The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (22 page)

Before Indrani had hijacked
their ship, they had planned to spend decades asleep in little boxes
with only enough food for those who would be waking every few
thousand days to tend their machinery. But now, these aliens would
need feeding too, and that meant hunting and the risk of a horrible
violent death.

Stopmouth was on his way back
towards the U with its new set of defences that everybody had been
building, when he smelled Rockface's foul breath. He would have known
the man was there anyway by the sudden appearance of hip-high
children, armed with better weapons than most of the adults here
could make.

"You've taught them well,"
he told the older man.

The children grinned and passed
hunting signs amongst themselves as though they had been born to
them. Indeed, some of the gestures they used were wholly new to the
Chief and only the presence of the Talker allowed him to fully
understand what was going on.

"Where did they learn to do
that?" he asked.

"They're good, hey?"
said Rockface, clapping the younger man all too hard on the back.
"They were having trouble getting through to me without that
Talker you always keep to yourself, and the little Fourlegger can't
make half the sounds she needs either."

"Of course..."
Stopmouth couldn't take his eyes off the children, as they mocked
each other with supple hands or made jokes that the hunting language
of home could never have coped with. "That's wonderful," he
breathed and Rockface's chest swelled with pride.

"I'd nearly take them
hunting now," said the big man. "They'd do a better job
than any of the Newcomers, but they still lack the strength in their
arms..."

Those words seemed to be some
kind of signal that caused three of the children to launch themselves
at the old hunter, and with the stiffness in his back, they almost
knocked him over. "Not yet, young ones, hey? Wait 'til you're
shoulder-height before you try bringing
me
down! Listen, Chief," he sent the children running ahead with a
go
signal and an extra wave of the fingers that somehow meant "home."
"Listen, these new people you've given me to train, these Ship
People... They're worse than the others. They won't learn anything.
Won't even try. All they do is weep. The only time they'll fight is
against our lot. Ancestors but they hate each other!"

"I know." Stopmouth
sighed. He had really hoped the secular Ship People and the Religious
tribe he and Rockface had saved from destruction hundreds of days
before, would have united, if only because they were humans together
against a sea of Diggers and other beasts that wanted them for the
pot. "Indrani says the new ones are unlikely to come around
until they get as much of a shock as our lot got back in the
beginning."

Another great backslap from
Rockface. "We showed them, though didn't we, hey? What fights we
had back then! We were stacking up flesh like the Ancestors intended.
A sharp spear and a strong arm. No tricks!"

The two men were walking past a
new set of walls. They wouldn't provide much protection against the
Diggers the next time they crossed the hills, but they might deter
the few other beasts that were still around. Besides, everybody slept
a bit better for being inside them.

Beyond the gate, Yama was
shouting at sweating Ship People, who were building up the defences.
"That's all you're good for," he cried at them. "You'll
never be a real killer like me! Yama of the Bloody Hand!" The
builders glared at him, but saved a little of their hatred for
Stopmouth who had brought them here against their will. Two men and a
woman halted work long enough to spit as the Chief walked by.

"Don't worry about them,"
said Rockface. "We'll Volunteer anyone who tries to murder you
in your sleep."

"Thanks," Stopmouth
muttered, wondering how he could trust any of these people to fight
for the tribe, or even themselves. He could understand why they
disliked him, but he found it incredible that they had started
listening to Dharam again. Surely they knew who had destroyed their
world?

Or, maybe not. The vast majority
of them had been frozen in little boxes when Stopmouth had taken over
the Warship. They had not heard Dharam condemn himself from his own
mouth. And even if they had, they might prefer to continue on in the
belief that it was the Religious or some other enemy that had
poisoned the Roof. And now, when they had expected to awaken in
paradise, they had instead been "kidnapped" by a cannibal
and condemned, as they saw it, to a life of flesh-eating and murder.

"They would have died
anyway," he muttered, remembering how the slime had contaminated
all their machines. Never mind. Already a plan was forming of how he
was going to win flesh for his tribe and their Fourlegger allies. It
wouldn't work without the cooperation of the Ship People, so they
would be coming along whether they liked it or not.

"Rockface, I want to talk to
the Tribe tonight."

"Even Dharam's lot? I mean,
how is he still alive? They keep feeding him, but I don't know where
they get the food."

Stopmouth knew that a proper
Chief would have Volunteered the man. Indrani wanted him dead too,
but she thought it more important that Stopmouth take no part in it.

"It's a new world now,
love," she'd said. "Or will be when the fields are
producing. We can't be seen to Volunteer anybody, although even the
Diggers are a better death than the likes of him deserve! And
remember, if we kill him, he becomes a hero for them, a
martyr
."

Now, Rockface was saying, "I'll
bring them. The ones who will come."

"No," said the Chief.
"You will bring them all."

A stinging backslap followed and
a final gust of foul breath. "That's the spirit, hey? That's
what I like to see! I'll have every one of them there even if I have
to eat their arms for them."

"Feast well," Stopmouth
muttered.

***

No
Roofsweat fell tonight, for the hole created by the crashing Warship
lay open above their heads, and tiny bright dots twinkled eerily in
place of the reassuring grid of the tracklights.

Other than guards and scouts, all
of Stopmouth's people had gathered together in one place, just in
front of the ruins of HeadQuarters. They perched on tumbled masonry,
or leaned back against walls. They huddled in rival groups such as
the one led by the madman, Dharam, who had killed the Roof and who
now whispered and gesticulated amongst his followers.

