The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy)

by Peadar O'Guilin

  "Don't worry, husband," said Ashsweeper. "The Ancestors have inspired this plan. It can't go wrong." She was preparing a cloth to tie around Nighttracker's little shoulders. The boy's share of the tribe's goods would be symbolic: a few strips of meat that he would bear proudly for the length of the journey. Ashsweeper would have preferred that he be carried instead, but the fact that he was named now made that impossible. Whistlenose constantly prayed to the Ancestors that the boy would be able to keep up with his mother.

  "Don't let her out of your sight, you hear me?" he told Nighttracker. "She won't be safe without you."

  "No, dada."

  "And no hiding for the rest of the day."

  "I don't do that anymore. I'm big now. I have a spear."

  And so he did. A sharpened stick. "Good boy. Give me a kiss." It was getting dark. The runners would already be in amongst the planted bodies that would be moaning to warn the Diggers of attack. Whistlenose shuddered. He took up his position with the other men in trenches dug especially for them, with cover provided by moss camouflaged blankets copied from those of the Jumpers. Would that be enough to hide them from the Diggers? Wallbreaker seemed to think so.

  "The Diggers' hearing is good enough to see with," he said. "They make a sound we can't detect, they create echoes with it that..."

  "Echoes?" Everyone was staring at him except Aagam who sneered openly at the men.

  "Oh... never mind," said the Chief, "it doesn't matter. Just duck down and as long as you've never taken flesh from their fields and keep quiet, they won't be able to tell you apart from a pile of rocks."

  Afterwards, Laughlong said to Whistlenose, "Maybe they will be able to see us. "Maybe Wallbreaker is counting on it and we're the real bait for his trap. He could rid himself of all us older men in one go."

  Whistlenose didn't believe that, but who knew with the Chief? Who knew what the Ancestors were whispering in his ear. Or was it only Aagam who did that?

  The last of the Rooflight dimmed and the grids of tracklights came on to cast wild and frightening shadows through tangled branches. Whistlenose tried to ignore them, to stay present. He felt suffocated by the moss he had wadded up his left nostril to block the sound from it. The rough camouflage blanket spawned a thousand itches all over his back.

  Men were used to ambushes. They trained for them before they were even named. They learned stillness and silence and patience. It was the one part of hunting where the old surpassed the young. But Whistlenose twitched and sweated, his mind on his family as well as the young men who surely should have returned by now from their taunting of the Diggers.

  He started at the sound of a crack nearby. Calm, be calm. It was just another branch succumbing to the residue of the slime that had dried it out. And then, too late to save that dying tree, he felt the first chilly drops of Roofsweat trickling into his hiding place. He suppressed the urge to shiver, to move at all...

  Was that...? Yes! The cries of men; the pounding of running feet. He wasn't imagining it! The young hunters were returning, a long line of them sprinting through the darkness, their skin streaked with the blood of the planted bodies they had killed. Each man would have consumed a sliver of flesh along the way too, to ensure the Diggers would come after him.

  Whistlenose counted more than twenty survivors. Not too bad! Although some had abandoned spears they would be needing shortly. He hoped Wallbreaker had foreseen that possibility too and would have provided for more weapons at the far end of the old camp.

  The hunter tried to still his own excited breathing. He gripped the shaft of his spear. The second to last man passed him by and he appreciated the Chief's cleverness all the more now, for none tripped on the smooth path or lost their way in the darkness. All that chopping of wood made more and more sense as the night progressed.

  Poor Treekisser was bringing up the rear, carrying a leg wound. Ancestors help him! He wouldn't last too long. A slick black swarm was already nipping at his heels, its members too numerous to count. They flowed past, silent and vengeful, their skin writhing with grubs that shone silver in the tracklights. They kept coming and coming. More than any human had ever seen and surely more than the ambush at the far end could cope with.

  Don't think about it, boy! It's not your problem.

