Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

  The quick and the desperate came first. They were not the strongest, only the earliest, the most opportunistic, harbinger of what else would come. They growled and tore into the carcass and the scent of blood and then entrails grew in the air.

  “Hurry!” Hati said.

  “A’ip!” Tofi yelled. “Ya! a’ip! ” The beast the slaves were loading stood trembling, and without complaint, when she gave a jerk on its lead.

  More of the flying vermin had landed.

  And a glance off across the land showed a furtive, eye-deceiving movement as if the land itself had come to life.

  Marak saw Norit into the saddle, delayed to assist Tofi’s women while Tofi railed on his slaves. Osan had gotten up onto his feet.

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  He did not delay then to make Osan kneel again. He seized the rein, jumped, and seized the saddle, hauling himself up by brute strength until he put a foot in the mounting loop, a move he had doubted he could do. Osan was moving before he could land in the saddle and tuck his leading foot into place. Tofi scrambled up, and the slaves mounted in desperate haste, the pack beasts tethered in line and each trying to move at once.

  Osan quickened his pace, flicking his ears in distress, laying them back at what he smelled. The beasts knew what the nomads of the Lakht knew, what Hati had foretold. Marak himself had never seen a mobbing . . . few in the Lakht had seen it and lived.

  The beasts picked up their pace, treading heedlessly, crushing small vermin that chanced underfoot, creatures hardly more than a hand’s length. The mobbing started on that scale, other creatures turning toward the smell of death near at hand, already beginning to gorge and being bitten and clawed by other creatures nearby.

  In an instant what had begun as a flattened multipede became a fist-sized ball of struggling eaters that grew larger by the moment.

  All that hunger, Marak thought, only a day or so out from the rich oasis of Pori. And the storm had churned it to madness of a different kind, a natural frenzy.

  The beshti hit a traveling run, a difficult pace for the unhabituated, and next to a flat-out bolt, which might fling the weak riders from the saddle. Marak held Osan back, and crossed him in front of Tofi’s men, who were about to break ahead.

  “Don’t wear them down,” he said sharply. Hati pulled in front with the same advice, and they slowed the impulse toward outright flight. At a moderate pace they reached sand that no longer moved.

  Then they counted themselves truly escaped, and fortunate.

  They did not overtake Malin and the ex-soldiers.

  They did not camp at noon, either. They kept going with minor rests, taking a little of the dried fruit for their meal, and a little water, enduring the heat of the sun, and even the beasts did not complain.

  The distance between them and the disturbance still seemed perilously scant, the beasts still were skittish, and they rode until they had put the whole afternoon behind them.

  Then they settled down for a shortened rest, with no tents pitched, lying on their mats until the stars came out.

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  In the distance a hunter howled, and most all the still bodies in the camp roused and turned and looked toward that horizon.

  So did the beasts, lifting their heads in perfect unison.

  Marak saw nothing but a flat, endless, wind-scoured land.

  He let his head back and trusted the beasts to raise a fuss if danger came close. The voices urged him, pleaded with him, Hurry, hurry, hurry! even now, and rest came hard.

  Fear was on the wind tonight. The tower built itself, and the cave of suns was in it, and he heard voices multiplying.

  Then he gained the strangest notion that he should get up, and take his beast and keep traveling.

  Certain of the sleeping madmen sat up, too. Hati had gotten to her feet, and then Norit, who plunged her head into her hands and shook her head, refusing the vision, perhaps, or perhaps only weary beyond words.

  The beasts themselves, not being mad, could not sustain such a pace. But after all the fright and terror of the day, still, the mad rose up, not listening, locked in that intensity of purpose that drove men to walk to their deaths.

  Malin and the soldiers had been the first.

  “No,” Marak said. He went to them, seized one arm and the other, and shook at them. “Wake up. Don’t follow it afoot like Malin and Kassan. You saw what happened with the beast. You know what happened to those that walked out. In a few hours we will go. But not straggling off by twos and threes like fools! Listen to me!”

  Two heard him. The orchardman began to walk, and the potter followed.

  He caught the orchardman and hit him hard with his fist, pitching the man down. He overtook the potter, a slighter man, and hit him, the same. The man went down unconscious, and that was the end of his walking off in the night.

  The orchardman sat nursing a bloody lip and muttering to himself, but sane enough with the pain of a chipped tooth to know he had been a fool.

  Marak went back with a sore hand and sat down to suck at a cut knuckle.

  “Let them go,” Hati said.

  “Why should you care?” Norit asked. “Why should any of us care?”

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  The erosion was reaching the rest of them, a slippage of what kept their company together, a bleeding of reason and sanity.

  “Because we should care,” he said. “Because when they brought us from the villages we became beasts. I don’t wish to be a beast again.

  And I won’t be a beast. Damn the visions! I may not go to the tower, and damn them all. It’s my choice! It’s become my choice, and I may not choose what they want me to choose! ”

  Hati thought about that. And in his mind, at least, the visions had become quiet.

  Sanity seemed to have settled over them all for the while.

