The Inferior

by Peadar O'Guilin

  The Skeletons increased their pace, their legs bent backwards, seeming to imbue every step with extra spring. Many had drool running down their chins, their narrow mouths working beneath a quartet of colourless eyes. Stopmouth waited until the main body had passed him. Then he screamed, ‘Attack!’ in the only language he knew and began launching slingstones into the packed mass of beasts. For a heartbeat he was alone, but then stones were flying in from all directions.

  The Skeletons had barely a moment to absorb this shock before men poured out of doorways with spears and knives. Many of the beasts managed to bring their own weapons to bear, and they might have slaughtered their inexperienced attackers if Yama’s group hadn’t come charging back into the fray at just the right time. They screamed as they advanced and the enemy, packed in together and caught on all sides, could do little to defend themselves.

  The victors cheered and licked their weapons.

  Stopmouth smiled so as not to dishearten them. Many men lay dead or volunteered, their faces melted away. Maybe twenty since the day had begun. Too high a price. In the distance the tree trunk was still pounding against the second barrier. Yama indicated they should go back towards it. ‘There’s no point,’ said Stopmouth, knowing the boy couldn’t understand him. ‘They’re expecting us.’ He desperately needed time to think.

  And then the pounding stopped.

  His men, who were still celebrating their little victory, froze. They all realized what it meant. Stopmouth gripped the shaft of his spear like he meant to throttle it. He had nothing to say to them, nothing at all. The Skeletons would soon be inside the complex on their way to the women and children. He couldn’t save them now. But perhaps…perhaps there was a way to be with them at the end.

  ‘Let’s go!’ he shouted. ‘Come on! Move!’

  He led the men back to where the Skeletons had been trying to climb onto the roof of Headquarters earlier in the night. Corpses surrounded the fallen tree trunks.

  He indicated to his hunters that they should help him raise one of the beams against the wall. Many were arguing, pointing back in the direction of the barrier. So Stopmouth began heaving at the wood by himself until the others joined in. The Skeletons had carved handholds into the trunk, and while the spacing wasn’t right for human limbs, they were definitely helpful.

  Stopmouth pointed at Yama and then the roof.

  ‘Go!’ he signalled.

  For once the boy didn’t try to contradict him. He climbed as well as any Flim while other men kept the trunk steady. When Yama reached the top, he stared around for a few heartbeats and then turned back and shouted something. Suddenly everyone was grabbing at the handholds, all of them trying to climb at once. Stopmouth and Kubar made them raise the other trunk and fought them into a rough queue. Then Stopmouth flung his spear over the parapet and followed it up.

  Yama heaved him over the edge into chaos.

  The roof he’d climbed onto was the lowest of the three that made up Headquarters. The others lay perpendicular to it and looked down on it by less than the height of a child. Defences were concentrated around the long flat roofs of the two buildings which lay to either side of the U’s mouth. Defenders were streaming away from one of these now, while people on the other side jumped up and down in anxiety. Stopmouth could make out the figure of Indrani standing among the second group, urging them to stop staring, to keep throwing rocks. He could hear Rockface yelling in rage at the fools around him.

  Stopmouth still couldn’t see any Skeletons. But he guessed that one of the ground-floor doors or windows had been breached and the enemy were now on their way up the stairs to the rooftop. And so the defenders were running away, seeking to preserve their lives a little longer when they could have sold them dearly at the skylight. Men and women pushed past Stopmouth and Yama at the base of the U. A few of the braver ones halted long enough to help hunters over the parapet. In this way Stopmouth had gathered most of his men together when the first Skeletons arrived through the skylight onto the recently abandoned building.

  The beasts took their time. They had no need to rush now. They spread out to allow others of their kind to climb up unmolested.

  Stopmouth brought his men over to join Indrani on the far side of the U from where the enemy had entered. Everybody here looked tired and afraid. Old women had bloody hands from pushing rocks and throwing stones. Men wept; some rolled into balls, their arms wrapped around their knees. The whole Tribe knew it was the end, that tonight the Skeletons would feast on their flesh.

