The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy)

by Peadar O'Guilin

  Dharam must have won the Religious over to his cause. Stopmouth didn't understand how, but he suspected it was something to do with Dharam's insistence that there was another way to escape the surface of the world, to get back to civilization.

  It was something all the Roofpeople yearned for, and that evil man, that magnificent liar, must have turned their longings on a spit, until they glistened and dripped with delicious fat. The bellies of the Religious, empty but for fear, had been maddened with it. It was the only explanation Stopmouth could think of.

  He forced himself to sit up, ignoring the desire to be sick, and the sudden pounding of his head. He needed something to help him stand. "Where is my spear?"

  "Oh, they took your weapons. But they couldn't get mine! And I've been making more all along. Like the old days, hey?"

  "We will to attack them!" Indrani insisted, but both hunters shook their heads together and she spat at them and turned away, as though unable to look at them further.

  "But what about f-f-food..."

  Rockface grinned. "Let's just rest a little, Chief."

  "That's... that's not like you, Rockface."

  The big man made an exaggerated yawning motion as if he didn't have a care in the world, trying and failing to suppress a grin. "It's nearly night, hey? When a man should be squeezing his wives and lighting fires. Let's just wait for that ridiculous ‘sun’ of yours to pass the edge of the hole Indrani made."

  Stopmouth nodded, uneasily. He always hated it when Rockface had a plan. The lack of weapons only made him more afraid. "W-what are you up to?"

  "What does it look like?" The big man lay down on a bed of moss. "Going to sleep, hey? To listen to the Ancestors a while instead of your moaning."

  Stopmouth slept too, without meaning to. His eyes closed just for a moment, and then a few heartbeats later, or so it seemed, they opened again in total darkness. He heard whispers and he heard giggles. Kindling flared into life and then a torch. Children were everywhere, perhaps as many as a dozen, their hands flying in hunting gestures too complicated for Stopmouth to follow. Their leader was a fierce little girl called Fulki who bossed them from task to task.

  Even the little Fourlegger was there, its claws distinctly making the sign that meant "hurry," but evolving it into "split" and then "go" in a way that made no sense at all.

  Somebody grabbed one of the Fourlegger rolls of moss and twigs from the corner and used it to create an instant fire. And soon, flesh, delicious flesh, began sizzling over it.

  "What's g-going on?" he said. He felt better already, barely able to speak for the drool forming in his mouth.

  Rockface grinned. "We can talk to the little Fourlegger and she can talk to the adults, hey? And they have thirty days worth of food that we gave to them only yesterday! Eat up! Only the Ancestors know what creatures they came from, but what a feast!"

  Stopmouth saw Sodasi, looking beautiful with firelight wrapping around the curve of one cheek. She too spoke with her hands, much more awkwardly than the children, but Rockface seemed to be following along because he laughed from his belly and rubbed her face. Her smile grew wider and the big man grinned shyly back.

  Indrani whispered, "First time he see her. What a fool! Does he think she wants another father?"

  "He'll g-get to it," Stopmouth whispered back. A man had to decide he wanted to live before he could even think of getting married.

  Afterwards, everybody ate the unidentifiable flesh, except for poor Tarini who wept and gagged. All the Roof people had that problem to begin with. Nobody had the words to help her, but a few of the smaller children gave her hugs before gobbling up whatever she couldn't manage. They fought, laughing, over Vishwakarma's substantial leftovers until every scrap of food had been consumed.

  Stopmouth played with his Flamehair for a while. Sometimes he thought he could see bits of his brother in her, especially in the way her cheeks seemed to dimple when he made her smile. But she was his daughter now and that's all there was to it. He would find a way to get her back into the tribe, even if he himself could never be part of it. She would need somebody to marry in the years to come and to bring flesh when she had children of her own. "But you'll fight like your mother, won't you, little one? You'll kick hunters in the face if they say so much as a bad word to you!"

  The other children were yawning by now, relaxing against the walls and chatting, sometimes with words of human or their own language, sometimes with gestures.

