The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy)

by Peadar O'Guilin

  Mossheart's daughter had taken to playing gently with Flamehair and was a comfort to her while her father was off dealing with Digger attacks. New generations of the enemy were maturing all the time, away out there in the dark. But they arrived in scattered, disoriented groups, many of them with no grubs of their own so that they died easily. With no new flesh coming from the Roof, the rest of the enemy would soon starve.

  Stopmouth closed his eyes, listening to the strange songs of the Roof People and feeling the heat on his face from the fire. But Mossheart wouldn't let him rest. "Oh won't you look at him!" she said. "That old man should be soup long ago."

  She was still talking about Rockface. The hunter had just landed from a leap over the fire. His face was flushed with pleasure and only the slightest hint of pain. But he waved towards his bride, beckoning her forward. "Jump!" he cried, repeating the word with his hands as all the children did.

  "It's a waste of food feeding him," Mossheart continued. "The Tribe needs the strongest to survive."

  "It's n-not about the strongest any more. It's the best we need to survive now. And Rockface is the best."

  "Stupid Roof talk. That Indrani poisoned you."

  Sodasi leapt without hesitation, crashing into Rockface as everybody cheered. But then, worried hunters were stepping in to help the couple back to their feet. "It's all right!" Rockface cried. "It's just my back! It does that sometimes, hey?"

  Flamehair squirmed in Stopmouth's lap. "You want some rice, baba?" he asked her.

  "Rice!" Mossheart spat.

  "She'll have to g-get used to it. There won't be any m-more Diggers to eat when she's older."

  "Pah! There's no strength in it. She'll never get a name like that."

  "She already has a name."

  "A proper name. Her own name. Not something you just stole from your poor mother."

  The time had come for Sodasi's last dance among her unmarried friends. Far too many people were joining in to suit tradition, even men. Tarini was there, making friends with Vishwakarma and a few others. But Rockface knew the proper way to do things and he came over to lie beside them in a cloud of his own sweat.

  "Oh, I know I should Volunteer," he said to Mossheart's disapproving look. "But she wants me, my poor girl, and I won't refuse her anything, hey?"

  "You won't last her the time it takes to make a child!" said Mossheart.

  "I don't know." He grinned at his dancing bride and she waved back from the far side of the fire. "We have to talk with our hands, so I don't always get what she means. But she says I'm only forty—whatever that is! Forty what? Days? I ask her. But she says no, that's not it. She says I'll be around a long time. Long enough. We'll see. Things are different now. I know it's not right." He grinned. "But I don't care, hey? I mean, look at her!" He shouted, "I don't care!" And all the dancers cried gibberish of their own in time to the drums and Flamehair laughed.

  "I love you," Stopmouth told his child. "R-rockface? Show F-flamehair how to s-say 'I love you' with the signs."

  "I'll show her. I'll show both of you, hey? And you'll never have to worry about that tongue of yours again."

  Stopmouth had stopped worrying about that long ago, but he grabbed Rockface with his free hand and pulled him into a fierce hug. He wished more than anything Indrani could be here now. At the end of the world with him. At the beginning of everything.

  EPILOGUE: Four Mothers

  There were four of them left. Their children burrowed tunnels through their flesh and they felt the pain of it as a glorious web of fire. Their poor, unmated sisters would never know this joy; would never share the pain of the universe: the cries of stars longing for the love of their creator; the screaming, eternal dying of the comets. Only their children allowed them to be part of all that. Only their grubs.

  But agony should not be hoarded selfishly. It must be shared.

  And so they ran. Deeper and deeper into the darkness. Nowhere could they find new hosts for the grubs. Everywhere they went were fields planted with their own sisters until even these petered out into desert. By the time their energy had left them, they saw a place where light shone by day. A glare that caused their grubs to shrink deep inside their mothers' bodies. Perhaps some hosts might live there? But no, they had not the strength left to do the right thing; to subdue even one lucky creature.

  They found a single planted human there, high on the side of a hill so that he faced down to where the light shone and from where the smell of smoke and wasted, cooked flesh must have tickled his nose. A metal ball lay at his hip and a broken spear.

  They lapped gratefully at the nutritious drool from his mouth.

  "Mother..." he moaned. He suffered an agony greater than any member of his species had ever known. They felt particularly tender towards him in that moment and they chose this spot to plant each other so that they might be near him and share in his pain as they all sank into the soil together.

  Each of their deaths would mean the birth of a single child. There would be no more Diggers after that, and this too, was beautiful.

  [THE END.]

  Acknowledgements

  I won't write anything fancy here, but I want to say that everybody who helped out on the first two books, The Inferior and The Deserter, gets my love and thanks all over again. This includes family and friends, work colleagues and neighbours. It includes commenters and tricksters from the Brotherhood Without Banners. It includes an elite band of booksellers from Dublin to St. Andrews, to Liverpool and Lansing. It includes everybody at Conville & Walsh, at Random House Children's Books and at that mighty forge of the imagination known as David Fickling Books in Oxford.

  Who else? Who else? Gabrielle Harbowy swooped mercilessly on typos. Fiona Jayde provided a great and bony cover...

  But most of all—because this is a book that should not exist—I want to thank all of those people in every part of the world, who stormed their piggy-banks to buy the first two volumes, and who pestered me for years afterwards with questions such as, “What part of the word trilogy don't you understand?”

  It's all done now. Let's go back to sleep.