C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall

by Hammerfall(lit)

  Marak, his voices said, but he made no sense of what followed.

  The water kept coming on the roof, and made pools and puddles. He heard it. The Ila did.

  Luz knew. Luz told them.

  The fever built in him, threatening to sweep everything away. Hati was running, alone, through the cold wet, and then Patya and Tofi had overtaken her, and they sprinted, soaked as they were, through a murky grayness and a grayed red of puddles. Norit came after, holding Lelie, all of them drenched.

  Marak, his voices said, and he was aware of the Ila's limbs, fever-hot, and the war they fought, each holding the other up.

  "Why take up my father?" he asked, and, for his pride's sake: "How long?"

  The Ila laughed, not a pleasant laugh, near his ear. "During your search, my men found him. I've always taken alternatives. Always alternatives. He was in and out of my tent, from time to time. He followed, outside the column, in a Haga's robes. I'm tired. Lie down with me. See which of us wins."

  It was easier to sink down, both on their knees, then on the carpet, twined together. After a time he saw them lying there like the dead, two bloody figures locked in embrace. He saw, and knew he looked from outside himself, and that it was a vision of sorts, Luz's vision, what Luz saw of him, but he had no idea how she saw.

  Then Norit came and touched his forehead ever so gently. His wives and his sister Patya and his brother-in-law Tofi all came to that bloody place, and sat down near him and waited, and waited. They expected-they feared, perhaps, for him to lose consciousness in fever, or to die. The Ila's servants moved about them. The au'it were there, perhaps their own au'it as well.

  A moment of darkness. "Marak," a voice said then, asking his attention, and someone lifted his head and gave him water, an abundance of water, as many drinks as he wanted. He was fever-hot. Heat swept through him then like a furnace, as if water were all the makers had waited to have.

  Thunder walked overhead. Water dripped somewhere. It sounded like a fountain, dripping and gurgling like the Ila's Mercy-water, the universal condition of life, had become that abundant.

  Someone came at that point, someone who wanted Hati, and Norit, wanted them urgently. He thought it was Patya. He dreamed it was Patya, who bent and kissed him before she took away all his help, all his protection, leaving him entirely alone with the Ila.

  But shadows immediately came and peered down at him, a handful of veiled, armed shadows, who had no possible reason for being where they were, in the Ila's tent.

  They retreated and sat, with their weapons, and they watched. Keran, he was sure. But were those Haga, sitting with them?

  "Your helpers," the Ila said to him, faintly, wryly, from beside him, in this makeshift bed they shared, of pillows and blankets and blood-soaked carpet. "I made a good throw, didn't I? Now, one way or the other, we become allies. and what will we do with Luz, do you think? Or what will Luz do with you and me?-Or what, do you suppose, will we all do with the ondat?"

  "I don't know," he said, in pain, not knowing where to take the Ila's words, or how to answer. The fever produced unbearable headache, and swelled the flesh around the wounds. He had nothing to do with the Ila's questions. The makers were at work. He had to endure it.

  And the way he had held Lelie, and shed makers into her blood, he had pressed his wounds to the Ila's wounds, and hers to his-both of them, makers shared. Makers at all-out war not only with the wounds. but with each other, live or die, win or lose.

  He understood the Ila's dealing with Tain, when she caught him. What else was she to use for weapons, when her makers had consistently lost their battles with Luz's makers?

  What else was she to use, when Tain fell into her hands?

  Tain, being Tain, to be sure, meant to seize power for himself. he had not made his move yet, but that had been his intention, and surely the Ila knew it, being old as the world and still alive.

  But Tain was also her weakness: Tain had not known how far Memnanan had allegiances elsewhere. Tain had not known how much a man could love a wife, that a man could have a friend against his own interests. There was Tain's downfall, in every canny truth he thought he knew, in every lesson he had tried to teach his son about the world.

  Kaptai, against all odds, had taught him otherwise.

  His head throbbed. Pain shot through his ears and eyes. It might have been a skirmish his makers had just won. Or lost.

  One au'it among the lot of au'it, perhaps their own, wrote and wrote. He was aware of the movement. The drip of water. The rumble of thunder.

  And he became aware of Hati, of Hati and Norit, near Memnanan, and he saw a vision, Tofi struggling to heat a pan of water.

  Hati's impatience came through. And Norit's.

  They were not in his war. They had Luz's makers in them. And he heard them, saw them.

  They shoved Tofi sharply aside.

  "Push," the women cried together. "Push! Now! Now, woman!"

  Came a woman's shout, then, and cries from the others, and then from the men.

  A newborn baby cried protest, newly arrived, as the heavens poured.

  "A boy!" Memnanan's mother cried above a crack of thunder. "My son has a son!"

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Things change. That is what I arrange to happen. In a limited system, in an alien environment, that means frequent intervention, with only my returning nanoceles to report on the local health of the system. That means I am the living template, and in my own cells I assure a standard. Whenever I am tempted to create a match for myself, I ask myself whose would be the standard then? And would they understand at all what I have done, and why I have done it, even if I told them?

