The Inferior (20 page)

Stopmouth walked into the open, passing over the roofs of sunken houses to the place where the bodies began. They were thick in this area, with no room to walk between them and only the odd lump of rock sticking up here and there. The stench was incredible, even worse than he remembered it: like a mixture of vomit and human waste. It was so strong that the young hunter had to stop to force clumps of pounded moss into his nostrils and take deep breaths until the nausea had passed.

Sometimes little bits of equipment lay scattered around the listless victims. The Diggers obviously had no use for anything other than their claws and hadn’t bothered collecting them.

The young hunter found Crunchfist first. On a human face the agony suffered by all the surrounding creatures was obvious. The man said nothing, looked at nothing in particular. Yet his eyes bulged out of their sockets, and while his body hung motionless except for the odd twitch, his nostrils flared and his lips were drawn back as far as they could go. The soil only rose to his thighs, and around him were scattered his broken spear-shaft, the Talker and bits and pieces from his tool-belt.

‘Crunchfist?’ No answer came, nor even the faintest hint of recognition. Stopmouth was anxious to find Indrani. Like Crunchfist, she was a new arrival. The young hunter hoped that meant she’d be somewhere on the edge of the crowd too. But he needed the Talker and he didn’t want to leave any human in this kind of agony, even Crunchfist. So he gripped his spear firmly and shoved it straight into the big man’s heart.

‘Mother!’ said Crunchfist. ‘Oh, Mother!’

‘Hush,’ said Stopmouth. ‘You’ll bring them on me.’

Crunchfist grabbed the spear-shaft and pulled it deeper into himself before a surprised Stopmouth could let it go. He fell off-balance into the big man’s embrace. Arms twice the size of his own squeezed tight.

‘Mother,’ wheezed Crunchfist. Nearby, other creatures began to take up the call. Stopmouth could barely breathe, and the clumps of moss in his nose only made matters worse. He struggled, pushing and prying at the immovable arm holding him. The vision at the corners of his eyes began to darken. He forced himself not to think about air, not to waste his energies on useless struggles. Instead, he tried to turn his kneeling legs into a position where he might push away with them. The soil was too slippy for a proper grip. He needed…

‘Mother!’

Mother indeed. He could see her smiling. She hadn’t died at all, then. Her embrace was firm and loving. Far away he could feel his feet scrabbling, slipping. It was tiring work and neither he nor his mother could see the point of it. Better to rest, to sleep. Then one of her arms fell away and the grip of the other weakened. Stopmouth took in a gulp of air, the glaring Roof swimming above him. He felt himself sliding backwards.

A familiar voice said, ‘I can’t believe it. Look, Stopmouth! I cut his throat and the poor man’s still alive, hey? Stopmouth?’

‘Rockface?’ He sat up. The first thing he saw was the blood bubbling far too slowly from a gash in Crunchfist’s neck. One of the hunter’s arms lay on the ground where Rockface had hacked through it. He was still trying to speak–the same word, ‘Mother’, mouthed again and again–as the other prisoners around him lapsed into silence.

Rockface hunkered down beside Stopmouth, the smell from his teeth covered completely by the stench around them. A thatch of dried blood clumped the hair down one side of his head, but he smiled, as though delighted to be in this fine place.

‘Let’s find Indrani, hey?’

She’d been buried sideways on. She also tried to squeeze the life out of Stopmouth and called for her mother. But Rockface pinned her arms while Stopmouth dug up the soil with Crunchfist’s blunt knife. The earth writhed with yellow grubs, most no larger than his thumb. A few had grown to the size of his hand, and these tried to dig themselves out of his way with tiny limbs. But not for long. They curled and died without any intervention on his part while the imprisoned beasts around him continued calling for their mothers.

Blisters and wounds of many sizes covered Indrani’s skin beneath the level of the soil. None appeared very deep. Even the wound in her calf caused by the adult Digger seemed shallower than it should have been.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Mother,’ she replied. She struck at him clumsily until they’d pulled her ten strides from the rest of the prisoners. Then her eyes closed and the agony left her face.

