The Homeward Bounders

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Are wars very common?” he asked me.

  “About every sixth world,” I said. “Sometimes I think war is Their favorite thing to play. Half the other worlds are either just working up to a war or just finished one.”

  Joris nodded. His straight face was very straight. “Oh,” he said. “Them.” The way he said it proved he really was new to the Bounds. It was fresh new hatred, like Helen’s, not weary old hatred, like mine.

  We sucked our sherbert sweets and we ate Joris’s chocolate, in nibbles to make it last, and listened to the guns crashing. Joris amused me, the way he kept glancing at the bits of Helen’s face that showed when she parted her hair to eat, then looking away as if he was afraid, like I had been, that her face was sacred.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Her face isn’t sacred. She’s just peculiar.”

  Helen put one side of her hair behind an ear in order to glower at me, and jerked her head at the noise overhead. “Are we going to get any peace tonight?”

  “Shouldn’t think so,” I said. “Mud-browners never seem to sleep. They always fight all night.”

  “In that case,” Helen said, hooking the other side of her hair up and turning the whole fierce pointed sacredness at Joris, “we’d better talk. Tell us who you are and what you did to make Them exile you. Then we’ll tell you about us.”

  I tried telling Helen that you didn’t ask Homeward Bounders about themselves, or talk about Them. But she just looked contemptuous. And Joris looked anxiously from one to the other of us, wondering which was right. “Oh, go ahead,” I said, “if you want to talk. Don’t mind me. I’ve only been on a hundred worlds to her three.” At that, Joris looked as if he wanted to talk but didn’t know how to start. So I said, to get him going, “I can see you’re new to the Bounds. You come from somewhere where they speak English too, don’t you?”

  He hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I was born in Cardsburg, and I can still speak Kathayack a little. But I was sold to the Khans when I was seven, and I’ve spoken English ever since—”

  “You were what?” I said.

  “Sold,” he said, looking slightly surprised. “I’m a slave, you know. Doesn’t it show?”

  “How could it show?” I said. “You’re pulling my leg.” Or so much for my ideas about posh boys, I thought.

  His freckled face went quite pink with worry. “It should appear in my manner. I hope I’ve not grown presumptuous.”

  It just shows you. You wander every kind of world, and you still get surprised like this. Helen didn’t believe him either. “Prove you’re a slave,” she said.

  “Of course,” Joris said, very humbly, and began rolling up his right sleeve. This felt familiar. I began to wonder what Joris’s arm was going to turn into. But it was an ordinary freckled white arm, with a good many more muscles than mine, and at the top, near the shoulder, there was—well, it looked like a little blurred pink drawing. A drawing of an anchor.

  One look, and I leaped off my sandbag. “Where did you get that?”

  “It’s Konstam’s mark,” Joris said. His eyes filled with tears. “I’m Konstam’s personal slave, you see. Konstam bought me.”

  Little did I know how soon I would be groaning at the sound of that name! At the time, as I looked at that anchor, it seemed like an omen, a sign, a lucky charm. I swore to myself as I sat down again that I’d hang on to Joris too next time the Bounds called. Meanwhile, Helen was leaning forward giving the arm and the mark the full fierce boot-button treatment. “Anyone can have themselves tattooed,” she said.

  Joris wiped his tears with a finger and said, almost proudly, “It isn’t a tattoo. It’s a brand. They do it with a hot iron.”

  “How disgusting!” Helen said. I liked that from her. I told you the kind of world she came from.

  “They give you an injection first,” Joris said. I could tell he was used to explaining to worried ladies. “It doesn’t hurt.”

  It may not have hurt him, but it worried me. I fell to thinking about Them, and whether it was Them who did this kind of thing to people, or whether people did it to themselves. But I didn’t have much space to think, because, now Joris had got going, he got going with a vengeance.

