The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy)

by Peadar O'Guilin

  "The Ancestors!" somebody cried, although the attackers looked like Aagam, like Indrani.

  They slaughtered the enemy in great numbers with the strangest hunting style Whistlenose had ever seen. They swarmed about in little packs. Not all of them carried spears. They had women amongst their numbers, often as slingers or diving in close with knives. Each pack worked together, protecting each other as some of the Diggers, trapped against a wall of their own species, fought back.

  "Let's go and meet them!" shouted Fearsflyers.

  Whistlenose surged to his feet. "Go back to your mother, Nighttracker. I need you to protect her with your spear!"

  He and the other men ran pell-mell down the slope to crash against the panicked enemy. He had lost his fear of capture, of being buried. He brushed grubs from his face and stabbed all around him.

  The enemy wished only to flee, but more than one hunter felt their claws in his belly or across his throat. Several screamed and disappeared as tunnels opened at their feet or the ancient streets collapsed beneath them.

  Soon, however, only a thin line of stubborn Diggers separated the Tribe from its rescuers. At the head of the newcomers fought a pale-skinned hero. His speed with spear and knife; his fierce, flashing eyes and sleek muscles, all showed him to be an Ancestor reborn. There could be no other explanation. Why he had been born to these foreigners and not the Tribe from ManWays, made no sense to Whistlenose, but in that moment, he did not care. Directly behind the great hunter, a woman, as powerfully built as any man and wearing strange clothing, held the Talker high above her head. A few heartbeats later and the hero faced him over the body of the last Digger.

  "You are Whistlenose?"

  "You... you recognise me?"

  "Of course! Don't you recognize me?"

  "I..." Was this John Spearmaker? The Traveller?

  "Never mind," the stranger said. "We have to hurry. We have to get you all out of here." The hero strode past, while the powerful woman with the Talker tried to follow, but then gave up.

  "I'm not walking on that," she said.

  "On what?" asked Whistlenose. Her face was perhaps the most beautiful he had ever seen, but to his eyes, it sat strangely on such a large frame.

  "On them!" She indicated the Digger corpses that had piled up as far as her knees. She shuddered, although she had been killing the creatures herself until moments earlier. "I'll wait here until you all come down again. But tell him to hurry up. We'll need to get back while it's still light beyond the hills."

  "All right," he said. "I'll... I'll tell them."

  All along the lines, people were looking at each other, the light-skinned members of the Tribe and their darker saviours.

  "Can I see?" Fearsflyers said to another young man. "Can I see your spear? Why did you make it that way?"

  Whistlenose left them to it and followed the hero back up the hill, racking his memory for where he had seen the man before. He would never have forgotten such a skilled hunter, surely. The Tribe would have songs about such a man and fathers would have fought each other trying to marry their daughters off to him. The blue light of the Talker stayed at the bottom of the hill and the old man saw the newcomer pause at one of the fires, his brave face in a frown.

  "T-t-tallies? Are those t-t-talley sticks?"

  "By the Ancestors! You're Stopmouth!"

  The young man grinned. "Who else would I be? We have R-rockface too, you know?"

  "Rockface? That madman is still alive?"

  The grin widened. "He's tried hard enough to get himself k-k-killed, but still has a way to go."

  "Of course, he does. He would!"

  Stopmouth's voice turned to a whisper. "And my b-b-b... And m-m-m..."

  "Your brother?"

  A nod. Whistlenose should have remembered that the young hunter had been condemned as a traitor. His own tally stick had been snapped in two in Centre Square. Surely that would all have to be forgiven now.

  "The Chief is just up a bit farther."

  People had been wandering down the hill to look in wonder at the newcomer, mostly children and women who had not taken part in the last fight. Not one of them recognised him any more than Whistlenose had. As if the Ancestors had slipped a mask over his face.

  "You're supposed to be dead." There was no fooling Mossheart. She had come to the front of the group.

  The young hunter nodded, still reluctant to speak, but he met her gaze in a way he would never have done before he had left. He'd been so shy, Whistlenose remembered. And then his handsome mouth set itself into a hard line. Somebody else had pushed his way forward.