Rockface offered to carry her.

‘No,’ said Stopmouth, although Crunchfist had squeezed the strength out of him. He heaved her onto his shoulders and staggered back to the rotting forest edge, while the big man trotted ahead. Behind them, a wild variety of beasts continued to suffer in their shared torment. A disturbing desire tore at Stopmouth to turn round and dig them all up, no matter that they weren’t human. He knew it was stupidly dangerous and wrong besides, for surely none of those he rescued would have hesitated to hunt him. No, each species must look after its own.

Indrani’s condition didn’t change until they reached the cover of the trees. Then she made a terrible choking noise. Alarmed, he dropped her to the ground. Her whole body spasmed and she came up on her hands and knees, choking and coughing. About fifty little grubs sprayed from her throat onto the mossy soil. Many of them wriggled for a moment, trying to bury themselves perhaps. But one by one they fell still.

Indrani’s eyes were open, looking straight at him. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said. Then she lay down on top of the mess she’d made.

Stopmouth took one of the grubs and held it up to the light. The colour already seemed darker. It felt slimy and a little warm.

The hunter shrugged and popped it into his mouth.

‘Good eating!’ said Rockface. He shoved a whole handful between his own jaws and sucked noisily on the juice. Then he placed one grub in his ear and one against the orbit of an eye. ‘Look at me, Stopmouth! What am I, hey? Take a guess!’

‘Careful, Rockface, we need to save some of those for Indrani. She’ll be needing her strength.’

‘Oh, you’re worse than your father, boy. Too full of strange thoughts to have a laugh. I remember one time, old Toecracker hid your father’s portion of the kill and he was too embarrassed to admit he couldn’t find it. We watched him go round and round the fire, pretending he was just restless, and I laughed so much I wet myself. That was my first hunt as a man. It was the best time I ever had.’

Stopmouth felt his face go red. ‘So he was just the butt of your jokes, was he?’

‘Oh no! Well, yes, but we loved him, you know? And I mean
all
of us. Look! Look here.’ He lifted up his arm. Down one side of the big man’s stomach, between the tattoos of a spitted Hopper and a dying Flim, lay a thin white line Stopmouth had never noticed before. ‘I shouldn’t be with you now, hey?’ He pointed up at the Roof. ‘I should be up there, me and many others, if it wasn’t for your dad.’

The big man surprised Stopmouth by wiping his eyes with the back of a huge hand. ‘And you look just like him, you know? More with every passing day.’

Stopmouth didn’t know what to say. ‘Um, Rockface? I do have a sense of humour. With Indrani, we—’

‘Oh, I know, boy! And that’s as it should be. And now that you’ve rescued her, she’ll be wanting to jump the fire with you in no time, hey?’

Stopmouth went red again. He turned away in embarrassment and delight.

The humans kept to the forest after that, for the difficulty it would cause the Diggers if they chose to follow them. At first the party meant to travel only by day, where speckled light guided them between the boles of twisted trees. The forest seemed beautiful then. Mossbeasts chirruped in a chorus that Stopmouth had never heard at home and saplings burst out of luminescent clumps of blue moss. Wallbreaker would have been fascinated by the whole thing, and even Rockface exclaimed in wonder at all the new colours. But in the three nights that followed, the beasts always knew where to find their quarry and sleep became impossible. As soon as the Roof darkened, faraway trees would come crashing down and Stopmouth would lift Indrani onto his shoulders and stagger on.

‘Let me walk!’ she whispered sometimes. She did her best, but she didn’t get far with her wounds. It was quicker just to carry her, leaving the scouting up to Rockface.

‘We’re lucky they don’t like to travel by day,’ she said at one point. She wouldn’t talk about her sufferings when the Diggers had buried her, but the shame that used to fill her voice when she’d spoken of them had been replaced now with hatred.

‘It’s the light,’ he replied. ‘I think it kills the grubs. If I thought it would hurt the adults too, I’d risk using the Talker on them.’

‘No, you’re right. It is just the grubs that fear the light. I knew that before, but I must have forgotten it.’

