C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Page 19

  The beasts grumbled. Tofi grumbled not having had all their sleep. Haste, haste, haste, the voices said. Luz tormented them with threats, with visions, with promises: Norit suffered, too, and her eyes looked weary and worried.

  They came to that rising of the land that led up to the Lakht, and to the path on the slope where they had lost the one beast.

  "That's where the besha fell," Tofi said, pointing. "That's our trail."

  They looked up, but nothing remained up on the shale where it had fallen, not a bone, not a scrap of cloth or a remnant of the saddle. Of vermin there was no other sign. They ate, and they dispersed. might have fought among themselves. The survivors would be sated. The crumbling rock gave no hint of past violence, only a single trail of bright reflection on the slope where broken shale marked the fatal slide.

  They had arrived on the ascent by midmorning, as they hoped. They dismounted and led their beasts up, and climbed with caution: whoever had made the fragile path down off the Lakht, likely Pori's hunters, had somewhat compacted the fragile rock, and their own passage had compacted it further, but it was steep and narrow, no place for a misstep, and one beast tended to rush up behind the beast higher up.

  The slaves below, hindmost, were not helping. "Fools!" Tofi called out, looking back, and risked his life, descending the trail side to hold back one beast until the one ahead had vacated a foothold for it.

  They made the crest. They were on the Lakht. Tofi, bedraggled and dusty, came up last. "I said get before them!" Tofi shouted at the slaves. "I said hold the line back! I said be a gateway, not an open door! Shall I free fools? How will you make a living in the world?"

  The slaves were chagrined, and hung their heads; but it came to Marak with sudden force that Tofi believed the world would go on, and that he himself went on believing it, at heart. while if Luz was right there would be no continuation, no order of life such as they knew-

  If Luz was right. If she was, then Tofi's promises were a mirage, Tofi's promises, his beliefs. all mirage, all blind faith. After a rest full of nightmares and visions it came to him like a blow to the heart, and for an instant the question devastated him: How will you make a living in the world?

  How would they deal with a changed desert, and this enemy, and Luz's protection.

  What would he say to the Ila if he could reach her?

  Is Luz telling the truth? That would be the first thing.

  To find his mother and get her into his hands. that was where he was going.

  But for what? For what better life?

  He sat down on a convenient flat shelf of rock, and tried not to find deeper answers. He had to rest; they all had to rest. The beasts were weak-legged from the climb, and sat down under their burdens. It was no time for prolonged thinking. It could only lead to despair.

  "We should pitch the tent," Tofi came to him to say. "We have plenty of water, no lack of food. The sun is not quite at noon, but it makes sense to stop."

  Did it? Did it, when Luz said it might already be too late to carry their message? Despair and urgency wavered back and forth in his brain like chill and fever, an approaching panic.

  There was no reason to lame the beasts or drive themselves to collapse: that was no help to them.

  "Pitch the tent," Marak said, and resolved on less desperate speed and a steady progress for the days ahead. They would reach Pori in the night, and then expect no more diversions until Oburan, not diverting or stopping for any wells, since they still had sufficient water and a wealth of supplies. They were making good time, having cut two days off their trek already.

  They had their supper while the burning light of noon came in under the tent edges. They ate well, even extravagantly, and lay down to sleep.

  But in early afternoon, Norit sat up, waking both of them with her sharp gasp.

  "We should not go to Pori," she said.

  "Not go to Pori," Hati said in amazement, when it was their chief watering stop on the way to the holy city. Marak was half-asleep, having achieved rest, and cudgeled his brain toward coherent action.

  "We should not go there," Norit said in a whisper, and seemed to look into the distance, at something not evident to them. "When we bring the rest, we need Pori, but not now. Go north."

  Norit was not the one to give them orders. Norit had expressed few opinions, until now. Marak got to one knee and put out a hand and turned her head gently until she did look at him.

  "There's no time," she said. "We can't wait. Take the northern trail. Tofi will know."

  When did Norit know any trails on the Lakht? "Luz!" he said, and Norit blinked, and took a deep breath.

  "Take my advice," Norit said as if she were god-on-earth, and with a lift of her chin. She drew her shoulder from under his hand as if he polluted her with his touch.

  Hati had laid a hand on her knife, alarmed; but Marak seized Norit's hand, hard.

  "Wake up," he said, and Norit blinked twice, and looked astonished at herself, on the edge of tears.

  "Luz spoke through you," Hati said.

  "I heard," Norit said, and shivered and ran her fingers into her hair, clenching it, pulling it, self-distraction. "I hear her. I don't want to hear her."

  "Damn Luz," he said. "We'll go on to Pori. Never mind what Luz wants."

  Norit flashed him a look of terror. "No," Norit said, and pain rushed through him, and through Hati, and through Norit, until pain was all there was, and he was descended to mere creature, wallowing on the ground where he had fallen. Lights flashed in his eyes and pain roared in his ears.

  "Listen to advice," Luz said fiercely in that sound, Norit leaning above him with unwonted fierceness. "It's already begun! I can't stop it! Do what I say!"

