Hammerfall (39 page)

“Tell them there's water at Pori,” he muttered to Luz. “Have her do something useful. It's not damned useful to scare everyone.”

East,
the word came to him.
East, east, east,
and an overwhelming sense of urgency, but he denied it. The needs of a whole caravan short of water denied it. Pori was the destination.

They camped. They had to, and he had reached the limit of his recovered strength. He sat down until the slaves had the tent ready, and he let Hati unsaddle Osan.

And curiously, without any threat in the heavens, every tent deployed side flaps on every side but that facing their line of march, an arrangement which both gave them deep shade and prevented the air moving as efficiently.

It cut off the view of anyone trying to find a target within the tents.

Norit came back to them, saner than she had left. She sat down under the tent, and Patya gave her Lelie, who was fretful and confused, as what child might not be?

But before their noon meal Norit had Lelie sleeping in her lap, and smoothed Lelie's fine hair . . . unthought, repeated gesture.

“Come,” he said to Norit, to Hati. “Lie down. The baby, too.”

They did, their mats set together. Lelie squirmed and fretted, still fevered with her wound, and found a new soft place between Norit and him. Memnanan's mother and that household sat at one end of the tent, and Tofi and he and his at the other, but when they went out to get their bowls filled at the common pot, with the rest, and came back to sit and eat, they made one circle.

There Lelie, still fretful, injured, discovered willing sympathy in Memnanan's mother, and left off scratching her healing wound to sit and be coddled on the old lady's knees. The mother of the Ila's own exalted captain fed a village waif, and Memnanan's wife, uncomfortable at every angle, carrying a child of her own, smiled, a transformation of a plain, thin face into a remarkable woman.

Patya and Tofi sat and talked together. Marak lay down with Hati, alone with Hati, at peace for a little time. He wondered at himself at times, that he could go through such a day and suddenly think of making love to his wife. But thinking was as far as it got.

Come to bed, he wished Norit without saying so.

Babies grew and changed so quickly. Perhaps Norit could not figure where the missing weeks had gone. Two months, and three, and the child was not the infant she remembered. None of them had recovered what they had lost. Everything fell through their grasp so quickly.

Fire blazed through his vision. Rings of fire spread outward.

Marak,
his voices said, and something else. Lovemaking became impossible.

Damn the Ila, damn Luz, damn the
ondat
. He saw the structures start to build in his eyes. He shut Luz out, remembering music, remembering voices, remembering the courtyard and the garden, and the old slaves gathering fruit. Go to hell, he said to Luz. Lines became the base of the garden wall. Voices became the sound of water.

The earth trembled, reminding him it was the Lakht, after all, and that hours of sleep were hours of life irrevocably lost.

The Anlakht is the land of death, but it is also the mother of wells and waters. Fortunate for the world that mountains rise beyond the Qarain and trap the water that rises in the wind. That gift, passing through the hard rock of the Qarain, feeds the wells of the Lakht.

In the same way the Lakht sends water down to the lowlands, turning bitter water into sweet. The unkindest land feeds all the rest. On that one circumstance the whole world lives.

I am the Anlakht of my own creation.

—The Book of the Ila

STARS FELL, AND
multiplied streaks of light across the night sky as they rode through the dunes that night. Some stars vanished beyond the distant wall of the ridge, off the edge of the Lakht. Some sank themselves in cold waves of sand in front of them.

One exploded overhead and left a trail that twisted slowly in the sky.

Marak, Marak, Marak,
the voices said constantly, allowing him no rest from warning. Norit rode with Lelie asleep across the saddlebow, and had her eyes shut, listening or seeing visions, but Hati seemed doggedly trying to sleep, head down and arms clenched as she rode.

Over hours, the ridge to the east played out. The sand stretched level as they traveled south. There was the way to the rim, that track they had taken before, avoiding Pori. The night went insane above them, one streak and the next.

East!

The voices suddenly redoubled their efforts, as if the tower had just wakened from sleep and found out where they were.

Marak! East! Now!

Marak bit his lip, and kept going as he had set their course, as he had told the lord of the Keran, who was deaf to voices and blind to visions.

Lelie began to cry, wordless, plagued, perhaps, by prophecy even in her young age.

Norit suddenly reined in her besha and diverted it from the line, obstructing the course of beshti behind them. Tofi and Patya scarcely avoided colliding with her.

Marak rode close and leaned from the saddle, evading the irate snap of the besha's jaws. He seized the rein and led Norit back, and Norit jerked at the rein and tried to seize control of the beast.

“East,” Norit insisted. “The hammer of heaven. We have to go east.”

“We know it,” Hati said, entirely awake now, and in bad humor. “All of us know it's coming. But we're not going east. We haven't any water. Make Luz understand that. We can't kill all the villages.”

