Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

  He fell to his knees and gathered Kaptai up into his arms. He felt the life weak in her as he lifted her, immediately felt the moisture of blood on his hands, under her back. “Marak,” she said, just that, her eyes half-open. Then she went limp in his hands.

  Just that. Only that. He had held the dead before. He knew that absolute shift in weight. She was gone.

  Patya gave a great sob and tried to chafe life back into their mother’s hand. His, damp with blood, tested for pulse and breath, and he knew that Patya’s tears would bring nothing of their mother back, ever.

  He let their mother slide to the ground and got up, conscious of all the witnesses around them, the Haga, and Menditak himself . . .

  conscious of rage, and grief, and a mind slipping toward unreason.

  “It was Father,” Patya said. “He did it. He came into the tent while everyone was sleeping. He wanted Mother to come outside with him, and she did, and I did, I knew it wasn’t good, and she said run.”

  Kaptai had known enough to leave her husband. But, prideful to the last, she had not known enough to cry out and wake her tribe to deal with Tain. No, she had gone out to deal with him herself, sending her daughter to safety, to get his help. As a consequence, she was dead, and Patya might have been.

  Why? screamed inside his head. Why would she not turn the Haga on Tain? He had deserved it. He had entirely deserved the shame, and being driven out like intruding vermin.

  For love? For love, even yet, had she gone out to meet with him, even knowing to send Patya to safety?

  “We missed catching him,” Menditak said grimly. “We’ve sent men out, looking.”

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  Tofi’s tents as fast as he had run getting to the Haga, blinded by dust that stuck to his face and collected about his eyes.

  Inside his tent, he snatched up his aifad from where he had been sleeping and put that on. He put on his belt, and snatched up the machai and his waterskin, all the gear an abjori needed in the desert.

  Tofi was awake and on his feet, staring at him in dismay. “Wake the captain,” Marak said, measuring his breaths and ordering his information as if he were back in the war, hiding and fighting among the dunes. “Tain’s killed my mother. Tell him!”

  Tofi ran to do that.

  The au’it had come back with him, and sat down on the sand, writing, writing all of it, in that heavy book. Hati and Norit came back, bringing Patya, who was convulsed in tears, but his began to dry, and his mind ordered matters in small, precise packets.

  “He’s gone to the south side of the column,” he said to Hati.

  “He’ll likely cross it again when he reaches some village band, and cross it several times after to confuse the track. He’ll hang off our flank and wait his chance at me, at Patya, at the Ila. I should have dealt with him before we set out.”

  “What are you going to do?” Hati asked.

  “Find him. And kill him.”

  “No,” Norit said sharply, and not Norit, but Luz. “No! You have a responsibility.”

  “The hell with my responsibility!” He strode out the door, with Hati hurrying after him, and Patya seizing his arm. He shook them both off, and rounded on Norit, who had followed as far as the doorway of the tent. “The hell with my responsibility to the whole damned world! This is mine. This is my responsibility! You can do what I do. You hear Luz. She talks to you nowadays. So do it! And, Hati, don’t you follow me! Don’t do that to me. I know his tricks.

  He’ll be after me, and you, and the Ila, next. I count on you to take precautions, and keep this camp safe!” It was on Hati he relied most, Hati’s interference he most had to stop cold, Hati’s life that mattered most to him, even above Patya’s. “Guard my sister. Hear me? Don’t make me lose her, too! Patya, behave yourself. I’ll be back.”

  “Don’t go out there alone!” Hati said to him. “Get Memnanan.”

  “I know what my father will do, and the Ila’s men don’t. I know he’s not alone. And I don’t want Memnanan’s men out there: it stirs up the old abjori, and that gives my father what he wants.” He 6710.01 5/31/01 11:53 AM Page 258

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  reached Osan among the beshti and got him up. The saddle was near.

  He flung it on, adjusted its padding. “He’ll go to supporters in other villages. He’ll persuade some here and there along the line to come out beside the column.” He tightened the girth. “He’ll take tents, and gear, and beshti, and he’ll create his army to harass the line. This is war he’s declared. And the Ila’s soldiers aren’t well loved in the villages he’d try to convert, but I have friends there. Trust me that I know.” He made Osan put a leg out, and seized the mounting loop and swung up. He saw Memnanan coming through the dust, with Tofi, in haste. “You explain it to him,” he said to Hati. “You’re in charge.”

  “Marak, be careful!” Patya cried. “Don’t die out there! Please don’t die.”

  “Do everything Hati tells you. Stay with her and don’t be stupid.”

  He took up the quirt and gave Osan a hard hit, leaving before he had to explain anything. The Ila might not forgive him. Memnanan might not.

  He might not forgive himself if he let his father do to all these people what he knew his father intended.

  The dust came between them. It had veiled his father. Now it veiled him as he rode.

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  19

  A bitter tree must be cut down. Its shade has become tainted. Its soil shall be dug out and cast away. None of its leaves and none of its fruit shall be eaten or pressed for water. All its substance and progeny shall be burned.