  "Are they s-sleeping here?" he asked Rockface.

  "Well, we can't be putting them outside."

  "But, I mean..." he waved the hand that wasn't holding the baby. "Shouldn't they be getting back to their parents?"

  "These are the ones with no parents, remember? We're all they've got now."

  "They n-need a Tribe."

  "I know, hey?" and Rockface actually looked angry. "But they won't obey me when I tell them to join Dharam's lot. And why should they? Who will teach them to hunt? Who will make sure they eat?"

  Stopmouth nodded. "I d-don't know what the right thing for them is either. Or for the Tribe." Dharam's reign as Chief might come to a sudden end when everybody learned he couldn't bring them back to civilization. Or could he? There would have to be something behind his lies, surely, to win over clever men like Kubar.

  Indrani had been with Tarini, trying to get the girl to eat some more and to keep it down. Now she came back to sit beside him.

  "What do you think, love?" he asked her. "The Roof is dead, everybody can see that. Why would anybody believe Dharam could help them escape from here now?"

  She shrugged. "The Roof has many things of your Ancestors up there. Many things like Warship."

  He nodded, making sense of what she was saying. His people, once known as the Deserters, had fled from Earth a long time ago. In the process, they had abandoned Indrani's Ancestors to what everybody had thought was certain death. Eventually, the Deserters had been overtaken and captured, condemned for their selfishness to a life of primitive cannibalism, while their spacecraft, became trophies and monuments in the parks and gardens of the victors.

  Later, the strange slime that fed on the sophisticated machines of the Roof, had left the more primitive technology of the Deserters completely untouched.

  "You think Dharam knows where to find a Deserter ship?" he asked.

  She struggled to explain her thoughts, "Dharam is waster. Is... not a hunter to tell... right things."

  "You mean he's a l-liar?"

  "Yes! A liar. You, my man. You will eat his heart."

  "I will," he said, grinning. But he couldn't help turning over in his mind the idea that another ship might really be found. Dharam's followers would get the escape they clamoured for... Or would they?

  Stopmouth had seen one of these Deserter craft for himself, and one thing he knew for sure, was that it was a lot smaller than the Warship. There was no way everybody would fit.

  But in the end, none of that mattered. Dharam would never be able to fly up into the Roof to retrieve the new ship. And even if he did, nobody could survive the horrors up there. Stopmouth had seen that for himself. In the end, the Tribe would be staying put to face the Diggers, and that was that.

  He sighed. "I'm sorry, Rockface. You know there aren't enough of us here to keep the children properly safe. They can stay tonight, but they have no future here with us." Because we have no future.

  Then the moss curtain over the door opened and Stopmouth jumped. They hadn't even set a guard! What was he thinking?

  But it was only an adult Fourlegger sticking its head inside so that a few rusty scales fell away to the floor. The young Fourlegger rushed forward to rub snouts with it before turning to Rockface and signalling the "all clear" with its claws. The Chief grinned and relaxed. There had been guards after all. Inhuman ones. And suddenly Stopmouth found himself dizzy all over again, but not from the knock on the head. Indrani was grinning at him, her eyes shining. "We not few as you think, husband!"

  "No,"
he said, smiling back, his eyes prickling for some reason. The Fourleggers were Tribe to him! He saw that now. There might be a future, after all. A bizarre one, maybe, in which the shattered remnants of different tribes learned to work together as one body, with one heart.

  CHAPTER 22: The Dark

  The Ancestors had performed such miracles to keep the Tribe alive in the wilderness that few people remained who doubted their power or love, or Wallbreaker's connection to them. Even the loss of the Talker had failed to dampen spirits.

  A few days after the sighting of the Slime Woman, the Roof fell dark for the last time. The despicable Aagam cried out in a mix of anger and horror, shaking his fist and screaming gibberish until Fearsflyers silenced him with a smack to the back of the head. Nobody was afraid anymore. Not of the Blindness. Not of the Diggers. Every horror that had come their way was beaten back, and just when hunger struck, bodies had rained from the Roof.

