known as "volunteering", and it is considered shameful to attempt to resist being volunteered for the good of your tribe. Stopmouth himself (who is said to be around 5,000 days old, around 13 years old) is constantly overlooked and overshadowed because of both his stuttering speech impediment and his more popular brother, Wallbreaker. One day Stopmouth meets a woman named Indrani. Indrani fell from the sky when one of the mysterious globes that fly across the 'Roof' (the Human tribe's name for the sky, basically) explodes, and she is expelled from it. Indrani seems to be more civilized than Stopmouth's tribe, and is disdainful of them. The Human tribe believes her to be 'slow', or stupid, because she cannot speak their language, and their experience has been that there is only one Human tribe. She was going to be volunteered, but Wallbreaker took her as a wife (partly because of her beauty, and partly because one's status is raised when one has more than one wife), protecting her from being traded. Eventually, a great war ensues over a piece of technology known to the barbarians as 'the talker'. It allows different species to communicate with each other, thus making them easier to coordinate alliances with. It eventually gets to the point where most of the species opposing the Humans are destroyed, and Wallbreaker (having been elected chief by this point) takes possession of the talker, which becomes a coveted artifact. Stopmouth, who has come to love Indrani and resent Wallbreaker for taking her before he did, steals Indrani from him and, at her request, the talker. He is pursued across the land by his tribe until they eventually lose their pursuers. Stopmouth (having travelled to a distant part of the land) eventually becomes the surrogate chief of a tribe of religious humans who are on the verge of being wiped out by a strange race of creatures. With his help, they learn to fend for themselves. Indrani reveals toward the end of the book that she comes from a tribe of Humans who live in the Roof, and actually watch the Humans below fight for their lives as a form of entertainment. Stopmouth is devastated by this, but eventually they reconcile, as Indrani has come to a different view of his people, and now holds a degree of respect for them where there had only been disdain before. The book