Hammerfall

by C. J. Cherryh

  Marak! the warning came to him. He saw the ring of fire, three times repeated. He saw the fall of stone on sphere, and it seemed he knew where Norit was, that she had found a besha and came desperately toward them.

  Then he did see her: in the dark, mad as ever she was, Norit came riding toward him, but she came with Tofi, with Patya, and them leading beshti with them.

  “The star is coming down,” Norit said, Luz said. “Get to shelter now! Everyone get to shelter. It’s coming. It’s coming down! ”

  In his own vision he saw what he had always seen. But he believed her. He stopped his work and stood still, dazed, seeing all these men, tribesmen, who had come farther and farther from their tents and from safety . . . that was his first clear thought at the warning, that it was not only a question of his safety, and above that, Hati’s, but of Tofi and all these other men.

  But other men had heard the prophet. A panic began in that moment, even among the brave.

  It tried to rise in him, the moment he gave it any room. “Hati,” he said. “Spread the word. Then get home.” Home, he said, like a villager fool, when Norit, their beacon, had come out here, so that in all this expanse of tents neither of them knew where that was.

  But suddenly he did know. He knew, Norit knew, he thought Hati knew, and he thought strangely enough that, in the heart of all the world, a baby with the makers in her knew where the ones who loved her were standing at this very moment.

  “Lelie’s our beacon home,” he said on a hoarse breath, and climbed to the saddle and took the offered rein. “Follow it! Spread the word: the storm’s coming. Get to cover! Now! ” He turned and waved and lifted his voice in the loudest shout he could make clear. “Hindmost tents, take in all comers! Spread the word! Spread the word! Get the beshti sheltered! Take in the stranger! Take in your worst enemy! In all the world, there’s only us, and the storm!”

  Men began shouting one to another, and what had been methodical work became hasty, then frantic effort, the last tents going up, the 6710.01 5/31/01 11:53 AM Page 361

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  last webbing snugged down, the last-arrived wailing about their safety, their relatives, their belongings still without shelter.

  Marak rode north, along the face of the camp, shouting at villagers just getting to shelter and at men still working. He heard the warning spreading up and down the rows, and back deep among the farther tents. Take cover, take cover, men shouted, when the night seemed as clear as any morning in the world, and not a breath of wind stirred.

  But slowly, from the darkest dark of night, the detail of ropes and irons began to seem clearer, and clearer, and he realized to his horror that the dawn was coming out of the west, not the east.

  He looked back toward the cliffs and up, where climbers still labored downward . . . still they came, with shelter so close, and it was too late.

  His voices clamored at him, and it might have been a moment, a heartbeat, the blink of an eye that he stared, but then he laid his quirt to the besha he rode and put the terror at his back.

  Light sheeted above them, went on across the face of the world, throwing distant mountains into relief, showing them the whole world in a lightning stroke, leaving him nothing but the will to get the ones with him to shelter, where Lelie was—center of the world, that place, that refuge, that safety where Hati would go, and Norit.

  He saw tents around him, sitting beshti, exhausted, lifting their heads toward the strange dawn.

  Marak tucked low, ready for quake or wind or whatever might come, rode and rode past tents and men straggling back to their own families, their own tribes, running now, desperately.

  This light instead of fading only increased, and as he rode to the last tents, as he slid down to stand on the earth and looked up next to his own beshti, he saw a murky fire above the cliffs in the west, a fire shedding that unnatural glow in the sky above their heads.

  He saw Norit and Hati arrive, and seized their reins, and helped them down. Tofi and Patya followed.

  “The sea boils up!” Norit cried, her face turned up to that red-glowing sky. “A pillar of cloud goes up and burns with light, up and up and up, and the bitter water and heavens are overturned.” She lifted up arms bare against that red, western dawn, and for a moment she seemed caught in that vision, spread against the sky, dyed in light.

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  Marak seized her, pulled her toward the tent.

  The earth suddenly shook as if the world had broken. Beshti went down, some sitting down, one, Norit’s, thrown down off its feet.

  Marak lost his footing, and protected Norit with his elbows. The tent and shelter was just next to them, while the shaking continued, and continued, and continued.

  Then stopped. The whole world, lit red, caught its breath. The air was still. Marak moved, got a knee under him, got the other to bear and got up. Their tent was still standing. The au’it stood at the doorway, red-robed, expressionless recorder of all she saw.

  Hati and Patya and Tofi tried to help him up, and he got up, hauled Norit to the doorway, used her body to brush the storm flap out of his path. Hati was at his back, all of them were there, and they tried to help him in the blind dark inside. It was all he could do, to carry Norit. His strength was flowing out of him fast; and when he reached what he thought was their place, their mats, he fell, trying to kneel, and bruised his knees in doing it.

  He let Norit down from hands numb with swelling.

  “Lelie,” Norit said. “Lelie, Lelie, Lelie!”

  She wanted her baby. Luz had left her. But Lelie was not his at the moment to give, and he knew at least Lelie was there, and Hati was.

