C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  "If I'm that mad, how shall I remember to come back?"

  "If you are that mad," she said, "will you care? And if you are not mad, will you serve my needs? I think not. I think only the mad can find this answer."

  "It may be," he said.

  "You attacked my city."

  "So I did."

  "And failed."

  "And failed," he said.

  "Why?" she asked, as if she had no idea at all. "To take? Or to destroy?"

  A wise question, an incisive question. It told her everything of his wishes in a word.

  He made a move of his hand, about them, thinking of the machines. "If the machines would work for us," he said, "I would be very content to sit in this hall."

  "And would you do better than I, sitting here?"

  "I would not pour water into the desert," he said. In this mad give-and-take, the memory of such waste still galled him. "I would build a stone cistern, and put it next to the walls, and let whoever wished settle around it and grow fruit."

  It might be a foolish answer, as the holy city saw it. The Ila listened to him, listened very gravely. "You think we waste it."

  "What else is it, when it pours out under the sun? You feed the vermin. They multiply out there."

  Her lips quirked. It might have been a smile. "You would turn us into a village."

  "It's not likely," he said.

  "Not likely that you would ever have taken Oburan? No. Far from likely. It was far from likely when you and your father came up onto the Lakht. Surely you knew that."

  He shrugged, having no wish to discuss his father's plans or their misguided strategy, or the failed aim of his thirty years of life. The world might turn again, and, meanwhile, he was alive, and he had eyes, and he had seen the inside of this place. No, it was not likely that he or his father would have sat in this hall, rulers of all the world, but fortunes shifted. If she willed, his were changing; he was not dead yet. He managed not to meet her eyes, and asked himself why he cared for her respect, or what he suddenly had to fear in this debate.

  Did he believe in her proposal? He was not sure, that was the thing. And the voices still cried, screamed, roared, all their words confounded in the depths of his hearing.

  "You have never renounced your ambition," she said.

  He shrugged, and did look up, discovered, pinned for the moment to the truth. "No," he said. "But it's not likely."

  "The voices have always spoken to you?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "You are to investigate, Marak Trin. You are my eyes and my ears in this matter. I ask, and you've promised me answers. How long have the voices spoken to you?"

  "Since about my sixth year. Since then."

  "And the visions?"

  "They've always been there."

  "Did a stranger come to Kais Tain when you were a baby?"

  "I have no way to know," he said. "Why do you ask?"

  "It's a common part of the story. A mysterious stranger. A visitation. A baby that grows up mad."

  He found that idea sinister beyond belief. No stranger had touched him that he knew, but his mother had never said, one way or the other.

  "It wouldn't be easy to come into our household."

  "Among the lords of Kais Tain? Perhaps not. But very easy, in most peasant houses. Perhaps it's why mad lords are so rare, and mad farmers are so common. Farmers are generally more hospitable."

  "I've no idea." They sat so easily, so madly companionable. "Who are these strangers? What do they do, and why?"

  "I have some ideas. I know, for instance, that the madness that afflicts you is a specific madness, and that all that have it are under thirty years of age. How old are you?"

  "Thirty." He thought of the old man, and doubted what she said. But had it been the same madness? Was there more than one kind?

  "Do you hear the voices now?"

  "I hear a roaring." What she asked was an intimate confession, one he had never made except to his father and his mother. "I sometimes hear my name."

  "That seems common," she said, leaning forward, as if they gossiped together. "What else do you hear?"

  He shook his head. "Nothing."

  "Yet you know this thing is in the east."

  "The world tilts that way."

  "Does it?"

  "To us it does. It does it morning and evening, regular as you like it. Watch the madmen. Most will fall down."

  She neither laughed nor grew angry. "If I had your ears, if I had your eyes, I could know what I wish to know. If I had your strength, I might walk to the east and know what I wish to know. So I purchase them. I purchase you. Is the price enough?"

  "I can't bargain with you."

  "Ah, but you can. Ask me."

  "I have nothing to ask."

  "If you betray me, I promise you Kais Tain will smoke for days. I promise your mother and your sister will die very unhappily. Does that excite your interest? I thought so. I give you this one year of their safety for free, and all the resources you may need, a regiment of my guard if you wish it. Gold? Gold is sand under my feet. But knowledge? That, you can bring me. Then you and I will talk again. Name what you need to accomplish what I ask."

  He saw she was utterly in earnest. "Keep your regiment," he said. "Give me my freedom. The safety of my house and its villages for this year. And my father's life, even if he's offended your officers."

  "What do you care for him?"

  "He's my father. He's signed your armistice."

  "Done. What else?"