  —The Book of the Law

  A SMALL BAND OF HAGA HAD ALREADY RIDDEN OUT ON

  Tain’s track. Even in the blowing dust and the rapid fill of the surface, the traces of their passage were plain in the sand, where no other track had been, out between the dunes and then back alongside the caravan track.

  But it was more than footprints that Marak used. A besha tracked others: set a besha on the trail, persuade him not to go back to the main caravan, which was his initial and overriding instinct, and by sight or by scent he tended to follow any other track where other beshti had gone, the strongest and most persistent trail as his first choice. It was a useful instinct in a native of the deep Lakht. It was useful to the riders as well as to the beasts, and Marak rode quickly, confident of Osan’s senses.

  But it was not Tain Trin Tain he found. Haga lay at the end of that trail, four of them, in among the dunes, dead on the ground, half-sand-covered. Vermin were already worrying at their bodies. Those scattered as he rode onto the scene, but he delayed for no rescue of the dead and no moment of sympathy or respect, either. He knew Tain’s tricks, and the skin between his shoulders felt the threat of ambush. He turned Osan away quickly, seeking the side of the wind that his father would use.

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  But in the dunes he only found the tracks of beshti going away from there, as beshti would, back to the caravan, reporting their own dead. There was the track of one, only one, going to the west, back along the caravan trace. That was his father, doing what he thought his father would do.

  So now the toll was five.

  It might be the politic and prudent course for him to go back to the Haga, to rouse all of them in indignation at this killing and lead them out on the track, but that kind of massive excursion had never availed anything against Tain’s subtle kind of work. He had a single hot trail back toward the tents of the encamped line, and he knew Tain would move quickly to lose himself where it would cost lives to get him out.

  He chose not to go back. He followed Tain’s tracks, as he thought, and that trail took him back beside the tents, not crossing the line of march yet, but proceeding straight back alongside the encampe
d tribes.

  Among the foremost there had as yet been no detectable movement to resume the march, and none came for a long time. Whatever was proceeding, whether the Haga had recovered the four riderless beshti and had left his mother’s burial to go out hunting on their own, it was early in their noon routine. Tribes behind the Haga in line were still asleep, still unaware what had happened up in the Haga camp.

  He knew, too, that if he lost Tain’s track, he might lose more than he had lost. Tain might immediately double forward again to attack Tofi’s camp, and he might be wandering back here; or if he followed too fast, Tain might realize who was on his trail and lie in wait for him.

  He expected ambush minute by minute, as he was sure Tain expected him. The dust made shadows of the encamped tents and the resting beshti . . . themselves a temptation for a man who might want a relief mount; but Tain had not struck here, not yet: beshti disturbed at their rest would not settle so complacently, would alarm their owners and rouse out a camp, and nothing of the like had happened.

  Marak, Marak, his voices whispered to him. It came to him they had spoken before and he had not been attentive . . . nothing had been in his head at all but the necessities and the dangers of the chase. Go back, his voices said to him.

  “Go to hell,” he said to Luz. “It’s my mother. Do you understand that? Did you have a mother?”

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  Marak, the voices whispered.

  “Go to hell!” he said, and, on clear trail for a moment between dunes, he diverted Osan into a tribal camp. They were the Rhonandin, allies of the Haga. “Rhonan!” he shouted out, waking the camp, and roused men out from under their sheltering canvas. They came in alarm, clutching swords and pistols.

  “My name is Marak Trin,” he said to the Rhonandin. “Marak Trin Tain, to the point. My mother is Kaptai of the Haga, Menditak’s cousin, Tain Trin Tain’s wife, and she’s dead.”

  “What do you want of the Rhonandin?” a man in authority asked him.

  “Tain’s murdered my mother up in the Haga camp and killed four of them in ambush when they rode after him. I ask you send a messenger to lord Menditak and tell him his men are dead. Tell him I’m on Tain’s trail, to kill him, and I can’t lose it.”

  “Montend,” the man named one of his own. “Go to the Haga.

  Antag, you and your brothers, go with this man.”

  “I’m in your debt,” Marak said fervently, “for water and peace. I honor you as my grandfather, omi. But they’ll have to follow me. The wind’s taking the trail, and I can’t stop that long.”

  Beasts were unsaddled for their noontime rest. Men ran while he rode out to recover the trail. He recovered it, and in a very short time Antag and his four brothers appeared out of the dust behind him, armed with hunting spears and swords and one long rifle wrapped against the dust. Under the circumstances it was a weapon worth ten men, and one which Tain would kill to get into his hands.

  “Omi,” the foremost said. “My name is Antag. These are my brothers.”

  “In your debt, all.” He never delayed, scarcely took his eyes off that quarter of the horizon where he guessed the trail to lie. “My father intends to raise a war within the caravan. He’ll ride across the camps somewhere. There are those that might join him.”

  “The Ila is no friend of ours,” Antag said. “But the Haga are.”

  “I’m outside the Ila’s orders. This is a blood matter. And life and death for us. If Tain starts a war between the villages and the Haga, and these villagers get to acting like fools, they’ll shed blood, and we’ll feed the vermin, all of us. He doesn’t care. He’s angry, and now he’s attacked the tribe that were his friends.”

