Gene Wars - Hammerfall Part 30

Norit lifted a hand, as autocratic as the Ila herself. "If they lost two, give them no more to lose. Let them all go to other tents, and settle in the village behind them in line."

Marak was astonished, and the Pesha villagers wildly outraged. It was a desert judgment from a softhearted village woman. And on that thought, Marak knew Norit had not made that choice.

"This isn't just!" the men cried.

"The desert isn't just. Those who lost two tents should have better leaders."

"They have a book," the priest said, over the protests of the villagers. "Shall they keep it? Or shall it also go to their hosts?"

"It should go to their hosts," Luz said through Norit, but Marak thought it was Norit who added: "and the village lord should beg the pardon of Pesha village for losing the tents. He may be a wise man in his own village affairs, and he can command again after we reach the tower, where we're safe, but he should leave pitching camp to those that kept all their tents, and thank them for keeping his safe."

The priests and the chagrined villagers bowed and went away with their message.

Well judged, and well said, Marak thought to himself in their departure. Even Luz could learn the exigencies of the desert; and even Norit could moderate Luz's harsh judgments.

But that disaster was not the worst. Tofi reported grimmer news relayed to him up from the tribes, a concern that small vermin had moved in near the caravan track back among the villages, and showed increasingly disturbing courage over the last two days. The tribes nearest the villages had warned them to be more careful with their waste, and the priests, in evidence of very bad judgment, had not reported it when they reported the lost tents.

Tofi, however, knew the dire seriousness of what the tribes observed, and stood waiting for a solution from him.

The vermin came to the moisture and waste of a caravan. They always followed caravans, but they never, almost never, attacked one on its march: the noise was too much, the activity too threatening.

Vermin were interested in everything a caravan left or shed... starting with the latrines, and the small insect vermin that burrowed there, and the larger vermin that came to feed on them, and the largest that fed on the larger. They were habitual pests, no more than that, on the average route, at worst startling some caravanner bent on private business in his tent's latrine, in some three-day camp.

But no one had ever seen a caravan that took a day or more to march past a given point. No one knew what happened when the rule that vermin never mobbed a large caravan ran up against the rule that vermin always gathered and moved in on an abandoned campsite.

In their all-inclusive caravan, only the Ila's party and the tribes and the villages in front marched over clean sand. Past the first half hundred or so camps, the entire route of march of those behind was through one continuous campsite, and Marak was appalled that they had not once thought of that ominous situation. They were fools.

He looked at Tofi, took a hitch of the aifad to obscure his dismay. The dust stung his eyes. It made the air itself smell like hot sand. "They're marching over old ground," Marak said. "There's never been a caravan so large its back end marches over its own trail after breaking camp, not that I know."

"We must stretch out at least a day's march, maybe two," Tofi said, over the thumping of the nearby tent, which slaves were working to take down. "It's going to happen, isn't it?"

"The city people, those afoot..." Marak shuddered to think of the situation of the hindmost: beshti were some defense. But for a man afoot...

"I'll tell Memnanan," he said to Tofi, and went and immediately called the Ila's captain apart from his men, the two of them curtained in the blowing dust, partly sheltered by the Ila's tent.

Memnanan listened grimly, as appalled as he. He had fought in the desert. He knew the hazards of vermin, and the rules of a clean camp, no matter what city people understood. "Wait," Memnanan said, and went to talk to the Ila, reckless of her bad mood, and talked for several moments, urgently, before he came back.

"The Ila understands," Memnanan said. "She gives us leave to do whatever is necessary."

"If we increase the pace more than this," Marak said, "we'll lose lives. But if we don't, we'll lose villages. Send a letter back through the line. Tell the villages to dig their latrines as deep as they can.

Cover everything they leave behind as deeply as they have the strength to dig. Let the strong dig for the weak, and let them make only as many pits as they can make doubly deep. Digging will delay the vermin and give us time... if only they don't go for the stragglers: there maybe a mobbing, but we won't be there to see it."

The earth shuddered. They had all but learned to ignore such moments.

"Kinder, perhaps," Memnanan said, "to leave the weak behind all at once, and not to drag the inevitable out in days of misery."

"Kinder to poison the lot of them this evening," Marak said above the thumping of the wind-stirred canvas, "and not leave them for the vermin to eat alive. But we're men, and we don't give up. Sometimes we win. Sometimes even villagers win."

"You were already safe at the tower," Memnanan said, chasing that old question. "If it was safe. You knew you were risking everything. Why did you come back?"

"For my mother. For my sister. Wouldn't you?"

"So you have them. Why don't you ride off ahead of the rest?"

He had no idea why he stayed. But he shook his head again, thinking of thousands of the helpless, all the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and children in the world. "We do what we can," he said with a shrug, "or nothing at all gets done, does it? Nothing ever gets done, and no one gets saved, if we aren't fools at least some of the time. Why don't you run for the tower with a few men and the best beasts? You know the route. Why does even the Ila march at this pace? We're fools, is all."

"I'll instruct messengers to go back," Memnanan said. "I don't trust your written message."