  "Where is my wife?" asked Wallbreaker.

  The two brothers looked so alike now and their faces seemed to ripple under the weight of powerful emotions. Hatred, love, violence and fear. The crowd stepped back to form a circle, as though they might be caught between falling buildings.

  "She was mine, Stopmouth. And you stole her from me. And a Talker, the one you have below! You stole that too when we might have saved ourselves with it. Instead, you use what is ours, what belongs to the Tribe, to act the hero. We lost... we lost everything because of that.

  "Well, you can give it back to us," he continued. "We don't need your rescue. Give it back and we will drive the Diggers away all by ourselves."

  It was true, Whistlenose realised! Surely no strangers had been needed to save the Tribe if only the extra Talker had not been stolen before! "Grab him," said Wallbreaker. "While his puny hunters are all down at the bottom of the slope. We can ransom him for it. It belongs to all of us."

  Somebody bowled Whistlenose aside and swept Stopmouth's feet from underneath him. A few other hunters piled on top. The young man roared and threw them off again as though they were dried twigs, but others piled in, pinning him to the ground, his face against the dirt.

  Stopmouth struggled to speak. Finally, he managed: "W-w-we came for y-you. C-c-came f-f-for T-t-tribe."

  "Then you won't mind returning the Tribe's property."

  "W-w-wouldn't w-w-work. Talker f-f-feeds on d-daylight. No d-d-days here. It's already h-h-hungry."

  People glanced nervously down the hill. Sure enough, the blue light of the Talker did not seem as strong as it had before. Whistlenose could feel everybody growing more tense around him.

  "You don't know what you're talking about, brother," Wallbreaker said. "You barely knew how to swallow soup until I showed you! Now. What about the other thing? My wife? Where is my wife?"

  "Stopmouth's wife is here. Let me to pass."

  And so, Indrani had arrived. Stopmouth seemed as surprised as anybody else to see her. "G-go b-b-back!" he cried. "G-go back!" He bucked harder than before, upsetting the hunters on top of him.

  Indrani looked as beautiful as ever, maybe more so, as she had left her girlhood behind her and wore comfortably the hides of exotic creatures. Everybody made space, as they would have for Speareye, or one of the great Chiefs of the past.

  She faced her ex-husband, nothing in her fist but a black stone, watching him as he drank in the sight of her.

  "You came back to me."

  "I am here to kill you," she said. Her face betrayed absolutely no emotion.

  "N-no!" said Stopmouth, but Wallbreaker laughed.

  "Oh, yes! I remember those high kicks of yours and how some of the older men lost a few teeth over them. What about you, Whistlenose? Were you one?"

  "I never lost a tooth to her, no." It had hurt, though, he remembered that, when they had first attempted to catch her.

  "Well, wife. You tried your tricks on me, remember? But I was faster. I'm famous for it. You can't beat me. You can't touch me. And—"

  She raised the black stone. A loud bang sounded and everybody jumped, looking around for fear of a new attack. Wallbreaker was on the ground, there was blood everywhere, spilling from his shoulder. Mossheart was screaming.

  A hunter ran towards Indrani, but she pointed the black stone at him, until he backed away from her. Then, she was right beside the
Chief, pressing the strange object up against his skull, while Mossheart screamed and everybody fell back and away from her.

  "What do you say now?" she asked. "What do you say? You will to hurt no person again."

  "Wait!" he cried. "You don't understand. The Tribe needs me! I know how to defeat the Diggers! I have a way to defeat them!"

  "You say anything to live. You lie."

  Whistlenose surprised himself by speaking up for the Chief when none of the younger men would. They all wore expressions of shock. "Wallbreaker does have a way out. He told me so himself just before the last attack. There was no point in a lie. We thought we were all going to die."

  Indrani's face showed some confusion and the black stone might have moved a little away from the Chief's head and then, Stopmouth came forward, having pulled free of his captors. "He's r-r-right l-l-love. If anybody could think of a w-w-way to defeat the D-Diggers..."

