C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Page 13

  The water-au'it meanwhile measured out the flow by which they filled all the waterskins, theirs and those large ones the beasts carried, to the brim. They favored themselves, at the Ila's charge, with a last, full drink from the sweet water, and the lord of the village, not disparaging madmen who paid well, gave each of them a fresh fruit, even the slaves.

  It was a welcome surprise. Tofi was ready, however, and gave the lord a token, one of their fine bronze heating-mirrors, wrapped in soft leather.

  "Count this, too, from the Ila," Marak said in all honesty.

  "We look forward to your return," the lord of Pori said, bowed deeply and cherished the big mirror against his heart.

  Would they? Marak asked himself. He had not asked himself that question in their stay here. It was their mission. But would they?

  The lord's wife presented a bundle of dried fruit, which was a fine gift, too, one which Marak did not intend to hoard to himself; but by now he feared he was not as expressive as he wished. Marak, Marak, the voices were saying and in his head he saw the cave of suns and imagined Kassan and Foragi descending rocks, afoot, in danger. In his blood was a fever to be moving he had not felt since the Ila's hall. Structures of fire shot through his vision, and the sweet-sour taste of the living fruit, dripping with juices, provided its own distraction. He bid farewell with juice-wet fingers and kept the pit in his mouth, too distracted for conversation or wit.

  Haste, the voices seemed to say now. Haste, as if someone were waiting and impatient. Was the vision of Kassan and Foragi added to the rest? Or did ordinary men see such things? He had never understood, having been mad all his life.

  There was still loud complaint from the beasts, from the village edge to the caravan track outside, and onto the flat that stretched before them. But, Marak! the voices said, over and over and over, and the fire was in the rest of them. Water and fresh fruit and willing flesh had no power like what seethed in the mad now. It had overpowered the soldiers. Now it overpowered even Malin, who might have wanted to stay in Pori. She wept. She ran off among the buildings. And she crept back again, and sought her riding beast, catching its rein. But she had no one to help her mount. She tried to make it kneel, and it only circled and bawled.

  "Damn you!" she shouted. It made some of the villagers laugh, but none of the mad was amused.

  "Do we want her?" Hati asked, in the haze of images and the din of voices.

  Malin had gotten two village men to lift her up, and suffered indignities of their hands on the way. But she landed astride, her clothes utterly in disarray, and took the rein in both hands, and kicked the recalcitrant beast as fiercely as she could. It threw back its head and complained, but she had the rein in her hands, and turned him, to the howling mirth of the villagers.

  "Let us go," Marak said to Tofi, who was already out of countenance with the sudden departure, and with Malin, and the missing soldiers.

  "This isn't wise," Tofi said. "This isn't a race, omi."

  Marak was sure it was not. But it satisfied the voices. And not even Malin could slither out of their grip.

  Chapter Nine

  The stars in heaven are numbered and the Ila knows the names of them.

  -The Book of Oburan

  They found their missing pair staggering along toward noon, glassy-eyed and confused, on a steep shale. Alive. That was the wonder.

  "Where are you going, fools?" Marak asked.

  "To the tower," Foragi said, and the other, Kassan:

  "The cave."

  "Give them water," Marak said. "They seem alive enough to save."

  "Things are growing in our eyes," the one cried, and it was all too true: Marak knew; all the mad knew: there were times that the lines of fire seemed to proliferate, to demand attention, to build and build and build.

  They had brought beasts saddled for their fellow fools, but it was too steep to mount, and they were big men, too heavy to lift up at the disadvantage of the slope. The ex-soldiers had to walk down.

  "These men we can do without," Tofi said in a low voice as they rode. "The woman we can do without, most of all. They're the troublemakers. There always are, in a caravan, and these are ours."

  "There always are," Marak agreed. "Without their bad example, someone else would have to be the fool. Would they not?"

  Tofi gave an uncertain laugh, and thought about it on the way down the shale.

  By the time they got down it was noon, and Foragi had cut his boot on a rock, and bloodied his foot. That was not good. Tofi was out of sorts, and Marak this time agreed with him.

  "We shouldn't camp near this accident," Tofi said. "We should bind that up, and get him on his beast, and be another hour away before we rest."

  "We'll do that," Marak said, well knowing the reasons. He himself got the kit and bound up the wound and dried it with powders, and scoured the boot out with sand and liniment. The au'it recorded the men's recovery, and their treatment.

  In the meanwhile they all baked in the sun, and the beasts grew ill-tempered before they set themselves under way, several of the pack beasts having sat down, then refusing to rise until they were completely unpacked and allowed to stand. Then they had to be packed up again, all to grumbling and complaint and bawling up and down the line.

  They were at the edge of a stony plain, lower than the highlands of the Lakht, a region littered with fragments of shale. The persistent wind moved the sand always in the same direction, in great red ripples flecked with black, and there was no easy way across. The beasts complained. Men complained.

