C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  But he went to Memnanan and asked the service of one of his men.

  "I need someone to ride back and find Tarsa in the line," he said, "and find someone named Lelie."

  "Why?" Memnanan asked.

  "One of Norit's kin, I think. I don't know. But I want this Lelie found. It's a favor."

  He left that statement to lie unadorned between them. There were favors passed, indeed there had been favors passed between them. Without comment, Memnanan called a man over and put him under that instruction.

  "Find out who Lelie is, and if there is a Lelie with Tarsa's company, bring her with you and protect her from all unpleasantness. A member of this lord's party wants her."

  The man reined aside from the column and rode back alongside it. There was no telling where in the line of march Tarsa might fall: it might be a journey of one or two days.

  By morning the man Memnanan had sent had still not come back. By then Marak began to know it was no small favor he had asked, and by afternoon, after their rest, that most likely time for the man to catch up to them, he began to worry about the man, and about the favor he had asked of Memnanan.

  He found nothing comfortable to say about the situation, only to shrug apologetically when he met Memnanan and to wish the man safety and a safe return.

  "The line is very long," Memnanan said. "It may take a while."

  But none of them, not even those experienced at reckoning the number of a group by looking at them, knew how long the marching line would be. All methods of measuring failed against the scale of the undertaking, to move everyone in the world to shelter. Marak found himself in Memnanan's debt, and in debt to the messenger, who had surely had no idea, either, the size of the task when he left.

  Morning, too, brought a stiff head wind that kicked up the dust in their faces and made the pitching of tents at noon a far more difficult operation.

  Rumor filtered up the line during the rest, one group talking to another next in sequence. A old man had fallen off and broken his leg. A woman of the villages had given birth, and men had carried her on a litter while she did so.

  Life in the column went on, no matter its difficulty.

  But the messenger had not come back by then, either, and no rumor reported the messenger on his way.

  Chapter Eighteen

  If a good well turns to bitter water, the village dies: there is no remedy.

  -The Priest, in his Book.

  The wind that had made pitching the tents so difficult at least blew the clouds away. Tofi laughed when they waked after noon rest and saw a bright blue sky. "I thought we might never see the sun again," he said. His voice attempted levity, but it was relief everyone must feel.

  Norit seemed calmer, and had done with crying. She seemed to have forgotten having named Lelie, and they failed to mention the messenger. Norit rode with them, and measured the fringed edge of her aifad, over and over and over, lost in her own thoughts, or in Luz's: there was no telling. The voices were quiet.

  But that night as they rode, the stars fell again in all their terrible glory. No few were the fiery sort, that stitched their way in silver and gold across the night before they plunged below the horizon.

  Memnanan rode with them a time. The messenger had not yet returned.

  "I regret asking the favor," Marak said. "Something may have happened."

  "It may," Memnanan said. "But it may not. I'm not yet worried. It may simply take that long."

  "I hope for his safety," Marak said. Norit was near them, but he had never yet told her about the search.

  "Has the fall been this thick before?" Memnanan asked, with a look aloft. This was a man who had spent days before this in the heart of the city, where lights blotted out the sky.

  "It's become ordinary these days," Hati said. "I suppose it will be ordinary for a long time."

  "No," Norit said suddenly. "It's not ordinary. That's why we have to hurry. The hammer of heaven will fall."

  "The hammer of heaven," Memnanan said.

  "A very large star," Marak said; that was the way he interpreted it. "Where will it fall, Norit? On the Lakht?"

  Sometimes Norit seemed to intervene in Luz's answers, or failed to understand them. She turned and pointed, back, behind them. "Not on the Lakht. Out in the bitter water."

  "Then not on us," Memnanan said with relief.

  "But wherever we are, still, the wind will reach us, and when that wind blows, the sun will stop shining and the stars will vanish. The earth will ring like an anvil. When it comes, we have to be off the Lakht. If nothing else, we have to be off the Lakht, and down below it. The wind up here will be terrible."

  "Is this the truth?" Memnanan asked.

  "That we have to be off the Lakht before this great star comes down?" Marak said. "I don't know about the sun and the stars. But she's saved our lives before." Under the streaks of the star-fall, the desert showed cold, and the wind bit as it came. The sand blew along the surface, a light film of fine dust, and in Norit's doom-saying, it struck him with peculiar force just then that in all this riding since starting out from Oburan, he had seen no birds, no vermin, and no trace of them. It was more than strange, and what was strange lately became ominous.

  "Can we reach the edge by then?" Memnanan asked.

  "If the weather holds," Norit said. "If it turns against us, we don't know. I can't prevent the storms."

