The Homeward Bounders (12 page)

“Is this a war?” he said, as he landed beside me. I went
chuff
, because we landed so hard. He didn't. He was athletic. “What's going on?”

I meant to blister him. But there were definitely tears running out of those blue eyes of his. “Oh, don't tell me!” I said. “You're new to the Bounds! I seem fated to run a nursery school these days!”

A terrible din prevented any of us saying anything for a minute. Those explosions were bursting all round, and in the yellow sky, like gigantic fireworks. We could hear pieces of metal from them thumping down all round us. I really quite pitied this boy if it was his first time through a Boundary. Baptism of fire, as they say.

After a bit, when things grew quieter, I said, “This has happened to me quite often by now. That's the trouble with Boundaries. Lots of them are in empty land, and empty land makes a lovely place for two armies to fight. What's happened is that we seem to have arrived between two armies who are having a war. The thing that matters to us, is how big this war is. Look out for soldiers. If they're all wearing bright colors, it's quite a small war, and we'll have a chance to slip out between them. It's when they're wearing mud-color that you're in trouble. Mud-color wars go on for miles.”

Helen pointed to the left. A bunch of soldiers was chasing across between bushes there. They carried long guns, and the yellow light showed everything about them to be the dreariest mud-brown color.

“Thanks, Helen,” I said. “A real pal, you are. Well, we know the worst now. We'd better find somewhere we can hide up till morning.”

“We could do worse than make for those bushes,” suggested our new boy.

“And go now, while we can still see,” said Helen.

“Yes,” I said. He was competent too, just like Helen. Blast them both! “What's your name, by the way?”

“Joris,” he said, and he sort of half sat up as he said it, making a bow. I saw he had some kind of black sign painted on the front of his white clothes. It was just like the Homeward Bounder signs, but it wasn't any I knew. That made two I didn't know. I didn't like it. I was beginning to feel ignorant.

“Get down!” I said. “You're in white. You'll get shot at. We're all going to have to wriggle on our faces for a while. My name's Jamie. She's Helen Haras-uquara and I'm her native guide. Get wriggling, Helen.”

We got wriggling. Helen was practically invisible with her hair over her face. My red clothes didn't show up much in that light either, but I was worried about Joris in white. I kept turning round to look. But he was doing better than I was. He might not be used to wars, but he was used to keeping out of sight. I kept taking him for a stone.

I don't like competent posh people, I thought.

About then, a huge machine came grinding up from somewhere and ran over half the bushes and the soldiers we had seen. Joris looked pretty sick at that, but I don't suppose I looked very happy myself. Wars are beastly things.

Gunfire started crashing again as we reached what was left of the bushes. Helen and I froze. But Joris really was competent. He wriggled on and found a soldiers' hideout hidden under the bushes. It was a fairly deep hole in the ground with a tin roof and earth piled on the tin. There was some more tin and some sacking to shut the entrance with. And inside were sacks stuffed with sand and a lamp of some sort on a sack in the middle.

“This is great!” I said. I gushed a bit, to make Joris feel wanted. He showed us the hole with such a nervous air, as if he was sure experienced Homeward Bounders like us would expect something better. “Let's get that doorway blocked. Then we can light that lamp and live in real comfort.”

Helen did expect something better. “What do you call
dis
comfort then?” she said as she climbed in. “It smells. And what do we light the lamp with?”

That stumped me, I must confess. “Oh, as to that,” Joris said. He felt behind the part of his clothes which had the sign painted on it. “I have a lighter here. If you would make sure the door is blocked first. I think someone might shoot at a light.”

Helen and I blocked the entrance while Joris clicked away with his lighter-thing, and shortly the lamp was burning cosily. I took a look round the hole, hoping for food, but we were out of luck there. “No food,” I said, sitting down on a sandbag.