  When the sea appeared in front of them, just as Wallbreaker had promised, the Tribe's faith only strengthened. They could see little of the water beyond the range of their torches, but men laughed and stabbed it with their spears. Children lapped at it, spitting it out, throwing cold handfuls at each other. It tasted saltier than blood.

  Only the endless darkness oppressed them, but even in this they were offered hope.

  One day, trudging along the endless road of sand that ran the length of the sea, the ground shook hard enough to throw everybody from their feet. Ashsweeper cried out and Nighttracker forgot he was supposed to be grown up and called, "Dada! Dada!" until Whistlenose wrapped him in his arms.

  In the distance, a portion of the Roof was glowing.

  "The light is coming back!" somebody cried.

  It turned red first, and then intensely white, as flaming fragments of it tumbled and burned. A column of fire followed on from this and whole hills seemed to be ablaze. Whistlenose felt vibrations through the sand, in every part of his body that touched the ground. How many times can the world end? he wondered.

  But calm returned and soon a new set of hills interposed themselves between the Tribe and the distant fires they had witnessed. Then, after what felt like a number of days, the Diggers, who had not been seen since the forests, began to mass again just beyond the range of their torches.

  "They were fighting elsewhere," Laughlong growled. "But they must have missed us all along."

  Nobody panicked, and word came down from the Chief so that when the enemy finally struck, the Tribe knew exactly what to do.

  "Into the sea!" Wallbreaker shouted, and people waded fearlessly into the freezing water with torches held high and children floating on bundles of tally sticks. The enemy, shorter than men, proved very awkward in this new element. They had to swim where men could still stand, and Whistlenose stabbed one after another until a carpet of the hapless creatures surrounded him.

  "We'll feast tonight!" said Laughlong from somewhere nearby. "If they let us back onto the beach..." But even he had ceased to criticize the Chief lately.

  So easy was the fighting in the water, that many suggested the Tribe could live here forever. And another miracle happened there too, something extraordinary. Hightoes gave birth right in the water! Nobody had seen such a thing before and they all marvelled at how easy the birth had been, even as the Tribe had been battling for its life against the Diggers. It was a fine baby boy that brought tears to the eyes of his father, Fearsflyers. "The Tribe continues!" he cried. "Even here! Even here!"

  But the sea, it seemed, had life of its own. After a ten, or maybe fifteen days, people began disappearing, pulled under before they could so much as cry out.

  The Tribe moved on.

  They reached a place where the air hissed like burning fat and a fast-moving Wetlane—or river, as Aagam seemed to call it—poured into the sea. Here it was that they saw daylight again for the first time in nobody knew how long.

  It was some distance away from them—in the very place where they had seen the Roof burning when the earth had shaken enough to knock them over. It was burning again now, but much more gently and with a kind yellow glow. Whistlenose knew his jaw was hanging open. He hugged his family tightly to him and everywhere men were doing the same. Nearby, Aagam gibbered excitedly, speckling his speech with proper human words like "good" and "tasty."

  Daylight! Daylight! It seemed to lie in exactly the direction Wallbreaker had promised to take them, the one from which the river came. "It's not that far," Laughlong was saying to his own surviving wife, Sweetfoot. "Four or five days for a hunter. More with you to distract me!" Sweetfoot giggled like an unmarried girl.

  But to get there, they had to leave the safety of the sea. So, they clung to the tops of the hills along the river, while just beyond the circle of torchlight, the Diggers seemed to be moving with them.

  The enemy never attacked, however. Even when the distant daylight disappeared night after night.

  People speculated why—everything from the protection of the Ancestors, to something the Chief had come up with, to the enormous losses the Diggers had suffered in the sea. But as the tribe stumbled towards the daylight over slippery rocks, with the rushing water of the river to one side and the whispering darkness to the other, Whistlenose felt his own fear growing stronger and stronger.

