The Deserter Read online

  ‘Why can’t they heal all of us?’ asked Stopmouth.

  ‘They’re programmed to die,’ said Hiresh. ‘It stops them maybe mutating in unexpected ways. Imagine how dangerous bad ones could be if they just kept multiplying! They could eat the whole world!’ He harrumphed. ‘Maybe they already are. That’s probably what the Virus is …’

  Papa’s gloves spread the cream on the old lady’s skin, as close to her injuries as he could go. The bruising was horrific and bones moved rather too easily under his strong fingers.

  But the miracle took no more than a few hours to accomplish. Before it was time to sleep again, the old woman opened her eyes. They wandered confusedly around the room, not seeming to focus on any one person.

  The savage must have been dying to ask about his traitorous wife. Instead, he said, ‘Are you all right, Jagadamba? You’re with friends, don’t worry.’

  ‘Roof worshippers,’ she croaked. ‘Practically heathens.’

  She closed her eyes again. This time, her breathing came easily and quietly. In fact, it was the quietest breathing Hiresh had ever heard her do.

  In the morning Hiresh saw a new cubicle in the corner where none had been before. Sometimes, in the old days, Papa would make the apartment grow a wall halfway across the room so he could beat Hiresh without Mother’s interference.

  ‘You will believe,’ Papa said one time, ‘if I have to smash every bone in your body.’

  ‘I’ll bring you down,’ Hiresh snarled back. ‘I will, I will!’

  ‘What, you? A blade of grass that couldn’t bring down a daisy in the park?’

  True, but even so, Father always needed a gang of his friends to hold his son whenever the time came to give him a new tattoo. The shame it brought on the brute was the greatest satisfaction Hiresh had ever known until his escape.

  Just as Mother was handing him a cup of weak tea, the cubicle withdrew into the floor, revealing his father and Jagadamba. The old woman looked strong and straight. The treatment had taken several years off her age, though white still dominated her hair. Hiresh couldn’t help wishing they’d given it to his mother instead.

  Jagadamba exchanged a significant look with Papa. They were up to something. Rebellion probably. Well, they wouldn’t get away with it.

  ‘We’ll meet again,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ A nod.

  ‘Get our things together, savage,’ she said. ‘We’re off to find your woman. Let’s hope that this time you don’t have to kill anybody.’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ he said.

  She looked puzzled and turned to Hiresh. ‘Your father says you were in a fight with Wardens and that you got away.’

  ‘He hurt them pretty badly,’ said Hiresh, worried about where this was going.

  ‘But they could have had a hundred friends after us in seconds,’ she said.

  For a moment Hiresh didn’t have a good answer for this, but then he remembered how the truth was often the most effective lie.

  ‘They didn’t know who we were. They brought us into an apartment to rough us up away from any broadcasts. They were in the wrong and they knew it.’

  Jagadamba nodded with a smile. ‘How typical of them, arrogant Secular scum. And no doubt you were a great help to the savage in the fighting?’

  ‘Savage?’ asked Papa, puzzled. Clearly, whatever he’d been discussing with the old lady hadn’t included Stopmouth’s identity.

  ‘It’s just what we call our warrior friend here,’ she said, pointing at the hunter. ‘He fights as well as the creatures below.’

  Stopmouth kept the truth to himself.

  Hiresh’s father didn’t even say goodbye, which suited the boy fine. But Mother clung to him, as if she knew he’d never want to come back again. He hugged her, biting his lip to keep tears from his own eyes. He was shocked by how much he missed her and couldn’t believe he was now about to leave her all over again.

  9. THE HUNGER IN THE DARK

  NO SOONER WERE they back in the corridor than Jagadamba turned to Hiresh and said: ‘I don’t care if you are a fan of this savage, we don’t need you any more, big man. Why don’t you stay with your parents? Important things will happen in this area very soon. Great events. You must leave your life of sloth behind you and follow your duty. Your father can show you how.’ Her voice rang clear and strong. Hiresh had a sudden flash of what she must have been like as a younger woman – ugly but dangerous, fearless.

  ‘I want to go with you.’