Joris said, “Oh, as to that,” again, and felt in the front of those clothes of his. I looked at his getup with interest, now I could see it properly. It seemed to be as much of a uniform as the mud-color of the soldiers. The white stuff had baggy sleeves and baggy trousers, and it was some strange thick material which showed not a mark from all that wriggling on the ground. He had long white boots on his feet. And the part where the black sign was painted was white leather, like a tough leather pullover. From behind this part, Joris took his hand out with three blocks of chocolate in it. “This isn't much, but it's something,” he said.

“You travel well-prepared,” Helen said. “Light and food.”

Joris was looking at her with the same kind of amazement that I had when I first saw Helen. All he could see of her was a sheet of black hair and the tip of a nose. He nodded to the nose politely. “I'm a demon hunter,” he said, as if that explained everything.

There followed another crashing of guns. It was so near that I got up and made sure the door wasn't showing a light. Joris winced at the noise.

“Are wars very common?” he asked me.

“About every sixth world,” I said. “Sometimes I think war is
Their
favorite thing to play. Half the other worlds are either just working up to a war or just finished one.”

Joris nodded. His straight face was very straight. “Oh,” he said.
“Them.”
The way he said it proved he really was new to the Bounds. It was fresh new hatred, like Helen's, not weary old hatred, like mine.

We sucked our sherbert sweets and we ate Joris's chocolate, in nibbles to make it last, and listened to the guns crashing. Joris amused me, the way he kept glancing at the bits of Helen's face that showed when she parted her hair to eat, then looking away as if he was afraid, like I had been, that her face was sacred.

“It's all right,” I said. “Her face isn't sacred. She's just peculiar.”

Helen put one side of her hair behind an ear in order to glower at me, and jerked her head at the noise overhead. “Are we going to get
any
peace tonight?”

“Shouldn't think so,” I said. “Mud-browners never seem to sleep. They always fight all night.”

“In that case,” Helen said, hooking the other side of her hair up and turning the whole fierce pointed sacredness at Joris, “we'd better talk. Tell us who you are and what you did to make
Them
exile you. Then we'll tell you about us.”

I tried telling Helen that you didn't ask Homeward Bounders about themselves, or talk about
Them
. But she just looked contemptuous. And Joris looked anxiously from one to the other of us, wondering which was right. “Oh, go ahead,” I said, “if you want to talk. Don't mind me. I've only been on a hundred worlds to her three.” At that, Joris looked as if he wanted to talk but didn't know how to start. So I said, to get him going, “I can see you're new to the Bounds. You come from somewhere where they speak English too, don't you?”

He hesitated a moment, then said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I was born in Cardsburg, and I can still speak Kathayack a little. But I was sold to the Khans when I was seven, and I've spoken English ever since—”

“You were what?” I said.

“Sold,” he said, looking slightly surprised. “I'm a slave, you know. Doesn't it show?”

“How could it show?” I said. “You're pulling my leg.” Or so much for my ideas about posh boys, I thought.

His freckled face went quite pink with worry. “It should appear in my manner. I hope I've not grown presumptuous.”

It just shows you. You wander every kind of world, and you still get surprised like this. Helen didn't believe him either. “Prove you're a slave,” she said.

“Of course,” Joris said, very humbly, and began rolling up his right sleeve. This felt familiar. I began to wonder what Joris's arm was going to turn into. But it was an ordinary freckled white arm, with a good many more muscles than mine, and at the top, near the shoulder, there was—well, it looked like a little blurred pink drawing. A drawing of an anchor.

One look, and I leaped off my sandbag. “Where did you get that?”

“It's Konstam's mark,” Joris said. His eyes filled with tears. “I'm Konstam's personal slave, you see. Konstam bought me.”

Little did I know how soon I would be groaning at the sound of that name! At the time, as I looked at that anchor, it seemed like an omen, a sign, a lucky charm. I swore to myself as I sat down again that I'd hang on to Joris too next time the Bounds called. Meanwhile, Helen was leaning forward giving the arm and the mark the full fierce boot-button treatment. “Anyone can have themselves tattooed,” she said.

