C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  A potter from the lowlands claimed he saw angels on the cliff, claimed it quite calmly, though there was no cliff in sight.

  The lad from Tijanan, at the edge of the shade, rocked obsessively for an hour and banged his head bloody against the stony sand.

  Toward afternoon the caravan master and his men doled out cold rations; the wife from Tarsa and the boy were both too distraught to eat, but the caravan master beat them with his quirt and the boy ate. The wife they forced to drink, holding her nose until she swallowed, and after a while, the caravanners holding her arms, she swallowed water on her own. It was a sort of kindness. They might have left her to walk thirsty, knowing they would still deliver her to the city by next afternoon, but the sickness came rapidly on the ones who would not drink. Their bodies poured out less and less water, and they died, cheating the Ila of whatever she wished. So the guards assured that they would have no fault in the matter.

  Marak made no such rebellion against his fate. He took a little water in his mouth, broke the caked provision with two free hands, and ate, slowly, observing the guards' diminishing battles with the wife, wondering would she yet die before they reached Oburan, and be free.

  The mad had proliferated in the west, in the hills, for thirty years, and now rumor said the Ila had had a dream of them, and wished to purify the land once for all of their affliction.

  He feared his father might not rule long, and not alone for the shame and the disappointment of his son. Men would not follow the mad, and through him, the taint had come on the house. To cast blame on the woman who had borne him was his father's only salvation with his men, and Marak understood that, but it was likewise his mother's ruin, and there was no refuge for her if she had not gone to the Haga.

  Perhaps she had gone there. Perhaps she was there by now. Perhaps she had found some well, and walked on, and told the Haga only that she was divorced from her husband. A Haga wife had that right, absolute and unquestioned. Perhaps she could forget her son.

  But he doubted it. She was stubborn, was Kaptai; she was proud; and she was a devoted mother. Could she lie, regarding her son? Could she leave her daughter, having had her son led away in shame?

  Only one thing he could do, one thing he could do to bring an end of questions, one thing he could do to redeem his disgrace: kill the Ila.

  One thing he could do to win his father's forgiveness of his mother, and win his sister's honor, and her life, and her chance of happiness and marriage and children.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said. The madness that afflicted the others afflicted him with visions of a tower, of a cave of suns. Thoughts of any purpose or connection went sliding away in sluggish indirection.

  Perhaps the cakes they were fed contained some drug that numbed the senses and the will. He thought at times that might be so. They at least contained nettle that numbed the tongue: the potter complained of it. If it was so, if they numbed the mind, if they somewhat numbed the visions and silenced the voices, Marak took the numbness as relief and did not question the food or refuse to eat as the wife had done.

  And when the visions left him, when he was free to lie still and dream ordinary dreams, they were of the western lowlands and the stone towers of Kais Tain, the watchmen watching against the sunset, and his father's house between two high towers. It was a house thick-walled against the sun, and dug deep into the cool sand: the village sprawled out on either hand, around the net-covered garden, and the well.

  The dream changed. He saw his mother, standing by the golden, dusty roadside, wrapped in dark robes, wrapped and veiled as he had seen her last, enigma.

  His father Tain, the warlike, the defiant, the terrible man, simply acquiesced to all the terms, gave him away like a bartered mat, and signed a lasting armistice with the Ila's men. It was only to his family and his officers that Tain Trin Tain revealed his rage and his affront. Before the whole assembly of his men he called his children's mother a whore.

  His mother, being Haga, had said not a word in her own defense, only wrapped her robe about her face, walked out, and refused to meet the stares of her slaves.

  Being Haga, she said nothing of her plans. She refused to debate, refused to resist what she could not withstand.

  But the desert was no terror to her. Nothing in the world could be a terror to Kaptai, after her husband.

  The tilting of the world increased, then stopped as it would do, without warning.

  Marak stared, wordless now, watching the world from far, far off. He watched false oases disintegrate and the sun turn the red sand to brass and haze.

  A bird flew past, brief shadow, a scout from the holy city, where birds gathered thick and fattened off the refuse. Birds, like other vermin, would eat the dead, if they had dead; but they had none this day. Dissatisfied, it wheeled away.

  At last, with the sun well past noon, the order came from the caravan master to strike the tents.

  "Hay-up!" the man yelled. He and his family and his slaves came through waving their hands and uttering that hup-hup-hup they used on their beasts. Hup-hup-hup for the Ila's men. Hup-hup-hup for the madmen, too. The wife, exhausted now, could not be roused from her lethargy, and when they loosed her from the pole she lay on the sand and babbled of fire and light and death.

  No one cared, not even the other madmen, while they gathered up the tents.

  The Ila's men dragged the wife out under the sky, from under the imminent collapse of the last tent. The boy from Tijanan knelt, rhythmically striking his scabbed forehead on the ground, talking to the invisible. Sand stuck to his forehead and grew red with blood.

