The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (14 page)

The Chief shrugged,
unembarrassed. An older hunter was supposed to make way for younger
men and the whole Tribe understood that.

"You reported a mound half a
day's travel behind us," he said.

Laughlong nodded. "I said it
would be a good campsite, yes. But that was before we found this
place. These walls make for a much more defensible position. We can
hurt them here. We can fight them."

The Chief smiled. In the distance
where the women and lower-status hunters watched, he must have looked
confident with those dimples of his pressing deep. But Whistlenose
stood close enough to see the tremor in Wallbreaker's limbs and the
sickly look of terror in his eyes. "I do not intend to fight
them at all," he said. "Everybody get ready to move."

And so the madness began and all
without explanations, as if the Chief did not trust his own plan at
all. Even so, they obeyed. Everybody obeyed.

Most of the Tribe packed up and
began the short trek towards the mound. The rest had special tasks to
carry out. Whistlenose, for example, stayed behind to help guard a
gang of women that included Ashsweeper.
She
shouldn't have been chosen for this. She's the mother of a nameless
child.
Hightoes would have to keep an eye on the boy
for them.

Ashsweeper showed no resentment
and took charge of the other women with ease, although a few were
thousands of days older and had borne many children.

"No talking," she told
them. "We're here to work."

And what awful work it was too!
Around the site of the abandoned camp, they dug up latrine pits,
gathering as much of the foul waste as they could, and piling it into
blankets of pounded moss. They couldn't even sing as they worked for
fear of attracting something hungry when they had less than a dozen
hunters to keep them safe.

The forest was quieter now than
it had been a few days earlier. The berries had stopped popping and
the clouds of flashing
mossbeast
s
had changed from perfectly co-ordinated swarms to individual insects
meandering erratically from rock to branch to who-knew-where.

Whistlenose scanned the poor
sight-lines of the forest looking for movement. The past few days had
shown that Jumpers had infinite patience when on the hunt. They were
as much at home crawling through the undergrowth in camouflaged moss
cloaks as they were at balancing on coiled tails and springing to the
attack. Could they climb? he wondered. Had the Chief thought of that?
He signalled off to his left where Eatenfinger waited, just as
nervously as he:
anything
?

A shake of the head.

In the other direction, no more
than twenty paces away, his wife still worked, using a filthy skull
to scoop excrement into a moss blanket. He risked moving over beside
her, passing through a place where one of the slime puddles from the
Roof had dried away to a fine white powder.

"What does he want this dung
for?" she whispered.

"It must be their sense of
smell," he said. "He'll use it to upset them in some way,
or... or..."

"Or blind them?" she
asked. "If their noses are as good as our eyes?"

"Maybe. They have eyes too,
though. I don't know."

"The Ancestors won't abandon
us, husband."

"No." But Whistlenose
wasn't so sure. All his life he had heard tales of species going
extinct. The story was always the same: numbers would drop below a
certain level and then, crack! Gone within days. The Flim were
destroyed when he was a boy. The Hairbeasts, by rights, should have
been next if the humans hadn't sheltered them.

And now we are little more than a
thousand. And fewer every day.

He had no doubt the Chief would
get them through the next few days, but the real question was how
many would die in the process.

Another filthy woman approached
on silent feet. Whistlenose was surprised to recognise her as
Mossheart. She too was the mother of a nameless child and shouldn't
be here. Punished perhaps, for speaking out at what should have been
a meeting of hunters.

"Why are you dawdling,
Ashsweeper?" she asked, proud as ever. "There's a big pit
left at the back."

"It's nearly dark,"
said Ashsweeper.

"All the more reason to
hurry."

But at that moment, Browncrack
and Shoulderbiter came sprinting out of the woods. They looked
worried and tired, but they weren't calling out the alarm.

"Time to go," said
Whistlenose.

He needn't have spoken.
Everywhere, the workwomen were already wrapping up their sacks of
filth and piling them on to the food sleds that had been freed up for
that very purpose.

"How near are they?"
Whistlenose asked the two young scouts.

Both were smeared with the
poisonous juices of crushed berries and they stank like rusty metal.
"Two thousand paces!" said Browncrack.

"All right, that's all
right. I thought we were going to have to put up a fight to allow the
women to get away."

"To get away with the shit?"
said Shoulderbiter. "We might have had to die for shit? Can't
the women just abandon the sleds?"

"All right. Let's keep our
voices down now. Listen, two thousand paces is plenty. Jumpers are
slow when travelling, and when they get here, this whole place will
stink of us and it will be night time. They'll have to stop and make
sure we're not all around them ready to strike. We have plenty of
time to make it to the new position."

And so it proved. Even in the
dark, the gatherers and their escorts had no trouble following the
trail left by the tribe earlier that day. The enemy were sure to find
it just as easily, although they would have to worry more about
ambush.

Whistlenose stumbled along,
struggling to stay alert after a ten-day of incredible worry and
fear. All he wanted was to curl up beside his family at the new
position and forget about anything until the morning.

Up ahead, the dark shadow of the
mound gradually became apparent. He had seen it only by day when
scouting for a campsite, back before they had met the Jumpers. He
wondered why no fires had been lit. There was no more hiding now, so
why shouldn't the Tribe have one last hot meal to raise their
spirits? Why no final dance to the sound of wedding drums?

He jumped as he felt something
brush across his neck.

"You're dead," a voice
whispered.

"Laughlong?"

"Is that you, Whistlenose?
Oh."

"Is... is something wrong?"

