Marak ordered Osan up, and in the pragmatic way of beshti, the besha pinned against the slide behind him made methodical efforts toward the open ground, dislodging more rock, while Hati's stubbornly sat fast, as beshti tended to do when they thoroughly had had enough of a situation. Marak seized the bridle and the mounting strap of the fallen besha, tugged in time with its efforts to free its legs, and it suddenly shoved forward, gained its feet, crowding him and crowding Hati.
The beast's embarrassed master reached a place where he could stand, and worked his way past the besha, which stood, barrier between the tribesman and a further slide.
"Omi," the tribesman said, as shaken as a man of his kind was apt to appear, and Marak asked himself whether it was his repair which had given way up above.
But Hati was all right. She had her besha up, and the au'it did, by now. Marak could only keep going, with the tribesman between him and Hati now, the trail impossible for two abreast.
There had been shouting back and forth, the tribesman's kinsmen ascertaining he was alive, and now repairing the trail above them. On their own level, they moved carefully, beshti planting their feet gingerly on ground they no longer trusted, but going on, following those ahead as the gap widened. The instinct to go with the group overrode everything but immediate self-preservation, and Marak, with the bottom of the climb in view, let Osan set his own pace.
Three more sharp turns, three more sloping, rock-cluttered stretches of trail, and they began to go among projecting rocks, in places where they had to clear fallen stones from their way. They had lost sight of the men before, who had ridden down, who had been on lower courses when the shaking came: they were in the dark, now, and the rocks had cut off the view of anyone ahead.
But they came down past rocks Marak remembered from their last descent, and in the murk of the night, in a breathless hush of air, saw the tail of the tribe ahead of them, and tents promising shelter.
Now they could mount up and let the beshti go at their pace, but those still on the climb might take the same cue, and Marak refused. He walked Osan, leading him slowly, and came out onto the flat, where the tribesman who had fallen took his respectful leave and dropped back to join his kin, and where Hati and the au'it overtook him and walked beside him on the widening trail.
A rider came toward them, and then another and a third. The first proved to be Tofi, who had been watching the trail from a distance. In the starlight, under falling stars and on a tremulous earth, Marak saw more tents going up, the camp spreading out its canvas as fast as it could, bracing itself, waiting.
The second rider was Patya, the third, Norit, and they met under the momentary flare of a falling star and a crash of ruin in the heavens.
Marak met them, touched hands, and Hati joined them, and the au'it, their own au'it, if there was justice at all. Norit stayed mounted, but Tofi and Patya jumped down to embrace them arm to arm. The beshti set to bawling and rumbling, rubbing necks and heads and snuffing familiar scents, as happy as the rest of them, weary as the creatures were, and deserving of rest.
"It's coming. It's coming," Norit said. "Get to shelter, those who can."
"Where's Lelie?" Now he missed her, in the distraction of a hundred thousand lives at risk behind him. But this one he felt, as he felt Norit, as he felt the danger rushing down at them. "Where is she?"
"Memnanan's wife has her," Patya said. "The Ila's in a fit. We've put the stakes down, deep, and we've braced the side canvas. Norit says the danger will come from the west, to dig in and put the webbings on. We hope we're dug in enough."
The ring of fire flashed across Marak's vision. For a moment he failed to know where he was, whether he was floating in the air or standing. as if, having stopped defying Luz, now he suffered all the pent-up visions, the impact, the ring of fire, and now a fountain of cloud, something going up and up, fire, or cloud, or water-he was not sure.
"Marak!" Hati cried. He reached out blindly for her, found her arm, held to her for a moment that the whole world seemed to turn and sway under them. Then he began to walk, urgently, desperately, toward the tents, and Hati stayed with him.
"Every tent," he said to those he met. "If you're done, help others. Fast as we can make it. Storm's coming. Eat. Drink."
"The water, omi," Tofi reminded him. "We're almost out of water. Even the Ila's out of water."
"Every man drink a sip, and eat a bite, and turn out to pitch tents as fast as they come in before the wind hits. Free and slave, the Ila's men, the tribes, all of us. We'll be doing it as long as we have time, all night and into the morning-in the calm or in whatever rolls in on us." He still could see nothing but the ring of fire, over and over again. He had held Luz at bay this long. He had ridden to Pori and back. Now Osan's strength was spent, and Osan would not kneel for him, so blind and half deaf to the world, he walked and walked, and tried to maintain his awareness of the world under feet gone all but numb.
He thought that Tofi and Patya had mounted up again, and he thought the au'it had lost her grip on her besha's rein and it had gone ahead of them toward the tents, but that was all right. The beshti all knew where their own herd was, and where their own tents were pitched.
