The Inferior

by Peadar O'Guilin

  ‘Are you mad?’ said Rockface.

  The Bloodskin awoke. Its eyes glinted like the lights in the metal shell. Rockface knocked his companion away and stabbed down at the beast. Stopmouth never saw if the strike succeeded or not; he was already falling backwards. He crashed into the damaged wall and felt it shake under his weight. He looked up in time to see part of the fragile ceiling give way. A piece of stone twice the size of his head slammed down onto his legs. Pain erupted in him, like knives and teeth together. He saw bone, his own, poking through his skin. He screamed as he’d never screamed in his life. Whether it was the pain or the sight of his ruined legs even he didn’t know.

  ‘Shut up!’ shouted Rockface. ‘For the life of your Tribe, shut up!’ Rockface hit him and he did.

  Several times his pain woke him, and several times it drove him into unconsciousness again. He caught the rest of the night’s events in flashes. Rockface must have lifted him to his shoulders and made a run for it. Stopmouth heard the Bloodskin alarm, a rhythmic clanging sound. But the houses around them had all been destroyed and so the enemy had further to come to catch up with them.

  Rockface ran straight down the main street and passed between two guard towers. Every step jolted Stopmouth’s ruined legs. Slingstones fell around them. Two struck Stopmouth but hit nothing vital. A third found his legs and sent him back into unconsciousness.

  Later he woke again. A pack of six Bloodskins were closing in fast. Their leader had almost caught up with the humans. Its strangely shaped muscles flexed under glistening skin; its eyes and spear pointed straight at Stopmouth. ‘Was it your brother we killed?’ he mumbled. ‘Are you the Bloodskin version of me? Is that why you’re so fast?’

  They’d reached the trees by now. Stopmouth could hear the slap of branches and felt Rockface’s great body heaving for breath.

  ‘You should drop me,’ he tried to say.

  By now the Bloodskin version of Stopmouth had come close enough to spear its human counterpart and might have done so if it had been more sure of its footing. Stopmouth saw its glittering, intelligent eyes, its lips pulled back in a snarl. At last the spear arm reached back, preparing to strike.

  Rockface leaped into the air.

  Stopmouth saw the beast falling forward, heard it scream. Then Rockface landed on the far side of the pit with a jolt and Stopmouth was screaming too.

  5.

  THE NEXT VOLUNTEER

  Wallbreaker’s stomach churned at the sight of his brother’s smashed legs. The young hunter, converted to flesh and white bone, brought his nightmares into focus and set him to scratching the spear scars the Armourbacks had made in his skin.

  He couldn’t face it. ‘Take him home, Rockface. Take him to my mother’s house. Please.’ Rockface nodded, though his chest still heaved after his heroic escape.

  Wallbreaker and the others got down to the business of butchering the Bloodskins who’d come running into their trap. The humans had done well and their families would gain honour for such a successful hunt.

  Lowsquat slapped the hunt leader on the back. ‘Six adult Bloodskins in exchange for one human. Amazing! And thanks to Rockface, we even get to keep Stopmouth for trade—’

  Wallbreaker almost struck the man with his spear. ‘Stopmouth isn’t dead.’ His head was spinning. Gore covered his hands, and instead of the Bloodskin under his knife, he kept seeing poor Stopmouth.

  Lowsquat seemed oblivious to Wallbreaker’s anger. ‘The funny thing is,’ he continued, ‘if Stopmouth had lived, there’s easily half a bride price in his share–well, it’ll be your share now, of course. And if you want another wife, you couldn’t do better than my Brighttooth: she—’

  Wallbreaker screamed and grabbed Lowsquat by the neck. ‘My brother’s not dead! You hear me?’ He raised his fist, but the others pulled him away and the eldest hunter of the group, Frownbrow, spoke the words all knew to be true.

  ‘Calm yourself, Wallbreaker! Stopmouth was a hero today’–the others grunted assent–‘but we all saw his legs and they’ll not heal straight. You must help him do the right thing and bring honour to your family. Don’t shame his coming sacrifice.’