He sensed, rather than saw, the
lowering of the spear. "I'm sorry, Whistlenose. I'm truly
sorry."

"About what?" But he
already knew. Deep in his guts, he already knew. The boy. It had to
be the boy.

There
were always children who did such things. "Don't run away!"
were among the first words parents tried to teach. But every few
hundred days or so, somebody's precious girl or boy walked around a
corner and never came back. Things had improved after the attack of
the Flyers and their Armourback and Hopper allies. ManWays had
greatly shrunk and in the process its borders had become tighter,
more secure.

But then, the Ancestors had sent
the whole tribe running off into the forest.

Ashsweeper was on her knees, not
even crying, her eyes as dry as a dusty brick, as if she didn't know
anything had happened at all. The only sounds were from the great
mound where crowds of people were digging pits with improvised
shovels of wood and bone.

Hightoes had been brought out to
them.
She
was weeping while her husband,
Fearsflyers
,
stood nervously at her side. She explained it all again and again.

"He was too fast. In my
state, I couldn't... He said he wanted Ashsweeper... he said... he...
he ran back down the trail we had made. I hoped he would just run
into you along the way, but he's... he's not with you..."

Her voice seemed to fade into the
night. Here between the trees little chilling drops of Roofsweat
spattered Whistlenose's face and rattled the canopy of leaves. He had
that spinning feeling in his head, like his spirit was being sucked
out of his skull. He was no longer an Ancestor: no longer anything at
all. And poor Ashsweeper still made no sound. But the Roof made up
for her—it always wept at night.

Nearby, men were getting ready to
grab hold of him. They knew he would try to go looking and they
couldn't allow him to waste his flesh that way.

Suddenly, everybody around him
tensed. A warning was shouted and spears were lowered and then, just
as quickly, relaxed. Laughlong started jumping up and down, as though
he were trying to shout out something, but had lost his voice.

"Dada?"

The boy was there, clutching at
his father's leg. Was Whistlenose dreaming? Everyone was babbling all
at once until a sentry had to come back and shut them up. Whistlenose
lifted the child into the air so that they were face to face. "What?
How? What did you...?"

"I hid," said the boy.
"I saw you coming and hid. Then I tracked you back. Nobody saw
me! I won, I won the game! I always catch you, dada!"

"Night tracker," said
Hightoes.

"What?" Whistlenose
felt dizzy.

"That's his name," she
said.

Whistlenose still barely knew
what was happening, but somebody slapped his back. Others were
embracing Ashsweeper. And they were embracing the boy too with
"welcome to the Tribe!" and "your Ancestors can see
you now!" and other things. Surely it was too early? And the
other pregnant women hadn't agreed to it yet, but nobody here had any
doubts that the name would stick. Nighttracker. He had chased down
his own parents and, in the process, he had evaded even the most
experienced hunters. "Nighttracker".

Ashsweeper finally started
crying. But not Whistlenose. Ever since the boy was born he'd felt a
grip around his throat that had tightened and tightened so that it
troubled even his sleep; so that at times he couldn't breathe. That
was gone now, cut loose and all the cool air of night flooded into
him at once. "Nighttracker," he said, his voice awed. A
good name. So much better than his, with a good story behind it that
people would tell around fires for hundreds of days to come.
Nighttracker.

The following day, Wallbreaker
revealed the full horror of his plan to the Tribe.

***

A
Globe passed overhead, its metal body glinting in the light of the
Roof, but not as brightly as it should have. It felt dark for the
time of day. Or was it just fear that made him feel that way?

Whistlenose said nothing. Nobody
did, stuck in such uncomfortable positions as they had been for two
full tenths already. He wanted water. He was desperate to scratch his
right leg. And worse than all of that, was the stench, the awful
stench of human excrement, and the vomit too that the Chief had
insisted on, despite all the food wasted in order to create it.

And yet, he still felt giddy.
That was the word, "giddy," over the naming of his son.
Nighttracker was a real hunter's name. And wasn't that how it often
worked out? How people somehow lived up to what they were called?
Speareye had been a great Chief; Crunchfist was every bit as powerful
as he sounded, and Flimface... poor Flimface! As cowardly in the end
as those creatures he so uncannily resembled.

And then there was "Whistlenose,"
of course. A fool's name. Harmless and unremarkable, with no stories
to leave after him for the fireside. But he
had
left a great hunter to continue the Tribe and
nothing
could be better than that.

A nearby woman, who must have
been just as expendable as he was, coughed when the smell became too
much. Somebody else hissed her quiet. What a fool! he thought. Can't
she shut up?

And still, in the forest, nothing
moved.

The mound, it turned out, had
been terribly hard work to dig. People kept pulling away blocks of
the stone known as "concrete." The most disturbing
discovery of all, however, had been the bones. Human, beyond any
doubt. Crumbling away at the slightest touch. The Tribe had travelled
five days away from ManWays. How could there be humans here? Did that
mean the tribe had migrated once before, deep in the past? Or worse,
that their territory had been slowly shrinking over the generations?

"None of those things,"
Aagam had said, but Whistlenose and the other hunters had been sent
away before he explained the rest of it.

Something shifted in the forest
and the hunter felt his heart speeding up. Another movement, and his
eyes, which had been learning to spot them, made out the camouflaged
shapes of two Jumpers crawling through the undergrowth.

"Ancestors help us,"
whispered the silly woman, but quietly enough that the creatures were
unlikely to be able to hear it. Not that she could know that for
sure!