  "You could think a way, Stopmouth!" she said. "You could. He is nothing, no better than... Pah!"

  "But I haven't thought of anything, l-love. We can use the T-Talker to drive them back for a while, b-but they're not stupid. They will l-learn to overcome it. Think of the Tribe. Think of F-F-Flamehair."

  His last words were a mistake. All the confusion left her face at once. The black stone returned to the Chief's skull and a loud click sounded. Whatever she was trying to do, hadn't worked this time, but Wallbreaker jerked suddenly and Whistlenose might have thought he had died if he hadn’t screamed out, "Ancestors save me!"

  Then, Stopmouth was beside Indrani, pulling her away from the Chief and into an embrace. She shouted at him, kneed him in the groin so that he ended up at her feet.

  "The Tribe," she spat. "The Tribe! Stopmouth, you said I am your Tribe now! When all these tried to kill us. You said it!" She threw the black stone into the dirt next to his face so that he winced. And then, she was gone back down the slope, with nobody thinking to stop her.

  Stopmouth staggered to his feet, struggling to breathe.

  "I want her back," said Wallbreaker. "She's mine."

  Stopmouth smiled through his pain. "You have w-wet yourself in t-t-terror of her, brother."

  It was true. Enough firelight remained to see the glistening stain in the Chief's leg and Whistlenose, who thought he could feel no more of anything, felt shame on the Chief's behalf.

  Stopmouth, despite his youth and a lack of scarring, looked more a Chief than his brother now. The two stood together and for what must have been the first time in their lives, the younger brother looked down on the older. He turned to the crowd.

  "Follow me to the river," he said. "There is a way to s-safety, but you must t-trust me."

  "We will do what you say," Wallbreaker agreed. He recovered himself long enough to address those around him. "The Ancestors have kept us safe," was all he said. He was bleeding from his shoulder and it seemed he might faint at any moment. But he managed to lead his family to join the crowd following after Stopmouth.

  The next tenth brought its own share of terrors to everybody. Stopmouth's strange followers moved the Tribe towards the banks of the rushing water of the river. Their hunting signs were familiar, but somehow more elaborate than those used back in ManWays. The Talker still provided some light, but it was much dimmer than it had been and everybody fretted that the Diggers would return when inevitably it died.

  But what followed scared Whistlenose even more.

  He was left on the bank, staring into the blackness for a return of the enemy, while his family were set whimpering onto sheets of some strange material that floated on the river. Nighttracker called out to him as the flimsy craft fell away with the current, and men and women on board beat frantically at the water with pieces of wood.

  He winced as a hand clamped over his shoulder.

  "They'll g-g-get across, Whistlenose. We m-managed it on the w-way here. And this is a calm spot."

  "Aren't there Diggers on the other side?"

  "Oh yes. But too r-r-rocky for f-fields. I h-hope they w-won't know we were there until we have returned home safely."

  The numbers of hunters around Whistlenose dwindled, until, eventually, he and Stopmouth along with a dozen other men abandoned the empty bank of the river for a raft of their own. It felt like a living thing beneath him, yawing and bucking to throw them all into the deadly water. They spun around more than once.

  On the last occasion, he saw, in the pitiful firelight they had left behind, a single Digger staring after them.

  CHAPTER 26: Bringing Them Home

  Stopmouth felt exhausted. He desperately wanted to talk to Indrani. Something had happened between them back there by the ruined bridge when he'd tried to stop her from killing Wallbreaker.

  He hadn't even known she'd come along as part of the raid, or that she had borrowed a gun from Ekta. But it was obvious to him now, why she had changed her mind about rescuing his old Tribe and why she had argued for their return. She just wanted to remove the thorn from her heart that Wallbreaker had put there. She needed it, almost more—he feared—than she needed to live. And Stopmouth, her own husband, who was supposed to love her, had got in her way.

  He wanted to see her, to explain himself better... to explain why Wallbreaker had to live.

  But there was no time for that. First, the Tribe had to be ferried across the river. Then, on the far side, they sneaked through ruins on a route that would keep them as far from the nearest Digger fields as possible. Finally, they would cross the river one last time, back to the relative safety of HeadQuarters.