  “It’s our choice,” Hati echoed him. “I can make it. I decide.”

  Norit said, “There’s no use dying before we know what it is we’re looking for, is there?”

  “No,” he said. “There is not.” He gathered them both against him, Hati against his side, Norit against his knees. They were beyond passion, since Pori. The intervening days they had had no strength to spare. Things had assumed a haste that had no reason, and now he reminded himself he had company, and had lives in his hand, and could not make Kassan’s choices.

  Within the hour, all the same, they saddled up the beasts again and rode on, but sensibly so, to use the cool of the night while they had it and to stop again close to their ordinary schedule. They rode on into the day and by then, though the chipped tooth stayed chipped, the orchardman’s lip showed healed. More, the orchardman and the potter were quarreling again and calling one another fools, and the whole company seemed in better humor.

  The sun went to noon, and they pitched the tents precisely as they needed to, on a sandy flat. They were still on the storm track: the recent debris of oasis fiber-palms where no trees grew showed how very far the winds had carried debris. It had likely come from the palms at Pori. Usually the sun heated their tea; they lit the fiber for fuel, and it brewed up a fine spiced porridge with the added flavor of smoke.

  In the afternoon, however, and before they could break camp and have the tents safely folded, the wind began to blow. The breeze was a relief from the heat, but it gusted and battered at them and made more work with the tents.

  The wind grew worse with the evening. Dry and hot, it wearied the bones, blew up the dust, and made the deep-irons a serious consideration by the next noonday, if they were to pitch the tents.

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  “It’s only a small blow,” Marak said, when Tofi hesitated, and feared they might misjudge the weather. The urge to move was so strong his skin itched.
“Wrap up in mats. We can do without the tents.”

  “No, omi. If we misjudge, it’s the death of us. We have to pitch the tents.”

  He knew better. As he had known the storm’s limit, he knew the limit of this, and so Hati argued his point, and so many of the mad joined him, all grumbling: no one wanted the delay. The visions came and went; but east, east, east! the madness shrieked, and there was anger, and there were sulking faces. Tofi flung wide his arms and shouted at them all, “All right, all right, we will not use the deep irons, at least, and may the god have mercy on our lives!”

  They pitched the two tents, which billowed and bucked as if they had a life of their own, in the lee of a low ridge, which they had somewhat between them and the wind. The animals settled peacefully to their noontime meal, and the lot of them, mad and sane, had dried fruit and a little grain-cake.

  Marak, the voices said. Every noontime they spoke. They spoke to Maol, Tofi’s woman, who stood in the dusty noon sun, battered and shaken by the wind. She had forgotten Tofi, forgotten who she was.

  Norit watched her, singing to herself, her fingers measuring all along the hem of her robe, as if this were somehow important.

  Every man, every woman, seemed numb. There was no strength, no time amid the visions: passion ebbed and evaporated with every trace of moisture shed into the wind.

  Norit sang of water, of a stream and a lost love, and her voice, childlike at times, haunted the wind. The woman, Maol, swayed, as if dancing to that music.

  Marak!

  He looked up, his heart beating hard. All at once he wished more than life to rise up and walk toward that summons.

  Instead he doggedly lowered his chin into the muffling, protective aifad and fingered the stitching on his boot, losing himself in the patterns. Hati, likewise veiled, was against his side. Norit was with him, sitting, swaying. The au’it slept nearby, the Ila’s eyes and ears, in company with madmen who thought of nothing more than losing themselves in the desert and becoming food for the hunters.

  Marak!

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  Now he rose to his feet without even thinking. So had Hati, and Norit, and all the mad. Only Tofi slept, only the slaves, and the au’it.

  Marak’s heart sped. No, he said to himself. No! But the voices said yes.

  Hati began to walk. He reached out to stop her, and shook at her, and seized Norit by the arm as Norit began to walk past him. The dust had begun to rise. It obscured all the horizon.

  And in the blowing dust, a ghost, a spirit, a mirage without the sun, a figure stood.

  It seemed to be a man in thick gauzy robes, in the colors of the sand.

  No tribesman. The vision of the tower rose up, built itself in Marak’s eyes where the man stood.

  And vanished.

  Marak blinked the blowing dust into tears, resisted the impulse to wipe, that would abrade his eyes. The slack of the gust showed him the shape again.

  Hati pointed. She saw the same. Norit stood close to him, held to him, pressed against his side, and all the while this vision came walking down the slope, and became clearer and clearer to their eyes.

  “He is no tribe I know,” Hati said.

  In an an’i Keran, that was remarkable enough. The Keran were masters of the Lakht, and there were means to tell one tribe from the other: to know those differences was life and death.

  The stranger came ahead with confidence, and that also was remarkable, and ominous.

  “We might be bandits,” Marak said. “We have no prosperous look. And we are no tribe.” The man was trusting . . . or there were more of them beyond that hall.

  But as the man came, the voices clamored. East, east, east, became here. Now. This place. This man. Marak’s heart beat like a smith’s hammer.

