C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  But quirts would not be enough when dark fell, as the camp ripped up the stakes and folded its canvas and began to quarrel about the life-and-death question of who rode, and who walked, and what they had to leave behind.

  There would be a brief period of looting, Marak was well sure: when this huge camp utterly broke up, the wise would leave what fools would think they desperately needed; and there would be that sorting out of goods. Some, too, would elect to stay with the ruins, seeking shelter there, in the ruin of the Beykaskh, ignoring prophecies as they ignored the evidence of their eyes. Those few might even be right. The wealth there, and the burrows they might make in the shattered stones, might suffice to save them.

  He would never wager his own life on it.

  The sun sank in the clouds. He kept his eyes sweeping the south, where the caravan had to form, trying to discern whether the tribes had yet moved, sure that the first hint that one tribe was on the road would set off the others determined to secure their place in the march. He had said sundown: sundown was what he aimed for, and he feared delay for its own reasons: tonight the ones in utter lack would run riot in the ruins, predators and prey alike.

  He waited, and he waited, and sure enough, as the sunset widened across the clouds. A handful of the more organized rough element made a determined sortie against their belongings. Marak saw it developing, and joined Tofi and his men, not just quirts now, but knives as well. None of the knives in fact drew blood: the skilled snap of a loaded quirt across a man's arm or head was no small deterrent, and the ex-slaves enjoyed giving back what they had gotten. The ruffians drew back to regroup, nursing bruises.

  "Marak." Norit caught his attention, pointing.

  A line of riders descended the hill among the collapsed tents, tall beasts gliding through the smoky chaos of the camp with the beshti's classic arrogance. The foremost of those riders were armed men and the center of that column were riders all in red.

  At that presence people all across the camp were distracted, and the straggling priests found a focus for their prayers to heaven.

  A great number of the dissolving camp surged toward the Ila, those who worshiped her posing a more serious threat than bandits. Silver flashed in the dim sunlight as the Ila's guards cleared a path for her safety.

  So the Ila and her court came down from the hill.

  "Get the packs on," Marak shouted over at Tofi, who sat his saddle sweating and pale from the latest fight. "Pack up! We're through with this! We have an armed escort now. And we're going to move!"

  Chapter Seventeen

  Give shelter to an enemy and you hold a knife by the blade.

  -Miga proverb

  The ila might never have ridden in her life, Marak thought, but ride she did, at Memnanan's side, and behind her rode the au'it, a broad gout of jewel red in a landscape otherwise brown and rust and yellow, under a murky sky. Behind them came the Ila's guard and the Ila's household, down to the servants.

  Then came the pack beasts, to the number of about a hundred, all under Tofi's direction, and under the management of his freedmen and his slaves: the Ila's staff had no idea how to pitch a tent.

  For so large a group, including tents for the guard, it was a modest number of beasts: Memnanan above all that staff understood the necessities of the Lakht, and might have enforced his choices on the Ila's will. Tofi had had the foresight to gather help, at a time when skilled help had become as precious as water.

  None of Tofi's doings needed question. Marak only waited while that line of riders clove its way through the confusion and turned toward them.

  At the last, calmly despite the recent armed confrontation, he simply lifted his hand to confirm his location, if Memnanan had doubted it. Memnanan lifted his hand. They saw one another. It was accomplished, all they had set out to do.

  Now it was a matter of getting this mass of people directed south in some kind of order.

  Hati moved off to consult with Tofi, but Norit stayed by his side, silent, watching as Tofi's men hurried to attach the packs to the saddles. "Hup-hup-hup!" Marak heard, that call that had afflicted the mad on their march, but this time it came as a welcome sound, a promise of freedom. Beasts snarled and grumbled and got up to work.

  Tofi himself brought a waterskin for him, and the two freedmen brought Norit's. They had secured none for themselves: it was the way the day had progressed. "I have your gear packed aboard," Tofi said, "all of it."

  "I'm in your debt," Marak said. He had regarded Tofi as a quickwitted young man; he was not surprised, or disappointed, either. "If debts will ever be paid in this life."

  "Save us from the Ila, is all," Tofi said under his breath. "Don't let her cut my head off, and I'll be grateful."

  Tofi went to his business. Hati rode up beside him, and slowly the Ila's column wedged a straight course through the confusion toward them.

  "Form up," Marak called out when he judged it time.

  Tofi moved, shouting to his men, who already knew their places in the line of march.

  The Ila approached, at Memnanan's side, and Marak waved a signal, sweeping to the south and never even stopping for courtesies. Marak fell in smoothly with the head of that column, he and Hati and Norit.

  The Ila was behind them, in the heart of their protection, not leading. An au'it, their own au'it, fell in with them and rode with them, her book on her knee, writing as she rode.