  Tofi avowed he had no idea, beyond Pori, where they were bound, except the star Kop still would provide their easterly direction.

  "East is all we have," Marak confessed to Hati, to Norit, to the au'it, and necessarily to the men who shared his tent, two hours later, in the hellish heat of a still afternoon on the pan. "East. I don't know what else to do, now."

  Since the debacle at noon, he had regretted leaving Pori. His haste to put them on the road seemed foolish to him now that they had found the soldiers alive, even if another night might have lost them. They had lost others. Proffa the tailor had been a fine man, worth ten of those two. But an underlying urgency gnawed at his reason. He saw it working in the soldiers. He saw it building in others. There was no more economy and no more common sense where that impulse took over. Structures built within his eyes. They shaped letters. Hurry, they said. No delay.

  They burned there, overlying the world.

  "I see words," he admitted to Hati.

  "How can you see words?"

  "I see them," he said. "Like the au'it. I read. We're late for something. We have to hurry. I don't know why that's so. The soldiers knew it. Maybe they can read, though I'd have doubted it."

  The au'it wrote all they said, for the Ila's record.

  "I see people walking," one of the others said, Kosul the potter, who sat nearby, and that, it struck him, was exactly what Norit had said. "They want us all."

  "The people there in the tower want us," Norit said in this council of equals they had made in their tent. "I don't know why."

  Heads generally nodded agreement.

  And who had said there were people in the tower? But now they all believed it, and everyone agreed. Whether or not the soldiers could read, he had no idea. They had chosen the shade of the other tent, preferring the company of Maol and Tofi and the slaves, who detested them. most of all preferring Malin, who would not come near Hati, and there were only two tents in which to shelter.

  Marak's skin crawled. He wanted to rise up and deny all relationship with the rest of them.

  And yet he increasingly formed a notion in his head not only of a threat sweeping down on them from every quarter of the earth, but of a refuge toward which they walked, one at the very heart of all the mystery they pursued, one they must reach soon, or die.

  He shivered, and Norit caught the shiver, and so did Hati, then no few of the others.

  All at once, for no reason whatsoever, he-all of th
em, perhaps-saw a hall of suns; and figures moving shadowlike among them. Structures traced fire across his vision.

  He shouted. He clenched his hands and saw a door before him, and that door moved with no hand touching it, like the Ila's doors, but what was behind that door he could not answer and did not want to know.

  A man cried out near him, and fell down in a fit. "I see spirits!" he cried. "The god! The god! Ila save us and intercede! I see the god!"

  Fever rushed over Marak's skin, making his heart beat hard and his ears roar with sound.

  Marak, a single voice said, wishing his attention, and he tried to give it, but the images came pouring through. From the other tent, at greater remove, there were shrieks and shouts.

  Tower and cave and star, and each opened, and divulged a heart of structures and shapes and forms and light, all jumbled together. Walls were built of light and fire. Structures had tastes. Sounds had texture like rough sand.

  He shouted. He leapt up and found something to lean on, the smooth strength of a tent pole, proving where he was. He rested his head against it, and stayed there long, long, not daring move until the visions stopped.

  The fever had come back, as if he had taken a wound; and when his vision cleared he saw Norit had clenched her arms across her stomach and Hati had her hands braced before her mouth, gazing at nothing at all.

  They had rushed out into the wilderness like novices, they had found their lost, and now they suffered for it.

  Tofi came over to find them in that condition. Men were lying in fits and others lying tranquilly staring at the ceiling. "What's this?" Tofi cried, and then began to back out from under the shade of the tent, as if he feared for his life. They all might be in that condition, in both tents, all but the sane.

  Marak roused himself so far as to lift his head. "Resting," Marak said. "Only resting. Is it time to move?"

  Marak! The voices screamed at him, shook him, raged at him with lights. Hurry, hurry, hurry!

  "It's time," Tofi said fearfully, doubtless longing for Pori, and safety, and sane men.

  Marak, pulled Hati up, saw the vacancy in her eyes, and shook her. "Wake," he said. "Wake. Sleep in the saddle."

  No father, no mother, no sister, no wife, no lover could divert them. Lifelong, one purpose, one need. East. East. East, where the sun begins.

  Norit, too, he pulled to her feet. The au'it and Tofi woke the others, and they began to pull the stakes and collapse the tents.

  Malin and the soldiers, it turned out, had gone, simply walked ahead of them when the madness had taken hold, and no one had noticed until they all mounted up, and there were two beasts too many. So all their haste to leave Pori was wasted, and no one much cared about three fools madder than the rest of them.

  But Marak cared. The land descended, beyond the dunes, in more dry, broken shale, black rock that heated enough in the afternoon to blister a human foot, and the beasts hated the footing. the heat hurt even through their pads, and their long, thin legs had trouble dealing with a skid.

  More, there began to be blood on the shale, and off toward the shadowing east, an ominous gathering of vermin dotted the sky.

