Текст книги "Hammerfall"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

“This is my wife’s baby,” he said to Antag, shouting over a gust. “She’s divorced from her husband. He’d kept the child and didn’t want it. At least there’s this.”

“A good thing,” Antag said, as they moved along beside the next village in the line. The baby’s wail for a moment was louder than the wind. “She’s likely scared. The wind’s no lullaby.”

“She’ll sleep,” Marak said. Her struggles were wearying, but they were nothing to him. “She’ll grow tired.”

“So do the beshti,” Antag shouted back. “We can gain a little distance, still, tonight, but we ought to camp with one of the villages next noon, and maybe get that baby some milk or something. Not to mention changing her.”

There was a young man who knew infants with complete common sense. Camping with one of the villages was also better sense than he had been thinking of.

And he was willing to do that.

“We should pick a group now and keep their pace,” he shouted at Antag and the brothers. “No sense wearing the beshti down. We’ll sleep, gain back a little tomorrow, ride back if we can.”

“That’s good!” Antag yelled back at him.

So they fell in with the pace of the third contingent up from where they were. The village was Kais Kurta, a western village, and Andisak was its lord: one of his father’s veterans, a man of his father’s generation, but one who had broken with Tain before this. Marak was dismayed, meeting Andisak, to know where he had arrived.

“It’s possible I shouldn’t be here,” Marak said. “Tain has killed my mother in the Haga camp. I’ve hunted him for my mother’s life as far as the tracks lasted and found nothing that tells me we’ll come on him tonight. So I’m going back to my camp, but we can’t make it all the way tonight. And I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known this was Kais Kurta. What do you want? Will you take us into your camp until the next rest? Or shall we move on? I’ll take no offense if you decide that’s best.”

“Stay with us,” Andisak said, and he was western, so that was that: if Andisak himself invited them, there would be no treachery within the camp, on the offender’s life. Andisak’s reputation was at stake. “Give me the news,” Andisak said, “what the state of affairs is between you and my old ally.”

Marak began to, in the sinking of the wind for a space, and they rode at that pace the night long, resting sometimes, talking with Andisak in the intervals when the wind allowed easier speech, and they kept very close to the contingent in front, even commingling ranks with that village in the confusion of the wind and the blowing sand. Andisak was wise, and allowed no gap between his village and the next, but that spoke only of Kais Kurta. If any village let themselves lag behind, they could stray off the track in the storm and consequently lose all the rest of the caravan, never to find their way again.

It was a terrifying realization. For the first time Marak understood how fragile the chain of life was, far back in the line. The tribes would never break and lose their way… but the villages had no experience at this business of caravans. For most the only journey they had ever made in their lives was the matter of getting to Oburan on a well-traveled trade path. Now the weakest village lord, and his bad decisions, could kill all the rest of the people in the world, and vermin had begun to be a threat, much bolder than ordinary, much bolder than they had been since the war, when they had gathered thick about the battles and preyed on the wounded… the vermin could change their habits, and had begun to encroach, even within the line, where beshti feet cracked shells and where seething masses in the night and the blowing sand denoted some latrine left by a prior tribe.

That was not ordinary. Nothing of the sort was ordinary.

And where was Kais Tain? Somewhere at the rear of the line of march, at least far enough back that a day of riding against the flow of villagers had not located them. Kais Tain was in danger, and those who walked were doomed.

“Have you seen anything of messengers?” Marak asked Andisak, and Andisak said he had.

“They went on down the line, but never came back,” Andisak said. “And the priests come and go, the Ila’s priests.”

The priests were never well loved in the west.

“We have one of the Ila’s books,” Andisak remarked at one point. “At your urging we took it. If you ask me, as the priests did, but I didn’t say, it’s damned dull. Court proceedings. Are they all like that?”

“To my knowledge, probably,” Marak said.

“I’m not sure I want to be written in the Ila’s book,” Andisak said. “What if I keep this book?”

“I’m sure it won’t be that much use. It’s what’s in it that matters; it’s all the books together. The Ila wants that.” So did Luz. So, very much, did Luz, who suffered through this dialogue and nagged him, saying his name over and over: Marak, Marak, until he grew distracted. East, east, east, Luz chided him, impatient of the delay.

