Текст книги "Hammerfall"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“Let me go!” Luz cried. She struck him with the heel of her hand, trying to break free.

“Let Norit go,” he retorted, and did not abate his attentions, not though Norit’s body struggled and her mouth cursed as Norit never had, with words that made no sense in any dialect.

Her struggles, her outcries, waked Tofi and the slaves and the au’it, who stared in dismay. Had he not disapproved the soldiers for the very same act?

He spent no time explaining his actions. He swept Norit up and carried her out of the tent kicking and struggling. Gently, for Norit’s sake, he set her down on the shaded sand outside and proceeded to what he intended.

“Damn you!” Luz cried.

Only when Norit pounded him with her fists and began to gasp after breath did he turn gentle with her, and then Norit simply lay in his arms and cried and sobbed. He had least of all intended to hurt her.

“You hate me,” she wept. “You hate me!”

“Never, Norit,” he said, and added honestly: “I’m not that sure about Luz.”

She struck at him, and he caught her fist easily within his, she was so small and her violence so slight. He lifted her face and tried to make her look at him, but she shut her eyes.

“Tell me the truth, Norit. Tell me the truth. Do you hear me? Look at me and tell me the truth. What do you want, and what does Luz want?”

Her eyes squeezed shut. She made no other struggle, no other response, either, as he tucked her clothing back to rights and smoothed her hair gently into place. He had no idea what he had won, or if he had won any relief for Norit—he had hoped if he could bring her back for an hour, Norit might have a chance, and he knew by what seethed in his own mind that she had less of a chance if Luz was always there.

But now he regretted doing what he had done. He had tried to help Norit. He had no idea now whether he had scared her instead of Luz, or offended her, or what vengeance he might have brought down on them all.

He led her back into the tent and let her go, and she sat down on her own mat. She sat staring at the wall for a long while before she lay down again and tucked her clothing tightly about her.

Tofi and the men likely were awake with all the commotion, but they were pretending otherwise. The au’it certainly had waked, and wrote, silent in her preoccupation.

Hati lay with one arm beneath her head, gazing at the sun through the canvas as he lay down beside her.

“Luz has her all the time,” he said. “I don’t know which I dealt with. I tried to help. I don’t think I did.”

“Norit knows what you do,” Hati said. “Norit wants help.”

“I think she does. But she can’t push Luz out.”

“Norit can’t say no to anyone, least of all to Luz. But she wants you. She wants you more than anything.”

“What can I do? What cure is there for her?”

“None,” Hati said, “until Norit says no to Luz.” Hati rolled over and opened her arms to him, and drew him in despite the heat.

At that small move, Norit moved, and leapt up, and shoved the au’it out of the way and sent the au’it’s pen into the sand in her rush out of the tent.

Marak leapt up, and Hati did, dodging the au’it, half-stumbling over Tofi and his helpers, hurrying to stop her as she raced out of the shade of the tent.

Norit ran past the resting beasts, wasting strength and sweat in the heat, and Marak ran foremost after her. Hati ran behind him. There was a rock shelf beyond, where a careless foot might slip, and Norit sent herself straight for it, maybe knowing what was there, maybe forgetting that hazard.

Before she could reach that edge Marak caught her, and barely so. They fell down on the stony ground, full length.

Her clothing had saved her skin, except her hands bled. His arm bled. But the madness was in possession of her. She struck at him as he got up and dragged her to her feet, struck him hard, and then only halfheartedly. “I want to die,” Norit cried, as he held her, but Luz said, in the next breath, trying to stand erect: “She won’t succeed. I won’t let her come to harm.”

He still had possession of Norit’s wrist. Hati arrived at a walk, now, ahead of Tofi and his two men. To their appalled looks, he shook his head and walked toward the camp, leading Norit by a firm grip.

Norit said not a thing, nor objected when he set her down on her mat and harshly told her to stay there. The blood on her hands was still fresh, but the wounds were already dry as if hours old.

The au’it had not ventured far from the tent. She had watched their return. She sat and wrote, now, a dry, persistent scratching, recording Norit’s desperate rush toward death.

Marak, Marak, Marakwas in his head, then. He expected vengeance, pain, he had no idea what, but what he received was a dinning urgency to move on. Haste, the voices said. Haste. Enough. The vision of the falling star began again.

He went out and began kicking furiously at the tent stakes.