  Wallbreaker didn’t answer, but when they released him, he took up his knife and went back to butchery without looking at his comrades.

  Later Frownbrow made a sled of tree branches. The men used it to pull the bounty of flesh back with them across the Wetlane, where shadows rose to the surface to look on enviously.

  The return of such a hugely successful hunt ought to have attracted more attention from the Tribe, especially as Rockface had gone on ahead to announce their triumph. But even the tower guards were facing the wrong way to see them.

  ‘A big white thing came down in the square!’ shouted one, a grizzled man almost old enough to volunteer. ‘Come back and tell us when you find out what it is!’ No one offered so much as a word of condolence over Stopmouth, though Wallbreaker found he could think of little else.

  The first streets were deserted, without even children to run alongside begging for scraps or trophies. They heard an uproar from Centre Square and as they got closer, they found their way blocked by growing crowds.

  A day earlier, with his brother safe and happy, Wallbreaker would have done anything to examine the mysterious creature first-hand. Instead, his imagination raced down one blind alley after another in search of a way to keep Stopmouth alive, to undo the terrible thing that had happened because he, Wallbreaker, had been too cowardly to take his place at the front. He’d been relieved when Stopmouth had offered to be the runner. And now the poor boy would be volunteering for something else entirely, something final.

  The little group’s progress came to a halt in the press of the crowd. Wallbreaker felt dizzy with the noise of them, their smells. They were his people, his friends. They were Tribe. But Stopmouth’s legs…A wave of nausea threatened to push him to his knees in disgrace. He decided to try to make it to his mother’s house through one of the side streets, but he was interrupted by the arrival of Bonehammer, Chief Speareye’s youngest son.

  ‘Daddy–I mean, the chief–wants you. Quick, he says.’

  Wallbreaker was too tired to argue and knew his family would need the chief’s favour if Stopmouth was to avoid volunteering. So he allowed the boy to thread him through the crowd to a crumbling storehouse near Centre Square, where confused hunters kept the curious at bay. The Roof was beginning to emit the faint light of dawn and it showed up the new bruises and black eyes sported by many of the guards. The chief had earned some minor injuries of his own. Wallbreaker found him limping up and down angrily in front of the storehouse.

  ‘At last!’ said Speareye. He didn’t enquire about the hunt. ‘I need you to see this…this creature. See what you can tell me about it.’

  Wallbreaker could think only of his brother, but he stepped into the darkness amidst sides of hanging meat. He could hear the creature breathing as his eyes adjusted. His nightmares were always like this: he imagined the Armourbacks driving him into a dark room, where he’d hear only the scuttling of their young across the floor. He shuddered and struggled not to shame himself.

  But already he could distinguish its outline. Her outline. A woman such as no woman he’d ever seen; her skin flawless. She stared up at him and he recognized the terror in her eyes. His first thought was: We have this fear in common. And it pleased him. His second thought was to wonder why the chief hadn’t claimed her as another of his wives. How could any man resist such perfection? His gaze lingered on her breasts and he saw her dark eyes narrow in response. Then she shouted something at him, something angry and hateful and utterly without meaning.

  At last he understood. ‘The chief doesn’t want you because you’re simple,’ he said. ‘You’ll be volunteered at the next trading…’

  His eyes lingered on the curve of her hips. ‘Such a pity,’ he whispered.

  He reached out a hand to her skin, which got her shouting again. She actually tried to bite him.


  ‘And yet,’ said Wallbreaker, ‘you came from the sky. I saw it! You came from a Globe. You can’t be an idiot, can you?’

  Her struggles had brought a sheen to her skin such as he had when he woke from his awful dreams. Wallbreaker felt exhilarated, and for the moment had even forgotten about his brother. He went back outside to the chief.

  ‘Definitely human,’ he said.

  ‘But simple,’ said the chief. ‘We will have to trade her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wallbreaker. ‘Or maybe…maybe I could take her to wife. Since she is without family, I’d have to give the bride price to you, as chief.’

