Gene Wars - Hammerfall Part 39

"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 theondat 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 theseondat , 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.

"Child, sleep soundly in my arms. Nothing can harm you here. Dream of springs rich in water, Dream of palms of shade and fruit. Dream of fields gold with grain. Dream of cool breezes. Our house is shut against the night. Our door is strong, our shutters tight. Stars are brightly s.h.i.+ning."

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 ma.s.s and pa.s.s 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 a.s.sistance, 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.

His grip after that embraced Norit, and kept her across the saddle like a water sack while he reached forward for the rein. It was a feat of skill no villager would match, and it freed them all to run all-out.

No one had bled, no one had died, no blood had encouraged the vermin: distance widened between them and the mob, and when Marak looked back he saw clear sand between them.

He slowed. Far enough in the lead to know they had room, they all slackened to a staying pace, but kept moving. He held Lelie. He had Hati and Norit as safe as any of them.

Norit's besha meanwhile was long over the horizon, headed breakneck toward the caravan to join the herd it knew. Unrewarded, behind them, the vermin had straggled out, and most would go back to the water. A few might follow the track they inevitably left-less dominant outrunners, more desperately seeking moisture or carrion, or living prey.

They were not out of danger, but they had gotten away from the heart of the mob.

Marak finally became aware of Lelie's struggles in his arm. He had kept her still, carefully managed his grip to let her breathe, and now he soothed her frightened, wounded sobs and sheltered her in his coat as he had on the ride that brought her.

He thanked the G.o.d he doubted that he had had the instinct to doubt his judgment and investigate before bringing the slow caravan with all its weak and helpless all the way to Pori.

But there was no water.

"Hati," Marak said. "Go. Take the women with you. Warn lord Aigyan. We've no choice but to turn toward the rim. Have them turn, don't camp, and we'll catch up on your new track."

"I'll see you there," Hati agreed, and called out to the two women and laid on the quirt. She was gone over the roll of the next hill, vanis.h.i.+ng in the dust they left.

"I warned you," Norit said in a brittle voice. The tribesman had gotten her upright.

"That you did," Marak allowed. He had no wish to take up a quarrel with Luz. He doubted even Luz had known the danger there was at Pori, or Norit could have warned them in far clearer words. The truth was that Luz had not known, had had no idea until now about the mob there. But:East, east, east ! the voices urged, as if they had always been right.

He said, he hoped sanely so, and calmly: "Well, we can't water at Pori; that's clear. Noritwas right: we can't camp and rest. We need to get all this ma.s.s of people as far east as we can. If we're out of water, we're out. We'll do what we can."

East. Surrender to Luz settled him into a familiar track. He knew the way down the cliffs to the east of Pori, and he knew that the gathering of vermin had just doomed a good number of the caravan to a struggle they might not have the strength to make without rest and water.

But if the continual footfall on the earth of the last caravan in the world drew attention from Pori, if the smell of them wafted on the chance wind, if the vermin still following the column met those feeding on Pori's ruin... if any one of those three things happened, the unthinkable became a certainty.

He led. They veered just slightly off the track they had taken getting to Pori, and for the better part of an hour they moved over trackless sand.

Then as they crossed a shallow pan they saw, as Marak had hoped, a distant haze of dust below the line of a far ridge. That hazy disturbance in the sameness of the Lakht marked the caravan's pa.s.sage, and it had, indeed, turned eastward.

Hati had reached them safely. Aigyan had heard the warning.

The sun stood at noon, and the caravan pressed eastward, not camping, not resting.

Marak kept his pace, not pus.h.i.+ng his own party. The beshti under them were tired, worn down by days of travel and now coming within sight of water and hazard at distant Pori-only to turn away.

But the beshti had not called out after the water at Pori: they had seen for themselves a hazard and smelled a smell that ruffled the ridge of hairs down their backs-Marak recalled that fine line of fear on the nape of Osan's neck, just before he had known there was trouble. Tails had gone half-up, and stayed bristled, even now. The beshti left the promise of water and traveled back to their own caravan without a sound, thirst and self-preservation at war in their keen instincts. Only once in the next hour the beshti stopped, braced their feet, snuffed the air. The earth trembled slightly. But as it proved no worse, they resumed their progress toward the distant caravan.

Lelie, drained of tears, had seized hold of Marak's coat at that instability and held on after that for dear life, not releasing her hold. She was bruised and sc.r.a.ped from the fall, but the makers were surely attending to that. It was the wound to her soul, her mother's casual forgetfulness, that the makers could not cure: Norit had never asked to have her back, and as he rode, Marak stroked her hair gently, told her in a low voice that all was well, that they would go down to a safe place... half lies, all, making it sound easy, making it sound like tomorrow, when the next instant was Lelie's tomorrow, in her young perception, and her mother rode dazed, lost in Luz's visions.