Stopmouth looked at her, wondering how a person could lose such a vital piece of knowledge. She returned his gaze, her face a mask of exhaustion, as his must be. They were resting at midday, believing themselves safe from attack. Rockface had gone ahead a little in search of the signs of pursuit. He seemed to have recovered from the knock on the head, but even he would need more food soon. They’d eaten the last of the grubs that morning. From now until their enemies finally caught up with them, the party could only get weaker.

‘Is there nothing else you remember about the Diggers?’

Indrani shook her head.

‘Are you sure, Indrani? Like, how do they know we stole you back from them? How do they always find us when night falls? And what trick did Crunchfist use to get through their fields of bodies?’

She sighed and shook her head. ‘Stopmouth, can you remember the first words you spoke to your mother?’

He shrugged. ‘I doubt I was good at speaking even then. I don’t know. Why is it important?’

‘I don’t remember my first words either. Not here on the surface of the world. But my people rely on the Roof to remember for them. It knows everything. You need only ask it.’ As she spoke, her fingers wandered over the wounds of her legs, scratching and picking at scabs. ‘The Roof is more than a place, Stopmouth. It’s knowledge too. All the knowledge humans have ever learned. It keeps our memories safe for us so we never need to forget anything. But then it gets hard to tell sometimes which bits are in our heads, and which are in storage.’ Her legs were bleeding now under her busy fingers. He pulled them away, taking her hands in his. She jerked out of his grasp, almost cowering away from him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, seeing the hurt on his face.

‘No. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what my people did to you. My brother…I would never—’

‘Oh, Stopmouth, I know! You saved me from him. I know you wouldn’t hurt me.’

‘I won’t let the Diggers have you either,’ he said. ‘Let the ancestors witness. I
will
find us a place where we can live and be safe.’

She smiled at him, the weariness disappearing from her face. He dared to touch her cheek, his heart thudding as much as it did in a fight. Indrani didn’t pull away this time, but she said, ‘Rockface is signalling us, Stopmouth. I’ll try walking again.’

He nodded and dropped his hand. It felt warmer than the rest of him, as if it were tingling.

In spite of his promises, the young hunter didn’t really expect them to survive much longer, and he contemplated finding a way to ambush their pursuers while he and Rockface still had some strength. But although he didn’t know it, the ancestors had taken pity on the small band of humans. The ground began to slope upwards away from the Wetlane and the trees grew scrawnier, like grasping hands bent against the slope. Soon the forest had fallen behind them altogether. The ground became lumpy, and brown moss replaced the more colourful varieties of before. Stopmouth groaned at the sight of the hill stretching ahead of them, knowing they couldn’t possibly keep going. But Indrani surprised him by smiling.

‘There must be rock underneath,’ she said. ‘They’ll never follow us here! Oh, thank the gods! We’ve escaped! We’ve beaten them!’ She was shaking with exhaustion now, every step marked with agony across her face. The others fared little better. Even Rockface had stopped talking and looked thin and stooped. But Indrani was right. By the time night had fallen they were walking along something she called a
ridgeline
–a chain of
hills
, like muscles of earth flexing skywards–with no sign of pursuit.

Below them, in the direction from which they’d come, lay a ribbon of reflected light that could only be the Wetlane, made tiny by distance. From the other side of the ridge they saw a dark line of buildings, with here and there the orange glow of cooking fires.

Indrani threw herself on the ground to sleep and so missed out on the other gift the ancestors had chosen to bestow on them that evening: right in their direction of travel, no more than two days distant, a section of houses suddenly flashed, brighter than the Roof. The two hunters fell to their knees, eyes momentarily blinded. ‘Oh, thank you!’ Stopmouth said. ‘Thank you!’

It seemed almost too good to be true.

16.

THE NEWCOMERS

D
ays and nights of frantic, painful travel brought them to a point on the ridgeline directly above the area where the new beasts must have arrived.

The city here differed greatly from Stopmouth’s home. Rather than being divided into clearly defined Ways, the streets clustered in an unbroken line along the length of a strange, noisy Wetlane known as a
river
. From this distance the buildings looked battered and worn, hunched together like unwilling volunteers on a final journey.

