The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (12 page)

Three other men made up the
numbers: Hoarseshout, Flatface and the trundling Mossdrinker. They
had spread themselves out so far that with all the swarming insects,
he couldn't be sure they'd see his signal in case of a problem. So he
waved them back into the centre and crouched down until all were
within whisper distance, but facing outwards with eyes peeled. Good
men, he thought. Good men, after all. Better than he was and they
likely knew it. But Wallbreaker had put him in charge.

"You're lucky," the
Chief had said. And that was that.

"Anything?" Whistlenose
asked now.

"A smell," said
Chinjutter.

"You're sure it's not the
berries? That's the sour scent we're getting."

"No, no. This isn't sour.
Smells more hairy. Like wet fur. It's been growing stronger."

With
that black growth in his nostrils, it's no wonder everything smells
like wet fur!
Whistlenose shoved the nasty thought
away. Nerves, just nerves. "Anybody else smell it?" he
asked. "I'm getting nothing."

"I didn't notice until you
mentioned it, Chin," said Mossdrinker. "But now..." He
pointed vaguely in the direction they'd been travelling.

Aagam had told them this route
would be safe. He'd found a swathe of forest that ought to take them
halfway to where they were going without encountering a single
community of beasts. And where there were no beasts to feed on,
there'd be no Diggers either. But anything might have changed in the
meantime and everybody knew that.

"Very slowly then," he
said, "and listen... you heard the Chief and you know he's
right... The most important thing is not to give the Tribe away.
There's no walls to protect our families back there. So, anybody who
gets caught... No rescues. All right? We're just here to find out
what's facing us. Then we run back and report."

"Unless we outnumber them,
surely," said Mossdrinker, flexing one large fist.

"Maybe." Whistlenose
looked around the group before settling on the youngest, the untried
Browncrack. "You're the fastest of us," he said. He had no
idea if that was true, but the boy looked like he was about to live
up to his name and they had yet to so much as see a single enem
y
.
He needed a kill
to settle his nerves, but until then, he was just going to get in the
way.

"At the first sign of
trouble, even if we look like we're about to win, take a heartbeat to
learn what the creatures look like. Then, I need you to run all the
way back to the Chief. Can you do that? Straight back. He's to put
guards out and if you do your job, they'll know what to look for."

"I won't let you down."

"Stay at the back then."

The other five spread out and
moved forward in a crouch. Ahead, the land dipped to form a clearing
with a circle of mossy boulders around a still pool of water. The
smell had grown strong enough that Whistlenose could get it now, too.
Wet fur, indeed. A good way to describe it.

He felt a faint sensation in the
soles of his feet. Diggers? Maybe. It seemed more gentle than that.
It seemed distant. He signalled the two flank men, Hoarseshout and
Mossdrinker, to run to the far side of the dip. They did so, slipping
around the boulders and falling into a crouch.

He was raising his arm to move
the rest of the team on, when Chinjutter touched his shoulder. The
other man's eyes rolled in the direction of one of the boulders and
Whistlenose had to stifle a gasp. The rock was
twitching
.
Not a lot, barely at all, really. Slowly, he lowered his arm. But
just then, the creature must have realised it had been spotted. The
"boulder" suddenly rose up. The carpet of moss it had been
wearing fell away to reveal a compact body of rubbery, glistening
green flesh. It roared, deep in its chest, before springing forward
with all the power and all the speed of a slingstone. It flew across
ten paces to strike Chinjutter so hard that the man...
snapped
.
There was no other way to describe it.

Other "boulders" came
alive. They sprang on coiled green tails. Hoarseshout went down.
Mossdrinker was shouting, cursing the Ancestors, while Flatface
stabbed and stabbed at the monster that had killed Chinjutter,
looking for a vital organ.

A flash of green. Whistlenose
threw himself to one side as a beast shot past him. He rolled to his
feet. It rose too, behind him now, while another, approaching on
short little hops of its coiled tail, came up to face him. Like a
human, it had two eyes. They hung unblinking over a wide, tube-like
mouth where a tongue beat at the "cheeks" with a drum-like
sound that might have been communication. It also had two arms. One
of them slashed at him with a short, long-bladed spear. The other
held a circle of wood that parried his two attempts to strike back.

There was no time for another
attack. He rolled away, aware of the enemy behind him. Mossdrinker
screamed. "Oh no! Oh no!" Flatface was grunting in time to
the sound of a spear striking wood. The enemy were rattling their
tongues, and deep in the forest, their rhythm was taken up by others.
Many, many others. A swarm of them, it seemed. A dozen swarms, while
the wet fur smell blanketed everything and seemed only to be getting
stronger.

A long spear-point flashed past
Whistlenose's face. He didn't have time to be afraid.

"Run, Browncrack!" he
shouted. "Tell the Chief!"

He fell back against a tree
trunk, a nice thick one. Whoever was behind him now wouldn't get much
chance to attack. He pushed his spear in the direction of the nearest
creature's round mouth. It raised the wood to block him and must have
been shocked when the Armourback shell tip passed through far enough
to cut. Whistlenose had already dropped the weapon, taking his knife
to the now-exposed belly. If it even was a belly! It must have hurt,
however, for the monster let out a terrible shriek, its tongue a blur
against swollen cheeks.

And then, Whistlenose found
himself lying on the ground, his face numb all down one side. The
enemy that had been behind him, must have hopped far enough around
the tree to smack him with the wood. More than just a defence then,
his mind said calmly.

You
should get up, boy.
But his head was ringing and none
of his limbs wanted to respond. Only the old injury gave sign of
life, throbbing in time to his heart.