  It was dark in the tent, while fire raced across the skies. He called for Patya, to be sure she was there, and Tofi; and hearing answers he fell down on the mat and lay there, only breathing, thinking of the beshti, still under saddle, and the people still on the road, and worst of all, caught on the cliffs with the storm still coming . . . since come it would.

  They could still get behind rocks, at a last resort. He wished them to think of it, simply to snug down with whatever canvas they could secure against something strong—but he was powerless to help them, powerless in all events now. If the sky was burning—if the earth shook like that—what hope was there?

  He shut his eyes, but the visions persisted. Stone had hit the sphere. The ring of fire had gone out, and that was what sheeted over them. He knew it now. He got up on a fevered, exhausted effort, and put his head out to see what he could.

  There was as yet no sign of storm, only that unnatural glow in the sky, a glow enough now to cast a shadow.

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  the wind—the wind was yet to come. A few more might straggle into the tents. A few more might live.

  He knelt in the doorway of the tent, on knees numb with exhaustion, his arms and back afire with fever, and he felt Hati take his arm.

  He felt her presence, felt Norit’s, Lelie’s, continually. Norit and Lelie had found each other.

  A new vision came: a pillar of cloud, lit red, spreading light across the heavens.

  The bitter water, Norit had said. The hammer of heaven would come down in the bitter water, and the fountain would go up, and the earth would crack like a pot, pouring out fire.

  Had they not felt the earth break?

  “It shines like a lamp,” Norit said. “The heat of it goes out and the ashes will fall and fall. The hammer is down.”

  If it were himself alone he might sit down in the doorway in a fit of shivering and watch what came next. As it was, he felt Hati’s hand, and moved his hand to Hati’s, felt her fingers, as swollen and rough and wounded as his own, and dragged his gaze away from the awful sky and toward the look she gave him.

  “We’re going to live, ” she said, and set her ja
w in that way Hati had, and he loved her, he loved her so much in that moment he could look away from the sky.

  But vision came, a vision of sky and dark, and it came, and it came, a ring of darkness behind the ring of fire.

  Marak! the voices cried all at once.

  He pulled the storm flap shut, worked with swollen fingers to lace it tight.

  It was coming, it was coming, he said to himself, seeing the ring of fire and the ring of darkness again and again and again.

  Inside, Tofi told Mogar and Bosginde to pull the storm lines tight and hold on, back at the weather side of the tent, back where they had put their baggage: storm rigging—lines connected to the webbing above the canvas were anchored inside the tent, around the weight of the baggage. If anything held, those lines would hold, pressing the tent down harder the more the wind blew to lift it up.

  They took their places inside, in the dark, with no lamp burning.

  They braced. They sat ready. Marak joined those holding the lines. Hati did. Memnanan’s wife and aunts and mother held one an-

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  other, and Norit with Lelie and the au’it as well he thought had moved near them.

  Thunder came first—and the ground shuddered with that thunder, a rhythmic beating like that many footsteps: beshti from end to end of the camp bellowed alarm.

  Wind hit like a fist, hit, and began to pull at the ropes, trying to lift the tent. The ropes began to vibrate, and hummed with the assault, and Marak gripped the rope, robbed of breath, as if the very strength of the air had been swept away around them. Ears congested; night-blind eyes seemed to swell in their sockets, and Marak shut his eyes tight, squinted down, to keep them from bursting, and pulled on the rope, and felt its vibration going through his arms, through his bones, and up from the sand under them. He might have shouted. Others might have. He was deaf, and his ears were bursting.

  Debris hit the tent, a heart-stopping impact that hung and beat against them, threatening to destroy them. A wave of cold came. Still the wind beat at them, indistinguishable from earthquake. Marak bit his lip and hung on, and held on, feeling the line shake under the stress. Hearing had all but gone, but the vibration in his bones had a voice, the wind’s voice. Distanced by the congestion in his ears, it had voices wherever it found a chink, an inlet, and it wailed, it howled, it roared. Marak, his voices raged at him, but they were small against that voice. The visions showed him ruin and the ring of fire and the ring of darkness—and this was it, he thought, this surely must be the worst.

  His hands gripping the rope were beyond pain: cord met raw flesh, and he would not let go, would not give up their tent to the wind. They were the outermost of the crescent of tents: they were the ones exposed to the greatest force of that wind coming off the cliffs, with no shelter at all but the tents behind them, and if their position was wrong, they were dead, but the sand was going past them . . .

  was going over their heads, in a wind greater than any wind that had ever blown.

  A second object hit the back tent wall, something huge that flapped about and rumbled over the top of them with indistinct sound: it might have been a tent blown loose, its people dead in an instant in this wind, its goods carried away on the storm front. The seams of the tent strained, and sand rubbing against the canvas was 6710.01 5/31/01 11:53 AM Page 365

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  a force that could wear away the threads, secure an opening, and if there began to be an opening, the wind could tear it wide.

  Marak held on. He had for days denied the voices, and now, like a penitent thief, he hoped for some answer from Luz: in extremity and fear for all their lives he begged for a voice, contritely, obediently, ready to surrender to his voices if only they would tell him what to do.

