The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy)

by Peadar O'Guilin

  "Don't be reckless. The Ancestors w-will be angry if we w-w-waste our flesh this day." All gibberish to Vishwakarma. That didn't stop him nodding and grimly gripping the spear. "W-welcome back, hunter."

  Stopmouth cut his finger and flicked a drop of blood at the wall. Then, covering the tiny wound with a bandage of moss, he led the other man outside. As he had hoped, the short night seemed to be coming to an end. Already a gentle breath of golden light was brightening one ragged edge of the hole in the Roof.

  The men passed by a motionless trio of Fourleggers that stood guard on the building, before breaking into an easy jog and heading for the hills. The light of the rising sun followed them all the way, warming their backs and waking swarms of mossbeasts into glittering, rising spirals. Way back in time, when there had been no Roof, and no hunters either, these insects and the sun must have greeted each other like this every morning.

  The run up the side of the hill went so much faster with no Ship People to slow them down. They were young men at the peak of their strength, and in Stopmouth's case, even old wounds and scars had been scoured away after exposure to Medicine during his time in the Roof. The slopes and the coloured mosses, the sliding scree, were like meat to him after a long fast.

  And then they were at the top, looking down as the light sped across the fields below with their lines of bodies stretching back and back farther, into the darkness where the sun would never reach.

  "S-something's not right."

  The human raid had cut swathes in the line and Stopmouth wasn't surprised to see that the gaps had been refilled with fresh bodies. The familiar stench too, tickled his nostrils, even from this distance. And yet...

  "Let's g-get closer."

  They jogged down the slope. They were no more than halfway, when Vishwakarma, whose eyes must have been better than Stopmouth's, hissed and fell back on his bottom, smothering a cry of alarm before signalling frantically for "retreat." It took the ex-Chief a few heartbeats to realise what was wrong.

  Diggers! Dozens of them. Rarely seen by daylight and certainly not in such numbers! His heart caught in his throat, but he calmed himself and signalled Vishwakarma to "halt" and to be "silent." A human could outrun Diggers most of the time, as far as he knew. So, as long as this wasn't an ambush, they should be all right.

  The creatures showed no interest in the distant hunters. None at all.

  "I think I know w-what's happened." He signalled "forward" and was glad to see Vishwakarma nod back at him, much calmer now. He too, must have realised what was going on.

  They proceeded more cautiously down the slope until they were within slinging distance of their listless enemies. Like the other creatures around them, these Diggers had been planted, their lower legs buried in soil, their claw-tipped upper arms limp at their sides. Either the enemy had run out of creatures to hunt in the rest of the world, or they were fighting amongst themselves now. Both cases implied a level of desperation. Stopmouth knew better than to see this as a good sign.

  The creatures eaten by the Diggers' young tended to sink as they were consumed from below, until only the head remained to be fought over by the remaining grubs. The last grub, the victor, large enough by that point, would consume the entire skull and bury itself deep in the ground, only to emerge later as a full-grown adult. Stopmouth had seen this himself when the Roof had sent him visions of it.

  Now, he imagined something different. His mind's eye saw how the fields in the heartlands of the Diggers must be empty, depopulated of anything the creatures might live on. This had forced them to expand and expand until no other species remained alive anywhere in the world, so that they must turn on each other.

  "Oh Ancestors," he said. "W-we're all they have l-left." He'd always known the enemy would not long delay their attack over the hills, but any hopes that the Diggers’ fear of being burned again by the ship's engines would keep them permanently away, failed him now. The Diggers simply had no choice but to keep going.

  And yet, they had waited. But why?

  The men moved down to the bottom of the slope where the soil became too rocky for planting. He stepped as close as he dared to the first of the creatures, while Vishwakarma kept well back. These Diggers in front of him did not look well. Many lacked claws or bore terrible wounds. "Knives and spears did this," he said. "Not claws or teeth."

  He walked carefully along the lines and then stopped dead. A piece of wood still jutted from the chest of one of the beasts, although the wound had long since ceased to bleed. It was the handle of a dagger, much like the one a human would have made back in ManWays, just the right size for a man's hand. Could it be...? No, no. Of course not. But he was holding his breath all the same.

