. Darkness fell—just like the time when Whistlenose had been in ClawWays. A darkness deep enough to hide men no more distant than the length of an arm. There was a sound, like the creaking of tortured metal, except that it came from everywhere at once and people started screaming, terrified the Roof was about to fall on them. And something did fall. Liquid, as warm as blood, in drops the size of a fist. Whistlenose felt them plopping down onto his skin.

  "It stings!" somebody said nearby. Worse than moss juice, it was like a burn from the fire and everywhere screams and prayers rose...

  And then, all at once, it was over. The Roof shone again, bright enough to blind, everybody blinking and afraid and rubbing at th
e red patches on their skin that the falling slime had etched there.

  Laughlong recovered before anybody else and began pushing his way towards the Chief, his face white with anger and, under the fury, fear.

  Whistlenose glanced quickly over the heads of the crowd to see Ashsweeper waving to him. She never seemed to be afraid! The boy too, could be seen at the centre of the camp where he had left him. Good, good. He followed after Laughlong to find out what was happening.

  Wallbreaker had not been touched by so much as a drop of slime. He and his two wives and his daughter lived under a canopy he'd had built for himself. Now, he stood outside of it, poking his toe at a newly formed pool. "It moves! Do you see that, men? It's crawling... or slithering!"

  Laughlong pushed him with such sudden violence that the Chief fell back into the arms of two hunters who were supposed to be guarding him and taking his messages.

  "Enough!" Laughlong shouted. "Enough of this madness!"

  Wallbreaker's response surprised everybody.

  With his soft chest and belly, people forgot that he had once been the Tribe's most promising hunter. Whistlenose used to watch him sparring in Centre Square and remembered wishing he had even half of that speed.

  Now, the Chief righted himself. Then, in a blur of movement, he kicked one of Laughlong's feet out from under him, before following up with a shoulder charge that threw the older man bottom-first into the pool of creeping slime.

  "Maybe it will crawl up your crack and shut you up," he said.

  He could be funny too, the Chief. That had also been forgotten. And a few people managed a laugh.

  "Now, hunter. You have lost your pack and there'd better be a good explanation, for they were younger and better men than you."

  "That they were," said Laughlong and he shocked everyone by starting to cry. He accepted a hand from Whistlenose, wiping the stinging slime away. "The green beasts," he said. "The Jumpers. Like you guessed, they can smell us even better than we can smell them, so, we covered ourselves in crushed berries and hid, hoping to take one alive for you to interrogate with the Talker."

  But the patrols of the enemy had somehow missed the humans completely. To their horror, the men found themselves surrounded when the entire Jumper tribe had moved forward around them.

  "That means they're coming," Laughlong said. "They don't have enough food to carry on this stalemate with us. They have no choice now but to fight."

  "Foolish of them," said Wallbreaker. "We're dug in. We have walls. Small ones, but still. We can hold off twice our own number."

  "But what about five times?" said Laughlong "I was able to do a count, I know what I saw."

  "No, no," said the Chief, shaking his head vigorously. "It still wouldn't be worth their while. They'll have to go around us. They can't know how much they outnumber us. They can't know this isn't our permanent home with generations of defences. They couldn't be that stupid."

  Whistlenose disagreed. "It's fight us or face the Diggers, Chief. That's the only choice they have now. And the forest is too narrow for them to pass us safely without going into the... into the... you know."

  Everybody nodded. They knew. He was talking about the fields where the Diggers planted their food. In these places the bodies of living, captured creatures, were buried up to their waists, and there they remained, unresisting, as Digger grubs feasted on them from below. The moaning victims would even cry out to alert their tormentors if somebody tried to rescue them, or would try to grab at would-be saviours and trap them there. Humans had come to dread the fields. The Jumpers would not want to go there either.

  And so, they would have to come here. No doubt about it now. They'd be passing this way and whether they defeated the humans or not didn't matter. They feared the Diggers more and that was that.

  Whistlenose felt light-headed, as though his spirit were leaving his body. My boy... my boy will never be named... Everyone knew the Tribe could not long survive the losses of such a fight, even if it won.

  He looked over at the Chief, hoping for some kind of solution. The man was crouching over the slime. Aagam had emerged from under the canopy to stand beside him.

  "I don't like it," Wallbreaker was muttering. "Why me, Aagam? Why me?"

  Whistlenose didn't understand what they were talking about. Was it another clever scheme from the Ancestors?

  "Why you, what?" said Aagam.

  "This slime stuff. It's crawling. Look. It has ignored Laughlong and everybody else. It just keeps moving towards me. It follows wherever I go. Look!"

  That much was true. A few of the puddles had moved in his direction, albeit slowly, as though hunting him. They clustered around his feet, although he scattered them again easily. "What is this stuff, Aagam?"