  -The Book of the Ila

  Visions ceased, the providers of visions grown exhausted, and resting. The dark lost all feature except a red glow that pulsed, more and less, more and less, like the fire that burned through his veins.

  Marak lay still, measuring his breaths until the pain became bearable. He heard thunder. The rush of wind.

  But the tent ropes held. The canvas did.

  Marak, the voices whispered, wanting his attention, and visions claimed him.

  It seemed the stars came out in this vision. Then a strange thing appeared in the night, white, and looking like a village from a distance.

  He drifted closer.

  It glittered with lights, some that blinked, others that lit its walls.

  And this place, above all visions he had seen, was ominous to him. He had no trust in Luz, that the vision would prove harmless.

  Ondat, his voices said to him.

  "Do you see it?" he asked Luz in a whisper, and then, thinking that someone else, perhaps Hati, was close to him. "Do you see a village in the night sky?"

  "I see something white," Hati said, and a hand rested on his shoulder, comforting him. "It could be a village. But its towers go off in every direction."

  "Like the tower," Norit said, from behind her. "It's a tower in the sky."

  Luz warned them: the ondat were here. Somehow the ondat had established a village that had no ground under it, and Luz showed them this sight to amaze them.

  "What does it mean?" he asked Luz in that absence of other questions. "What are they? Where are they?"

  Up, that strange sense of direction told him, as it had at other times told him east. This time it was up, up, up, when he knew there could be nothing up there but the sky and the stars.

  Perhaps the ondat had breached their treaty and taken over.

  Perhaps after all they would destroy Luz and her tower, and with Luz, their refuge, and all of them would die.

  Perhaps their real safety, now that the hammer had fallen, was not the tower, but to scatter into the low desert, and hide in caves, hoping to live in whatever circumstances they could.

  "What do you want us to do?" he asked Luz in a whisper, as he always had to speak to Luz aloud to be heard.

  He only felt a direction, and that direction was what it had been. East. East.

 
East.

  He felt someone rest a hand on his shoulder. Tofi was there. The tent above him seemed far less fine. Daylight came only from an open flap. There were no lamps lit.

  "We're in danger of drowning," Tofi said. "We're going to move the camp."

  "East," he said. The vision of the tower in the stars broke apart, became irretrievable, something beyond imagination.

  "East," Tofi said, and that satisfied him. Satisfied Luz.

  It dawned on him the plain tent above him was his own, and that Hati and Norit were on his other side, with Lelie, and that there were, unaccountably, more points of contact than the three of them. Four, one in this tent, largely unaware, asleep. Five, the last at a little remove from him.

  That one was aware, and in pain. It was the Ila.

  "We're going to have to pack the tents wet," Hati said to him, businesslike. "We have to move. There's water just flowing through, washing out some of the tents. It's become the one thing we're not short of."

  "I probably could ride."

  "Probably you could," Hati said. "But you're not going to."

  He shut his eyes.

  Eventually they moved him onto a litter, and wrapped him in two blankets and a piece of canvas, and carried him out into the light.

  The world had changed its coat. It had been all blowing sand. Now it was murky grays, sandy mud, and a dull sheen of reflections off rain-pocked water. It was as if a well had overflowed. Some water-au'it had not been doing her job.

  He shut his eyes. They balanced the litter on two bundles of baggage. Hati bent and kissed him. He heard a small baby crying. Then Lelie set up a howl. A new baby had come out of nowhere and cried, taking attention, and Lelie, he thought, was jealous, and angry.

  He went to sleep again. When he waked, he saw tribesmen carrying the litter, tribesmen afoot and walking. He found that curious and went back to sleep.

  Mostly he slept, and waked again, once as the earth shivered, then again at a change of bearers.

  Then, a distant whisper, he heard his voices. Marak, they said. Marak, Marak.

  Calmly. A part of the world. Contact, with Luz.

  He drew a wider breath, ignoring the pain in his ribs. He reached up an unwounded finger, pulled down the stiff canvas that covered him above the chin, and gave a critical eye to the world.

  It was unremitting gray overhead. The sun went veiled. He ventured more of his hand into the sunlight, and realized then something strange about his hand, as if it was suddenly someone else's. It lacked the killing-marks. He extracted it completely from the canvas, held it up to the light, and saw only the reddened trace of the marks that had existed on his fingers.

  A part of him, a part of his former life, was wiped out.

  He shoved the canvas farther back, blankets and all as the bearers carried him, heedless, and he looked at the skin of his chest, which showed only the faintest trace of the abjori mark, as his hands showed the redness of healing cuts, and the wound in his side was sealed, swollen, painful.

  "Lie still," Hati said from the lofty height of her saddle. Her besha moved with lordly ease beside the struggling bearers. "Don't make trouble."

