C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  Men moved forward in the line, one that might be the old man's messenger, the other that might have some answer about the child, both faceless shadows in the violent, sand-edged dark.

  "Where is this Marak Trin?" one asked. "Who wants this child?"

  Marak saw no child in the man's possession. "I'm Marak Trin Tain," he said, to have that clear. "I want this child for a woman who asked for her."

  "My wife is dead," the man said, and Marak had no idea of his name, though sharing what they shared it seemed he ought to know that small fact.

  "Do you want the child for yourself?" Marak asked him. "I haven't come to take it, if you want it. But I'm telling you there's one who does, desperately."

  "Is it my Norit?" the man shouted across the wind. "Is she the prophet we heard? Is it really Norit?"

  "She is the prophet," Marak said. "And she speaks well of you. And she misses Lelie."

  "I have a new wife," the man said. "My Norit is dead."

  "She loves you," Marak said to him, deciding he might feel sorry for this man, deciding that his rights here were limited and circumscribed by older ones. "She's well. But she suffers."

  "Is she sane?" Shouting across the wind robbed the voice of inflection. It might have been an accusation. Or a heartfelt longing.

  "Sane enough she guides us all," he shouted back. "Sane enough to this hour, but her duty won't bring her back, not likely, not if you've married again. Give her the child if she's a trouble to you. If she isn't, then be a father to her. And if you want Norit back-" He had no power to give Norit to anyone. "Come forward in the line and ask her for yourself."

  "I have my new wife," the man answered him. He unfolded his robe and unskillfully managed his besha closer to Osan, to pass across a small bundle, a half-limp child who waked on being exposed to the blasting wind, and struggled fretfully.

  Marak reached across and took it under the arms, a light weight, a girl, he thought, maybe about a year of age, maybe two. She seemed light for her size.

  "Do you want to give her up?" Marak shouted at the father, at Norit's husband. "Don't do it if you don't! I'm here to offer and ask, not to order! The Ila's man came asking. Did you ever hear him?"

  "I heard nothing," the husband said back to him. "But Norit is mad. So Lelie may be. And my new wife doesn't want her."

  "Then I'll take her to her mother," Marak said, and opened his robe and snugged the infant into that warm shelter. The baby fought him. He hugged her tightly, preventing her struggles. He feared even so that he had robbed the father, but if what the father said was so, maybe he had saved the child a warfare with a new wife, one that wanted no reminders of a marriage the father had not willingly left, a villager that would never reach such an accommodation as he and Hati had with Norit. "I'll take care of her," he said. "Shall I say anything to Norit?"

  "She's dead," was all the husband would say, as Agi said, as everyone in the village might say.

  "Antag!" Marak called out, gathering his companions, and rode forward with the storm at his back, on across the gap at which Tarsa lagged behind the next village. He felt obliged to explain himself; but he had no explanation that would make sense to strangers.

  "We were looking for this baby," he said, feeling that life squirm against him. The wind drowned its outcries and its fear. He was holding it too tightly, and eased his grip, and patted it inside his coat, trying to still its crying. Her crying. Lelie had ceased to be an abstract question, and became a living distraction, a personal folly.

  If he had been alone, he might have said to himself Tarsa was not all he wanted to find. Tarsa was not what he had looked for. But he had found Tarsa, all the same, and he had pursued a question which was not his question, and met a man he had never wanted to meet, and acquired an answer that had already cost a life.

  And now if he did anything but go back to the Ila he risked more than himself, and he risked these men, and more. The squirming bundle against his side, trying to kick him, told him how much he had risked already, and reminded him there were other concerns besides his blood debt, and his mother, and his grief. He wanted no part of these concerns. if he had his own way he would hand the baby to Antag and keep going; and he could do that.

  But thinking once meant thinking twice, and thinking twice told him that if it had been rash to come out here, it was increasingly his father's territory, back here among the villages, among men whose loyalties were in question. His loss might lose all the rest, and he had something to live for. he had two women, and a young man, and even the Ila's captain, who had trusted him with all he personally cared about.

  He could not go back to Kais Tain. Having seen a father part with his daughter and a village agree with that act, he could no longer delude himself that Kais Tain would ever confess their own guilt for turning him out. They would never change their minds, or give up their allegiance to Tain. He had rescued Lelie, but no one would rescue him, if he went on into territory where Tain's word had more credit than his, and where a man who spoke for the Ila was the enemy.

  He hugged the child more gently, a living prize, when the ride had begun with a death. He knew Kaptai would have hugged Lelie. Kaptai had had a large soul. Kaptai had loved his father, which took particular persistence and patience-and too much patience, and too much belief. He knew now what she had never confessed: that she never should have left her tribe, and now Kaptai lay somewhere ahead of him in the dark, that, for all her love and her loyalty. not prey to vermin, not now, not like those shallow-buried others. not when the sand got up like this, and not when, knowing it, the Haga raised a mound over their dead. The sand would cover her, make her the heart of a dune, turn her to one of those strange dead the sand gave up rarely. She had loved the high desert, and now it took her in, and he could do nothing to mend her death and nothing to get her back.

