The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (26 page)

He managed a smile for her and
the others. What a tribe they made! Six starving humans: one infant;
an old man with a twisted back; a younger man with a broken heart to
whom nobody could talk; a Crisis Baby—also confined to vague
gestures; a nursing mother; and an Ancestor-cursed Chief.

"I love you all," he
said. Vishwakarma didn't look up and Tarini didn't understand, but he
grinned at her anyway. They might survive another twenty or thirty
days, even a hundred if the Diggers failed to come again. That would
have to be enough. Despite what Indrani had said, he would make no
attempt to win back the Talker or to persuade the Religious to fight
for him. He would not endanger the main body of the Tribe by becoming
the cause of a split. On the contrary: he would do everything in his
power to see that it survived.

Dharam must have won the
Religious over to his cause. Stopmouth didn't understand how, but he
suspected it was something to do with Dharam's insistence that there
was another way to escape the surface of the world, to get back to
civilization.

It was something all the
Roofpeople yearned for, and that evil man, that magnificent liar,
must have turned their longings on a spit, until they glistened and
dripped with delicious fat. The bellies of the Religious, empty but
for fear, had been maddened with it. It was the only explanation
Stopmouth could think of.

He forced himself to sit up,
ignoring the desire to be sick, and the sudden pounding of his head.
He needed something to help him stand. "Where is my spear?"

"Oh, they took your weapons.
But they couldn't get mine! And I've been making more all along. Like
the old days, hey?"

"We will to attack them!"
Indrani insisted, but both hunters shook their heads together and she
spat at them and turned away, as though unable to look at them
further.

"But what about f-f-food..."

Rockface grinned. "Let's
just rest a little, Chief."

"That's... that's not like
you, Rockface."

The big man made an exaggerated
yawning motion as if he didn't have a care in the world, trying and
failing to suppress a grin. "It's nearly night, hey? When a man
should be squeezing his wives and lighting fires. Let's just wait for
that ridiculous ‘sun’ of yours to pass the edge of the
hole Indrani made."

Stopmouth nodded, uneasily. He
always hated it when Rockface had a plan. The lack of weapons only
made him more afraid. "W-what are you up to?"

"What does it look like?"
The big man lay down on a bed of moss. "Going to sleep, hey? To
listen to the Ancestors a while instead of your moaning."

Stopmouth slept too, without
meaning to. His eyes closed just for a moment, and then a few
heartbeats later, or so it seemed, they opened again in total
darkness. He heard whispers and he heard giggles. Kindling flared
into life and then a torch. Children were everywhere, perhaps as many
as a dozen, their hands flying in hunting gestures too complicated
for Stopmouth to follow. Their leader was a fierce little girl called
Fulki who bossed them from task to task.

Even the little Fourlegger was
there, its claws distinctly making the sign that meant "hurry,"
but evolving it into "split" and then "go" in a
way that made no sense at all.

Somebody grabbed one of the
Fourlegger rolls of moss and twigs from the corner and used it to
create an instant fire. And soon, flesh, delicious flesh, began
sizzling over it.

"What's g-going on?" he
said. He felt better already, barely able to speak for the drool
forming in his mouth.

Rockface grinned. "We can
talk to the little Fourlegger and she can talk to the adults, hey?
And they have thirty days worth of food that we gave to them only
yesterday! Eat up! Only the Ancestors know what creatures they came
from, but what a feast!"

Stopmouth saw Sodasi, looking
beautiful with firelight wrapping around the curve of one cheek. She
too spoke with her hands, much more awkwardly than the children, but
Rockface seemed to be following along because he laughed from his
belly and rubbed her face. Her smile grew wider and the big man
grinned shyly back.

Indrani whispered, "First
time he
see
her. What a fool! Does he think she wants another father?"

"He'll g-get to it,"
Stopmouth whispered back. A man had to decide he wanted to live
before he could even think of getting married.

Afterwards, everybody ate the
unidentifiable flesh, except for poor Tarini who wept and gagged. All
the Roof people had that problem to begin with. Nobody had the words
to help her, but a few of the smaller children gave her hugs before
gobbling up whatever she couldn't manage. They fought, laughing, over
Vishwakarma's substantial leftovers until every scrap of food had
been consumed.

Stopmouth played with his
Flamehair for a while. Sometimes he thought he could see bits of his
brother in her, especially in the way her cheeks seemed to dimple
when he made her smile. But she was
his
daughter now and that's all there was to it. He would find a way to
get her back into the tribe, even if he himself could never be part
of it. She would need somebody to marry in the years to come and to
bring flesh when she had children of her own. "But you'll fight
like your mother, won't you, little one? You'll kick hunters in the
face if they say so much as a bad word to you!"

The other children were yawning
by now, relaxing against the walls and chatting, sometimes with words
of human or their own language, sometimes with gestures.

"Are they s-sleeping here?"
he asked Rockface.

"Well, we can't be putting
them outside."

"But, I mean..." he
waved the hand that wasn't holding the baby. "Shouldn't they be
getting back to their parents?"

"These are the ones with no
parents, remember? We're all they've got now."

"They n-need a Tribe."

"I know, hey?" and
Rockface actually looked angry. "But they won't obey me when I
tell them to join Dharam's lot. And why should they? Who will teach
them to hunt? Who will make sure they eat?"

Stopmouth nodded. "I d-don't
know what the right thing for them is either. Or for the Tribe."
Dharam's reign as Chief might come to a sudden end when everybody
learned he couldn't bring them back to civilization.
Or
could he?
There would have to be something behind his
lies, surely, to win over clever men like Kubar.