  Today it was the wife who balked. Yesterday it had been the potter, and they had beaten him. The wife they only hit until she brought up her hands to cover her face. Then they knew she would stop fighting them.

  Hup, the word was, when the tents were struck and the beasts were laded after their rest. Hup, and they took up the wife on one of the beasts, the smallest, packed on and tied on like cargo lest she harm herself. A soldier would walk: the wife was worth a bounty.

  Hup, and the sand-colored beasts rose on their long legs, shook out their lofty necks, and began to move, led by the grizzled old white one, their half-lidded eyes deprecating alike the world's folly and the weakness of men.

  The Ila's men set their beasts walking, and Marak walked. The sane shepherded the mad.

  The Lakht stretched on and on, masking its traps in distance and illusion, the shimmer of false water and the movement of ghostly vermin.

  In the passage of hours, again, under a fading sky, Marak saw visions. Towers built themselves in fire and wove themselves in symbols. A cave gaped and glowed with suns equally spaced, marching on forever.

  He ignored them and saw the sand through them. He looked at the horizon, where at last the sun sank, where the true holy city might rise before the next day.

  Marak, the demons said, having long ago learned his name. Marak, Marak, Marak.

  The demon voices were sometimes like women's voices, sometimes like men's. He ignored them as he had learned to do all through his thirty years, and gave his attention to the sounds of men and beasts walking ahead of and behind him.

  Over it all came the high, thin wail of the wife from Tarsa.

  "Damned," the wife cried at the gathering night, "damned, damned, damned, the Ila save us all! We're all damned!"

  The sun went down in flame and spread a last illusory glow across the land, like gilded water.

  "I am not mad!" the wife cried as she rode. "I am not mad!"

  So she said.

  And when the night had fallen and cooled the air of the Lakht to a gentler warmth she sang as she rode to a husband who no longer wanted her. "Let us love," she sang, "let us look to the moons for light and make us a house of stone. Let us dig us a well for our lives and plant green vines and melons. Let us make us a child and dance with the children of our children. Let us lie down in our bed and sleep the long sleep and dream the long dream. Let us love."

>   And so the tune went round again, round and round and round, a litany, as feet grew worn and legs cramped.

  "Let us love," the potter cried at the heavens, "let us love, let us love. Oh, mother, mother, mother! Where is my mother?"

  And another, an orchardman, "You never had a mother! Be still!"

  The boy from Tijanan heard nothing. He walked, hugging himself, waving his arms outward and slapping himself as he walked, complaining about burning fires.

  Marak said nothing. The voices sang in his head, too, but nothing of love or dancing or fires. His voices said words to him and his skin went hot and cold while the lines made pictures against the night.

  He saw lines of fire making structures. He saw a beacon flashing in the sky, illusion like the rest. He knew that it was illusion, but in the dark the visions easily became more real than the stars above them.

  Red light and green alternately flickered, blinded him. At one point he could no longer see to walk, and fell, his trousers ripped at the knee.

  Pain followed. He felt about him, blind, his fingers finding only wind-smoothed stones.

  He forgot where he was. He had fallen. The world he occupied was mapless. He was on the Lakht. But it might be at the head of his men. It might be in war. They might be raiding a caravan, and he could not remember.

  A hand inserted itself into his collar and dragged at him, and after that something passed about his neck, a collar, a rope, he realized, to guide the mad.

  They pulled, and he walked, quite, quite blind. He heard his father's voice saying to his mother that she should not speak to the dead.

  He heard his father say that she must have gotten him with some no-caste: he could not be Tain's son. Clearly his mother was a whore.

  The pain in his knees was dull and distant. Tugs of the rope both pulled him off-balance and reminded him of left and right. He took it meekly, for simple guidance, that he could not walk aside from the column. It was important to stay with the caravan. It was important to be quiet and cooperative. He had something yet to do, a reason to go on walking.

  After a passage of time they rested. He was blind, and they gave him bitter beer to drink, the first beer he had had on this trek. It conjured harvest evenings, the yellow, yellow straw, laughter in the fields. It conjured campfires and campaign, and a man lying bandaged and dying of his wounds. They had had such beer in the Lakht, three years ago. They had captured a wagonload of beer and behaved like boys.

  Here we are, they had laughed, where the ships came down. Shall we look for ships in the desert?

  "Here we are!" they had shouted at the sky, blasphemed, and waved their arms as if they would beckon down heavenly watchers.

  They had roused up a band of the Ila's men by mischance and fought them, drunk as they were. His father had hit him when he found out, but not been greatly angry, since none of them had died, and they had killed the Ila's men.

  Hup-hup-hup, the word came.

  The wife was dully compliant now, having had a double ration of beer, and they set her on her feet and had her walk.

  The potter, equally drunk, asked after his mother. "Be still," others of the mad shouted at him, and the Ila's men laughed and rode down on either side of the potter, picked him up by either arm, and carried him far ahead of them, where they dropped him.

