The Inferior

by Peadar O'Guilin

  More movement. A struggle, he thought.

  Stopmouth grabbed his spear and surged to his feet.

  ‘Rockface!’ He kicked his companion awake. ‘Up! Up! I think something has taken Indrani!’

  The ground he stood on trembled slightly, but he had no time to worry about that. He placed the Talker about his neck and helped Rockface to his feet. Both men padded towards the movements as quickly and quietly as they could.

  ‘That way!’ said Rockface suddenly, and started running through the whipping fronds of darkened trees. Stopmouth chased after him. He too could hear sounds ahead now.

  Something whipped past his ear and shattered against a nearby tree. Then Rockface cried out and fell over. The young hunter sidestepped and half fell behind a solid trunk. He could hear more impacts through the wood. Slingstones? His heart was hammering. He wondered for a moment if Indrani had lost her mind and started attacking him with his own weapons.

  ‘Rockface? Rockface?’ There was no answer and he couldn’t see his companion from where he hid.

  The vibrations in the ground were getting stronger.

  ‘Come out, Stopmouth,’ said a man’s voice.

  The young hunter felt his gorge rise. Crunchfist. He should have been expecting it. The ancestors seemed to inhabit the man constantly and kept him alive through everything. What better vehicle could they have for the punishment of law-breakers?

  ‘Your woman gave me more trouble than the Longtongues I killed on my way here. She nearly broke my nose. I will enjoy her while you cower behind that tree.’

  ‘What do you want from us, Crunchfist?’ Underneath the protection of the Talker, he stuttered worse than he ever had before.

  The earth rumbled. Back towards the edge of the wood, a number of trees started listing to one side, sinking into the ground.

  ‘The Diggers are coming,’ said Crunchfist, his voice harsh against the drip-drip of Roofsweat through the branches. ‘They’ve been tracking me since I took a bit of flesh from their fields.’ He didn’t sound in the least bit concerned. Trees began falling, some of them breaking in half with a great cracking noise. Stopmouth pictured the Diggers underground, struggling through the roots with empty eye-sockets and chewed-up skin, while their own young ate them alive. He wondered why they hadn’t simply surfaced outside the forest and run the last few hundred paces. And yet, in spite of the route they’d chosen, the beasts were getting nearer. When they reached the clearing where the large hunter waited with his prisoner, there’d be nothing to stop them.

  ‘It’s very simple,’ said Crunchfist. ‘Your coward brother wants another metal toy. He’ll have to forgive me publicly if I get it for him. Then he’ll have an accident and I’ll be chief. But first I’ll give him a full account of how I enjoyed his woman.’

  ‘I’ll swap you the Talker for her,’ said Stopmouth as Crunchfist must have known he would.

  But both of them had waited too long. Somewhere below ground the Diggers had found a corridor free of roots all the way to the clearing where the big hunter waited with his prisoner. Stopmouth’s tree leaned back so suddenly it knocked him over onto his side. He saw soil fountain into the air between himself and the other humans. He heard Crunchfist curse above the din and saw Indrani collapse to the ground as he released her. Diggers with writhing skin and powerful claws surged out of the hole towards Crunchfist before he could run from them. He bellowed as the ancestors filled him with anger and inhuman strength.

  Stopmouth could only watch helplessly. He wondered how he could use the distraction of the attack to sneak in and rescue Indrani. Seeing her endangered swallowed all the anger he’d felt for her only a few hours before. He realized that no person in this world was more precious to him. She’d suffered terrible crimes at the hand of his family and it was his sacred duty to see her safe now. But the Diggers were on all sides, scrambling towards the man who’d stolen from them, and there was no way through.

  Crunchfist was fast as well as strong. He worked his spear like a club, sweeping beasts into heaps with the butt until he saw a opening. Then the pointed end found throats or empty eye-sockets. He fought with fury, snarling and snapping like a Bloodskin. Spitting curses. The Diggers were no weaklings as the Flims had been, and Stopmouth counted at least ten in their hunting party. But incredibly the big man drove them back towards their hole, receiving only small wounds and scratches for every one of them he put out of the fight. But he was weakening. Stopmouth saw one Digger tear a gash in his calf and Crunchfist almost went down, staggering and swaying, biting his own lip bloody with pain. He flung his spear straight into the head of an enemy before wringing the neck of the one that had injured him. He used this corpse as a bludgeon. Another creature ducked under it to score him across the ribs.

