The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (17 page)

"You let me worry about
that," said Wallbreaker. "Now, wait." He beckoned
Hightoes out from under the trees where she had been watching. She
was a fine-looking woman, Whistlenose thought, but she was here now
because she was closer to giving birth than anyone else in the camp.

"You men," she said and
then coughed, nervous under their stares, although she spoke now as
the Heart of the Tribe. "You men are my hands. You are the
strong arms and the swift legs that will carry me Home. I am the fire
that waits for your gift of flesh. I am the voices of your children;
the embrace of your wives."

Each of the runners produced a
knife and cut his fingertip. They flicked beads of blood at her until
she was speckled with it. Rarely did so many hunters leave on a
single venture, but she didn't make the mistake of wiping her face
clean; rather, she honoured the men by licking her lips and smiling
shyly at them.

"Your blood has returned to
me," she said, "and so shall you."

Cheering was no longer
appropriate. The men wrapped the cuts in moss so as not to make
tracking them any easier. It was habit more than anything else, for
this was one occasion in which they wanted to be followed.

Then, the hunters, in total
silence, turned up the path the Tribe had created together and broke
into a quick jog. Whistlenose wondered how many of them would make it
back, despite the blood they had just shed. He felt afraid for them,
but very proud too, for not one showed any hesitation in his step.

"We have the hardest job
now," said Laughlong. "Waiting. Worrying."

Whistlenose knew what he meant,
but didn't feel it was right to say so. He had been chased by Diggers
before and dreaded to think what it would be like in a forest, at
night, where every step on the rough, root-covered ground might bring
a hunter down to be overrun.

Sometimes, when he closed his
eyes, he still saw the grub pushing itself up Highstepper's nose. Now
he feared that many of those young men would not be coming back from
their deliberate attempt to provoke the world's most powerful
species.

The ambushers were allowed a
final visit to their families, no more time than it would take to hug
their children and flick a drop of blood at their wives. The women
and other hunters had plenty of work of their own to do. By now most
of the food was gone. Maybe no more than three days' worth remained
and this was divided out amongst everybody, along with tally sticks
for the women to carry. The sleds were to be abandoned entirely, left
at the old camp, which was also to be the site of the planned ambush.

"Don't worry, husband,"
said Ashsweeper. "The Ancestors have inspired this plan. It
can't go wrong." She was preparing a cloth to tie around
Nighttracker's little shoulders. The boy's share of the tribe's goods
would be symbolic: a few strips of meat that he would bear proudly
for the length of the journey. Ashsweeper would have preferred that
he be carried instead, but the fact that he was named now made that
impossible. Whistlenose constantly prayed to the Ancestors that the
boy would be able to keep up with his mother.

"Don't let her out of your
sight, you hear me?" he told Nighttracker. "She won't be
safe without you."

"No, dada."

"And no hiding for the rest
of the day."

"I don't do that anymore.
I'm big now. I have a spear."

And so he did. A sharpened stick.
"Good boy. Give me a kiss." It was getting dark. The
runners would already be in amongst the planted bodies that would be
moaning to warn the Diggers of attack. Whistlenose shuddered. He took
up his position with the other men in trenches dug especially for
them, with cover provided by moss camouflaged blankets copied from
those of the Jumpers. Would that be enough to hide them from the
Diggers? Wallbreaker seemed to think so.

"The Diggers' hearing is
good enough to see with," he said. "They make a sound we
can't detect, they create echoes with it that..."

"Echoes?" Everyone was
staring at him except Aagam who sneered openly at the men.

"Oh... never mind,"
said the Chief, "it doesn't matter. Just duck down and as long
as you've never taken flesh from their fields and keep quiet, they
won't be able to tell you apart from a pile of rocks."

Afterwards, Laughlong said to
Whistlenose, "Maybe they
will
be able to see us. "Maybe Wallbreaker is counting on it and
we're the real bait for his trap. He could rid himself of all us
older men in one go."

Whistlenose didn't believe that,
but who knew with the Chief? Who knew what the Ancestors were
whispering in his ear. Or was it only Aagam who did that?

The last of the Rooflight dimmed
and the grids of tracklights came on to cast wild and frightening
shadows through tangled branches. Whistlenose tried to ignore them,
to stay present. He felt suffocated by the moss he had wadded up his
left nostril to block the sound from it. The rough camouflage blanket
spawned a thousand itches all over his back.

Men were used to ambushes. They
trained for them before they were even named. They learned stillness
and silence and patience. It was the one part of hunting where the
old surpassed the young. But Whistlenose twitched and sweated, his
mind on his family as well as the young men who surely should have
returned by now from their taunting of the Diggers.

He started at the sound of a
crack
nearby.
Calm,
be calm.
It was just another branch succumbing to the
residue of the slime that had dried it out. And then, too late to
save that dying tree, he felt the first chilly drops of Roofsweat
trickling into his hiding place. He suppressed the urge to shiver, to
move at all...

Was that...? Yes! The cries of
men; the pounding of running feet. He wasn't imagining it! The young
hunters were returning, a long line of them sprinting through the
darkness, their skin streaked with the blood of the planted bodies
they had killed. Each man would have consumed a sliver of flesh along
the way too, to ensure the Diggers would come after him.

Whistlenose counted more than
twenty survivors. Not too bad! Although some had abandoned spears
they would be needing shortly. He hoped Wallbreaker had foreseen that
possibility too and would have provided for more weapons at the far
end of the old camp.

The hunter tried to still his own
excited breathing. He gripped the shaft of his spear. The second to
last man passed him by and he appreciated the Chief's cleverness all
the more now, for none tripped on the smooth path or lost their way
in the darkness. All that chopping of wood made more and more sense
as the night progressed.

