C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  "How many beasts?" the captain asked Marak.

  "Ask the caravan master," Marak said. "He knows that, or he knows nothing."

  "Ask wide, but prudently," the captain said sternly to the master. "This is the Ila's charge."

  The master, whose name was Obidhen, looked down and counted, a rapid movement of fingers, the desert way, that took the place of the au'it's scribing. "Sixty-nine beasts," Obidhen said. "The tents are enough, ten to a tent. More will mean more beasts, more food, more pack beasts, more work, more risk. I have slaves enough, my grown sons, and the two freedmen."

  "The tents are enough," Marak agreed.

  "This is a modest man," the captain said to Obidhen. "The Ila finds merit in him, the god knows why."

  Obidhen looked at Marak askance, not having been told, perhaps, that his party consisted entirely of madmen.

  But after that, the supplies must be gotten and loaded, and the caravan master went out with orders to gather what he needed immediately, on the Ila's charge, and form his caravan outside the walls by the fountain immediately. Obidhen promised three hours by the clepsydra in the courtyard, having his beasts within the pens to the north of the city, and his gear and his tents, he said, well-ordered and waiting in the warehouses by the northern gate. He could find the rest, with the Ila's seal on the order, within the allotted time.

  "We will need for each man or woman a change of clothing," Marak said. "Waterskins. Mending for their boots and clothing. And salves and medicines for the lot."

  "Done," the captain said then, and appointed aides to bring it, and a corporal to rouse out a detail to carry it down past the fountain gate, to be parceled out as Obidhen directed, every man and woman a packet to keep in personal charge. not so much water as might be a calamity to lose, but enough to augment their water-storage by one full day and their food by a week.

  "Sergeant Magin will escort you as far as your first camp out from the walls," the captain said, when the au'it had written down the details for whoever read such records. "I know," Memnanan said. "You wish no escort. This is not an escort."

  "I take the warning," Marak said.

  Memnanan looked at him as if there was far, far more he wanted to ask, and to say, and to know, before he turned an abjori lowlander and a caravan of good size loose in his jurisdiction.

  "You will carry a letter and water-seal," Memnanan said, "for the lord of Pori."

  It would speed their journey, if they might water to the limit of their capacity before descending the rim. Marak approved. For the rest, he trusted Obidhen knew the wells, and the hazards.

  It was approaching dawn by the time he was satisfied about the rest of the baggage, and by the time the Ila's men reported the mad were delivered to the bottom of the hill. He had thought it might take longer, and saw now that there would be no rest, not even an hour, but that was well enough. His back ached, his ears roared, his joints ached, and his eyes blurred with exhaustion, but the expectation of life and freedom had become bedrock, underlying all actions, the urgency of the departure as overwhelming as the direction, and the Ila's officers were inclined to take her orders as like the god's, instantly to be fulfilled. East, his voices said, persistent, though the Ila's blast had deafened him. East. Now. Haste.

  "I will come back," he said, if Memnanan had doubted it.

  Memnanan eyed him at a certain remove, as if still trying to sum him up. He likewise fixed Memnanan in his mind, a man not remarkable to look at, but distinguished by honesty, by wit, by intelligence. Someday they might be bitter enemies. In this hour they were close allies, and he meant to remember this name, this face, for good, whatever fell between them.

  Then still haunted by his voices, half-deafened and aching in his bones, he turned and left, to walk down the hill like any common traveler. Memnanan sent the sergeant and his men down with him, and the au'it that the Ila had instructed to go with him walked with him, too, down the streets he had walked up mere hours ago as a prisoner.

  The city rested neither by day nor by night. only changed its traffic. As folk did in the downland villages, people in Oburan did their major business by day; but the city being also of the Lakht, there were still plenty of curious onlookers abroad even in the depth of the night. They wondered at him, perhaps, not having had the rumor from the day people what he was. But they seemed to wonder more at the au'it, red-robed, the visible presence of the Ila, where they crossed the occasional circle of bug-besieged, oil-wasteful lamplight. Omi, they said. Lord. Lady. They bowed, or covered their faces, fearing her more than weapons.

  When they reached the gates, gates that stood open by night in these times of peace, they had only to walk outside, there by the Mercy of the Ila, where Obidhen had arranged his beasts and their burdens. The pack beasts all sat saddled. Their burdens, which seemed all apportioned, sat ready to be bound to the saddles just before they set themselves under way. The riding beasts, too, were saddled, awaiting their riders. Obidhen had been a busy man.

  "We are ready," Obidhen reported, bowing.

  "The au'it will ride with us," Marak said. "I doubt she knows how. I doubt many of the others do."

  "We have been advised," Obidhen said. It was still a question of how much Obidhen had been advised, but Marak thought likely Obidhen had by now heard the nature of his party.

  The sergeant commanding the Ila's men, too, gave the necessary commands to the caravan master, and went off to secure their own riding beasts from somewhere near, while Obidhen began to appoint his party of madmen to their beasts.

