Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

  All the mad. All those that wandered away from the villages, fed, and clothed, and kept in safety—if they survived the desert.

  He was overwhelmed, surfeited with this babble of good fortune.

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  Hati and Norit were beset with questions and details of the wealth here, the au’it sat down and opened her book to record these wonders, and in a sudden need for escape, Marak walked out into the heat of the sun, where their beasts sat, well fed and supplied, by a pool of water that had no right to be where it was.

  The sun warmed his shoulders. He walked where a multitude of feet had tracked the sand, and he climbed the sandstone slant to gain a vantage and a breath of the world’s own sun-heated wind.

  He had to ask himself and his demons what he ought to do with Luz’s warning, what was truth, what was safe, what was a mirage that killed the fools that believed it . . . that was what he sought, simple solitude, on the safety of an often-used trail.

  But as he climbed he saw a gleam of white, and a wider and a wider gleam, the other side of the rise on which the tower sat. A city of white canvas spread across the sand.

  White tents. Shelter. People. A green-bordered river of water, shaded by palms.

  He sat down. He did not even remember doing it. He simply sat and stared at that sight with shock spreading through him like the cold out of the tents.

  Steps sounded behind them, so ordinary he failed to question them. Hati came and sat down, and after that Norit, and then the au’it, too, came and sat down by him. None of them spoke for a long time, looking at that sight, that clear evidence that Luz at least had told a part of the truth.

  He could not leave this vision untested. He got up and began walking down the slant of the sand that rose up against the sandstone, down a well-trodden path that led him down to the level of those orderly white tents. Hati followed, and Norit and the au’it trailed them both, all the way to the edge of the encampment, where a green-banked pool stood. Beshti wandered at liberty at some distance around the pool, halterless, seeming to belong to no one. Children ran and played, and splashed in the water.

  The children stopped and stared. In their gift-robes, they looked like everyone else in sight, but the au’it with them did not. When they walked by and into the rows of tents, people stopped their work and stared.

  The people were like the people of any village. There was a potter at work, a weaver. There were all these ordinary activities.

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  “Where are you from?” Marak asked a potter, and with a clay-caked hand the potter indicated himself and several adults around him.

  “From La Oshai,” the potter said with an anxious glance at the au’it. It was a village in the northwest. “My wife is from Elgi.” That was on the western edge of the Lakht. “We met here.—Where are you from?”

  “Kais Tain,” Marak said. He walked farther, with Hati and Norit, and the au’it trailing them. He asked names. He asked origins. The whole place was a mingling, and as far as he could tell it went on and on.

  “The hammer will fall,” one weaver said suddenly, after naming his village. “This is the only safe place. This is the only place.”

  “Are you happy here?” Norit asked, and the man’s overly anxious smile faded.

  “I wish my wife would come. I wish I could go out there and tell her.”

  “Can’t you?” Marak asked.

  “I don’t know the way,” the man said.

  It was the only unhappiness they had met face-to-face; and it was too painful, and brought back what Luz had said, that everyone who was not here would be under attack, and no one could save them.

  Marak turned and walked away, out under the heat of the sun, and walked back to the pool and up toward the ridge, Hati and Norit and the au’it in his tracks.

  He had become a void, a sheet of sand on which nothing at all was written.

  The unfortunate man down among the tents, a weaver, had no idea of directions. Perhaps he had followed a vision to get here. He had none to take him home to his wife.

  Marak climbed the steep sand to the ridge and looked back on wealth greater than he had ever imagined, on green-edged water, on the white, cooling tents, hundreds of them, and hundreds of individuals ripped up from their lives and set down in paradise . . . but it was a paradise without loved ones. All the villages, all the city, all the tribes had no warning, no knowledge of Luz and this place.

  The hammer will fall, he heard in his head, and all at once the vision came, the rock and the shining sphere.

  Marak, it said. Marak, Marak, the old refrain, the old restlessness.

  Peace here had no comfort.

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  “I have to go back,” he said to Hati and to Norit and the au’it. “The madness won’t stop for me. I have to go. I have to report what’s here.

  My mother and sister, that man’s wife . . . who’s to tell them, if I don’t go?”

  He walked away down the slope, recklessly downhill toward their own camp, and under the white tent, Hati and Norit with him, still trying to follow: he could not shake them with a declaration of madness. The au’it, too, fell in with them as they went, a small force that knifed straight to the heart of their small camp. He expected to be alone. He wanted to be alone in his folly.

  Tofi was there, with a costly cup in his hand, and lifted it cheerfully. “So you’ve seen the sight from the ridge. They say we’ll join the rest. Perhaps we were waiting for you. Sit, sit down and drink.”

  “I need two beasts,” Marak said, “mine, and two pack beasts, irons, and canvas.” He was more and more sure of his choice, however much it hurt. He had led the mad and the lost to safety; and with the alarm Luz had set seething inside him, and the voices dinning in his ears, he could not stay here, grazing on provided fodder like the beasts. He was never made to sit and fold his hands and ask for sweet fruit to land on the table.