  "How should I know?"

  "Well, it came from the Roof!"

  "I tell you I don't know and I don't care! We have a problem now. A real problem, you understand? These new beasts are coming to kill us."

  "He's right," said Laughlong, wiping his eyes. He had recovered his composure, both anger and sorrow had been emptied out of him.

  "But we have the Talker," said Mossheart. She too, had come out from under the canopy. Hunters glared at her. What was she doing listening in? "We can just negotiate. Why would they risk the losses?"

  Instead of scolding her, as would have been proper, the Chief answered her question. "When they come out of the forest, they will be in new territory. They need a nice large store of flesh to keep them alive long enough to learn the streets, or to help them flee even farther from the Diggers. I'm not so sure they would negotiate, or that they would do so in good faith."

  "Like us and the Hairbeasts," said Laughlong and Whistlenose could see by the way he said it that he felt ashamed by his part in the attack on humanity's ancient allies.

  "Exactly," said Wallbreaker. "Besides, letting them know we have the Talker would just be another reason for them to fight us." But he seemed more interested in the slime than in saving his people. Fearful arguments broke out around him as he bent to study the strange puddles.

  Laughlong looked like he wanted to take another swing at the Chief, but Whistlenose pulled him to one side. "How long?" he asked. "Before the Jumpers get here?"

  Laughlong shrugged. "I was able to watch them for a full tenth. The little ones move slowly, and even the adults can't travel that fast in this terrain. Although I bet they're murder on a nice flat street. No, they'll be a full day and a night catching up with us here."

  "And we definitely can't go around them?"

  "The forest isn't wide enough. They'd smell us out for certain. They stink, but we must stink worse."

  Wallbreaker had moved closer to Whistlenose, but only so he could watch the slime as it continued to track him. "It's slower now," the Chief was saying. "Look!" Many of the puddles had begun drying up in the heat of the Roof, leaving a faint metallic smell behind them.

  Like the rest of the slime, Aagam too had followed the Chief closely.

  "Remember," he said, "there are people where we're going, right? You can afford to lose more of these than you think. And this lot understand sacrifice. They will understand—"

  Suddenly, Wallbreaker stood up. "The Ancestors have spoken," he cried. He didn't look as certain of his words as Whistlenose might have hoped, but still... "Laughlong, Whistlenose, you two have done the most scouting."

  "Yes," said Laughlong. "That's because you're trying to kill us."

  The Chief shrugged, unembarrassed. An older hunter was supposed to make way for younger men and the whole Tribe understood that.

  "You reported a mound half a day's travel behind us," he said.

  Laughlong nodded. "I said it would be a good campsite, yes. But that was before we found this place. These walls make for a much more defensible position. We can hurt them here. We can fight them."

  The Chief smiled. In the distance where the women and lower-status hunters watched, he must have looked confident with those dimples of his pressing deep. Bu
t Whistlenose stood close enough to see the tremor in Wallbreaker's limbs and the sickly look of terror in his eyes. "I do not intend to fight them at all," he said. "Everybody get ready to move."

  And so the madness began and all without explanations, as if the Chief did not trust his own plan at all. Even so, they obeyed. Everybody obeyed.

  Most of the Tribe packed up and began the short trek towards the mound. The rest had special tasks to carry out. Whistlenose, for example, stayed behind to help guard a gang of women that included Ashsweeper. She shouldn't have been chosen for this. She's the mother of a nameless child. Hightoes would have to keep an eye on the boy for them.

  Ashsweeper showed no resentment and took charge of the other women with ease, although a few were thousands of days older and had borne many children.

  "No talking," she told them. "We're here to work."

  And what awful work it was too! Around the site of the abandoned camp, they dug up latrine pits, gathering as much of the foul waste as they could, and piling it into blankets of pounded moss. They couldn't even sing as they worked for fear of attracting something hungry when they had less than a dozen hunters to keep them safe.

  The forest was quieter now than it had been a few days earlier. The berries had stopped popping and the clouds of flashing mossbeasts had changed from perfectly co-ordinated swarms to individual insects meandering erratically from rock to branch to who-knew-where.

  Whistlenose scanned the poor sight-lines of the forest looking for movement. The past few days had shown that Jumpers had infinite patience when on the hunt. They were as much at home crawling through the undergrowth in camouflaged moss cloaks as they were at balancing on coiled tails and springing to the attack. Could they climb? he wondered. Had the Chief thought of that? He signalled off to his left where Eatenfinger waited, just as nervously as he: anything?

  A shake of the head.

  In the other direction, no more than twenty paces away, his wife still worked, using a filthy skull to scoop excrement into a moss blanket. He risked moving over beside her, passing through a place where one of the slime puddles from the Roof had dried away to a fine white powder.