Poor Treekisser was bringing up
the rear, carrying a leg wound.
Ancestors
help him!
He wouldn't last too long. A slick black
swarm was already nipping at his heels, its members too numerous to
count. They flowed past, silent and vengeful, their skin writhing
with grubs that shone silver in the tracklights. They kept coming and
coming. More than any human had ever seen and surely more than the
ambush at the far end could cope with.

Don't think about it, boy! It's
not your problem.

The experienced hunters didn't
lift a finger as Treekisser went under with a pitiful cry. They bit
their lips waiting for the last of the Diggers to pass. Then, as
silently as they could manage, hunters sprang from their burrows.
They uncovered smouldering embers from pouches of tanned hide. They
set light to piles of undergrowth that the tribe had been building up
for days. Then they blocked the path down which their friends had
fled with branches and tree trunks set aside for that very purpose.
These too were set alight.

Roofsweat began to fall a little
more heavily, but it did nothing to protect trees that had been
parched dry by the slime. Whistlenose had never seen a fire take so
quickly or burn so fiercely.

Everywhere, the old camp site
blazed as men, and even a few of the younger women, scattered their
store of embers. There hadn't been enough hunters to carry out all
the many parts of the Chief's plan and, just as the migration had
forced men to dig and bring down trees, it now brought women into
close proximity with living enemies. None of the women had
complained.

"Ready?" shouted
Laughlong. "Get ready!"

The fire fed greedily on the
slimed trees, but was beginning to spread to parts of the forest
beyond the camp too: to trees that drank from the Roof every night
and that should have been far too wet to succumb. The hunters now
faced a real danger of being caught in their own trap.

"Here they come!"

Two dozen Diggers charged back
towards them along the path. They would have had nowhere else to go.
The younger band of hunters had led them into a huge ambush at the
far end of the old camp. Now their one path to escape lay through a
much smaller group of older men and untrained women.

"Slings!"

Stones smashed enemy bodies.
Diggers tumbled, tripping those behind and giving the humans time for
another shot. But many of the creatures remained unhurt and the first
of these threw their bodies straight onto the flaming branches so
that others could scamper over their writhing flesh. Grubs fell away,
hissing and popping in the heat.

"We can't let them past!"
Laughlong was shouting. "Not even one!"

But it was all going horribly
wrong now. A bridge of bodies had been created, three wide. Yet more
of the enemy had come running out of the forest behind, their fur
singed, their grubs tumbling off them. Fifteen or so made it out of
the trap to throw themselves at the defenders.

Whistlenose thrust his spear as a
Digger charged him so that the Armourback point disappeared far into
its chest and was pulled from his hands. Another creature, coming on
behind, hit him hard and the two were rolling in the moss as flames
roared all around and above them. Claws raked his side and then tried
for his throat. He wanted his knife, but couldn't reach for it; his
two arms were busy fending off the forelimbs of the beast. It was
stronger than he. The creature wrenched itself free, but it had no
intention of killing a human this night, it just wanted to escape. It
clambered over his body only to meet somebody else's spear.

"Up, get up, Whistlenose!"
shouted Laughlong. "I've killed it for you. We've killed them
all! Up! Everybody! Run now. We have to run or be boiled in our
skins!"

Whistlenose obeyed, remembering
somehow to retrieve his spear. Smoke had spread everywhere. The men
and women coughed, stumbling over corpses of friend and foe alike.
The fire had spread far beyond where they had intended it, but
somebody shouting, "I found it! It's here," brought them
all onto a second, smaller path.

They were in a race now against
the flames. It licked at their heels as they ran, pulling each other
along, choking, eyes streaming. "We're cooking, Ancestors save
us!" Whistlenose couldn't see who'd said that. By day, the route
had seemed so short and he began to fear they had turned the wrong
way in the confusion. But then, the stench of Digger fields
overpowered the smoke and they knew they had made it beyond the reach
of the fire.

They fell, every man and woman,
gasping into the muck.

The cold Roofsweat soothed the
scratches on Whistlenose's skin. He panted and panted and every
breath scorched his lungs going in and coming out.

"Are you all right?"
That was Laughlong, his voice a rasp. Whistlenose didn't answer right
away. He was looking up at the tracklights far above, blurred and
glittering behind a veil of mist.

When he was growing up, people
said the tracklights were the fires of the Ancestors in a grid of
streets such as you saw in some places. But people had stopped saying
that since that cursed woman Indrani had fallen from the Roof.
Whatever she was, she was no Ancestor.

"Whistlenose? We have to
catch up to the Tribe. We can't stop here."

"Their fires are going out,
Laughlong," he said.

"What?"

Just as had happened in the
daytime, large areas of the Roof were dark by night too. The Diggers
didn't like light, didn't need it. Were they were taking over up
there also? Is that what this all meant?

He allowed Laughlong to help him
to his feet.

Bodies had replaced tree trunks
in the murky darkness, hanging listlessly and stretching off into the
night. Nobody dared stand too close to them, despite the heat of the
forest so near at their backs and still growing hotter.

"You made it! Thank the
Ancestors." It was a new voice, undamaged by smoke. "Did
you kill them all?"

"Of course," wheezed
Laughlong. "Is that you,
Fearsflyers
?"

"It's me. I'm to bring you
to the new camp."

"Camp?" said Laughlong.
"I thought we were supposed to keep pushing through the night.
All the way to those magical
holls
."

"
Hills
,"
corrected the young man, unhappily. "You're right. But they've
stopped. I don't know why. I was just told to come back for you. Come
on, everybody, come on."