The Inferior

by Peadar O'Guilin

  ‘Did he weaken you with poison?’ asked Stopmouth. ‘Did he trick you into eating mossbeasts?’

  ‘No,’ said Indrani, not looking at him. ‘That was my idea. After.’

  Stopmouth felt ashamed. He wanted to tell her that not all savages were rapists; that he, Stopmouth, wasn’t one. Surely she knew that already! She’d been ill and at his mercy for days and he’d done nothing but care for her. He didn’t want to believe Wallbreaker was capable of such things either, in spite of all he’d seen, but one glance at Indrani’s face told him otherwise.

  Rooflight was already beginning to fade and still the fields of planted beings continued along the banks of the Wetlane. In the distance Stopmouth saw a dark line that might have been trees. He prayed fervently that this was so.

  ‘Look!’ said Rockface. ‘A Digger!’

  Sure enough, a triangular head regarded them from the edge of the water no more than two hundred heartbeats distant. Its great, flat claws gripped the lip of the Wetlane and its long, perfectly round snout dripped clear liquid that hissed on impact with the water. It stared at them, if ‘stare’ was the right word for a creature with large but empty eye-sockets. Stopmouth remembered how the Diggers’ skin had seemed to writhe on their bodies the night before. As he got closer, he saw the reason why. A hundred thumb-sized grubs scurried over the creature, into and out of its ragged ears and the empty sockets of its eyes.

  ‘They’re its young,’ whispered Indrani. ‘They’ll keep feeding on it until it can find them another host. Then it will mate again.’

  The creature had powerful-looking hind legs and it flexed them now as if it might try to leap aboard. Stopmouth poled them further from the bank, unable to understand how the beasts survived like that.

  As the humans passed directly in front of it, the Digger said: ‘Attack.’

  All beasts planted nearby obeyed at once. A multitude of appendages reached for muck or stones and flung them at the raft. Most of the missiles landed way off. Many didn’t even reach the Wetlane, while others threw up plumes of water to either side.

  A clod of earth broke over Stopmouth’s head, but he kept pushing them along. Stones struck him in the shoulder and Indrani yelped a few times. Rockface growled back at the enemy. He returned any missile that came near him with as much force and accuracy as he could muster from a kneeling position. He got close to the Digger a few times, but it seemed unperturbed.

  Finally, when they’d passed a dozen paces beyond it, the creature said, ‘Stop.’ Its empty eyes followed them until they were out of sight.

  ‘A display of power,’ said Indrani with a shiver. ‘It was struck as often as we were, I think.’

  They came up to the trees in full darkness, but still Indrani wouldn’t let him stop. When he claimed to be too tired to continue, Rockface took over the job of poling them along. The big man was even more clumsy than Stopmouth had been, and surprisingly nervous, perched on the edge of the raft.

  ‘Those trees are still pretty sickly,’ said Indrani. Stopmouth didn’t think she was much better herself. She had gained some strength, but looked like she could have done with a few more days’ rest before setting off. If we get past the Diggers, he thought, we can hole up for a while. Then his only problem would be keeping Rockface from turning back in search of special Digger trophies. He sighed. At least he’d finally found one thing the big man feared. Rockface was sweating much more than would have been expected and he kept his gaze away from the water as much as possible.

  ‘Let me take over for a while,’ said Stopmouth. ‘Go on, we’ll need your strength for later. And I enjoy it.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ said Rockface, handing over the pole immediately.

  Stopmouth wasn’t sure. Exhaustion and pain were quick to replace the pleasure of his earlier exertion. Roofsweat started falling shortly after that. It brought some relief. It also saved his life.

  Just as the trees were looking healthier, something grabbed the pole and yanked hard. Stopmouth’s slick palms lost their grip and he fell forwards onto Rockface, one hand clutching at the straps that held the logs together, the other landing in the water. Indrani shouted a warning and he pulled his arm free just as a pale head, all eyes and teeth, surfaced, lunged and sank.

  For a beat all was calm. Stopmouth had knocked the wind out of Rockface. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered as the big man struggled for breath. The pole was floating away from them. Stopmouth got to his knees and used his Armourback-shell spear, point first, to pull it in closer.