  "Ride with me," Marak said to Memnanan. "Is your household with you?"

  "Within the column. They'll come to your tent when we camp," Memnanan said. "I've told them. You have my lasting gratitude. And your relatives?"

  "With the Haga," he said. "I hope they're there." For the first time he thought of that second question. "My father?"

  "Released," Memnanan said, and Marak suffered curiously mixed feelings about that.

  "It was that or kill him," Memnanan said. "I'll not have him near the Ila."

  "I well understand," Marak said. A certain part of his heart wished he had seen Tain. A certain part of him longed to linger back and wait for Kais Tain to pass: See, Father, he could say. I've done something useful with my life. I've saved all of you.

  And another part wanted to say, I've survived. I'm still alive. So has my mother, so has my sister, damn you for a devil.

  He did neither. They filed out along the road, past that trampled ground near the ridge, past the wreckage of the carts, where not a book remained, only a vermin-covered body. The junior priests might not have lingered to bury their chief priest, or, do them credit, perhaps they had, and misjudged the tenacity of the vermin. In either case, even if they had carried him back to the city for burial, the vermin would get the body, with more or less work.

  On that thought, Marak rode aside from the column and looked back at the city.

  A pall of smoky haze hovered above the hill that had been Oburan, and over the Beykaskh that had been the heart of it. It was the last of sunset. The glass dome and the glass-rimmed walls caught no light now. Their fire and their life was extinguished. The vast camp had gone down, collapsed, beshti rounded up, pressed back to the work of carrying riders and baggage.

  And some had none. People had come in from the villages using them; and only if they were strong enough and forceful enough, they rode out with them. He knew with all his experience of desperate men that the desperate and the hard would have beasts to ride and the forgiving and the gentle would have no one to defend their rights.

  Oburan's people in the city's fall had passed through a sieve, through which only one kind survived, and it was not for the better, and it was not for the kindest, except as they had protectors more ruthless as the worst. and the Ila had moved to the fore of the line, being that ruthless. So had he. But the Lakht as it had become was a far finer sieve, a trial from which fools and those led by fools did not emerge at all, and a leader who had too much pity for the few would kill everyone who trusted him. Witness the caravan they had passed, bones, naked bones in the sand, and a leader who should ha
ve known his business had miscalled the storm and the proximity of safety. Norit had warned them. and they had used that advantage.

  He saw the tribes drawn up along the road, different in proportion of beasts and goods than those caravans of the villages, for the tribes had less, used less, were much the same as each other in weight carried, in every aspect. There were subtle differences in colors and patterns, but all tribal patterns, even the brightest, blended generally with the beasts, with the rocks, with each other, as if the same haze of desert dust lay over them all. The Ila and the au'it were a splash of scarlet in his company, the priests that had attached themselves a glare of white, and then the rest of the tribes poured in, following their line, more dusty hues half-obscured in dust as the sun sank to leaden death.

  As for the villagers, beyond his view, people of every color and every pattern, inexpert with the beshti and a hazard to themselves and others in the high desert, he could only wish they hurried onto the road and kept the pace behind them as best they could. He would not turn back in this deep dusk to see how they fared, what they chose, what they did. So far as they would survive, behind the tribes' example and advice in front of them, they were on their own.

  Hati paced him, riding by him. Norit scarcely bothered. They both knew where she was, back among the rest, and nowhere, drifting in her mind in a dark place, cold, peaceful, remote from them.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, as if he could be several days' marches farther on, and they would never be satisfied.

  They rode past familiar formations, and on and on. There was no fall of stars tonight. The cloud obscured it.

  Throughout the night the villages camped around the ruin would still be setting themselves on the road. Perhaps into morning, the halt would ripple down the column to those just setting out. They had thought they would make better time than they had on the way back, with lightly laden beasts, but with the incidents on the road, it turned out they had not. Now by no means would they set any greater pace on this trip, with the beasts as laden as they were, burdened most of all with shelter and with water. The slow pace was unintended mercy for those afoot. It was danger to the rest of them, and still the hindmost might not survive. but they would have a trail to follow, the more they straggled. They would have it until the wind blew and erased the slate and buried the bitter wells too deeply to dig out.

  Marak slept, rocked by Osan's motion, safe in Hati's company. At times she slept, and he stayed awake, both of them exhausted.

  Past the mid of the night, Memnanan came forward.

  "The Ila asks when we will take a major rest," Memnanan said. "I think I know your answer. But these people are unaccustomed to riding."

  "At noon," he said. "Granted no delays. Tell her I regret the discomfort, but this is to save her life. Twenty and thirty tomorrows will have no more pleasant answer."

  Memnanan rode back to tell her so.