  Stopmouth looked at his woman. The tree-trunk ladders still leaned against the wall. If they ran now, the two of them could make another desperate try for the Roof. And yet not everyone had given up hope. Yama had gathered his boys together and he whispered to them fiercely. Kubar and others were picking up slingstones.

  Meanwhile the handsome Varaha had finally lost his composure. He scanned the Roof, muttering to himself, fidgeting with his necklace. But he also held a spear in his white-knuckled hand and it was clear he intended to use it.

  ‘We’ll kill them all, hey?’ Rockface stood right at his ear, a grin on his face. His belt bristled with spare weapons. The dullness of before had completely disappeared. ‘They won’t be getting my flesh!’

  ‘I thought you w-wanted to v-v-volunteer.’

  Rockface growled. ‘Do I look like a volunteer to you? You asked me to guard the children. And I am.’

  Indrani was busy too, dragging women to their feet, hissing at tired old men till they armed themselves. Stopmouth knew then that even if it meant his death, he couldn’t abandon his people to this. They were Tribe and only the Tribe could give life its meaning.

  ‘Everybody listen to me!’ he shouted. As always, it amazed him the way they stopped and turned to him. ‘We can still beat them!’ he said. ‘They’re the ones who’ve suffered all the losses getting here! We’re far more numerous now!’ It wouldn’t matter, of course. Women, children and weaklings against real hunters. ‘But they’ll beat us if we cower back here. We need to meet them just before the base of the U, where we’ll have the advantage.’ The enemy would have to climb half the height of a man to reach the defenders.

  They followed him there and he marshalled them into a line with spearmen at the front and everybody else gathering up handfuls of stones. He took a deep breath. The Skeletons would pay dearly for their genocide.

  ‘Hunters! Slings first.’ The enemy would be exposed for several heartbeats as they jumped down on the other side.

  He felt somebody move into the line beside him. ‘Indrani?’ Sweat and grime covered her from head to foot. She was magnificent, beautiful, and seemed utterly unafraid. ‘Don’t worry, Stopmouth. They brought the spirit-lovers here for a reason. They won’t let me die. You’ll see.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who won’t let you die?’

  She didn’t answer the question. She took his face in her hands and kissed him. ‘I’m glad I found you,’ she said. ‘Now, we must be ready. Look!’

  She turned to face the enemy.

  Fifty or sixty Skeletons had made it onto the roof. It had been an expensive night for them. They must have lost tens under rocks plus those that Stopmouth and his men had already killed outside. It was more than any Tribe could afford and Stopmouth knew they’d never have been willing to pay the cost had they known it in advance. Now they came forward at a jog, crossing from one roof to the next on their arm of the U.

  The humans waited for them in a mass of bristling spears and stakes without points. Many of the people there couldn’t even hold a weapon the right way round. But the beasts didn’t know that and stopped in their tracks just out of sling range.

  Everybody waited, spears weighing on tired muscles, while the Skeletons seemed to confer amongst themselves. The beasts were in no rush. Stopmouth could hear children crying and mothers hushing them. Otherwise the humans were silent as the enemy made plans to kill them.

  ‘We should attack them,’ said Yama. ‘They look confused.’ />
  Nobody paid him any attention. Stopmouth sighed, his fear ebbing away. Maybe the enemy would call it a day now. It’s what he’d have done. If the Skeletons made an orderly retreat and took all their dead with them, the humans were finished. Thirty days of hunger and attrition would guarantee it.

  Then people around him cried out in dismay. Ten more Skeletons had climbed up through the skylight. They must have come from the rearguard at the barrier. One of these was the tall creature with the decorated hides that Stopmouth had seen at the beginning of the night. It gestured once with its spear, and all the others fell in around it. Then it pointed its weapon across the U at the humans. The beasts surged forward, leaping down onto the lower roof that separated them from their quarry.

  ‘Stone them!’ shouted Stopmouth. He needn’t have bothered. Every human, from the smallest child capable of lifting a rock to the woman with the greyest hair, flung stones for all they were worth. Stopmouth’s hunters used their slings, a few of them getting in two shots before the Skeletons had crossed half the roof. Most of the stones were ineffectual–some didn’t even reach the enemy. But others struck home, and here and there a beast stumbled, fatally slowing the charge of its comrades and giving the defenders yet more chances to attack.