  He held, and the wind that came now was not the slight coolth and strange smell of deep sands overturned. This wind stank with a stench that raised the fine hairs on his nape, an indescribable mix of scents, things that never have been carried into the light, the depth of the destruction of Pori, and Oburan, and the overthrow of the bitter water itself. It smelled like a forge confounded with a graveyard, it smelled of the wind off the high mountains and the rotting bottom of a garden. It was all these things, and the wind grew louder, and louder, and louder and his ears more and more congested, until he thought his head must burst in the next instant.

  Then, like an immense weight on their shoulders, the storm began to let them go, and passed them with a roar so deep the ground seemed again to thump in its going.

  Someone wept. Lelie set up a wail drowned by the wind.

  Then a woman’s voice came clear in a sharp, gasping cry for help, and he began to realize that it was Memnanan’s wife.

  “It’s now!” the lady cried, breathless, terrified, and then Marak understood the commotion and dismay. Her baby was on its way, in the dark, in the storm, in the noise that drowned everything but the loudest shouts.

  Even so, the wind was falling. The ache in his ears subsided. He had no knowledge of birthing babies, but he knew beshti, and he knew the storm that had rolled over them might have brought it on.

  His ears might clear, but the woman had no such relief. The birth pangs were not likely to stop, once started, no matter what the storm did, no matter the things that could go terribly wrong if the baby was not ready to come.

  He heard a commotion among the women. Lelie, apparently shunted aside in the confusion and the dark, wailed her distress and her fear in the dark, but he thought Norit had her. The women asked each other advice, gathered about Memnanan’s wife: Norit had birthed a child. Memnanan’s mother assuredly had.

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  “What can we do?” he heard Tofi ask, and he heard Patya and Hati and then even Bosginde talking to Memnanan’s mother, their voices even so smothered by the wind and the racket of the canvas, and by the bubbles that seemed lodged painfully inside his ears.

  Memnanan was out of reach. It was folly to try to bring him: their tent had stopped trying to fly away, but it still shuddered to gusts strong enough for any storm. The sand would be too thick to breathe out there.

  Marak cautiously released the rope he had held, forced locked, swollen fingers to move. His mouth was so dry his throat felt coated with dust. He rubbed at a coating of fine, dry dust on his face and about his eyes, and made matters worse. He hardly had strength left to lift his arms.

  “Can we get a light?” Memnanan’s mother pleaded.

  They had a lamp, the most basic sort of lamp, as every tent had, in their dwindling store of supplies. It was something men could do.

  Feeling their way in the raucous dark, he and Tofi and the slaves got the elements together from their baggage.

  Then it was another lengthy and doubtful process to light it while the wind ripped and battered at the canvas. Mogar carried a small flintwheel, that most elementary of firestarters in a desert night, but drafts through the tent lacings quenched the sparks they raised.

  They lacked quick-fire, or any other element to make it easy.

  Bosginde, however, said he could do it, and they were able, finally, to bring fire to a dry nest of fibers and what seemed strands of Bosginde’s hair, and then to a piece of oil-soaked wick. All the while the tent shook under the gusts, and they used their bodies for a windbreak.

  The fibers in the cut end of the cord glowed minutely. It was a race between their fire going out and the wick taking light, and Marak yanked out a loop of his own hair to keep the little flame going; Tofi did, and the fire still went out, the middle of the hair loops burning through too quickly.

  But the wick had just caught, and in their deep dark and the overthrow of the world, it cast comforting light on worried men’s faces—it reached up and illumined tent canvas that quivered under the steady onslaught of the wind, and it reached aside to the women’s circle.

 
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  and gave it to Hati. It lit female faces, the lady’s, the mother, the aunts, and Hati and Patya and Norit—and, distressed and tremulous of lip, Lelie. The au’it, too, was there, frowning and without advice—the Ila’s virgin servant.

  In the violence of a sudden gust the lady screamed, but the wind drowned the most of it, and Marak sat unhappily listening to a pain he could not help. It would be what it was. If there was anyone to intervene, the women knew, the women would.

  “It’s her first,” Marak said to Tofi with a shake of his head. “It’s a month early. It’s the storm. I hope that baby is brave enough to be born.”

  “They don’t ever change their minds, do they?” Tofi asked.

  “Not often. Not when it’s this far.” Excluding some wisdom of the an’i Keran that he had never heard, the birth was in progress. Not to the good of the mother would the baby change its mind now.

  The au’it, incredibly, spread her book and wrote, slanting it to the little light there was. The record resumed. The world went on. Marak drew a wider breath.

  Tofi even dared take a brief look outside, through the lacings.

  “They’re alive out there,” he reported of the beshti. “I don’t know how.”

  They sat, waterless, without easy rest. The wind blew. The labor went on and on, until at last the women clearly despaired of what they saw, and roused the lady up and supported her from either side in a walk about the tent, around and around and around, while Bosginde sheltered the lamp for them.

  The lady lay down again. Got up again.

  “Is it any closer?” Marak asked Hati.

  “No,” Hati said. “No. It isn’t.”

  There was yet another circuit of the tent, but the lady failed and collapsed in the women’s arms, screaming in misery none of them could help, crying for her husband, her own mother, people none of them could find. Lelie began to cry, and the wind howled, never less than storm force.