  How the Ila had received it he was not sure, but Norit came forward then, and rode with them a while, and slept in the saddle: Norit had finally learned to do that in their travels. had learned her balance, and how to brace herself, and rested as secure as a woman of the tribes.

  The falling object hit the sphere, again and again and again. The lake of fire flowed down over the rocks like a spring let loose.

  Norit waked, and said nothing to either of them.

  When the sun came up, a gathering light along the line of the Qarain, Marak rode up the line a little. Hati paced him as he rode past their column, not pressing the beshti for any speed, but gaining, slowly, slowly, comfortably, as riders moved within the column. They entered the Haga column.

  Patya saw them. She rode over just out of range, looking for a signal, but she was no great rider, and she could hardly guide her mount with any subtlety. Hati waved to her. Marak would not bend to acknowledge a close relationship, not now, not since the caravan was under way, but she could come to him, and it was his hope that Patya and his mother would move toward him if he came up in the line. He had no need to ask whether their mother was safe: she drifted close, a far better rider, and stayed just within sight of him, presence enough to assure him she was safe and well, but she, too, had her dignity before her new neighbors, her relatives. She would hold off as long as there was Patya to run the errands between them.

  "Are we really going to the end of the world?" Patya asked, as if she of all these leaders and all these people could have the precise truth from him. "And is that woman with you a real prophet?"

  "You mean Norit," he said; he was aware of Norit having followed him, also at a distance. "Her name is Norit. She's my wife. Is that what the priests say?"

  "For what the priests are worth." There was never any great reverence for priests in Kais Tain. "But if you say she is, I believe it. And your wife, too. You've joined the tribes like us."

  Tribesmen might have more than one wife.

  "I suppose I have," he said.

  "She's very pretty," Patya said, meaning, he thought, Hati, but Hati said nothing.

  "Where did you meet her?"

  "On the road," he said. "After the Ila sent us east." He found there was a great deal he dared not tell his sister, not about Luz, not about the tower, not the least detail from his own mouth. Now he regretted he had come up here, or that the questioning had taken this direction. Let Tofi gossip, let Hati, if she chose: but what he said, men would repeat as coming from authority, and that was substance: men would debate it, dispute it, argue over it, dice it fine and begin to reject parts of it or to substitute their own notions. He could not.

  "Did Father send you away," he asked Patya, "or did you just go?"

  "Oh, we were going to, but Father-" Patya hesitated, trouble shadowing her brow. "But the Ila's men came and arrested us. And we rode to Oburan."

  "Did they treat you well?" He had not ridden to Oburan: that, at least, indicated that Patya had fared better.

  "Oh, they gave us everything. You never saw such food. And fine clothes, and everything. But Mother wanted to leave."

  "I'm not surprised."

  "Then the sky started doing what it does." Patya was brimming with things she likely had no words to say. "And everybody was scared. Why does it do that?"

  "I don't know," he said, which was only the truth.

  "The tribes started coming in. And the villages and all. Father packed up Kais Tain and left. That's what we learned, anyway. We were living in the Beykaskh until it shook down, and then we lived in tents, and then the servants told us we were free and we could go to the Haga, outside the camp."

  "That was what I asked Memnanan to do."

  "What's going to happen to us? Is there a tower?" His sister knew he could lie. His sister wanted the truth the Ila and the tribes and all the villages might not get from him. And would repeat it.

  "There is a tower. I promise you there's a tower."

  Patya looked relieved at that. "I'll tell Mother."

  "Good."

  "You can ride here a while," Patya suggested, falling a little behind as he quickened Osan's pace. "You could ride over and see Mother."

  "She knows you'll tell her. I have a job to do." He put the quirt to innocent Osan, who hardly needed that vigorous an encouragement, but he wanted away, quickly. Hati was with him as they rode forward in the line.

  "She seems a fine girl," Hati said. Around them the sun had brought color to the land. The desert had acquired detail while he talked with Patya, so rapid the sunrise was on the Lakht.

  "So she is. But full of questions."

  "The same with Aigyan," Hati said. "I won't answer him, either. I'd rather not go that far."

  He saw that clearly enough.

  "Have you a mother? A father?"

  "Both gone," Hati said. "Gone in the war, with my uncles. We fought the Migi for the southern wells. The Migi are dead. But so are most of Aigyan's house. Don't go there yet. Don't talk to him. He'll only argue. Don't talk to Menditak this morning, either. You'll only make Aigyan suspiciou
s. Let them settle out, on the trail. Let Aigyan declare his camp with no one advising him. That will be soon enough."

  Marak, the voices dinned at him, a rising echo, a warning.

  The vision was back, the star-fall, the ring of fire.

  He took the warning. He reined back, to the side of the column. They need only wait there as the column proceeded, until they could simply set the beshti in motion to rejoin Tofi and Norit.