C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  The Ila had no need to ask him questions, if that was the case. In the au'it's report she proved to herself whether he would lie to her, or to his companions, and when he posed himself that question he grew calmer: he never had lied, so far as he recalled. If she was sane, she would know he had never worked against her.

  Perhaps the Ila even trusted him, as far as she trusted anyone, even Memnanan. That was an unlooked-for conclusion.

  But whatever the Ila thought, whatever she schemed, whatever she intended toward him, if her intentions agreed with his, getting this mass of people down off the Lakht before the hammer came down, he decided not to confuse the issue any further with questions.

  Or reports.

  Or speculations.

  For the next number of hours, her motives and his motives might both demand they get off the Lakht and stay alive.

  For the next number of hours, if that was her thought, it was good enough.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  In the abyss above the sky, I saw death. Below the heavens, I have made all choices I could make not for lives, but for life itself.

  -The Book of the Ila

  They rested for two measured hours on the tribal clock, simply looking at the sun and trusting the sun, no matter the fate of the world, to stay on its course. They pitched no tents, only unrolled their mats. The Keran and the Haga drank very, very little, allowing the water to stay in their mouths for as long as possible. They gave sweet water to their beshti, as much as they could give, to sustain the legs that carried them. They sorted even the sparse goods that a tribe owned, paring down the weight the beshti carried to the least possible, while the sky above them was blue.

  At that stop, the horizon of the world was closer than it ever had been. The drop into the rolling flat of the east was clear and distinct to see, seeming so close that Marak would have driven himself and his own to keep moving and to reach it, and to go down, but the distance in that vision was deceptive because of the scale. It was another long walk away, and desperate as they were, they had no choice but to rest-and to ask the Ila, through Memnanan, to be wise: to do as the tribes did, and to cast away anything that could be cast away. The tribes made a small heap of what they abandoned. Yet nothing from the Ila's baggage joined it, and for the Ila, her servants spread a side flap as a canopy and a curtain for a wind-break: the Ila would not lie down in the witness of others, and what she owned, she would not cast away.

  Hati had lain down with her veil pulled over her face, like the dead. Norit rocked Lelie. rocked sometimes, simply because she was mad, but it chanced to calm Lelie, all the same, while it calmed Norit.

  "Soon, soon, soon," Norit said to no one in particular, and exhausted herself, refusing rest. Marak saw how worn she had come to look, how the bones stood out in the hand that rested on Lelie's back.

  It was no wonder. He had watched it happen. He blamed Luz, and hoped Norit had strength enough to carry her down the cliffs. The child-Lelie-was a hazard on the descent, when a suddenly ill-placed weight, like too much weight, could cause a besha to miss its footing, and where one besha falling could wreak havoc on those below. But Norit had taken Lelie back. And he summoned up faith that Norit would make it-hope that she would make it. She was a better rider than Patya: she had become so, on their ride. He appointed the man to go beside Elagan, and keep her steady, and he appointed another to go beside Memnanan's mother and his two frail aunts.

  He trusted them. He trusted their own party to get down intact: the tribes knew what they were doing, if the Ila's men did not.

  But what disasters would happen after, what would happen if the hammerfall overtook them on the descent, what would happen if the weather turned, what would happen when inexperienced villagers attempted to ride down the cliffs under adverse conditions-during earthquake, or in storm. those were questions with one plain answer, and he blotted it out, as far as he could, while anger at the Ila's obstinacy churned in him-about her decisions, he could do nothing.

  He thought he should station someone to check the villagers' loads before they started down. He should have someone to advise certain villagers, inexpert riders, to walk, and certain others to adjust their packs and lower the height of them before attempting the descent.

  He might find some tribesman that brave, to linger back behind the tribes, to stand among the damned and save those he could. It galled him to have to ask that of the tribesmen who knew better and had managed better all their lives, and one part of him said he should not; but he imagined the calamity among the helpless and the weak, the unjust, undeserved calamity of villagers who had never learned the Lakht and had no reason to know, and the ondat, serene in the heavens, hurling stars at men and women as innocent as the old slaves in the garden. There were gods-on-earth, and gods in the skies, so far as men of his ability could ever deal with them, and reason gave way to blind luck and justice had no place in the reckoning: like the wind, death just was, and he knew he was going to fail to save some-and more than some.

  His orders from Luz were running out. He had gotten them this far. He considered the Ila's arrogant canvas, and began to ask himself what he himself was worth, more than the rest, and why should he tell another man to stand back at the beginning of the descent and advise villagers on the way to get down?

  His job was to save lives and get them on their way. But he had done that. Norit would see the rest to safety. She was their guide. Anything he could do, Hati could do.

  Was he holier and more righteous than the Ila in her shelter?

  And then he looked at Hati, asleep beside him, and knew in his heart that Hati would stay with him, no matter what. It was never just one life that he would risk, taking that hazardous post for himself: he would kill Hati by that decision.