  He kept remembering the day he had seen Bloodskin burning, when he and five companions had been chased among the houses of no man's land. His small group had not been attacked immediately then either. "Playful" was what he had thought at the time, as if the Diggers revelled in a cruel sense of fun.

  "They even move away when we go scouting," Browncrack told him. "They stay just out of the circle of our torchlight, but you can hear their claws and it's louder than the hissing of the river."

  "They must be afraid of us," said Whistlenose, hiding his real thoughts.

  "Of you, maybe, with your bad knees and worse breath," said Browncrack.

  "Well, it can't be as bad as the breath from that lower mouth of yours that gave you your name!"

  "Ha, old man. I've wiped it clean on hides that were fresher than you..."

  They clapped each other on the back as if they were home in ManWays after an easy hunt.

  Three days travel later, sort of—the new, far-off, daylight didn't seem to last as long as it should—brought them to the remains of a great stone structure that hung halfway over the river with a slope leading up to it and a small stand of dying trees to provide them with firewood. Of course the Tribe camped there, up high, with the rush of the river beneath them. Of course they did.

  Wallbreaker stood at the edge of the stone structure, with the river hissing along directly below. He beckoned Whistlenose to approach. "Give me your torch," he said. The Chief flung the burning wood out as far as he could. It smashed into something on the far side, exploding into a shower of sparks. "Ha!" he cried. "I knew it! Did you see that? It collapsed into the water, but this used to be a bridge."

  "A what? Like a tree trunk?"

  "Exactly! Like the tree trunks we used to use to cross the Wetlanes back home. Or the metal ones you find sometimes."

  "But this is stone!"

  "Sure, sure. What a shame it collapsed. I wonder how they got it to stay up?"

  In the distance, in the direction of their future home, the sky turned pink and bright yet again and the people cheered as was their new habit. But suddenly the sentries were crying out in alarm. They had built fires down at the bottom of the slope. Whistlenose and most of the other men ran down to join them there in case of attack.

  But there was no fighting. At the very farthest edge of the firelight, the Diggers had finally shown themselves. They waited in their hundreds. Thousands maybe. A great mass of them, just standing there. "Use your slings!" Wallbreaker shouted when he arrived. But nobody dared. The two sides simply stared at each other.

  "What are they waiting for?" whispered the Chief. There were enough of the creatures that they could have overrun ten times the numbers of humans that re
mained. Nobody spoke for a while, but eventually, Laughlong, from over on the right, provided the answer.

  "The fire," he said. "They knew we'd camp here with all this wood. Three days worth to keep ourselves safe from them. But we've only trapped ourselves to get it. There's no defences here and we've left the sea far behind. There's no way out at all unless... Chief? A new plan? From the Ancestors?"

  Wallbreaker didn't answer. He turned and stumbled back up the hill.

  Three days, Whistlenose thought. After that there could be no more fire. And the Diggers, in masses never before seen, were waiting.

  But they were not as patient as they seemed.

  CHAPTER 23: Evidence of Life

  Scouting, that was the first thing. Stopmouth's new hybrid tribe would only need to survive until Dharam's lies became apparent to his followers. Until then, the young hunter wanted to know where the Diggers had got to. Surely they should have tried to launch an attack by now? Their cowardice made no sense to him. They needed to feed like everybody else!

  So, for the good of the Tribe, for the future of his wife and daughter and all the other children and friends he still had, Stopmouth needed to find out what was going on beyond the hills.

  After slipping from the warmth of his moss bed with Indrani, he crouched next to the lump that Vishwakarma had become.

  "Get up," he said.

  The hunter spoke no words of human other than weapon words such as "spear" and "sling," but his eyes opened, glittering in the darkness.

  "You can't stay dead f-forever. I need you." Vishwakarma understood none of this, of course. Nevertheless, he sighed and allowed himself to be helped up. He accepted one of Rockface's new spears, as well as a sling and a Slimer hide skin of water. He must have suspected then he would be heading into danger and seemed glad of it.