The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (29 page)

Stopmouth was on his feet again
instantly.

He didn't get very far, however.
The Warden Ekta appeared out of nowhere and pointed a gun right at
his face. "I can't let you have that, Chief," she said
quietly. But in spite of her artificial strength, she had none of the
great speed of a true Elite. She grunted as she felt the tip of
Rockface's spear caress her neck.

"I like this," Rockface
said, grinning. "Maybe Vishwakarma can marry this one and all
three of us will have women who can fight, hey, Stopmouth?"

"Shoot them!" Dharam
shouted from above. "Why is nobody shooting?"

"Lower your weapon, Ekta,"
said Stopmouth to the Warden. "I just want to speak to them. No
flesh should be wasted over a few words."

There came another crack, and a
man to Stopmouth's left fell over clutching his temple. The gun he
had drawn fell from his hands into the muck and he lay there moaning.

"We have slingers out there
watching you from the dark," said Stopmouth. "And
Fourleggers."

"Fourleggers?" asked
Rockface.

"Enough, Rockface!"

Ekta lowered her pistol at last
and Stopmouth strode forward.

"Go away," a young man
shouted at him. "Nobody wants you cannibals here!"

"I will go away," said
the hunter. "Let me have my say and I'll leave." He fixed
his stare on the man who had shouted at him. "And nobody else
need get hurt."

They were still afraid enough to
quieten down after that.

"So, you think you are safe.
You trust this man above me. A man you must know is lying when he
says he can save your lives."

"His story makes sense,"
said Ekta. "There
are
Deserter craft in the Roof. You have seen them yourself, I imagine.
And while there's not enough fuel left to allow the Warship to take
off, there's enough for the small craft we are building. Enough for a
few pilots to get up there and bring one of those ships back here!"

Murmurs of agreement followed,
and more than a few faces glittered with tears of hope. Stopmouth
realised then the futility of his mission as he looked at these
people. Even the Religious wanted to believe, even Kubar.

He imagined Sodasi crouching out
there in the darkness with her sling, wondering now if she had made
the right choice. For although in its last days the Roof had been a
place of horror, it had been nothing but a long wedding feast when
many of those around him had been born. There'd been food and comfort
for everybody, with nobody to fight but themselves. Stopmouth could
not hope to compete with such a dream. Strife was all he could offer
them. A short life of terror, ending in a monster's belly.

Ekta must have seen it on his
face. She held out her hand for the Talker.

Then, somebody laughed out in the
darkness. A woman's voice.
Indrani's
voice. She strode into the gathering, her beauty extraordinary to his
eyes. "Those ancient spacecraft will not work," she
asserted. "Why else did that lying fool above us go to all the
trouble of building the Warship if he could have
deserted
without one?"

"You were just as quick to
run away," Dharam shouted from above.

"I was," said Indrani.
"I
begged
for a place on that craft in order to save the life of my child."
Her eyes glittered as her gaze swept the gathering. "So, ask
yourselves this: why am I not begging for a place now?"

"Because you
want
to stay," said Dharam. "Among the cannibals. You have a
taste for those foul practices that civilized people long ago
abandoned. No wonder you came back here instead of letting us wait
for Earth to rescue us."

Many nodded vigorously at his
words, but Indrani had not finished speaking. "Fuel burns,"
she said. "That's the whole point of it, is it not? Do you
really think our ancestors would have been stupid enough to hang
spacecraft full of fuel above our public parks? And would there have
even been any fuel left to the Deserters anyway after their long
journeys through space?"

One of the older women in the
crowd stood up. "Actually... I'm an engineer."

"Sit down," Indrani
told her, "Without the Roof to hold your memories, you're
nothing."

"I'm not nothing," the
woman replied. She kept her feet, her grey hair and the lines on her
face lending her a strange unruffled dignity. "We have books
here, remember? It's clumsy, I know. But still, I have learned some
things for myself. Our Warship was only ever meant to orbit this
planet while we slept and waited for... well, never mind that. The
point is, the Deserter ships are likely to have used a thing called
nuclear technology..."

Indrani interrupted her.
"Whatever that is, it will still need some form of fuel."

"But we can get it!"
said the engineer. "I have seen only hints in the books so far,
but I'm pretty sure we can dig the fuel it needs right out of the
ground!"

Indrani burst out laughing, her
voice startling the older woman. "You are fools, every one of
you if you think you can get craft that are hundreds of years old to
live again. Look around you! I have no Roof, but I remember the
Deserters had centuries of their cruel civilization behind them when
they built those things. They had... what do you call it? They had
industry
.
They had our ancestors working for them like armies of slaves. If you
are very lucky, it will take you years to get one of them down from
the Roof and to get it working.

"But you don't have years,
do you? Do you? Your lives... your lives are now measured in
days
."

"She's lying!" shouted
Dharam. "Where's your courage? Take her down. Ekta!"

"I will hear her out,"
said the Warden. "She, at least, is no coward."

The two women exchanged a nod.

"The Diggers must cover 80%
of the surface of the world by now," Indrani continued. "And
the darkness of the Roof will only have helped them against whatever
creatures remain to resist them. Here, only the rocky hills and the
memory of how they were burnt out last time keep our enemies focused
on easier prey. But already they are running short of food. That will
force them to try us again very, very soon. And what will they find
when they do?"

She looked around her, lingering
on the Ship People who had never fought a day in their lives, before
passing on to the miserable, unloved Religious with barely a hundred
left among them who could raise a spear.

