The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (18 page)

A ragged crowd of maybe fifteen
stumbled nervously into the field of the Diggers. With luck its
owners were all dead now, following the ambush.

While the fighting had been going
on, while poor Treekisser was dying under a swarm of enemies, the
main body of the Tribe must have been sneaking out of the forest.
First would have come men with Armourback spears to stab planted
aliens in their brains. This would stop them calling out in alarm or
grabbing at people. Then would have come the heavily laden women, the
children, a scheming Aagam, a cowardly Chief...

The hunters sidled past a swathe
of eerie but now harmless bodies. Whistlenose couldn't help goggling
at the wonders around him. He saw tentacled monsters, all beaks and
eyeballs. There were creatures of scale and fur, of feathers and
shells and spines: creatures with wings; with claws or hands or
pincers.

In spite of the terror he had
been through, in spite of the choking stench all around them, the
field was starting to feel like a magical place to him. "I would
love to taste every one of them," he said to Laughlong, wiping
the drool from the side of his mouth.

"I know, my stomach has been
going crazy. It can't decide whether to rumble or to throw up!"

But nobody so much as unsheathed
a knife, of course. The Diggers paid special attention to those who
stole from them.

"But then..." said
Laughlong, "then I can't help thinking..."

"Thinking what?"

"All of these beasts... The
Diggers beat them all eventually. What chance have we?"

Whistlenose shook his head,
although he had been avoiding the very same thought himself. "There's
every kind of beast here, my friend. Every kind but human."

Up ahead, Whistlenose could see
torches and knew they were already catching up on the rest of the
Tribe. He was limping yet again by the time they reached a rearguard
of men who nodded in greeting but didn't speak otherwise, even
through signs. A returned hunter was supposed to see his family
before anybody else and Whistlenose wanted that more than anything
now.

"Everybody looks so
worried," Laughlong muttered. That was true. As Whistlenose
moved forward, he found people to be more and more bunched up, their
torches waving uncertainly.

And then, warm arms wrapped
around him and Ashsweeper's breath was tickling his ear. "Welcome,
husband."

"Where's the boy?"

"Nighttracker is with his
cousins. I'm going straight back there after one kiss." She took
more than one, her lips soft against his. "I need to clean all
those cuts for you, husband, but you'd better go on, first."

"Go on where? What do you
mean?"

"
He
will want to see you. The Chief."

Whistlenose asked no further
questions, pushing right through the crowd until the reasons for the
Tribe's stopping here became obvious. A great line of bewildered,
worried people were spread out along the shore of a Wetlane. On the
far side, the planted bodies continued, although many of these had
sunk so far into the ground as to be little taller than a man's knee.

He limped over to where the Chief
raged at Aagam.

"This is not supposed to be
here, Roofman! You said we were clear through to the hills!"

"How do you expect me to
remember every little detail without the Roof? I had to store all the
information, absolutely everything in my head. Have you any idea how
difficult that is?"

Whistlenose thought that was a
strange argument. Where else was a hunter supposed to keep his wisdom
if not in his own thoughts?

"And, anyway," Aagam
continued. "This should be easy. We just need a few tree trunks
to bridge the thing and we can all be on our way. Send a few of these
men back to the forest for some." But he was not as confident as
his words made him sound. The stranger's eyes kept darting in one
direction and another. Morning could not be too far away surely and
there appeared to be no end in sight to the fields. And how long
before new enemies came looking for them? For all anybody knew they
had already moved into the territory of another Digger Tribe—what
Aagam himself had called a "family."

"We have
burnt
all the trees," said Wallbreaker. "Remember? We need
something else. You have to give me something else!"

At that moment, his eyes settled
on Whistlenose. Not speaking to anybody in particular, he asked, "Has
this man seen his wife yet?"

"I have," the hunter
answered, surprised that Wallbreaker could sometimes still be polite.

"Tell me the truth, then,
hunter. Is it true you leapt over one of these Wetlanes? Like
Waterjumper did?"

"Almost, Chief. I landed
just at the lip on the far side. I was lucky to be able to pull
myself out."

"Could you do it again?"

Whistlenose looked around,
struggling hard not to show his terror. After what he hoped was long
enough to make it seem as though he had considered the matter
seriously, he shook his head. "No. There was a road back there
where I did it. The ground here is too rough to get a proper run up.
Not even the younger men would make it. And even if you got somebody
across, what then? How would we move the rest of the Tribe?"

The Chief nodded and Whistlenose
struggled to keep his composure. His sore leg started throbbing
enough to make him wince. But everybody had turned back to the Chief
again by then.

Wallbreaker pointed up and down
the Wetlane.

"There's no point going back
now," he said to Aagam, "Which way? Which way for the
hills?"

"Why ask the Roofman?"
Laughlong had come up too from the back, his voice so rough from
smoke as to be barely human. "Haven't the
Ancestors
already told you what to do?" He smiled. "In a
dream
?
Here's what I think: the Ancestors wouldn't have wanted us to lose so
many hunters for the privilege of starving in the middle of this
Digger larder."

His words spread out through the
crowd and Whistlenose realised then how stressed and afraid the Chief
must have been to hold this meeting in public. His eyes, like the
bottomless pits of a skull, had known little sleep recently.