  ‘Got one!’ Rockface shouted. ‘Got one!’

  Stopmouth himself slung like a madman, matched stone for stone by Sodasi and Kamala.

  Then the Skeletons were flinging knives before them. Women and children screamed as they were struck. Hunters fell. They were dragged away and replaced as the first of the enemy came close enough to fight. Men stabbed into the glowing mass of beasts. Sometimes the target of their attacks would grab a thrusting spear in tentacle-like hands, pulling humans down amongst slashing knives.

  Stopmouth felt like he was watching himself fight, watching a stranger. Fear had left his body entirely and his Armourback-shell weapon worked in a blur before him. He was aware of Indrani nearby, backing him up, making sure he never had more than two to deal with at a time.

  Behind the line of hunters, women and older children lobbed a continual rain of fist-sized rocks over the men’s heads. Meanwhile the sisters, Sodasi and Kamala, were still managing to fire obliquely into the mass of the enemy. This close, they couldn’t miss.

  It all worked as Stopmouth had dreamed. Every weak link of the human body moved as one until the whole was stronger than the sum of its parts. Yet it wasn’t enough. Yama screamed, his leg bubbling with beast spit. A pair of knives flashed through the air to take another man in the stomach. The defence began to buckle.

  ‘I’m jumping!’ shouted Indrani. ‘I’m jumping now!’

  And she did. One moment Stopmouth felt her beside him, the next she was gone, in amongst the enemy.

  ‘Indrani!’ he screamed.

  He saw her fall to the ground just in front of him. A beast was reaching down for her with a knife. Stopmouth’s vision turned red. He all but decapitated Indrani’s attacker with a swing of his Armourback-shell spear. But two more of the enemy were already reaching for her and the rest of the humans were being driven from the edge of the roof. He felt a cut on his leg and found the Skeleton chief before him, pushing him back, away from Indrani. He screamed.

  It was then that the Globe descended on them, a streak of shining, roaring silver. The sky flashed.

  The whole world seemed to shake. A wave of heat washed over the combatants, followed by smoke. The fighting paused as human and beast took in what had happened. Half the lower building of the U was missing. Blackened Skeleton corpses covered the rest of it, some of them smoking, some in small pieces, as though torn asunder and flung in random directions. Only the rank of beasts nearest the humans had survived.

  The pause was ended by the translated words of the Skeleton leader. ‘Over the wall!’ it shouted. ‘We are finished! Over the wall!’

  As the Skeletons turned to flee, Stopmouth picked up his Armourback-shell spear and flung it as hard as he could. The shaft flew true and plunged through the enemy chief’s body. Then he was leaping down to the next level. His injured leg gave way under him. He forced himself up, pulling charred and smoking bodies from the spot where he’d seen Indrani go down.

  ‘I’m unhurt,’ she said when he found her, although her whole body shook. ‘I told you. They wouldn’t let me die.’

  He wanted to ask her how she’d known the Globes would intervene–they’d never tried to save her before–but she seemed to be looking straight past him. He turned to find Varaha standing behind him. The man hadn’t even suffered a scratch.

  ‘I’m glad you’re all right,’ said the teacher. ‘Whoever did this’–his eyes flickered to Stopmouth and then back to Indrani–‘will want something in exchange.’

  She nodded once and the man turned away.

  ‘Indrani…?’

  ‘I’m fine, Stopmouth.’ She avoided his eyes. ‘Your people need you now. They have no experience of this. Help them.’

  It was true. The wounded were everywhere, crying out in pain or fear. Some people were tending them, others were finding Skeletons in a similar condition and taking revenge. Stopmouth glanced upwards. The attacking Globe had returned to its usual harmless floating.

  He almost tripped over Kubar, tending the injured Yama.

  ‘Staring’s not going to help!’ said the elder.