  “Konstam chose me, out of all the slaves in the mart,” he said, “to train as his assistant. He took me back to Khan Valley and he gave me a really good education. I mean, it’s not necessary to do more than read and write in order to train as a demon hunter, you know, but Konstam’s never given me anything but the best possible treatment. Konstam’s really marvelous. He’s the best demon hunter working today. You know, Konstam can sense a demon when none of the instruments give even a corporeal reading, I swear it. And Konstam’s great company too. He never treats me like a slave. From the way he treats me, people think I’m his free-born assistant, just like you did. But I never presume on it. I try to do everything Konstam wants. I honestly tried today, but I let him down dreadfully.”

  Actually, I’ve cut down on the Konstams, telling this. Konstam came in every other word. Long before Joris had got to this point, Helen and I had got the idea: Konstam was a Great God. He was ten foot tall, dark, handsome, strong, skillful, kind, considerate—you name a virtue, Konstam had it. He was rich too—demon hunting seemed to pay well. According to Joris, Konstam drove an expensive fast car and stayed in the best hotels, and insisted on the best of everything. He lavished the best of everything on Joris too. I suppose this meant that Joris was a good slave, since he must have been one of the expensive things Konstam insisted on. Well—I’d heard of slavish devotion, but I’d never met it before.

  “How much were you worth as a slave?” I asked, to divert Joris from Konstam-worship a bit.

  “Oh, about twenty-thousand crowns,” Joris said seriously. “I’d be worth at least twice as much if I was fully trained. But—I suppose I never will be now. I’ve let Konstam down—”

  Helen shot me a nasty look. She always did if I talked about how much things were worth. She said I was commercial-minded. “Tell about demons,” she said. “How do you hunt them?”

  “Demons,” said Joris. “They’re quite hard to explain if you’ve never seen one.”

  Neither of us had. Demons must have been the one nasty thing that Helen’s world didn’t have.

  “I think,” said Joris, “that demons are the war that They play in my world. Demons hate humans. They really are utterly malignant. We have to keep them from spreading, because they can kill people outright; or they can enter into people and possess them—you know, work them like puppets; or they can haunt a place and poison it for living in; or they can drain off a person’s mind, so that the person can be walking about, while his mind is elsewhere in agonies. They can do all sorts of other things too. They really are dangerous, and they’re not made like us humans at all. We’re half body and half soul. Demons are never that corporeal—they have more spirit than body, always. If you’re trained to look for it, you can see the spirit as well as the body. Demon spirit is more visible than human—much more.”

  “Then what do demons look like?” we asked.

  “It’s hard to describe,” said Joris, “to someone who’s never seen one. They can change their shapes, you see. But basically, the most corporeal ones are the most grotesque, with lots of arms and legs—horrible—and red and gray and blue. Some of the more spiritual ones look like long white humans, but they usually have at least one extra pair of arms.”

  “How do you hunt for them?” said Helen.

  “That’s rather technical,” said Joris. “Basically, you have to find their lair and then tempt them out of it. Or, if they won’t come out, you have to go in and get them. Konstam’s wonderfully brave and cool at that. There are all sorts of ways of killing them, but however you do it, you always have to kill them twice—once for the body and once for the spirit. If you don’t, they grow back again—and they usually come after you when they have. In order to kill them spiritually, of course, you have to go into the
spirit world. Konstam always does that. He’s taught me how to, but he says it’s too dangerous for me yet. I—I wire the demons for him—only—only I let him down over that today.”

  Joris gulped and shed tears here. It took him a while to get going again. It really had been only that day, it turned out, that he had been made a Homeward Bounder for going after a demon too hard.

  That morning, Joris and Konstam had been called out to investigate a case of demon-infestation at a remote farm. It was nothing very bad, the farm people said. They had found a sheep with all the blood sucked out of it, and no animals would go near the old barn up the hill. But the demon hadn’t shown itself or tried to harm the humans, which made them think it could only be a small one. Konstam had warned Joris to be careful, though. When a demon hides up and starts sucking blood, that means it’s thinking of having a brood of baby demons. It gets very vicious then.