  The experienced hunters didn't lift a finger as Treekisser went under with a pitiful cry. They bit their lips waiting for the last of the Diggers to pass. Then, as silently as they could manage, hunters sprang from their burrows. They uncovered smouldering embers from pouches of tanned hide. They set light to piles of undergrowth that the tribe had been building up for days. Then they blocked the path down which their friends had fled with branches and tree trunks set aside for that very purpose. These too were set alight.

  Roofsweat began to fall a little more heavily, but it did nothing to protect trees that had been parched dry by the slime. Whistlenose had never seen a fire take so quickly or burn so fiercely.

  Everywhere, the old camp site blazed as men, and even a few of the younger women, scattered their store of embers. There hadn't been enough hunters to carry out all the many parts of the Chief's plan and, just as the migration had forced men to dig and bring down trees, it now brought women into close proximity with living enemies. None of the women had complained.

  "Ready?" shouted Laughlong. "Get ready!"

  The fire fed greedily on the slimed trees, but was beginning to spread to parts of the forest beyond the camp too: to trees that drank from the Roof every night and that should have been far too wet to succumb. The hunters now faced a real danger of being caught in their own trap.

  "Here they come!"

  Two dozen Diggers charged back towards them along the path. They would have had nowhere else to go. The younger band of hunters had led them into a huge ambush at the far end of the old camp. Now their one path to escape lay through a much smaller group of older men and untrained women.

  "Slings!"

  Stones smashed enemy bodies. Diggers tumbled, tripping those behind and giving the humans time for another shot. But many of the creatures remained unhurt and the first of these threw their bodies straight onto the flaming branches so that others could scamper over their writhing flesh. Grubs fell away, hissing and popping in the heat.

  "We can't let them past!" Laughlong was shouting. "Not even one!"

  But it was all going horribly wrong now. A bridge of bodies had been created, three wide. Yet more of the enemy had come running out of the forest behind, their fur singed, their grubs tumbling off them. Fifteen or so made it out of the trap to throw themselves at the defenders.

  Whistlenose thrust his spear as a Digger charged him so that the Armourback point disappeared far into its chest and was pulled from his hands. Another creature, coming on behind, hit him hard and the two were rolling in the moss as flames roared all around and above them. Claws raked his side and then tried for his throat. He wanted his knife, but couldn't reach for it; his two arms were busy fending off the forelimbs of the beast. It was stronger than he. The creature wrenched itself free, but it had no intention of killing a human this night, it just wanted to escape. It clambered over his body only to meet somebody else's spear.

  "Up, get up, Whistlenose!" shouted Laughlong. "I've killed it for you. We've killed them all! Up! Everybody! Run now. We have to run or be boiled in our skins!"

  Whistlenose obeyed, remembering somehow to retrieve his spear. Smoke had spread everywhere. The men and women coughed, stumbling over corpses of friend and foe alike. The fire had spread far beyond where they had intended it, but somebody shouting, "I found it! It's here," brought them all onto a second, smaller path.

  They were in a race now against the flames. It licked at their heels as they ran, pulling each other along, choking, eyes streaming. "We're cooking, Ancestors save us!" Whistlenose couldn't see who'd said that. By day, the route had seemed so short and he began to fear they had turned the wrong way in the confusion. But then, the stench of Digger fields overpowered the smok
e and they knew they had made it beyond the reach of the fire.

  They fell, every man and woman, gasping into the muck.

  The cold Roofsweat soothed the scratches on Whistlenose's skin. He panted and panted and every breath scorched his lungs going in and coming out.

  "Are you all right?" That was Laughlong, his voice a rasp. Whistlenose didn't answer right away. He was looking up at the tracklights far above, blurred and glittering behind a veil of mist.

  When he was growing up, people said the tracklights were the fires of the Ancestors in a grid of streets such as you saw in some places. But people had stopped saying that since that cursed woman Indrani had fallen from the Roof. Whatever she was, she was no Ancestor.

  "Whistlenose? We have to catch up to the Tribe. We can't stop here."

  "Their fires are going out, Laughlong," he said.

  "What?"