  Bubbles of flesh and blood covered Yama’s left ankle. His face was distorted in pain, the scars on his cheek darker than ever. He looked up at Stopmouth.

  ‘We should have charged them when I said!’ he raged. ‘This would never have happened to me.’

  A lot of people nearby turned at the sound of his raised voice.

  ‘I see,’ said Stopmouth. He nodded. He raised his own voice too, but kept it as calm as he could. ‘You also said, I remember, that we should do things properly around here. That we should have volunteers from now on.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Stopmouth turned to Kubar. ‘How long do you think it will take him to heal?’

  ‘Well, how would I know? We’ve never even seen that kind of injury before!’

  ‘Maybe not soon enough,’ said Stopmouth.

  ‘I’ll heal!’ said Yama. ‘Oh, gods! I’ll heal.’ He started to cry, not like a man would, but like the boy he was, snivelling, blubbing. ‘Please, Stopmouth. Please, not me.’

  Stopmouth did not alter his expression. ‘I trained you and these others, Yama. I wanted us to act like one body, to be one body. And that body can only have one head. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had snot running down his upper lip.

  Stopmouth felt wretched, lower than the worst bully. He kept his face impassive. All the survivors were watching. ‘Who is the chief?’

  ‘You are. You are, Stopmouth.’

  ‘You will never disobey me again.’ He limped away as quickly as he could. His own injured leg was about to give way. He didn’t want anybody watching when that happened.

  22.

  WHO WILL LOOK AFTER THEM?

  The orphans were supposed to be sleeping now that dark had fallen. Stopmouth listened to the echoes of their whispers and giggles as they rolled about the floor with the infant Fourlegger. He’d heard it could understand a few human words, but couldn’t reproduce them. He wondered again at the wisdom of letting it live. How would such children grow to hunt Fourleggers now? How could he hunt them? He never used to have nightmares about killing beasts, but these days…He didn’t know whether to blame the change on his woman or the Talker, but he wasn’t sure he could survive without either.

  ‘Leave the children,’ he said to Indrani. ‘Lie down with me.’

  ‘I don’t know who’s going to look after them.’ She held her hands across her belly in a gesture he’d seen before but couldn’t place.

  ‘You’ll look after them,’ he said.

  She bit her lower lip and came to the bed of pounded moss they shared. As usual, these days, she lay down far enough away that he couldn’t encircle
her with his arms.

  ‘It’s been a long time–two tens, Indrani,’ said Stopmouth. ‘At least two. Why won’t you move closer? Ever since the battle on the roofs it’s like you…’ Like you died. He’d said it before and didn’t want to repeat it now.

  Not too far away, through one of the many doorways that honeycombed the top floor of Headquarters, a woman was singing. Something lovely maybe, but distorted by echoes and frequently interrupted by the slap slap of small running feet and the pointless scolding of an adult voice.

  Then all was quiet again. Stopmouth and Indrani were alone but for a charcoal figure somebody had drawn on the wall–a long-nosed beast, supposedly a god. It flickered in the light of a dying fire, its great mouth grinning at the chief’s discomfort.

  ‘What have I done to you?’ Stopmouth said to Indrani.

  He really wanted to ask her about Varaha. She’d seemed to dislike the man before, but was spending more and more time with him now.

  ‘It’s nothing you’ve done,’ she said. And she turned away so he wouldn’t see the usual look of guilt that crossed her face when he confronted her.

  Stopmouth sighed and regarded the circle of hunters. Eight men and two women hung on his every word, looking at him as they might have looked at their gods, back before they’d abandoned them. Sometimes he felt like shouting: ‘That’s not me!’ But Indrani wasn’t the only one acting strangely since the battle. Stopmouth wasn’t his usual self any more either; the tongue-tied boy, the lesser brother. The hunters obeyed him without question, but were too respectful to be his friends.

  ‘Tonight we need three corpses.’ He took the time to look each hunter in the eye. ‘If those corpses are human, so be it. And don’t think three’ll be enough for even one meal for the Tribe! It won’t. But I’ll be taking another group out tomorrow night, and another one the night after that. In four nights’ time you all get to go again.’