  Stopmouth hated the man and feared him above all others. But when he saw Crunchfist in trouble, a human fighting heroically against beasts, he knew he had to intervene. Only two of the original attackers remained, but the earth was rumbling again and Stopmouth felt certain more of them were about to climb out of the pit that separated him from the other humans. It was no wider than a man lying down, and if Stopmouth positioned himself at the lip on his side, he might just be able to spear the Diggers from behind as they emerged.

  Crunchfist dispatched the last of his enemies and staggered back towards Indrani. The shaking of the ground was intensifying and Stopmouth was about to shout across the pit to offer the man the Talker again when something incredible happened: eight of the creatures Crunchfist had ‘killed’, including the one with the spear jammed in its body, seemed to have revived themselves enough to begin crawling or rolling back towards the pit.

  ‘How?’ asked Crunchfist when he too saw it.

  A great crack! filled the air and three trees on the far side of the clearing toppled over. The upper branches of one of them scratched Stopmouth all along one side of his body, cutting him off from Indrani even more. To get to her now, he’d have to climb through branches and over the trunk. And he’d need to hurry: even as he watched, a new pit opened up behind the other humans, and Diggers clustered at its edge.

  Crunchfist roared his frustration. He picked up his prisoner and flung her body at the beasts to scatter them. Stopmouth screamed. He fought through clinging, sopping branches, knowing he’d never make it in time. One of the creatures, perhaps to disable her, had already shoved claws deep into one of her calves.

  ‘Give me the Talker!’ shouted Crunchfist. ‘Give it to me and I swear by all the ancestors I’ll save her. I swear it. Let me never go Home if I lie.’

  Stopmouth didn’t hesitate. He threw the pouch over the tree and the first pit. Crunchfist nodded once, his great frame leaking blood from a dozen wounds. Then he charged straight in among the beasts. There were fewer of them and they must have sensed the battered remains of the first party. But they showed no fear.

  Stopmouth didn’t wait to see what happened. He was desperately trying to climb onto the fallen trunk and it blocked his view of the fight. He heard Crunchfist’s shouts and sometimes the grunts that indicated fresh injuries. The younger man’s spear kept getting in the way, yet he didn’t dare let go of it. In a dozen heartbeats he’d made it onto the trunk and all of the carnage became visible.

  Dead beasts lay everywhere, but they’d left red slashes of revenge all over their enemy. Now the big man was wrestling with one of two surviving Diggers. Such was his weakness, the contest was an equal one. But not for long: the other surviving creature, its hind legs broken, crawled towards the struggle, intending perhaps to hamstring its opponent.

  Stopmouth had too many branches to get through to join the fight. So he steadied himself on the trunk and pinned the crawling Digger to the ground with a mighty throw of his spear. Crunchfist needed no help with the last beast. He snapped its back over his knee.

  ‘Good,’ said the big man, looking up. Already some of his ‘dead’ opponents had begun dragging themselves back to the pit from which they’d emerged, yellow grubs
wriggling frantically over their skin. ‘You gave me the Talker and I have saved your woman as I promised.’ With visible effort, he picked up Indrani. Her leg wound was bleeding freely and would need to be bound as soon as possible.

  ‘Leave her there,’ said Stopmouth. ‘I will tend to her when you’re gone.’

  Crunchfist laughed. ‘And what am I supposed to eat for my journey home? Do you think I’ll risk one of those’–he kicked at a crawling Digger–‘coming alive in my belly?’

  ‘You promised,’ said Stopmouth. He was already looking for a way down through the rest of the branches to challenge the weakened hunter.

  Indrani groaned and blinked her eyes. Crunchfist transferred her to his left arm. With his right, grunting in pain, he wrenched the Armourback-shell spear from the body of a twitching Digger.

  ‘You’ll be needing this,’ he said. He flung it, point first, straight at the younger man. Stopmouth jerked to one side, but the tree swayed beneath him and he fell backwards in amongst the clinging branches. He too was not as strong as he should have been, and he struggled far too long to free himself and recover his weapon. Dawn was brightening the Roof by the time he’d made it into the clearing. Some of the ‘dead’ Diggers had disappeared underground. The others, perhaps five, lay unmoving, and the grubs that had once crawled all over them had fallen off the bodies and were nowhere to be seen.

