The Deserter Read online

  ‘Of course she does!’ shouted Stopmouth. Everybody stopped to look at him; the children covered their mouths with bloody little fingers.

  Rockface patted him on the back. ‘You’re right, boy. Sure, sure.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Stopmouth. ‘I don’t know why—’

  ‘The only thing is’ – Rockface stretched his arm out fully, or tried to; he grimaced – ‘I’m not ready for a journey yet.’

  ‘Rockface—’

  ‘All the way to the mountains, hey? To the place where the world reaches right up to touch the Roof? That will be some sight. Some sight. Only the Traveller ever saw it before us, or so the old tales would have us believe.’

  ‘Rockface … listen …’ Stopmouth could tell by the way the big man wouldn’t look at him that he already knew what was coming next. ‘I need you to stay here. I need—’

  Rockface threw his knives hard over the heads of the children so that they smacked into the walls. It was a moment before he could speak again, but finally he managed, ‘If you think I’m ready for the pot, why didn’t you just let the Fourleggers have me, hey? And save everybody a lot of trouble?’ But the heat was already going out of him.

  ‘This lot need you,’ said Stopmouth.

  The youngest girl of the group, Lali, gave the big man a hug. Some of the boys crowded in to pat him on his scarred and tattooed back.

  ‘I’ll bring her home,’ said Stopmouth. ‘I won’t risk anybody else to do it. And when I come back, I expect to find enough of you alive to make the return journey worth my while. Only you could make that happen.’

  ‘I’m not so good at the chief thing,’ Rockface mumbled.

  ‘Kubar can do that – they listen to him. You just keep them hunting. Don’t let them give up! That Digger the Fourleggers found … that Digger …’ He shivered.

  In the dark, the whispers of his people seemed louder. Words drifted down from every rooftop, blessings and curses and tears; a soft blanket of sound, wrapping him in need, begging him to stay. Stopmouth stood at the mouth of the U-shaped complex of buildings known as Headquarters. The fixed eyes of every member of the tribe glittered like a second set of tracklights, watching him as though he were life itself. None of them spoke. Not even Rockface.

  The chief didn’t want to think about their need and how it made him feel. He turned back to face Kubar, who would lead when he was gone.

  ‘You’re deserting us,’ said Kubar. ‘Do you know what that means?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Stopmouth said. ‘When the Diggers come—’

  The priest growled at him. ‘Diggers! I’ve never seen these Diggers, except for one mouldy corpse riddled with holes. We have Skeletons. Yes, yes, I’ve seen them eating one of my cousins. And Slimers to drag children away in the night. Definitely Slimers. Real threats that never leave us and will kill us quicker than any number of imaginary Diggers.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Kubar.’

  ‘I know,’ whispered the priest, ‘that it’s just about your woman. The—’ He stopped himself before calling Indrani ‘the Witch’, but Stopmouth knew he wanted to. The Religious had never liked her, and not even those such as Kubar, who had been exiled from the Roof and sent to live here on the surface of the world, had changed their opinion. ‘You’ll kill us, Stopmouth. You’ll kill all of us. Your old tribe was barely getting by with generations of skills to call on and dozens of hunters as good as you are. We need you more than she does.’

  ‘You’ll have Rockface to teach you.’

  ‘Rockface!’ Kubar didn’t dare say more than that.

  ‘And you’ll have the Talker.’ Stopmouth felt a chill at the thought of leaving it behind. All his life he’d stuttered and stammered, until the magic device of the Roofpeople had made him almost as eloquent as his brother. He’d discovered that he loved to speak. And now he’d be returning to life as the butt of everyone’s jokes. But there’d be no people where he was going, not unless he made it to the Roof. And once there, he’d find as many Talkers as he needed.

  ‘The Diggers are real, Kubar,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen the body yourself. And they’re already making forays over the hills. What happens when they get a foothold on this side? I could stay here to watch you all die, or I could do something to help.’

  Kubar shook his head. ‘You know nothing about the Roof, savage. Nothing! Down here you may eat us, but up there, it is they who will eat you. Fighting, rebellion, crowding. Ha! They will put you in a cage and laugh. Or they would if they had room for a cage. It’s changed since I was a boy, oh yes. I tell you, the Roof is no place for a helpless savage.’

