Hammerfall (7 page)

That was the orderly beginning of the matter. Then Obidhen's slaves, strong men, each, roused each of the forty-some riding beasts up, beginning with the au'it, and hoisted their passengers up, like children.

“Sit still!” Marak shouted out. “Let them settle!”

It was appalling confusion. The beasts, in the uncertainty of so many new riders, lost patience and moved away from nudging knees and elbows, adding to the bawling confusion. Two and three of the novice riders toppled hard onto the sand. Marak seized stray reins, and so did the freedmen and the sons and Obidhen himself, while onlookers gathered from the city gate to add to the confusion. The soldiers, riding up with shouts and derision, had to gather in reins to hold other bawling beasts.

Meanwhile no few riders let their beasts escape their inexpert reining, and those animals set to circling, ignoring tugs on their reins by the simple trick of laying their heads around. It was no surprise that several novices had their feet bitten, which brought howls and panic anew, and catcalls from the gate despite the presence of the au'it and the soldiers.

The madmen were mostly villagers, but they had walked the desert, not ridden it. Save a few desert-bred folk and two others who were clearly expert, the most of the madmen had never ridden in their lives, and the slaves had a great deal to do to convince any of the beasts thus mounted to keep a line.

Marak approached his own well-bred besha and took his quirt from the saddle. After the recent confusion his beast rolled a wary eye back, sizing him up.

Marak took the rein and stepped smoothly into the higher mounting loop. The besha, perhaps relieved to sense a rider who knew the fast way aboard, half straightened his forelegs and came up under him as he landed.

There was no need for
hup-hup-hup!
Marak sized the beast up, too, braced both hands against the double horn, one high, one low, as the back legs shifted.

The pitch forward reversed in the next breath as the forelegs straightened.

And just when an inexperienced rider would least expect it, the hind legs drove in one long shove, propelling the rider forward and all but upside down for an instant, testing the strength of the girth around the beast's broad, deep chest.

That
was what the double horn and straight-armed brace of the hands was for, and
that
was why children and old folk mounted a besha only with assistance, while it was standing.

A fourth, a minor jolt, almost a hop, straightened the forelegs entirely, and at that, the rider's whole body snapped back to view the world from twice a man's height, poised on a stilt-limbed body four times his size. It all proceeded in a few blinks of the eye; and weary as he was, trembling as he held the rein, and surrounded by a band of madmen apt to fall in the dust or lose toes to vexed mounts, Marak still found a breath of freedom.

The beast under him, no common run of the herd, wanted to move. He held it back. The besha swayed back and forth under him, grumbling in its chest, as beshti would do when they were full of spirit and impatient with the lowly pack beasts. Marak allowed no nonsense, settled his right foot possessively on the besha's curved neck, and heaved a deep and shaken sigh. The besha under him did the same.

They all were up. No one had been killed. Obidhen's sons linked the animals that would move under halter, to loud complaints and the occasional outright squall of indignation from riding beasts unaccustomed to such treatment when they were under saddle.

The packs, meanwhile, all had their specific places, hung over the packsaddles, tied down with a few short turns of rope. The caravan slaves hastened, sometimes running from one beast to the other, beshti patience notoriously scant with imbalance or hesitation. Everything was packed, every packet balanced for the two sides of the saddle, everything apportioned to the individual beast's capacity to carry:
there
was the mark of a veteran caravanner. Every pack went on the first time, and every beast responded to the light snap, not the impact, of a quirt.

A last few madmen, desert-bred, mounted up on their own, and rode back and forth, free of the detested lead, restless, as anxious as the beasts.

Certainly the caravan master's three sons had no need of help when the time came. “Bas!” the order was, making a standing beast simply put out one foreleg. That served as a footbridge to an unseen mounting loop and, by a quick turn, to the saddle. To the unknowing eye, in the dim light of dawn, the master's eldest son had leapt to his besha's back.

It was the trick of the young, the lithe, the desert-bred, and Marak doubted he could still do it himself. He had softened considerably in village life, since their retreat from the Lakht, and he knew now he had watched his father, too, grow soft, and angry, and settle in for the life of a village lord. There had been the start of the bitterness, a man always mourning the chance that had never come, the vengeance that had never fallen into his hands.