Marak had a vision of the line stringing out as they marched, farther and farther separated, the strong leaving the weak, and the villages beginning to know it.

"There'll be panic," he said, thinking of the last messenger they had dispatched, and took a small, personal chance. "You might inquire of Tarsa, if someone gets as far as that village. Tell them ride through the column, not down the sides."

"We do what we can," Memnanan said, and they parted, and went each of them to see to their own necessities.

His were simple, to see everyone in his own tent mounted up and ready. Tofi had packed the tents. The beshti and the waiting riders stood like ghosts in the blowing sand.

He had no desire to imagine their collective situation if all the vermin in the world began to turn toward the only caravan in the world as their only source of food. He declined to mention the notion to Hati and Norit and the rest as he joined them: if Luz had not bothered to tell them in relentless detail, he kept the secret. Tofi looked at him questioningly, and he said: "The captain's sending instructions back."

By the time they began to move, behind the Haga and the Keran, the dust was blowing steadily at their backs, and the Keran, foremost, had surely gotten the message from Memnanan's first messengers. The Keran moved out, and they did, and they set a faster-than-usual pace as the wind helped them along.

The strong west wind was an a.s.sisting hand behind the weak in these first hours; but the dryland gusts carried moisture away from them, too, and made them drink more often. The wind stressed the weak, some of whom would die today. Marak could not but think of it.

Three times that morning the earth shook, but the line never faltered, not, at least, that the foremost could see when they looked back. At noon they made the ordinary measured rest, and pressed on.

The Ila through the day spoke rarely and was cross with everyone. The aui'it went in healthy fear, and theirs was likely glad to be serving them, writing down their daily progress and little else, ignorant, perhaps, of what Memnanan had told the Ila. In the late afternoon Marak rode up a time to see his mother and his sister, and they had heard the news: the Keran had told everyone in their camp.

"Are we in danger?" Patya asked, being half a villager, and doubtless she had asked their mother the same question.

"Not us," he said plainly. "The last ranks are dead men."

The knowledge of the situation cast a pall on their meeting. Kais Tain might be among the last. He had never yet seen his own village in the lines. But they never mentioned Tain, and they never mentioned their village. He dropped back to ride with Hati and with Norit, and Luz was quiet, apprised of the hazard around them: so by then, might they be, but he told them.

"Vermin are moving in. The end of the caravan is in danger."

He saw only Norit's eyes above the aifad, but he imagined the worry. He raised no hopes, said no word of Norit's lost Lelie, and neither did Norit.

By evening, the wind had sunk notably. The Keran had found a bitter spring in the rocks, and dug it out.

The beshti drank, and the Keran marked the place for the other tribes and the villages as they moved.

The spring scarcely kept up with the demand of the beshti, and no man could drink it, but the beshti, whose urine was at times poisonous even to vermin, were content with what they drank.

By morning, there was cloud above the blowing sand, and by the hour they camped, the cloud was such that they could not use the sun for the heating-mirrors, and could not cook their rations or boil water.

Only the Ila had tea, using precious lamp oil for fuel as well as light.

Her tent, of all the rest, surely, in all the long line of all the tents left in the world, glowed in the gathering murk, stained with the light of lamps inside. It must be all of them lit, Marak judged, profligate waste.

"The Ila shouldn't burn the fuel for tea," he ventured to say to Memnanan. "Or light. We may need it in the storms. We've been lucky so far. Can anyone reason with her?"

"She's angry," Memnanan confided in Marak. "It's become the tea, the clouds, the wind, the dust, but mostly it's the situation. Men are dying behind us. She lights the lamps.She will have tea. I don't know why. Sometimes I think this is how she grieves."

The Ila's messengers through the day had come in with news of lost tents, straggling walkers, and persistent vermin, and said four young villagers had died or would die as fools, drinking the bitter water-but as yet they had had no disasters beyond the loss of a few sacks of grain riddled with hardsh.e.l.ls. They were not doing that badly. It was strange to hear Memnanan's observation... that the living G.o.ddess grieved, and sipped tea.

He marked, too, that Memnanan had not visited his wife or his mother. Memnanan had only spoken to them outside the tent, obsessed strictly with duty, or perhaps commanded to that obsession. And still the Ila grieved.

"More useful if she saved the fuel," Marak said. "We haven't seen any excess of vermin this far forward, and that's good news. But we can't say about the weather." The west had made him increasingly uneasy, in the steady wind. For two days he had been free of visions, but when he said that, he saw the ring of fire.

More, he saw the ring become a sheet and a wall of fire and rush across the land as high as a dust storm, towering up to the heavens. He took in his breath, lost to ordinary use of his eyes, lost to his sense of balance.

"What's the matter?" Memnanan asked.

Out across the flat pan, with his eyes, he saw the streak of a falling star pierce the cloud, and fall and hit the earth. It shook him. He was not sure it was real. "Shall I talk to the Ila?" he asked. "I know how to give her bad news... and how to call her a fool. If she kills me, she loses her guide."

"Not now," Memnanan said soberly. "Not today. Not even you."

"What, besides the haste?" he asked.