Indrani had been with Tarini,
trying to get the girl to eat some more and to keep it down. Now she
came back to sit beside him.

"What do you think, love?"
he asked her. "The Roof is dead, everybody can see that. Why
would anybody believe Dharam could help them escape from here now?"

She shrugged. "The Roof has
many things of your Ancestors up there. Many things like Warship."

He nodded, making sense of what
she was saying. His people, once known as the Deserters, had fled
from Earth a long time ago. In the process, they had abandoned
Indrani's Ancestors to what everybody had thought was certain death.
Eventually, the Deserters had been overtaken and captured, condemned
for their selfishness to a life of primitive cannibalism, while their
spacecraft, became trophies and monuments in the parks and gardens of
the victors.

Later, the strange slime that fed
on the sophisticated machines of the Roof, had left the more
primitive technology of the Deserters completely untouched.

"You think Dharam knows
where to find a Deserter ship?" he asked.

She struggled to explain her
thoughts, "Dharam is waster. Is... not a hunter to tell... right
things."

"You mean he's a l-liar?"

"Yes! A liar. You, my man.
You will eat his heart."

"I will," he said,
grinning. But he couldn't help turning over in his mind the idea that
another ship might really be found. Dharam's followers would get the
escape they clamoured for... Or would they?

Stopmouth had seen one of these
Deserter craft for himself, and one thing he knew for sure, was that
it was a lot smaller than the Warship. There was no way everybody
would fit.

But in the end, none of that
mattered. Dharam would never be able to fly up into the Roof to
retrieve the new ship. And even if he did, nobody could survive the
horrors up there. Stopmouth had seen that for himself. In the end,
the Tribe would be staying put to face the Diggers, and that was
that.

He sighed. "I'm sorry,
Rockface. You know there aren't enough of us here to keep the
children properly safe. They can stay tonight, but they have no
future here with us."
Because
we have no future.

Then the moss curtain over the
door opened and Stopmouth jumped. They hadn't even set a guard! What
was he thinking?

But it was only an adult
Fourlegger sticking its head inside so that a few rusty scales fell
away to the floor. The young Fourlegger rushed forward to rub snouts
with it before turning to Rockface and signalling the "all
clear" with its claws. The Chief grinned and relaxed. There had
been guards after all. Inhuman ones. And suddenly Stopmouth found
himself dizzy all over again, but not from the knock on the head.
Indrani was grinning at him, her eyes shining. "We not few as
you think, husband!"

"No," he said, smiling
back, his eyes prickling for some reason. The Fourleggers were Tribe
to him! He saw that now. There might be a future, after all. A
bizarre one, maybe, in which the shattered remnants of different
tribes learned to work together as one body, with one heart.

The
Ancestors had performed such miracles to keep the Tribe alive in the
wilderness that few people remained who doubted their power or love,
or Wallbreaker's connection to them. Even the loss of the Talker had
failed to dampen spirits.

A few days after the sighting of
the Slime Woman, the Roof fell dark for the last time. The despicable
Aagam cried out in a mix of anger and horror, shaking his fist and
screaming gibberish until
Fearsflyers
silenced him with a smack to the back of the head. Nobody was afraid
anymore. Not of the Blindness. Not of the Diggers. Every horror that
had come their way was beaten back, and just when hunger struck,
bodies had rained from the Roof.

When the sea appeared in front of
them, just as Wallbreaker had promised, the Tribe's faith only
strengthened. They could see little of the water beyond the range of
their torches, but men laughed and stabbed it with their spears.
Children lapped at it, spitting it out, throwing cold handfuls at
each other. It tasted saltier than blood.

Only the endless darkness
oppressed them, but even in this they were offered hope.

One day, trudging along the
endless road of sand that ran the length of the sea, the ground shook
hard enough to throw everybody from their feet. Ashsweeper cried out
and Nighttracker forgot he was supposed to be grown up and called,
"Dada! Dada!" until Whistlenose wrapped him in his arms.

In the distance, a portion of the
Roof was glowing.

"The light is coming back!"
somebody cried.

It turned red first, and then
intensely white, as flaming fragments of it tumbled and burned. A
column of fire followed on from this and whole hills seemed to be
ablaze. Whistlenose felt vibrations through the sand, in every part
of his body that touched the ground. How many times can the world
end? he wondered.

But calm returned and soon a new
set of
hills
interposed themselves between the Tribe and the distant fires they
had witnessed. Then, after what felt like a number of days, the
Diggers, who had not been seen since the forests, began to mass again
just beyond the range of their torches.

"They were fighting
elsewhere," Laughlong growled. "But they must have missed
us all along."

Nobody panicked, and word came
down from the Chief so that when the enemy finally struck, the Tribe
knew exactly what to do.

"Into the sea!"
Wallbreaker shouted, and people waded fearlessly into the freezing
water with torches held high and children floating on bundles of
tally sticks. The enemy, shorter than men, proved very awkward in
this new element. They had to swim where men could still stand, and
Whistlenose stabbed one after another until a carpet of the hapless
creatures surrounded him.

"We'll feast tonight!"
said Laughlong from somewhere nearby. "If they let us back onto
the beach..." But even he had ceased to criticize the Chief
lately.

So easy was the fighting in the
water, that many suggested the Tribe could live here forever. And
another miracle happened there too, something extraordinary. Hightoes
gave birth right in the water! Nobody had seen such a thing before
and they all marvelled at how easy the birth had been, even as the
Tribe had been battling for its life against the Diggers. It was a
fine baby boy that brought tears to the eyes of his father,
Fearsflyers
.
"The Tribe continues!" he cried. "Even here! Even
here!"