C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Page 3

  He was not the common sort of madman, to elbow the others for drink. Here at the lower outflow he had it all to himself. He saw the wife from Tarsa shoved to the ground by the potter, and he seized the man by the collar and held him back until the wife had gotten up, bruised.

  "There is no scarcity," he said to the potter. "Are you a man at all, or not?"

  The potter's profane answer proved he was a fool, at least, and Marak showed his contempt for the water of the Ila's Mercy by dumping the potter bodily into the beast's trough, perhaps the first water bath the potter had had since his birth. The guards laughed, in far better humor with their bellies full of water, and no one rebuked him for the act.

  With that act, he had waked somewhat from the drug in the food they fed him. He felt his heart beating and the blood moving in his veins. Beyond the immediate noise of the beasts, he heard the noise of the curious of the city and the passersby, heard the jeers of a gathering crowd while the potter clawed his way out of more water than he had ever sat in, and dripped onto the pavings. Marak heard young voices squealing as a besha snapped at a tormenting child, and heard the ting and clash of belled harnesses, the sound of a caravan all about them. All the bystanders laughed, having gathered to watch the potter's bath, and had no idea, perhaps, that they were entertained by the mad.

  Marak stretched his back and arched it and looked up and up at the threat of the walls, the high barricade that had thwarted Tain's rebellion after all their plans and their ambitions.

  He saw from this vantage the glass-edged defenses he and Tain had once tried to breach, and with a soldier's cold eye, too, looked up at the scars he and Tain had left on the limestone walls of the holy city, the jewel of the Lakht. They were no few scars, and lasting ones, but not mortal, no, far from mortal wounds against this city.

  They had not known, then, about the guns, or the launchers.

  He imagined there were things about the city he did not guess yet. The very reason for this summons was one.

  Did the Ila in her power shrug off the war out of the west, and yet seek out the mad on a whim? Was it mere curiosity?

  So now the damned and the mad gathered at the Ila's request, to live or to die, and the son of the Ila's enemy was here, one among many, and yet not unknown, he was sure. He was in the records these men had made, and he was sure someone would inform the Ila what a prize her men had gathered in the west. He wondered if the Ila's men would single him out before the Ila knew; would they make his name known in the streets? And he wondered if that happened what the people would do, who had lived through the years of the attack?

  Would they resent him?

  Attack him, if he shouted out, I am Marak Trin Tain?

  He was tempted to do it, if only to die with a name and to make the most trouble possible in his dying. But he had another purpose yet to accomplish.

  The guards moved the other prisoners on, and he bowed his head like the rest and walked with them, led like the beasts.

  "Walk!" the Ila's men shouted at them. For the first time in a day they used their quirts, set afoot, moving among the mad to set them on their way through the gates.

  The journey was over. The caravan masters would seek their pay of the offices, most likely, as in every town, when cargo was offloaded. The Ila's men had assumed all command now: the beasts and their masters they left behind with the tents and the baggage, all except the beast that carried the old man. The boy, Pogi, stopped to stare at their parting; but the guards whipped him on.

  A prudent man might be ready for whatever whim moved the Ila, and the sergeant in charge of the caravan was, over all, a prudent man. He shouted out curses at men who whipped the boy too hard; he shouted encouragement at the mad to walk. "Not so far now," the sergeant said. "You'll sit up there! Move!"

  Marak walked behind the beast carrying the dead man, with a view of its legs and underbelly, mostly, as the stone-paved street rose up and up the city's broad terracing, up between the frontages of craft shops and warehouses and the better dwellings.

  In a turn more the sunlight dimmed with dusk and colors lost their brilliancy. The day was over. And Marak walked in the wake of the beast, which, watered, stopped a moment to do what beshti rarely did, and moved on. Those afoot got the worst of it.

  In their war here, his father's war, not only had they never breached these walls, they had never imagined the teeming mass of people that lived inside the holy city. He walked now within deep shadow of tall buildings and dusk, within a stench of smoke and rot and urine. He felt the slight coolth of perpetually shadowed stone as well as the cooling of the air that followed the sun's descent. Noon could hardly reach this place. He had not appreciated his last view of the sun outside. If he saw it rise again, he was sure now it would be his great misfortune.

  High, high up the winding turns of the street they passed now with little curiosity from the people, until the word must have passed, and the residents of the holy city came out to jeer at the madmen, and to pelt them with rotten fruit-with the incredible luxury of the holy city, where there was food discarded, where the middens were richer than villages. Precious moisture ran with common waste down the sides of the streets, and fruit pulp slicked the stones underfoot.

  The boy picked up a half-rotten fruit and ate it. The wife fell and soiled her knees in the muddy pulp. Marak pulled her up in the next stride: it was no place to die, in such filth, after so long struggle to come here. She sang to herself as they walked, as water ran between the stones, as better food than many villages ever knew pelted them as common refuse.

