C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  Suddenly the beshti set to bawling again.

  The earth shook itself like a beast twitching its skin, a hard shaking. Tofi's riding beast, which had started to rise in panic, plumped back down again, unhurt, but rolling its eyes and bellowing to the heavens.

  Norit sat with her hands in her lap, combing out a tassel on her headcloth.

  The tremor passed. Tofi swore and hid his face in his hand, looked up again as if to be sure it was over.

  Norit showed no inclination to move.

  "Shall we go?" he asked Norit.

  "Not yet," Norit said. She stared into nothing, the tassel forgotten.

  The sphere fell against the greater sphere. The ring of disturbance went out. Marak saw it. He knew Hati did. Hati's hands were clenched on her quirt until the knuckles stood white.

  The au'it, having endured one shaking, grimly gripped her book and her ink-cake, and wrote, braced for more disturbance.

  Time passed.

  "Shall we pitch the tents?" Tofi asked at last. The sun was high. It seemed now that they would not go beyond this place before noon.

  "No," Norit said shortly, in a tone not inviting question. "Stay still."

  Marak shrugged and found occupation sharpening his boot-knife, as Hati and two of the helpers had tucked up and attempted to sleep.

  Norit combed out the one tassel and three or four others.

  Then a haze in the west caught Marak's eye, a fuzzy seam on the far horizon that grew wider and wider and wider every instant.

  "Hati," he said as it grew. And to all of them, "Storm."

  Damn Luz, there was no time to pitch the tent. The storm came like sand flowing downhill: it went from that seam to a band across the horizon to a towering wall faster than he had ever seen a storm move, less like a wind than a landslide. In hardly longer than a panicked mind could think about it, that wall filled the sky, and rushed over them with a stench of earth and heat like nothing Marak had ever smelled.

  The beasts did not attempt to rise: with successive shoves of their knees and hind feet, they shifted about to present their backsides to that oncoming wind, burdens and all.

  Sand began to blast over them, stinging exposed skin.

  "Get together!" Tofi shouted, flinging his arms about Marak and Hati. The au'it folded her book and put away her writing kit. Norit moved closer to them, the au'it joined them; and Tofi's two men, and they all pressed themselves against the sun-heated earth, together, making a single lump, robes tucked up for shelter.

  The moving sand deafened them and dimmed the light. Marak protected his eyes with the headcloth and tried to see through that veil, and found only greater dark and lesser. It grew hard to breathe through the folds of cloth. The smell was that of a sandstorm, and of hot sand and of deep sand and of burning.

  There was no substance left in the air; they struggled for the least whisper of breath, losing strength, until at last the air came, tasting like the wind off a forge.

  Lying together, faces buried in each other's robes, they gasped and breathed such as they could, fighting for the dusty air they drew, and dared not move, while the wind roared over them, and kept on, and kept on.

  But air there began to be, if only a trickle through cloth; and the sand that blasted over them began to settle long enough to become a weight in the folds of their robes. It found ways in among them, in the crooks of arms and legs, building supports under them, finding crevices to fill, threatening to bury them alive.

  Breathing was the greatest concern. They fought to stay behind the wall of sand that built against them and atop what built under them. It seemed forever before the gust front passed and they could stir out of their sand-choked huddle, still wind-battered and blinded by the blowing sand, but able to stand.

  The beasts had suffered. One was down under his pack, alive, but unable to free himself until they removed the baggage that trapped him at disadvantage, and by then he had been lying so long he was paralyzed. They had to rock and pull and haul him to rights and up to his feet. Three had painful windburns on their rumps, where the hide was blasted bare and red, and the canvas that wrapped the packs, part of the tents, was worn through several layers on one edge.

  They were all alive, that was the miraculous thing. They were alive, though the sky was still a sandy murk, and the air still stank like hot iron.

  "If we pitch a tent," Tofi said, muffled in his veils against sand and dust, "it will not stand with this constant shaking. Best we do as we have done, build a wall of the baggage and stretch our canvas from it. I've never seen a storm come on like that,"

  "Will there be another?" Marak asked Norit, hard-edged. Norit said nothing. "What should we do? Luz? What comes next?"

  The vision of the spreading rings repeated itself in his mind, over and over and over, making no sense.

  Came another shock, a great one, a long one, and the one beast that had gotten up staggered and bellowed its distress.

  "Norit!" Hati shouted.

  "Camp here," Norit said.

  Pressed to invention, they and the slaves unburdened all the beasts and contrived to stretch canvas from a stack of baggage to a few anchoring stakes, lashed down so it would shed sand that accumulated from hour to hour.

  That gave them a measure of comfort. They slept, but slept by turns to go out and keep the two entries clear. The sand-fall, no longer blasting, but a general murk in the air, went on and on into true dusk, then a night so deep and so cold they huddled together, men and women, freemen and freedmen together.