  ‘What for?’ She turned to Stopmouth. ‘He will only slow us down. Another two days and we’ll be there.’

  ‘Two days?’ said Stopmouth. ‘It’s too long. My people—’

  Jagadamba ignored him. ‘I only let the fool come before because I thought he had nowhere else to go except to the authorities. But look! Proper parents. People who can give his life purpose …’

  Hiresh would have to insist if he were to complete his mission. Not that he really wanted to now that he understood Stopmouth a little better, but he didn’t know what would happen to Tarini. He had to find a way out; a way that would make it look like he’d done his best.

  ‘I want Hiresh to come with us,’ said the hunter.

  The boy felt his face go warm.

  Why? he wondered. What good am I? Why?

  ‘There isn’t enough room for a big man like that where we’re going,’ said Jagadamba. Yet, when Hiresh turned to follow her, Stopmouth clapped him on the back and the old woman offered no further protest.

  The pace was quicker now. The Medicine Papa had obtained from his network of fellow Roof worshippers had removed the hobble from the old woman’s gait, and Stopmouth was anxious to hurry everyone along.

  ‘Two days,’ she had said. Two more days. Then Hiresh’s new life could begin, while Stopmouth … Stopmouth would be all right. He’d never be able to prevent the destruction of his tribe anyway. He’d be safer in the Roof.

  The same might not be said for the traitor, Indrani.

  Indrani, thought Stopmouth, had always wanted to return to the Roof. And yet most of the reunions he dreamed of with her were lovely. He’d sweep her into his arms. He’d feel her soft skin against his. He’d see the impish glint that had been in her eyes back when she’d taught him to walk on crutches while throwing stones at him for fun.

  How he’d missed her. He couldn’t help wishing that his guide would just tell him where to go instead of dragging him along at this agonizing pace. But he’d never have made it on his own – not in a world as strange as this one where people ate soggy pellets and swarmed everywhere in impossible numbers.

  Jagadamba took them on a shuttle car. ‘I’ve arranged a new meeting for us,’ she said. ‘And no, savage, there’s no way to make it any faster.’

  The journey wasted several precious hours interrupted by incomprehensible religious arguments between the other two. Jagadamba hawked, but couldn’t find anything in her newly repaired throat to spit at Hiresh. She threatened him with multiple, horrific rebirths. He laughed and promised, ‘You have to die to be reborn, right? But I’ll be living for ever! Everybody will when the Crisis is over. Everybody except you!’

  ‘Oh, your Commission won’t be in charge much longer!’ she snarled. ‘The savage’s woman’s got something in her head they’re deadly afraid of. They’re sweeping whole sectors looking for her, you know. It has them terrified! And she’s with us now.’

  And on and on in the same vein until Stopmouth was driven back into his daydreaming. As always, he pictured his woman and tried to imagine a life for them together on the surface. This got him thinking about the tribe again, and before he could stop himself, he was asking the Roof to send him back there for a look, a chance to dwell among them as the ancestors must do.

  He found them celebrating a successful hunt. Various limbs roasted on spits while the women danced around them and children kept watching the meat turn, licking their lips. For a moment he didn’t see Rockface, and panicked. The big man should have been here,
rejoicing with the others, boasting of his part in the hunt or telling his fellows where they’d gone wrong. ‘You should have charged, hey? All this hanging back, and what good did it do you in the end?’ But where was he now? Where?

  The Roof took him immediately to the hidden room Rockface had claimed for his own. He sat with his back pressed against the mossy stone and his feet stretched out and braced against the opposite wall. Maybe if he pressed hard enough, his back would straighten itself?

  Sodasi sat just round the corner from the room, as if by coincidence. She sat quietly and must have been able to hear Rockface’s secret grunts of pain as he ground his back ever harder against the stone. But she said nothing, and Stopmouth suspected that as soon as the food was cooked, she’d be running off to fetch two portions rather than one. Enough, he’d seen enough.

  And yet what else could he do? Return to the shuttle and the meaningless arguments between Hiresh and Jagadamba?

  Stopmouth found his spirit drifting higher. The Diggers, he thought. He’d find out how far they’d got. He could do that much. Maybe he could also spy out the abodes of other beasts. Once he’d returned to the surface, such information would be invaluable to the tribe.

