C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  "Luz," he said aloud, to the presence behind Norit's glazed steadiness. "Can you bring water to us at the bottom of the climb? We need your help. Too many of these people will die. Can you send Ian? Can you lead us to water closer to the cliffs?"

  He begged for help. He bargained with their fate. Pride was nowhere in his reckoning. He prayed to a second goddess-on-earth for a miracle their Ila could not provide, and all the while the skin between his shoulders was uneasy, as if they had not shaken all the vermin off their track. He felt calamity organizing around them, and the people for whom he held all responsibility were in greater and greater disarray.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, was all his own voices said in reply. He saw the sphere and the rock and the rings, twice repeated. That was the help Luz gave. She had done better. She had reached him before, and now found nothing to say to him but that: go, go blindly, giving him no reasons.

  He suspected the fault lay in himself, that he was most-times deaf, and unreceptive.

  Like his father. Like Tain, deaf to things he needed most in the world to hear.

  But unlike Tain, he broke his silence. "Norit," he said, pleaded. "Does Luz say anything about water? Does she offer us any help?"

  "There's nothing," Norit said, sitting in the embrace of the tribesman who had saved her. "Nothing I can do."

  Norit never yet asked how her daughter fared after that fall. Luz had never asked. Luz involved herself not at all in the welfare of individuals, cared nothing for the workings of Norit's heart. Later Norit would shed tears, but Luz did not let her shed them now.

  "It's coming," Norit said further. "It's on its way. We have two days. Just two days. You won't reach the tower in two days."

  That was the plain truth, and it offered them no water, no help. It occurred to him to ask Luz if there was any point in trying, but it occurred to him, too, that he had no interest in hearing the answer one way or the other: it would not change what he would do. He could not sit down in paradise. He could not sit down in hell, either. He was going to try to reach the tower. he was going to try to get all his people down off the Lakht and into the lowlands before the hammer fell. He was going to get them as far toward safety as he could get them. They had him for a leader: that was what they bargained for.

  "Why didn't you tell me this before we went to Pori?" He did ask that question.

  "You weren't listening. Now you are. Get below the cliffs. Get behind rock. Get the stakes down. I don't know what may happen. I'm trying to know where the hammer will come down. It's not good for where it falls. It's not good for the other side of the world either, and that's what we have to worry about. The earth will crack at both places and melt the rocks in its forge."

  Luz made the visions. Norit said them as best she knew how, out of things she had seen: what more could she do? Sometimes they were things no one alive had ever seen, and Norit tried to describe them, out of a village wife's meager experience.

  "The prophet," the tribesmen said to each other in muted tones, and meant Norit. The tribes regarded no priests, but the Keran had learned that this one spoke for the power that led them, and they were in awe at this strange conversation, this matter-of-fact consultation of their oracle.

  And there was no comfort in anything Norit could say.

  They traveled toward that haze of dust that marked the passage of the caravan across the land at the same steady pace.

  And uneasy as he was about the land behind them, Marak became aware, in that sight, that he knew where Hati was. He knew it as well as he knew Norit's location beside him, as steady, as reliable as the pole stars in the general fall of the heavens. She was there in the heart of the column. The constellations might be shaken, but he could not get lost in the world that contained the other parts of himself.

  The caravan had no need of another dreamer, another guide as mad as Norit.

  It needed a plain, headblind madman to say only: I've been there before. I can lead you. I know a way down. Don't hesitate, don't camp.

  It needed Tain's son, too: it needed him to say: Don't have pity on the dying. Don't hesitate. When the line goes, go.

  He rode toward the column, and on the edge of joining it, on the very moment of crossing toward safety in among the plodding beshti, he realized their party had been one member short on the retreat. He was so used to the au'it following him and Hati and Norit that he had failed to notice that this time she had not followed them out from the caravan.

  Surely she had not come out with them.

  "No au'it followed us," he said to the Keran, half a question. "You saw no au'it tracking us at any time."

  "No, omi."

  At least they had not lost her. He thought they had not.

  He rode in among the Ila's servants, and near the Ila, and up to Hati's side.

  "I advised Aigyan," Hati said first. "He knows all the situation. He's going to keep the line moving. We're going over the rim."

  Hati looked aside. The Keran had let Norit down off his besha, and Tofi had gotten down. Norit's besha was, not surprisingly, walking with the rest, riderless, and Tofi called out to Bosginde to catch the beast and bring it. The caravan, meanwhile, never stopped. Such small exchanges dropped behind temporarily, and caught up again, beshti tending to seek their own herd.

  But if anyone was as likely as the Ila's priests and servants to be alive with the Ila's own makers, if there was anyone in the Ila's service who could be as aware of the Ila's whims as he was aware of Luz's moods and desires, it was the au'it.

  Her priests, her servants knew the Ila's wishes and obeyed her.