  But going? Luz wanted his unquestioning acceptance, his absolute belief; and his own father had never gotten that from him.

  Who were Ian and Luz to ask it?

  The cup had stopped in its course from Tofi’s lips, and hesitated: Tofi lowered it to his knee, immediately sober. “Where are you going?”

  “Back,” he said, and Tofi looked dismayed. “Back to Oburan.”

  “With no guide?”

  “I know the stars,” he said. “I can find my way.” He was aware of Hati and Norit, standing near him, but they said nothing. He left Tofi, having informed him what he was taking, and went out to find Osan among the idle beasts.

  He led him back toward the place where the saddles were stacked, supported on their untouched baggage.

  Hati walked from that place, as he was arriving. She carried her saddle in one arm and hauled Norit’s in the other hand. Norit walked behind.

  “Where do you intend to go?” he asked.

  “To Oburan,” Hati said. “Norit, too. Where are you going?”

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  He stood wordless for a moment. Then he shrugged, with a tightness in his throat. “I suppose to Oburan.”

  Hati went to find her beast and Norit’s. That was that.

  He found his saddle, and set out three of the pack saddles, and chose a bundled tent he knew was their own, and waterskins, still filled with Pori’s water.

  Tofi came and brought the slaves.

  “One tent,” Marak said to him. It was Tofi’s property he proposed to take, but he saw no reason for Tofi to deny him the use of what lay for the most part unused, unnecessary in paradise.

  “You’re going to Oburan, you say.”

  “Yes,” Marak said. “Hati and Norit, too, and the au’it will go. One tent. Five, six beasts.”

  Tofi frowned and lo
oked at the horizon and at him as if he prepared to bargain. “I’m a fool,” Tofi said with a sigh. “But my father told the Ila he would come back. He won’t give me peace otherwise.

  He’s a cursed stubborn old man. So are my brothers.”

  Tofi spoke of them as if they were still alive, and gazed into an empty horizon, but perhaps saw something in it. There was more than one kind of madness.

  “The people in the tower say the world is ending,” Marak said.

  “And we have to warn everyone else.”

  “We’ve heard that,” Tofi said.

  “I see it,” Marak said. “Hati, and Norit, and I, we all three see it.”

  Tofi shrugged. “I don’t. But I’m not mad.”

  “Then stay here. This place will be safe. They say so, at least.”

  This with a glance toward the tower. “They’ll let you stay. You don’t have to be one of us.”

  “Maybe not,” Tofi said, “but I’m not one of this batch, either. I’m scared. I don’t say I’m not. But there’s nothing here for me until I finish this trek. I keep hearing the old man . . . like your voices. He says,

  ‘Get up, get up, get up, boy. You’re not done here.’ He’s ashamed of me. If there’s anyone going back to finish the contract, and I don’t, I know him: he’ll give me no peace.”

  Rock hit shining sphere, again, and again, and again.

  Marak blinked, feeling an inward chill. “You may die. The people in the tower say there’s some calamity already on its way, whatever it is. We may not make it to the city, let alone back again.”

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  grieving, and the grief broke through for a moment in a tremor of his chin. “I’ll do it, I say. Then my father will shut up.”

  “Five of us, then,” Marak said.

  “Seven,” Tofi said. “The slaves are my father’s. Now they’re mine.

  I won’t ride off and leave them. They owe me. They owe me their wretched lives. They’ll damned well pay their debt, wherever we end up.”

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  11

  The Ila neither ages nor suffers illness: from her all life flows, and life and health is her gift to those who keep her law.

  —The Book of Priests

  TOFI ARGUED WITH THE SLAVES. HE CAJOLED, HE RAISED

  a quirt, he threatened

  “Pack up,” Tofi said. “You’re fools here. You haven’t a trade, you don’t have relatives.” That availed nothing. “I’ll free you when we get to Oburan,” Tofi said. “You’ll be freedmen when you come back.”

  There was no movement.

  “Damn you, I’ll pay you wages when you’re free!”

  The slaves looked at one another, then began to get up, one and the other. “Move!” Tofi said, and they moved, and went to work.

  They took all the beshti, all Tofi’s goods. The beasts complained about being roused out for service, but not beyond the ordinary.

  They were well rested and well watered, and had eaten all they wished for the several days of their sojourn here. Gorging to their bellies’ contentment and moving on was the sum of what they did all their lives, and now the packs were lighter, the gear distributed out over those beasts that had no riders, by the simple change of running two deep-irons through saddle rings and lashing them down. The loads they made were so light that for a besha’s strength, it was as if they carried no weight at all.

  The mad turned out to stare at the process. Some of them, understanding where they were going, even professed a thought of going with them.