  Just as had happened in the daytime, large areas of the Roof were dark by night too. The Diggers didn't like light, didn't need it. Were they were taking over up there also? Is that what this all meant?

  He allowed Laughlong to help him to his feet.

  Bodies had replaced tree trunks in the murky darkness, hanging listlessly and stretching off into the night. Nobody dared stand too close to them, despite the heat of the forest so near at their backs and still growing hotter.

  "You made it! Thank the Ancestors." It was a new voice, undamaged by smoke. "Did you kill them all?"

  "Of course," wheezed Laughlong. "Is that you, Fearsflyers?"

  "It's me. I'm to bring you to the new camp."

  "Camp?" said Laughlong. "I thought we were supposed to keep pushing through the night. All the way to those magical holls."

  "Hills," corrected the young man, unhappily. "You're right. But they've stopped. I don't know why. I was just told to come back for you. Come on, everybody, come on."

  A ragged crowd of maybe fifteen stumbled nervously into the field of the Diggers. With luck its owners were all dead now, following the ambush.

  While the fighting had been going on, while poor Treekisser was dying under a swarm of enemies, the main body of the Tribe must have been sneaking out of the forest. First would have come men with Armourback spears to stab planted aliens in their brains. This would stop them calling out in alarm or grabbing at people. Then would have come the heavily laden women, the children, a scheming Aagam, a cowardly Chief...

  The hunters sidled past a swathe of eerie but now harmless bodies. Whistlenose couldn't help goggling at the wonders around him. He saw tentacled monsters, all beaks and eyeballs. There were creatures of scale and fur, of feathers and shells and spines: creatures with wings; with claws or hands or pincers.

  In spite of the terror he had been through, in spite of the choking stench all around them, the field was starting to feel like a magical place to him. "I would love to taste every one of them," he said to Laughlong, wiping the drool from the side of his mouth.

  "I know, my stomach has been going crazy. It can't decide whether to rumble or to throw up!"

  But nobody so much as unsheathed a knife, of course. The Diggers paid special attention to those who stole from them.

  "But then..." said Laughlong, "then I can't help thinking..."

  "Thinking what?"

  "All of these beasts... The Diggers beat them all eventually. What chance have we?"

  Whistlenose shook his head, although he had been avoiding the very same thought himself. "There's every kind of beast here, my friend. Every kind but human."

  Up ahead, Whistlenose could see torches and knew they were already catching up on the rest of the Tribe. He was limping yet again by the time they reached a rearguard of men who nodded in greeting but didn't speak otherwise, even through signs. A returned hunter was supposed to see his family before anybody else and Whistlenose wanted that more than anything now.

  "Everybody looks so worried," Laughlong muttered. That was true. As Whistlenose moved forward, he found people to be more and more bunched up, their torches waving uncertainly.

  And then, warm arms wrapped around him and Ashsweeper's breath was tickling his ear. "Welcome, husband."

  "Where's the boy?"

  "Nighttracker is with his cousins. I'm going straight back there after one kiss." She took more than one, her lips soft against his. "I need to clean all those cuts for you, husband, but you'd better go on, first."

  "Go on where? What do you mean?"

  "He will want to see you. The Chief."

  Whistlenose asked no further questions, pushing right through the crowd until the reasons for the Tribe's stopping here became obvious. A great line of bewildered, worried people were spread out along the shore of a Wetlane. On the far side, the planted bodies continued, although many of these had sunk so far into the ground as to be little taller than a man's knee.

  He limped over to where the Chief raged at Aagam.

  "This is not supposed to be here, Roofman! You said we were clear through to the hills!"

  "How do you expect me to remember every little detail without the Roof? I had to store all the information, absolutely everything in my head. Have you any idea how difficult that is?"

  Whistlenose thought that was a strange argument. Where else was a hunter supposed to keep his wisdom if not in his own thoughts?

