The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (10 page)

Twenty young hunters clumped
about the enemy, gathering themselves into groups, ready to charge
stupidly. Wallbreaker poked his head out of the window. "Use
your slings, you idiots! What I told you! Use your slings!"

But already, Quickbite was
arriving to steady them, with Laughlong and Mossdrinker only a pace
behind. Still, only seven Hairbeasts had made it out of the tower.
Had the others all fallen asleep, then? Had the plan worked well
enough for that, at least? But even seven was too many. Or eight,
really, since another of the creatures had already run off into the
streets. It wouldn't survive alone: nobody could.

A large male charged a clump of
boys. It caught one of them—Wallbreaker couldn't tell who it
was—it caught him in the centre of his body, caving in the
ribcage, throwing the young hunter a man-length through the air to
land skidding and bleeding amongst the smoldering moss.

Seven Hairbeasts. Only seven.
More than enough to make the price too high...

But already the enemy were down
to six thanks to a shower of slingstones under Laughlong's shouted
order. The other humans were beginning to get the idea, backing away,
firing from a distance or charging the woozy Hairbeasts from behind.
One young idiot, Gaptooth, kept laughing and ducking under the
hapless swing of a club, bleeding the female Hairbeast with one
shallow cut after another. Wallbreaker used to be like that himself.
Fast and confident. Nothing could hurt him in those days.

Now, only three of the enemy
remained standing. Laughlong was telling Gaptooth to get out of the
way. "I'll kill it myself!" shouted the youngster. "It's
already weakening. Look at it! Look!"

A smell tickled the Chief's nose.
What was that?

It was all the warning
Wallbreaker had. He had lost none of his reflexes and rolled
immediately to the left, away from the window. Air washed his face a
mere heartbeat before a massive club coming in from behind, shattered
the windowsill. Splinters showered the whole right side of his body
and he tumbled backwards into the shadows. It was in here with him!
The Hairbeast that had run into the streets. It must have seen him
shouting to his men and it had circled back.

"I will eat you while you
live," it told him. "Your brothers are too far off to
help."

"We can make a deal,"
said Wallbreaker. The sweat was pouring off him under the clumsy
cloak while the rough wall seemed to burn against the scars left by
the Armourback spears. He could see the creature's large,
slow-blinking eyes, trying to fix him in place. "It's not too
late to save your tribe," he said. "The rest are only
sleeping in the tower. They—"

The change in its breathing sent
him scuttling out of the path of the club. He scattered a fistful of
dirt in the direction of its face and ducked under its grasping
claws. If the moss smoke had made it dozy, the creature had already
thrown off the effects of it. It yanked at his cloak, but he untied
it, just in time, and staggered into the back room where—thank
the Ancestors!—the rear doorway remained unblocked.

Wallbreaker made it out into the
street. He could outrun it now. A human hunter should be able to do
that easily. He would make his way towards the Wedding Tower,
although the twisty layout of the streets in this part of old
ManWays, would drive him away first for a turn or two and then—

—
a line of fire ran down
his side as the beast caught him with a lunge of its claws.

"I will... eat... you...
living
..."

He screeched like a child with
the shock and the pain. He ran as fast as his legs would carry him.
But things were not as they had once been. He hadn't properly hunted
since becoming Chief. He spent much of his time now resting and
thinking.

The largest share of the food
from the hunts he planned always came to him and he ate his fill of
it. Sometimes, it was to make the day pass more quickly. Sometimes he
just wanted to show he could, in front of those lacking the proper
respect. Symbols mattered more than ever when Chieftainship hung by
the narrowest of threads. Meanwhile, his limbs had softened. His body
had become listless, as though enemy Ancestors fed upon his spirit,
slowing him down.

Wallbreaker's tormentor, a
creature in its prime, pounded down the street after him, scattering
moss and pebbles.

Go left! Wallbreaker thought. Go
left around the next bend! A dozen paces after that would bring him
to the hunters who must have finished mopping up the rest of the
enemy by now. The Hairbeast was falling behind, its breathing
unnaturally raspy. The corner, Wallbreaker was at the corner. Just—

That was when the creature
decided to throw its club: an awkward flinging motion from arms not
built for it. Maybe it had been trying to brain him, but the heavy,
knobbled wood caught itself up in his legs instead. His face smacked
hard down onto a patch of moss. His whole body skidded forwards while
sap burned his face and stung his eyes. Only his left hand had made
it past the corner.

The raspy breathing had reached
him. He was weeping from the moss sap and everything appeared to
float in his vision. "You turned your back on our ways,"
the Ancestors said. "Now we turn our backs on you."

He saw his enemy. Its fur hung
bedraggled and wet in the Roofsweat of nighttime. It swayed a little,
but managed to lower itself down onto its hunkers to grab his ankle.

"Living," it reminded
him. It opened jaws lined with blunt teeth. Hairbeasts loved marrow
best, he remembered. Looking into its mouth, he could see how they
extracted it. It would crush his foot in a heartbeat. It would work
its way up his leg.

He should scream for help, but
he'd be dead before anybody got to him. The tears were still flowing
from his face, but it wasn't the sap any more.

"I will give you anything,"
said Wallbreaker.

It raised his foot with
deliberate slowness, and asked, its tone curious, "You would
give your mate?"

"Yes!" shouted
Wallbreaker, for his foot had almost reached the jaws.

"Your brother hunters?"

"Yes! Yes!"

It chose to mock him for a
moment, licking his foot with a rasping tongue. All of a sudden, he
voided his bowels, the stench filling the air between them and the
creature wrinkled its nose.