Chapter Twenty

« ^ »

Every child must be written down by the au’it and its shape accounted. When a child is born the priest must see it.

–The Book of the Ila’s Au’it

They talked at times, marak and the lord of kais Kurta. They rode at that easy pace the night long, into a sandy, murky dawn, and on into the day, letting the beshti rest from their long trek back in the line.

At dawn, when Lelie became fretful, Andisak found a woman to take Norit’s baby and tend it, and Marak let it go. He had not known how heavy that load had been, in all senses. He slept in the saddle after he had turned the hungry, fretting child over to a strange woman. He slept the sleep of the exhausted, and at the same time Antag and his brothers slept, trusting Andisak’s honor.

All that morning, at Marak’s intermittent waking, the wind blew and the sand still moved. They went over a desert continually being rewritten, discouraging the vermin, making the vermin’s constant hunt for leavings more difficult. The pickings were constantly richer toward the end of the caravan.

That was where trouble gathered. Those were the people with most to fear. Was it possible, if a mobbing started, that all the vermin in the world could sate themselves with a handful of villages and spare the rest? Marak, Marak, his voices chided him, but mildly now. He was sure Luz now had some idea where he was, and that he had turned back toward his duty: she seemed content with that. Whether Luz had also told Norit what gift he had with him he very much doubted; and whether Luz approved of his collecting Lelie along the way, he had no idea.

But he was glad of the voices as a guide, as an indication that Hati was well and Norit was well. He had no idea about his sister, but he had trusted Hati and Norit to take care of her, and if they were well, then that was cared for.

“I’m coming back,” he muttered aloud, to Luz, if she heard him. “I’m all right.”

They dismounted, unsaddled, and rested a while, at noon, as Kais Kurta pitched its tents. And in that rest he took the child from the woman and tucked her up next to him.

“Is it a child you know?” the lord of Kais Kurta asked him, sitting near him. “Or one you found?”

“My wife’s,” he said, and touched a small hand… incredible to him that a hand could be so small, and his sun-dark and marked with the killing-marks, one for every finger. She played with his fingers like Patya when she was a year old. She made him remember.

“We had enough war,” Andisak said with a sigh. There came a broad shadow in the wind, as the industrious young men put up a side flap of their tent, to give them shelter a while from the constant buffeting. Before them, the next village was camped, and the sun sat at a sullen yellow noon.

But now the wind grew chill as it did at times when a larger storm was coming. Haste, the weather said. Make all possible speed. The ground shook, shivered like a besha with an itch.

“So had I,” Marak confessed, “had enough war. Enough of a lot of things.”

“Is this the whole truth?” Andisak asked. “Is there a safe place?”

“I’ve been there,” he said. “I’ve seen the river, the water. Everyone is fed. Everyone has shelter. The ones who went with me stayed there, all but Tofi and his freedmen.”

“I saw you,” Andisak said, “on the ridge. It was a relief to hear someone we know say so.”

“It’s all true, omi. I wouldn’t bring this many innocents into the desert on a lie.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” Andisak said, and nodded slowly. ”And the tribes aren’t fools. They’re up there at the front of all this. To the umi of the Rhonan: welcome.“

Antag nodded, and took down his veil, as a man did with a friend. So his brothers did, and they all did, while Norit’s Lelie slept, collapsed across Marak’s knee.

They shared the prepared meal, but not to their fill. They had riding yet to do. In no more than an hour, they tightened girths and prepared to set out, with Andisak and his household bidding them a courteous farewell.

The weary beshti launched only token complaint. They did not belong with these beshti, and were restless, outside their own camp.

So were they all. The voices dinned a constant noise as Marak got up into the saddle.

From Antag’s hands he then took Lelie up, and she waked and struggled and cried in fretful, constant misery, tears running through dust on her face, but Marak took her inside his coat, and took up an offered aifad for her, and sheltered her and wrapped the cloth about her small face, veiling it, and keeping her close.

“We owe you,” Marak said to Andisak. The woman who had cared for Lelie was the one who had given the aifad. She had turned up among the foremost to see them off, not without regrets, Marak thought, perhaps very much wanting the baby; but Lelie was Norit’s, and once she resumed her place across the saddlebow, wrapped within his coat, she quieted.