Then Tofi and Hati, outside, began to help him. He ripped his own hand bloody, pulling up a stake, and the pain scarcely reached him.

“Damn them!” he shouted at the white-hot sky. “Damn them all!”

But no one answered, no one came to offer reason. Hati went to bring out Norit and the au’it and their mats out before the tent went down.

It billowed flat, the former slaves folded it, packed it, and loaded it in rare, fearful silence. The sun was still high as they mounted up and rode on, and the beasts, ignorant of all the mistakes they had made, grumbled, disturbed early from their cud-chewing.

The whole afternoon long seemed to pass in numb, paralytic silence, inside and out, as if even the madness stood back from him and from Norit. Perhaps Luz was aghast at the violence.

His hand healed. By nightfall the flesh was sealed over. Norit showed no lasting injury. The stars began to fall and fell until the dawn.

Over the next several days the voices were silent, exhausted, perhaps, or Luz, distant in her tower, plotted some revenge. She gave no hint. Perhaps on her bed she thought about him. Perhaps she and Ian made love. Marak cared nothing for that, either. Perhaps they could hear him as he heard the visions. He wished only for their continued silence. Norit was more herself, fearful of the star-fall, tender in her dealings with everyone, lacking prophecies.

They reached the very heart of the Lakht, within sight of the Qarain itself, and the border of the Anlakht, and every night the stars still fell, stitching small streaks across the dusk and across the night, occasionally exploding into fire. Every day the au’it wrote, and wrote copiously, but what she might have to say Marak had no idea.

The days became hot, the hottest any of them remembered. The sky was a brazen dome above their heads, and, having no shortage of water, they let the wind blow over the sweat that ran on their limbs. The beasts, however, grew irritable in the heat, and the heat wore on them all: when they rested it was a numb sort of rest, more desperate unconsciousness than sleep. The open-sided tent offered shade, but gave far less relief when the wind failed. Heat rose shimmering from the sand. Light glared off the rocks, and hot air gathered under the canvas.

Marak found to his chagrin that he had lost all count of the days, but more worrisome, he had ceased to care. Habits on which life itself depended faded from importance in the oppressive air. The au’it never spoke, in all these days. Norit had grown increasingly quiet and hard to rouse. Hati moped in the weather. Tofi looked ten years older from sunburn and dirt, while the ex-slaves recalled the white tents, and safety, and sat listless in the shade. They found a bitter spring, and the beshti, well watered, disdained it. But their water supply had become, at least marginally, a concern, and after this they determined to reserve the good water and let the beshti go in want. Tofi harbored a secret worry, and still claimed he knew the way, but Marak began to suspect otherwise.

The silence of the voices began to seem not freedom, but abandonment, stemming from the assault on Norit, as best Marak reckoned. He asked himself whether Luz would damn all the world for his crime against her, and began to think every day of dying, not that dying held any attraction for him, only that it seemed the likely outcome.

And every night as they rode the sky was streaked with falling stars, sometimes so violent in their fall they flew apart in pieces, and sometimes so near them they screamed on their way down.

He had seen very many strange things, he decided, enough strange things that he ought to be satisfied. But he was not. On the way to the tower, when they had known nothing, he and Hati had shared a passion for life. Now he and Hati looked at each other through identical visions, made love sometimes, but more often laced fingertips, only fingertips, lying near and not against one another: the heat around them was stifling, sapping all strength. Together they cared for Norit, and were concerned for her, both of them helpless to rescue her.

They traveled and put up their tent, and had grain-cake to eat. To do more asked strength they hoarded. They sat. They ate.

“The sky,” Norit said suddenly.

Brisk movement came back to her limbs, and awareness to her eyes, and she rose to her feet, staring toward the end of the tent, toward the west.

Hati’s fingers knotted into his sleeve, a demand, a claim, when Norit’s distress distracted him.

“She may kill herself,” he said, and a sense of omen dawned on him, a sudden conviction that time had slipped away from him, and the vision was imminent.

“She won’t kill herself,” Hati said. “Didn’t Luz say she wouldn’t? She’s grown too hard for that. She listens to all we do and say, even if the voices are quiet.”

Norit went out of the tent and stood in the burning heat. Eventually he went, swept her up in his arms, and carried her inside. When he set her on her feet she abruptly sat down and stared out unblinkingly at the daylight.

“Luz,” he said, kneeling and shaking Norit. “Luz, you’re killing her. We love her and you’re killing her.”