  Memnanan laughed at the strangeness of that I can't prevent, as if he thought it a grim and impertinent sort of joke, but Marak was less sure, Luz would want to prevent the storms. If anyone could, Luz might be able; but she told them it was beyond her power.

  Their own contingent, third in line, moved at the pace of a very large caravan, which was to say, very slowly, still, despite Norit's warning. It was his intention to anchor the line, not to let the Keran and the Haga and the tribes with their travel-hardened beasts run a race to the detriment of all those village contingents behind. The villages, unaccustomed and containing many weak, could surely go no faster, and those afoot above all else could not match the tribes' pace.

  But now he wondered if that kindness to the hindmost was not risking all of them. "We could go some bit faster," he said to Norit, when Memnanan had gone his way, "but that would mean those afoot will likely die. What should we do?"

  Norit looked for a moment apt to burst into tears and shook her head distractedly as they rode.

  And for the first time he added up the fact that all the mad had heard the same voices, their own, and seen the same visions, at the same time, and so had Norit, on the way. But now he became keenly aware of what they had begun to believe beneath the surface and never saying it: that Norit had special warnings, and special visions, and that Luz's constant possession of her was different than what afflicted them.

  In a way he had known it for days; he had known it when Norit had warned them of a storm he had had no idea was coming. He had known it when Norit ran mad, alone, under the sky.

  It was not that he was hardheaded and failed to listen; it was not that he and Hati were too resistant to the voices-but that Norit's voice was a special one, and that it had begun to be a special voice in the tower, where he and Hati and Norit had spent an amount of time they had never added up.

  Now he believed Luz had done something special to Norit. She had done something special, and cruel, and Norit was not the same as she had been. Norit heard things constantly, and that flow of images that had once united the mad did not reach them. only Norit, who suffered.

  There was nothing they could do for her but find this lost person named Lelie. Norit had asked for that. But whether Norit would even continue to care for this Lelie, there was no promise. Every time he made an effort to get her back from Luz, Luz's possession of her was fiercer and harder when it set in.

  He looked at Hati, riding near them, and found no better answer. He no longer knew what to do: but he knew that he had no wish to end that possession entirely-their lives depended on it. Even Norit's life depended on
Luz's voice continuing.

  And all night long the star-fall continued, obscured at times by threads of cloud, dark strips in the heavens. By morning those strips glowed pink, then faint purple, then white.

  Even by this morning, there was no word from the young man they had sent down the line. Marak tried to imagine how far that was, and whether in fact it did extend all the way back to the holy city.

  But now he had to reckon that perhaps the young man had come to grief. nothing to do with vermin or bandits. The Ila's men were not loved in the villages.

  By midmorning two of the younger priests worked their way up the line, afoot, breathless, to ask the Ila questions, it seemed. They were from among a small set of priests taken in by Kasha village, among the first behind the tribes, so they said, they had not paid attention to the small traffic along the line, and after a brief sojourn near the Ila, but never directly with her.

  "Have you seen a young man of the Ila's guard?" Marak asked them afterward.

  "Yes, omi," they said. "But only going. Not coming."

  What had they asked the Ila, or what had they to report? Marak wondered, but dared not ask.

  They offered Norit their courtesies, wished the God's blessing on her, and by implication, he supposed, they asked for enlightenment. "Have you seen other visions?" the seniormost asked.

  "The hammer will fall," she said. "We have to hurry." After that she waved them away, disinterested in their prayers, having no more cheerful prophecy to give them, and no counsel.

  "Omi," the priests said to Marak, and the same to Hati, seeing that they were a group. They paid their parting respects to him and Hati as much for being associated with Norit, as for leading this company, so he suspected; but he felt better for their gesture. They rejoined their companions by the simple expedient of going outside the line and sitting still for as long as they had walked double the pace, and were gone.

  The au'it recorded their visit, afterward, but that was all the information they had from it: Norit had posed them no questions, the Ila offered no answers, and being distrustful of priests, he had made no detailed inquiry, either.

  The sun grew fever-warm. The air seemed to give less sustenance than usual. At noon he lay beneath the tent, numbed his mind, and sweated: he rested with his arm pillowed on his head, secure in Hati's presence beside him, and the au'it and Norit sleeping at his back.

  For two more days it was like this, with the stars falling at night and the sun burning by day. Once more the priests came. He asked them the questions he had reserved, what they had seen, whether the people were keeping the line together: they were, the priests said. But the Ila's messenger did not come back, and the priests had no news.

  "I fear I've brought that man to grief," Marak said to Memnanan when they discussed the matter. "I don't know where or how an experienced man fell into difficulty, but I'm very sorry for it."