"The haste, the wind, all these things." Memnanan heaved a sigh, looked at the sand under their feet and, looking up, gave a fourth reason. "The priests came. They call your wife a prophet. The Ila isn't pleased."

He had been aware of messengers coming and going. He remembered a visitation by priests, afoot. He had not reckoned that for the cause of the Ila's mood, but it made sense. "I'll speak to Norit," he said, and knew that, far more than that, if the Ila was growing chancy and destructive, he had to speak to Luz about the danger.

"Say nothing of it," Memnanan advised him. "The matter is settled now, and quiet. If she sends for you, you never witnessed such audiences as I did. Shewon't send for your wife."

It was a statement begging for a question. "Why not?" he asked.

"Your wife speaks for the tower. The Ila is increasingly distraught. She finds the connection intolerable."

"So does my wife," he confessed, in this moment of truths somewhat excessively given. "She doesn't like what's happened to her. But she does tolerate it, being mad, like the rest of us. She can't help it.

And she's our guide."

"Oh, the Ila knows that," Memnanan said. "She knows it very well. I would even say she forgives your wife, if I had any belief in her forgiveness."

"You don't."

"I don't."

"Yet you serve her."

"So did my father's father. And we've done very well, until now."

They parted. They went their ways. Memnanan stopped for a word with his wife and his aunts and his mother. Marak settled down with Hati and Norit, and they slept a peaceful, abandoned sleep.

Marak, his voices said, for the first time in hours, and waked him and them all at the same moment.

Marak . He saw the ring of fire.

Norit lowered her face into her hands and wiped her hair back, distracted and unhappy.

"In the bitter water," Norit said. "A great fall. A shake is coming. It's coming soon."

"Not a danger to us," he said, hoping it was the case.

"No," Norit said. But in only a matter of moments the earth shook itself like a beshti clearing dust. The tents swayed and the beshti bawled their distress. It did so twice more.

The wind had fallen off markedly by then. And as Marak came out of their tent to inspect for damage, a few drops of cold water fell from the leaden clouds. Sheet lightning showed in the distance, to the east, and as Hati came out under the sky, a spit of rain came down and pocked the sand all about them.

Marak gave a desperate laugh.

"What's funny?" Hati asked him. Worry had settled on Hati like a heavy weight these last days. She looked at him now as if he had become the madman again.

But before he could explain himself, more rain fell, and she took on a strange look and began to laugh and laugh, and laugh. "You're right," she said, and laughed again, until Tofi and the freedmen came out to see what was funny. She wiped her eyes with a dusty knuckle. "We'lldrown , next." She kept laughing.

"What's funny?" Norit asked next, completely seriously, and he and Hati both set to laughing, which brought a tentative laughter from Tofi and the freedmen, as if they dimly understood the joke.

"We'll drown or we'll be eaten," Hati said, and laughed. Norit simply looked puzzled and troubled.

"There's a storm coming," Norit said. "But a small one." That was from Luz, Marak thought, and he had Tofi move to strike the tent, determined to get the canvas down before it gathered water weight. The Keran were taking those down, and meanwhile one of Memnanan's messengers had come in, and he went to know what the news was.

"We've lost contact with the farthest contingents," Memnanan said to him, after talking to that man. It was sifting rain, now, a mist as fine as dust. "We've heard nothing yet. I hoped this man had ridden back that far, but he didn't. The weather changed, and he grew uneasy and came to report."

"It's possible they're that far off," Marak said.

"Or vermin ate them. But vermin aren't our only worry," Memnanan said. "There are bandits unaccounted for in all of this. They've doubtless picked over Oburan's bones. If they're starting now to pick at the column, there's nothing we can do about it. They'll scavenge the weak."

"Like the rest of the vermin," Marak said, all trace of humor gone from his heart. It was a reasonable suspicion, and one their plans could not deal with. "If that's started, our line will grow shorter until they have too much to carry. Or they'll tail us, picking off what they want, when they want it. We can't divert our march to deal with them." He knew this kind of war, this bandit hara.s.sment. He had practiced it himself, against the Ila's caravans. He had equipped bands of raiders that way.

"It's not in our hands," Memnanan agreed. "But we'll send no more men back there."

"I'd say that's wise," Marak answered him, "if it was for me to say anything."

"Oh, you're the desert master, Marak Trin. I listen."

Desert master because the abjori had fought from the desert, and Memnanan from the city, always from the city. And Memnanan remembered, too, what the marks were on his fingers.

"I've no better advice," Marak said. "I haven't, and Luz hasn't, nothing that I know."

The Ila remained secluded, and peevish. They parted, and Memnanan returned to his duty with a grim face. A short spate of rain soaked them, and then the clouds broke and shredded, and went flying along with amazing rapidity.

At sunset of that day a brilliant seam of color showed on the horizon and persisted after dark.

Clouds, some said. They had seen plenty of those.

Fire, others said. But the glow went out after dark, so they decided it had been cloud, and that foretold weather.

Sphere hit sphere in Marak's vision. Hati was as downcast as Norit, and kept looking behind them as they rode. Stars fell, not many, but large ones, one of which left a stuttered trail for a long distance.