  The au'it had reported, that was what.

  Looking back, he saw Norit had gained the saddle again, in the weary, moving throng. There was no eagerness in the crowd around them. A kind of glazed desperation had replaced fervor and mirth and anger and all the rest of motives that kept men moving toward the unknown, away from calamity.

  "Let me take the baby," Patya said, riding close to him. "I'll hold her."

  Marak passed her over, glad to surrender the responsibility. "Norit can carry her on the descent," he said, and added, because with his own experience, he pitied Norit: "Her mother doesn't know. She's gone where she goes."

  "Will she come back to be-?" Patya asked, and to her mad brother, tried to find words.

  "Sane again? Will she be sane? I hope so." But he saw no sign of it, not now, not for time to come. "If she doesn't, we'll take care of her, Hati and I. And you." He saw how Patya took to the waif. "We'll take care of you, too. We're family."

  He had to promise that to Patya. But he foreknew her relation to him might soon become a hazard to Patya's well-being, to her very life. He suspected their au'it had been making an extensive, perhaps not favorable, report, that her whole account had gone to the Ila now, and he had to know, before he set out on this risky descent, before people began coming to the Ila, mad for water and in terror of the star-fall, what the Ila meant to do about that report.

  He rode beside Hati, not reporting to Memnanan, or to the Ila.

  He waited for the Ila, riding within sight of him, to send for him.

  He waited for Memnanan to ask him what he had seen out there, or why they had ridden back in disarray. Even if Memnanan had gotten a full report from Aigyan of what Hati had told him-it was good sense to ask the firsthand witness, at least, what he had seen, and why he had changed his mind about Pori.

  No query came from either. The au'it-an au'it-rode near them, rode veiled, as she often had, appearing out of the dust.

  Why she had left them remained a mystery, one with, he was sure, the Ila at the heart of it, and Memnanan's ignoring him as the wrapping on the affair.

  "The Ila asked you no questions?" he asked Hati.

  "Not a one. I only talked to Aigyan."

  "Don't look back," he said in a low voice. "The au'it's back there. Did you see the au'it immediately when you got back?"

  "No." Hati sounded startled. "I don't think she went with us. Or did we lose
her?"

  "One is with us now," he said. "Something's happened. I don't know what, I don't know why, but something's happened."

  "About the Ila, you mean?"

  "She didn't want to know about Pori. She only took the easy chance to call the au'it back, maybe to read the book. We have an au'it back there now. I don't know that it's the same one. Memnanan's not talking to us. I can see him. He's not even looking our way. He's under orders."

  "We can't completely trust him, then."

  "We never could completely trust him," Marak said. He tried to think what reason the Ila might have for not needing to know about Pori, and all he could think of was that the Ila had foreknown there was no use in their mission there. Failing that-her need to have the au'it's report on them had become more important than her need to know what they did out there at Pori.

  Perhaps it was a consultation before their descent of the plateau, her wish to know everything they had said in secret before she went into Luz's territory. Perhaps the Ila herself perceived the approach of the hammer and pondered leaving his venture south, and going east, instead. She was well watered. There were makers in her blood. She might be, herself, mad.

  But if the Ila had found out something of Luz's intentions, it was not the au'it who told her, because they had no idea and could not have informed her.

  The Ila had ceased her daily baths. The Ila's servants no longer cooked for the camp or made tea for the Ila. Presumably the last few days the Ila ate the same dry ration as they ate.

  Perhaps the Ila held some intention of dealing with Luz and everyone that served her.

  "Do you think she means us harm?" Hati asked him.

  "I don't know what she thinks. I wonder if she's begun to hear the voices herself."

  "Luz's voice?" Hati asked.

  "The makers could do that. Her makers haven't cured us of Luz. Our makers keep us what we are. Maybe they've gotten into her, now." He paused on a thought. "Maybe she fears they're going to get into her-maybe she didn't want to drink water that didn't come from the Ila's Mercy."

  "All our water did," Hati said. Her dark eyes went wide and troubled. "And our food came from Oburan. Everything. Pori's wouldn't. Pori belonged to Luz. Didn't it?"

  "I think we shed makers," he said. "What if we breed them continually and shed them like old skin? What if we shed them into the sand and into the water? And the Ila's servants cook for the camp, or they did before we ran short. And the priests, the Ila's priests, they come and go up and down the line. Maybe it's a kind of war going on. What if the Ila would lose altogether if we took water from Pori, and everybody watered there?"

  Hati simply stared at him, the two of them riding side by side. "She hasn't given up, then."

  "I don't think she's given up," he said.

  "Do you think she's planning some sort of attack on Luz?"