  Speareye scoffed. ‘No hunter can afford to keep a simpleton! She’ll give you children who’re twice as bad! Besides, where would you get another bride price so quickly?’ But Wallbreaker could see the calculation in his eyes.

  The younger man smiled. ‘You didn’t ask about my hunt, did you, Chief?’

  Fever ravaged through Stopmouth’s body and had done so for as long as he could remember. Sometimes people came to see him. Rockface brought a gift of flesh. He talked to Stopmouth for half a day, but Stopmouth understood little. On another occasion he heard his mother speaking to Speareye in the next room.

  ‘Come on, Flamehair. You know that leg will never heal right.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Speareye. My boy deserves his chance.’

  The room swam in front of Stopmouth’s eyes. The trophies of his boyhood stared down at him from the walls, the skull of his first kill–an injured Flim Wallbreaker had permitted him to finish off–beside the bones of his father’s final victim. For a moment it seemed as though Speareye’s voice came from one set of remains and his mother’s from the other.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ said the chief, ‘is that you should prepare yourself. If he doesn’t get better, the flesh he consumes now is wasted. Others need it.’

  ‘Wallbreaker brings in enough flesh for all of us.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that,’ said Speareye. ‘His Bloodskin trick has worked with other species too…But it’ll never work twice with the same beasts. Then he’ll have to hunt just like everyone else.’

  Stopmouth missed the rest of the conversation, but his mother cried when it ended.

  Every day a strange woman came to see him.

  ‘Mossheart?’ he asked.

  He never saw her arrive or leave, and when she spoke, his fevered mind couldn’t hold onto her words. The sickness racked him day and night, but she was always near to press damp hide to his forehead and whisper soothing gibberish.

  ‘I’m not a baby,’ he told her. Or thought he did.

  Finally he woke up one day with the fog gone from his head. He saw the woman sitting in the corner of his room, and realized she wasn’t a creation of his pain, but a real human being.

  ‘W-what’s your n-name?’ he asked her. She had the shortest hair of any woman he’d ever seen; no longer than a single finger-joint.

  He tried again. ‘W-why have I n-never seen you before?’ The Tribe had a story about a man who’d hidden his mother away for half a generation so she wouldn’t have to volunteer. Had this woman spent her entire life indoors? Is that why her skin was so dark?

  She wouldn’t answer his questions. She simply looked at him. Perhaps, he thought, she was mute. Maybe the gibberish he’d heard her speaking had been part of his fever.

  It was only then that he began to notice the abominable itch in his legs. When he pulled away the pounded moss covering, he saw that somebody had tied each broken limb to long straight pieces of metal. Why, he didn’t know, but he was relieved he couldn’t see bone sticking out anywhere. He reached down for a good scratch, but the woman quickly stood and batted his hands away. Stopmouth couldn’t find the strength to fight her.

  ‘Mother,’ he called. ‘M-Mother!’

  No reply. He looked at the stranger again. ‘It’s j-just us, then.’

  The woman tapped her chest. ‘Indrani,’ she said.

  ‘W-well,’ he said, glad she could talk, but suddenly tongue-tied by her strange, dark eyes. And she too seemed reluctant to say anything else after that. He wondered if, like him, she suffered from embarrassment and a twitchy tongue. And so they remained in uncomfortable silence, interacting only when he stole glances at her strange face or when she hissed at his attempts to relieve the itch in his legs.

  Stopmouth didn’t discover how the woman came to be in his house until later that evening. Wallbreaker paid him a visit and seemed delighted to find his brother conscious.

  ‘You had me worried,’ he confessed.

  Stopmouth noticed that Indrani had moved to the corner of the room farthest from his brother. Strange, really, for Wallbreaker had regained the sleek air of confidence he’d lost during his encounter with the Armourbacks.

  ‘How l-long have I been f-f-feverish?’ asked Stopmouth.

  ‘You had your little adventure with Rockface twenty-two days ago.’

  Stopmouth thought about this. The sight of jagged bones poking through his skin would have left most of the Tribe doubting he would ever walk again, let alone hunt. Twenty-two days was a terribly long time for them to put up with that. To take his mind off it, he asked Wallbreaker to tell him about Indrani.

