Free The Inferior by Peadar Ó Guilín Page A

sickness racked him day and night, but she was always near to press damp hide to his forehead and whisper soothing gibberish.
    ‘I’m not a baby,’ he told her. Or thought he did.
    Finally he woke up one day with the fog gone from his head. He saw the woman sitting in the corner of his room, and realized she wasn’t a creation of his pain, but a real human being.
    ‘W-what’s your n-name?’ he asked her. She had the shortest hair of any woman he’d ever seen; no longer than a single finger-joint.
    He tried again. ‘W-why have I n-never seen you before?’ The Tribe had a story about a man who’d hidden his mother away for half a generation so she wouldn’t have to volunteer. Had this woman spent her entire life indoors? Is that why her skin was so dark?
    She wouldn’t answer his questions. She simply looked at him. Perhaps, he thought, she was mute. Maybe the gibberish he’d heard her speaking had been part of his fever.
    It was only then that he began to notice the abominable itch in his legs. When he pulled away the pounded moss covering, he saw that somebody had tied each broken limb to long straight pieces of metal. Why, he didn’t know, but he was relieved he couldn’t see bone sticking out anywhere. He reached down for a good scratch, but the woman quickly stood and batted his hands away. Stopmouth couldn’t find the strength to fight her.
    ‘Mother,’ he called. ‘M-Mother!’
    No reply. He looked at the stranger again. ‘It’s j-just us, then.’
    The woman tapped her chest. ‘Indrani,’ she said.
    ‘W-well,’ he said, glad she could talk, but suddenly tongue-tied by her strange, dark eyes. And she too seemed reluctant to say anything else after that. He wondered if, like him, she suffered from embarrassment and a twitchy tongue. And so they remained in uncomfortable silence, interacting only when he stole glances at her strange face or when she hissed at his attempts to relieve the itch in his legs.
    Stopmouth didn’t discover how the woman came to be in his house until later that evening. Wallbreaker paid him a visit and seemed delighted to find his brother conscious.
    ‘You had me worried,’ he confessed.
    Stopmouth noticed that Indrani had moved to the corner of the room farthest from his brother. Strange, really, for Wallbreaker had regained the sleek air of confidence he’d lost during his encounter with the Armourbacks.
    ‘How l-long have I been f-f-feverish?’ asked Stopmouth.
    ‘You had your little adventure with Rockface twenty-two days ago.’
    Stopmouth thought about this. The sight of jagged bones poking through his skin would have left most of the Tribe doubting he would ever walk again, let alone hunt. Twenty-two days was a terribly long time for them to put up with that. To take his mind off it, he asked Wallbreaker to tell him about Indrani.
    ‘Now that’s a story!’ said his brother. ‘Do you remember much of the night you escaped from Blood-Ways on Rockface’s back? We all saw this object falling from the sky and I was desperate to get a closer look, but everybody wanted to go on with the hunt.’
    ‘I think I r-remember something like that…’
    Stopmouth was sitting with his back against the wall. His mind had been clear for no more than a tenth part of a day, but already he was tiring. Indrani came over and helped him to lie down. She kept a wary eye on Wallbreaker and went straight back to her corner when she’d finished.
    ‘I’ll tell you that story,’ said Wallbreaker. He grinned. ‘I’ll tell you how I came to be married for a second time, young as I am!’
    Stopmouth looked in astonishment from husband to wife. It was indeed unusual for so young a man to have two women. And yet the Bloodskin hunt would have gained each member of the party a full adult carcass. If Wallbreaker had been able to repeat the success of that even once, it was no wonder he’d been able to afford the extravagance.
    ‘You see, brother, I knew the first moment I heard it