  What else was there? It was the last chance to amend their bargain. "Give me the madmen," he said. He saw little use for them in the holy city, where they would die, hanged or stoned, the common fate of the mad once discovered. They had walked together, he and the wife of Tarsa, and the potter, and he could not walk away alive and forget their fate. "If you mean all you say, you have no need for them, and I might learn from them."

  A red-gloved hand waved away inconsequences. "Take them. Do as you please with them. A caravan and its hire. Riding beasts. All these things."

  "Weapons." His were gone. "Tents enough for all of us."

  She laughed like a child, as if, together, she on the steps, he on the ground, they were two children planning a delicious prank. "An au'it to write things down."

  "I can write," he said in offended pride.

  "I write," she said with a wave of her hand, "but I find it tedious. An au'it, I say."

  "What if the au'it runs mad? Shall I be blamed?"

  "You will not be blamed." The red-gloved hands clasped silken knees. The eyes deep as wells stared at him. "The east is full of strange things. So is the Lakht. Take the regiment."

  "I never needed one. I rode all about these hills and your regiments couldn't find us. The sand and the stones are no threat to me."

  "The vermin are. Bandits are."

  "Only when you feed them on corpses and fat caravans! The holy city is their source of food. Pour out water, and vermin and bandits alike fight among themselves." He shrugged. "A regiment will take more time than an ordinary caravan. I know the Lakht. I don't need them. Give me a good caravan master. Good sound canvas."

  "And the mad."

  "And the mad."

  "Better than a regiment?"

  "We've learned the desert, have we not? We walked here."

  A long, long moment that dark gaze continued, intimate and close.

  "I shall be very disappointed if you fail. Is there anything you might ask of me, any favor for yourself alone."

  "Only what I've asked," he said.

  Perhaps it disquieted her to find a man who wanted so little. But there was nothing at all he wanted. There was absolutely nothing she could give, except his freedom, and the lives of his mother and sister and his father.

  "I dreamed of the east," she said in a low voice. "As the mad do. I will have an answer, Marak Tain. I will have an answer."

  "If I'm alive to come back, I will come back. Let my mother and my sister go
where they choose and you'll have your answer and all my effort. I've lied in my life. But I've never broken a promise."

  The Ila drew off a glove, finger by finger, as they did in the market, as they did in a court of law. Her hand was long and white, blue-veined marble, and she offered him her fingers to touch, concluding a bargain, flesh to flesh, with no au'it to write it. Her flesh was warm as his own. She smelled of fruit and rain, smelled of wealth and water.

  "Your household keeps its word," she said. "It always has. Its one virtue. Go outside. Bring my captain in."

  He rose with difficulty. The joints of his knees felt assaulted, still aching with the fire she had loosed. A roaring was in his ears, making him dizzy. He was not fit to ride, not today; but he would. If her promise brought him the means to leave this place and walk out under the sky again, he would do that. He made out the voices past the roaring in his ears. East, they cried, east! and he realized he was set free, to do what the voices had wanted all his life. Freedom racketed about his whole being, demanding a test, demanding immediate action.

  East. East. East.

  He backed away, wobbling. The Ila rose and mounted the steps, and sat down in her chair, composed and still.

  But reaching the door he realized it had no latch, and he had no knowledge how to open it. She made a fool of him, consciously, perhaps. He gazed at it in dismay, reminded in such small detail how far the holy city was beyond his expectation.

  She opened the door, perhaps. At least it sighed a steamy breath and admitted one of her chief captains, a man scowling, hand on dagger, ready to kill.

  "Here are my orders," the Ila said from her chair high at the end of the room. "Give him the madmen, an au'it, and a master caravanner, and whatever canvas and goods and beasts he requires. Marak Trin Tain is under my seal. When he goes out from this hall, respect him. When he comes back to these doors, admit him. Write it!"

  The au'it, Marak saw from the doorway, had slunk back to sit at the Ila's feet. Quickly she spread out her book, and the au'it wrote whatever seemed good to write.

  "I have sent for the wife and daughter of Tain Trin Tain, and spared Tain his fate. Write it!"

  What would they cry through the holy city and through the market? Marak Trin is the Ila's man?

  His father would hear it, sooner or later. His father would be appalled, outraged, and, yes, shamed a second time.

  But could he refuse to yield up to the Ila's demand his cast-off wife and daughter, where he had sent his son?

  And could his son have done otherwise, when Tain Trin Tain had once bowed to the Ila and signed their armistice?

  In that sense it was not his decision. It became the Ila's. And Tain would have known, when he threw down the damnation against his wife, that he had cleaved the two of them one from the other and thrown conscience after, a casual piece of baggage. He only hoped the Ila's men reached Kais Tain in time for his mother's safety.