There was no seeming awareness. Norit simply stared.

He gave up, took his hand away, then on a second thought laid hands on Norit and made her lie down. She stayed as he disposed her, and he went back to his mat, next to Hati.

The au’it slept. Tofi and the freed slaves slept. A rising wind stirred the broad canvas of their shelter, and everyone but Norit roused to see the sight. They had seen nothing else living for days, not even the flight of a bird. The land seemed dead around them.

Then the canvas stirred slightly and lifted like a breath of hope.

Then the southwest wind began to blow, but it was the breath of a furnace, as unkind as the silence. They packed up and moved on, the beasts complaining, and by evening the wind was a west wind, in their faces, picking up sand as it came. In the pans, uneasy dust flowed in small streams along the harder surface of the sand.

They crested a broad, gradual ridge as evening fell, and before them, as far as they could see, the otherwise flat, stone-littered plain of the Lakht beyond showed strange new wounds, pale sand circles in the old, weathered sand, two nearest that overlapped each other.

Had some desperate band of travelers, as lost as they, attempted wells all over the plain?

“What creature made that?” Hati asked Tofi. “Have you ever seen the like?”

“No,” Tofi said, sounding for a moment like the boy he was. “Never in my life.”

Their downward path took them alongside one such pale spot, a shallow new depression in the sand, with dark red, unweathered sand thrown out around it. The beasts lowered their heads and nosed the area, odd behavior in itself, and pawed at it, but they found nothing buried there.

They pushed on across the plain, not liking the vicinity. They put it far behind them by next noon, when they pitched a belated camp.

The earth shook itself, like a beast shaking his skin; and they who had been stretching rope, and the two freedmen, who had been pounding a tent peg, stopped their work.

They all stood still, except Norit, who had sat down at the start of their work, and who sat like a stone. The peg, half-driven, pulled loose.

“What was that?” Tofi asked.

“The earth will shake,” Norit said, breaking days of silence. “The earth will crack like a pot and spill out fire.”

Marak looked at Hati, and lastly at Tofi, who stood with a tent stake in his hand. Stark fear was on his face.

“Should we sink the deep-irons?” Tofi asked.

“Do that,” Marak said. He himself had no idea what next would follow. The stars fell. The earth itself had turned unreliable. Whether deep-irons could pin them to the earth and keep a shelter over their heads he had no idea.

The earth shook again while they were setting the stakes, and the now-freedmen dropped their hammers and looked as if they would run for their lives, if they had any idea at all where to run.

“What will this bring?” Marak asked Norit, who had never stirred from where she sat. “What does this mean?”

“The end of the world.” Tears overwhelmed Norit, who began to sob quietly, covering her face with her hands. “Luz doesn’t think so. But I do.”

It was a whisper of Norit’s old self, free, for the moment. That in itself lent him encouragement.

“The end of the world it may be, but we’ll die well fed and well watered. Get under the tent, Norit. Go.”

Norit obeyed him quietly. It was her task, when she would do it, to unpack their noon meal, such as it was: dried fruit and grain-cake, and tea, if they chose to heat water.

He wielded a hammer, and Hati helped him. “Get to work!” Tofi chided his helpers. “You’re free men. Act like it!”

The earth gave a shudder, and the beasts bawled alarm as the poles swayed and strained the ropes of the tent. They pulled to steady them, and sat down hard on the sand. It was that violent a motion.

The shaking was brief, and left no apparent damage. If the earth would crack, there was no sign of it.

Marak, having fallen hard on his backside, gave a laugh. “Well, the earth tries, but it can’t shake us off.”

“If the earth cracks, what will we do?” Hati asked, with real fear in her voice. “Perhaps we willdie.”

“Maybe we won’t,” he said, sitting there, toe to toe with her. “ Idon’t intend to. You’re on your own if you do.”

Hati gave a shaken laugh of her own, threw her head, and got up, dusting herself off. “I’m not that easy to kill.”

They went under the shade of the tent, Tofi and the slaves as well. They broke grain-cakes and ate well, and drank. Twice more while they slept the earth shivered, and both times they waked.

“Perhaps at least the shaking is done,” Marak ventured to say, as dark fell with them still camped. They had been reluctant to pull up the deep-irons and venture out.

Just then another shudder ran through the earth, so that neither earth nor heavens seemed stable tonight.

“Speak of misfortune,” Marak muttered.

Tofi went outside the open sides of the tent to see to the beasts, and came running under the tent again, a shadow in the dark.