  His stomach rumbled. He remembered Crunchfist’s comment about the Diggers coming alive in his tummy, but for all his fears he knew he’d need his strength to track the man and find Indrani. The shell tip of his spear sliced easily through Digger flesh. It was riddled with little grub-sized holes, but he put that out of his mind and forced himself to chew the tough flesh and swallow. A horrible thought came to him: Crunchfist would be hungry too.

  He jumped to his feet. And stopped. What about Rockface? Crunchfist must have hit him with a slingshot. After all he’d done for Stopmouth, surely the least he was entitled to was that a friend should consume his flesh.

  Stopmouth shook himself out of his reverie. Indrani couldn’t afford to wait. He followed bloodstains into the forest. The trees seemed to close around him, almost bringing night again. Pungent moss, unlike any at home, hung from every branch and quickly bathed him in a cold slime. Tracking became extremely difficult. Crunchfist, in spite of his injuries, had gone to some effort to cover his trail, and several times the younger man would have lost it entirely had it not been for a curious thing: he kept finding items from his own tool-belt. His sling lay caught in the branches of a bush; his needle glittered in a stray shaft of Rooflight. Part of him wondered if the other hunter were leading him slowly into a trap, but that was more Wallbreaker’s style than Crunchfist’s. No, it had to be Indrani, calling for help.

  He stumbled on, ignoring a thousand scratches and a throbbing pain in his left biceps. The ground squelched beneath him here and the cloying smell of rot hung in the air. By nightfall he still hadn’t caught them. He was getting desperate.

  The trail finally ended when Stopmouth found Crunchfist’s bloody knife. Hidden in the undergrowth around it lay the entrances to three tunnels. The beasts must have picked their way carefully through the roots to get here, for above ground there were no signs of sagging trees. It was a perfect ambush. Stopmouth’s legs wobbled beneath him. He allowed himself to fall and lay still on his back, watching the tracklights of the Roof. He didn’t need to go looking for Indrani any more. He knew where she must be.

  The young hunter forced himself to wait for daylight, trying for sleep and failing. When dawn brightened the Roof, he shoved Crunchfist’s knife into his belt and made his way to the forest’s edge. He could see the border of the Diggers’ territory from here.

  Stopmouth walked into the open, passing over the roofs of sunken houses to the place where the bodies began. They were thick in this area, with no room to walk between them and only the odd lump of rock sticking up here and there. The stench was incredible, even worse than he remembered it: like a mixture of vomit and human waste. It was so strong that the young hunter had to stop to force clumps of pounded moss into his nostrils and take deep breaths until the nausea had passed.

  Sometimes little bits of equipment lay scattered around the listless victims. The Diggers obviously had no use for anything other than their claws and hadn’t bothered collecting them.

  The young hunter found Crunchfist first. On a human face the agony suffered by all the surrounding creatures was obvious. The man said nothing, looked at nothing in particular. Yet his eyes bulged out of their sockets, and while his body hung motionless except for the odd twitch, his nostrils flared and his lips were drawn back as far as they could go. The soil only rose to his thighs, and around him were scattered his broken spear-shaft, the Talker and bits and pieces from his tool-belt.

  ‘Crunchfist?’ No answer came, nor even the faintest hint of recognition. Stopmouth was anxious to find Indrani. Like Crunchfist, she was a new arrival. The young hunter hoped that meant she’d be somewhere on the edge of the crowd too. But he needed the Talker and he didn’t want to leave any human in this kind of agony, even Crunchfist. So he gripped his spear firmly and shoved it straight into the big man’s heart.

  ‘Mother!’ said Crunchfist. ‘Oh, Mother!’

  ‘Hush,’ said Stopmouth. ‘You’ll bring them on me.’

  Crunchfist grabbed the spear-shaft and pulled it deeper into himself before a surprised Stopmouth could let it go. He fell off-balance into the big man’s embrace. Arms twice the size of his own squeezed tight.