Joris wiped his tears with a finger and said, almost proudly, “It isn't a tattoo. It's a brand. They do it with a hot iron.”

“How disgusting!” Helen said. I liked that from her. I told you the kind of world she came from.

“They give you an injection first,” Joris said. I could tell he was used to explaining to worried ladies. “It doesn't hurt.”

It may not have hurt him, but it worried me. I fell to thinking about
Them
, and whether it was
Them
who did this kind of thing to people, or whether people did it to themselves. But I didn't have much space to think, because, now Joris had got going, he got going with a vengeance.

“Konstam chose me, out of all the slaves in the mart,” he said, “to train as his assistant. He took me back to Khan Valley and he gave me a really good education. I mean, it's not necessary to do more than read and write in order to train as a demon hunter, you know, but Konstam's never given me anything but the best possible treatment. Konstam's really marvelous. He's the best demon hunter working today. You know, Konstam can sense a demon when none of the instruments give even a corporeal reading, I swear it. And Konstam's great company too. He never treats me like a slave. From the way he treats me, people think I'm his free-born assistant, just like you did. But I never presume on it. I try to do everything Konstam wants. I honestly tried today, but I let him down dreadfully.”

Actually, I've cut down on the Konstams, telling this. Konstam came in every other word. Long before Joris had got to this point, Helen and I had got the idea: Konstam was a Great God. He was ten foot tall, dark, handsome, strong, skillful, kind, considerate—you name a virtue, Konstam had it. He was rich too—demon hunting seemed to pay well. According to Joris, Konstam drove an expensive fast car and stayed in the best hotels, and insisted on the best of everything. He lavished the best of everything on Joris too. I suppose this meant that Joris was a good slave, since he must have been one of the expensive things Konstam insisted on. Well—I'd heard of slavish devotion, but I'd never met it before.

“How much were you worth as a slave?” I asked, to divert Joris from Konstam-worship a bit.

“Oh, about twenty-thousand crowns,” Joris said seriously. “I'd be worth at least twice as much if I was fully trained. But—I suppose I never will be now. I've let Konstam down—”

Helen shot me a nasty look. She always did if I talked about how much things were worth. She said I was commercial-minded. “Tell about demons,” she said. “How do you hunt them?”

“Demons,” said Joris. “They're quite hard to explain if you've never seen one.”

Neither of us had. Demons must have been the one nasty thing that Helen's world didn't have.

“I think,” said Joris, “that demons are the war that
They
play in my world. Demons hate humans. They really are utterly malignant. We have to keep them from spreading, because they can kill people outright; or they can enter into people and possess them—you know, work them like puppets; or they can haunt a place and poison it for living in; or they can drain off a person's mind, so that the person can be walking about, while his mind is elsewhere in agonies. They can do all sorts of other things too. They really are dangerous, and they're not made like us humans at all. We're half body and half soul. Demons are never that corporeal—they have more spirit than body, always. If you're trained to look for it, you can see the spirit as well as the body. Demon spirit is more visible than human—much more.”

“Then what do demons look like?” we asked.

“It's hard to describe,” said Joris, “to someone who's never seen one. They can change their shapes, you see. But basically, the most corporeal ones are the most grotesque, with lots of arms and legs—horrible—and red and gray and blue. Some of the more spiritual ones look like long white humans, but they usually have at least one extra pair of arms.”

“How do you hunt for them?” said Helen.

“That's rather technical,” said Joris. “Basically, you have to find their lair and then tempt them out of it. Or, if they won't come out, you have to go in and get them. Konstam's wonderfully brave and cool at that. There are all sorts of ways of killing them, but however you do it, you always have to kill them twice—once for the body and once for the spirit. If you don't, they grow back again—and they usually come after you when they have. In order to kill them spiritually, of course, you have to go into the spirit world. Konstam always does that. He's taught me how to, but he says it's too dangerous for me yet. I—I wire the demons for him—only—only I let him down over that today.”