“The stars are all gone!” Tofi cried.

Marak gathered himself up in alarm, with Hati and Norit close by, and indeed, as he walked out beyond the edge of the tent, the whole heaven was black. All the land was dark.

“All the stars have fallen,” Hati said in dismay.

“They are there,” Norit said calmly. “The star-falls have kicked up the dust to the sky. That’s all.”

“That much dust?” Hati asked, but had no answer.

Marak could see nothing in the pitch-black, except shadows against shadow.

Then in the far west white fire chained through the murk in the west, and thunder cracked, as sometimes it would in the great western storms.

A storm was indeed coming, and weather-sense had failed him. Now he was very glad that they had driven down the deep-stakes.

“We should put on the side flaps,” he said, and, difficult as it was in the dark, they began to do that.

Before they were done, a sudden wind came and battered at the canvas, making it boom and rattle while they worked. “Make sure of the ropes!” Tofi shouted at the ex-slaves. “Do it right this time, or you go out alone to tie it down!”

The beasts got up and settled down in the lee of the tent. The food and water all had to be moved inside, for fear of it all being buried in blowing sand; they made a wall of the rest of the baggage, and the side flaps had to be battened down tight. As an added measure, feeling their way in the dark, they made the tent sides and the roof fast a second time to the baggage, and to a second line of stakes, which they drove down inside the tent.

Then, sitting against that wall of their possessions, they were ready for the earth to shake and the heavens to be carried away.

The wind roared and the thunder boomed above them. The canvas bucked and thumped away, anchored by the deep-irons and the heavy buffering on the windward wall, inside their tent. Having worked so hard and so quickly, and having nothing left to do, they ate an extra ration of sweet dried fruit and grain-cakes in the pitch blackness and settled down to rest through to the wind and the storm.

The air grew far cooler, even cold, strangely smelling of dust and water.

“It smells like the inside of a well,” Hati said in wonder.

It did. But rain never came to the Lakht, and only twice in his life in the western lowlands.

Thunder crashed over them, the wind roared, and in the overthrow of the heavens and the battering of the wind, Marak held Hati to him for warmth. They tried to gather Norit into their embrace, but like the au’it, Norit stayed apart, somewhere near the big tent pole, waiting, waiting. She began to sing to herself in the dark, a tuneless song like the wind, drowned intermittently by the thunder and the crack of the canvas.

Lightning flashes showed through the seams of the tent. A terrible crash of thunder hit their ears.

A pattering followed, as if pebbles were falling on the tent.

But in the rain of pebbles battering against the canvas over their heads, Marak realized the singing beside had stopped a moment ago.

He gathered himself up and felt toward the tent pole where Norit had sat.

“Norit?” he asked the dark, and the roaring and the thunder gave him no answer.

Were it Hati, he would have thought she had simply gone off to the corner of the tent on intimate business. But a moment ago Norit had been singing, and now she was not where she had been. That warned him something might be amiss.

Then he felt a sudden gust, and he knew for certain. The tent flap blew and moved in the dark, its cords loosed, admitting a dark less absolute than the dark inside, and a fitful flicker that picked out a horizon.

He went out it, flinching as pebbles struck him… not woundingly hard, but hard enough, and when he put a hand to his bare skin he felt his skin slick and gritted with sand that immediately stuck to it. In the lightning flashes he saw small shining objects lying about him, like jewels in the lightning. He saw others bounce as they hit, and felt the sting of others, an impact on his skull.

“Norit!” he shouted into the wind and the falling stones, angry, willing finally to leave her to Luz.

But he heard her voice on the wind, sobbing or laughing, or perhaps both.

“It comes,” Norit cried. Lightning showed her dancing along the ridge.

On that dim, lightning-lit sight he ran out through the pelting from the heavens, knowing that only fools and suicides wandered away from tents in storms. He reached her, he seized her in his arms and precisely reversed that trail, aiming straight for the tent door, in a sudden, blind dearth of lightning.

“This way!” Hati shouted from ahead of him.

He went toward that voice and as he made the doorway, fierce, familiar hands seized on him and on Norit. Lightning showed him Hati’s face, a series of three flashes.

“Fool!” Hati shouted at him over the roar of the wind. “Get in! Get in!”

Even in that time pebbles had bruised his back and his head, and with Norit in his arms, they burst through the windblown door and into the numbing stillness and blackness inside.