  That was the orderly beginning of the matter. Then Obidhen's slaves, strong men, each, roused each of the forty-some riding beasts up, beginning with the au'it, and hoisted their passengers up, like children.

  "Sit still!" Marak shouted out. "Let them settle!"

  It was appalling confusion. The beasts, in the uncertainty of so many new riders, lost patience and moved away from nudging knees and elbows, adding to the bawling confusion. Two and three of the novice riders toppled hard onto the sand. Marak seized stray reins, and so did the freedmen and the sons and Obidhen himself, while onlookers gathered from the city gate to add to the confusion. The soldiers, riding up with shouts and derision, had to gather in reins to hold other bawling beasts.

  Meanwhile no few riders let their beasts escape their inexpert reining, and those animals set to circling, ignoring tugs on their reins by the simple trick of laying their heads around. It was no surprise that several novices had their feet bitten, which brought howls and panic anew, and catcalls from the gate despite the presence of the au'it and the soldiers.

  The madmen were mostly villagers, but they had walked the desert, not ridden it. Save a few desert-bred folk and two others who were clearly expert, the most of the madmen had never ridden in their lives, and the slaves had a great deal to do to convince any of the beasts thus mounted to keep a line.

  Marak approached his own well-bred besha and took his quirt from the saddle. After the recent confusion his beast rolled a wary eye back, sizing him up.

  Marak took the rein and stepped smoothly into the higher mounting loop. The besha, perhaps relieved to sense a rider who knew the fast way aboard, half straightened his forelegs and came up under him as he landed.

  There was no need for hup-hup-hup! Marak sized the beast up, too, braced both hands against the double horn, one high, one low, as the back legs shifted.

  The pitch forward reversed in the next breath as the forelegs straightened.

  And just when an inexperienced rider would least expect it, the hind legs drove in one long shove, propelling the rider forward and all but upside down for an instant, testing the strength of the girth around the beast's broad, deep chest.

  That was what the double horn and straight-armed brace of the hands was for, and that was why children and old folk mounted a besha only with assistance, while it was standing.

  A fourth, a minor jolt, almost a hop, straightened the forelegs entirely, and at that, the rider's whole body sn
apped back to view the world from twice a man's height, poised on a stilt-limbed body four times his size. It all proceeded in a few blinks of the eye; and weary as he was, trembling as he held the rein, and surrounded by a band of madmen apt to fall in the dust or lose toes to vexed mounts, Marak still found a breath of freedom.

  The beast under him, no common run of the herd, wanted to move. He held it back. The besha swayed back and forth under him, grumbling in its chest, as beshti would do when they were full of spirit and impatient with the lowly pack beasts. Marak allowed no nonsense, settled his right foot possessively on the besha's curved neck, and heaved a deep and shaken sigh. The besha under him did the same.

  They all were up. No one had been killed. Obidhen's sons linked the animals that would move under halter, to loud complaints and the occasional outright squall of indignation from riding beasts unaccustomed to such treatment when they were under saddle.

  The packs, meanwhile, all had their specific places, hung over the packsaddles, tied down with a few short turns of rope. The caravan slaves hastened, sometimes running from one beast to the other, beshti patience notoriously scant with imbalance or hesitation. Everything was packed, every packet balanced for the two sides of the saddle, everything apportioned to the individual beast's capacity to carry: there was the mark of a veteran caravanner. Every pack went on the first time, and every beast responded to the light snap, not the impact, of a quirt.

  A last few madmen, desert-bred, mounted up on their own, and rode back and forth, free of the detested lead, restless, as anxious as the beasts.

  Certainly the caravan master's three sons had no need of help when the time came. "Bas!" the order was, making a standing beast simply put out one foreleg. That served as a footbridge to an unseen mounting loop and, by a quick turn, to the saddle. To the unknowing eye, in the dim light of dawn, the master's eldest son had leapt to his besha's back.

  It was the trick of the young, the lithe, the desert-bred, and Marak doubted he could still do it himself. He had softened considerably in village life, since their retreat from the Lakht, and he knew now he had watched his father, too, grow soft, and angry, and settle in for the life of a village lord. There had been the start of the bitterness, a man always mourning the chance that had never come, the vengeance that had never fallen into his hands.

  Thoughts muddled. Sounds became distant, and the weariness weighed down and down, numbing senses. The foot-braced attitude Marak held, keeping his beast at rest, was one in which he had slept many a ride, and of all things else he had left behind with his youthful confidence, his body had not forgotten how to keep centered on a swaying back. He shivered in the dawn, but at least no one noticed his weakness. The shivering was lack of sleep; it was the unaccountable shift of his fortunes. It was the roaring in his ears, that the Ila's retaliation had brought on him, and now that he had done everything, now that there was nothing more for him to do but sleep, it was beyond him to fight his exhaustion. Body heat fled. He drew his robes close about him, even covering his fingers within that warmth and taking in the heat of the huge body under him.

  The roaring increased within his ears. Pain had invaded his joints, down to his fingers and his toes, and reasserted itself, after so long ignoring it. But it was only exhaustion, so he argued with himself. It all would pass. The trembling would pass. Surely the roaring in his ears would pass with sleep.