They rode out. He had done nothing that he had set out to do, and acquired something he had never planned on.

When, as they rode through the dust and fought the wind, Lelie opened her small arms and took a strong grip on his shirt, he found unaccountable satisfaction in that, and hugged her with his free arm, like a close-held secret.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, a guidance as the earth shook, once strongly enough to stagger the beshti.

They had learned to duck low when that happened. No one fell. The beshti had no liking for the sensation, and a few younger ones in the column bolted and had to be reined in.

Lelie, too, waked and cried, and Marak opened his coat and talked to her: “Be still. I won’t let you fall.”

“Mama,” Lelie said. “Mama, mama, mama.”

Not papa. Marak heard that clearly enough, justifying what he had done in taking her. “Hush,” he said, drying tears and leaving mud on her face instead. “It’s just the wind. It’s just the earth twitching its skin, like a besha. Such things happen these days.”

He flinched, himself, when something boomed, and the earth shook like a table jolted by a fist—all of it in murk that only gave them shadows to see, hulking tents with the flaps down in some instances, and others which had only pitched canvas halfway, as windbreaks, not a safe proposition, if the storm should worsen. It was better to have enough stakes down and more canvas spread.

He said as much to villages where they passed in their long, long ride, and they might have listened to those who looked like tribesmen, as villagers were always wise to listen to those who knew. They were not pressing the beshti now, not asking more of them than they could reasonably give. They rode generally to the outside of the column, to left or to right, on untracked ground, and the beshti startled vermin that were otherwise scuttling about at the edges of the pitched tents… flattened a few, which became snarling balls of other vermin. If he had known nothing from the priests, it would have been troubling, that the vermin were so quick, that they came out of nowhere. They were growing hungry. They had found a food source.

In their ride, they passed priests walking along the spread tents, and exchanged greetings with them… these men he had despised proved hardy and resourceful, and carried messages. He gave them one in the Ila’s name, that the villagers should never pitch lean-tos in a gale, and they nodded solemnly and promised to repeat it.

They moved on past the resting tents. In the lulls he talked with Antag and his brothers, idle talk, for the most part, those things that strangers could say to each other… he clarified rumor, and answered questions on the tower, questions about the land there, about the camp and the nature of the strangers… all these things. Lelie grew fretful and wanted down, and went and squatted in the sand with five men to guard her moment of vulnerability. So they all took the chance, and even while they were occupied at that, Marak saw five and six of the beetles that haunted such sites, and one of the creepers that preyed on the beetles, though the sand was blowing and quickly covering any damp spot.

It was not good.

They moved on, and the wind grew fiercer, and they struggled to keep going as the beshti leaned into the blasts and wanted to turn tail to them. Lelie cried, and exhausted herself, and slept again. But they kept going. The time passed that the camps might begin to stir and pack up, Marak thought, but no one moved in front, and so the villages down the line stayed put later, and later.

The dim glow in the murk that was the sun had inclined halfway down the sky and no one had stirred. Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said, and he began to fear that Luz was holding the whole caravan for him. On the one hand they might be wiser to rest this storm out, and on the other it was loss of time, precious time, time that was worth lives, if there was any chance of moving at all. He had no foreknowledge of better coming, only of worse, and when he shut his eyes, now, which were crusted with dust and sand and running tears, he saw the ring of fire, over and over and over, worse and worse as he grew more tired.

Once he had been terrified of the visions for themselves. Now he had a warm weight against his side, and village lords telling him, if he asked, that they understood everything, oh, yes, and all their precautions were enough.

He began to understand a diffuse sort of fear, not acute, but widespread, a sense of disaster shaping about them. He began to understand he cared in more than the abstract, that he cared for the weight in his arms, and that it was all too large. He had not been able to ride all the way to the back of this mass of people, and that there was more to be done to save the people than one man could do, more to be done than any ten men could suffice to do.

His father had one answer. The Ila might have one. Luz had, and moved to execute it. There were all these competitors, when the vermin were gathering to feed on their corpses.

The best thing he could ask was for his father to gather all the discontent, the core of the abjori, and trail the column, so that perhaps the fact that the column reached refuge and the fact that the things Luz warned of came about would make Tain understand, and change his tactics, because after the caravan entered sanctuary, there would be no caravans to prey on. Ever.