Thoughts muddled. Sounds became distant, and the weariness weighed down and down, numbing senses. The foot-braced attitude Marak held, keeping his beast at rest, was one in which he had slept many a ride, and of all things else he had left behind with his youthful confidence, his body had not forgotten how to keep centered on a swaying back. He shivered in the dawn, but at least no one noticed his weakness. The shivering was lack of sleep; it was the unaccountable shift of his fortunes. It was the roaring in his ears, that the Ila's retaliation had brought on him, and now that he had done everything, now that there was nothing more for him to do but sleep, it was beyond him to fight his exhaustion. Body heat fled. He drew his robes close about him, even covering his fingers within that warmth and taking in the heat of the huge body under him.

The roaring increased within his ears. Pain had invaded his joints, down to his fingers and his toes, and reasserted itself, after so long ignoring it. But it was only exhaustion, so he argued with himself. It all would pass. The trembling would pass. Surely the roaring in his ears would pass with sleep.

“Are we going home?” one confused madman asked another in his hearing, as the line filed past, and the caravan set itself in motion. “Where shall we go?”

One madman answered another: “East, man. We go east. Everything is east. And then we go back and tell the Ila what we find. That's the crazy part. Tain's son is one of us. He claims he'll figure it out.”

The law of the caravans is this: that the master of the caravan has the power of life and death over all who travel under his rule, except over a priest, except over an au'it, except over the Ila's man. These lives belong to the Ila. The master of the caravan must preserve them at the cost of all others.

—The Book of Oburan

THE SUN ROSE
as a vast, expanded disk and climbed above the Lakht in an unforgiving sky. The day's heat grew and grew, and built toward that hour when prudent travelers pitched their tents. Marak had indeed slept in the saddle, an uneasy sleep, a sleep with a watchful eye on the mad and on the soldiers and the caravan master and his sons alike; but no greater disturbance demanded his attention than the passage of birds, shadows on the sand, and the track of a solitary belly-creeper headed for the reed-rimmed Mercy.

Past midday, with the pond behind them, the heat only increased. The caravan master ordered a halt until the heat of the day had passed, and Marak, among the rest, was glad to bid his beast kneel and to step down from the saddle.

In the jolt of the beast's kneeling down, his own knees and elbows ached with remembered fire. He sat down on the burning sand against his beast's broad side while the caravan master and the servants pitched the tents.

The au'it settled near him, book and kit in her lap.

There would be nothing remarkable in this camp to record. He was determined on that point.

He said to her, instead, “Write the names of the mad.” It seemed a harmless question. “Write the names of their cities. Write what they look for.” It might keep her from hovering near him.

The au'it bowed her head and went on her mission, visiting the rest, who disposed themselves in a tight, sweaty huddle under the first canvas stretched . . . forty madmen, all in a space for ten.

Marak cared little for what she did or reported. The holy city had gone below the horizon, but it would appear many times during the next night and day, and for that sight he no longer roused himself. He only cared that he hear no loud sounds and that nothing require him to stir, and where he would find the strength in his legs to mount the beast again this afternoon he could not imagine. Now the pain had set in. Now the weakness swept over him. The caravan master's sons would heave him up as they did the wife of Tarsa and the potter.

He would burn with shame, he, Marak Trin, once Trin Tain, his father's heir.

Terror of the Lakht, the men had called him. Not lately.

He rested foolishly in the sun, not even seeking shelter in the first canvas spread: at this pitch of disgust with himself he could not abide the looks and the questions of his fellow travelers, the recipients of his charity, the models of his fortune. It was the latter truth that galled him most, that in point of fact, as far as the Ila cared and as far as the soldiers cared, he had become no different than the rest of them. He brooded on his situation, his aifad pulled about his face, shading him from what was now, though he had invited every one of them, an unwelcome company.

But when all five tents were all up, all open-sided to let the air flow through, the mad had somewhat spread out and settled down on their mats. Then he stirred himself.

“Omi,” Obidhen accosted him.
My lord.
“I'll have the number one tent, with my freedmen and the slaves. My second son Landhi will have the next, Rom, my eldest, the third and Tofi, my youngest, can manage the fourth. I can place two freedmen with the first and manage the fifth myself, unless, omi, you will take charge there. You know the Lakht. You clearly know the necessities. If you will take the au'it in your care and be master there, it might be best.”