  "What happened to the Ila?" he asked, but once he asked, he knew, he knew her location, as he knew Hati's, Norit's, Lelie's, at every moment he was near them. And the new one.

  "You beat her," Norit said, also from above. She was riding on his other side, with Lelie on her saddle. "She's with the priests. Memnanan's gone to see to her. We know where she is. Always."

  So did he. She was behind him in the line. As weak and sick as he was, he thought, and with the remnant of a hellish headache.

  He lay back and drew up the blankets against the chill in the air. He slept again, slept until they camped and raised the tents.

  By then the rain had stopped, but a nearby pan had become a pool of water, safe, at least, for the beshti; and the tents went up with the lighter stakes this time, a quicker job.

  Hati offered him a drink of sweet water, and he drank, and slept-and waked in the enclosed dark of the tent as the earth shook.

  The baby born in the storm-Memnanan's son-let out an infant cry of disturbance. That point of awareness was active. Then the Ila waked, elsewhere. Hati and Norit were much closer.

  Thunder rumbled. The whole world felt strange, the air choked and thick with damp.

  Marak rubbed his ears, rubbed his eyes, decided he could sit up, and did. Hati set her hand on his arm.

  He moved that arm, embraced her shoulder, drew her close. They sat that way a while, one leaning on the other. Norit slept with Lelie across her lap.

  He felt exhausted, drained of all the strength he had ever had.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. Luz said. Or whatever it was that droned on that way. The world had reached a sort of exhausted peace. He saw Norit wake, and he put out a hand and caressed Norit's knee without resistance. Norit set her hand on his, looked at him, for the most part sane.

  They rested that way until the light crept back, slowly, sullenly.

  He decided finally that it was morning enough, and that today he would get on his feet and get into the saddle again.

  It took two tries to get on his feet. Hati braced herself and pulled and he made it up, and walked, and passed the tent flap to the outside, into what passed for a dawn.

  The air was cold, bitter cold. The sand was wet. He wrapped his coat about him, and saw others stirring out of their tents. He walked past the edge of the tent and looked around the camp, all around, seeing tents as far as he could see. After the wind that had blown over them, after seeing the scoured bone that had landed at the edge of the Ila's tent, he had feared far worse was the case. Beshti, some of them, bore cuts and gashes. Some were burned over part of their skin, the hair simply gone. They were a sad-looking lot, and some might have died.

  Tofi came out of the tent. Patya did. "You're all right," Patya said.

  "Well enough," Marak said, and heard the voices to distraction: Luz was nagging him. Luz wanted something that did not involve the east, rather north. North. Not far.

  He looked, saw the Ila's tent, and walked that way without a word to anyone. Hati and Norit went with him, perhaps under the same instruction, hearing the same voice. The au'it was not with them. He had no idea whether the au'it still attended them. Or whether the Ila, on second thought, needed an au'it with them any longer.

  They went into the Ila's tent, and inside, Memnanan was there, just putting on his belt. With him in crowded circumstances, in the tent foyer, were three of his men, an au'it, and two tribesmen, one Haga, one Keran-neither Aigyan nor Menditak, it seemed, had left anything to chance, or to the Ila's goodwill. They had slept there, and had just begun to prepare for the day.

  "Marak Tain," Memnanan said, looking at him as a man might look at the risen dead.

  "Alive," Marak said. And added: "Grateful."

  Memnanan nodded slightly, acknowledgment.

  Hati said darkly. "My husband saved the Ila's life. But I doubt she's grateful. She's awake. I think we need to see her."

  Memnanan indicated the way, the curtain. "My men take my orders. The priests. have come here. They've been about. I haven't let them in-waiting your orders, omi."

  The priests: a reservoir of the Ila's own makers, a source, like a well, of her former independence.

  But there was, he suspected, no renewal there: if they were overcome in her. Luz's would win, every time, now, and every priest who took in the Ila's makers would now take in Luz's. That was the truth his own body told him. That was the answer the world had, from now on.

  He pushed the curtain back. The Ila's servants, rising up to bar the way, saw him and hesitated. He simply walked through with Hati and Norit, in Memnanan's witness, and the tribesmen's, and flung back the last curtain.

  The Ila, aware of them as they were of her, sat in her chair, waiting for them. Au'it attended her. Her white skin, the red robes-those were the same. But bones stood out in her hands as they did i
n his. They both had given up substance to the struggle.

  Hati and Norit stopped one on a side of him. They were alike now, all together, all part of a set.

  The Ila moved her hand, and the au'it settled on the mats on either side of her and opened their books.

  "You've had your way," the Ila said. "You think you've won."

  "Luz has won," Marak said, but he was unwilling, himself, to concede that without limits. He added, for himself: "So far."

  "So far." The Ila's voice was weak, but edged. "I gave you your freedom. I gave everyone in the world their freedom, such as we had, so long as it lasted. Now there's one way, one blood, and one tribe in the world, and we've joined it." She drew breath, and her eyes held the old fire. "So let the ondat worry about that."