  When morning came creeping through the murk, there was no talk of moving on. Those habituated to the desert were used to waiting out storms, and were schooled to patience even this near a goal. So they waited, deciding finally that the ground had stopped shaking enough to try the pegs. They pitched their tent for comfort, and salved the animals' seeping windburns, which were crusted over with sand.

  At that, they and the beasts alike had proper shelter, and they rested wrapped in double robes against a cold unlike any they had ever felt.

  "I've never seen the like," Hati swore, shivering. "In the deepest desert I've never seen such a storm."

  "Tomorrow the sand-fall will be less," Norit said.

  There was no question in Marak's mind that Norit knew exactly what would happen. Norit crept close to him and then Luz shoved away. Alone, Norit bowed her head and wiped her eyes in silent tears. There was no solution he could give. He offered his hand, and she jerked away. It tore his heart to watch her.

  Hati shook her head as if she could read his thoughts, and rubbed his shoulders, making him realize his muscles were set like stone. She had clever fingers and knew where to press. He stretched out finally and slept, and for a few hours the dreams left him in peace.

  On the next day the storm abated somewhat; but the taste in the air was that of sulfur. The wind stank, and it burned the eyes. They ate beneath the canvas, and carefully shielded their food from the foul stuff that blew in from the sky, under a yellow murk in which the noon sun was a spot in the haze.

  "The grass and the grain will wither," Norit said. "All the west is ruins. But that's not the worst."

  Kais Tain was in the west. All his father's household was in the west. Marak wanted to strike her senseless. He had done all he had done, he had survived all he had survived, and Norit told them calmly that nothing lived in the west.

  Marak, the voices said in the midst of it all, clamoring for his action. Marak.

  Norit said, aloud, "We should go now."

  "When did she become god?" Tofi cried. Their voices had become raw and unpleasant from the dust, and Tofi's voice broke on the shout.

  "Obey her," Marak said wearily. "Where else will you go?"

  "To hell," Tofi said bleakly. "We're all going to hell."

  But Tofi roused up the freedmen, who moved about loading their baggage and getting the beasts up.

  As they were packing up, a small thing that lived in buried rocks came out and hissed and dived back again.
One of the men threw a rock at the burrow in the Besh Karat.

  "It will die on its own," Norit said.

  The bitter spring was covered by deep sand. It would not flow again until the vermin dug it up. The beshti themselves, water-short, still showed no disposition to seek it out.

  What Norit prophesied haunted Marak as they rode away from that place.

  Should even the ill-tempered creature in its house of stone perish?

  Should winds like that cover the wells? From that small comprehension he truly began to grasp the height and depth of the devastation, east to west, from the highest to the lowest.

  He wished he had stayed at the white tents. He wished he had told Hati to stay. He wished he had never undertaken this fool's errand with Norit. There was no way out of this. There was no safety. He was a fool, and he had led them all to their destruction.

  But he had lived before by imposing strict conditions on his death.

  He would not die and leave Hati and Norit alone to face what came. That was his underlying resolve. He would not die without speaking to the Ila and relaying what she had asked to hear. That was his mission; and it was not that far. They would at least attempt the return, whatever the Ila did, and if, in the Ila's wrath, he could not, they would go back to the tower. He would put the fear in Tofi and have him promise that.

  Both these things he promised himself, while he roused Osan to his feet and turned Osan's head toward the holy city.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said to him. By noon, they passed bones that jutted up from the sand, a besha's carcass already stripped by vermin. They came to others, four and five, and the bones of two men on the other side of the caravan track, but those bones were gnawed for the marrow and scattered, dug up by some creature after the sand had covered them. A scrap of canvas lay against a distant rock, looking as the wind had carried it and bunched it around the base of the boulder. It might have sheltered a man, but if it did, that man was dead by now, beyond their help. And the visions were now of fire, fire flowing like water from a broken spigot, fire coursing through land and eroding it.

  They found other remnants of passage, as if bit by bit the whole caravan before them had come to grief, overwhelmed by the wind and the sand. Other debris was blown up against the rocks, far from their path, which now was as smooth as if no caravan had ever gone before them. When the desert destroyed, it both preserved and obliterated, even this close to the holy city.

  But the day-early mirage that usually heralded the holy city failed. The sky was dirty yellow, and the air was cold. They doled out a little water to the beshti, and wondered what was ahead of them.

  He contrived to speak to Tofi alone, riding side by side with him for a space, while Hati lagged back with the au'it. "I have a proposition for you," he said. "We both have a promise to the Ila. But she may reward you. If things go badly for me, as they may, take Hati and Norit and go back as fast as you can."

  "To the tower?" Tofi asked.

  "There," Marak said. "There's no safety here. You know that."

  "I already know," Tofi said unhappily. The young man who had thought at the beginning of this trek that the world would survive now had different ideas. "There is none here. We're lucky it's not our bones lying back there in the sand."