"Look," said the Chief,
at last, "didn't I promise you hills? Didn't I say they were
giant rocky mounds? Well, there they are!" The Roof had already
began to brighten with daylight, apart from a few diseased patches
here and there. Sure enough, in the distance, beyond the stinking
field of almost sunken bodies, a low green line bumped along the
horizon. It might have been anything, but many people shouted praise
for the Ancestors at the sight of it.

"I told you, didn't I? Only
the Traveller saw sights like these before us."

And
your brother. With your wife.
But Whistlenose kept that
to himself.

"We're not so far away now,"
Wallbreaker continued. "A hunter could run there in two days."

"Ten for the rest of the
tribe," said Laughlong. "If the Diggers don't catch us
first. If we can even get across the Wetlane."

"I am your Chief," said
Wallbreaker. "I am telling you the Tribe will survive this. You
have my word the Diggers will not catch us. You have the word of the
Ancestors themselves!"

"Then you won't mind,"
Laughlong said sweetly, "if you and your family travel at the
back from now on?"

A silence fell, broken only by
the dripping of water and the whir of
mossbeast
s
waking at last to greet the day. It seemed to last forever.

"Of course not," the
Chief replied finally. Any other response, in the tense, terrified
atmosphere, might have finished his leadership, because if he didn't
believe the Ancestors protected him, why should anybody else? He
smiled, although inside he must have been screaming.

We're nothing but slowly moving
food, Whistlenose thought.
Ancestors
protect my family. Ancestors bring us all Home.

For
some people, flesh was flesh. They would eat smoked Armourback with
the same enthusiasm as the liver of a Hairbeast pup. But most people
delighted in endless debates over flavours and textures. The thrill
of breaking through bone to the sweetest of marrows; the properties
of various organs that differed subtly from creature to creature.

As a man who knew himself for a
coward, Wallbreaker had spent more than one night in consideration of
the many types of terror with which he filled his belly, unable to
resist chewing and chewing at them until little of his real self
remained.

He had rarely experienced fear as
a child. His father had fed him and Stopmouth with tales of bravery;
of close encounters with sneaky Bloodskins; of daring escapes and
heroic kills made to feed the starving back home. It was all a game
that Wallbreaker longed to play for himself and when the chance
finally came, he displayed a wondrous talent for it, such as the
older men had never seen before. "The bravest of the brave!"
dear old Flimnose had called him. And, when Mossheart had asked him
once, "Do you never feel afraid?", he could answer, with
perfect sincerity, "Not so much as a tremble!"

Looking back, he saw now that all
this "courage" was born of the mistaken belief that he
could not be hurt at all. The shock, then, when his invulnerability
had turned out to be a lie, had destroyed him. He understood that. He
wished with all his heart, he could fight against it, fool himself
once more with the lovely lies he had grown up with. But, as mother
used to say, "You can't uncook a liver."

Fears were all he had now and he
spent his life balancing one off against the others. Should he worry
more about Laughlong's efforts to unseat him or an imminent attack of
Diggers? How important was his personal safety against that of the
tribe? After all, not even he could survive without a people! And
what about his family? His little girl? So like her mother, but
unpoisoned by the world and still content to find him and sleep in
his arms.

He always felt strongest when she
was close, but cursed her too, because her arrival into the world had
brought a whole new type of fear for him to deal with and one that
Laughlong had made worse with that challenge of his. Now
Wallbreaker's treasure would have to walk with her father at the back
of the migration—the worst possible place to be when the
Diggers came looking for revenge.

Whose life would Wallbreaker save
first when that happened? His or hers? He feared he knew the answer
and hated himself all the more for it.

"Aagam, come here."

The man looked so much fitter and
younger than when he'd first arrived in the Tribe, although his skin
had broken out in an unsightly rash of pimples that everybody joked
about.

"We can't cross, so which
way do we need to go? For the hills?"

"I don't know. This isn't
what I planned for." Aagam sweated and twitched in the heat
while
mossbeast
s
crawled over the hair he called his
beard
.
"Maybe... maybe..."

"Maybe's not enough,"
Wallbreaker said.

"You think I don't know
that, savage? This is my death sentence too." He paused,
scratching his scalp, eyes tightly shut. "By the gods..."

Wallbreaker, recognizing
calculation when he saw it, let the man take his time.

"It's no good," Aagam
said at last and shrugged. "You should have left ManWays when I
said and we wouldn't be in this position now."

People were watching, so
Wallbreaker had no choice. He took Aagam by the neck and dragged him
right up to the edge of the Wetlane, forcing him to lean over the
water so that drops of sweat from his brow spattered its surface. In
the murk beneath the hot blue reflection of the Roof, something swam,
its movements excited by the approach of food. But the threat
Wallbreaker meant to make died on his lips when the Roofman said
something curious: "You
barbarian
!
You mean to waste clever Aagam like this? I can't swim!"

"Of course you can't swim!"
Wallbreaker sputtered. "A man is not a twig that he can float
away!" And then, as though possessed by a crazy Ancestor, Aagam
started laughing. "Wait, wait! I know the answer! I know which
way to go!"

"You're just lying now."

"Am I?" a grin had
spread over his spiteful hairy face. "The twig—you said it
yourself—the twig! It floats along the Wetlane, but not at
random! No! It's got to be heading for the
river
."

Aagam explained what a
river
was. He claimed to remember seeing it on a map flowing right past the
place where their new home would be.

"How long will it take us to
get there?"

"I don't know. I didn't
learn that route. Longer. A lot longer. But we can't cross here, now
that you've destroyed all the trees."