He understood the delicate position the master was in. The Ila's soldiers had camped in that fifth tent, men over whom the master had little authority.

“I will deal with it,” he said to the master, “and I
do
know the Lakht.”

The master bowed, clearly relieved. He was relieved. He had a tent where his word was law. As for the soldiers, they would leave after their noon rest, and good riddance, Marak thought. He took his waterskin, took his mat, almost last of the pile, and went to that shade, sure that the au'it, still pursuing her questions, would come back to him in due time.

Meanwhile he spread his mat near the edge of the shade, where the breeze moved beneath the shelter, and went and got his rations. As master of the fifth tent, he was the arbiter of disputes, the dispenser of stores on days when they chose not to share a common meal. There were no disputes, no questions, and peacefully he unwrapped what he had to eat, the common fare on days when the travel was too hard and the press of that work too fast and furious to spread out the sun-ovens and cook. The cake was the sort of dry ration common to the Lakht, where water was too precious to let into food. Water stayed in the canteen, and one mixed the two in the mouth, to sustain life and make it possible to swallow. That was the usual fare of the desert tribes on the move, and the mad had learned it on the march. They might know nothing about riding beasts; but they knew by now how to eat and drink in the desert. These were the survivors, toughest, most adaptable of the lot. He had nothing to tell them regarding the preciousness of water and the apportionment of supplies . . . given they were in their sane minds.

The Ila's men, meanwhile, unwrapped their supper and ate fruit from the market, dripped juice wantonly on the sand, and pitched the pits away still having flesh on them. Marak glowered, resting, nursing the recurrence of pain the Ila had given him.

The au'it came back. “Two have left,” she said.

“Have they taken beasts?” Marak asked.

“No,” the au'it said. “When we stopped to rest, they simply walked away.”

“They're dead,” he said.

Those who also had walked the Lakht to the holy city had not prevented them or reported them, and there was a certain logic in that. If they would walk away today, they would walk away tomorrow, having eaten and drunk a day's rations in the meanwhile. The desert killed the wasteful and the extravagant quickly, surely, and covered them over. He had given them their chance and spent a day's food on them. Effectively they were dead, and he could not fault their choice.

It might be the better choice, who could know? He had asked for their lives in a moment in which he fought for his own life. Now he had no notion what he had done to these madmen, whether it was good or not. He had no idea whether he had rescued these people or damned them to a lingering death.

But he knew why he shuddered at the reasonless, wasteful actions of the men and women that surrounded him. The soldiers swilled water. One of the mad at the moment had wandered out and turned in circles, looking up at the sky and staring at the sun. Because he had asked for this man's life, was he responsible? Could he advise the man against his visions? Could he do better in leading this band of fools?

Could he say he would not, himself, sooner or later, be that crazed?

The au'it, in the soft, rarely used voice of her profession, reported the two names of the lost among the others from her book, and listed the rest as he had wished, with their origins. None of the names of the mad meant much to him, except that the wife from Tarsa had a name: Norit; and the potter had a name, Kosul. He took account of those and of others, despite the roaring that had begun in his ears, and meant to remember them.

It proved, too, that there were tribesmen among the mad. He had thought so. That was good news, in this land . . . only granted they were not the ones who had walked away.

He lay down to sleep after eating. It seemed to him this afternoon that the air was either hotter than the rule, or he might be fevered. He had been in pain, and his wounds always went fevered: it was his weakness from childhood.

When the fever came, however, he always healed.

And he waked after a sleep of a few hours in less pain, which put him in a better frame of mind. To his relief, too, there was less of the intermittent buzzing and roaring behind the voices in his ears, so he began to hope that, too, might abate. He heard one of his voices calling him, distinctly so:
Marak, Marak, Marak,
that idle repetition clear for the first time since the Ila's fire had run through his bones.

He had never thought he would be relieved to hear that voice, but he was. A voice was better than the roaring sound, and far better than dulled ears and diminished senses.

But less welcome, this afternoon, his eyes flashed with inner light, as the images once had done when he was a child, when he first remembered them building shapes in his eyes. It was as if they were building back again.

He healed. He always healed. Even the madness healed itself to its old terms, as if it were an inescapable condition of his good health.