  ‘You are calling me helpless?’

  Kubar sneered – he actually sneered at his chief, the wisps of his moustache almost disappearing into the deep wrinkles of his face. He knelt down quickly and grabbed a pebble no larger than the end of his thumb and held it up between them.

  ‘This, you ignorant savage, this is your whole world.’ He tapped one end of the pebble. ‘You started your great journey here.’

  ‘Man-Ways.’

  The priest shrugged. ‘Man-Ways. This is where you started. And this’ – he tapped the pebble again, and to Stopmouth it seemed that his finger hadn’t moved at all, that he was tapping in exactly the same place as before – ‘this is where we are now after your epic journey.’

  ‘No! We travelled at least twenty, thirty days. We—’

  ‘Exactly, savage. Exactly. The world is big. Now, this’ – Kubar wrapped his fist around the tiny pebble, enveloping it completely – ‘this is the Roof. You people think it’s like a bowl over your heads, don’t you? Well, you’re wrong, you’re wrong. The Roof surrounds you as a skull does the brain, only touching your world at the highest mountains. You cannot – you will never imagine how huge it is. Even we cannot. It has cities too big to walk across in a human lifetime, teeming with people – an army of children underfoot. And there are … oceans inside it. Whole oceans. Can you imagine that? It has areas bigger than this whole world just for playing. Or it used to … And tunnels without air where men and women travel faster than any stone you could ever sling. You would understand nothing! Nothing!

  ‘If Indrani lives at all … if she lives and if you get there before some devil beast has you for dinner, you will just be a burden to her. And she would be mad to want to come back here.’

  Stopmouth gritted his teeth. ‘Even if she … if she didn’t want to come back … she could give me the weapons and the other stuff she promised.’

  ‘Seeds,’ said Kubar, and spat. ‘That’s what she promised. But they’d never allow you that, you see? Never allow you to keep any of it. Why, if you didn’t have to fight for your food, what would be the point of it all down here? Who would they look down upon? They have banned them, Stopmouth – banned any plants you could eat, just for the pleasure of watching you bleed. Why would they change that now?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Kubar. I have to try. We’ve been over it and over it. We won’t last a hundred days if the Diggers make it to this side of the hills.’

  Kubar nodded slowly, his shoulders sagging. Then, with all eyes on the pair of them, he pulled the chief into an embrace. He whispered, ‘Take me with you. I want to go home. Oh, the gods know it’s horrible there, but … but the – the hunting, the fear every day. I can’t … I can’t …’

  Gently Stopmouth pushed the man away.

  Then he set off out through the gate, every eye in the tribe watching, pleading for him to turn round. The Roofpeople called his ancestors ‘the Deserters’, or so Indrani had told him once. Something about leaving her people to die a long, long time ago. He’d been offended by the idea. Lies, he’d thought then, for what kind of man would abandon his Tribe like that?

  He didn’t dare look back. His shoulders ached under the weight of food the tribe had given him – food they would need to survive. And he had their gifts to carry too: images of their gods; a child’s first attempt at a sling; a
nd other dangerous tokens of their love. All would have to be thrown away as soon as he was out of sight.

  The sheer waste of it, he thought. Off on an impossible mission to rescue a woman from a far safer place than this. How his ancestors must be raging at him.

  The narrow streets crumbled around him as he walked. Patches of red- and blue-coloured moss swarmed with clouds of poisonous insects. They buzzed past his ears, tasted his sweat, then left him alone. He kept to the cool shadows of cracked buildings, while above him, a Globe floated lazily against the glare of the Roof, never far away. It seemed that his senses were more alert than they had been for ages. The shifting of stones in a nearby alley helped him avoid a Slimer’s ambush, and his eye picked out old evidence of a Skeleton hunting party. Now that he was finally heading towards her, Indrani’s memory had lost the power to distract him.

