Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

  “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 may be a mobbing, but we won’t be there to see it.”

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

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  “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.”

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  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 assisting 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.

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  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 hardshells. They were not doing that badly. It was strange to hear Memnanan’s observation . . . that the living goddess 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 6710.01 5/31/01 11:53 AM Page 252

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  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. She won’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.”

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  “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’ll drown, 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.”

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  “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 harassment. 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.

  By dawn both those clouds and the wind had reached them, and it blew stiffly at their backs, raising the dust—if not for the dust, the wind at their backs would have been a benefit.

  “How will it be?” Hati asked Norit, for she, more than they, had become a weather-prophet. “How long will it last?”

  “It should last,” Norit said quietly as they rode. “But it won’t blow hard. Not enough to fear.”

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  dust rose, Marak thought of using them, because they dared not take risks with their lives and their sustenance, for the sake of all the rest.

  But Norit seemed right: by every scrap of weather-sense he possessed, he felt it would be a windy day, and the dust would get up, that curse of the pans, where a silken fine dust mixed with alkali and tasted bitter.

  By noon of that day, the fine dust was thick in the air. The Keran, ahead of them, were shadows in the curtain of dust, but it was not enough to worry them: the day was still bright, not that all-darkening gloom of the great storms, and the beshti made light of it, blowing the dust from their nostrils in occasional noisy gusts. They camped without the deep-stakes, and since the Ila’s men attached the flaps on the windward side of that tent for her comfort, Marak ordered the same for their tent.

  It gave them a few hours of relief from th
e wind. Dust seeped around the single wall, but far less of it. He and Hati even made love in the noon quiet, discreetly, hanging their robes on lines strung from the nearest center pole to the edge. Norit and the au’it were there to witness, but the wiry little au’it kindly went to sleep, and Norit lay with her back turned.

  Marak slept afterward with his arm around Hati, next to Norit, who snored gently, troubling no one. The gusting of the wind, the thumping of the canvas, had assumed a quiet sameness.

  Then someone came running. That was the impression that waked him from half sleep, that someone was running, and that someone coming into the tent had disturbed Memnanan’s family from their rest.

  He sat up, and moved the curtain. Tofi and his men, free and slave, were awake and upright on their mats, startled from sleep. It was a young woman . . . his sister Patya, her aifad trailing loose, her hair flowing wildly in the breeze from around the windbreak. Her expression told him something terrible was amiss.

  He scrambled to his feet. He snatched his robe off the line, flung it on, beltless.

  “Marak,” she said, then: “Mother,” and burst into terror and tears.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Father. Father came. She told me—”

  That was enough. In leaden fear he ran out from under the tent, and Patya and then Hati ran with him. The au’it, too, snatched up her kit, but what she did, Marak did not stop to know.

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  He ran through the blowing dust, back through their camp, in among the Haga tents, among a gathering of men and women roughly waked from their own noon sleep. Patya had his sleeve, and guided him straight to the heart of the camp, in among the tents.

  “She told me to run,” Patya managed to say on the way. “She said run, and I ran.”

  There was a crowd, shadows in the blowing dust, foretelling the worst. He pushed their way through, and saw, on the ground among them, a woman, their mother.