  Then something battered into the bottom of their raft, making them sway wildly. Stopmouth had to give up on the pole to lie flat on top of the supplies. The battering was repeated again and again. The creature or creatures struck mostly in the same place, as if hoping to create a weak spot. Perhaps they could see one already, a crack in a log or a frayed lashing. More of them seemed to be joining in on the assault. A flurry of thumps came that rattled every log and loosened the hide ropes holding them together.

  ‘Get away!’ shrieked Indrani. Stopmouth couldn’t see what had frightened her, but she rolled over towards him. As the raft tipped up, a log at the high end came loose entirely and floated free.

  ‘Untie another!’ cried a ‘voice’ from beneath them. Stopmouth saw a delicate white arm with writhing fingertips pulling at the rope directly under him. He shoved his dagger into the gap between logs, felt it bite, ‘heard’ a yelp of pain. But the raft continued to spin and twitch and shudder under a dozen different attacks.

  ‘We’ll have to give them the food!’ said Indrani.

  ‘We’re dead without it!’ he said. But it didn’t matter and they all knew it. Another log was starting to come loose.

  ‘Hold me steady,’ he said to Rockface.

  A few quick cuts removed the hide that kept the food safe. Then the three humans could only watch as their chances of surviving the journey spilled into the water, one precious joint of flesh at a time.

  A frenzy ensued. It seemed as if the creatures were fighting amongst themselves.

  By now the humans were clinging together on the three shaky logs that hadn’t been torn free. Rockface, still underneath, had a dagger in one hand and his eyes fixed on the water, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Stopmouth could feel Indrani’s rapid breath, wet against his ear.

  ‘Behind you,’ she whispered. He wanted to spin round, but knew it would have killed them all. However, it wasn’t an attack she’d spotted–some kindly ancestor had sent the steering pole floating back towards them.

  ‘I can’t reach it,’ he said, ‘even with the spear.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Rockface. ‘Let me up!’ His efforts to rise shoved Stopmouth onto Indrani and nearly over the edge. The raft swayed and dipped.

  ‘Enough! Rockface, please!’ said Stopmouth. ‘You can’t reach it either! Somebody will have to lean out over the water. Somebody the others can hold onto…’

  He could tell by the increased rapidity of Indrani’s breathing that she knew who that person had to be.

  The battle for their supplies seemed to be calming down now. Perhaps the creatures would be sated with what they’d already won, perhaps not.

  Rockface held Indrani by the waist as she leaned out towards the pole, her shadow stretching over the reflections of the tracklights on the surface of the water. Stopmouth kept them balanced by sitting as far back as he dared.

  ‘A bit more,’ Indrani said, straining, brushing the pole with the butt of the spear. All other activity in the Wetlane had come to a halt and Stopmouth wanted to scream at her to hurry up. Rivulets of sweat ran down her face, dripping into the water like invitations. She passed back the spear and lifted up the pole.

  ‘Watch out!’ yelled Rockface.

  A white head appeared and two arms, tipped with a nest of tentacles, reached up as if to embrace her. Indrani yelled and swung the wood at them. As the beast ducked away, she shoved the pole into the water and pushed the raft a man-length closer to the bank. Rockface drew hi
s knife and slashed at the water where the creature had been, yelling the worst insults he knew: ‘Waster! Hoarder! I’ll eat those eyes for you! Flesh rotter!’

  Whatever differences the creatures may have had earlier were forgotten, and everywhere their white forms were streaming towards what remained of the raft.

  Stopmouth threw his weapons and tool-belt over to the shore. It wasn’t so far now, but something was fighting with Indrani for control of the pole. She smacked the creature over the head with it even as more tentacle-like fingers were reaching up out of the water. She had to let it go.

  ‘Jump!’ Stopmouth said to the others. ‘Jump!’ Indrani did, while he struggled to keep them steady. Even so, she almost capsized them. Hands were already reaching up from below, plucking at his ankles, loosening the remaining knots. Rockface had a snarl fixed to his face. White arms clustered around him. ‘Jump!’ screamed Stopmouth again. Rockface ignored him, slashing and stabbing. ‘Please, Rockface! Do you want to end up like Lingerhouse?’ Half eaten, trapped in horror at the bottom of Wallbreaker’s net. Some of the fury left the big man’s face. ‘Please, Rockface, we need you! Jump!’