  "We had warning. They didn't. We have Norit. Listen to her."

  "The question is, what's there? Is it any better there than here?"

  "Norit will know," he said. "I think she knows as well as anyone what the state of the tower is. If anyone can get you back there alive, she can." He thought of the Ila's promise to save his mother and his sister, and now he knew that calling the Ila into the tangled affairs of his family might have put Hati and Norit in danger, and if things went wrong in the Ila's eyes, and she decided to blame him, he knew that she would never release those related to him: that was not the pattern of the Ila's justice. He could not ask Tofi to save his mother and sister in that case: there was no likelihood at all that Tofi could pry them from the Ila's hands and far less that Tofi could rescue him. But Hati-Hati was not a name the Ila even knew about.

  "Don't let Hati come with me once we reach the city," he said. "If you have to carry her off by force, do it. Claim her as if she were your family."

  "Can you argue with her?"

  "I'll give her that instruction. I'll tell her to take care of you. Go along with it."

  "I'll do my best," Tofi said, and joined the scheme to get the most of them back. "If the Ila's men ask, I'll lie and say she's my wife."

  That was the measure of Tofi's courage, his loyalty to a stranger. that he would lie to the Ila's men and rescue Hati. It was what happened to men on campaign together; and Tofi was no longer a boy, no longer a youngest son, struggling with a man's burden. The ex-slaves obeyed him. respected him, that had happened day by day.

  Now Marak discovered the courage that was in Tofi, as great as any man's he had ever ridden with; and he went to Norit, too, riding alongside her.

  "Tell Luz," he said, "if anything goes wrong, go to Tofi and tell him to get you to the tower. You'll need Hati, too. I can promise you, you'll get nowhere without her. Hati's of the tribes. You don't know enough about the desert on your own to live the day out. Your advice is dangerous to the inexperienced."

  Norit looked at him, frightened, as all her waking hours were a chaos of fear and Luz's presence. For a moment it was Norit, wholly Norit who gazed at him. Then the fear dimmed, and it was Luz. "Do what you came to do," Luz said sharply, and that was all she would say, leaving him angry and worried both.

  He delayed talking to Hati. He knew it would be an argument.

  Haste, the voices said. Don't stop. Don't rest.

  The sky remained the same dirty yellow toward the night, until the sun went down in a red sky the like of which none of them had seen; and that night the stars were hidden by cloud. Now and again in the far distance a trail of fire came through, and once a great boom resounded across the pans.

  Day came with a different shade, gray murk above their heads, streaked with dirty yellow high, high aloft.

  They had ceased to point at wonders. Tofi looked up gape-mouthed at this one, and so did Hati. The au'it began to write, and seemed to lose heart, and folded her book under this leaden sky.

  Norit had nothing to say.

  "We should keep moving," Tofi said. "The mirage has failed us. But I know we're not that far."

  The yellow dust of the western pans was on the move. Sometimes, being newly fallen, dust ran along the ground, a light film of it, streaks across the red sand of the Lakht.

  But by midmorning a dark haze was on the northern horizon, and by noon a low black pall obscured the face of the Qarain's red rock.

  "Fire," Hati said. "Smoke."

  It was the city itself they were seeing. They saw nothing like the tall graceful towers. The city lacked its towers and was surrounded by a field of dull gray and red-brown their eyes had taken for sand.

  Tents stood on the outskirts of the holy city. many, many tents spread all about it.

  But there was no city. All the fine dwellings, all the wealth, all the power of Oburan had come to this. The holy city was a hill of ruins.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The extent of the calamity of the heavens has yet to be known, but Oburan has opened its gates to the desperate: everyone who comes to the Ila's Mercy may come in.

  -The Book of Oburan

  They did not rest. the beasts remembered water or smelled it in the air, and even after so long a trek they stretched out in that smooth half-run the self-saving creatures rarely sustained, flagging occasionally but still moving at a walk, until they caught their breaths. Then one of the riding beasts would take it in his head to run, and off they would go again toward that distant ruin, maintaining the pace so long as their wind lasted, pack beasts jogging along behind.

  The leaden sky had turned red with sunset before they reached the outskirts. The color dyed all the canvas in sight as they reached the
first of the tents that ringed the city-dyed their party, too, with its ill-omened stain.

  In a certain area were Ogar tents, round and center-poled; and others were tents from the west, longer than wide. There were tents from the deep Lakht, square, with rope webbing; and tents from northwest, a simple cone-shape, made of hides.

  "This is not all Oburan," Marak said. Hope rose in him, seeing that motley gathering. "Those are from the lowlands."

  "Those are Keran," Hati said, rising on one knee in the saddle, pointing to a group aside, on the outskirts. Her people were here, and they rarely came in from the deep desert.