  "I don't know. But Luz hears us." It was hard to remember that they were spied on, constantly. But it was true. "Luz knows, now, everything we just said. We can't help that. I hope Luz figures how to protect us." The last he said like a petitioner in a village court, hoping Luz was listening carefully. "She's asked all these people to come to her tower. If she meant all of us to die, we could have done that in Oburan. Surely she has something she can do. She won't just turn on us, because of the Ila. She wanted her. I think she still wants her. But the Ila doesn't want to be taken." He was afraid, as he said it. He had met two small anomalies in the way things had worked: the au'it's desertion, and now her return, and neither might mean more than that the au'it had decided not to take an arduous journey, an ordinary simple decision.

  But the Ila was going into danger at the very heart of their safety: he understood more and more that peace between the Ila and Luz was not likely, and he grew as worried about what the Ila might do as they came closer to Luz, as their journey became harder and the decisions more dangerous.

  He worried about the Ila's unanticipated action now as he worried about the failing water supply, as worried as he was about the beshti's strength, about the people's strength to make the climb down from the Lakht-as worried about all those things near him, perhaps, as he was about the remote calamity coming to the world. The hammerfall was still distant: the Ila's independent action might come before they reached the cliffs, before they entered Luz's domain, and it might be anything, even a decision deliberately to kill all of them.

  And she might be mad. She might be as mad as the rest of them. She might do things that only made sense to the mad, just before they attempted the climb down with many, many people that, already, would not survive.

  But east and down was increasingly the only choice that would serve. If calamity was coming as a star-fall, then surely, he said to himself, it would be something the like of which they had accompanying the lesser star-fall. They had their forewarning in that: it would be quake and wind and blowing sand, ten times, a hundred times worse than before. And that, unlike the Ila, could not change.

  He gathered up his wits and his courage for confrontation and went to Memnanan instead, who rode behind the Ila's servants.

  "Pori's lost to us," he said.

  "So I gather," Memnanan said.

  "The Ila knows?"

  "She knows."

  "Quake and storm are coming," he said plainly, "worse than we've ever seen. And it's coming soon. This next camp of ours will be only a short rest, with no stakes driven. After that." He felt his way onto quaking ground, with a man he had generally trusted, who had trusted him, more to the point, and who had the Ila's ear. "After that, and it's not far from here, we go down the climb off the Lakht, and we try to get as many as we can alive to the bottom."

  "Is there any spring at the bottom? Is there anything near the cliffs?"

  "Not that I know. But we do what we can. We get down off the edge, and we immediately get the deep stakes driven, and we trust the cliffs to shelter us." He wanted to ask, and saw no course but to ask. "Pori was completely infested. Did the Ila already know that?"

  Hati, to his dismay, had followed him. Now both of them rode beside the captain, one on a side, and the au'it trailed them at a distance, as she always had.

  Memnanan had a grave, a worried expression, and did not look quite at him or at Hati. And failed to answer.

  "You don't need a report," Marak challenged him. "Why don't you need one? Why don't you ask? Isn't she taking advice?"

  "The Ila said let you try what you could, and if you couldn't, or if you didn't come back, then we would go down to the lowlands without you." Memnanan did look at him then. "She believes in your calamity. She expects a storm. She doubted Pori would be enough shelter." Memnanan seemed to weigh saying something further, then did. "She thinks most will die, and if anyone will live, we have to assume most will die."

  "More likely we'll die if we sit on our rumps. We're going to try not to. Tell her that. Tell her she needs to listen to advice." Tell her she was not in charge of decisions? Tell her she would not give orders to the tribes? That was too much to expect of Memnanan. If he tried to make that point, he would lose this man, and everything. "Tell her we can't rest long. Not a moment more than we have to."

  "I will."

  "What did the au'it tell her, in her report? Good, or bad?"

  "I don't know," Memnanan said.

  "Is that the same au'it with us now?"

  Memnanan's eyes traveled in that direction, and back. "I have no idea."

  "If the Ila orders anything that prevents us getting down off the rim," Marak said, "for her life, don't let her. Don't do anything to prevent us. It's coming. That's all I know now. It's coming."

  "I said: she's in favor of the descent," Memnanan said. "As soon as possible." He added, in a low voice, with as much desperation as a man might feel: "I trust you for my household, Marak Trin."

  Memnanan's wife, his mother. His unborn child.

  "I'll have a good man walk beside your wife when we make the climb down," Marak said, reassured that Memnanan had asked the fav
or, not quite admitting it. "To steady the besha."

  The au'it had moved up beside them. She wrote as she had written all the conversations before, all of which the Ila now knew-at least those the au'it might think most important.

  It was their au'it, he decided, in one glance, and then in the next, had his doubts return.

  He knew their own au'it's face, her mannerisms. And how often in the past had it been some different woman, when the au'it frequently wore the veil, against the unkind sun and the drying wind? Their own au'it might still be reporting. The Ila, riding with the au'it, ahead of them, might be making her own plans, outside Memnanan's knowledge.