  But after all was said and settled, to a man, they chose the rich ta-

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  bles and the promise of safety. Only as the seven of them rode away, their former companions lined the cool edge of the tent, waving, calling out well-wishes to them. One, Maol, one of Tofi’s two women, ran out to offer them fresh fruit for their journey and to shed tears at the parting. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for our lives.”

  But the rest simply stood back to watch them go, as much as if to say that of all the mad, they counted their former guides the most afflicted.

  Beyond the tents the beasts stretched out fully into that natural walk that could eat up so much ground a day. The slaves rode hindmost, loaded with food, which they ate with abandon, no one forbidding it. They had more than enough water to reach Pori, they had food enough for their whole journey: they had all Tofi’s wealth of tents.

  The weather held fair.

  That noon when they camped, they pitched only a single tent, heated water for tea and a good supper, and left the rest of the baggage packed and ready to put up on the beasts. The au’it wrote and wrote, seldom looking up, such was her haste and her concentration.

  The sky was the brightest of blues, clear of dust. The wind was gentle, but enough to move beneath the canvas. If the world threatened to end, still, the day seemed uncommonly good, and peaceful, and lacking all desperation.

  The time was already up, Luz had said, and Norit had heard it.

  Yet perhaps the tower-dwellers were fallible in their knowledge, or simply lying, to trap all the others in this paradise.

  If there was anyone who might know, Marak said to himself, the Ila might know what the truth of things was. There should be an answer, beyond folding the hands and sitting down under the white tents.

  The world to be snuffed out? Extinguished by some nameless enemy? This ondat? And they should give it up with no more than Luz’s saying so?

  He did not accept it. He refused to accept it. But try to save it, that he would.

  He lay beside Hati and Norit and found his eyes shutting. He had not truly slept, not a natural sleep, and now it came on him irre-sistibly, like a drug.

  Then he heard the voices, saying, Marak, hurry. Hurry, Marak. He had no strength to open his eyes. The vision came like nightmare.

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  Objects struck one another, impact repeated itself over and over and over. He rode the falling object down and down, and the sphere became land, and desert, and the desert plumed up like a fountain of sand and billowed up like a cloud that raced over the land, over dunes and villages.

  Came a new vision: water flowed in the desert, over rocks burned black. A stream coursed, cascaded. He could hear it dripping, flowing, gurgling down the rocks and into a broad expanse of water that swelled, swelled, swelled.

  He could see his father’s house, in Kais Tain, all of mud brick, sprawling around deep-floored gardens and wells that made that sound, that wonderful, rich sound of water that the dream made fearsome.

  He visited his own rooms, and heard the women laughing as they prepared food for the house: there was always plenty laid out. There were always children.

  He could see the stable yard, and the beasts he loved; and his little sister Patya fed Osan with her hand. She had to learn to flatten her hand, or lose fingers. She laughed at Osan’s questing lip. That laughter haunted him, and reminded him not all was well with that house, these days.

  He could not see his mother, or his father. He searched the house for them.

  The rocks above the house spilled down a dependable amount of water in every season, and the spring flowed from there down to a second well house. From there it went to the garden, which all the village tended. Each house had its own tree and its own vines, and everyone knew which was which, and whose grew best. The house-holders shared such secrets, and were generous with their surplus, beyond what they needed. The village was fed before it sold the excess. It was the custom.

  The great house, too, had its vines and its bushes in a garden apart, and a few slaves tended them, freedmen on the house records, but they liked their work in the garden too well and their freedom was to do
the work they loved. He learned that lesson from those men and women, that so long as they could not own the garden, their best way to be happy was to work in it for reasonable reward and a share of the fruit.

  They were richer than the Ila in her palace, wise in their own domain, respected throughout the village for their advice and their competence.

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  But they had no governance beyond their garden . . . and no power over its fate.

  Tain, on the other hand, was born to power. Tain had to keep his holdings by force, fighting against those who wished to take the food from people’s mouths, fighting against bandits and the Ila’s taxmen; and so he fought, and so the villagers and people of the district fought at his command. Some died, and left widows and children who, but for Tain’s upkeep, were helpless. And in the end Tain cast out his wife and his son.

  Perhaps after all it was better to be those freed slaves, content with the vines and each other’s company. They enjoyed as much as they wished of the fruit . . . and that was better than many had as daily fare. They were assured of beds, and knew every day what they had to do, which was to prune the vines and tend the trees. Every year of their lives was like the last.

  That was the life of the mad at the tower, to have tables spread with every good thing, and to work only at need. The inhabitants of the white tents carried the names of villages with them. They brought their crafts and practiced them. They married and begat and might see their children grow.

  But whence came the laws, and who made the food, and how long would it come so easily, if destruction came?

  At the pleasure of Luz and Ian, how long would they eat as well and have everything their hearts desired?

  He waked with a hard-beating heart and a remote, guilty regret for not urging more of the mad to come with them. Paradise was not enough for him. Not enough for Norit and Hati, not enough for Tofi, either, as it seemed. Least of all for the au’it, whose whole devotion was to the Ila.