  And if Norit was not enough, if they lost Hati, too, what application of common sense were all these people going to get in their leadership?

  None from the Ila, nothing that did not favor her own comfort, her own survival above all. The people deserved some leader who cared about them? And did that attribute make him holy? Or better?

  He ceased to have answers. He thought that he should go down. He thought that he should stay alive as long as he could, and do the most that he could, because he had no way of knowing what might happen after they reached the bottom, or where he might find a use.

  But if he went down, what man could he ask to stay? Or should he ask any man who might live to risk his life?

  He was looking at the ex-slaves, at Mogar and Bosginde, men who least of all had relatives depending on them, but they had each other, and could he ask those two men to risk their lives, even when no village would value those two lives? He knew what good men they had come to be, and how, in any other time, if there were time left in the world, those two would turn up masters of their own caravans. but there was no time left for good men to do anything but scramble with the rest and stay alive. If all the good perished, it left only the rest to have their way. And was that good?

  He was still thinking that when Tofi came to him and squatted down to talk, and he realized Tofi and Patya had been sitting off to themselves, and that now Patya was hovering suspiciously in the background. Marak shaded his eyes to look up at the young man.

  "Omi," Tofi began. "We may all die."

  "I don't certainly intend to."

  "I don't either," Tofi said sensibly, while Patya, hovered behind him in unaccustomed silence. "Your sister, omi, she doesn't intend to, either. But-we don't know about tomorrow. A star could fall on us."

  He suddenly realized where this was going. He understood Patya's desperate, anxious silence. They were young, and there was no time for decent understandings-that was the very point. The desperation in the air drove more than one older, more sober couple to their mats, trying to beget their way to immortality. The desperation gave no time for joy, or hope-or patience with custom, or modesty.

  "Out with it," he said. "Time's short. You're using it all up."

  "Patya a
nd I." Tofi tripped over his own need to breathe, or the need to remember what he had meant to say, exactly those desperate, calculated words.

  "Patya and you," he said. He looked at Patya. "Is this your idea, as well as his?"

  "I want-" she said.

  "You want. Everybody wants. Go to it. Good luck to you." He got up from his mat and took Patya's face between his hands, kissed her on the forehead. "The best of luck," he said, and knew, for himself, in the back of his moiling thoughts, that he could not risk himself for more than the immediate needs, either. he had more than a wife to constrain him.

  He had the Ila on his hands, and her dealings with Luz. And not Memnanan nor Norit nor any of the tribal lords could deal with her as he did.

  Patya blushed. Tofi did. Patya hugged him. He clapped Tofi on the shoulder and sent them away. There was no privacy in the whole camp.

  But lovers managed. They went off among the beshti. Inventive. He expected that of them.

  "That was sweet," Hati murmured, beside him. "I like him. I like your sister, too."

  "He's a good young man," he said. He fought off despair for their situation and exhaustion deeper than any since he had come on this trek. He touched Hati's shoulder, just touched her, wanting comfort for himself. He had not even spared half a thought for the appropriateness of his sister's choice. Kaptai would have married her daughter to a young man of more prospects than Tofi had. But who, in this hour, had more than Tofi?

  He was thinking of the deaths of hundreds and thousands. He had begun to plan for that carnage as inevitable. What share had Patya in his obligations?

  Obligations all came crashing down on him with a smothering weight, all the first ride to Pori, the trip back, Kaptai's death, and his failure to do anything for the ones who most relied on him, like Norit, like Patya. And Hati.

  Marak, the voices said, always there in these hours, along with the urgency to move, move, move, go east, and he would, he had to, but ultimately he had no power to save the weak, the feckless, the ignorant. He tried to call what he felt in his soul responsibility; but it was beyond any sense of responsibility: it was simply doing what he could do, as long as he could do it, like a man walking on his last strength.

  They settled. Norit, meanwhile, rocked, rocked, singing, quietly, mad as they came. Her head dropped several times, and a final time, and she slept, Lelie sprawled in her lap. There was nothing he could do for them, either. Hati slept, and he knew it was his own duty to rest and to become sane again, but Marak, Marak, Marak was all through his brain, and it would not let him go. Thoughts raced and circled through his head, what to do, whether he could find the exact spot where they had descended off the Lakht the last time.

  Most of all-the chance that storm might come while they were exposed to that edge, that the earth might shake while they were on that climb-all these things.

  And the sand-fall below the cliffs-he had forgotten that. Sand came off the Lakht, wind-carried. They could get down and find that their tame slope, their trail, was under a wind-borne waterfall of sand, the trail changing under them and a weight of sand simply crushing them down-but if they were too far away from the cliffs, the sand-charged wind would kill them. He struggled to imagine what the balance was, how close they dared be, whether the fiercest wind that ever blew might simply carry all the sand-fall up into the storm. Might it be the best gamble to pitch tents closer to the cliffs and risk being buried?