  Anyway, they went to the barn and took readings and, sure enough, it seemed to be a small demon. So they set to work to tempt it out. Now, it all got very technical here, but, as far as I could gather, Joris’s main job, as soon as the demon came out, was to stop it escaping into the spirit world so that Konstam could get a shot at it and kill the part of it that passed for its body—the corporeal part. They used stuff called demon wire for that.

  Here Joris broke off and got all unhappy again. He kept tapping the sign on his chest and saying, “But I can’t be taken to the spirit world! I carry all sorts of equipment to stop it. Konstam insists. I don’t know what happened!”

  “Do you mean that sign should stop you?” said Helen.

  “That?” said Joris. “No that’s Shen. That’s just power over demons. No, I have all sorts of other things. Anyway—”

  Well, the demon came charging out, and it seemed pretty small. Joris did his stuff, while Konstam stood ready to shoot, and he did it well and got a loop of his wire round the demon. Then all hell broke loose. Because the demon had been cunningly concealing its size. It wasn’t a small one at all. It was one of the long white human-looking kind, only one of the very biggest, the kind they call Great Demons, a sort of Demon King, really. Its name was Adrac, and it was almost all spirit. The body part of it was so small that Konstam missed it with his first shot, and all his other shots went wide, because the demon was dragging Joris hither and yon and trying to put Joris in the way of Konstam’s bullets. They have to be silver bullets, Joris said. But any bullet kills a human, and Konstam obviously didn’t want to shoot a valuable slave. So Konstam dropped his gun and came after Adrac with his demon knife. Joris said that was very brave of Konstam.

  As for what happened next, Joris didn’t tell it quite like this, but my guess is that his slavish devotion took over. He had been told by the Great God Konstam never, on any account, to let go of a demon once he had it wired, and he didn’t. He hung on. Konstam seems to have had more sense. The last thing Joris heard of him, Konstam was shouting to him to let go. But it was too late then. The demon took Joris into another world.

  “What? Through a Boundary, you mean?” I said.

  “Oh no,” said Joris. “We keep the Boundaries sealed off or the demons would be infesting every world by now. But there are an awful lot of weak places where a strong demon can burst through into another world. We use the weak places ourselves sometimes, to go after escaped demons.”

  Helen and I were both quite dumbfounded by this. We had thought no one but Homeward Bounders went from world to world. But, it turned out, Joris had actually been on quite a number of other worlds himself. With Great God Konstam, of course.

  “I wonder They allow you to,” Helen said.

  Joris looked as if he was going to say it would take more than Them to stop Konstam, but maybe he had doubts about that, because he said, “Well, I think They like to keep the game between humans and demons as even as possible, and it wouldn’t be even if we couldn’t go after them.”

  On this occasion, Adrac didn’t stop when he had dragged Joris into the next world. He (or it) went on, from one world to another, and Joris hung on, with worlds flipping past him like sleepers under a railway train, long after most people with any sense would have let go. Adrac kept turning round and saying, “Why don’t you let go?” and Joris kept saying, “No, I’m damned if I shall!” And Adrac said, “I shall suck your blood. I’ll take your mind away!” And Joris said, “You can’t, not with this wire.” So Adrac said, “We’ll take a plunge into the spirit world then, and you’ll be at my mercy there.” I can’t think why Joris wasn’t scared silly. But he said he wasn’t scared, not then, because he knew Adrac couldn’t do any of those things. Konstam’s equipment was too good. So the demon went on scudding from world to world, and Joris went on hanging on. He unhooked the white gauntlets from his belt to show us how the wire had almost cut through them. His hands were still sore, he said.

  Finally Adrac got quite exasperated. “I’ll give you one last chance,” he said. “Will you let go, or shall I see what They can do to you?”

  And Joris said, “No.” He had never heard of Them. He thought it was another empty threat.

  Adrac said, “Right, then!” And, Joris said, the demon seemed to change direction and plunge off a new way, from world to world, until suddenly they crashed into quite a different place. Joris could tell it was different from the worlds they had been racing through up to then. For one thing, it hurt Joris to crash through into it. He yelled with pain, and Adrac turned and gave a nasty laugh. For another thing, though the place felt more intense and solid than anywhere he had ever been, Joris couldn’t see it very well. It was a vast, quiet, shadowy place. Machines hummed and flickered there. And They were there, at Their gaming tables.

