C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Page 21

  The earth shook again while they were setting the stakes, and the now-freedmen dropped their hammers and looked as if they would run for their lives, if they had any idea at all where to run.

  "What will this bring?" Marak asked Norit, who had never stirred from where she sat. "What does this mean?"

  "The end of the world." Tears overwhelmed Norit, who began to sob quietly, covering her face with her hands. "Luz doesn't think so. But I do."

  It was a whisper of Norit's old self, free, for the moment. That in itself lent him encouragement.

  "The end of the world it may be, but we'll die well fed and well watered. Get under the tent, Norit. Go."

  Norit obeyed him quietly. It was her task, when she would do it, to unpack their noon meal, such as it was: dried fruit and grain-cake, and tea, if they chose to heat water.

  He wielded a hammer, and Hati helped him. "Get to work!" Tofi chided his helpers. "You're free men. Act like it!"

  The earth gave a shudder, and the beasts bawled alarm as the poles swayed and strained the ropes of the tent. They pulled to steady them, and sat down hard on the sand. It was that violent a motion.

  The shaking was brief, and left no apparent damage. If the earth would crack, there was no sign of it.

  Marak, having fallen hard on his backside, gave a laugh. "Well, the earth tries, but it can't shake us off."

  "If the earth cracks, what will we do?" Hati asked, with real fear in her voice. "Perhaps we will die."

  "Maybe we won't," he said, sitting there, toe to toe with her. "I don't intend to. You're on your own if you do."

  Hati gave a shaken laugh of her own, threw her head, and got up, dusting herself off. "I'm not that easy to kill."

  They went under the shade of the tent, Tofi and the slaves as well. They broke grain-cakes and ate well, and drank. Twice more while they slept the earth shivered, and both times they waked.

  "Perhaps at least the shaking is done," Marak ventured to say, as dark fell with them still camped. They had been reluctant to pull up the deep-irons and venture out.

  Just then another shudder ran through the earth, so that neither earth nor heavens seemed stable tonight.

  "Speak of misfortune," Marak muttered.

  Tofi went outside the open sides of the tent to see to the beasts, and came running under the tent again, a shadow in the dark.

  "The stars are all gone!" Tofi cried.

  Marak gathered himself up in alarm, with Hati and Norit close by, and indeed, as he walked out beyond the edge of the tent, the whole heaven was black. All the land was dark.

  "All the stars have fallen," Hati said in dismay.

  "They are there," Norit said calmly. "The star-falls have kicked up the dust to the sky. That's all."

  "That much dust?" Hati asked, but had no answer.

  Marak could see nothing in the pitch-black, except shadows against shadow.

  Then in the far west white fire chained through the murk in the west, and thunder cracked, as sometimes it would in the great western storms.

  A storm was indeed coming, and weather-sense had failed him. Now he was very glad that they had driven down the deep-stakes.

  "We should put on the side flaps," he said, and, difficult as it was in the dark, they began to do that.

  Before they were done, a sudden wind came and battered at the canvas, making it boom and rattle while they worked. "Make sure of the ropes!" Tofi shouted at the ex-slaves. "Do it right this time, or you go out alone to tie it down!"

  The beasts got up and settled down in the lee of the tent. The food and water all had to be moved inside, for fear of it all being buried in blowing sand; they made a wall of the rest of the baggage, and the side flaps had to be battened down tight. As an added measure, feeling their way in the dark, they made the tent sides and the roof fast a second time to the baggage, and to a second line of stakes, which they drove down inside the tent.

  Then, sitting against that wall of their possessions, they were ready for the earth to shake and the heavens to be carried away.

  The wind roared and the thunder boomed above them. The canvas bucked and thumped away, anchored by the deep-irons and the heavy buffering on the windward wall, inside their tent. Having worked so hard and so quickly, and having nothing left to do, they ate an extra ration of sweet dried fruit and grain-cakes in the pitch blackness and settled down to rest through to the wind and the storm.

  The air grew far cooler, even cold, strangely smelling of dust and water.

  "It smells like the inside of a well," Hati said in wonder.

  It did. But rain never came to the Lakht, and only twice in his life in the western lowlands.

  Thunder crashed over them, the wind roared, and in the overthrow of the heavens and the battering of the wind, Marak held Hati to him for warmth. They tried to gather Norit into their embrace, but like the au'it, Norit stayed apart, somewhere near the big tent pole, waiting, waiting. She began to sing to herself in the dark, a tuneless song like the wind, drowned intermittently by the thunder and the crack of the canvas.

  Lightning flashes showed through the seams of the tent. A terrible crash of thunder hit their ears.

  A pattering followed, as if pebbles were falling on the tent.

  But in the rain of pebbles battering against the canvas over their heads, Marak realized the singing beside had stopped a moment ago.

  He gathered himself up and felt toward the tent pole where Norit had sat.

  "Norit?" he asked the dark, and the roaring and the thunder gave him no answer.