  "The devils will come down!" the potter yelled at their tormentors. "The devils live on the high hill, in the tower, and they will come down and dance at your funerals!"

  At that defiance, the crowd flung more serious missiles. Marak fended a potsherd with his arm, but one of the mad went down: a barber, the man was, and a broken brick struck him in the head, toppling him in his blood.

  At that the Ila's men shoved at the crowd and hauled the attacker out, bringing him along, too, beating him with their sticks.

  Marak sheltered the wife from Tarsa against his side, away from the more accurate stone-throwers. "Where is love?" she sang unevenly, faintly, as she climbed. "Where is shade in the desert? Where is my love gone?"

  They suddenly passed a gate, into a large square, before those who flung stares, not stones; and those were better behaved, but more chilling.

  After that they came through a second gate, into the shadow of inner walls, and the reek of asphalt and oil. Steam went up here in rolling clouds. Rumor was true. Such was the wealth of the holy city that they had fuel to spare for furnaces, and gates moved by steam and not the strength of men or beasts. He had heard of it but never seen it.

  He bore up the wife, who staggered against him. "Please," she said, "let me rest. Let me rest."

  "Soon," he said. He could wish she had died quietly, as the old man had died. She was a gentle soul. She had no imagining of the possibilities in this place.

  "What is that sound?" she asked when the gates groaned and gave a tortured sound, iron on iron.

  "Machines," he said. "The machines of the Beykaskh."

  She seemed not to understand him. Perhaps she had never heard how the Beykaskh made gates of iron and boiled water to make them move, or how the Ila, displeased, flung deposed ministers into the works of those machines. The wife from Tarsa wavered in her steps, and looked numb, exhausted as they passed through the last gates, through the heart of the machines.

  They were within the inner sanctum, the heart of the holy city. He had come where his father's armies had only hoped to come.

  "This is the one," the captain of the Ila's men said suddenly, and seized Marak's arm, and drew him and the wife apart.

  The wife fell to her knees, crying out for his help, and for someone named Lelie. No one noticed. She lay on the pavings and the besha that bore the dead old man walked sedately past her defenseless arm, scarcely missing her, stepping delicately o
ver her. Marak saw it, held his breath, but walked obediently where the men bade him go.

  This is the one, they said of him, but even now they accounted him no threat.

  He would not lose his one chance for the sake of a gesture. He had fixed on one mad act as of some value to his father, as some way in which his father might say, and that the villages might say, Perhaps he was Tain's, after all.

  If he was Tain's, if he was Tain's, then his mother was no whore, and his sister's honor was safe.

  He had one chance. One chance. One chance. He had to be meek and tolerate everything until he found it.

  Then the mad would have a name, as far as they told the story. Every name would be remembered, and his father would say, He was not so mad as the rest, was he?

  Chapter Two

  To every good man the Ila gave the nature of men, and to every good beast the Ila gave the nature of beasts. The Ila named them and divided them one from the other. She appointed them their use and life under the sun.

  But even to the beasts of the desert the Ila's Mercy continually pours out her abundance.

  Even the destroyers the Ila made for her use.

  -The Book of Priests

  In here," the ila's men said, and made Marak duck, shielding his head from a low doorway. He wiped his eyes as his hair fell across his face, and consequently had grit in them, compounded with the sticky filth that clung to his skin and his hair and his clothes.

  Blinking tears, then, he prepared himself for soldiers' rough handling, but saw no authority awaiting him, only four slaves, who stood holding towels and such in a little fountain courtyard dim with twilight.

  "The Ila wishes not to be offended," one of the guards said.

  So the Ila had indeed heard the news of Tain's misfortune in his son, and become, as he hoped, curious. He would have the audience, and with no need for him to seek it, his most extravagant hopes realized.

  The officers of the household, armed and watchful, kept their distance from him, but in an act of leaden, ordinary compliance he began to shed the ruined boots, which brought away shreds of old white skin. New skin had grown, daily, to be worn away in blisters; it was his nature. It was the nature of all the mad, he had learned: they all healed well. Only the greatest injuries, like the boy's, could overwhelm their bodies' defenses.

  The slaves took his filthy rags with disgust. With gestures-they did not speak-they wished him to stand beneath a device that poured down water, and pulled a chain. A flood rushed down on him, a chill rush that made his flesh contract. Between his feet, water that had passed over his body stayed not to bathe him, but flowed out a drain so rapidly the puddle never showed soil.

  Perhaps that water flowed from the drain out under the wall, and perhaps it flowed down the streets to carry the waste of the holy city, or perhaps, again, it passed down clay pipes, to join the Mercy of the Ila, the drink of unknowing passersby.