  There was a table every few yards, Joris said, for further than he could see on all sides of him. They bent over the tables. He saw Them consult machines, and then carefully move pieces this way and that on the tables, and then sometimes They shook dice and consulted over that. Some played in pairs, others in companies. It was all very intent. Part of the horror was the terrible intentness of Them.

  The intensity and the sheer numbers of Them shook Joris to the core. And the nature of Their game. The nearest table he could see was his own world. They were moving humans and demons about in it. But, an instant or so after Adrac had come crashing in beside the table with Joris, a blue light began blinking at one end of the table, and They turned round to look.

  Joris said he was scared stiff then. “I think it must have been the spirit world, in spite of my equipment,” he said. “It felt so different. And I hadn’t any protection with me against the spirit world at all, because Konstam always did that part. I knew I was done for. There were so many of Them, and I could see They were all demons.”

  “All demons?” Helen and I said together.

  “Oh yes.” Joris was surprised we hadn’t known. “They’re not any kind I’ve ever seen before, but They certainly are demons. They’re more corporeal than Adrac, and a good deal larger, and the strongest I’ve ever come across, but there was no mistaking it. I could see Their spirit part shimmering round Them. And I was really frightened.”

  Adrac seemed fairly subdued too. He and Joris both stood there waiting, until, one by one, each table of Them turned Their hard-to-see faces to look at the two. When They were all looking, one in the distance said, “What are you doing here, Adrac?”

  “I’ve come to complain,” said Adrac. “You haven’t kept your promises.”

  Another of Them, a nearer one, said, “Mind your manners, Adrac. Speak to us like that again, and you’ll be punished.”

  Adrac said, in a mutinous, polite way, “Well, is it fair? We Great Demons agreed to play, if you promised not to let the humans cull among us. You agreed they could catch the small fry, and you promised we’d be allowed to breed in peace. You said you’d keep them off. I go to a quiet farm to start a family and—Well, look at me! Look at it!”

  The hard-to-see faces turned to Joris.

  “How did this
happen?” one of Them in the distance asked Them at the table of Joris’s world.

  They looked over Their table, consulted a machine, and looked carefully at the table again. One of Them turned to Adrac. “We apologize, Adrac. This seems to be a random factor we didn’t notice.”

  “Well, kill it for me then,” said Adrac.

  “Can’t you?” said one of Them.

  “I wish I could,” said Adrac. “But look at it. It’s hung about with every kind of protection. I can’t touch it, even here. You’ll have to do it.”

  They started moving towards Joris then, numbers of Them, tall and vague and gray. Joris said he dropped the demon wire in sheer terror and hardly knew what happened the next few seconds, he was so frightened. It was only when They stopped, in a ring round him, that he noticed he was still alive and untouched, with his demon knife in his hand.

  “Leave me alone,” he said. “I was only doing my duty.”

  They didn’t seem to notice that he’d spoken. “No good,” said one.

  “Why were they allowed this much protection?” asked another.

  “I said all along that it was a mistake,” Adrac said righteously.

  They ignored Adrac too. Joris said it was the queerest feeling to find Adrac, one of his world’s Great Demons, treated as a nobody. He would have enjoyed it, if he hadn’t been less than nobody himself.

  “This is a nuisance,” said another of Them. “You’ll have to make a discard instead.”

  “Have the Bounds room for any more?” asked another one.

  A voice of Them in the distance said, “There is room for two more discards only. Can’t it really be touched?”

  “No it can’t!” one of Them round Joris said, quite irritably. “The only solution is a discard.”

  “Well get on and discard then,” said another of Them in the distance. “You’re holding up play.”

  So the nearest of Them turned to Joris and said just what They said to me. “You are now a discard. We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, except that it is against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure that you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are. The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can. If you succeed in returning, you may enter play again in the normal manner.”