  “You’re sure of his track, omi.”

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  It was tacit acceptance, respect for him. And an essential question.

  “He has no second beast, unless he got it from the Haga, and I didn’t detect it.” It was a tribesman’s trick, to confuse the trail, steal a second besha and let his own go, to confuse pursuit as the freed beast wandered confused between the known company that abandoned him and the larger lure of the caravan.

  “The Haga are friends,” Antag said, and the four Rhonandin stayed with him, following the tracks in among the dunes, over the edges.

  The blowing dust made it harder and harder to keep the track, but it remained a single track. They passed one and the other of the tribes, and sometimes the trail came close, and then veered off. Tain had found the beshti too restive, set within the circle of tents as the tribes tended to keep such valuable possessions.

  “We’d best tell the tribes as we go,” Marak said. “Their livestock is at risk, if not their lives, tonight. Are these near us within your kinship?”

  “These are cousin-tribes.” Antag sent the two younger brothers off to the side, into the camps, where a kindred tribe would meet fewer questions and gain quicker compliance. Meanwhile Antag and the one brother stayed with him, in and out among the dunes, trusting the other two brothers to find them again by their pace and their direction.

  “He’s running hard,” Antag judged at a moment they found a clear set of tracks, and Marak agreed: there was the movement of a man bent more on distance than on cleverness.

  “He taught me every trick,” Marak said grimly. “And he’s not panicked. He has a lot of them left.”

  He tried not to plan what he would do, or what he would say when he found Tain. He planned only to kill him before there were any words to haunt his sleep. His mother’s blood was on his hands and before he was done, his father’s would be. He promised himself that, and grew as crazed as he had been when it was the voices. Luz wanted him back. Luz tried, but he refused, continually refused, and bent the sanity he did have in one direction, into the sandy haze and toward his father.

  They passed the last of the tribes and along beside the village camps. There Tain’s track moved inward, ran beside the tents, past one camp and a second.

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  Then as they might have guessed, that trail went into the midst of a village camp, and straight through its center and into the next.

  Here was where Tain might change beshti, and steal one or two, but as yet they found no trace of that: besides that, the trail grew confused, Osan taking the scents of dozens of his kind, growing distracted: they would have to pick up the trail outside again, and that would cost time.

  Sleeping men stirred beneath the tents, lifted heads from their arms. Or they were not quite sleeping, since the last intrusion.

  “A man rode through,” Marak said to the villagers. “Where did he go?”

  Several pointed the same way, back through the length of the camp, not to the side.

  “Which villages will shelter him?” Antag asked, as they followed that track.

  “The western,” Marak said. It made him think of home, of the walls of Kais Tain, irretrievable. Of neighboring villages, red walls and known wells, and boyhood friends, and pranks, and the shade of village gardens.

  Marak, Luz said, trying to recover him. He had shown weakness and she found it. Marak, Marak, Marak, listen to me.

  He refused.

  He tried not to think about the villages, those times, those lessons, the years he had loved and respected this man as the god of his life.

  In his boyhood the sun had come up every morning over Tain’s shoulder, and all the world had been right . . . or would be if he could be quick enough, hard enough, strong enough, to win Tain’s approval.

  In those years the western lords had all been Tain’s allies, and there had been no hint of the quarrels that would break the abjori apart. They had all fought against the Ila’s rule, which was eternal, remote from care of them and their needs. They had fought, and their cause was right.

  The western villages clear to the edge
of the Lakht had gone to war. They had engaged the sympathy of no few of the tribes, who themselves had disdained the Ila’s law. Tain had had close and friendly relations with the Haga, and won a Haga wife.

  Now they would chase him to the ends of the earth.

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  Now Tain had lost all virtue in tribal law. He had struck at the woman who had run his household and shared his bed for thirty years, at the woman who had borne his children and bandaged his wounds . . . struck at her because the war failed, because even then there were cracks in the structure of alliances Tain had built.

  Struck at her because Tain could not be the source of the madness and Tain could not be at fault for losing a war.

  So Tain stole up on a peaceful, allied camp and called a woman out, not to reconcile and beg her pardon as he ought by rights to do, as Kaptai had every right to hope he might intend—but to murder her and then run like the felon he had become, challenging every tribe to kill him.

  There was no forgiveness. There was no one left to ask it for Tain.

  Antag’s two brothers overtook them, calling out as they took shape out of the haze, to be sure of identities. The warning was given. The tribes knew, and sent out messengers and hunters of their own.

  They asked at every camp they passed: “Has a man ridden through?” and at five camps the answer was the same, but at the sixth there was confusion and an instant’s hesitation.

  “I’m Marak Trin Tain,” Marak said. “Where is my father? ”

  The people of that village, a village from the rim of the west, stayed unmoving, so many statues staring up at him with frightened eyes. Tain was known to take bloody vengeance on betrayers. Did he not know that?

  But one old woman pointed to the side of the camp.

  “You said nothing,” Marak said to her. And to the rest: “It’s your mistake if you pity him. The tribes are against him. The Ila is guiding you to water, out from under the star-fall. His own son guides this caravan. Do you want to die?”