The Volunteer (The Bone World Trilogy) (31 page)

"
Stopmouth's
wife is here. Let me to pass."

And so, Indrani had arrived.
Stopmouth seemed as surprised as anybody else to see her. "G-go
b-b-back!" he cried. "G-go back!" He bucked harder
than before, upsetting the hunters on top of him.

Indrani looked as beautiful as
ever, maybe more so, as she had left her girlhood behind her and wore
comfortably the hides of exotic creatures. Everybody made space, as
they would have for Speareye, or one of the great Chiefs of the past.

She faced her ex-husband, nothing
in her fist but a black stone, watching him as he drank in the sight
of her.

"You came back to me."

"I am here to kill you,"
she said. Her face betrayed absolutely no emotion.

"N-no!" said Stopmouth,
but Wallbreaker laughed.

"Oh, yes! I remember those
high kicks of yours and how some of the older men lost a few teeth
over them. What about you, Whistlenose? Were you one?"

"I never lost a tooth to
her, no." It had hurt, though, he remembered that, when they had
first attempted to catch her.

"Well, wife. You tried your
tricks on me, remember? But I was faster. I'm famous for it. You
can't beat me. You can't touch me. And—"

She raised the black stone. A
loud
bang
sounded and everybody jumped, looking around for fear of a new
attack. Wallbreaker was on the ground, there was blood everywhere,
spilling from his shoulder. Mossheart was screaming.

A hunter ran towards Indrani, but
she pointed the black stone at him, until he backed away from her.
Then, she was right beside the Chief, pressing the strange object up
against his skull, while Mossheart screamed and everybody fell back
and away from her.

"What do you say now?"
she asked. "What do you say? You will to hurt no person again."

"Wait!" he cried. "You
don't understand. The Tribe needs me! I know how to defeat the
Diggers! I have a way to defeat them!"

"You say anything to live.
You lie."

Whistlenose surprised himself by
speaking up for the Chief when none of the younger men would. They
all wore expressions of shock. "Wallbreaker does have a way out.
He told me so himself just before the last attack. There was no point
in a lie. We thought we were all going to die."

Indrani's face showed some
confusion and the black stone might have moved a little away from the
Chief's head and then, Stopmouth came forward, having pulled free of
his captors. "He's r-r-right l-l-love. If anybody could think of
a w-w-way to defeat the D-Diggers..."

"
You
could think a way, Stopmouth!" she said. "
You
could. He is nothing, no better than...
Pah
!"

"But I
haven't
thought of anything, l-love. We can use the T-Talker to drive them
back for a while, b-but they're not stupid. They will l-learn to
overcome it. Think of the Tribe. Think of F-F-Flamehair."

His last words were a mistake.
All the confusion left her face at once. The black stone returned to
the Chief's skull and a loud
click
sounded. Whatever she was trying to do, hadn't worked this time, but
Wallbreaker jerked suddenly and Whistlenose might have thought he had
died if he hadn’t screamed out, "Ancestors save me!"

Then, Stopmouth was beside
Indrani, pulling her away from the Chief and into an embrace. She
shouted at him, kneed him in the groin so that he ended up at her
feet.

"The Tribe," she spat.
"The Tribe! Stopmouth, you said I am your Tribe now! When all
these tried to kill us. You said it!" She threw the black stone
into the dirt next to his face so that he winced. And then, she was
gone back down the slope, with nobody thinking to stop her.

Stopmouth staggered to his feet,
struggling to breathe.

"I want her back," said
Wallbreaker. "She's mine."

Stopmouth smiled through his
pain. "You have w-wet yourself in t-t-terror of her, brother."

It was true. Enough firelight
remained to see the glistening stain in the Chief's leg and
Whistlenose, who thought he could feel no more of anything, felt
shame on the Chief's behalf.

Stopmouth, despite his youth and
a lack of scarring, looked more a Chief than his brother now. The two
stood together and for what must have been the first time in their
lives, the younger brother looked down on the older. He turned to the
crowd.

"Follow me to the
river
,"
he said. "There is a way to s-safety, but you must t-trust me."

"We will do what you say,"
Wallbreaker agreed. He recovered himself long enough to address those
around him. "The Ancestors have kept us safe," was all he
said. He was bleeding from his shoulder and it seemed he might faint
at any moment. But he managed to lead his family to join the crowd
following after Stopmouth.

The next tenth brought its own
share of terrors to everybody. Stopmouth's strange followers moved
the Tribe towards the banks of the rushing water of the
river
.
Their hunting signs were familiar, but somehow more elaborate than
those used back in ManWays. The Talker still provided some light, but
it was much dimmer than it had been and everybody fretted that the
Diggers would return when inevitably it died.

But what followed scared
Whistlenose even more.

He was left on the bank, staring
into the blackness for a return of the enemy, while his family were
set whimpering onto sheets of some strange material that floated on
the river. Nighttracker called out to him as the flimsy craft fell
away with the current, and men and women on board beat frantically at
the water with pieces of wood.

He winced as a hand clamped over
his shoulder.

"They'll g-g-get across,
Whistlenose. We m-managed it on the w-way here. And this is a calm
spot."

"Aren't there Diggers on the
other side?"

"Oh yes. But too r-r-rocky
for f-fields. I h-hope they w-won't know we were there until we have
returned home safely."

The numbers of hunters around
Whistlenose dwindled, until, eventually, he and Stopmouth along with
a dozen other men abandoned the empty bank of the river for a
raft
of their own. It felt like a living thing beneath him, yawing and
bucking to throw them all into the deadly water. They spun around
more than once.