  "The desert has its dangers," Memnanan said with a shrug, and that was the end of it: Memnanan showed no enthusiasm to send another man, and he would not ask it. So there was no answer about Lelie. There was no way to trace the man without risking another, and of the rumors that found their way up and down the line-of births, of deaths and calamities: vermin invading a village's food store during rest, but they had not lost it all-for two more days there was no word, and they gave up hope. Luz was quiet, the au'it recorded little but the arduous routine of camp and cooking, and one tremor in the earth that lasted longer than any before. It did no damage, beyond the collapse of the soldiers' tent and the disturbance of the beshti, who complained from camp to camp.

  Escorted by two villagers, at the next morning, on a day of high wind and dusty haze, priests came into camp to seek the Ila, and failing her civil reception of them at this hour-wind had put out the small stove that heated the Ila's tea, and she was indisposed-they came to Norit.

  "Pesha village has lost two tents," they said, speaking for two dour and mistrustful village men. "What shall we do?"

  "Has Pesha lost its water and its food?" Norit asked, consulting no one, though Marak stood by and listened to this audience.

  No, the man from Pesha insisted, and tried to present more of a case for being given tents from some other village. "We have elderly," he said. "Our lord is an old man. We need the tents."

  Norit lifted a hand, as autocratic as the Ila herself. "If they lost two, give them no more to lose. Let them all go to other tents, and settle in the village behind them in line."

  Marak was astonished, and the Pesha villagers wildly outraged. It was a desert judgment from a softhearted village woman. And on that thought, Marak knew Norit had not made that choice.

  "This isn't just!" the men cried.

  "The desert isn't just. Those who lost two tents should have better leaders."

  "They have a book," the priest said, over the protests of the villagers. "Shall they keep it? Or shall it also go to their hosts?"

  "It should go to their hosts," Luz said through Norit, but Marak thought it was Norit who added: "and the village lord should beg the pardon of Pesha village for losing the tents. He may be a wise man in his own village affairs, and he can command again after we reach the tower, where we're safe, but he should leave pitching camp to those that kept all their tents, and thank them for keeping his safe."

  The priests and the chagrined villagers bowed and went away with their message.

  Well judged, and well said, Marak thought to himself in their departure. Even Luz could learn the exigencies of the desert; and even Norit could moderate Luz's harsh judgments.

  But that disaster was not the worst. Tofi reported grimmer news relayed to him up from the tribes, a concern that small vermin had moved in near the caravan track back among the villages, and showed increasingly disturbing courage over the last two days. The tribes nearest the villages had warned them to be more careful with their waste, and the priests, in evidence of very bad judgment, had not reported it when they reported the lost tents.

  Tofi, however, knew the dire seriousness of what the tribes observed, and stood waiting for a solution from him.

  The vermin came to the moisture and waste of a caravan. They always followed caravans, but they never, almost never, attacked one on its march: the noise was too much, the activity too threatening. Vermin were interested in everything a caravan left or shed. starting with the latrines, and the small insect vermin that burrowed there, and the larger vermin that came to feed on them, and the largest that fed on the larger. They were habitual pests, no more than that, on the average route, at worst startling some caravanner bent on private business in his tent's latrine, in some three-day camp.

  But no one had ever seen a caravan that took a day or more to march past a given point. No one knew what happened when the rule that vermin never mobbed a large caravan ran up against the rule that vermin always gathered and moved in on an abandoned campsite.

  In their all-inclusive caravan, only the Ila's party and the tribes and the villages in front marched over clean sand. Past the first half hundred or so camps, the entire route of march of those behind was through one continuous campsite, and Marak was appalled that they had not once thought of that ominous situation. They were fools.

  He looked at Tofi, took a hitch of the aifad to obscure his dismay. The dust stung his eyes. It made the air itself smell like hot sand. "They're marching over old ground," Marak said. "There's never been a caravan so large its back end marches over its own trail after breaking camp, not that I know."

  "We must stretch out at least a day's march, maybe two," Tofi said, over the thumping of the nearby tent, which slaves were working to take down. "It's going to happen, isn't it?"

  "The city people, those afoot." Marak shuddered to think of the situation of the hindmost: beshti were some defense. But for a man afoot.

  "I'll tell Memnanan," he said to Tofi, and went and immediately called the Ila's captain apart from his men, the two of them curtained in the blowing dust, partly sheltered by the Ila's tent.
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  Memnanan listened grimly, as appalled as he. He had fought in the desert. He knew the hazards of vermin, and the rules of a clean camp, no matter what city people understood. "Wait," Memnanan said, and went to talk to the Ila, reckless of her bad mood, and talked for several moments, urgently, before he came back.

  "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."