Smoke rose into the air and Stopmouth feared it meant the new arrivals had already adapted to the shock of their situation and were organizing themselves. He hoped they still had a lot to learn. The humans were far too weak to pose a threat to any creature versed in the arts of survival. Hunger and various injuries had worn all three down to the point where a single Hopper would have picked them off gratefully.

Indrani, in particular, had reached the end of her strength. She had walked most of the way there despite the agony brought on by her wounds with every step. She never once complained. A few days of hunger and travel had turned her from a woman back into a child, her fat all gone, her muscles fading.

Stopmouth shook Rockface by the elbow, surprised at how long it took to get a reaction out of him. The hunter had been delighted by the flash two days before. Since then his nights had been bad and he tired quickly during the day. It was almost as if he didn’t want to find vulnerable new beasts waiting to save his life.

‘We need to hunt,’ Stopmouth told him.

‘For who?’

‘For us…For Indrani.’

She had already flopped to the ground, and even before the men had finished speaking, she curled up behind a small ridge. Stopmouth watched her settle. He longed to hold her, to look her in the eyes for what might be the last time.

‘I will not fail you,’ he whispered, wondering if something as bad as the Longtongues waited for them below. But a pain in his gut told him it was time to leave. She was lying on top of the Talker and the thought never crossed his mind to take it from her.

The hunters set off on trembling legs in search of flesh. A few painful falls on the scree taught them to walk where the moss grew until the vegetation thickened again and brightened in colour. In the distance smoke was still rising from somewhere among the houses by the river. They moved low along the ridgeline until the smoke was directly opposite. Then they crawled or skidded from bush to rock until they neared a stand of trees. They never reached it. At the last moment the sound of a snapping twig sent Stopmouth diving for cover. Rockface was still standing in the open and his young companion had to pull him down behind a boulder.

‘I thought you wanted to hunt,’ muttered Rockface. But he said no more.

Stopmouth was breathing hard by now, every part of his body caked with sweat and dust. He counted off a few dozen heartbeats, praying Rockface hadn’t been seen.

He hadn’t. When Stopmouth poked his head round the edges of the boulder, he saw four beasts with their backs to him. They were spindly, with such smooth white skin he immediately baptized them ‘Skeletons’. They had four arms, which tapered off into supple triangles of flesh rather than hands.

The beasts carried well-crafted spears and were crouching low amongst fallen branches for what could only be an ambush. What perfect targets they made! But they were too many for a pair of exhausted hunters. The men had no choice but to wait them out in the hope they might leave some scraps of their kill behind them. Stopmouth passed the time wondering whether their head, as in humans, was a weak spot. He imagined himself scooping out the brains. His mouth watered.

At last something seemed to be moving in the wood, something clumsy and large.

A creature emerged blinking into the light. Stopmouth almost choked. This was no beast. It was human, a real human, with skin as dark as Indrani’s and strange, grey-coloured hair. He carried a belly such as Stopmouth had never seen in his life, being almost as large as a child all by itself. Sweat poured down the man’s face and he stumbled right into the waiting beasts.

They didn’t attack. Instead, they rose up smoothly to either side of their victim, as if they were playing with him.

Suddenly Rockface bellowed, ‘Leave him alone!’ Stopmouth nearly jumped out of his skin. But when Rockface stumbled to his feet and shambled off towards the beasts, Stopmouth gladly followed. They wouldn’t leave one of their own to die so cheaply. The beasts turned as one to face the new threat, ignoring their previous quarry. Before Rockface reached them, his foot caught on something hidden in the undergrowth and he went down just in front of Stopmouth. The young hunter leaped over his companion to stand in front of him.

His short charge had left him exhilarated, full of the rush of battle. If the beasts had come for him straight away, he might have been all right.