  "And, anyway," Aagam continued. "This should be easy. We just need a few tree trunks to bridge the thing and we can all be on our way. Send a few of these men back to the forest for some." But he was not as confident as his words made him sound. The stranger's eyes kept darting in one direction and another. Morning could not be too far away surely and there appeared to be no end in sight to the fields. And how long before new enemies came looking for them? For all anybody knew they had already moved into the territory of another Digger Tribe—what Aagam himself had called a "family."

  "We have burnt all the trees," said Wallbreaker. "Remember? We need something else. You have to give me something else!"

  At that moment, his eyes settled on Whistlenose. Not speaking to anybody in particular, he asked, "Has this man seen his wife yet?"

  "I have," the hunter answered, surprised that Wallbreaker could sometimes still be polite.

  "Tell me the truth, then, hunter. Is it true you leapt over one of these Wetlanes? Like Waterjumper did?"

  "Almost, Chief. I landed just at the lip on the far side. I was lucky to be able to pull myself out."

  "Could you do it again?"

  Whistlenose looked around, struggling hard not to show his terror. After what he hoped was long enough to make it seem as though he had considered the matter seriously, he shook his head. "No. There was a road back there where I did it. The ground here is too rough to get a proper run up. Not even the younger men would make it. And even if you got somebody across, what then? How would we move the rest of the Tribe?"

  The Chief nodded and Whistlenose struggled to keep his composure. His sore leg started throbbing enough to make him wince. But everybody had turned back to the Chief again by then.

  Wallbreaker pointed up and down the Wetlane.

  "There's no point going back now," he said to Aagam, "Which way? Which way for the hills?"

  "Why ask the Roofman?" Laughlong had come up too from the back, his voice so rough from smoke as to be barely human. "Haven't the Ancestors already told you what to do?" He smiled. "In a dream? Here's what I think: the Ancestors wouldn't have wanted us to lose so many hunters for the privilege of starving in the middle of this Digger larder."

  His words spread out through the crowd and Whistlenose realised then how stressed and afraid the Chief must have been to hold this meeting in public. His eyes, like the bottomless pits of a skull, had known little sleep recently.

  "Look," said the Chief, at last, "didn't I promise you hills? Didn't I say they were giant rocky mounds? Well, there they are!" The Roof had already began to brighten with daylight, apart from a few diseased patches here and there. Sure enough, in the distance, beyond the stinking field o
f almost sunken bodies, a low green line bumped along the horizon. It might have been anything, but many people shouted praise for the Ancestors at the sight of it.

  "I told you, didn't I? Only the Traveller saw sights like these before us."

  And your brother. With your wife. But Whistlenose kept that to himself.

  "We're not so far away now," Wallbreaker continued. "A hunter could run there in two days."

  "Ten for the rest of the tribe," said Laughlong. "If the Diggers don't catch us first. If we can even get across the Wetlane."

  "I am your Chief," said Wallbreaker. "I am telling you the Tribe will survive this. You have my word the Diggers will not catch us. You have the word of the Ancestors themselves!"

  "Then you won't mind," Laughlong said sweetly, "if you and your family travel at the back from now on?"

  A silence fell, broken only by the dripping of water and the whir of mossbeasts waking at last to greet the day. It seemed to last forever.

  "Of course not," the Chief replied finally. Any other response, in the tense, terrified atmosphere, might have finished his leadership, because if he didn't believe the Ancestors protected him, why should anybody else? He smiled, although inside he must have been screaming.

  We're nothing but slowly moving food, Whistlenose thought. Ancestors protect my family. Ancestors bring us all Home.

  CHAPTER 15: The Bravest of The Brave

  For some people, flesh was flesh. They would eat smoked Armourback with the same enthusiasm as the liver of a Hairbeast pup. But most people delighted in endless debates over flavours and textures. The thrill of breaking through bone to the sweetest of marrows; the properties of various organs that differed subtly from creature to creature.

  As a man who knew himself for a coward, Wallbreaker had spent more than one night in consideration of the many types of terror with which he filled his belly, unable to resist chewing and chewing at them until little of his real self remained.