The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (13 page)

Small victories were won:
ambushes that brought tangy green flesh to silent cheers and
congratulations. But as the days passed, the Chief's agitation only
grew worse. "How can I study them?" he raged, "if I
can't get one alive? How can I make a plan?"

"Haven't the Ancestors told
you what to do?" asked Laughlong, making sure there were plenty
there to hear him. For all his Tally must be full by now, he was
still a brawny man with enough tattoos that his words could not be
ignored. "Or maybe you could go out on patrol yourself and bring
the Talker with you?"

Wallbreaker sent the man on more
and more missions, but Laughlong always found his way home to the
Tribe without so much as a scratch.

Whistlenose, however, earned
plenty of scratches. When he returned from patrol, he would bring his
boy to the centre of the camp, stepping over families that joked with
him or asked him how things were "out there." The boy had
friends too and they called him "Blackie" for his tangled
mop of hair that Ashsweeper tried in vain to keep tidy with
decorative bones. The children waved to each other, but the boy
refused to be parted from his father when Whistlenose was in camp.

"Why can't we play the
tracking game any more, dada?"

"Because you're too good for
me. But don't worry, when we get to our new home, we'll play every
day."

"But I want to play now!"

A woman saved the boy from a
scolding, "Ooh, there's a handsome little man."

"Thank you, Hightoes."
Whistlenose smiled. The young woman, being with child, and therefore
holy, got to sit in the centre of everything. The pregnant women
received a constant stream of visitors asking for blessings and dream
readings. Hightoes grinned again at the boy. "I hope my first
child is as beautiful as you, little man."

The boy squirmed. "As fierce
as him, Hightoes. That's what you meant, wasn't it?" Whistlenose
said.

"Why yes, of course!"
She grinned. Her husband, the young
Fearsflyers
,
was out right now, tracking down the Jumpers. She let none of her
worry show. Instead, she said to the boy, "Why are you here? You
need another story? Didn't I just tell you one yesterday?"

Whistlenose enjoyed the tales as
much as anybody, and it was right here, at the centre of the camp,
that they came to life. No more than two paces behind Hightoes, an
enormous roll of furs held the oldest tally sticks from the House of
Honour back in Centre Square. Many had been lost or damaged during
the fight against the Armourbacks and Flyers, but Wallbreaker, to his
credit, had ordered them packed up again. "We need them more
than ever now," he'd said. How right he had been! Somewhere in
the bulging furs, were sticks that had belonged to the Traveller, to
John Spearmaker, to Treatymaker and other heroes of the Tribe. And
many heroines too, thought Whistlenose, thinking sadly of poor
Watersip. As a man, he dared not touch them, but he could feel their
power from where he stood. It made his knees tremble.

The Tribe had worked for days to
build extra sleds for the Tallies, despite Aagam's protests.

Now Whistlenose pointed to them.
"You see the furs, son? You know what's in them?" A nod.
"
This
is ManWays. Not the streets we left behind. This. This is us."

Beyond that large sack, lay
another series of sleds that carried the tribe's food supply—mostly
Hairbeast flesh and that of a dozen Clawfolk for whom he himself had
been exchanged, back when he'd Volunteered.

"Half gone," he
muttered. "And we've travelled less than five days from home."

"What was that, hunter?"
asked Hightoes. She had been on the point of launching into a story
for the boy.

He had no time to answer. A shout
went up—shocking, when most people spoke in whispers. Men were
running for the walls, hopping over and lunging past family groups,
weapons held above their heads. "Mind him for me, please,
Hightoes!"

He didn't bother going back to
Ashsweeper for his spear, knowing there'd be weapons waiting at the
wall.

Laughlong had returned from
patrol. He had a wild look about him and there was no sign of the
rest of his pack. There should have been others, five healthy men.

"The Chief has brought us
into a trap!" he cried. "Let me through! We need to run for
home! The Ancestors have abandoned us!"

And he must have been telling the
truth, because something horrible happened then. Darkness fell—just
like the time when Whistlenose had been in ClawWays. A darkness deep
enough to hide men no more distant than the length of an arm. There
was a sound, like the creaking of tortured metal, except that it came
from everywhere at once and people started screaming, terrified the
Roof was about to fall on them. And something did fall. Liquid, as
warm as blood, in drops the size of a fist. Whistlenose felt them
plopping down onto his skin.

"It stings!" somebody
said nearby. Worse than moss juice, it was like a burn from the fire
and everywhere screams and prayers rose...

And then, all at once, it was
over. The Roof shone again, bright enough to blind, everybody
blinking and afraid and rubbing at the red patches on their skin that
the falling slime had etched there.

Laughlong recovered before
anybody else and began pushing his way towards the Chief, his face
white with anger and, under the fury, fear.

Whistlenose glanced quickly over
the heads of the crowd to see Ashsweeper waving to him. She never
seemed to be afraid! The boy too, could be seen at the centre of the
camp where he had left him. Good, good. He followed after Laughlong
to find out what was happening.

Wallbreaker had not been touched
by so much as a drop of slime. He and his two wives and his daughter
lived under a canopy he'd had built for himself. Now, he stood
outside of it, poking his toe at a newly formed pool. "It moves!
Do you see that, men? It's crawling... or slithering!"

Laughlong pushed him with such
sudden violence that the Chief fell back into the arms of two hunters
who were supposed to be guarding him and taking his messages.

"Enough!" Laughlong
shouted. "Enough of this madness!"

Wallbreaker's response surprised
everybody.

With his soft chest and belly,
people forgot that he had once been the Tribe's most promising
hunter. Whistlenose used to watch him sparring in Centre Square and
remembered wishing he had even half of that speed.

