C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  Lelie began to cry, wordless, plagued, perhaps, by prophecy even in her young age.

  Norit suddenly reined in her besha and diverted it from the line, obstructing the course of beshti behind them. Tofi and Patya scarcely avoided colliding with her.

  Marak rode close and leaned from the saddle, evading the irate snap of the besha's jaws. He seized the rein and led Norit back, and Norit jerked at the rein and tried to seize control of the beast.

  "East," Norit insisted. "The hammer of heaven. We have to go east."

  "We know it," Hati said, entirely awake now, and in bad humor. "All of us know it's coming. But we're not going east. We haven't any water. Make Luz understand that. We can't kill all the villages."

  Lelie kicked and squalled. Patya rode close, far more skilled a rider than Norit, and held out her arms. So also Memnanan's relatives rode near to offer help, asking what was the matter, while the caravan moved around them, never pausing. Children grew fretful. Families held discussions. It was no one else's business.

  "Give Patya the baby," Hati said harshly. "Give her to Patya! You'll drop her if you go on."

  Norit would not. Norit held Lelie and hugged her close, hushing the cries, and the look in her eyes, in the light of a star-streaked heaven, was a hell of fear and desolation.

  "It's not safe."

  "Nothing's safe," Marak said. "We're not safe if half the villages die of thirst."

  Rock hit sphere, over and over. He was blind for the moment, but he jerked the rein from Norit's hand and the besha, misused, squalled and backed and jerked its head, dragging painfully at his grip, compressing his fingers.

  But he held. He kicked Osan and started forward, and the besha, glad, perhaps, to have a direction compatible with the herd, walked, Norit willing it or not, and Lelie still in her possession.

  "We'll die!" Norit cried. "We have to go east, we have to go over the rim!"

  "Shut up!" Hati said. "If you let that baby fall, I'll hit you!"

  Marak paid no attention to the argument, or to Norit. He led, blind with visions that argued Norit's opinion, and knew when they passed the track that had turned north of Pori the last time they had made this trek. They passed it by.

  "We'll die," Norit muttered. "No safety there. No safety. No safety."

  "There'll be water," Marak said, weary of listening to her, distracted by the vision of the star-fall. "There'll be water, and we'll be there by morning. We'll be straight on to the rim with no more than a camp. It's the best we can do."

  "No safety," Norit said.

  He was not talking to a sane woman. He feared if he let go of the rein, Norit would be off through the column, creating a panic, and as it was, the Ila's servants looked at them askance, and the slaves looked fearful.

  In time Memnanan came to ask what the disturbance was, and went to report Norit's vision. The au'it stored up things to write at sunrise.

  "It will be the worst," Norit muttered under her breath, and hugged Lelie to her while dying stars streaked the heavens in their hundreds. "The earth will crack and pour out blood. Smoke will go up and blot out the sun. It's coming, and nothing can stop it. Fool, Marak. Go east."

  "No," he said.

  "What does she expect from us?" Hati asked. "Why won't she just give up and let us go at our own pace?"

  "Who knows if the ondat even exist?" Marak said in despair and exhaustion, and regretted saying it, knowing that Luz was listening. He amended it. "Probably they do exist."

  "Someone's throwing stars at us," Hati said, a bitter try at a joke. "If it isn't these ondat, it must be their cousins. Maybe their uncles."

  "That's clearer than we've gotten from Luz."

  Norit held her daughter close now, and sang to her, not a madwoman's song, but the clear, quiet tones of a lullaby.

  "Child, sleep soundly in my arms. Nothing can harm you here. Dream of springs rich in water, Dream of palms of shade and fruit. Dream of fields gold with grain. Dream of cool breezes. Our house is shut against the night. Our door is strong, our shutters tight. Stars are brightly shining."

  A star exploded on the horizon while she sang. The explosion lit the sky like a northern sunrise, so bright the column cast shadows.

  A wind came after that and ran up the beshti's backs, a wind from off the Anlakht, where the blow had struck, but it did no harm.

  At dawn, the au'it began to write, and wrote and wrote, furiously, fighting the pages flat in a light breeze.

  At midmorning Norit suffered another fit, and Marak was quick to seize her rein again and bring her under tight control.

  The rocks that broke the horizon were those of Pori, that height which poured out the water.

  East, east, east, the voices said, maddening, frantic, and he could no longer believe that Luz was blind and deaf to their situation.

  "I'm going ahead," he said to Hati. "I'm going to have a look." He no longer took responsibility for Norit: she was in Luz's hands. But they were close enough to see the landmarks, and he had his strength, Hati her keen eye for situations on the Lakht, and for the lives of all of them, he could no longer ignore the two-way pull on his instincts. It was another day to the descent, another waterless day, with no water at the bottom of a climb that was itself bound to cost lives, and the villages' strength was surely running out. They needed to camp. Pori would let them recover their strength for the descent, gather into a large mass and pass instructions before the descent: and if Pori village was already gone, there was still the water. There was a stone cistern. There was surely that.

  He rode forward, Hati riding beside him, and they paused only to let Aigyan know his intention.

  "What of Tain?" Aigyan asked. "What of ambushes?"