  Yes, he’d been selfish to leave his people. And yes, he had done so for the wrong reasons. But everything he’d said to Kubar and Rockface had been true too: the whole tribe’s future, the world’s future, depended on Indrani’s safe return. He would bring her back, fight her enemies if he had to, and nothing would keep her from him again.

  Stopmouth walked quietly, always alert to what might be round the next corner. He avoided open spaces. Where he’d grown up, the ruins had seemed endless, and only the legends of his tribe had ever hinted that anything might exist beyond them. Stories told how the Traveller had taken the best hunters off exploring long ago. He’d returned alone, the lives and flesh of all his companions wasted. But for all his foolishness, the Traveller hadn’t lied when he’d claimed to have found a faraway place where the Roof met the surface of the world. Kubar and Indrani had both confirmed it: a mountain, it was called, like the hills that now rose to his right, only much, much larger.

  The nearby hills marked the border to Digger territory, but Stopmouth, unlike the poor Traveller, had learned to find refuge there. Creatures that hunted mainly lived in houses. When a new group arrived on the surface of the world, they woke up in buildings, never in the forests or on higher ground. If Stopmouth could get himself onto the slopes, if he moved only at night, then the first part of his journey along the length of the river should be safe enough. It would have to be. Every intelligent creature he came across would want to eat him. And he would be alone too. That was only hitting him now. He wished he could have taken Rockface with him after all. Or what about Kubar, or one of the others who understood the Roof?

  It stretched above his head, going on for ever and ever. It passed right the way around the world, if he could believe the priest, swallowing everything Stopmouth knew, as though it were all nothing but a scrap of meat in a hunter’s mouth. How – how could he ever hope to find her up there? Kubar was right. They had all been right. It was madness.

  On the seventh evening, the hills he travelled began to shrink. A barren landscape of rock and scree replaced them, where the glorious colours of the moss paled towards dull greys and blues. Stopmouth saw plants that were totally new to him: single, tapering stalks that reached up pitifully towards the Roof until their own weight bore them down again. The hunter would find no cover here. Luckily, since he’d left the houses behind, he hadn’t seen any signs of intelligent life either. Even better, the horizon showed the land rising again further on. He could see a range of hills, high and pointed. Mist clung to the tallest, hiding its peak.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s it, it has to be. There.’ He laughed with relief.

  Then, to his left, a boulder moved. It rippled; it growled. The rock lifted itself up off the ground. Scaly legs, tipped with long claws, emerged as if from nowhere; eyes rolled open from what he’d supposed to be clumps of woody moss. The whole creature roared and leaped at him. All Stopmouth could see was the mouth. It was almost large enough to swallow him whole, foetid with the smell of rotting flesh.

  He staggered back, yelling in horror, slipping on the little stones that lay everywhere.

  The monster’s first lunge missed. He could see it better now – its long body, its skin slightly too yellow to be rock, the hairy tufts of its eyes.

  Its claws came too fast for his sliding feet to avoid, but he ducked to one side, using the supplies to shield his legs. The creature bellowed in dismay and the roar was answered by several others nearby.

  Stopmouth parried another thrust. Sharp claws dug deep into the netting that held his food and snagged themselves on cuts of smoked flesh. The human’s spear flashed round and sank deep into his enemy’s back. It staggered away from him, crying out. But Stopmouth didn’t dare hang around to finish it off or even to untangle his supplies from its claws. He could hear scrabbling feet converging on him from all directions but one. It might have been a trap, but he didn’t care. There seemed to be dozens of the beasts around him, roaring now, all at once, their great bucket mouths wide open, looking to be filled. A claw caught him on the elbow; an instant of pain. He staggered, skidded down a hillock on his knees, before righting himself and taking off at speed.

  The bellowing of the monsters followed him long after he’d escaped. He knew he wasn’t safe. He’d left his food behind and, worse, a trail of blood as clear as day.

  3. THE RUNNING SAVAGE

  DESPITE THE RISING tension, Hiresh couldn’t take his gaze off Purami. Her face had kept him awake at nights, even before she’d been injected and raised to the Elite. Back then, he used to be able to speak to her without having to bow. In the weeks since, the special nano-machines of the Elite had been at work inside her body, firming and strengthening to the point where her slender hands could bend iron bars.