  He drifted out over the hills and saw, on the other side, the horrific fields of the Diggers. A few hundred days before, when his little party had escaped up these rocky slopes, the beasts had still been far away from here. Yet now, Stopmouth could see row upon row of planted, moaning bodies, each kept alive while being eaten from below by the tiny yellow grubs that would grow up to be Diggers in their own right.

  He drifted over the fields for a while, never coming close enough to hear the groans of pain or smell the stench of rot he still remembered. However, he felt his heart skip a beat when he spotted the luminous white skins of creatures that could only be Skeletons. So close? Were they really that close? He moved on, afraid he’d see Fourleggers next, or Slimers, or even humans.

  The tortured planted beings sank lower in the earth the further he moved from the hills. Soon he reached a place where all but the heads had been consumed. But that didn’t last for long. Fat, dirty grubs as large as his arm fought over them, driving off the losers until the victor opened its mouth wide enough to swallow the victim’s screaming face whole.

  Afterwards, or so the Roof told him when he couldn’t help asking, the now huge grub would burrow into the earth and sleep until it woke again as an adult Digger. And there were a lot of these! So many!

  Stopmouth looked around and saw nothing but poisoned, devastated land in all directions. The newborn Diggers would find nothing to eat here and would have no way to feed their young, other than with their own bodies. The pain would soon push them over the hills.

  ‘I want to wake up!’ he told the Roof. ‘Please wake me up!’

  He found his companions still arguing with one another – although, strangely, they’d left the venom behind.

  ‘But we are not Indians!’ Hiresh was saying. ‘Thousands of real years and light years separate us from them, and all the while we’ve been changing. They would hate us. We’re as far from them as Stopmouth is from’ – he closed his eyes for an instant – ‘from the ancient Romans! Our languages are different, our customs are different, and as for our religions—’

  ‘What do you know about religion, fool?’

  ‘I know our ancestors wouldn’t recognize anything about ours: they’d think we—’

  ‘Ah, savage,’ said Jagadamba, sounding almost relieved to put an end to Hiresh’s tirade, ‘I see you’ve come back to us. It didn’t take you long to turn into a useless Dreamer, did it?’

  Stopmouth felt groggy, his muscles all stiff. It took him a moment to remember why he’d wanted to leave the Dreamworld so quickly.

  Jagadamba continued, ‘Your little Secular friend is too clever for his own good. He’s going to damn himself with his own smart mouth.’

  Hiresh snorted. ‘There’s nothing you can say to me, crone, that I haven’t already heard from him!’

  ‘He means his pious father, of course. He—’

  ‘Pious! You call him pious!’

  ‘All right!’ said Stopmouth. His tongue tasted of sleep and his head throbbed. ‘We’ve got to hurry. I’ve got to get Indrani and go home to the surface as soon as possible. My people are in big trouble.’

  The old lady wagged her finger at him. ‘Silly savage, look at the light outside the shuttle – look!’

  Stopmouth obeyed. Beyond the glass, all was dim except for a single strip of illumination.

  ‘There are hundreds of lamps out there, each a hundred steps apart. We couldn’t possibly be going any faster! We’d be flattened if we tried to leave. But it doesn’t matter … We’re nearly there now, nearly there.’

  Sure enough, the single strip of light divided itself into smaller and smaller blurs as the shuttle slowed.

  They emerged into another strongly Religious area. The people here wore masks with cold glittering eyes. Some painted their skin blue, some gold or other colours. They spoke a language much like that of Stopmouth’s new tribe, or so Hiresh told him.

  A blue man with thin arms beckoned them into a room without moving pictures. ‘My contact,’ whispered Jagadamba.

  Inexplicably, he pricked Stopmouth with a needle, stole a drop of blood – something only a friend should get – and ran off for a few minutes. When he returned, he smiled and nodded at Jagadamba.

  ‘So you’re the real thing, monster. I told them that.’