  {Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said, chiding him. or beckoning him to folly: he never knew.}

  Meanwhile the slaves washed his body with soft clothes, scrubbing in their ignorance at his tattoos, at the mark he wore, the abjori emblem, in blue above his heart, scrubbed at the killing-marks on his right hand.

  "They will not come off," he said to them after enduring their efforts. Perhaps the slaves had never been outside the Beykaskh: at least they desisted when told. They loosed his hair and scrubbed it, and combed it with gentle fingers. The last of twilight was going. A slave brought out lamps and hung them in the open courtyard, providing a golden light.

  They had him sit down, next, and by that light carefully shaved his face clean, a luxury he had not had in all the time of walking. They used a straight razor which if he had seized it would have been a fearsome weapon. But he waited. They were deft and quick, and even followed the shave with a soothing herbal, while he sat with his hands on his knees, the object of the guards' indolent stares.

  There was no reason for shame. The long walk had worn him, but he had healed. He was thinner than he had been, but he was still strong. He was still Tain's son, no matter Tain had rejected him. He was still himself.

  He expected clean clothes of some sort. It hardly made sense to waste so much water and clothe him again in garments foul with refuse. And indeed, they unfolded clothing from the protection of thick towels. They gave him a shirt of cloth as fine as a bride's gown, shirt and trousers that felt strangely old and worn to comfort as they slid over his skin. There was a belt, which was foolish to give a prisoner, but they gave it, all the same. They carefully combed his hair, and bound it with soft leather. Instead of the galling rope about his neck, they wished to place a light chain of ornate links, common brass, such as common folk wore. That alone he refused, wishing no Lakhtani chain on his neck, no matter their custom.

  "He wants one of gold," the chief guard said to the slaves, mocking him, and added: "Let it be. It's no matter of importance."

  That was the importance. But it was not important in the guards' thinking, and he said nothing.

  All these proceedings, he was sure, readied him to come into the heart of the Beykaskh, and near the Ila. It had fallen dark now, except their lamp. The slaves brought boots for his feet which fit amazingly well. so much care they took for his comfort. They must have measured his ruined ones, split seams and all. And where did one find an array of boots simply waiting?

  And would he see the Ila tonight, and have his chance at this late hour? Or must he wait?

  {Marak, Marak, the voices said, damnably ill timed.}

  He shut his eyes, pretending weariness to conceal his distraction. But worse than the voices, that swinging sense came over him, the one that could take a man's balance.

  "Come along," his guards said.

  {Marak, the voices said. Marak. Get up. Walk.}

  He made a careful, practiced effort against that swinging feeling. He gained his balance. Above all things else he wished no restraint, no impediment to the one chance he might have at the Ila, and he had no need, for a moment, to pretend helplessness for his guards' sake. The structures of fire blinded him, and the world swung violently, always toward the east.

  They led him by either arm, the captain and the guard, out that low fountain-court door and into the hallway.

  More guards stood on duty here, men in the gilt-trimmed uniform of the elite of the Ila's men. Now it was certain where he was going. Now his palms sweated and his heart beat hard. Be silent! he chided his voices, attempting to govern them, as he rarely could.

  He succeeded. He faced stairs, and he climbed doggedly, at his guards' orders. He knew how he wished to die.

  Chapter Three

  The Ila descended to the Lakht and established the center of the earth. Outside was the wasteland. Until that time there were no villages anywhere and there was no cultivated field.

  The Ila established the Holy City and from it went out appointed authorities to establish other centers throughout the land, to widen the habitable lands, to drive back the vermin, and to enrich the earth with gardens.

  -The Book of Oburan, ch. 1, v. 1.

  He hoped for single audience. In his wildest hopes he wished to come very near the Ila, and to have her guards far away.

  But to his disappointment he was not alone. A group gathered in an upper hall outside a set of massive doors, a motley group of old and young, men and women, all dressed in the ordinary white and brown of the holy city. All the company had a haggard look. Some bore recent wounds. Were they the local harvest of the streets, Marak wondered?

  But among them, along the edge, he saw the wife from Tarsa, the potter, the barber, and the rest that had come with him. Then he knew that he was not alone in this audience, only better dressed.

  They must be all mad, the scourings of the Ila's search, not only from the villages of the west, but from all the land. There were that many more of them, filling the hallway as far as the corner.

  The metal doors sighed heavily and opened, no hand touching them.


  Beyond them was a narrow, pillared hall. At the end of the hall was a dais and a high seat, and on that seat was a figure robed in red.

  The Ila. The source of all authority. deathless, immortal, so some said. A god on earth, priests maintained, and the Ila did not refuse their worship.

  If she was a god, Marak proposed to find out. Under his brow, head bowed among the herd, he measured the length he must go to reach that figure. He imagined to himself dealing one, just one strong blow to that fragile-seeming neck before they cut him down.

  Orders passed in gestures, the permissive lifting of the Ila's hand, and the guards brought them forward as a group, for the Ila's examination.