He lay on his mat and listened to his voices until the sun sank and the caravan master and his sons began to strike tents. Then it was time to move. The soldiers gathered their water-plump flesh up onto riding beasts and rode back the way they had come, returning to the city. No one was sorry for that.

And the mad, once rested, wandered about with more energy than before, carrying their own mats, some even helping with the tents now that the soldiers were gone, now that they were sure they were no longer prisoners.

Everyone was out and about, finally, except the wife from Tarsa, Norit, who sat and rocked, rocked, rocked, as the boy had used to.

The caravan master came cautiously to inform him they must strike this tent, too, if they were to move, and asking him would he persuade the madwoman to get up.

Marak saw from the tail of his eye that the au'it made a note in her book. He wondered what she wrote, and for whom she wrote it.

He went and assisted the wife, Norit, to her feet. And the au'it made another note.

Marak, Marak, Marak.
The sound went on, maddening. The lights within his skull outshone the sun, a long, long tunnel of suns.

The slaves had saddled his riding beast. In this gathering bout of madness he thought it was Osan, the name of his very first, when he was a boy; and as he settled himself in the saddle and endured the neck-snapping jolts of the beast rising, he decided that that was its name. His life had come to a new beginning. He had cast away responsibility to his father, and taken up responsibility for madmen . . . he knew he could not cure them, no more than he could heal himself. But here he was. He had achieved the command for which his affliction fitted him.

A breeze rose with the lowering of the sun, the first breath of air, a reminder of life in the midst of the great flat, and it roused Osan's spirits, too. Marak took in the rein and walked Osan in a circle until all the mad were up and until the caravan masters had mounted their own beasts. Then he let Osan go, riding first with the master's sons, and then alone, striking a good traveling pace.

He had used to ride into the western desert for days. Where have you been? his father would ask, and he would lie and call it hunting, when his hunting was voices and the visions. He would kill something at the last, and bring it back, and his father would believe him.

He recalled killing a bird, and remembered how he had stroked its head and thought if he were not mad it would not be dead, because there was precious little good to him in killing it. He had stamped it into the sand. He had thrown rocks at it. Then, in cowardice, he had killed another, to have something to show his father for his day in the wilderness.

Osan, his companion of prior lies and deceptions about his madness, was bone and dust now. The shoulder on which he used to lean was gone. There was no more help from that quarter. There was this beast, which would live or die with him. So with all these men. He need not go anywhere to explain himself this night. No more. No more lies. He was what he was, and the soldiers, their last tie to the city, had left them. Only the caravan master could dispute his word, and Obidhen, set under his orders, called him lord.

They were well equipped, like the best of caravans. There were no walkers to slow them. There were no wagons. Out away from the wells as a fast, well-equipped caravan could travel, there was less chance of bandits. It was water that drew predators.

Marak,
the voices said, past the roaring in his ears.
Marak. This way.

East where the sun rose. East where the world slid. East, east, east, and an end of questions, for men and women in universal agreement, a handful of souls all set desperately toward the identical, desperate, crazed obsession.

So his jagged reasoning went as they traveled on into the night, when every man was isolate and when the dark cooled the land to shadow and starlight.

At times he slept in the saddle. At times he waked to look at the stars and realize that nothing known lay in front of him.

In the enduring dark this new Osan called up emotions in him that he thought the drugs and the march had killed. Osan made his hands remember love and his body remember freedom, and those two things stirred other feelings.

Marak, Marak, Marak,
his voices said. His body fell into a rhythm it had known from before he could remember, a rhythm he had learned in his father's arms, when that had been the safe place, the shaded place, the secure place.

Now that of all things was the deadliest place, the most painful place for memory to go.

There was only Osan.

Freedom was all he had ever asked of his father.

A cave of suns beckoned him, blinding bright: he squinted his eyes even in the dark, and it made no more sense than it ever had.

A tower rose up against the stars, a black shape, a vacancy of light.
Marak,
the voices said.

He had fought the voices' advice, smothered the images, hidden them all his life, and now he had nothing to learn of the world but the truth of what they meant. It was as if they, he and the madmen, all shed their clothes and ran naked in the dark. The au'it had told him all their names, and he knew now he was not alone. He had sisters. He had brothers. The truly mad had walked away to die and now he was left with those who, like him, had wit enough to dominate the visions, and will enough to live.