  Rockface roared. His great fist pummelled once against a pale row of eyeballs. Then he tore himself free and leaped ashore, even as one of the last three logs came away from the raft.

  Stopmouth’s heart was beating now, faster than the drums at his brother’s wedding. He couldn’t get up without falling in; he couldn’t control the raft. Terror ran free in his blood. Why hadn’t he jumped himself? Why should he be the last one left here, where the others couldn’t even help him?

  ‘It’s better to drown them first,’ said a ‘voice’ beneath him. ‘Pull it down and fill its lungs!’

  ‘One more knot,’ said another.

  ‘Stopmouth!’

  The beasts sounded happy. ‘It’s coming loose. I have it now!’

  Something poked Stopmouth in the face. He saw it was the end of his spear, and he grabbed onto it for dear life. Indrani and Rockface pulled the raft in with desperate strength. The creatures, surprised perhaps at the sudden movement, reacted slowly. Stopmouth shook off their clutches and brought his legs and body onto the shore, one arm trailing behind him on the raft. To right and left, other figures were struggling out of the water too.

  ‘Leave them to me!’ shouted Rockface, running to head them off. ‘They’re mine!’

  But the beasts hadn’t finished with Stopmouth yet. One creature, pale and slender of body, surged out of the Wetlane and fixed the needle teeth of its jaws about the young man’s biceps. The pain and the beast’s weight dragged him back to the water, where shapes were rising and jaws opening.

  Indrani screamed with rage. She still had the Armourback-shell spear. She plunged it deep into the chest of the creature on Stopmouth’s arm, and although it didn’t let go, the two humans together managed to wrestle it ashore.

  The hunter felt its grip release and he rolled away, clutching at his arm, almost delirious with pain and terror.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ said a ‘voice’. ‘I’m dying. I can’t breathe.’

  Stopmouth’s arm was bleeding profusely. ‘Shut it up,’ he said. ‘Kill it!’

  But he heard a splash, and when he sat up, the creature was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘What…?’ For the first time since the arrival of the Talker, he was speechless.

  ‘It was frightened,’ said Indrani.

  ‘Frightened?’ He couldn’t believe it. He looked around. Rockface stood panting fifty paces further up the bank. He was covered in scratches and bites, but none of the enemy had managed to scramble ashore. Stopmouth turned back to Indrani. ‘But what are we going to eat? It might have kept us alive.’

  Indrani shook her head and pointed upwards. ‘They’re watching me, don’t you see? Every awful thing I do down here will make them less likely to take me back. And…and that beast’s no different from you, Stopmouth. It’s an intelligent, suffering being. I couldn’t kill it, I—’

  ‘You did kill it!’ he shouted.

  ‘Go easy,’ said Rockface, walking back towards them.

  Stopmouth ignored him. ‘You stabbed it through the chest with my spear. It’s being eaten, right now, by its own kind!’

  She started crying then. Great sobs that pulled at his heart. She didn’t move away when he wrapped his bleeding arms around her, but nor did she hug him back. Instead, she soaked his shoulder with tears.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ said Rockface, patting her back from the other side. Stopmouth didn’t contradict him, although he knew they’d all be dead in a few short days.

  ‘Not all the flesh was lost,’ Rockface continued. His voice was surprisingly gentle and Stopmouth remembered how caring and careful he’d always been around his son, Littleknife. ‘I still have a roll of Clawfolk meat in the pouch on my tool-belt. And we’d have wanted to do a bit of hunting on this trip anyway, hey? What was the point of bringing more than we could carry? Now we get to chase something fresh, something no human has tasted since the Traveller!’

  Indrani pulled away from both of them. ‘I don’t want to kill things. I don’t want to eat them.’ Her weeping got worse. ‘It’s wrong. I can’t do it any more.’

  Stopmouth didn’t know what to say. He remembered his own mother’s words whenever he refused the flesh of some evil-tasting creature as a child. He repeated the admonition to Indrani: ‘If you don’t eat flesh, you’re killing yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re weakening the Tribe.’