  It was possible Tain had gotten ahead of them. That was always possible. It was possible for the rest of their lives.

  "We have a premonition," Hati said, "and we need to know where we're leading, omi. We need to be sure about Pori. We'll go and be back before noon camp."

  "Not without escort," Aigyan said, and named two men and two women to go with them, men and women of Hati's kind, dusky-skinned and wrapped in the dark-striped robes of their tribe, two of them with rifles.

  Marak made no objection. They quickened their beshti's pace and rode out to the fore, and far separate of the others. Another rider joined them. Norit, with Lelie held close, had come for a look of her own, and he said not a word to note her presence. He bent all his attention to the land, keeping his eyes tracking every roll of the sand, every stone that might mask ambush: sand-colored robes and a well-laid ambush was the abjori style of attack, and he was alert for it.

  It was the way they had plundered the Ila's caravans and killed her soldiers. It was the way they had enforced Tain's will on the villages and made the west for the better part of a decade a difficult place for Memnanan's men to travel. But he saw nothing of ambush, only a furtive movement of vermin that vanished ghostlike into tumbled rock, persuading the eye it had been mistaken.

  "Paish," Hati said. That was one of the larger sort, knee high to the beshti, strong and tracking mostly by scent. He saw it go over a ridge just ahead of them, a red-brown flash of a flank and a tail, then gone.

  One rarely saw them.

  The beshti, on their own or subtly cued by the Keran riders, picked up the pace. For half an hour or more they proceeded, up and over ridges, down again into the general pitch of the land toward the edge of the Lakht.

  Two stars fell by daylight, paired bright streaks across the sky that vanished beyond the hills. The boom that went out shook the air and made Lelie cry.

  One more ridge, and the roll of the land gave up a strange sight, the ruined sticks of trees, the jagged edges of walls.

  A star had fallen here. The well had broken open and continued to flow, soaking the sand.

  Marak drew Osan in atop the ridge. So all the rest reined in. They stood atop the ridge and looked out on what had been an oasis, and now was a sky-reflecting pool of water, around which the red sand
writhed. Small clumps of bodies detached at various places around that edge and floated out. hundreds, thousands of vermin gathered and pressing in on the sweet water, a living carpet of predators and scavengers that fought and preyed on each other, and waited only for the smell of death or waste to draw them all outward in a ravening swarm.

  "Dead." Norit said faintly. "Pori is dead."

  "Marak," Hati said, pleading with him, turn, move, and quickly.

  He drew Osan's head about-his hands moved before his vision had finished taking in the danger. He was wrong. He had been wrong all along.

  "Ride softly," a Keran tribeswoman said. "Quietly, please, omi."

  He knew. The sound, the scent, any whisper of presence might send the outermost of the mob toward them. They had the whole caravan advancing toward this place, and he could only be glad Norit had raised the doubt in him, and could only wish he had listened to Norit, to Luz, to the warnings Luz had tried to give them before now.

  They rode away behind the ridge at a restrained pace. Lelie began to fret and to cry. Norit hushed her with a hand over her mouth, and hugged her close. It was more than their own escape they had to manage. They dared not draw the mob after them, and the beshti, uneasy, wanted to travel faster, to break into a run that would take them back to the herd. that was the beshti's view of things, get to the herd and bolt for the horizon, faster than the mob could follow.

  Osan fought to get free. Norit's besha, beyond her strength or skill, suddenly jerked the rein and pulled Norit half from the saddle, and a tribeswoman seized her before she could fall free. seized her robe in one hand as she swung to the side, but the besha went out from under her. Lelie fell from her grasp, and Norit herself fell to the sand, her besha running free, rein trailing.

  Hati reined in beside the accident as Marak did, and before he could get from the saddle, Hati jumped down and swept Lelie up in her arms. Lelie had had the wind knocked out of her, and got her breath back, and screamed, Hati trying in vain to prevent her crying. Meanwhile one of the two tribesmen, retaining a tight grip on his rein, had leapt down to haul Norit to her feet.

  Marak rode past Hati, grasped the baby by one arm as he did so, and yanked her into his grasp, smothering her against him to silence her cries as he reined around. It seemed forever then. Hati fought to steady her panicked besha long enough to get back into the saddle, a lifelong-practiced set of moves, and made it-got her hands on the harness and was up into the saddle, leaving Norit still down, still dazed by a thump of her head against the sand. But one of the men of their escort immediately gathered Norit up, supported her, staggering as she was while the other man pressed close to control the rescuer's besha.

  It was all a matter of heartbeats, scant moments-but there had been too much noise, far too much for their safety, and as the one tribesman held Norit on her feet against the side of his besha, Marak's anxious glance found an ominous furtive movement among the rocks on either hand.

  "Up!" Marak said. "Luz! Get her up!"