  "Are we going home?" one confused madman asked another in his hearing, as the line filed past, and the caravan set itself in motion. "Where shall we go?"

  One madman answered another: "East, man. We go east. Everything is east. And then we go back and tell the Ila what we find. That's the crazy part. Tain's son is one of us. He claims he'll figure it out."

  Chapter Four

  The law of the caravans is this: that the master of the caravan has the power of life and death over all who travel under his rule, except over a priest, except over an au'it, except over the Ila's man. These lives belong to the Ila. The master of the caravan must preserve them at the cost of all others.

  -The Book of Oburan

  The sun rose as a vast, expanded disk and climbed above the Lakht in an unforgiving sky. The day's heat grew and grew, and built toward that hour when prudent travelers pitched their tents. Marak had indeed slept in the saddle, an uneasy sleep, a sleep with a watchful eye on the mad and on the soldiers and the caravan master and his sons alike; but no greater disturbance demanded his attention than the passage of birds, shadows on the sand, and the track of a solitary belly-creeper headed for the reed-rimmed Mercy.

  Past midday, with the pond behind them, the heat only increased. The caravan master ordered a halt until the heat of the day had passed, and Marak, among the rest, was glad to bid his beast kneel and to step down from the saddle.

  In the jolt of the beast's kneeling down, his own knees and elbows ached with remembered fire. He sat down on the burning sand against his beast's broad side while the caravan master and the servants pitched the tents.

  The au'it settled near him, book and kit in her lap.

  There would be nothing remarkable in this camp to record. He was determined on that point.

  He said to her, instead, "Write the names of the mad." It seemed a harmless question. "Write the names of their cities. Write what they look for." It might keep her from hovering near him.

  The au'it bowed her head and went on her mission, visiting the rest, who disposed themselves in a tight, sweaty huddle under the first canvas stretched. forty madmen, all in a space for ten.

  Marak cared little for what she did or reported. The holy city had gone below the horizon, but it would appear many times during the next night and day, and for that sight he no longer roused himself. He only cared that he hear no loud sounds and that nothing require him to stir, and where he would find the strength in his legs to mount the beast again this afternoon he could not imagine. Now the pain had set in. Now the weakness swept over him. The caravan master's sons would heave him up as they did the wife of Tarsa and the potter.

  He would burn with shame, he, Marak Trin, once Trin Tain, his father's heir.

  Terror of the Lakht, the men had called him. Not lately.

  He rested foolishly in the sun, not even seeking shelter in the first canvas spread: at this pitch of disgust with himself he could not abide the looks and the questions of his fellow travelers, the recipients of his charity, the models of his fortune. It was the latter truth that galled him most, that in point of fact, as far as the Ila cared and as far as the soldiers cared, he had become no different than the rest of them. He brooded on his situation, his aifad pulled about his face, shading him from what was now, though he had invited every one of them, an unwelcome company.

  But when all five tents were all up, all open-sided to let the air flow through, the mad had somewhat spread out and settled down on their mats. Then he stirred himself.

  "Omi," Obidhen accosted him. My lord. "I'll have the number one tent, with my freedmen and the slaves. My second son Landhi will have the next, Rom, my eldest, the third and Tofi, my youngest, can manage the fourth. I can place two freedmen with the first and manage the fifth myself, unless, omi, you will take charge there. You know the Lakht. You clearly know the necessities. If you will take the au'it in your care and be master there, it might be best."

  He understood the delicate position the master was in. The Ila's soldiers had camped in that fifth tent, men over whom the master had little authority.

  "I will deal with it," he said to the master, "and I do know the Lakht."

  The master bowed, clearly relieved. He was relieved. He had a tent where his word was law. As for the soldiers, they would leave after their noon rest, and good riddance, Marak thought. He took his waterskin, took his mat, almost last of the pile, and went to that shade, sure that the au'it, still pursuing her questions, would come back to him in due time.

  Meanwhile he spread his mat near the edge of the shade, where the breeze moved beneath the shelter, and wen
t and got his rations. As master of the fifth tent, he was the arbiter of disputes, the dispenser of stores on days when they chose not to share a common meal. There were no disputes, no questions, and peacefully he unwrapped what he had to eat, the common fare on days when the travel was too hard and the press of that work too fast and furious to spread out the sun-ovens and cook. The cake was the sort of dry ration common to the Lakht, where water was too precious to let into food. Water stayed in the canteen, and one mixed the two in the mouth, to sustain life and make it possible to swallow. That was the usual fare of the desert tribes on the move, and the mad had learned it on the march. They might know nothing about riding beasts; but they knew by now how to eat and drink in the desert. These were the survivors, toughest, most adaptable of the lot. He had nothing to tell them regarding the preciousness of water and the apportionment of supplies. given they were in their sane minds.

  The Ila's men, meanwhile, unwrapped their supper and ate fruit from the market, dripped juice wantonly on the sand, and pitched the pits away still having flesh on them. Marak glowered, resting, nursing the recurrence of pain the Ila had given him.