  Pain racked him. He dragged himself up, appalled and angry. He strode out from under the tent, into the sun, and began kicking loose the tent stakes, blindly, even before the slaves had gathered up their goods.

  "Wait, wait!" Tofi cried, waving his arms. "What's wrong with her? What's wrong with any of you?"

  Marak knew his act was as mad as Norit's. The pain reached his ears and his skull and hammered at him. He spun about, arms wide, looking up at the eye of heaven as if he flew, as if he were bound to nothing but the blue-white air, as if he were caught between the hammer of the sun and the anvil of the earth. He would fling himself down and die before he became utterly mad. He would cast himself off the cliffs before he became a mindless slave to the voices.

  "You'll have nothing!" he shouted at the heavens. "You'll have nothing from me!"

  The pain in his head became pain in his chest and in his spine and in his gut, and the noise in his ears became a light like the sun. He spun and he spun and he spun until he fell.

  He lay on the sun-scorched sand, whole, and unbroken.

  Luz said, into his ears: Listen to me. Lives are at risk. It's already begun. Someone will see to Pori. Go north, away from danger.

  Hati dragged his head into her lap, shading him with her body, touching his face with precious water. "Marak. Marak. Wake up. Wake up! Don't leave us."

  Don't leave us, don't leave us, don't leave us.

  "Marak," Hati said, and fear was in her voice, where fear was a stranger. "Marak, wake up. Do you hear me?"

  He could not leave Hati lost. He could not leave Norit possessed of devils, with no one to understand her.

  He drew several great breaths and slowly blinked at Hati's shadowed face, against the sunglare. He saw Norit beyond her shoulder, a plain, sweet, woman's face dim to his eyes, wild-haired and bareheaded, haloed by the sun.

  He reached back with his hands and pushed himself up, gathered a knee under him with Hati's help and then Tofi's.

  He looked dazedly at Norit, wondering if he was looking at the same time at Luz. But if it was not also Norit within that body, he reasoned, then Norit had no other place to be, and whatever she carried within her, he could not turn on her. He had no power to drive out his own vision. He certainly had no power to condemn hers.

&n
bsp; "We will pass by Pori," he said, to Tofi, to Hati, to whoever cared. In that promise, the pressure in his head eased, and Luz grew silent. Tofi had a frightened look.

  He staggered upright, staggered as he walked toward the tent to continue ripping up the stakes, still dizzied by his looking at the sun. He was not accustomed to defeat. He burned from the shame of his actions.

  And for what, he asked himself, for what reason?

  Tofi yelled at the slaves to help, and lent a hand. Together, with Hati and with Norit, all of them helping, they folded the tent and packed it. They loaded the beasts, and roused them to their feet, ready to move.

  "This northern way," Marak said to Tofi. "Do you know it?"

  "There is a shorter way across the highland," Tofi said. "My father never used it. I can try to find it."

  Try, in an unforgiving waste. But it seemed to him he knew.

  And Luz knew. Luz knew exactly where they were, and where she wanted them to go.

  Tofi had a worried look and clearly waited for him to say, No, no, let us go the sane and reasonable passage, but he waited in vain.

  "We have guidance," Marak said. He had never been more angry in his life, but never in his life had any man more deserved a plain answer from him than young Tofi. "The woman in the tower speaks to Norit. I don't trust it, but she wants us to go to Oburan. At least we're agreed in that."

  "I suppose we have water enough to make mistakes," Tofi said faintly, and shook his head and walked off to mount up.

  They set the au'it into the saddle; and helped Norit, who seemed dazed and hesitant: Luz or Norit, it would be Norit's bones that broke, and they roused her besha up and set her securely on it.

  The rest of them got up, and Tofi turned them north. Beasts that had anticipated one road and now were turned onto another bellowed their frustration to the skies, as much as to say that they remembered Pori, and fools forgot where the water was.

  The complaints gradually faded. The sun sank and vanished in a brassy dusk.

  "Look!" Hati said, as a star fell.

  They looked aloft for falling stars, then, that sign of overthrow and change, and saw another, and a third and a fourth.

  Then a fifth blazed bright, and stuttered a trail of fire across the sky. The beasts saw it in alarm, and their heads swung up.

  A seventh and an eighth, as bright, traced a path from horizon to horizon.

  Marak had viewed the first falling stars as a curiosity, but now he saw a ninth fall, bright and leaving a trail behind it.

  A tenth, and thunder cracked among the stars, making everyone jump, and then laugh, caught in foolish fear.

  Everyone had seen falling stars. They happened in the sixth and the eighth month, very many a night, but, Marak said to himself, this was the fourth month, no more than early in the fourth month, at that, and the heavens lit up in bright trails, one after another, interspersed with bright interrupted ones.

  Another star fell, this one in a crack of thunder, and shattered in a cloud that blotted out the stars along its track.

  "This will continue," Norit said in a tone both cold and assured, and yet trembling with Norit's chin. "This will continue. It will likely miss Pori. But the plain beyond isn't safe."