  ‘Now that’s a story!’ said his brother. ‘Do you remember much of the night you escaped from Blood-Ways on Rockface’s back? We all saw this object falling from the sky and I was desperate to get a closer look, but everybody wanted to go on with the hunt.’

  ‘I think I r-remember something like that…’

  Stopmouth was sitting with his back against the wall. His mind had been clear for no more than a tenth part of a day, but already he was tiring. Indrani came over and helped him to lie down. She kept a wary eye on Wallbreaker and went straight back to her corner when she’d finished.

  ‘I’ll tell you that story,’ said Wallbreaker. He grinned. ‘I’ll tell you how I came to be married for a second time, young as I am!’

  Stopmouth looked in astonishment from husband to wife. It was indeed unusual for so young a man to have two women. And yet the Bloodskin hunt would have gained each member of the party a full adult carcass. If Wallbreaker had been able to repeat the success of that even once, it was no wonder he’d been able to afford the extravagance.

  ‘You see, brother, I knew the first moment I heard it that her gibberish was just another form of speech such as the Hairbeasts use among themselves. Now, we’ve never been able to learn the Hairbeast language. But they’re not people, right? We can’t think like them without going mad like Treatymaker. However, if another human language existed–and it’s not something those farts in the Flesh Council will ever accept!–but if it did exist, I figured I ought to be able to work it out. I’ve already learned some of her strange words and she’s picked up some of ours. Not enough, though. Not nearly enough.’ He’d uttered the last sentence so quietly, Stopmouth wasn’t even sure he’d heard it.

  ‘Enough f-for w-what?’

  Wallbreaker glanced out of the doorway and lowered his voice. ‘When I tried to take her to my bed, she struck out at me. She fights as well as most men. Not me, of course, or she’d have broken my jaw! Also, Mossheart is being unreasonable about the whole thing, if you can believe that. She’d be a head wife and her still so young. But no. She wouldn’t have another woman in the house. Doesn’t even want me to visit Indrani. Madness! So, for now, until I can explain to Indrani that she’ll be volunteered if she doesn’t find a use for herself, and to Mossheart why she must obey…Well, until then, you’ll have her here to look after you.’

  ‘The m-metal?’

  ‘Yes, the metal splints were her idea. I was amazed, but I immediately saw how they might keep your legs straight while they healed. She’s a match for me, all right! And if we can keep the Flesh Council off your back for another twenty days, she might even have saved your life!’

  Wallbreaker smiled at his new wife. She glared back for a moment before turning away. Stopmouth felt himself drif
ting, but his brother wouldn’t let him sleep yet.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘This is important: as far as the Tribe is aware, I have full control over her, all right? I will too. I just have to learn to speak to her first.’

  But he’d need her co-operation for that, and Indrani didn’t look like she’d start co-operating any time soon. Stopmouth wanted to offer to learn her language on behalf of his brother, but already the excitement of the day had been too much for his recovering body and he slipped quickly into darkness.

  When Stopmouth woke again, the light coming through the only window had weakened. He felt sure he’d lost at least another full day to sleep. But that was fine. Somebody must have fed him because there was soup caked on his lips and he felt a little stronger than before. Indrani sat in the corner on crumpled hides that looked like they’d been slept on. Stopmouth thought she’d been crying, though the darkness of her skin made it hard for him to tell. He knew she couldn’t understand a word he said, but he tried to speak to her with kindness in his voice. ‘You are my sister now, Indrani.’

  She looked up at her name, but spoke none of her gibberish in return.

  Mother and Wallbreaker walked in. They must have heard his voice. Mother seemed more stooped than when he’d last seen her. New lines had spread across her face. Or maybe it was a trick of the light coming through the pounded-moss doorflap behind her that he noticed them now for the first time.

  ‘My Stopmouth, you’re awake!’ Anxiety filled her voice more than joy. ‘Quickly,’ she said, reaching for him. ‘Quickly! You have to stand! A Clawfolk delegation has arrived to trade. Speareye wants five volunteers. Five!’