Thirst had his mouth and throat all but incapable of swallowing: the air was dry as dust, and over the course of their walking, this close to safety, he offered Hati a sip of the water he personally carried, but, prudent, she had her own, and drank a sip. For himself, he drank the skin dry, the last bit, telling himself somehow there would be more, and somehow Luz would see them supplied, after all they had passed, but he was not through with his work. He had to wring more out of a body already exhausted, which needed water now, and no matter the thirst to come. He would not be through until every living survivor was down the cliffs and under canvas.
"The waters will rise up," Norit's voice cried behind him, thin and high, a voice divorced from reality. "The bitter waters will rise up like a wall and that wall will go out to overflow the edges of the world! It's coming down! It's already falling!"
Marak wished her quiet. He saw these things in his own mind when she said them. He had no idea what he was seeing until Norit named them, but she pulled the images into terrible clarity.
"The earth will crack! The bitter water pour in on the forge, and the heat of it will go up like a furnace, like water cast onto hot iron!"
It was the fountain he saw. He had thought it was cloud in the sky.
"The hammer will fall!" Norit shouted at the heavens, at those behind them, at anyone near her who would listen. "The earth will ring like an anvil! The wind will come, stronger than any wind before!"
Marak turned, staggering in the giving sand. "When?" he shouted back at Norit. "How much time, woman? Will it blow the sand over us? Are we too close to the cliffs?"
But Norit was not sane enough for that reckoning, and continued to shout about cracks in the earth and pools of fire in a voice that broke, ragged with thirst.
He turned back. He walked. They walked, almost at the tents, and when they looked back, the line of those still coming toward them went on back into the dark, in the starlight, as far as the cliffs of the Lakht, on that trail where the tribes still descended and where the villagers-the foremost of the villagers-had yet even to reach the cliffs.
The weak almost certainly could not do it. There would be falls. Fatalities.
There remained nothing-nothing at all Marak found to do for them, once he reached their own tent.
"Death comes down on us!" Norit shouted in his distant hearing, distracted, gone wandering, disturbing other hearers, and Marak moved to stop her, but Hati held his arm and tugged at him.
"Let her go. She'll know when to go to cover, more than the rest of us, she'll know. Luz won't let her die. She moves everyone to work. We all have to do something when we hear that."
"We can't have panic. We're going to need every hand in camp. Every clear wit." Osan pulled at the reins, wanted his freedom, and his just reward, and Marak had not the stren
gth left in him to unsaddle and care for him. He staggered to a stop.
Tofi took the rein from his hand without a word, and Patya took Hati's, as Tofi called Bosginde and Mogar to tend the beshti and get them unsaddled.
"I'll need another besha," Marak said hoarsely, "one that hasn't trekked to Pori and back. I'm too tired to walk, and I've got to talk to Aigyan. To Memnanan and Menditak."
"Then I need one, too," Hati said, exhausted as she was, and Marak said not a word to stop her, knowing he might need her to reason with Aigyan. The hush about the camp, the near-stifling stillness of the wind, warred with the chaos in his vision and the racket in his ears, warning, continually warning him, if he knew how to hear it, how short the time was. but only Norit had that burden, to take the message straight in and not to shut it out.
And Norit ran mad among the tents.
Sensible men around him, however. sensible men around them did sensible jobs, the only sort of thing they knew how to do. In astonishingly short order there were beshti saddled and even more precious water offered, and it took as much strength to refuse that as it needed for him to get into the saddle again.
Tofi got under him and, in undignified fashion, shoved, not asking if he needed help. Hati made it up mostly on her own, at the last with Mogar's help, and Marak reined off into the dark, threading through the little space there was, past the resting beshti, in among the Keran tents-Aigyan first, Aigyan, whose lead the tribes might follow.
And Menditak, the canny, the quick, the old man who had outlived most of his enemies. and befriended the greatest of them.
And somewhere amid it all, he searched for the Ila's captain.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Any tent, when the storm comes.
-Kerani proverb
Marak, the voices dinned in his hearing, voices thrumming with anxiety and disaster, while the dark and the open flat resounded with the sound of hammers and mallets.
Deep-stakes went down; and over all the commotion ranged the hoarse voices of tribesmen shouting orders, and arranging a storm camp, tents placed for best protection in the likelihood of a wind from the west. west had become the source of danger: Marak was sure of it in his own heart. West for danger, east for salvation.
Beshti complained in the lack of water and food. Children cried in the tents, weary and hungry and thirsty, but the very little little water there was, the tribes guarded closely and would not give up.