Tofi asked in the dark, “What’s falling on us?”

“Pebbles,” Marak said. They all were struck and bleeding as best he could tell, and he set Norit down on the mats, trying to tell whether there was any injury to Norit’s head: he found grit and wet in her hair, her aifad carried away in the wind. He felt wet on his own skin, and on his clothes, and a profound chill followed. The three of them, he, and Norit, and Hati, all huddled together shivering while the thunder raged.

In time he warmed, and rested. And uncommon storm that it was, the air grew still before the dawn. Tofi got up and put his head out to find out what might be going on.

“The stars are back,” Tofi exclaimed, “and more are falling down.”

After this, Marak said to himself, nothing could astonish him. He got up to see, found it true, then went back to rest, in the knowledge that at least there were stars in the sky. The convulsion in the heavens had settled again, if only to a steady ruin.

Marak, Marak, the voices said, back again, after such long silence, and rocks and spheres collided, and the heavens fell. He could have wept. They were not lost. The voices knew how to find them. The visions were back. He never thought he could be glad. West, the voices told him. West by northwest.

“Do you hear?” he asked Hati. “Do you hear them?”

She moved her head against his arm. He thought it was a yes.

The sun, relentless, came up as sane as ever. They unfastened the lee-side tent flaps and let in light, welcoming the sun, and where Marak had expected half-healed wounds, he found no fever and no swelling. Where he expected blood from the stones, he saw no blood, rather a patchwork of dirt on his arms and his clothing, and on Norit’s, and on Hati’s, as if they had been pelted with mud.

He walked outside, seeing the ground all likewise splotched and spattered, and the canvas the same. The beasts were all but laughable, having a coating of dried mud all over their backs, and the pale, spread canvas was a patchwork of red and rust like him and like Hati.

“Raindrops!” he exclaimed in astonishment. He laughed aloud, having expected blood and bruises, and finding them marked like fools. “Water drops. No wonder we were wet!”

“In the far north,” Hati said, “sweet water fell hard as stones, and became water again in the sun. So the grandfathers tell it.”

Norit had come out, and so now did Tofi and his men. Norit, too, was splotched with huge dollops of rust, and at some point tears had run down from her eyes, trails through the red smears. Now her eyes, red as fire, were fierce as Hati’s.

“So it has rained on the Lakht,” Norit said in a low, hoarse voice, “and it will rain. The floodgates of the heavens will pour it out. A man can dieof too much water.”

That was almost the last of his patience. Of all Luz’s utterances, this one seemed sinister, intended to frighten them, he still had bruises on his skull, and for a moment he vowed he had made his last effort for Norit, as a vessel for Luz. But a second thought showed him Norit beneath the dirt and behind the burning eyes, and he said to himself that her skull likely had more bruises than his, and her head rang with worse than voices and a useful sense of where to go.

“Go sit and wait,” he said gently, to the wife from Tarsa, not to Luz. “Rest. Dust yourself off. We’ll be moving on.”

The animals had to be brushed clean of grit so sand would not gall their hides under the packs. The mud had to be swept off the tent canvas, or it became a heavy weight of dirt for the beast that carried it. Before all was done they all had bleeding hands and sore arms, but they dug out the deep-irons, packed the tent, reorganized their baggage, and moved, over a rise and down across a landscape dotted with thousands of small pits.

This morning, however, they saw wild creatures, furtive shadows that dived beneath rocks at their passing: the water-fall had brought them to this plain. A handful of plants bloomed and withered with the day’s heat, leaving a gold spatter of their life-bearing dust on the rocks. Water spilling on stones. Spheres falling into spheres. Gold dust scattering on the wind.

West by northwest. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry, Marak.

Marak tucked his foot up and rested his arms on his knee as he rode, rested his forehead so, trying not to think, to hear, wanting not to imagine what would be their fate if they had been on this plain when the stars fell.

Luz bore no grudge. And could he fault Norit, after all? Had harm come? It was only water. It was only pride. They had laughed, and the laughter, half-crazed and weak as it was, had healed them.

Had Luz, in driving Norit to the edge of collapse, managed their escape from the falling stars? Had she preserved their lives as mindfully as she preserved Norit from harm, and had she directed them around the region of worst damage? He wondered what had become of Pori, and the plain beyond.

A trail of fire went across the heavens. A star fell by daylight, smoking as it went. It went to the south: it was one whose direction was clear, and it fell beyond the hills, like a guide.