Beyond the far lip of the rise,
he could see more of the creatures on their way. A swarm, he'd
thought earlier, and he'd been right. More than a man could count,
big and small.

He could see the other men from
where he lay at the edge of the dip. Hoarseshout and Mossdrinker had
done well, but would do no more. Each had taken an enemy with him.

I got one, too... Not bad for a
poor hunter.

A long-bladed spear rose towards
the Roof. His enemy vibrated with triumph.

Make it quick.

Out of nowhere, Browncrack
appeared, with an inherited Armourback shell spear of his own. It
tore right through the green beast's face and out the far side.

"I hope you can run with
that limp of yours," said the boy excitedly. "They're
nearly on us."

"You were supposed to go
back. I ordered..."

Browncrack's voice had risen high
enough to grate. "Well, I'll be going back now, won't I? Come
on! Come on!"

The Ancestors still loved
Whistlenose, it seemed, and the swarm of creatures, for all that they
could spring forward at great speed in an ambush, came on now in
harmless little hops. The humans left them far behind.

Members
of the Tribe knew how to stay quiet from a very young age. Mothers
would gather wood with infants strapped to their breasts. They would
walk from one clump of moss to another so that the juices stung their
feet, but cushioned the sound of their steps too. They had signs of
their own, just as the hunters did, and everybody watched and scolded
everybody else's children—often with no more than a glance,
lest some hungry beast hear them and swoop down from the sky or up
from under their feet.

Even so, with over a thousand
people of all ages clustered together for warmth and safety, the camp
could be heard from a distance of two hundred paces. Thousands of
twigs cracked under feet more used to streets than forest. Babies
cried out for milk; adults whispered in argument while untrained boys
made eyes at grinning girls who were far too haughty to show fear or
excitement.

Whistlenose had mostly recovered
his composure by the time they made it back. His ears still rang with
a sound that nobody else could hear. His leg ached, of course, but he
wasted no thought on that. He had run almost as fast as Browncrack.

"It's a migration,"
said the Chief when they reported what they'd seen. "Just like
the Longtongues, these new beasts are fleeing the Diggers behind
them."

Wallbreaker was sitting on the
ruins of an ancient wall, legs dangling. He'd been piecing together
shards of what might have been a skull, although Aagam called it
pottery
and insisted humans had made it. Every word the man spoke only made
Whistlenose want to kill him all the more.

However, Wallbreaker was still
talking. He had a magical ability to explain what he himself had not
been there to s
e
e.
"Our scouts ran into theirs, that's all. But what will the
creatures do next? We need to double the guard. Bring Laughlong here.
Get everybody ready to fight and to move."

"I killed one!" said
Browncrack. "Do I get a tattoo?"

"No," said Wallbreaker.
"You should have come back like Whistlenose ordered. How many
times do I have to tell you, things are different now. That's not how
we win."

"But Whistlenose would have
been dead without me!"

"If they'd had slings and
aimed one at you, the whole Tribe would be dead. They would have
surrounded us in the night while praising their Ancestors for sending
them an idiot like you to deliver us into their bellies."

"Perhaps you should make an
example of him," said Aagam. "Does he have a wife?"

"Shut up," said the
Chief. "You were the one who told us we would be safe in the
forest. Half the journey, you said!"

"Then you should have left
the day I told you! Things have changed. The Diggers are on the move.
The more their population grows, the more food they need. The edges
of their territory must be expanding
exponentially
.
If we'd left at once, like I wanted—"

Whistlenose pulled Browncrack
away and left them to argue. He didn't know why the Chief let Aagam
talk to him like that, but it was beyond his power to change.

All he wanted now was to see
Ashsweeper. But as soon as they were out of earshot of Wallbreaker's
circle, he put one hand on each of Browncrack's young shoulders and
looked him in the eye. "They're right, you know? You should have
left me."

The boy nodded, a tight movement,
almost a jerk of the chin.

Then Whistlenose pulled him into
a tight, trembling embrace. "Bless you, boy. You are Tribe to me
now."

"Thank you."

"Oh! And you have wet your
spear. I can't call you 'boy' any more, can I?"

A dozen heartbeats later, he was
back with his family. Ashsweeper sat him down without a word and
sponged him off with water from a deliciously cold pool at the centre
of the camp.

"He sends you out every
day," she said, her voice a whisper. Everybody was speaking in
the same tone so that it felt like they were surrounded by a
constant, gentle hiss. "And you get all the most dangerous
missions. You and Laughlong who displeased him."

"We're older than everybody
else. You should know that."

Of course she knew. Hidden in her
pack, she would have the tally stick on which she marked off his
days. She recorded her own too. Only the boy, happily stalking
mossbeast
s
around a rotted tree trunk, remained ageless and without a Tally of
his own.

"How happy he must be,"
Whistlenose muttered. "We fight so hard to get him named, and
yet, from that moment on, his every heartbeat will be numbered."

"Don't be sad," she
said.

He shook his head. "It has
passed again already, my bride." He hugged her. He would have to
get up again now, he realised, to seek out the families of the men
who had died.

Wallbreaker's orders for the
Tribe to pack up arrived shortly after that. They moved backwards
half a day's travel to a chest-high ring of crumbling old walls.
Everybody tried to fit inside, so that whole families lay squashed
in, one atop the other. They stayed there for two swelteringly
horrible days, while women dug pits and every man who could lift a
spear struggled through undergrowth, poking each rock for fear it
should spring up at him.

The new beasts—people had
begun calling them "Jumpers"—followed on. Their
patrols sparred with humans. Hunters died in a contest of equals, and
sometimes the bodies of heroes were carried back to feed the Tribe.