"We have better weapons than
the savages," said Ekta. She waved her gun to show everybody
what she meant.

"You can fight them,"
agreed Indrani. "But I have yet to hear any target practice. Not
a single day of it. And do you know what that tells me? It tells me
you don't have enough bullets for your guns. And that you don't know
how to make any more of them. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me, Ekta, and
I'll leave you all in peace."

But the Warden looked away,
unable to contradict her.

A few cries of fear and shock
greeted these words. Stopmouth felt so proud to be married to her,
although, it seemed strange she had turned up here to argue in favour
of rescuing the Tribe. She would have had to leave Flamehair with
Tarini to come out here tonight. And this after all that scowling she
had done when they spoke of a rescue back in the Fourleggers'
warehouse. Stopmouth had assumed then it was because she feared his
brother might still be alive. Now, he didn't know what to think.

Indrani smiled grimly. "Only
savages have any hope of keeping you alive long enough to grow more
food. Only savages can win you the time to retrieve one of those
useless Deserter craft so that Dharam and a dozen of his cronies can
leave the rest of you behind again."

"Oh, rubbish," cried
Dharam, "how could any of you believe that?"

He may have been surprised by the
laughter that broke out amongst the crowd. They knew, of course they
knew he wouldn't hesitate to leave them behind. They themselves,
after all, had deserted the Roof in its hour of greatest need, and
many of them felt terribly guilty about it now.

Stopmouth took this moment to
step forward, holding the Talker high like a trophy. "My people
are nearby," he shouted. "My people that I grew up with.
They are trapped down the river from us on the great rock that rises
above it there. I think that's why the Diggers haven't been pushing
us here so much. My tribe have been taking all their fury and they
have bought us time. But if we can bring them back here, they could
keep us all alive. All of us. For tens of days, maybe, or even
longer!

So, who will come with me?"
His voice rose to a shout, without—thanks to the Talker—the
slightest hint of a stutter. "Who will come for the Tribe?"

Nobody moved.

"Oh, they're useless!"
cried Rockface. "But with all the Diggers down there, none of
them would last a dozen breaths and—"

"Will nobody come with us?"
Stopmouth asked again, his heart breaking.

"I will." It was Kubar,
looking older than ever. He stood up, his back straight and his head
high. "Twice, I owe you my life, Stopmouth. I have only repaid
you with betrayal." Behind him his Religious friends stirred
uncomfortably, although he had carefully avoided including them.
"Stopmouth, you have always been truthful with me and loyal.
When you ran off to the Roof, I begged to go with you, because I
was... because I still am, a coward.

"I will go with you, though
it terrifies me. I will go with you and die today rather than live
five more days in the service of the liar Dharam. The monster. The
Deserter." He turned to the Religious behind him. "You know
what Indrani said about the Diggers is true." And then, his
gruff voice rose in what might have been song:

"
Do
not become a coward, because it does not befit you. Shake off this
trivial weakness of your heart and get up for the battle!
"

As he sang his voice grew
stronger and the words seemed to have a special meaning to his
people, for all at once they cried out in rage and leaped to their
feet.

Stopmouth felt Ekta's breath
right at his ear. "This is why Religion is so dangerous. A few
magic words and they'll do just about anything."

"They might be saving your
life," he said.

"Oh, I know. That's why I'm
coming too."

"What about Dharam?"

"If he's right, then nobody
here needs a Warden to protect them. Besides, somebody should keep an
eye on you savages, right?"

They
had burnt all the wood. The fires had gone out.

Whistlenose cried and grunted and
spat and cursed. He and the Digger rolled down the side of the hill,
locked together. It was stronger than him and barely reacted when he
bit the wiry hide of its face—no surprise for a creature used
to being consumed alive by its own young.

The pair had fetched up on an
overhang above the
river
as other knots of human and beast fought around them with only embers
to see by. He could feel his muscles weakening under its insistent
claws, although he still lived because it seemed reluctant to damage
him. No, its real weapon was a single grub that it tried to place on
his cheek so that the thing could crawl into an eye or an nose or an
ear.

One of the grubs had already made
the mistake of pushing in between Whistlenose's teeth.
You
feed me, not I you
...

The pressure increased, forcing a
grunt out of the hunter. The Digger's breath came in rapid sighs, the
sounds swallowed by the
river
below. He cried out, trying to get a foot underneath to launch both
himself and his attacker into the water. The current ran rough here.
He and his enemy would die quickly together if he could only pull
back far enough.

But the Digger knew what he was
trying to do and kept the old human pinned down, his right arm
trembling, but bending too, the first hairy tendrils of the
finger-sized grub tickling his cheek. With a cry, he allowed his arm
to collapse all at once, using the strength of his enemy to squash
the grub against his face. But more followed it, crawling down from
the top of his scalp.

And then, the weight was gone
altogether and the Digger tumbled silently into the churning foam
below. "Get up!" shouted
Fearsflyers
.
"Up, old man! Up the slope!"

He obeyed, not sure what was
happening. There was fire all around them. Fire everywhere and the
Diggers fleeing before it. "How...?" he asked. "The
wood is all used up! I saw it!"

Fearsflyers
was too tired, too
sad
to answer. They had fought all night, and Whistlenose knew that it
was night because in the distance they had seen the magical,
longed-for daylight disappear, only to return again now, too far away
to help them; too beautiful for words.