  "This is my wife's baby," he said to Antag, shouting over a gust. "She's divorced from her husband. He'd kept the child and didn't want it. At least there's this."

  "A good thing," Antag said, as they moved along beside the next village in the line. The baby's wail for a moment was louder than the wind. "She's likely scared. The wind's no lullaby."

  "She'll sleep," Marak said. Her struggles were wearying, but they were nothing to him. "She'll grow tired."

  "So do the beshti," Antag shouted back. "We can gain a little distance, still, tonight, but we ought to camp with one of the villages next noon, and maybe get that baby some milk or something. Not to mention changing her."

  There was a young man who knew infants with complete common sense. Camping with one of the villages was also better sense than he had been thinking of.

  And he was willing to do that.

  "We should pick a group now and keep their pace," he shouted at Antag and the brothers. "No sense wearing the beshti down. We'll sleep, gain back a little tomorrow, ride back if we can."

  "That's good!" Antag yelled back at him.

  So they fell in with the pace of the third contingent up from where they were. The village was Kais Kurta, a western village, and Andisak was its lord: one of his father's veterans, a man of his father's generation, but one who had broken with Tain before this. Marak was dismayed, meeting Andisak, to know where he had arrived.

  "It's possible I shouldn't be here," Marak said. "Tain has killed my mother in the Haga camp. I've hunted him for my mother's life as far as the tracks lasted and found nothing that tells me we'll come on him tonight. So I'm going back to my camp, but we can't make it all the way tonight. And I wouldn't have come here if I'd known this was Kais Kurta. What do you want? Will you take us into your camp until the next rest? Or shall we move on? I'll take no offense if you decide that's best."

  "Stay with us," Andisak said, and he was western, so that was that: if Andisak himself invited them, there would be no treachery within the camp, on the offender's life. Andisak's reputation was at stake. "Give me the news," Andisak said, "what the state of affairs is between you and my old ally."

  Ma
rak began to, in the sinking of the wind for a space, and they rode at that pace the night long, resting sometimes, talking with Andisak in the intervals when the wind allowed easier speech, and they kept very close to the contingent in front, even commingling ranks with that village in the confusion of the wind and the blowing sand. Andisak was wise, and allowed no gap between his village and the next, but that spoke only of Kais Kurta. If any village let themselves lag behind, they could stray off the track in the storm and consequently lose all the rest of the caravan, never to find their way again.

  It was a terrifying realization. For the first time Marak understood how fragile the chain of life was, far back in the line. The tribes would never break and lose their way. but the villages had no experience at this business of caravans. For most the only journey they had ever made in their lives was the matter of getting to Oburan on a well-traveled trade path. Now the weakest village lord, and his bad decisions, could kill all the rest of the people in the world, and vermin had begun to be a threat, much bolder than ordinary, much bolder than they had been since the war, when they had gathered thick about the battles and preyed on the wounded. the vermin could change their habits, and had begun to encroach, even within the line, where beshti feet cracked shells and where seething masses in the night and the blowing sand denoted some latrine left by a prior tribe.

  That was not ordinary. Nothing of the sort was ordinary.

  And where was Kais Tain? Somewhere at the rear of the line of march, at least far enough back that a day of riding against the flow of villagers had not located them. Kais Tain was in danger, and those who walked were doomed.

  "Have you seen anything of messengers?" Marak asked Andisak, and Andisak said he had.

  "They went on down the line, but never came back," Andisak said. "And the priests come and go, the Ila's priests."

  The priests were never well loved in the west.

  "We have one of the Ila's books," Andisak remarked at one point. "At your urging we took it. If you ask me, as the priests did, but I didn't say, it's damned dull. Court proceedings. Are they all like that?"

  "To my knowledge, probably," Marak said.

  "I'm not sure I want to be written in the Ila's book," Andisak said. "What if I keep this book?"

  "I'm sure it won't be that much use. It's what's in it that matters; it's all the books together. The Ila wants that." So did Luz. So, very much, did Luz, who suffered through this dialogue and nagged him, saying his name over and over: Marak, Marak, until he grew distracted. East, east, east, Luz chided him, impatient of the delay.

  Chapter Twenty

  Every child must be written down by the au'it and its shape accounted. When a child is born the priest must see it.

  -The Book of the Ila's Au'it

  They talked at times, marak and the lord of kais Kurta. They rode at that easy pace the night long, into a sandy, murky dawn, and on into the day, letting the beshti rest from their long trek back in the line.

  At dawn, when Lelie became fretful, Andisak found a woman to take Norit's baby and tend it, and Marak let it go. He had not known how heavy that load had been, in all senses. He slept in the saddle after he had turned the hungry, fretting child over to a strange woman. He slept the sleep of the exhausted, and at the same time Antag and his brothers slept, trusting Andisak's honor.