  As she faced Chakrapani, those long fingers trembled and clenched at her side. Chakrapani was shaking too. His upper lip rose into an animal snarl that twisted his perfect features. Both were tensed; both were ready to spring.

  To Hiresh and the other spectators, it didn’t look like the antagonists were standing in the trainee lecture hall at all – the walls that curved up over everybody’s heads were projecting images of Earth’s Amazon rainforest, while the floor had taken on the colours of soil and had remoulded itself to give a textured, natural feel under the sole of the foot. Almost every surface of the Roof could do that, and the illusion might have been perfect, thought Hiresh, had it not been for the air in the room, heavy with the stench of fury.

  Rumour had it that Chakrapani hadn’t adapted to the nano-machines as well as his opponent. He had freaked out a few times already, smashing a priceless mahogany table that had survived transport from Old Earth itself. Who knew how long it would take Dr Narindi to balance him out, and what damage would he cause before then?

  ‘In case you didn’t know,’ Chakrapani said through clenched teeth, ‘your savage—’

  ‘Stopmouth,’ said Purami. ‘He’s a human being, which is more than can be said for—’

  ‘Your savage has already murdered one of us. He sold off Varaha’s body to some aliens for their gods-damned dinner!’

  ‘That was self-defence,’ Purami sneered. She was magnificent, truly magnificent. ‘And your brother was a second-rater anyway.’

  Hiresh, who’d been watching all this from the relative safety of a crowd of Apprentices, felt somebody wriggle through the audience to stand beside him. He knew without looking that it must be Tarini. ‘You’re staring at Purami again,’ she whispered.

  He turned to deny it, and in that moment Chakrapani dived across the room at his tormentor. The two untrained Elite rained clumsy blows on each other faster than the eye could follow, while their body-servants tried to dodge out of the way. More antiques were thrown about at velocities that turned them to splinters and had all the Apprentices ducking for cover or pushing for the door.

  Purami should have ended it with a flying kick – Hiresh heard the crack as she broke Chakrapani’s jaw with it. It didn’t stop him, though. He was a bull, every bit as much a savage as any creature from the surface of the world below them.

  Hiresh sent a frantic call through to
security. A specially trained squad of Tranquillizers was already on its way. But they were going to get here too late. Roaring in pain and foaming at the mouth, Chakrapani trapped and broke his opponent’s left leg. Her neck would be next, and she knew it now; realized for the first time what a mess she’d made for herself. Her cry went out, both from her mouth and via a broadcast that every apprentice heard, loud enough to deafen.

  ‘Purami!’ shouted Hiresh. He found himself running forward, but Chakrapani’s body-servant had got there first and, by some miracle, placed himself between his master and the girl on the ground.

  ‘No,’ the boy was saying – Hiresh had never learned his name. ‘Enough, Master, enough!’

  Chakrapani swatted him aside and the boy flew out of the way.

  And then Hiresh found himself behind the monster as Chakrapani raised his foot to stamp on Purami’s neck.

  Hiresh had never been strong, even by the standards of those terrible days of shortage when everybody went hungry.

  Back before the Crisis, parents had the full might of the Roof at their disposal and could choose exactly how their child would look. Handsome, of course. A young god, like Chakrapani, his jaw firm enough to carve stone, his eyes large and sparkling.

  But then the so-called Virus had come to poison the Roof. Nobody knew exactly what it was, and the Roof itself stayed silent on the subject. But in a matter of months, the creation of new nano-machines – from which Medicine and other wonders were made – had come to a sudden halt.

  Only a year separated Chakrapani from the so-called ‘Crisis babies’ like Hiresh. They were the first generation to be born without modification. They were puny, they were helpless. But they weren’t always without talent, and Hiresh had one special knack of his own: he always knew where the weak spot was.

  Still new to his status as an Elite, in his rage Chakrapani wasted what little training he’d had. His stance was all wrong, and as he raised his foot for that final strike, Hiresh slammed his puny frame into the back of the other leg. The Elite fell over, rolled once, and was on his feet again in an instant, facing his new enemy.