Lelie kicked and squalled. Patya rode close, far more skilled a rider than Norit, and held out her arms. So also Memnanan's relatives rode near to offer help, asking what was the matter, while the caravan moved around them, never pausing. Children grew fretful. Families held discussions. It was no one else's business.

“Give Patya the baby,” Hati said harshly. “Give her to Patya! You'll drop her if you go on.”

Norit would not. Norit held Lelie and hugged her close, hushing the cries, and the look in her eyes, in the light of a star-streaked heaven, was a hell of fear and desolation.

“It's not safe.”

“Nothing's safe,” Marak said. “We're not safe if half the villages die of thirst.”

Rock hit sphere, over and over. He was blind for the moment, but he jerked the rein from Norit's hand and the besha, misused, squalled and backed and jerked its head, dragging painfully at his grip, compressing his fingers.

But he held. He kicked Osan and started forward, and the besha, glad, perhaps, to have a direction compatible with the herd, walked, Norit willing it or not, and Lelie still in her possession.

“We'll die!” Norit cried. “We have to go east, we have to go over the rim!”

“Shut up!” Hati said. “If you let that baby fall, I'll hit you!”

Marak paid no attention to the argument, or to Norit. He led, blind with visions that argued Norit's opinion, and knew when they passed the track that had turned north of Pori the last time they had made this trek. They passed it by.

“We'll die,” Norit muttered. “No safety there. No safety. No safety.”

“There'll be water,” Marak said, weary of listening to her, distracted by the vision of the star-fall. “There'll be water, and we'll be there by morning. We'll be straight on to the rim with no more than a camp. It's the best we can do.”

“No safety,” Norit said.

He was not talking to a sane woman. He feared if he let go of the rein, Norit would be off through the column, creating a panic, and as it was, the Ila's servants looked at them askance, and the slaves looked fearful.

In time Memnanan came to ask what the disturbance was, and went to report Norit's vision. The au'it stored up things to write at sunrise.

“It will be the worst,” Norit muttered under her breath, and hugged Lelie to her while dying stars streaked the heavens in their hundreds. “The earth will crack and pour out blood. Smoke will go up and blot out the sun. It's coming, and nothing can stop it. Fool, Marak. Go east.”

“No,” he said.

“What does she expect from us?” Hati asked. “Why won't she just give up and let us go at our own pace?”

“Who knows if the
ondat
even exist?” Marak said in despair and exhaustion, and regretted saying it, knowing that Luz was listening. He amended it. “Probably they do exist.”

“Someone's throwing stars at us,” Hati said, a bitter try at a joke. “If it isn't these
ondat,
it must be their cousins. Maybe their uncles.”

“That's clearer than we've gotten from Luz.”

Norit held her daughter close now, and sang to her, not a madwoman's song, but the clear, quiet tones of a lullaby.

A star exploded on the horizon while she sang. The explosion lit the sky like a northern sunrise, so bright the column cast shadows.

A wind came after that and ran up the beshti's backs, a wind from off the Anlakht, where the blow had struck, but it did no harm.

At dawn, the au'it began to write, and wrote and wrote, furiously, fighting the pages flat in a light breeze.

At midmorning Norit suffered another fit, and Marak was quick to seize her rein again and bring her under tight control.

The rocks that broke the horizon were those of Pori, that height which poured out the water.

East, east, east,
the voices said, maddening, frantic, and he could no longer believe that Luz was blind and deaf to their situation.

“I'm going ahead,” he said to Hati. “I'm going to have a look.” He no longer took responsibility for Norit: she was in Luz's hands. But they were close enough to see the landmarks, and he had his strength, Hati her keen eye for situations on the Lakht, and for the lives of all of them, he could no longer ignore the two-way pull on his instincts. It was another day to the descent, another waterless day, with no water at the bottom of a climb that was itself bound to cost lives, and the villages' strength was surely running out. They needed to camp. Pori would let them recover their strength for the descent, gather into a large mass and pass instructions before the descent: and if Pori village was already gone, there was still the water. There was a stone cistern. There was surely that.

He rode forward, Hati riding beside him, and they paused only to let Aigyan know his intention.

“What of Tain?” Aigyan asked. “What of ambushes?”

It was possible Tain had gotten ahead of them. That was always possible. It was possible for the rest of their lives.

“We have a premonition,” Hati said, “and we need to know where we're leading,
omi
. We need to be sure about Pori. We'll go and be back before noon camp.”

“Not without escort,” Aigyan said, and named two men and two women to go with them, men and women of Hati's kind, dusky-skinned and wrapped in the dark-striped robes of their tribe, two of them with rifles.

Marak made no objection. They quickened their beshti's pace and rode out to the fore, and far separate of the others. Another rider joined them. Norit, with Lelie held close, had come for a look of her own, and he said not a word to note her presence. He bent all his attention to the land, keeping his eyes tracking every roll of the sand, every stone that might mask ambush: sand-colored robes and a well-laid ambush was the abjori style of attack, and he was alert for it.