"They have a secret stash of
food somewhere," Indrani said to her husband. "They're
keeping Dharam alive with it. We should take it from him."

"You're the one who won't
let me Volunteer him!"

"Yes, but there's nothing
stopping you hurting him, though! You should break a leg to match his
broken arm."

Stopmouth shifted uncomfortably
at the thought. Volunteering a man made sense, but to cripple him? He
shook his head. Even so, yes, he already knew about the stash of
food, and was counting on finding it.

Stopmouth looked around the faces
in the firelight. The Religious exiles of what he used to refer to as
his "New Tribe" all sat together at the front, clustering
around Kubar for the most part, or the grinning Yama in some cases.
They were few now—no more than a hundred fit for the hunt. Yet,
their spears had drunk deep; had bitten into squirming flesh. They
had been through trials that the two thousand newly woken Ship People
could not imagine.

But there was no getting away
from the fact that it was the soft newcomers who were the future of
the Tribe. Knowing their precious machines must soon die, they had
brought huge amounts of knowledge with them in flapping boxes known
as
books
.
They were the ones who would make food come up out of the ground;
food that wouldn't even fight back, that would just lie there,
waiting for the butchers... But all of that would only happen if
Stopmouth could keep them alive.

The Ship People hated him,
though, most of them. He could feel it like a spear poised at his
neck.

He took a moment now to look over
them, to gather the courage he still lacked sometimes when so many
eyes rested on him.

"Why have you kept us
waiting here so long?" asked a woman too deep in the crowd to be
identified.

Kubar shouted back at her, "And
what else would you have been doing tonight, you Godless
whore
?"

"Enough!" cried
Stopmouth. There'd already been several fights over the last few tens
of days that had come close to killing people. "Sit, Kubar,
please." He had expected better of the old priest.

"Listen now!" continued
the Chief, and when they still failed to settle down, he tried a
fierce glare. As always, it surprised him to see how well it worked.
But it saddened him that his people feared him so much. As if he
would ever hurt them!

He had grown since the days when
he had first taken Indrani away from his brother's house. He had the
strong limbs of a man, and while he would never be as muscular as
Rockface, whenever he spoke to his old companion now, he found
himself looking down into the hunter's creased brown eyes. The Ship
People saw his growing strength as a threat. Well, so be it. He would
use that if he had to.

"We have new allies,"
he cried, "the Fourleggers. They have kept treaty with us since
before my time in the Roof, and we can trust them to keep it now.
They are fierce in the hunt and have excellent hearing, but their
claws have not tasted blood lately. We need to feed them before they
can be of help to us."

Mutters rose from the crowd and
it was only then Stopmouth realized how odd his statement had been.
What would his original Tribe have thought if they could hear him
now? Trying to persuade men and women he loved to risk their lives to
save beasts from extinction? Wallbreaker had urged something similar
for the Hairbeasts, but on that occasion, nobody had had to lift a
spear for the creatures or Volunteer on their behalf. The idea made
him dizzy.

"Why should we give those
monsters our rice?" shouted a Ship Person. "We don't even
have enough to last us until our first harvest. And what if they
can't eat rice anyway?"

"Nobody wants your filthy
rice!" Yama replied. "We want flesh! We want to kill it
ourselves!" and his crowd of youngsters cheered.

"Enough, Yama! Everybody,
quiet! Quiet!" The glare again, pinning the crowd to the spot as
surely as a spear. "I don't know if they can eat your rice, but
there's not enough of it in any case."

"How would
you
know that?" shouted the woman who had spoken before.

Stopmouth ignored the question.
"The fact is, we need flesh. There's no other way out of it. So,
tomorrow at dawn, we will cross the hills and steal as much of it as
we can from the fields of the Diggers."

"We?" an outraged
newcomer.

"
Everybody
.
We are all needed. The Fourleggers will kill the Digger victims for
us. Then, with own brave hunters to guard us, every single person who
can walk will carry joints of meat up over the hills and back down
here."

"—Disgusting!"

"—I'm not touching...
touching...
meat
!"

"—I feel sick."

"You have no choice,"
Stopmouth told them. The Seculars weren't listening, they stood to
shout at him or to argue with each other or the Religious at the
front. Nobody noticed the arrival of Rockface and little Tarini, who
had saved him in the Roof. She winked at him, smiling with crooked
teeth.

Stopmouth smiled back. The
presence of his two friends was enough to tell him that the secret
stash of rice and other foods had been found. A small, loyal group
would already be moving it elsewhere. Now, all he had to do was wait
for the yelling to die down. Then, they would
have
to listen.

But a voice whispered in his
heart, they will hate you more than ever if you make them do this
thing. And he knew it spoke the truth.

The
old and the lame stayed behind to make a show of guarding the
children at HeadQuarters. Humans in ManWays had long ago learned that
most of the beasts they fought had difficulty distinguishing a
fighter from any other person. Then again, nobody back home lived
long enough to have more than a strand or two of grey in their hair.
That would change now if the new crops worked. People wouldn't need
to Volunteer at all, but would instead hang around, uselessly,
getting weaker and weaker forever. It made no sense to the Chief that
a hunter would want to live like that.

Rockface felt the same and
Stopmouth knew that if it weren't for the loving attentions of Sodasi
and the pleadings of his Chief, the older man would long since have
found a glorious end for himself.

Well before dawn, the whole tribe
moved out—nearly two thousand people. Stopmouth already
regretted it as he watched his few experienced hunters roaming the
edges of the great crowd, making targets of themselves with the
torches they carried to guide the ungrateful newcomers.