  The journey took two whole days with the Talker barely strong enough for a gentle glow. That didn't seem to bother Stopmouth's old Tribe, however. They seemed to have lost their fear of the dark. Every one of them appeared strange to him now: purified; with a feverish light in their eyes to match that of some of the Religious fanatics he had met in the Roof.

  Even stranger was the way they argued over who should be allowed to carry his wounded brother around, as though their Chief were a pregnant woman or the skull of an Ancestor! What had he done to deserve it, after all? During the fighting, Wallbreaker's spear had stayed dry as old bones. The supposed Chief had hidden at the top of the slope where the bridge hung out over the river. He hadn't even come up with a plan! Instead, he had been rescued in a way that nobody could have predicted, and at the end of it all, a woman who had once humiliated him had done so again. Only a miracle had spared his life.

  But Stopmouth received his own share of love, too. The Tribe welcomed him back, touching his arms, marvelling at the new muscle. "That brother of yours must have known you'd come for us. How clever of him to send you away all that time ago, waiting for this day."

  "What? I don't..."

  "Oh, I suppose it is the Ancestors we should really be thanking. They speak to him. He's never wrong."

  Stopmouth shook his head, his confusion greater than ever.

  The two tribes could not converse except in the presence of the Talker. Even hand signals created problems, because the signs of the New Tribe had evolved beyond anything the Old Tribe had ever needed. The subtle differences between the two systems only deepened the confusion.

  When finally everybody had been brought safely to the vicinity of HeadQuarters, Indrani ran back alone towards the Fourlegger Warehouse. Stopmouth wanted to follow her at once, but some of his brother's men appeared around him. These were little more than boys, being about a thousand days younger than he was. But they carried themselves as bravely as any hunter with a house full of trophies.

  "He wants to speak to you," said one of them whose whole left side looked as though it had been scorched not too long ago.

  Stopmouth swallowed, containing a sudden surge of anger.

  "Good. I want to talk to him."

  Wallbreaker lay alone by the bank of the river where the rushing water would hide their words from anybody else. Always clever, even now.

  This time, you're in my territory.

  But the words wou
ld not come to him. His brother looked exhausted and thin. The muscles of his shoulders and arms seemed too soft for a grown hunter and his whole body lay bent over to the right, as though trying to escape the seeping hole Indrani had made in his left shoulder.

  "So, here we are again, brother," Wallbreaker said.

  "Tell me the plan," said Stopmouth, not trusting himself with anything less practical. His every word had to fight its way free of clenched jaws and grinding teeth. "You said you knew how to defeat the Diggers. Can you?" He wanted to hit this man. To embrace him. To drown him in the river so that he would never see his face again. Poor Indrani!

  Wallbreaker grinned. "Amazing how the Talker has fixed that tongue of yours, isn't it, Stopmouth? Well, that's too bad. I have to take it back now."

  "You'll get nothing more from me, brother." One thing the Talker couldn't hide was the catch in his voice.

  "On the contrary, I am the one who gave you everything and I'll have all of it again soon. That spear you use so well? I taught you those skills after Father had given up his flesh for the rest of us. I was the one who protected you from the bullies. It was I who spoke up for you back when many were thinking of not naming you. I protected you when your legs were broken. And even after mother Volunteered to save you, it was me and my hunting tricks that kept you from the pot. A thousand times you would be dead, Stopmouth. And the Tribe would be dead a thousand times too if it wasn't for me with the Ancestors looking down on nothing and nobody for ever and ever." These words were true. Every one of them.

  "But my kindness to you," Wallbreaker continued, his voice thick, "all counted for nothing the first time an unfaithful woman looked over her shoulder at you."

  Stopmouth stepped closer. His whole body thrummed with emotions he couldn't quite identify. He swallowed painfully and tightened his lips into a line. Wallbreaker ignored the potential threat and kept talking. "And here you stand now, young and healthy, and so full of your own importance as to think you are a Chief! Do you really think you could lead our people?"