  They were following three fools. What could they expect?

  Yet haste! haste! haste! the voices railed, and the tower built itself, and fire ran across the horizon.

  "They're leaving blood," Hati said, on the slide above him. "This is not safe."

  "What is safe?" Tofi asked with an anxious laugh, from below them. They were on the steep part of the shale, now, and every step the beasts made cracked into a thousand sliding fragments. "What has been safe?"

  He no more than said it than there came a loud slippage and dark rush of dust and shale past them, and beasts bawled and shied in a cascade of fragments.

  One of the pack beasts had fallen, and took his burden with him, sliding all the way down to the bottom. It flailed and bawled and could not rise from its burden, and it remained a sobering example of a misstep until they could make the long descent and deal with it.

  The beast when they reached it had broken bones, and had to be killed: Bosginde did that with a quick stroke and covered the blood-soaked shale with shovelfuls of dry sand, where he could scrape enough together for the purpose.

  The water bags had not broken. None of the supplies was lost, except a tent's deep-irons, which lay far up on the unstable slope, in plain sight, but Tofi ruled against sending anyone up, no matter the value.

  "We can cut the beast up for meat," the potter said. "We can take the best."

  "No," Hati said fiercely. "Leave it all. Leave all the gear. Let us move. We may have saved those three fools, but we may lose ourselves if we stand staring!"

  There was that feeling in the wind. There was disaster about the whole day, and Tofi gave the order to the slaves to apportion out the packs and get them all moving.

  Even so, the first crawling vermin appeared among the rocks before they had gotten the packs redistributed.

  "What is that?" Norit asked, looking around her. There was a scrabbling in the rocks, a snarl of combat. "What's that?"

  "A feast in the desert gains too many guests," Marak said. They had followed a blood trail. With the letting of the blood from the beast's wounds, they had the raw meat smell about them. It carried far on the desert wind: even a man could smell it. Carrying pack items that might have blood on them had risk, once the carrion-eaters gathered.

  Haste, the voices said to him, no delay. No waiting.

  The storm would have driven the vermin to cover, and to hunger, and the rearrangement of the land would drive some of the smallest out of their ranges. The whole path of the storm might be unsettled, and that storm track took shape in the back of Marak's mind the way the shape of the storm had appeared in the images. He sensed desperation in the circling predators. He cursed himself for a fool not having anticipated that Foragi might have been already past reason.

  One need not fear the strongest beast on the Lakht, that was the proverb. The strongest would take the carcass. But the weak were gathering, too, and they might follow the second choice. He saw the sky over them gathering with ten and twenty and thirty of the vermin.

  "Hurry," Tofi said to the slaves, as they went about the work with the packs. "You'll be first and afoot if the vermin come on us! Move, you sons of damnation!"

  The first of the flying and the crawling vermin arrived and began worrying at the carcass with them only a stone's throw away. Another few sent down a shower of shale fragments, coming down the slide.

  The quick and the desperate came first. They were not the strongest, only the earliest, the most opportunistic, harbinger of what else would come. They growled and tore into the carcass and the scent of blood and then entrails grew in the air.

  "Hurry!" Hati said.

  "A'ip!" Tofi yelled. "Ya! a'ip!" The beast the slaves were loading stood trembling, and without complaint, when she gave a jerk on its lead.

  More of the flying vermin had landed.

  And a glance off across the land showed a furtive, eye-deceiving movement as if the land itself had come to life.

  Marak saw Norit into the saddle, delayed to assist Tofi's women while Tofi railed on his slaves. Osan had gotten up onto his feet.

  He did not delay then to make Osan kneel again. He seized the rein, jumped, and seized the saddle, hauling himself up by brute strength until he put a foot in the mounting loop, a move he had doubted he could do. Osan was moving before he could land in the saddle and tuck his leading foot into place. Tofi scrambled up, and the slaves mounted in desperate haste, the pack beasts tethered in line and each trying to move at once.

  Osan quickened his pace, flicking his ears in distress, laying them back at what he smelled. The beasts knew what the nomads of the Lakht knew, what Hati had foretold. Marak himself had never seen a mobbing. few in the Lakht had seen it and lived.

  The beasts picked up their pace, treading heedlessly, crushing small vermin that chanced underfoot, creatures hardly more
than a hand's length. The mobbing started on that scale, other creatures turning toward the smell of death near at hand, already beginning to gorge and being bitten and clawed by other creatures nearby.

  In an instant what had begun as a flattened multipede became a fist-sized ball of struggling eaters that grew larger by the moment.

  All that hunger, Marak thought, only a day or so out from the rich oasis of Pori. And the storm had churned it to madness of a different kind, a natural frenzy.

  The beshti hit a traveling run, a difficult pace for the unhabituated, and next to a flat-out bolt, which might fling the weak riders from the saddle. Marak held Osan back, and crossed him in front of Tofi's men, who were about to break ahead.