It was the way they had plundered the Ila's caravans and killed her soldiers. It was the way they had enforced Tain's will on the villages and made the west for the better part of a decade a difficult place for Memnanan's men to travel. But he saw nothing of ambush, only a furtive movement of vermin that vanished ghostlike into tumbled rock, persuading the eye it had been mistaken.

“Paish,” Hati said. That was one of the larger sort, knee high to the beshti, strong and tracking mostly by scent. He saw it go over a ridge just ahead of them, a red-brown flash of a flank and a tail, then gone.

One rarely saw them.

The beshti, on their own or subtly cued by the Keran riders, picked up the pace. For half an hour or more they proceeded, up and over ridges, down again into the general pitch of the land toward the edge of the Lakht.

Two stars fell by daylight, paired bright streaks across the sky that vanished beyond the hills. The boom that went out shook the air and made Lelie cry.

One more ridge, and the roll of the land gave up a strange sight, the ruined sticks of trees, the jagged edges of walls.

A star had fallen here. The well had broken open and continued to flow, soaking the sand.

Marak drew Osan in atop the ridge. So all the rest reined in. They stood atop the ridge and looked out on what had been an oasis, and now was a sky-reflecting pool of water, around which the red sand writhed. Small clumps of bodies detached at various places around that edge and floated out . . . hundreds, thousands of vermin gathered and pressing in on the sweet water, a living carpet of predators and scavengers that fought and preyed on each other, and waited only for the smell of death or waste to draw them all outward in a ravening swarm.

“Dead.” Norit said faintly. “Pori is dead.”

“Marak,” Hati said, pleading with him, turn, move, and quickly.

He drew Osan's head about—his hands moved before his vision had finished taking in the danger. He was wrong. He had been wrong all along.

“Ride softly,” a Keran tribeswoman said. “Quietly, please,
omi
.”

He knew. The sound, the scent, any whisper of presence might send the outermost of the mob toward them. They had the whole caravan advancing toward this place, and he could only be glad Norit had raised the doubt in him, and could only wish he had listened to Norit, to Luz, to the warnings Luz had tried to give them before now.

They rode away behind the ridge at a restrained pace. Lelie began to fret and to cry. Norit hushed her with a hand over her mouth, and hugged her close. It was more than their own escape they had to manage. They dared not draw the mob after them, and the beshti, uneasy, wanted to travel faster, to break into a run that would take them back to the herd . . . that was the beshti's view of things, get to the herd and bolt for the horizon, faster than the mob could follow.

Osan fought to get free. Norit's besha, beyond her strength or skill, suddenly jerked the rein and pulled Norit half from the saddle, and a tribeswoman seized her before she could fall free . . . seized her robe in one hand as she swung to the side, but the besha went out from under her. Lelie fell from her grasp, and Norit herself fell to the sand, her besha running free, rein trailing.

Hati reined in beside the accident as Marak did, and before he could get from the saddle, Hati jumped down and swept Lelie up in her arms. Lelie had had the wind knocked out of her, and got her breath back, and screamed, Hati trying in vain to prevent her crying. Meanwhile one of the two tribesmen, retaining a tight grip on his rein, had leapt down to haul Norit to her feet.

Marak rode past Hati, grasped the baby by one arm as he did so, and yanked her into his grasp, smothering her against him to silence her cries as he reined around. It seemed forever then. Hati fought to steady her panicked besha long enough to get back into the saddle, a lifelong-practiced set of moves, and made it—got her hands on the harness and was up into the saddle, leaving Norit still down, still dazed by a thump of her head against the sand. But one of the men of their escort immediately gathered Norit up, supported her, staggering as she was while the other man pressed close to control the rescuer's besha.

It was all a matter of heartbeats, scant moments—but there had been too much noise, far too much for their safety, and as the one tribesman held Norit on her feet against the side of his besha, Marak's anxious glance found an ominous furtive movement among the rocks on either hand.

“Up!” Marak said.
“Luz! Get her up!
”

Norit managed, winded as she was, to take hold of the saddle loops, but the tribesman shoved her from below so that she landed like baggage, and never delayed to mount as with a frightened snort the besha moved out. Vermin poured out of the rocks: one besha moved and they all moved, for their lives. The man's grip on the mounting loops held, keeping him with his besha in a maneuver that carried him along faster than a tired man could run, clinging on the side of the saddle, hitting the ground with occasional strides. “Go, go, go!” the Keran all insisted, and that man no less than the others. The tribesman had a death grip on the mounting loop, and before Marak, burdened with Lelie, could ride Osan in to his assistance, his brother tribesman came by on the man's left side to seize his hand, leaning down, boosting him higher off the sand in two strides, until the man was able to get an arm past Norit and haul himself half-over the saddle behind her.