  ‘Mother,’ wheezed Crunchfist. Nearby, other creatures began to take up the call. Stopmouth could barely breathe, and the clumps of moss in his nose only made matters worse. He struggled, pushing and prying at the immovable arm holding him. The vision at the corners of his eyes began to darken. He forced himself not to think about air, not to waste his energies on useless struggles. Instead, he tried to turn his kneeling legs into a position where he might push away with them. The soil was too slippy for a proper grip. He needed…

  ‘Mother!’

  Mother indeed. He could see her smiling. She hadn’t died at all, then. Her embrace was firm and loving. Far away he could feel his feet scrabbling, slipping. It was tiring work and neither he nor his mother could see the point of it. Better to rest, to sleep. Then one of her arms fell away and the grip of the other weakened. Stopmouth took in a gulp of air, the glaring Roof swimming above him. He felt himself sliding backwards.

  A familiar voice said, ‘I can’t believe it. Look, Stopmouth! I cut his throat and the poor man’s still alive, hey? Stopmouth?’

  ‘Rockface?’ He sat up. The first thing he saw was the blood bubbling far too slowly from a gash in Crunchfist’s neck. One of the hunter’s arms lay on the ground where Rockface had hacked through it. He was still trying to speak–the same word, ‘Mother’, mouthed again and again–as the other prisoners around him lapsed into silence.

  Rockface hunkered down beside Stopmouth, the smell from his teeth covered completely by the stench around them. A thatch of dried blood clumped the hair down one side of his head, but he smiled, as though delighted to be in this fine place.

  ‘Let’s find Indrani, hey?’

  She’d been buried sideways on. She also tried to squeeze the life out of Stopmouth and called for her mother. But Rockface pinned her arms while Stopmouth dug up the soil with Crunchfist’s blunt knife. The earth writhed with yellow grubs, most no larger than his thumb. A few had grown to the size of his hand, and these tried to dig themselves out of his way with tiny limbs. But not for long. They curled and died without any intervention on his part while the imprisoned beasts around him continued calling for their mothers.

  Blisters and wounds of many sizes covered Indrani’s skin beneath the level of the soil. None appeared very deep. Even the wound in her calf caused by the adult Digger seemed shallower than it should have been.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Mother,’ she replied. She
struck at him clumsily until they’d pulled her ten strides from the rest of the prisoners. Then her eyes closed and the agony left her face.

  Rockface offered to carry her.

  ‘No,’ said Stopmouth, although Crunchfist had squeezed the strength out of him. He heaved her onto his shoulders and staggered back to the rotting forest edge, while the big man trotted ahead. Behind them, a wild variety of beasts continued to suffer in their shared torment. A disturbing desire tore at Stopmouth to turn round and dig them all up, no matter that they weren’t human. He knew it was stupidly dangerous and wrong besides, for surely none of those he rescued would have hesitated to hunt him. No, each species must look after its own.

  Indrani’s condition didn’t change until they reached the cover of the trees. Then she made a terrible choking noise. Alarmed, he dropped her to the ground. Her whole body spasmed and she came up on her hands and knees, choking and coughing. About fifty little grubs sprayed from her throat onto the mossy soil. Many of them wriggled for a moment, trying to bury themselves perhaps. But one by one they fell still.

  Indrani’s eyes were open, looking straight at him. ‘I knew you’d come,’ she said. Then she lay down on top of the mess she’d made.

  Stopmouth took one of the grubs and held it up to the light. The colour already seemed darker. It felt slimy and a little warm.

  The hunter shrugged and popped it into his mouth.

  ‘Good eating!’ said Rockface. He shoved a whole handful between his own jaws and sucked noisily on the juice. Then he placed one grub in his ear and one against the orbit of an eye. ‘Look at me, Stopmouth! What am I, hey? Take a guess!’

  ‘Careful, Rockface, we need to save some of those for Indrani. She’ll be needing her strength.’

  ‘Oh, you’re worse than your father, boy. Too full of strange thoughts to have a laugh. I remember one time, old Toecracker hid your father’s portion of the kill and he was too embarrassed to admit he couldn’t find it. We watched him go round and round the fire, pretending he was just restless, and I laughed so much I wet myself. That was my first hunt as a man. It was the best time I ever had.’