  Were it Hati, he would have thought she had simply gone off to the corner of the tent on intimate business. But a moment ago Norit had been singing, and now she was not where she had been. That warned him something might be amiss.

  Then he felt a sudden gust, and he knew for certain. The tent flap blew and moved in the dark, its cords loosed, admitting a dark less absolute than the dark inside, and a fitful flicker that picked out a horizon.

  He went out it, flinching as pebbles struck him. not woundingly hard, but hard enough, and when he put a hand to his bare skin he felt his skin slick and gritted with sand that immediately stuck to it. In the lightning flashes he saw small shining objects lying about him, like jewels in the lightning. He saw others bounce as they hit, and felt the sting of others, an impact on his skull.

  "Norit!" he shouted into the wind and the falling stones, angry, willing finally to leave her to Luz.

  But he heard her voice on the wind, sobbing or laughing, or perhaps both.

  "It comes," Norit cried. Lightning showed her dancing along the ridge.

  On that dim, lightning-lit sight he ran out through the pelting from the heavens, knowing that only fools and suicides wandered away from tents in storms. He reached her, he seized her in his arms and precisely reversed that trail, aiming straight for the tent door, in a sudden, blind dearth of lightning.

  "This way!" Hati shouted from ahead of him.

  He went toward that voice and as he made the doorway, fierce, familiar hands seized on him and on Norit. Lightning showed him Hati's face, a series of three flashes.

  "Fool!" Hati shouted at him over the roar of the wind. "Get in! Get in!"

  Even in that time pebbles had bruised his back and his head, and with Norit in his arms, they burst through the windblown door and into the numbing stillness and blackness inside.

  Tofi asked in the dark, "What's falling on us?"

  "Pebbles," Marak said. They all were struck and bleeding as best he could tell, and he set Norit down on the mats, trying to tell whether there was any injury to Norit's head: he found grit and wet in her hair, her aifad carried away in the wind. He felt wet on his own skin, and on his clothes, and a profound chill followed. The three of them, he, and Norit, and Hati, all huddled together shivering while the thunder raged.

  In time he warmed, and rested. And uncommon storm that it was, the air grew still before the dawn. Tofi got up and put his head out to find out what might be going on.r />
  "The stars are back," Tofi exclaimed, "and more are falling down."

  After this, Marak said to himself, nothing could astonish him. He got up to see, found it true, then went back to rest, in the knowledge that at least there were stars in the sky. The convulsion in the heavens had settled again, if only to a steady ruin.

  Marak, Marak, the voices said, back again, after such long silence, and rocks and spheres collided, and the heavens fell. He could have wept. They were not lost. The voices knew how to find them. The visions were back. He never thought he could be glad. West, the voices told him. West by northwest.

  "Do you hear?" he asked Hati. "Do you hear them?"

  She moved her head against his arm. He thought it was a yes.

  The sun, relentless, came up as sane as ever. They unfastened the lee-side tent flaps and let in light, welcoming the sun, and where Marak had expected half-healed wounds, he found no fever and no swelling. Where he expected blood from the stones, he saw no blood, rather a patchwork of dirt on his arms and his clothing, and on Norit's, and on Hati's, as if they had been pelted with mud.

  He walked outside, seeing the ground all likewise splotched and spattered, and the canvas the same. The beasts were all but laughable, having a coating of dried mud all over their backs, and the pale, spread canvas was a patchwork of red and rust like him and like Hati.

  "Raindrops!" he exclaimed in astonishment. He laughed aloud, having expected blood and bruises, and finding them marked like fools. "Water drops. No wonder we were wet!"

  "In the far north," Hati said, "sweet water fell hard as stones, and became water again in the sun. So the grandfathers tell it."

  Norit had come out, and so now did Tofi and his men. Norit, too, was splotched with huge dollops of rust, and at some point tears had run down from her eyes, trails through the red smears. Now her eyes, red as fire, were fierce as Hati's.

  "So it has rained on the Lakht," Norit said in a low, hoarse voice, "and it will rain. The floodgates of the heavens will pour it out. A man can die of too much water."

  That was almost the last of his patience. Of all Luz's utterances, this one seemed sinister, intended to frighten them, he still had bruises on his skull, and for a moment he vowed he had made his last effort for Norit, as a vessel for Luz. But a second thought showed him Norit beneath the dirt and behind the burning eyes, and he said to himself that her skull likely had more bruises than his, and her head rang with worse than voices and a useful sense of where to go.

  "Go sit and wait," he said gently, to the wife from Tarsa, not to Luz. "Rest. Dust yourself off. We'll be moving on."

  The animals had to be brushed clean of grit so sand would not gall their hides under the packs. The mud had to be swept off the tent canvas, or it became a heavy weight of dirt for the beast that carried it. Before all was done they all had bleeding hands and sore arms, but they dug out the deep-irons, packed the tent, reorganized their baggage, and moved, over a rise and down across a landscape dotted with thousands of small pits.