  All that morning, at Marak's intermittent waking, the wind blew and the sand still moved. They went over a desert continually being rewritten, discouraging the vermin, making the vermin's constant hunt for leavings more difficult. The pickings were constantly richer toward the end of the caravan.

  That was where trouble gathered. Those were the people with most to fear. Was it possible, if a mobbing started, that all the vermin in the world could sate themselves with a handful of villages and spare the rest? Marak, Marak, his voices chided him, but mildly now. He was sure Luz now had some idea where he was, and that he had turned back toward his duty: she seemed content with that. Whether Luz had also told Norit what gift he had with him he very much doubted; and whether Luz approved of his collecting Lelie along the way, he had no idea.

  But he was glad of the voices as a guide, as an indication that Hati was well and Norit was well. He had no idea about his sister, but he had trusted Hati and Norit to take care of her, and if they were well, then that was cared for.

  "I'm coming back," he muttered aloud, to Luz, if she heard him. "I'm all right."

  They dismounted, unsaddled, and rested a while, at noon, as Kais Kurta pitched its tents. And in that rest he took the child from the woman and tucked her up next to him.

  "Is it a child you know?" the lord of Kais Kurta asked him, sitting near him. "Or one you found?"

  "My wife's," he said, and touched a small hand. incredible to him that a hand could be so small, and his sun-dark and marked with the killing-marks, one for every finger. She played with his fingers like Patya when she was a year old. She made him remember.

  "We had enough war," Andisak said with a sigh. There came a broad shadow in the wind, as the industrious young men put up a side flap of their tent, to give them shelter a while from the constant buffeting. Before them, the next village was camped, and the sun sat at a sullen yellow noon.

  But now the wind grew chill as it did at times when a larger storm was coming. Haste, the weather said. Make all possible speed. The ground shook, shivered like a besha with an itch.

  "So had I," Marak confessed, "had enough war. Enough of a lot of things."

  "Is this the whole truth?" Andisak asked. "Is there a safe place?"

  "I've been there," he said. "I've seen the river, the water. Everyone is fed. Everyone has shelter. The ones who went with me stayed there, all but Tofi and his freedmen."

  "I saw you," Andisak said, "on the ridge. It was a relief to hear someone we know say so."

  "It's all true, omi. I wouldn't bring this many innocents into the desert on a lie."

  "I know you wouldn't," Andisak said, and nodded slowly. "And the tribes aren't fools. They're up there at the front of all this. To the umi of the Rhonan: welcome."

  Antag nodded, and took down his veil, as a man did with a friend. So his brothers did, and they all did, while Norit's Lelie slept, collapsed across Marak's knee.

  They shared the prepared meal, but not to their fill. They had riding yet to do. In no more than an hour, they tightened girths and prepared to set out, with Andisak and his household bidding them a courteous farewell.

  The weary beshti launched only token complaint. They did not belong with these beshti, and were restless, outside their own camp.

  So were they all. The voices dinned a constant noise as Marak got up into the saddle.

  From Antag's hands he then took Lelie up, and she waked and struggled and cried in fretful, constant misery, tears running through dust on her face, but Marak took her inside his coat, and took up an offered aifad for her, and sheltered her and wrapped the cloth about her small face, veiling it, and keeping her close.

  "We owe you," Marak said to Andisak. The woman who had cared for Lelie was the one who had given the aifad. She had turned up among the foremost to see them off, not without regrets, Marak thought, perhaps very much wanting the baby; but Lelie was Norit's, and once she resumed her place across the saddlebow, wrapped within his coat, she quieted.

  They rode out. He had done nothing that he had set out to do, and acquired something he had never planned on.

  When, as they rode through the dust and fought the wind, Lelie opened her small arms and took a strong grip on his shirt, he found unaccountable satisfaction in that, and hugged her with his free arm, like a close-held secret.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, a guidance as the earth shook, once strongly enough to stagger the beshti.

  They had learned to duck low when that happened. No one fell. The beshti had no liking for the sensation, and a few younger ones in the column bolted and had to be reined in.

  Lelie, too, waked and cried, and Marak opened his coat a
nd talked to her: "Be still. I won't let you fall."

  "Mama," Lelie said. "Mama, mama, mama."

  Not papa. Marak heard that clearly enough, justifying what he had done in taking her. "Hush," he said, drying tears and leaving mud on her face instead. "It's just the wind. It's just the earth twitching its skin, like a besha. Such things happen these days."

  He flinched, himself, when something boomed, and the earth shook like a table jolted by a fist-all of it in murk that only gave them shadows to see, hulking tents with the flaps down in some instances, and others which had only pitched canvas halfway, as windbreaks, not a safe proposition, if the storm should worsen. It was better to have enough stakes down and more canvas spread.