  But Stopmouth barely noticed. The walls here had been painted (by hand, apparently) with images of other blue-skinned men fighting battles with metal weapons and clever contraptions called bows that fired tiny spears over great distances. He studied them, too fascinated to object as he was stripped and daubed with shiny gold paint. A group of masked women performed the same procedures on a squawking Jagadamba.

  ‘A woman should be covered! It’s indecent!’ But she cried even more loudly at something else her contact must have said to her. ‘You are joking! They want us to go there?’

  Hiresh too looked miserable until they hid his face with a mask. Men muttered and pointed at his thin body – and Stopmouth couldn’t blame them.

  ‘You never told me you were a hunter too,’ whispered Stopmouth, ‘to have such … such scars.’

  Hiresh said nothing, but he covered up the strange lump on his upper left arm with one hand and refused to let them paint there. A recent wound that might still be delicate, perhaps.

  After that, they were shoved into the corridor. A party of masked and golden young men came upon them without warning and bore them along in their midst through a series of twists and turns. They all stopped at a junction to shout insults at some distant Wardens, before running on, laughing.

  At one point two strapping young men took hold of Jagadamba and lifted her along between them, whooping and twirling her around as she shouted curses at them.

  Stopmouth smiled behind his mask. It was like being on a hunt again, surrounded by comrades and running into danger. But there was something reckless about this group, a carelessness that no true hunting party would dare risk.

  ‘What is your name?’ Stopmouth asked one of the men.

  ‘Arjuna,’ he replied.

  ‘So am I!’ said another. ‘And you are Arjuna too, brother, when you wear His mask!’

  They came to another junction with a bigger crowd of Wardens waiting at it.

  ‘I don’t like this!’ wheezed Jagadamba. The young men had let her down again and Stopmouth was beginning to worry about her ability to keep up.

  ‘Go home!’ called one of the Wardens, his voice amplified by his helmet.

  The youths started uttering ululations. Then they charged, crashing into the black uniforms of the guards, who hammered back with augmented muscles and green truncheons. The youths didn’t stand a chance. Stopmouth wanted to go with them, to show them how it was done, but it all seemed like a mad waste to him. Besides, he couldn’t leave hi
s companions to cope by themselves. However, another young man was calling at them to move down a side passage.

  ‘I am Arjuna,’ he said. ‘Like you. Take two left turns and the second right.’ Then he started ululating before sprinting towards the hopeless confrontation the other Arjunas had begun. Most of the youths were unconscious already. A few hung back, exchanging threats with their enemies.

  ‘Come, savage,’ said Jagadamba.

  She led them down a path so narrow that anybody sleeping here would have had to lie on their side. Above them, walls stretched up and up, seemingly with no end. Stopmouth felt dizzy until Jagadamba’s bony hand gripped him above the elbow.

  ‘Look, savage. See the colour of the walls?’

  ‘Black,’ he said, feeling the dizziness return.

  ‘You must look higher then. See how pale they become further up?’

  ‘Ice!’ said Hiresh, horrified.

  She shot him a look of disdain. ‘Yes, big man.’ And to Stopmouth, who’d never seen ice before, ‘Do you know what that is now? What’s up there? The air has been allowed to thin a little, you see, and the temperature has dropped—’

  ‘But we can’t go there!’ said Hiresh. ‘Even if you have the right supplies, what about the alarms? What about’ – and here he gulped – ‘what about the Emptiness?’

  ‘Your kind are naturally empty,’ she said. ‘You pride yourselves on it. You will not be welcomed up there.’

  ‘Hiresh comes with us,’ said Stopmouth. ‘Hiresh is Tribe.’

  ‘Pah. You can keep your tribe. Now, listen carefully. Upstairs, the Roof will not listen to us. Nor will it speak or give us any information …’

  ‘The Emptiness,’ said Hiresh again, as if he couldn’t believe it. ‘The Virus has killed all the machines.’

  ‘Stop interrupting!’ warned Jagadamba. ‘There isn’t much time. Those brave boys are selling their freedom for a moment’s distraction. Don’t waste it! If you don’t listen to me now, savage, you won’t understand me when we don’t have the Roof to translate for us.’

  Stopmouth nodded. Hiresh remained frozen to the spot.