  ‘I have no Tribe,’ she said. ‘They’ll never take me back now.’

  ‘We are your Tribe, Rockface and me!’

  ‘You’re only savages.’ The Talker had never found a good word in Human for that particular concept, but it hurt him as nothing else could.

  ‘You’ve taken flesh like the rest of us savages,’ he said. ‘And we had to kill extra so you wouldn’t go hungry. Those beasts died at your hand even if you were too much of a coward to lift the spear yourself!’

  She wiped her eyes with the palm of one hand. ‘You’re right. It’s too late for me now.’ She took a deep shivering breath. ‘I will hunt with you tomorrow.’

  Later Stopmouth took the risk of lighting a fire. He felt Indrani needed it and he certainly did. He baked all Rockface’s Clawfolk flesh, seeing no point in trying to save any for the morning.

  That night, for the first time, Indrani ripped into her food as if she were really enjoying it. She ate with relish and asked for more when she’d already put enough away to keep Rockface quiet. But there was no more. She shrugged and lay back, firelight dancing over the perfect lines of her face even as Rockface’s first snores tore through the night. Stopmouth watched her, thinking, surely she was too beautiful to be real.

  ‘Are you truly human?’ Stopmouth asked. He hoped she’d open her eyes and look at him. Another part of him wanted her to keep them closed so he could watch her without making her angry.

  They stayed closed.

  ‘I’m human,’ she muttered. ‘As human as you are, anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked, puzzled.

  She lifted her head. ‘None of your men have hair on their faces. You live on a diet of pure meat, most of it non-human. Your women never die in childbirth. You rarely get sick, any of you. And all of a sudden I’m the one who’s not human?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, confused by her strange words, ‘I only asked because…well, you mentioned something about my ancestors yesterday. As if they were different from yours.’

  ‘You don’t really want to know.’

  ‘I do, of course I do.’ Wallbreaker would want to know, but never would. It was a thrilling thought.

  She nodded slowly. ‘I’m not sure, Stopmouth. You’re so different from your ancestors.’

  It was a cruel thing to say. ‘I am?’

  ‘Yes. Very different. You see, they were cowards. They were deserters and thieves.’ That word again, deserters. Uttered as if there were nothing worse in all the world. �
��They stole everything from my people and left us to die. They deserved this gods-forsaken world and everything that happened to them since. But you don’t, Stopmouth. You’re—’

  Stopmouth felt his face grow hot. He was dizzy. She mustn’t have meant it, she couldn’t have. To speak ill of the ancestors was like…like wasting food, like murder. And the hypocrisy of it! He and Indrani were the ones deserting their Tribe. They were the thieves, stealing their own flesh from the needy. Stopmouth turned away lest his forefathers see her through his eyes and force him to avenge them. Perhaps she apologized afterwards, but he didn’t listen. He waited until she slept. Then he was up on his knees, begging forgiveness on her behalf until sleep took him.

  15.

  AN ANCESTOR’S WRATH

  That night the ancestors sent Stopmouth many bad dreams. He was a criminal, they informed him, who’d stolen his flesh from the Tribe to run off with a woman who despised him.

  ‘You’re just a savage; a potential rapist.’

  He tried to block out their voices, but Mother was among them, and his half-remembered father.

  ‘If Indrani hates us who are the marrow of your bones, your flesh, your heart, then what must she think of you?’

  He opened his eyes, praying desperately that the night had finally ended. But darkness still reigned under the trees with the patter of Roofsweat playing softly on the branches. He wasn’t the only one visited by nightmares: big Rockface was sobbing in his sleep. How terrible to lose your whole family all in one go. During the day Rockface smiled and joked and blustered. Yet sometimes it didn’t seem real to Stopmouth and he worried about the man. Many in similar situations had simply volunteered. But not Rockface. His whole chest shivered with grief, his deep voice now so childlike.

  And Stopmouth heard something else: a sound of jerky movement. He looked over to Indrani and saw that she’d gone. She liked privacy for when she made water, but she wasn’t so stupid as to go unarmed. She’d taken his tool-belt with its weapons and left the Talker behind.