  Marak dropped his veil, a villager’s friendliness, despite the choking dust; he lifted a hand in token of peace, and the vision, or the man, whatever it might be, likewise lifted his right hand and walked into their camp.

  The mad were all on their feet, and drew back from this visitor, not far back, but far enough.

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  names for them, as if he had always known them. “Marak, Hati, Norit.” The incantation went on, inexplicable, accurate, and complete, as the veiled man faced them one by one.

  “Tofi,” the man said, among the last. He even named the slaves.

  “Bosginde, and Mogar. Not least, the au’it.”

  It was the only name that remained secret among them, as the au’it had never confessed one. She had waked, and reached for her kit, and her book, and, shocked out of her rest in a gale of sand by this vision, spat onto her ink-cake and began to write.

  “Who are you?” Marak asked. Their visitor showed his power and his knowledge of them, but gave them nothing of his own nature.

  This was not necessarily the indication of a friend. “Where do you come from?”

  “Ian is my name.” The visitor reached up and took down his veil.

  “As for where I come from, from the wind and the air is where I come from, and from the empty place behind the wind.”

  That was to say, the land of ghosts, by the priests’ way of saying.

  No few of the villagers blessed themselves in fear, and nothing the man said comforted any of them, but Marak had no inclination to fall on his face to save his life, or to believe this man because he quoted the writings. He had come to the east, after so much, and so long, and was this his answer, Marak asked himself, this arrogant man with clever riddles and an appeal to superstition?

  And if he was the god himself, Marak asked himself, beyond that, then would he flinch from the dust and the blasts of wind?

  And if he were a ghost or a god, would he have watering eyes?

  Marak thought not.

  And was this Ian the end of his visions, and all the madness?

  Was this all?

  Marak drew in a deep breath and folded his arms, feet braced against any inclination to move. “What do you want?” he asked this Ian bluntly.

  Not welcomely so, he thought, since Ian looked at him, looked at him long and hard, not pleased. He might have been a curiosity, a momentary obstacle, a piece of some passing and despised interest.

  “You,” Ian said. “You. Marak Trin Tain. ” Ian walked a little past him, and looked at him, and then looked curiously at Norit, and at Hati, one by one. “They are with you.”

  “Yes,” Marak said.

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  “You three,” Ian said. “Come with me. The others, stay in camp.

  You’ll be supplied whatever you need.”

  No, was Marak’s first impulse, defiantly no.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices cried, pleading with him. Come.

  His madness acquired a direction, and leaned toward this man, this stranger. He could have run screaming at the sun, turned circles like Maol. Marak, Marak, Marak, they said, deafening him, showing him memories of riding in the hills, confronting his father, walking away from all he knew . . . recalling for him the acclamation of an army, and the straggling, ragged line of the mad.

  Marak!

  He would do nothing, nothing to conform to his madness. Pride prevented him. He trembled, he gathered his strength, knowing he could not walk away in disdain and resist the eastward tilting without falling down.

  “Come,” Ian said to him more civilly. “Come.”

  The tilting made him stagger, finally, rarely, it swayed him off his balance, and he feared it would fling him down in the dirt if he resisted. Besides, this Ian offered him answers, offered him the courtesy of asking repeatedly. Reluctantly, grudgingly, he followed, Hati and Norit walking with him: at least he had them where he could watch over them.

  But then he was aware of another presen
ce, another soft tread on the sand. Ian turned and said, harshly, “I said the three.”

  Marak turned, too, and saw the au’it, who clutched her book to her chest and wide-eyed, thin-lipped, resisted the dismissal.

  “She is the Ila’s au’it,” Marak said. “She has orders to go where I go.”

  “Whose orders?”

  “The Ila’s.”

  “The Ila’s orders have no weight here,” Ian said.

  “They have with me.” They had stopped on the exposed hill, where the wind battered them and the heavier sand stung bare skin.

  Ian’s scent came to them on that wind, too, a curious scent, like sun-heated cloth, like living plants. “We’re all mad here except the young master, the two slaves, and the au’it. We see visions and hear voices.—Do you?”

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  at. He was a strange sort of man, strange in his smell, tanned, with wisps of pale hair blowing out from under the headcloth, and with narrow, close-lidded eyes. Marak had never seen such sun-bleached hair, and never seen green eyes, green like stagnant water. The cloth of the sand-colored robes was fine as that in the Ila’s court, cloth of gauze of many lengths and layers, so that they blew and whipped in the wind, individually as light as the dust itself.

  Wealth, such cloth said. Power, that wealth said.

  And that the Ila’s orders did not reach here did not persuade him to trust this Ian, no matter how the voices dinned into his ears and no matter how the feelings in his heart said this was, after all his trials, the place. The Ila ruled everything. In Kais Tain they might have said that the Ila’s rule did not extend there, but they did not disrespect an au’it.

  “Come,” Ian said then, shrugging off the matter of the au’it, ignoring her presence, and led them farther, over the low dune. After that they walked along Ian’s back trail—he left tracks like a man—on for some little distance toward a sandstone ridge, and along that for a considerable distance south.