Soon, tomorrow, very soon now.

How many fathers must be making that desperate promise today, short of water, themselves short of strength... and how many fathers must be giving up their ration to their children today, not knowing themselves where the end of this was, not knowing whether it was wiser to consume the water themselves, to keep their strength, or how much privation a child could bear?

"Luz," he said aloud, to the presence behind Norit's glazed steadiness. "Can you bring water to us at the bottom of the climb? We need your help. Too many of these people will die. Can you send Ian? Can you lead us to water closer to the cliffs?"

He begged for help. He bargained with their fate. Pride was nowhere in his reckoning. He prayed to a second G.o.ddess-on-earth for a miracle their Ila could not provide, and all the while the skin between his shoulders was uneasy, as if they had not shaken all the vermin off their track. He felt calamity organizing around them, and the people for whom he held all responsibility were in greater and greater disarray.

Marak, Marak, Marak, was all his own voices said in reply. He saw the sphere and the rock and the rings, twice repeated. That was the help Luz gave. Shehad done better. Shehad reached him before, and now found nothing to say to him but that:go, go blindly , giving him no reasons.

He suspected the fault lay in himself, that he was most-times deaf, and unreceptive...

Like his father. Like Tain, deaf to things he needed most in the world to hear.

But unlike Tain, he broke his silence. "Norit," he said, pleaded. "Does Luz say anything about water?

Does she offer us any help?"

"There's nothing," Norit said, sitting in the embrace of the tribesman who had saved her. "Nothing I can do."

Norit never yet asked how her daughter fared after that fall.Luz had never asked. Luz involved herself not at all in the welfare of individuals, cared nothing for the workings of Norit's heart. Later Norit would shed tears, but Luz did not let her shed them now.

"It's coming," Norit said further. "It's on its way. We have two days. Just two days. You won't reach the tower in two days."

That was the plain truth, and it offered them no water, no help. It occurred to him to ask Luz if there was any point in trying, but it occurred to him, too, that he had no interest in hearing the answer one way or the other: it would not change what he would do. He could not sit down in paradise. He could not sit down in h.e.l.l, either. He was going to try to reach the tower... he was going to try to get all his people down off the Lakht and into the lowlands before the hammer fell. He was going to get them as far toward safety as he could get them. They had him for a leader: that was what they bargained for.

"Why didn't you tell me thisbefore we went to Pori?" He did ask that question.

"You weren't listening. Now you are. Get below the cliffs. Get behind rock. Get the stakes down. I don't know what may happen. I'm trying to know where the hammer will come down. It's not good for where it falls. It's not good for the other side of the world either, and that's what we have to worry about. The earth will crack at both places and melt the rocks in its forge."

Luz made the visions. Norit said them as best she knew how, out of things she had seen: what more could she do? Sometimes they were things no one alive had ever seen, and Norit tried to describe them, out of a village wife's meager experience.

"The prophet," the tribesmen said to each other in muted tones, and meant Norit. The tribes regarded no priests, but the Keran had learned that this one spoke for the power that led them, and they were in awe at this strange conversation, this matter-of-fact consultation of their oracle.

And there was no comfort in anything Norit could say.

They traveled toward that haze of dust that marked the pa.s.sage of the caravan across the land at the same steady pace.

And uneasy as he was about the land behind them, Marak became aware, in that sight, that he knew where Hati was. He knew it as well as he knew Norit's location beside him, as steady, as reliable as the pole stars in the general fall of the heavens. She was there in the heart of the column. The constellations might be shaken, but he could notget lost in the world that contained the other parts of himself.

The caravan had no need of another dreamer, another guide as mad as Norit.

It needed a plain, headblind madman to say only:I've been there before. I can lead you. I know a way down. Don't hesitate, don't camp .

It needed Tain's son, too: it needed him to say:Don't have pity on the dying. Don't hesitate. When the line goes, go .

He rode toward the column, and on the edge of joining it, on the very moment of crossing toward safety in among the plodding beshti, he realized their party had been one member short on the retreat. He was so used to the au'it following him and Hati and Norit that he had failed to notice that this time she had not followed them out from the caravan.

Surely she had not come out with them.

"No au'it followed us," he said to the Keran, half a question. "You saw no au'it tracking us at any time."

"No,omi ."

At least they had not lost her. He thought they had not.

He rode in among the Ila's servants, and near the Ila, and up to Hati's side.

"I advised Aigyan," Hati said first. "He knows all the situation. He's going to keep the line moving.