  Vishwakarma gasped as Stopmouth darted within range of the Digger's claws. He ripped the wood free, falling back again on his bottom in time to avoid the clumsy strikes that could have disemboweled him. The other hunter grabbed him under the arms to pull him further out of range, but Stopmouth shook him off and crawled back to where the weapon lay. He felt his jaws working, but no sound came out. He couldn't believe what he was seeing, couldn't believe it. He held it up to where his companion might see. But Vishwakarma didn't get it.

  "Armourback," said Stopmouth. "It's Armourback shell." He and Rockface had both owned similar weapons, but nobody else outside of ManWays ever did or could. Stopmouth's people had fought the Armourbacks to extinction and this wonderfully strong material had been their reward. Stopmouth himself had discovered how to shape it with fire after his brother had first betrayed him. It seemed so long ago now.

  He was breathing hard and his eyes were blurring. His people had to be close by, surely, and yet, none of them were planted here along with those they had been fighting.

  Stopmouth found himself on his feet again and running with no idea of how that had happened, but Vishwakarma was calling out his name, falling farther and farther behind. With an effort he stopped himself to wait for the other man to catch up. There was no point in exhausting himself without reason.

  The two hunters slipped into a more natural hunting jog. Vishwakarma asked a few questions and Stopmouth guessed the man wanted to know where they were going, but Stopmouth didn't know himself. He was following the line of planted Diggers. It was all he had to go on. Eventually, however, as they came to a place where the hills met the rushing river, they began to leave the sunlight from the hole behind them. The line of wounded Diggers stretched off into the darkness beyond, but the bodies along the river bank lay too thickly together to pass safely.

  What do I do now, Ancestors? No buildings stood nearby that he might have climbed for a better view. But the hill would do just as well, maybe better, for it would help prevent the Diggers from getting underneath them. But what would he see from up there anyway? Nothing could possibly survive out in the darkness other than his enemies.

  He sagged, exhausted from the day; frustrated and afraid. The whole idea of scouting seemed absurd. Other than a tiny patch of light under the hole Indrani had made, the entire world belonged to the enemy. If some human band from his lost home had tried to follow in his footsteps, then they must have wounded a few dozen Diggers and been swallowed up. And even if they still lived, the sheer mass of bodies between him and them, meant he would never meet them.

  He should have been glad of that. They thought him a traitor, after all, and maybe he was.

  Vishwakarma made a frantic gesture. "Down! Alert!" The men dropped behind a boulder. The ground shook. Soil sprayed from a small clearing amongst the planted victims nearby and suddenly Diggers appeared. They had bodies with them—more wounded Diggers to be planted here and there while the hunters held their breaths. The men didn't have to wait very long. In less than a tenth, the enemy had gone again, leaving the tunnel exposed behind them and a trio of fresh plantees.

  "They've been burned," Stopmouth whispered. "You see that? Somebody knows they d-don't like fire." Vishwakarma neither understood nor cared. He grabbed Stopmouth by the shoulder
and pointed up the hill. The Chief nodded, and the two climbed up above the river as quietly as they could, keeping two spear-lengths between them so that one might escape any ambush the other fell into.

  About halfway up, a sharp blaring cry echoed across the fields and over the rushing river beneath them. A Clawfolk horn. There could be no doubt about it. The alarm sound that had quickened his pulse so many times back home. The sound that brought hunters stumbling out of their beds, weapons in hand.

  When he turned now, a red glow lit the horizon. A fire: several fires, more likely, hot and bright.

  The river cut through a ravine back there, he remembered, just as it did here. A ruined structure stood right up over the river; easily defended on all sides with plenty of rock for flinging at an enemy, and wood too, for the fires he could see now.

  His people! Oh, Ancestors, how he missed them! The greatest hunters the world had ever seen! They were no more than a day's run away. An impossible gap to bridge in the Digger-controlled dark, even if he had every Ship Person on his side to help him. Even if they knew how to fight. He felt his chest tightening and his vision blurring.