"My hunters hurt your
people. It wasn't me. It was nothing to do with me. You can have
them. You can have any of them that hurt you. Any of my hunters! I'll
give you anyone! As many as you want! I'll—"

Four slingstones flew into the
Hairbeast, knocking it back. One of them must have got it in the eye
or in that part of the head underneath the earhole that the skull
didn't cover, because it didn't get up again and the rasping sound of
its damaged breathing failed to restart.

Suddenly there were men all
around Wallbreaker. He managed to lift himself up onto his elbows. A
mixture of older and younger hunters were looking down at him. One by
one they wrinkled their noses at the smell. They had been lying in
wait for the right moment to attack. They would have heard
everything.

"Well," said Laughlong.
"That's the last of them
murdered
."

"Go and butcher them,"
said Wallbreaker, but nobody moved. Finally, Laughlong nodded. "We
can't let it go to waste," he said.

Only then did the other men move
back towards the Wedding Tower.

Wallbreaker
saw all of it from the top window of the Chief's House. A group of
hunters, their faces covered in grease from the moss-flavoured
Hairbeast flesh, had pulled Aagam by the arms and dragged the
stranger right up to Wallbreaker's front door, while the man's new
wife, Ashsweeper, kicked at the soles of his feet.

"Waster!" she cried.
"To think they tried to steal my real husband from me for this!"

What did she mean by the words
"tried to"? Wallbreaker wondered. Whistlenose had done his
duty already and that was that, surely.

Now that they had dragged him
into the presence of Wallbreaker's Talker, Aagam finally understood
what Ashsweeper had been saying. He replied, voice shaking with fury,
"I'm your husband now, woman! The Chief said so!"

"Not any more! He's not
the..." Ashsweeper stopped herself. She looked up to find
Wallbreaker's eyes fixed on hers. She lowered her head again and shut
up. Everybody said she was a clever one and she had proved it now by
stopping her tongue just in time.

Below, the men pushed open the
front door and threw Aagam inside. "We don't need Volunteers.
Won't need any for two whole tens! But after that... we'll be well
rid of you."

A pair of the hunters remained on
guard at the door to make sure that Aagam couldn't get out again. To
make sure that
nobody
could.

After that, with Aagam
downstairs, thumping the walls in anger, the feast in Centre Square
took up where it had left off. No one had hunted in two days. They
didn't think they needed to. The attack on the Hairbeasts had
produced twenty adults and as many pups—more than their Chief
had claimed. The creatures could lie as well as humans, it seemed.
Such gluttony! Nobody had seen the likes of it since the defeat of
the Armourback alliance.

A great fire was blazing,
carrying the smoke of cooking all over the Square. Wallbreaker had
yet to taste a single morsel. He hadn't even been offered a slice off
that boy who had died, as tradition demanded. No, he and his family
could only look on with thundering bellies.

People sang to ancient tunes with
words that no longer made sense. A nameless boy and a girl of the
same age performed the male and female parts of a courting song. He
was offering her father the flesh of something called a "tract-ear,"
but it was not enough to win her hand.

Whatever a "tract-ear"
was, or indeed the "ache-ears" he also claimed to possess,
they must have been long extinct. And the girl's father didn't want
them anyway.

Everywhere, people lay groaning,
hands on their bellies, bursting with food. Wallbreaker couldn't stop
himself, couldn't resist calling down, "You're wasting it! We
need it!"

They must have heard their Chief,
because the children's song stuttered to a stop. But nobody looked
up. And then a woman brought out a wedding drum and everybody clapped
in time to her clever hands.

Was that a good sign or a bad
one? Wallbreaker wondered. The insults had stopped after they had
imprisoned him in his own house. There'd been an angry meeting,
despite the huge quantities of flesh that had been recovered. The
people were confused, he realised. His cowardice had finally been
proved beyond any doubt.

In the past, they must have
decided, each in his own heart, not to see him for what he was.
Wallbreaker brought them flesh, after all. He always found a way to
feed them and wasn't that the point of a Chief? Of any man? He
nourished the bodies of the Tribe along with the spirits of the
Ancestors.

And yet, how could a coward lead?
Tribe was everything. Women, children, hunters... all of them; their
hearts and their marrow; the flesh of their backs should be, must be,
sacrificed for the survival of all. When it came down to it, a
coward, no matter how useful, was somebody who would do the opposite,
who would betray the Tribe for himself.

It was a thought too horrible to
contemplate. And so they feasted and sang and refused to look at him.

"They'll be back," said
a voice behind him. "When they get hungry again."
Mossheart. She had discovered his weakness before anybody else, on
the very night of their marriage.

"Must you always eat my
thoughts, Mossheart?"

"I don't like the taste of
them. I would prefer some of that food."

"Where is our daughter?"

"With the woman,
downstairs."

"Woman? Woman! Why won't you
call her by her name? Treeneck? She's my wife too."

He turned around, at last, to
face her. He used to love her hair, the way it curled up around her
face, a frame for glittering blue eyes. Now, it hung lank about her
shoulders, as listless as the rest of her.

He wanted her to fight him more,
as Indrani had done. He wanted her teeth to be straighter and
brighter; her skin to be darker. He wanted her eyes to be black
pools, swirling with passion and secret knowledge. Most of all,
however, he wished he had not turned her into what she was now.

I'm sorry, he thought. I'm sorry,
Mossheart.

He would never set her aside. Not
just because she would tell everyone what she knew about him—the
weeping in the dark, the sudden sweats—but because he could
talk to her as though she were an Ancestor: in private; in full
confidence that she would take his side, despite her growing dislike
of him.

Aloud he said, "They will
see sense eventually. But that's not the point. We must leave—"

"Must we? Why? So you can
have again that black beast you tried to marry? She won't take you
back. She ran away, remember?"