Hammerfall (33 page)

“Norit din Karda is dead. Her mother is dead. Her father is dead. Her aunts are all dead. And she's dead.”

“To the life she had in Tarsa, yes. She is.”

The old man made no reply.

“Is Lelie dead?”

Still there was no reply.

“She named that name to us,” Marak said. “Is it a sister? A mother? A daughter?”

The old man was still a while answering. But Marak waited.

“The girl's with her father,” the old man said. “As she should be.”

“A daughter, then.”

“Yes.”

“Does the father treat her well?” He as much as any man knew the situation of an unwanted child, and the fate of one dragged into the affairs of state and the angers of leaders.

“She's alive,” Agi said flatly. That was all.

Not a good situation, then. And Marak made a quick decision, a desperate and dangerous decision, since if there was one person on whom thousands of lives relied, it was Norit, through whom Luz spoke most easily; and if there was one person whose sanity was in greatest danger, it was Norit. “If the father isn't happy, then give her to me, omi. I'll relieve the father of an obligation and take good care of her.”

The old man considered the proposition.

“This is a great lord,” Antag said across the wind-battered gap. “What he says he'll do, he'll do, omi.”

The old lord reined aside to one of his own men and spoke.

Then that man, no skilled rider, managed to turn aside in the storm and the dark and the stubborn persistence of the beshti in evading the wind, and to go back into the caravan of Tarsa.

No one spoke. The effort to converse was too great, and Agi had no great desire to speak to them, that was clear. Marak waited, thinking how he had come out into the caravan to take a life close to him and now bid to save one he had never met.

Memnanan's messenger had never gotten here. Why that was he still had no idea, and saw no profit in asking: it was the desert at fault, the abjori, his father, or Agi himself, but it was nothing he could mend now, under present circumstances. In some measure he was a fool even to trouble what was settled, a fool to think of taking a young child back the route he had come. It was a dangerous enough ride for him and the Rhonandin, and he had no idea of Norit's frame of mind. One might:
Marak, Marak,
his voices raged at him. But he paid no attention. He shut his eyes. He rode without attention to anyone. He waited.

Men moved forward in the line, one that might be the old man's messenger, the other that might have some answer about the child, both faceless shadows in the violent, sand-edged dark.

“Where is this Marak Trin?” one asked. “Who wants this child?”

Marak saw no child in the man's possession. “I'm Marak Trin Tain,” he said, to have that clear. “I want this child for a woman who asked for her.”

“My wife is dead,” the man said, and Marak had no idea of his name, though sharing what they shared it seemed he ought to know that small fact.

“Do you want the child for yourself?” Marak asked him. “I haven't come to take it, if you want it. But I'm telling you there's one who does, desperately.”

“Is it my Norit?” the man shouted across the wind. “Is she the prophet we heard? Is it really Norit?”

“She is the prophet,” Marak said. “And she speaks well of you. And she misses Lelie.”

“I have a new wife,” the man said. “My Norit is dead.”

“She loves you,” Marak said to him, deciding he might feel sorry for this man, deciding that his rights here were limited and circumscribed by older ones. “She's well. But she suffers.”

“Is she sane?” Shouting across the wind robbed the voice of inflection. It might have been an accusation. Or a heartfelt longing.

“Sane enough she guides us all,” he shouted back. “Sane enough to this hour, but her duty won't bring her back, not likely, not if you've married again. Give her the child if she's a trouble to you. If she isn't, then be a father to her. And if you want Norit back—” He had no power to give Norit to anyone. “Come forward in the line and ask her for yourself.”

“I have my new wife,” the man answered him. He unfolded his robe and unskillfully managed his besha closer to Osan, to pass across a small bundle, a half-limp child who waked on being exposed to the blasting wind, and struggled fretfully.

Marak reached across and took it under the arms, a light weight, a girl, he thought, maybe about a year of age, maybe two. She seemed light for her size.

“Do you want to give her up?” Marak shouted at the father, at Norit's husband. “Don't do it if you don't! I'm here to offer and ask, not to order! The Ila's man came asking. Did you ever hear him?”

“I heard nothing,” the husband said back to him. “But Norit is mad. So Lelie may be. And my new wife doesn't want her.”

“Then I'll take her to her mother,” Marak said, and opened his robe and snugged the infant into that warm shelter. The baby fought him. He hugged her tightly, preventing her struggles. He feared even so that he had robbed the father, but if what the father said was so, maybe he had saved the child a warfare with a new wife, one that wanted no reminders of a marriage the father had not willingly left, a villager that would never reach such an accommodation as he and Hati had with Norit. “I'll take care of her,” he said. “Shall I say anything to Norit?”

“She's dead,” was all the husband would say, as Agi said, as everyone in the village might say.

“Antag!” Marak called out, gathering his companions, and rode forward with the storm at his back, on across the gap at which Tarsa lagged behind the next village. He felt obliged to explain himself; but he had no explanation that would make sense to strangers.

“We were looking for this baby,” he said, feeling that life squirm against him. The wind drowned its outcries and its fear. He was holding it too tightly, and eased his grip, and patted it inside his coat, trying to still its crying.
Her
crying. Lelie had ceased to be an abstract question, and became a living distraction, a personal folly.

If he had been alone, he might have said to himself Tarsa was not all he wanted to find. Tarsa was not what he had looked for. But he had found Tarsa, all the same, and he had pursued a question which was not his question, and met a man he had never wanted to meet, and acquired an answer that had already cost a life.

And now if he did anything but go back to the Ila he risked more than himself, and he risked these men, and more. The squirming bundle against his side, trying to kick him, told him how much he had risked already, and reminded him there were other concerns besides his blood debt, and his mother, and his grief. He wanted no part of these concerns . . . if he had his own way he would hand the baby to Antag and keep going; and he could do that.

But thinking once meant thinking twice, and thinking twice told him that if it had been rash to come out here, it was increasingly his father's territory, back here among the villages, among men whose loyalties were in question. His loss might lose all the rest, and he had something to live for . . . he had two women, and a young man, and even the Ila's captain, who had trusted him with all he personally cared about.

He could not go back to Kais Tain. Having seen a father part with his daughter and a village agree with that act, he could no longer delude himself that Kais Tain would ever confess their own guilt for turning him out. They would never change their minds, or give up their allegiance to Tain. He had rescued Lelie, but no one would rescue him, if he went on into territory where Tain's word had more credit than his, and where a man who spoke for the Ila was the enemy.

He hugged the child more gently, a living prize, when the ride had begun with a death. He knew Kaptai would have hugged Lelie. Kaptai had had a large soul. Kaptai had loved his father, which took particular persistence and patience—and too much patience, and too much belief. He knew now what she had never confessed: that she never should have left her tribe, and now Kaptai lay somewhere ahead of him in the dark, that, for all her love and her loyalty . . . not prey to vermin, not now, not like those shallow-buried others . . . not when the sand got up like this, and not when, knowing it, the Haga raised a mound over their dead. The sand would cover her, make her the heart of a dune, turn her to one of those strange dead the sand gave up rarely. She had loved the high desert, and now it took her in, and he could do nothing to mend her death and nothing to get her back.

“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.

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
fight
against our ruin, woman. And we get children to inherit what we build, and we live, woman. I give
you
a 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.