  Suddenly, he was on the ground with Vishwakarma's arms clamped around him and the man babbling and pleading in his ear. Had he tried to run back down the hill? Had he really come so close to wasting his precious flesh?

  "You think I'm s-stupid, Vishwakarma? B-but imagine what they could do for us, those people trapped down there! They can hunt like your spirits or gods, or whatever you call them. It's only the dark that makes them weak and the Diggers strong. We have to get them back to HeadQuarters to f-fight along with us. We have to." And what he didn't say—not that the man could speak human in any case—was that his brother might be there. Hated so much, but loved too by a younger version of himself that still lived in his heart; a version that hadn't yet learned to give up.

  They headed back along the ridge of the hill, Stopmouth's mind filling with memories of home. He had been bullied and mocked as a child in ManWays. But none of that seemed important now; not against the weight of his mother and other beloved Ancestors; not against the Tribe, the real Tribe that was his marrow and guts and heart. Nothing mattered more. He had learned as much from his first breath.

  The light grew stronger as they came under the hole in the Roof again, but it had a deep, orange quality about it that Stopmouth was learning to associate with the coming of night. He could see HeadQuarters from here and the ruins that surrounded it. He could hear the river too, hissing like a living thing, too wide to cross, although the far bank bore matching ruins. He had never spotted any life over there. But he was glad to have the river as a defence against the Diggers should they ever appear from that direction.

  Vishwakarma grabbed his arm and signalled "alarm!"

  Two hundred paces away in the failing light, a woman-shaped, glistening beast rose up out of the ground. It glowed with a faint blue colour that seemed familiar to Stopmouth. And it was camouflaged too—he could see the colours of the rocks and moss behind it.

  He still had the Armourback shell knife in his hand. Some other man had made it, but the Ancestors guided Stopmouth's throw and the weapon flew true. It struck the creature right in the chest. But rather than sticking, it passed fully through to fall out the back in a spray of transparent liquid.

  The hunters stared. A mouth appeared in that female face. "Shtop-mou..." it seemed to say. Almost as though... almost...

  Vishwakarma grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled hard. They could not kill this creature of pure liquid! So they ran again, fearing an ambush that never came.

  Whatever that was, it can wait.

  They reached the first, rubble-strewn streets, not stopping until they had returned to the building of the Fourleggers, panting and exhausted after the day, calves aching from the hills.

  "Rockface!" Stopmouth called. "Rockface, I need you! Indrani!"

  His wife appeared first, shushing him, until she saw the look on his face. Then, she had her arms around him. She smelled of milk and baby and he remembered again, for the thousandth time, that little Flamehair had been fathered by his brother and not him. Rockface turned up a moment later with Sodasi at his side, both of them smiling.

  "Ha!" said the big man, uncaring that Flamehair must be sleeping nearby. "You're not going to believe it, but I've caught myself a new wife. At least I think that's what's happened. We'll need to borrow that Talker to be sure, hey?" And he laughed while Sodasi shyly took his huge hand in hers.

  "Aren't you happy for me, boy? I should be meat, of course, I know it, hey? But you're to blame as much as I am. I Volunteered, you may remember. I Volunteered! But it'll be a while before—"

  "R-rockface! Indrani! Rockface... you h-h-have to listen to me."

  "A man on his dowry day, doesn't have to—"

  "The T-tribe. Our Tribe. F-f-from ManWays. They're still alive. Less than a d-d-day away."

  "No!" Indrani and Rockface both said the same word simultaneously in very different tones of voice.

  "T-they're trapped on that big rock down by the r-river. W-w-we need them here. Those Ship People are useless. They won't even learn to hunt, most of them."

  He felt Indrani leave him. He saw her run out of the room from the corner of his eye, but he couldn't think of that right now. The Tribe, the Tribe! And Rockface felt the same way, his big face writhing with emotions too powerful for words. Meanwhile, Vishwakarma and Sodasi were talking rapidly in their own tongue.