And no one out here yet understood that. No one understood that where the producers of affluence went, those that ate the scraps would follow after, more and more desperate. The land would not be the same, and such as Lelie would not inherit anything her elders would recognize.

That was what he held in his arms. That was what breathed and wriggled and fretted against his heart. It was time-to-come. It was After. It was what-next, insistent with its sole question and tearful in its protests about its situation.

It made him aware that his own vision stopped at Norit’s hammerfall, again, and again, and again repeated in his sight: it reached that point and stopped, just stopped, with the scouring of everything he knew from off the face of the earth. Antag and his brothers asked him questions, What will we do? Where will we trade, when we’re there? and he could not answer any of them, except to laugh hollowly and say that he supposed they would lie under palm trees in paradise and eat until they had an idea.

Antag laughed at the joke, somewhat desperately, gallantly. Marak reached inside his coat and held his hand on Lelie’s back, and felt her breathe, quiet as she was. Now he was afraid of what-next. What about Lelie? What about the children? What about the books, safe in the hands of every elder?

Antag had asked him, “What do we do when we get there?” and he had said, “Lie under the palm trees,” but what resounded in his brain over and over again, with the visions of damnation, was the building of a city, a city like Oburan, around the Tower.

We make a city. We grow strong. We build, woman, and we make, and we do, no matter this enemy we never asked to have. We fightagainst our ruin, woman. And we get children to inherit what we build, and we live, woman. I give youa vision. This is what we have to have.

Marak, Marak, Marak, hurry, the voices said now. We’re waiting. Keep coming. Weather’s moving in. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

He picked up the pace as they came across the first camp of the tribes. The caravan still waited, lashed down tight against the storm that was coming. And if that stayed true, Osan would have his rest at the end of the ride, and if it was not, if he had to stop to rest, then he would camp beside the moving caravan and wait until Osan was fit. Antag and his brothers asked no questions of his intentions. But they kept with him; and “Mama,” Lelie wailed against his heart.

Had she never ceased to call that, in all the time since the Ila’s men had taken her mother away?

And had the man in Norit’s songs waited so little time before taking another wife?

“Hush,” he said to her, just beneath the wind, just beneath what his companions could hear. “Hush.”

Your mother’s waiting, he said to Lelie in his mind. Luz won’t have all her attention now. It’s not fair, what she does to your mother.

“Be still,” he said, “be patient. It’s only the wind, and the beshti can see the way, if we can’t. They always know the way.”

They passed camp after camp, and now the beshti had some recognition in their heads, or some sense in them that said their own bands were close. They began to move faster and faster, and they passed alongside the tribal camps, one and the next.

They reached the Rhonan, and there Antag and his brothers reined back their beshti from the goal they wanted, only for a word or two.

“Good luck to the mother of the child,” Antag said. “And good luck to you, Marak Trin, wherever we go.”

“My thanks to you and your lord,” Marak said. “My tent will always shelter you and your tribe.”

It was what friendly tribes said. They were pleased: despite the veils, he could see that.

“And ours, yours,” they answered with the ritual courtesy. “At any time.”

The storm battered them. They had said all that had to be said. He was within easy reach of his own camp, and he gave Osan the signal to move.

“He may be out there,” Antag said to his back. “Tain is a clever man. Be careful.”

“I will be.” He gave Osan his head, and they rode beside the column, he with Lelie, at a traveling clip. People in the Haga camp had put up the tent sides. Warnings about the weather had passed from Norit, or the tribes sensed it themselves, and not empty fear, either. From moment to moment the dust cut off all view: the sun was on the horizon now, at his back, and cast no shadow at all in the thick air.

He rode finally alongside his own tents, and Osan made a jogging, eager approach to the beshti he knew, the comfort of his own herd. The side flaps of these tents, too, were down: the wind was cold, and he hoped for help as he rode Osan in among the beshti of his own tent and began to get down.

A gun went off. He stopped in mid-dismount, with Lelie in his arm, and was thinking of having to unsaddle Osan on his own when that strange thing happened: he was still thinking of it as a bullet tore through him where he held Lelie. Osan shied, finishing the motion, and went out from under him.