  What was right? What could Luz know about conditions no one had ever seen?

  "Marak," Hati said, and sat up and tugged at him, wanting him to lie down and be reasonable. He would not. Could not rest. Not with that realization. They had to do more than just reach the bottom. They had to get a camp pitched that would save their lives.

  And he had to guess right.

  She leaned against him, and put her arm about him, her head against his shoulder. "Luz is noisy today. She should shut up."

  "It's coming," he said. "It's coming for sure. Luz wants us to move now. She's never walked this desert. She doesn't know what she's asking of us. But we don't know what we're facing."

  "She should shut up," Hati said, laying her head against his heart. "She should let us alone. We're doing all we possibly can."

  "If there's no water down below, before we reach the tower-" The worries obstructed clear reason, his thoughts going back and back again to the cardinal points. "She's got to do something, is all. I can't. I can't get the villages to move faster than they will. And if we don't camp close enough to the rocks at the bottom, the wind will kill us, and if all the sand falls off the cliffs, it may bury us. What's the answer for us? How far is safe?"

  "We've done all we can," Hati said. "We'll go down, is all. We'll do what we can, by what we see."

  Norit, who might know, who might hear Luz's answer, only rocked and sang to herself.

  There was nowhere any peace. He could look to the edges of the camp and see the furtive action of a few creepers, harmless things, but their disturbance could trigger others-all that mass at Pori, which stayed near the water, preying on itself, the stronger on the weaker. They had not walked into it. The chance that they might have walked in with the villages behind them still haunted him. But he tried to do what Hati said: he tried not to think.

  A wind blew, sulfurous and unpleasant. It might have stormed for days during their passage, and instead the weather had favored them, their one piece of blind luck. Not even Luz could have arranged that. He thought that calamities were piling up on him, but if he looked, he saw a few signs of luck still with him, a few signs that the odds could be shoved into better advantage. If a man paid attention. If he did think of all the possibilities.

  He kissed his wife, rested his head against her, shut his eyes a moment.

  "Up," Hati said after a dark space, giving him a little shake, and he realized she had held him, bracing his weight for however long he had slept, steady and sure. "We're moving," she said, and they were: the Keran were rolling up their mats. The Ila's servants had struck her shelter.

  A little sleep seemed for a moment worse than none. It was hard to move. He gathered his scattered wits, helped Hati up, waked Norit, but not Lelie-her he picked up, and heaved her, still sleeping, to his shoulder, to hand her up to Norit once Norit was mounted.

  Hati rolled up their mats and went and tied them on, and led the beshti back.

  Marak saw Tofi help Patya up. The aifad cheated him of the sight of Patya's face, but Tofi looked happy, and the language of their hands, not quick to part, was a reassurance. They looked only at each other.

  "Do your jobs," Marak said to Bosginde, who stood staring. "He won't give you orders." Meaning Tofi. "You're in charge. Prove what you've got."

  Bosginde went and with Mogar did his ordinary duty, and saw the girths were tight, then helped Memnanan's wife and mother up. Tofi became cognizant enough to join them, with looks back at Patya the while, the look of a young man with only one thing on his mind.

  Bosginde elbowed Mogar, with a grin and a knowing look on his face, before they helped Norit up and both got to the saddle. as if it were any day, as if nothing in the world was unusual. The Keran, meanwhile, were setting themselves into motion, the Ila's servants were attempting to get her mounted, and Memnanan and his men were up. The Haga began to flow out around the edges of the lump that was the city-dwellers in their midst. Marak saw it all, the amusement of the slaves, Tofi and Patya with eyes for one another, and Hati's amusement, and all of a sudden there was a commotion in the Ila's camp, the Ila's white besha having escaped out through the camp, and two more followed it.

  Everyone began to laugh, he laughed, and then the earth shook them all to sobriety: that was what had startled the beshti, and the Keran quickly caught the fugitives. The Ila, veiled and angry, allowed herself to be helped up.

  They could still laugh, the ex-slaves at the ex-master, the tribesmen at the city folk-all of them had laughed except Norit, who sat expressionless and staring blankly at the commotion.
She would go where the besha went. Whether she herself got her baby down the descent safely-she had no particular care-but Luz would see Norit survived, if anyone did.

  "Here." Marak made his decision and handed Lelie up to her mother, live or die, the best he could do: then he went and mounted up, the same. He turned Osan to follow the Keran, and Hati went with him, and Norit did, and Tofi and Patya, and the whole camp and the whole caravan began to set out.

  The wind fell. The afternoon grew hot, and the air utterly still as they traveled. The edge of the world was in front of them, a horizon unnaturally clear now that the wind had let the air clear.

  "Talk to me," he said to Hati. "Distract me."

  Marak, Marak, his voices said to him, and he saw a vision, the fall of a great star, as it seemed, and the earth splitting, and fire running in the cracks.