  Norit managed, winded as she was, to take hold of the saddle loops, but the tribesman shoved her from below so that she landed like baggage, and never delayed to mount as with a frightened snort the besha moved out. Vermin poured out of the rocks: one besha moved and they all moved, for their lives. The man's grip on the mounting loops held, keeping him with his besha in a maneuver that carried him along faster than a tired man could run, clinging on the side of the saddle, hitting the ground with occasional strides. "Go, go, go!" the Keran all insisted, and that man no less than the others. The tribesman had a death grip on the mounting loop, and before Marak, burdened with Lelie, could ride Osan in to his assistance, his brother tribesman came by on the man's left side to seize his hand, leaning down, boosting him higher off the sand in two strides, until the man was able to get an arm past Norit and haul himself half-over the saddle behind her.

  His grip after that embraced Norit, and kept her across the saddle like a water sack while he reached forward for the rein. It was a feat of skill no villager would match, and it freed them all to run all-out.

  No one had bled, no one had died, no blood had encouraged the vermin: distance widened between them and the mob, and when Marak looked back he saw clear sand between them.

  He slowed. Far enough in the lead to know they had room, they all slackened to a staying pace, but kept moving. He held Lelie. He had Hati and Norit as safe as any of them.

  Norit's besha meanwhile was long over the horizon, headed breakneck toward the caravan to join the herd it knew. Unrewarded, behind them, the vermin had straggled out, and most would go back to the water. A few might follow the track they inevitably left-less dominant outrunners, more desperately seeking moisture or carrion, or living prey.

  They were not out of danger, but they had gotten away from the heart of the mob.

  Marak finally became aware of Lelie's struggles in his arm. He had kept her still, carefully managed his grip to let her breathe, and now he soothed her frightened, wounded sobs and sheltered her in his coat as he had on the ride that brought her.

  He thanked the god he doubted that he had had the instinct to doubt his judgment and investigate before bringing the slow caravan with all its weak and helpless all the way to Pori.

  But there was no water.

  "Hati," Marak said. "Go. Take the women with you. Warn lord Aigyan. We've no choice but to turn toward the rim. Have them turn, don't camp, and we'll catch up on your new track."

  "I'll see you there," Hati agreed, and called out to the two women and laid on the quirt. She was gone over the roll of the next hill, vanishing in the dust they left.

  "I warned you," Norit said in a brittle voice. The tribesman had gotten her upright.

  "That you did," Marak allowed. He had no wish to take up a quarrel with Luz. He doubted even Luz had known the danger there was at Pori, or Norit could have warned them in far clearer words. The truth was that Luz had not known, had had no idea until now about the mob there. But: East, east, east! the voices urged, as if they had always been right.

  He said, he hoped sanely so, and calmly: "Well, we can't water at Pori; that's clear. Norit was right: we can't camp and rest. We need to get all this mass of people as far east as we can. If we're out of water, we're out. We'll do what we can."

  East. Surrender to Luz settled him into a familiar track. He knew the way down the cliffs to the east of Pori, and he knew that the gathering of vermin had just doomed a good number of the caravan to a struggle they might not have the strength to make without rest and water.

  But if the continual footfall on the earth of the last caravan in the world drew attention from Pori, if the smell of them wafted on the chance wind, if the vermin still following the column met those feeding on Pori's ruin. if any one of those three things happened, the unthinkable became a certainty.

  He led. They veered just slightly off the track they had taken getting to Pori, and for the better part of an hour they moved over trackless sand.

  Then as they crossed a shallow pan they saw, as Marak had hoped, a distant haze of dust below the line of a far ridge. That hazy disturbance in the sameness of the Lakht marked the caravan's passage, and it had, indeed, turned eastward.

  Hati had reached them safely. Aigyan had heard the warning.

  The sun stood at noon, and the caravan pressed eastward, not camping, not resting.

  Marak kept his pace, not pushing his own party. The beshti under them were tired, worn down by days of travel and now coming within sight of water and hazard at distant Pori-only to turn away.

  But the beshti had not called out after the water at Pori: they had seen for themselves a hazard and smelled a smell that ruffled the ridge of hairs down their backs-Marak recalled that fine line of fear on the nape of Osan's neck, just before he had known there was trouble. Tails had gone half-up, and stayed bristled, even now. The beshti left the promise of water and traveled back to their own caravan without a sound, thirst and self-preservation at war in their keen instincts. Only
once in the next hour the beshti stopped, braced their feet, snuffed the air. The earth trembled slightly. But as it proved no worse, they resumed their progress toward the distant caravan.

  Lelie, drained of tears, had seized hold of Marak's coat at that instability and held on after that for dear life, not releasing her hold. She was bruised and scraped from the fall, but the makers were surely attending to that. It was the wound to her soul, her mother's casual forgetfulness, that the makers could not cure: Norit had never asked to have her back, and as he rode, Marak stroked her hair gently, told her in a low voice that all was well, that they would go down to a safe place. half lies, all, making it sound easy, making it sound like tomorrow, when the next instant was Lelie's tomorrow, in her young perception, and her mother rode dazed, lost in Luz's visions.

  Soon, tomorrow, very soon now.

  How many fathers must be making that desperate promise today, short of water, themselves short of strength. and how many fathers must be giving up their ration to their children today, not knowing themselves where the end of this was, not knowing whether it was wiser to consume the water themselves, to keep their strength, or how much privation a child could bear?