He fell toward his back because Osan’s motion had flung him that way, and the shot had, and he was conscious of holding Lelie, but not being sure he had her as he went down. He was astonished at the turn of fortunes.

Then he hit the sand full on his back, and hit his head, and heard Hati shout and swear… he thought it was Hati. He lay there winded, dimly trying to find out whether he held the child, and aware that she was wet and hot, and trying to cry, not fretfully, but in earnest—but she was as winded as he was, and could not somehow get her breath.

“Get them!” Hati shouted at someone, and immediately a hand came under his head and an arm tried to lift him.

“It’s a baby,” someone said. “It’s shot, too, right through the leg.”

He was shocked, and angry, and tried to see the damage the bullet had done, but he could not get his head up. He would not let go of Lelie. He had held her, he had protected her, and he went on doing it until Hati pried his hand off the baby. Her, he trusted. Norit, he would trust.

If he was shot, it was his father’s doing. There was no one else. They were all in danger.

“Get him,” he tried to tell Hati. “Get under cover. Someone get him.”

“The captain’s men are going after him,” Hati said. She understood him. Someone was trying to press a cloth against his side, where Lelie was lying, and wanted to pick her up. “Let go,” Hati said. “Marak. Let go. Let them take her.”

“It’s Norit’s baby,” he said. “It’s that Lelie she asked for. Her baby.” But he was not at all sure Hati heard. He had no idea where anyone was, and that was unusual, as regarded his wives. His voices failed him. His whole sense of the world was fading. Their sense of presence had faded. He was sinking, and they tried to turn him over, which further confused his sense of the world.

“It went out his back,” Tofi’s voice said. “That’s good.”

“It could have carried threads into him. Heat some oil.”

Lelie had been shot, an innocent, if the world had one. The bullet had gone through her before it reached him. He had meant to save her, Lelie’s father had failed her, and his father had meant to kill him, and this was the way it all came together. It was his own father who had done all this mischief, his father who had won the throw. He had no doubt of it. His father had been more clever, still more clever, after all these years. His father had won, at least the contest between them, and he might die. Not dying was the only way to spite Tain. He told himself that.

Men were still shouting and running around him. The beshti complained, that noise which had underlain half his life. He heard a cry, a thin, desperate kind of baby cry, absolute indignation, it seemed to him, and justified, if ever a cry was justified in the world. “How bad is the baby?” he asked Hati, when she leaned close.

“She’s shot, too,” Hati said. “Norit. Norit, takeher, damn it. Don’t stand and stare like a fool!”

The baby still cried, more distantly. Pieces of his recollection scattered, like coins across a floor.

“Someone had better unsaddle Osan,” he said. “He’s been under saddle since yesterday. Maybe longer.” He could not remember. “Rub his legs.”

“We’ll see to him,” Hati promised him.

“Is he going to die?” That wail was his sister’s voice. He could not remember why she was there. “Is he going to die?” He tried to answer her for himself, though he could not see her. “No,” he said.

But after that men picked him up by the edges of his robe and carried him into the walled tent, where they had an oil light.

They let him down. He was content simply to breathe. The wind failed to reach here. The noise and the dust was less. He could have sunk into sleep, quite gladly.

But they brought hot oil, and poured it into the wound, repeated doses. He felt other faculties dimming as a fierce throbbing attended the hurt.

“It’s swelling,” someone said. “It won’t take the oil.”

The makers were at work. His makers. His protectors. About the baby he had no idea. He simply lay still, shut his eyes, tried to ride through the pain while they probed and cleaned: he fainted, and came back, and fainted again, but by the second waking there were wet compresses on the wound, and they had given up on the hot oil.

Hati was by him. He found no need to talk. The pain was all, for a while, and he could not organize his thoughts to want or wish anything beyond that. He simply lay still, wondering whether they had delayed for the storm, or for him. He vaguely knew Hati could answer that one question, but he had no wish to open a conversation he could not carry further. He was growing delirious with the fever, and his head hurt worse than any headache in his life. He decided he was willing to die, so long as no one disturbed him or hurt his head. The veins in his temples and in his ears seemed apt to rupture, the pressure was so great, and tears leaked from his burning eyes simply because there was nowhere else for the pressure to go.

The makers might not win this one, he thought, and if that was so, then he urgently had to muster the wherewithal to talk to Hati. There were instructions he had to give.