The Ila's tent was up and secure, staked deep in the stony sand. Lights shone inside it, making the canvas glow. because the Ila had lamp oil, carried along where water would have been far more useful.
There were instead, Marak recalled, all those books, the weight of which would have supplied the whole camp-
For what? For a day, on short rations? What was one day?
For those caught above the cliff, it was everything. It was the difference, for thousands, between getting off the Lakht to shelter-or not: but water could not give them time. Only the skies could give them that. Only his decisions, to camp, to move on, all the decisions during all the trek, could have given them that time-and those were his, balanced against this necessity and that and the strength of the villagers to keep moving. Those were his. He did not know whether they were the wisest decisions-the best economy of lives.
And when he thought how very many must still be up there on the cliffs, still making the perilous descent, still trapped between thirst and vermin, he could scarcely wrap his mind about the enormity of what he had told Luz he would do and what consequence every decision of his might have had.
He wielded a hammer himself in the dark, as camp after camp went up. Every tribe took their hammers and set the tents of all those that arrived, so that as fast as weary tribes reached the edge of the camp, the camp swallowed them up and gained workers.
Hati swung a hammer with him. Like others, like Tofi and Mogar and Bosginde, like Antag and his brothers, and every able man and woman, they wrapped their hands and worked and still bled. but in the mad, the makers swelled their hands with fever and activity. He and Hati healed as they bled, and as they exhausted themselves, strength came from somewhere. Villagers began to arrive, and young men and old, urged by the tribes, began to join the effort.
As for Norit, she wandered wherever she wandered in the camps, never quite out of their awareness, as the visions were constantly in their awareness.
Hammer, hammer, and hammer against the deep-irons, image of the hammer to come against the earth. Luz spoke to the mad, constantly, a nuisance that became, strangely, a reassurance that the tower still stood. They knew Luz was aware. They knew they were not forgotten, not yet, not now: death was coming, but the hammerblow was not yet on them.
Another tent rose, men and women pulling on the ropes, shouting together as the center poles came up and another canvas peak aimed at the uncertain heavens. Webbing went on, tied to the deep-irons, weighted with rocks where they could lay hands on them, to secure the frail canvas from billowing up in a gust.
The hammer-wielders advanced on another row of stakes, as women took another bundle cast from another packsaddle, and those villagers whose old and weak they had just scarcely sheltered joined them like the rest and took their efforts to another bundled tent, villagers unfurling canvas side by side with the tribes.
Another tent, and another. The camp spread and spread outward and sideways, onto every patch of sand that would take the stakes: the camp grew broader and deeper at a pace that had now the repetition of a machine, a pace that left the workers breathless, and a determination that continually sucked new workers into the frenzy. Any man, any woman who could unpack canvas or haul on rope surely became ashamed to sit still.
Still the new arrivals came down, and spread out, and kept spreading with that breathless speed-now and again a worker fell half-conscious on the sand, and lay with the weak, in a strange tent, cared for, given meager help, and two and three and four more newly arrived villagers took his place.
Hammer-sound echoed off the cliff face along a broad front, and beshti filed by, some laden with baggage, and riding beasts carrying the old and the young and led by the hale and fit: they worked through all this, and the earth shook, and shook again, and stars fell so near they lit the sky in untimely dawns, noons, and twilights, but they never ceased: men rested when they must, drove in stakes as they could regain their strength, as the villagers came down, staggering, some clinging to the beshti's mounting loops, scarcely able to point out their tents amid the baggage, and their water-starved beshti so anxious to sit down it was difficult to get the saddles off them.
Here was reason to keep working. Even the pragmatic tribesmen found reason to press their strength further, to provide minimal shelter, if not lifesaving water, and, in the way of the tribes in extremity, they pitched tents now in common, long constructions webbed down with whatever cordage they could manage, for villagers to pool resources and stay alive if they could.
But even men who had come in staggering with weakness managed to haul cord to shelter their families, and a few, the hardiest, having caught a little wind, joined the rest of them as they hammered and unpacked and spread canvas and snugged it down.
Here and there villages more prudent and better-led than the rest came in better condition, and some gave their water to strangers' children, because, one young idealist said, paradise was close and there would be no end of water.
Paradise was not close. The hammerfall was. Marak, Marak, the voices began to say, and while the cliffs cut all view of the Lakht, Marak could feel the fall like doom hanging over his shoulder. Closer, now, closer and closer.
Hati still worked with him. She placed the stakes and he hammered, and sometimes she directed villagers who grew confused in handling the ropes, an art she knew in her sleep, if she had had the strength left to manage it. Her hands bled. Marak's did.
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.
C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Page 44