  The potter sat down until the column overtook him, and then they roused him good-naturedly to his feet. The Ila's men were in high spirits, with the city so near. They gave their sour beer to their prisoners and planned on better in the city that ran with water.

  The old man fell down just before dawn and died, so it seemed: no one had touched him. The Ila's men argued among themselves and decided they needed to bring the body along, all the same. It might draw vermin, and it was a danger. They had abandoned the others that had died. But the Ila would pay them a bounty for each madman, and they might argue a little gold even out of the body, proving there was one less of their kind in the world. The city was close. So was reward.

  Marak ate what he was given at dawn, drank what water he was given. The sun came slipping over the Qarain's saw-toothed ridge with morning, red fingers lancing across the powder sand, and the city that spread itself like a seam of light now was no mirage. Many of the mad cried out, but some, once fooled, disbelieved it in silence.

  In the light and the trickery of the land Marak walked, walked, walked. The city grew nearer all day, the Lakht never seeming narrower, or the city nearer. The sun beat down, blinding, and now, having been generous, the Ila's men turned impatient. They did not camp at noon, but pressed onward in the blazing sun.

  The boy from Tijanan, whose sight was dimmer than the rest, at last saw the city the rest of them had seen for hours. "The holy city!" he shouted, and began to dance about, waving his arms, but the guards, out of humor, beat him, and shoved him ahead.

  The boy, Pogi, walked, striking his head with his hands.

  Marak likewise found in the city walls, however distant, an inspiration. He no longer trudged blindly. He walked as a man walks toward an encounter with his lifelong enemy, full of righteous anger.

  "Look at him," one of the Ila's men said. "Does he know where he's going? He's as crazy as the boy."

  The boy kept his course when the world tilted. The boy never had moved to the visions that stirred the rest. His madness was of a different kind. He was innocent, if their madness was a crime.

  Marak felt the world slide, but he kept his course as well. He looked at the walls and ignored the pitch.

  They reached the stone-paved road. There was no escape at all, now, and now if never before the dullest must ask themselves what waited for them. But Marak knew. There was comfort in knowing there would be a reason for his dying. There was even a satisfaction in it, when all other purpose had left.

  See, Father? I am not that mad. I am not that useless. I lied. All my life was a lie, but it was a rational lie.

  What pretenses do the sane make?

  What did you pretend, Mother, knowing from my birth that I was not like the rest of you?

  And what did you pretend to yourself, Tain Trin Tain, when time after time you believed my lies? You kept asking, but you took all the lies. Why now are you angry?

  The sun sank as they walked. The walls of the holy city, slanted and crested with imbedded shards of glass, caught the sunlight and sent light knifing into the eyes as if all the walls were hedged with divine fire. The dome of the Beykaskh, the dome of the Ila's Grace, was wholly tiled with glass, and it blazed like the sun itself. A man could no more look at it by noon than at the burning Eye of Heaven itself.

  The mad and the guards alike began to walk with heads lowered, not from shame, but to protect their eyes from the glory of the city.

  Birds flew thick about the walls, black spots in the glare. The southern wall was where the gallows were: the city gave the birds its unwanted, its malefactors, and its garbage.

  In its wealth it threw out in a day, men said, what whole villages could thrive on for a year. A pool of water stood by the gates, rimmed in stone and overflowing into the sand a good ways out: and out across the sand, on a bed of sandstone, a green-rimmed pond stood always filled.

  There vermin of every sort came to water, and to serve as sport for the Ila's archers and her riflemen. That spillage, that pond, was the most profligate consumption of resource possible, and the mad wondered at it, and called that reed-rimmed pool a mirage.

  But a pipe ran beside the road, and whereas villages measured and sold every drop, whereas they pressed moisture out of every bit of waste and distilled it in huge stills, it was not the way things were done in Oburan. They sent it out to the pool, to draw vermin.

  And as they came up under the shadow of Oburan, they met that rumored wonder greater than the blazing dome and the glass-edged walls. Beside the gate, that fountain known as the Mercy of the Ila gushed from stonework mouths and ran out so profligately that it splashed from the fountain bowl to the troughs and some onto the stones o
f the street, to be trampled underfoot.

  There travelers and traders were free to drink, while the remnant continually overflowed and ran from the trough through tiles until, Marak knew, it reached that distant, reed-rimmed pond.

  The beasts had not drunk for ten days. Here, at the long troughs, they crowded one another and pushed and snapped, asserting dominance, while at the upper bowl, the Ila's men wet their hands and wiped their faces at no charge, spilling water as they did. Then the caravanners drank, and here, scrabbling for double handfuls, elbowing one another and frantic with greed and fear and haste, the mad also drank at the bowl.

  Marak filled his cupped hands and drank from the troughs the beasts used, having no disdain for a little besha-spit. More, while others were jostling one another and worrying about their share of what was boundless, he filled both hands, first wiped a coating of dust into mud on his face and neck, and then sluiced more up, the cold water running down beneath the shirt.