  Now the heavens showed streaks of a star-fall denser than anything Marak had ever seen. At every moment the sky showed another, and another, and another, then five, ten at once, and more and more and more, faster than a man could count.

  "Is this the world ending?" Tofi asked. He had his arms folded over his head as he rode, as if that could make him safe from plummeting stars. The slaves cried out in alarm as another of the bright ones came down, and burst in a long trail of fire.

  "Keep moving," Norit said, and that new vision came, overwhelming, of rock hurtling into sphere, then a swarm of rocks, again and again and again. "This is the lightest of the fall. This is what will happen, here, and across the world, far worse."

  Marak all but lost his balance riding as his eyes revised the scale of those rocks of the vision as equal to the stars above them, careening down in dizzying succession.

  And what was the sphere?

  "The falling rocks," he said: those were the only words he could find for what he saw, and the import of them he could not measure by any attack he had ever seen. "The spheres."

  "The death of all of us," Tofi moaned, hiding his head, and the slaves rode up close to them, pointing at the largest, waiting to die. "Look!" they cried. "Look!" until they ran out of astonishment.

  It went on for hours: at times there seemed thousands at once, until the whole heavens were streaked with light, even while the sun was coming up. Norit hugged her arms against herself like a beaten child as she rode, rocking to the besha's gait.

  And the sun rose and reached its height.

  They reached a flat, and spread the tent, but kept looking toward the white-hot heavens as they hammered home the stakes. They had lost confidence in the sky. It was long before they slept, and waked and exited the tent to break camp as the sky began to shadow.

  Another star fell, herald of another such night.

  The slaves cried out. The au'it opened her book and recorded the fall. But a second and a third followed.

  "Let us be on our way," Marak said to Tofi. "If the heavens fall, what can we do? Let's go."

  But now the slaves went about their work with fearful looks at the sky, while the beasts, often reluctant, put up a mindful resistance and bawled and circled away from attempts to load them.

  At a great boom out of the sky, the beasts bolted.

  "They know they're going to die," the slaves cried. "We're all going to die!"

  "I will free you now!" Tofi cried. "I will pay you wages now! Catch them!"

  The slaves took out, running. Hati raced out, caught her own beast, managed to get into the saddle, and rode out and got ahead of the most of the strays, driving them back with blows of her quirt, to Tofi's effusive gratitude. The slaves caught the others and led them back, panting and staggering, too exhausted and too frightened, perhaps, to attempt to ride.

  Meanwhile the rain of fire continued in the heavens, and a strange cloud hung where the star had burst.

  Marak put Norit up on her beast, and the au'it onto hers. He mounted up on Osan as the slaves struggled with the packs and, with Hati, kept the frightened younger animals in place while the slaves made the older of the pack beasts kneel, and loaded up such of the baggage as waited ready.

  Seeing the other beasts sitting calmly under their packs, then, the skittish ones began to kneel on their own, the habit of their kind.

  They struck the tent. The rest of the baggage went on.

  Then they set themselves under way, under the overthrow of heaven, making all possible speed.

  Chapter Twelve

  In the afternoon sky in the third day of the third cycle of the first season a strange pale light appeared and the sun seemed to set in the east in daylight. The light endured as a sunset and faded as a sunset fades, but pale throughout. The lord of the tribe asked the grandmothers whether the tribe should go to know the source of this light, but it was near calving time and the grandmothers said it was far away and the walk would risk the calves and mothers. The lord of the tribe asked whether they should tell a village, and the grandmothers said the village priest would make trouble for the tribe.

  -The Spoken Traditions of the Andesar

  The sky whitened into day, and they reached an alkali pan. They had no need to drink, and would not drink of the well that they could dig in this place, not at the most desperate. They simply used the stony flat for a noontime camp, just off the clinging white powder, and the au'it sat and wrote in her book, flicking now and again at windblown white dust that fell on her pages.

  The three slaves bickered with Tofi, who swore he had never freed them, that he had only said he might free them if they caught all the beasts, but Marak, seeing unhappiness and surly workers, took the slaves' side. "You did say it. They're free men. Now they
have to earn their food."

  Neither side liked that completely, and the beasts sat bawling and complaining while Tofi and the slaves, now freedmen, bartered over wages in the hot sun.

  "Pay them what you pay any hireling!" Marak said, to end the dispute. "And no more!" He pointed at the au'it and made such a gesture as the Ila herself might make. "Write it! Besides, the world is ending. What does a little extravagance matter?"

  The au'it wrote.

  It was the first time he had said it in those terms. The slaves fell into silence. Tofi did, and after the beasts were unladed and the tent was up, Tofi on the spot untied a wrapped string and counted out gold rings. "If you have any sense," Tofi muttered to the new freed-men as he did so, "don't spend anything on drink. Buy goods when we get to Oburan and sell them where we're going. You know how it's done. If the world is ending, one can still make a profit. Think of what the white tents don't have, buy it cheap as you can and sell that."