  Love of his father? Loyalty? He no longer knew where to find that in himself. In the Ila's promise, he had lost one direction and found another. He did not resent the pain of the Ila's blow: lords struck when offended. It was an element, like heat, like thirst, to be endured. She had met the price, and he was bought. Had his father done as much, for all his blows through the years?

  He walked out with the captain, sure as he did so that here was a man, like his father, who had sooner see him dead. But the captain said not a word against the Ila's wishes, took him directly to the armory and let him equip himself with good, serviceable weapons: a dagger, a boot-knife, even considering that rarest of weapons, a pistol, difficult to keep in desert dust, and hungry for metal.

  "Sand will impair it," the captain said, plainly not in favor of him having it. "And aim is a matter of training."

  "I have no time for that," he said, and put aside that piece that, itself, could have hired a regiment.

  A bow-there were numerous good ones-might give him both range and rapidity of fire, but nothing to defeat a mobbing among the vermin, and it was a lowland weapon. In the summer heat of the Lakht the laminations outright melted and gave way.

  In the end he settled for the machai, a light, thin blade, as much tool as weapon, that he hung from his belt, and a good harness-knife.

  The captain looked at him oddly, and honestly tried to press at least a spear on him.

  "An encumbrance," Marak said. It was the same reason he wished none of the Ila's regiments, which encumbered themselves with all these things and baked in hardened leather besides, in the desert heat. "I want only this. For the rest of us, good boots. We'll ride. We'll all ride. But good boots. One never knows."

  "As you wish," the captain said, but after that the captain seemed worried, as if he had failed somehow in his duty, in sending him out short of equipment with an army of well-shod madmen, of which he was chief. The captain tried to make up for it in other offerings, silver heating-mirrors, a burning-glass, two fine blankets, and a personal, leather-bound kit of salves and medicines, all of which Marak did take.

  Then the captain walked him out to the pens, a fair distance, and pulled a riding beast from the reserve pens, a creature of a quality Kais Tain rarely saw.

  That, he prized, and found that he and the captain had reached an accommodation of practical cooperation. Under other circumstances they would have been aiming weapons at one another. But now the captain seemed to understand he was not there to steal away goods, but to carry out the Ila's wishes, economically, and asking no great show about it.

  In that understanding they became almost amiable, and the captain chided sergeants who hid back the better harness. They laid out the best. The captain's name, he learned, was Memnanan. He had spent all his life in the Ila's service as he had spent his in Tain's.

  They walked companionably through areas of the Beykaskh that Marak knew his father would spend a hundred men's lives to see. He looked up against the night sky at the high defenses, the strong walls and observed a series of latchless gates that sighed with steam.

  They had never even come close to piercing these defenses. Only their raids on caravans had gained notice, and that, likely, for its inconvenience, unless they should have threatened the flow of goods for a full year.

  The storerooms they visited and those they passed were immense. All the wealth in the world was here. They passed the kitchens. The vermin of the city ignored morsels of bread cast in a drainway. It lay and rotted. He found that as much a wonder as the steam-driven doors.

  "We have sent for a caravan master," Memnanan said. "We count forty-one who will make the whole journey, including yourself. Getting them outfitted will take hours, at the quickest."

  The captain ordered a midnight supper and shared it with him under an awning near the kitchens, the two of them drinking beer that finally numbed the pain, both getting a small degree drunk, and debating seriously about the merits of the western forges and the balance of their blades. In pride of opinion, they each cast at a target, the back of a strong-room door.

  They were within a finger of each other and the center of the target. Another beer and they might have sworn themselves brothers. And in that thought, Marak recoiled from the notion, and sobered, as the captain must surely do.

  A sergeant reported that the caravan master had come into the outer courtyard. This arrival turned out to be a one-eyed man with his three sons, who together owned fifty beasts, six slaves, and five tents, with two freedmen as assistants. This caravan master had served the Ila's particular needs for ten years, so he said, and took her pay and feared her as he feared the summer wind.

  "There are not enough beasts to carry us," Marak said to the man. "If the party numbers over forty, we're short, and it needs more supply than that."

  "To Pori," the caravan master said, which might be his understanding of the mission.

  "Off the edge of the Lakht. Beyond Pori." There was no lying to the caravan master, above all else. This was the man on whose judgment and preparation all their lives depended. />
  "There is nothing beyond Pori," the caravan master said.

  "That's why we need more beasts and more supply," Marak said, and appealed to the captain with a glance. "I need more tents, more beshti, first-quality, far more than the weapons."

  The captain snapped his fingers and called over the aide who had brought the caravan master; and the aide went in and called out an au'it, who sat down on a bench in the courtyard and prepared to write on loose sheets. A slave brought a lamp close to her, and set it down on a bare wooden table, while small insects died and sparked in the flame.