“We can’t stay camped,” he said, and what he tried to say was: ”The moment the weather allows, we have to move out of here. Something’s coming.“

“I know,” Hati said. “Be still. Sleep.”

“Did you hear me?” he tried to ask. He still heard Lelie crying, and he lost the thread of communication with Hati for a while, but he thought about it while he rested.

Marak, the voices said, and he tried to listen and learn this time. He hoped Luz could reach him, explain to him, understand their situation and get them to safety. He saw dots before his eyes, but it was one of those kind of visions he thought came from fever, not from Luz.

Then the dots, red and blue, mostly, acquired significance, individuality. They moved, and followed patterns. Life depended on them, and they made chains, spiraling like the flight of vermin.

It was surely fever. In a remote part of his mind he knew he was delirious.

Marak, the voices said again. Marak.

And in his dream, “I’m listening,” he said aloud. “Tell me what to do.”

You’ve been foolish, Luz said.

“ I know that,” he said in this dream, but he was mesmerized by the dots, wholly absorbed by them, as if they were the secret to all the world, just revealed to him.

You’re looking at the nanisims, Luz said to him. These are the makers. Are you listening this time?

“ Yes,” he said. “ Help us get out of here.”

They heal you when you’re injured. They’re my creatures, at work now, patching the damage you’ve done.

“ I’ve done. I didn’t do it. My father did.”

Small difference.

“ That’s fine. I’ll get well. Go away. I’m in too much pain to talk.”

The swelling can’t be helped. Your body does that when the nanisims rush to an injury: there are so many they congest the area. They diverge, you know, the makers aren’t the only sort. The makers make other makers, some of them the body’s own nanisims, if you like.

“ If I live I’m sure I’ll appreciate it.”

I’m sure you will, Luz said. Are you hearing me now? It’s rare that I can get your whole attention.

“ I’m trying.”

I’m sure you are. But know this: you carry these nanisims wherever you go, and shed them into the soil and the water. Or into blood. They work very efficiently in the bloodstream.

“ Nice.”

You took it on yourself to bring Norit’s baby. You risked every life in the world for one child.

“ As you did, to get the Ila.” Now he roused almost to consciousness, and for a moment the dots and their movements were not the whole world. “ The baby is Norit’s child. She misses her child. Is that such an offense to you?”

It’s certainly an inconvenience to her. But we have the child now: your blood shed new makers into her, not the old sort, not the sort she had from being in Norit’s body, rather the new ones we gave you at the tower. An unintended gift, and we get very little of sense from her, but she does try.

“ Damn you, let the child alone.”

She’ll heal, thanks to your makers. As you will. And you’ll shed your makers wherever you pass. You constantly shed them into the sand, and beetles take them up… small use, those. But we can direct their structure. You shed them everywhere. You’ve begun what the ondat decreed. Youare that change. You war with the Ila simply by breathing.

Dots built intricate structures, moved, shifted, built towers and strings and divided. Some beat like imprisoned birds, only fast, far, far faster. Some turned and shed pieces of themselves. It became incredibly sinister, the activity of those moving forms.

Big eaters eat little eaters and on they go, our makers, the Ila’s makers. They carry on warfare, and that war spreads wherever you go, and they change what they touch. If the Ila offers a man a cup of water, these nanoceles, these makers, go with that touch.

If a man goes back to his village and sleeps with his wife, so the makers will spread, and spread when she prepares a meal, or goes to the well, or kisses her child. All through the world, these makers renew themselves and become newer kinds.

And all these things the Ila does, because she contains her master makers. As you contain mine. And mine are essential. You have to live.

“ That’s comforting to know.”

You have to live. Tain has become my enemy and her friend.

“ Tain wouldn’t like being the Ila’s friend.”

Do you hear me? Repeat what I say.

“Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. God, I have your makers in me! The Ila has her own. And you’re against my father and he’s forher for some reason. But I don’t understand. And I don’t give a damn.” He wanted the rapid dots to stop, slow down, cease their actions. But he would not betray a weakness. His father had taught him that among his first lessons, never betray a weakness, never admit to one.

Had reticence and deceit helped Tain? Was it a reasonable way for a man to live, who hoped to be loved?