Now, the Chief righted himself.
Then, in a blur of movement, he kicked one of Laughlong's feet out
from under him, before following up with a shoulder charge that threw
the older man bottom-first into the pool of creeping slime.

"Maybe it will crawl up your
crack and shut you up," he said.

He could be funny too, the Chief.
That had also been forgotten. And a few people managed a laugh.

"Now, hunter. You have lost
your pack and there'd better be a good explanation, for they were
younger and better men than you."

"That they were," said
Laughlong and he shocked everyone by starting to cry. He accepted a
hand from Whistlenose, wiping the stinging slime away. "The
green beasts," he said. "The Jumpers. Like you guessed,
they can smell us even better than we can smell them, so, we covered
ourselves in crushed berries and hid, hoping to take one alive for
you to interrogate with the Talker."

But the patrols of the enemy had
somehow missed the humans completely. To their horror, the men found
themselves surrounded when the entire Jumper tribe had moved forward
around them.

"That means they're coming,"
Laughlong said. "They don't have enough food to carry on this
stalemate with us. They have no choice now but to fight."

"Foolish of them," said
Wallbreaker. "We're dug in. We have walls. Small ones, but
still. We can hold off twice our own number."

"But what about five times?"
said Laughlong "I was able to do a count, I know what I saw."

"No, no," said the
Chief, shaking his head vigorously. "It still wouldn't be worth
their while. They'll have to go around us. They can't know how much
they outnumber us. They can't know this isn't our permanent home with
generations of defences. They couldn't be that stupid."

Whistlenose disagreed. "It's
fight us or face the Diggers, Chief. That's the only choice they have
now. And the forest is too narrow for them to pass us safely without
going into the... into the... you know."

Everybody nodded. They knew. He
was talking about the fields where the Diggers planted their food. In
these places the bodies of living, captured creatures, were buried up
to their waists, and there they remained, unresisting, as Digger
grubs feasted on them from below. The moaning victims would even cry
out to alert their tormentors if somebody tried to rescue them, or
would try to grab at would-be saviours and trap them there. Humans
had come to dread the fields. The Jumpers would not want to go there
either.

And so, they would have to come
here. No doubt about it now. They'd be passing this way and whether
they defeated the humans or not didn't matter. They feared the
Diggers more and that was that.

Whistlenose felt light-headed, as
though his spirit were leaving his body.
My
boy... my boy will never be named...
Everyone knew the
Tribe could not long survive the losses of such a fight, even if it
won.

He looked over at the Chief,
hoping for some kind of solution. The man was crouching over the
slime. Aagam had emerged from under the canopy to stand beside him.

"I don't like it,"
Wallbreaker was muttering. "Why me, Aagam? Why me?"

Whistlenose didn't understand
what they were talking about. Was it another clever scheme from the
Ancestors?

"Why you, what?" said
Aagam.

"This slime stuff. It's
crawling. Look. It has ignored Laughlong and everybody else. It just
keeps moving towards me. It follows wherever I go. Look!"

That much was true. A few of the
puddles had moved in his direction, albeit slowly, as though hunting
him. They clustered around his feet, although he scattered them again
easily. "What is this stuff, Aagam?"

"How should I know?"

"Well, it came from the
Roof!"

"I tell you I don't know and
I don't care! We have a problem now. A real problem, you understand?
These new beasts are coming to kill us."

"He's right," said
Laughlong, wiping his eyes. He had recovered his composure, both
anger and sorrow had been emptied out of him.

"But we have the Talker,"
said Mossheart. She too, had come out from under the canopy. Hunters
glared at her. What was she doing listening in? "We can just
negotiate. Why would they risk the losses?"

Instead of scolding her, as would
have been proper, the Chief answered her question. "When they
come out of the forest, they will be in new territory. They need a
nice large store of flesh to keep them alive long enough to learn the
streets, or to help them flee even farther from the Diggers. I'm not
so sure they would negotiate, or that they would do so in good
faith."

"Like us and the
Hairbeasts," said Laughlong and Whistlenose could see by the way
he said it that he felt ashamed by his part in the attack on
humanity's ancient allies.

"Exactly," said
Wallbreaker. "Besides, letting them know we have the Talker
would just be another reason for them to fight us." But he
seemed more interested in the slime than in saving his people.
Fearful arguments broke out around him as he bent to study the
strange puddles.

Laughlong looked like he wanted
to take another swing at the Chief, but Whistlenose pulled him to one
side. "How long?" he asked. "Before the Jumpers get
here?"

Laughlong shrugged. "I was
able to watch them for a full tenth. The little ones move slowly, and
even the adults can't travel that fast in this terrain. Although I
bet they're murder on a nice flat street. No, they'll be a full day
and a night catching up with us here."

"And we definitely can't go
around them?"

"The forest isn't wide
enough. They'd smell us out for certain. They stink, but we must
stink worse."

Wallbreaker had moved closer to
Whistlenose, but only so he could watch the slime as it continued to
track him. "It's slower now," the Chief was saying. "Look!"
Many of the puddles had begun drying up in the heat of the Roof,
leaving a faint metallic smell behind them.

Like the rest of the slime, Aagam
too had followed the Chief closely.

"Remember," he said,
"there are people where we're going, right? You can afford to
lose more of these than you think. And this lot understand sacrifice.
They will understand—"

Suddenly, Wallbreaker stood up.
"The Ancestors have spoken," he cried. He didn't look as
certain of his words as Whistlenose might have hoped, but still...
"Laughlong, Whistlenose, you two have done the most scouting."

"Yes," said Laughlong.
"That's because you're trying to kill us."