  This morning, however, they saw wild creatures, furtive shadows that dived beneath rocks at their passing: the water-fall had brought them to this plain. A handful of plants bloomed and withered with the day's heat, leaving a gold spatter of their life-bearing dust on the rocks. Water spilling on stones. Spheres falling into spheres. Gold dust scattering on the wind.

  West by northwest. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry, Marak.

  Marak tucked his foot up and rested his arms on his knee as he rode, rested his forehead so, trying not to think, to hear, wanting not to imagine what would be their fate if they had been on this plain when the stars fell.

  Luz bore no grudge. And could he fault Norit, after all? Had harm come? It was only water. It was only pride. They had laughed, and the laughter, half-crazed and weak as it was, had healed them.

  Had Luz, in driving Norit to the edge of collapse, managed their escape from the falling stars? Had she preserved their lives as mindfully as she preserved Norit from harm, and had she directed them around the region of worst damage? He wondered what had become of Pori, and the plain beyond.

  A trail of fire went across the heavens. A star fell by daylight, smoking as it went. It went to the south: it was one whose direction was clear, and it fell beyond the hills, like a guide.

  Two days later they rode again within view of the Qarain by sunrise, and the day after that found one of those caravan traces that led toward the holy city.

  The au'it had learned to accommodate the beast's rocking gait and now used her journeys as well as her rests to record her observations.

  And this, too, she wrote.

  All the things they had seen and done the au'it had recorded. All these things she would present to the Ila, the unprecedented fall of rain and mud, the fall of stars alike.

  And what would her book say?

  That the stars fell? That their hope of safety lay in the tower, in the white tents?

  The one even the Ila could surely see for herself, and of the other, Marak thought, they had no proof, even for themselves.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We have seen the stars fall in their thousands. The book contains no event like this.

  -The Book of Oburan

  The ragged upthrust of the qarain, that division from the Anlakht, was a wall on their right hand as they went. They were on the edge of desolation.

  And by the next day they joined a recently used caravan trace and followed it in an abrupt turn toward the north, toward the Qarain.

  Marak thought he had crossed this place before. He thought he recognized the vast, stone-littered pan and the rocks beside it.

  Tofi recognized it, too. "Besh Karat," he said excitedly, pointing a thin arm to the left of the trail, where a ridge of rounded rocks stood, looking like its name, a burdened, sulking beast. "We're at Besh Karat, at the bitter spring. And these last tracks are only a day ahead of us. Another caravan."

  A little after that Norit suddenly reined back her beast, which squalled a protest and fought the rein. "Stop," she said. "Stop here."

  Marak shifted his foot back and took in the rein. Osan stopped, putting his ears up and laying them down. They were just passing among the rocks, an easy hiding place for vermin, and they were short of the bitter spring. It was not ordinarily a point to rest, and the beasts knew it, and complained.

  "A little farther," Marak said, which was only common sense. "Not in the rocks."

  "No. Here. Now." Norit tried to get her reluctant beast to kneel: it would not, and came close to veering off the trail in besha obstinacy, but stopped as she began to dismount all the same.

  "Damn," Marak said, and slid down and went to rescue Norit. Tofi and Hati dismounted, and Hati assisted the au'it to dismount. They were at a stop. The freedmen got down.

  "For what do we wait now?" he asked Norit, apprehensive and impatient both.

  She answered him with one of those cold, clear stares that said Luz, more than Norit, was hearing him.

  The vision of rocks and spheres followed, one crashing into the other, the sphere with fire at the point of damage, and a spreading ring of disturbance, like a stone cast into a fountain.

  "Make the beasts sit down," Norit said.

  "Why?" he asked.

  Norit said nothing. She only sat down, herself, her legs tucked up at a slant to avoid the heat of the sand.

  Marak looked at Hati, both his temper and his dread reaching a near boil. They were so close to reaching Oburan: they were on the very trail to the holy city, and was there another calamity?

  "Can she not explain, damn her?" he muttered under his breath, meaning Luz, and complaining to no one but the wind and the desert heat. "Do we need the tents? Is a star about to fall on top of us?" They were sitting next to Besh Karat, which indubitably housed vermin. he hoped they were small and timid vermin, nothing larger.

  The vision came to him, the ring of fire, so vividly it blotted out the sun. He ground his hands against his eyes, fighting for a sight of Osan'
s rein as he tried to grasp it, and shook his head to clear it.

  He settled Osan, and if Osan sat, Hati's beast and the au'it's settled, complaining. The pack beasts were always willing to settle, in hopes of shedding their packs for a rest, but here they were uneasy, and circled and made trouble, two of them wanting to stray off from their accustomed order. But they settled.

  Tofi and the freedmen did not then unpack the baggage, and the beasts complained about that, squalling and rumbling in the heat.

  So they sat, all of them, like fools, and waited for this danger, and they waited, and the unwilling beasts shifted their limbs under them and complained noisily, with no relief from the packs or the saddles in the sweltering heat. Tails whipped, beat the sand, thump.