Two days later they rode again within view of the Qarain by sunrise, and the day after that found one of those caravan traces that led toward the holy city.

The au’it had learned to accommodate the beast’s rocking gait and now used her journeys as well as her rests to record her observations.

And this, too, she wrote.

All the things they had seen and done the au’it had recorded. All these things she would present to the Ila, the unprecedented fall of rain and mud, the fall of stars alike.

And what would her book say?

That the stars fell? That their hope of safety lay in the tower, in the white tents?

The one even the Ila could surely see for herself, and of the other, Marak thought, they had no proof, even for themselves.

Chapter Thirteen

« ^ »

We have seen the stars fall in their thousands. The book contains no event like this.

–The Book of Oburan

The ragged upthrust of the qarain, that division from the Anlakht, was a wall on their right hand as they went. They were on the edge of desolation.

And by the next day they joined a recently used caravan trace and followed it in an abrupt turn toward the north, toward the Qarain.

Marak thought he had crossed this place before. He thought he recognized the vast, stone-littered pan and the rocks beside it.

Tofi recognized it, too. “Besh Karat,” he said excitedly, pointing a thin arm to the left of the trail, where a ridge of rounded rocks stood, looking like its name, a burdened, sulking beast. “We’re at Besh Karat, at the bitter spring. And these last tracks are only a day ahead of us. Another caravan.”

A little after that Norit suddenly reined back her beast, which squalled a protest and fought the rein. “Stop,” she said. “Stop here.”

Marak shifted his foot back and took in the rein. Osan stopped, putting his ears up and laying them down. They were just passing among the rocks, an easy hiding place for vermin, and they were short of the bitter spring. It was not ordinarily a point to rest, and the beasts knew it, and complained.

“A little farther,” Marak said, which was only common sense. “Not in the rocks.”

“No. Here. Now.” Norit tried to get her reluctant beast to kneel: it would not, and came close to veering off the trail in besha obstinacy, but stopped as she began to dismount all the same.

“Damn,” Marak said, and slid down and went to rescue Norit. Tofi and Hati dismounted, and Hati assisted the au’it to dismount. They were at a stop. The freedmen got down.

“For what do we wait now?” he asked Norit, apprehensive and impatient both.

She answered him with one of those cold, clear stares that said Luz, more than Norit, was hearing him.

The vision of rocks and spheres followed, one crashing into the other, the sphere with fire at the point of damage, and a spreading ring of disturbance, like a stone cast into a fountain.

“Make the beasts sit down,” Norit said.

“Why?” he asked.

Norit said nothing. She only sat down, herself, her legs tucked up at a slant to avoid the heat of the sand.

Marak looked at Hati, both his temper and his dread reaching a near boil. They were so close to reaching Oburan: they were on the very trail to the holy city, and was there another calamity?

“Can she not explain, damn her?” he muttered under his breath, meaning Luz, and complaining to no one but the wind and the desert heat. “Do we need the tents? Is a star about to fall on top of us?” They were sitting next to Besh Karat, which indubitably housed vermin… he hoped they were small and timid vermin, nothing larger.

The vision came to him, the ring of fire, so vividly it blotted out the sun. He ground his hands against his eyes, fighting for a sight of Osan’s rein as he tried to grasp it, and shook his head to clear it.

He settled Osan, and if Osan sat, Hati’s beast and the au’it’s settled, complaining. The pack beasts were always willing to settle, in hopes of shedding their packs for a rest, but here they were uneasy, and circled and made trouble, two of them wanting to stray off from their accustomed order. But they settled.

Tofi and the freedmen did not then unpack the baggage, and the beasts complained about that, squalling and rumbling in the heat.

So they sat, all of them, like fools, and waited for this danger, and they waited, and the unwilling beasts shifted their limbs under them and complained noisily, with no relief from the packs or the saddles in the sweltering heat. Tails whipped, beat the sand, thump.

Suddenly the beshti set to bawling again.

The earth shook itself like a beast twitching its skin, a hard shaking. Tofi’s riding beast, which had started to rise in panic, plumped back down again, unhurt, but rolling its eyes and bellowing to the heavens.

Norit sat with her hands in her lap, combing out a tassel on her headcloth.

The tremor passed. Tofi swore and hid his face in his hand, looked up again as if to be sure it was over.

Norit showed no inclination to move.

“Shall we go?” he asked Norit.