On the last occasion, he saw, in
the pitiful firelight they had left behind, a single Digger staring
after them.

Stopmouth
felt exhausted. He desperately wanted to talk to Indrani. Something
had happened between them back there by the ruined bridge when he'd
tried to stop her from killing Wallbreaker.

He hadn't even known she'd come
along as part of the raid, or that she had borrowed a gun from Ekta.
But it was obvious to him now, why she had changed her mind about
rescuing his old Tribe and why she had argued for their return. She
just wanted to remove the thorn from her heart that Wallbreaker had
put there. She needed it, almost more—he feared—than she
needed to live. And Stopmouth, her own husband, who was supposed to
love her, had got in her way.

He wanted to see her, to explain
himself better... to explain why Wallbreaker had to live.

But there was no time for that.
First, the Tribe had to be ferried across the river. Then, on the far
side, they sneaked through ruins on a route that would keep them as
far from the nearest Digger fields as possible. Finally, they would
cross the river one last time, back to the relative safety of
HeadQuarters.

The journey took two whole days
with the Talker barely strong enough for a gentle glow. That didn't
seem to bother Stopmouth's old Tribe, however. They seemed to have
lost their fear of the dark. Every one of them appeared strange to
him now: purified; with a feverish light in their eyes to match that
of some of the Religious fanatics he had met in the Roof.

Even stranger was the way they
argued over who should be allowed to carry his wounded brother
around, as though their Chief were a pregnant woman or the skull of
an Ancestor! What had he done to deserve it, after all? During the
fighting, Wallbreaker's spear had stayed dry as old bones. The
supposed Chief had hidden at the top of the slope where the bridge
hung out over the river. He hadn't even come up with a plan! Instead,
he had been rescued in a way that nobody could have predicted, and at
the end of it all, a woman who had once humiliated him had done so
again. Only a miracle had spared his life.

But Stopmouth received his own
share of love, too. The Tribe welcomed him back, touching his arms,
marvelling at the new muscle. "That brother of yours must have
known you'd come for us. How clever of him to send you away all that
time ago, waiting for this day."

"What? I don't..."

"Oh, I suppose it is the
Ancestors we should really be thanking. They speak to him. He's never
wrong."

Stopmouth shook his head, his
confusion greater than ever.

The two tribes could not converse
except in the presence of the Talker. Even hand signals created
problems, because the signs of the New Tribe had evolved beyond
anything the Old Tribe had ever needed. The subtle differences
between the two systems only deepened the confusion.

When finally everybody had been
brought safely to the vicinity of HeadQuarters, Indrani ran back
alone towards the Fourlegger Warehouse. Stopmouth wanted to follow
her at once, but some of his brother's men appeared around him. These
were little more than boys, being about a thousand days younger than
he was. But they carried themselves as bravely as any hunter with a
house full of trophies.

"He wants to speak to you,"
said one of them whose whole left side looked as though it had been
scorched not too long ago.

Stopmouth swallowed, containing a
sudden surge of anger.

"Good. I want to talk to
him."

Wallbreaker lay alone by the bank
of the river where the rushing water would hide their words from
anybody else. Always clever, even now.

This time, you're in my
territory.

But the words would not come to
him. His brother looked exhausted and thin. The muscles of his
shoulders and arms seemed too soft for a grown hunter and his whole
body lay bent over to the right, as though trying to escape the
seeping hole Indrani had made in his left shoulder.

"So, here we are again,
brother," Wallbreaker said.

"Tell me the plan,"
said Stopmouth, not trusting himself with anything less practical.
His every word had to fight its way free of clenched jaws and
grinding teeth. "You said you knew how to defeat the Diggers.
Can you?" He wanted to hit this man. To embrace him. To drown
him in the river so that he would never see his face again. Poor
Indrani!

Wallbreaker grinned. "Amazing
how the Talker has fixed that tongue of yours, isn't it, Stopmouth?
Well, that's too bad. I have to take it back now."

"You'll get nothing more
from me, brother." One thing the Talker couldn't hide was the
catch in his voice.

"On the contrary, I am the
one who gave you everything and I'll have all of it again soon. That
spear you use so well? I taught you those skills after Father had
given up his flesh for the rest of us. I was the one who protected
you from the bullies. It was I who spoke up for you back when many
were thinking of not naming you. I protected you when your legs were
broken. And even after mother Volunteered to save you, it was me and
my hunting tricks that kept you from the pot. A thousand times you
would be dead, Stopmouth. And the Tribe would be dead a thousand
times too if it wasn't for me with the Ancestors looking down on
nothing and nobody for ever and ever." These words were true.
Every one of them.

"But my kindness to you,"
Wallbreaker continued, his voice thick, "all counted for nothing
the first time an unfaithful woman looked over her shoulder at you."

Stopmouth stepped closer. His
whole body thrummed with emotions he couldn't quite identify. He
swallowed painfully and tightened his lips into a line. Wallbreaker
ignored the potential threat and kept talking. "And here you
stand now, young and healthy, and so full of your own importance as
to think you are a Chief! Do you really think you could lead our
people?"

"I don't 'think,'
Wallbreaker. I
am
Chief. Here at least." Now was not the time to discuss the
situation with Dharam. "
I
have my own people and you have yours..."

Wallbreaker laughed, despite the
pain in his shoulder. "Are there two tribes of Bloodskins? Two
tribes of Armourbacks? Of course not! Nowhere in the world do you see
two Chiefs. Such a thing cannot be and you know it as well as I do.
My people are the stronger. That much is already obvious. We will
dominate your dark-skinned weaklings, who probably aren't even human
anyway. The Tribe would never follow you."