  Finally, Rockface, with tears on his cheeks, let out a roar and grabbed a spear from the wall. "No! R-rockface! No! It's impossible. We need help on this one."

  "The Ship People? Are you crazy, hey? The Ship People?"

  "No, no. There are a f-few dozen of our hunters still around. The Religious. And we'll need a p-plan."

  Rockface threw the spear down again. "Why would they help us? They're with Dharam now. They don't want to eat flesh any more. He's meeting them all tonight to tell more lies. They lap it up from him like soup."

  "We can't d-do it without them, Rockface." Stopmouth felt sick. But he felt alive too. He hadn't even eaten the strips of dried flesh he had carried with him all day, but he forced some down now and made his friends do the same. Then he went to look for his wife, but she was asleep beside the child and wouldn't wake even when he shook her.

  "You're angry with m-me," he whispered. "He's probably not even alive anymore. This isn't about him. You must know that, love. Or me or you. It's Tribe. It's more than flesh." No response came until he bent down to kiss Flamehair on the cheek.

  But then, she murmured, "You said before we are Tribe. Flamehair and me, your womans."

  "Of course, you are! Of course, you are, love!"

  But she said nothing more after that.

  CHAPTER 24: The Dangers of Religion

  When they were growing up, uncle Flimnose used to tell the children stories of heroes from the Tribe's past. At the end, he'd always point up at the grid of tracklights that dotted the Roof at night. "And that's where they're living now," he'd say. "The fires of our Ancestors, watching over us until the day we all go Home."

  But fires weren't like that, were they? All laid out as neatly as the streets where hunters lived and died. Wallbreaker was always the one to annoy their uncle by pointing that out, but Stopmouth had wondered the same thing. Later, as an adult, he had travelled into the Roof and had learned that the tracklights were simply objects of dumb-metal and other materials whose names he had since forgotten.

  However, now that Indrani had torn a hole in the Roof, something new had come into the world: random speckles and clumps of light, sprawling across the night sky like true fires, except that they were as numberless as the Ancestors themselves. While the daytime sun could not be looked at, these stars always drew Stopmouth's eyes and filled him with new hope that the tales of his childhood had been more than mere lies.

  He dragged his gaze away from the hole to look down at the ruins of the Warship. Dharam was to h
old his meeting here, and already the Tribe was gathering. Bedraggled Ship People, no longer so confident of immortality, along with the remaining Religious, all together in a defensive clump. The latter, having spent time on the surface, knew the value of strong walls and were probably wondering why this meeting had been called at night, so far from HeadQuarters.

  Stopmouth wanted to know the same thing, but he had more urgent questions to answer. Where was Dharam himself? Where was the Talker?

  And then, he got all of his answers at once. A light shone from the top of the ship, as bright, or brighter than the sun, and Dharam appeared up there from a door where he seemed to be floating.

  "You see, my friends?" he cried. "You were wrong to bet against me. We have already uncovered some of the old technology of the Deserters. I know—only I!—where in the Roof to find one of their ships. It will whisk us away soon and we will leave this place to the Diggers and... and our other enemies." He rambled on in this vein for some time, using terms and ideas that made little sense.

  "They don't b-b-believe him," he said to Rockface.

  "So, why are they listening, hey? They even clapped for him when he spoke about the other ship."

  "They w-want to believe him. Because they hate us, but if he's wrong they have to become like us."

  "Bah," said Rockface. "I will have Sodasi hit him with that sling of hers. She's a very lucky shot for a woman."

  "She's a g-g-good shot," said Stopmouth. And she'd only improved since the death of her sister. "But if we k-kill him, they will only hate us forever... But y-yes. We'll be using Sodasi's skills very soon..."

  They moved closer. There seemed to be no guards of any kind. Were these people suicidal? Only the Religious seemed to be worried about security, and they kept throwing nervous glances towards the hills. Stopmouth's small group of hunters—himself, Rockface, Sodasi and Vishwakarma—was able to get within a dozen strides of the wreckage without being seen. At that point, Sodasi, always quick to understand what Stopmouth wanted her to do, stood up and let loose with a slingshot.