Instead, they looked him up and down, each with a quartet of glistening, pupil-less eyes over a tiny drooling mouth. Two stood close enough to him that he could have reached out and tapped them on the white domes of their heads. The other pair waited further off, still flanking the startled fat man. The beasts looked calm, as if nothing in all the world could scare them. Stopmouth realized how little he knew about these creatures, how heavy the spear felt in his hands, how tired he was. His heart hammered; his limbs trembled as fear began its whispers. He could still turn and run back to Indrani. They might live a few days more…

‘The sharp end,’ said Rockface, stirring at last. ‘See how they like it.’

Stopmouth stepped forward quickly and punched the shell spear straight through the chest of one of the two beasts nearest him. They were slow to react and he had all the time in the world to withdraw the point and swing round the blunt end at another creature’s head.

‘G-get up, R-Rockface!’

‘I am, I am.’

The last two Skeletons exploded into action. One bore down on Stopmouth at great speed. Its legs bent backwards rather than forwards; its tiny mouth worked furiously, spilling drool.

The beast threw its own spear even as it ran. The hunter felt it whistle past his ear and then the creature was pushing aside Stopmouth’s weapon with one pair of arms, while the other swung at him with knives. He stumbled backwards, released the shaft of his spear and allowed the unbalanced beast to fall past him.

It used three arms to push itself up, fending him off with the fourth. Stopmouth grabbed it where the wrist should be. He held the arm in place and kicked at the join. It snapped very easily, but the beast made no sound. Instead, it used the hunter’s spear against him like a club. One strike across the chest knocked the wind out of the human and drove him backwards. The creature moved awkwardly now, distracted by pain perhaps. Even so, it managed a blinding cut to Stopmouth’s scalp and the exhausted hunter might have died then had the fat man not come into the fight, shouting and throwing pebbles. When the Skeleton looked behind it, Stopmouth snapped the remaining knife arm and wrenched back his spear. The beast died without a sound.

Stopmouth looked around for Rockface and found him resting against the boulder they’d been hiding behind.

‘I needed that,’ said the big man, managing his first smile in days.

‘W-w-why didn’t y-y-ou—’

‘What are you saying? Maybe you should wait until we get the Talker back.’

‘W-w-why d-d-didn’t you h-help m-me?’

‘Oh! You know you wouldn’t have wanted me to. Pity that fellow spoiled it for you, hey?’

Stopmouth looked at the fat man, the man who
couldn’t
be here. He was still yelling in gibberish and throwing stones at the last dead Skeleton.

‘Are you from the Roof?’ asked Stopmouth when he’d caught his breath. Blood ran down over the young hunter’s face from the wound in his scalp. ‘Have you come looking for Indrani?’ He could scarcely credit his eyes. Another human! He wanted to embrace the man. But the newcomer abruptly turned away from him. He sat down on a boulder near the one Rockface leaned on. Then he began to cry.

‘You’re alive!’ said Stopmouth. ‘We won!’

He was about to offer the man his choice of the four kills when another crashing sound approached from the forest. A look of abject terror spread over the man’s face. Stopmouth was worried too: he didn’t think he had another fight in him.

‘We should flee,’ he said.

But the shapes struggling through the trees were human too. Five men, soft-looking, though not fat. They wore hides all over the lower halves of their bodies and the heat must have been intense. Each carried a long branch freshly broken from a tree.

‘We’re safe now,’ Stopmouth said.

The man’s fearful expression never changed. He stumbled to his feet and broke into a shambling run, weighed down by his wobbling belly. He fell over after no more than a dozen paces.

‘A law-breaker,’ said Rockface. ‘Like us.’

‘Y-yes.’ For some reason it made Stopmouth sad.

He didn’t intervene when two of the men picked the fat one up by the arms. Another member of the group, no more than a boy with new scars across his right cheek, approached the hunters, excitement on his narrow face. He gabbled frantically for a few seconds and then, quite distinctly, said: ‘Wok-faze! Shtop-Mou! Shtop-Mou!’

Stopmouth, though light-headed from lack of food and blood, laughed. ‘Yes! Rockface and Stopmouth! How c-could you know that? Who are you?’ His early experience with Indrani had taught him to point, but even so, the boy looked at him blankly. Then he too was grinning and tapping his own chest: ‘Yama!’

The others, however, weren’t amused. A heated discussion ensued with some of them gesticulating angrily towards Stopmouth. He hoped they’d sort out their differences quickly and give him something to bind his wound. Rockface wouldn’t be much help: he’d closed his eyes and seemed to be ignoring the newcomers.

While Stopmouth waited, he cut a slice of the bone-white flesh from one of the kills. He was surprised to find the body didn’t bleed red like all other creatures he’d known. Instead, a milky liquid seeped slowly over his fingers, still warm. It tasted sweet, the flesh firm and delicious.

He was about to cut more when a blow to the face knocked him over. A balding man he took to be the leader waved his stick at Stopmouth. He made chopping gestures and pointed back in the direction from which Stopmouth had come.

‘We’re not leaving without our share,’ said Stopmouth, angry now himself. He climbed unsteadily to his feet and levelled his spear. Of course he wouldn’t use it! He was so glad to see other humans, he would never dream of attacking them.

The bald man felt differently. He threw a clumsy swing in Stopmouth’s direction. The hunter dodged. He reversed his spear and sent the man tumbling into the arms of his friends.

‘We’re not leaving!’ he said again. He could see the bald man wanted to have another go at him. He was spitting and shouting while his companions held him back. Finally he quietened down and the others let him go. They grabbed the unresisting criminal and all six moved away without taking any of the kills for themselves. The boy, Yama, nodded and smiled as he left. Stopmouth nodded back, very confused.

He slid to the ground beside one of the Skeletons and cut away as much flesh as he thought they could carry.

‘R-R-Rockf-face?’

The big man’s eyes were still closed and sweat covered his limbs. Stopmouth pulled him away from the boulder to find a large gash in the man’s back, still bleeding freely. His opponent must have reached round behind him and caught him with a blade. Why hadn’t he said anything?

He used the big man’s own needle to stitch him up.

‘Your uncle taught you well,’ said Rockface, breathing hard against the pain.

‘Y-y-yes.’

He pounded some moss to remove the juices that would sting Rockface’s wound. Then he used it as a bandage, tying it on with a strip of hide.

‘Tell me something, boy. Why is your tongue always broken when you talk to me, but to those strange people it’s as smooth as your brother’s? They can’t even understand you.’

Stopmouth had wondered the same thing back when he’d tried to teach Indrani to talk. He shrugged and cut some slices of Skeleton meat for himself and his companion.

‘Don’t waste any on me, boy. I’m about ready to volunteer, hey?’

‘N-n-not d-dead yet.’

‘Yes, I am. Back home they’ll already have broken our Tallies and declared us ghosts. And I can’t…I can’t even be an ancestor now.’

Such talk frightened Stopmouth. It wasn’t like Rockface, not like him at all. He made the big man eat a little, then he packed as much meat as he felt they could bear and heaved Rockface to his feet.

They staggered up the hill together. Stopmouth hadn’t been able to stitch up his own wound and was weaker than he’d thought. After no more than a few paces he dropped one of the four limbs he’d been carrying. By the time they found Indrani, still asleep where they’d left her, his head was spinning and the pair bore no more than a single leg between them.

He woke with a pounding headache. Rockface had collapsed into sleep as soon as they’d returned and he still snored. His wound had been rebandaged with fresh moss and it looked as if the big man had a few thousand days more in him.

Stopmouth felt Indrani next to him, her cool hand against his forehead. She tutted. ‘That wound you came back with may have induced a fever in you.’

‘I’m not feverish.’

‘Not now. But you were last night. I was worried about you. You were mumbling all sorts of mad things.’

‘What are you talking about, Indrani?’

He’d been exhausted on their return, he remembered that much. He’d woken Indrani and the two of them had gorged themselves on sweet flesh as Rockface slumbered beside them. He’d tried to tell her what had happened while she stitched his wound, but his head had been reeling and she’d made him lie down.

‘Oh, you said you’d seen humans,’ she told him. ‘Which is impossible. And I should know. Unless we’re moving in circles, of course!’