C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  The au'it came back. "Two have left," she said.

  "Have they taken beasts?" Marak asked.

  "No," the au'it said. "When we stopped to rest, they simply walked away."

  "They're dead," he said.

  Those who also had walked the Lakht to the holy city had not prevented them or reported them, and there was a certain logic in that. If they would walk away today, they would walk away tomorrow, having eaten and drunk a day's rations in the meanwhile. The desert killed the wasteful and the extravagant quickly, surely, and covered them over. He had given them their chance and spent a day's food on them. Effectively they were dead, and he could not fault their choice.

  It might be the better choice, who could know? He had asked for their lives in a moment in which he fought for his own life. Now he had no notion what he had done to these madmen, whether it was good or not. He had no idea whether he had rescued these people or damned them to a lingering death.

  But he knew why he shuddered at the reasonless, wasteful actions of the men and women that surrounded him. The soldiers swilled water. One of the mad at the moment had wandered out and turned in circles, looking up at the sky and staring at the sun. Because he had asked for this man's life, was he responsible? Could he advise the man against his visions? Could he do better in leading this band of fools?

  Could he say he would not, himself, sooner or later, be that crazed?

  The au'it, in the soft, rarely used voice of her profession, reported the two names of the lost among the others from her book, and listed the rest as he had wished, with their origins. None of the names of the mad meant much to him, except that the wife from Tarsa had a name: Norit; and the potter had a name, Kosul. He took account of those and of others, despite the roaring that had begun in his ears, and meant to remember them.

  It proved, too, that there were tribesmen among the mad. He had thought so. That was good news, in this land. only granted they were not the ones who had walked away.

  He lay down to sleep after eating. It seemed to him this afternoon that the air was either hotter than the rule, or he might be fevered. He had been in pain, and his wounds always went fevered: it was his weakness from childhood.

  When the fever came, however, he always healed.

  And he waked after a sleep of a few hours in less pain, which put him in a better frame of mind. To his relief, too, there was less of the intermittent buzzing and roaring behind the voices in his ears, so he began to hope that, too, might abate. He heard one of his voices calling him, distinctly so: Marak, Marak, Marak, that idle repetition clear for the first time since the Ila's fire had run through his bones.

  He had never thought he would be relieved to hear that voice, but he was. A voice was better than the roaring sound, and far better than dulled ears and diminished senses.

  But less welcome, this afternoon, his eyes flashed with inner light, as the images once had done when he was a child, when he first remembered them building shapes in his eyes. It was as if they were building back again.

  He healed. He always healed. Even the madness healed itself to its old terms, as if it were an inescapable condition of his good health.

  He lay on his mat and listened to his voices until the sun sank and the caravan master and his sons began to strike tents. Then it was time to move. The soldiers gathered their water-plump flesh up onto riding beasts and rode back the way they had come, returning to the city. No one was sorry for that.

  And the mad, once rested, wandered about with more energy than before, carrying their own mats, some even helping with the tents now that the soldiers were gone, now that they were sure they were no longer prisoners.

  Everyone was out and about, finally, except the wife from Tarsa, Norit, who sat and rocked, rocked, rocked, as the boy had used to.

  The caravan master came cautiously to inform him they must strike this tent, too, if they were to move, and asking him would he persuade the madwoman to get up.

  Marak saw from the tail of his eye that the au'it made a note in her book. He wondered what she wrote, and for whom she wrote it.

  He went and assisted the wife, Norit, to her feet. And the au'it made another note.

  Marak, Marak, Marak. The sound went on, maddening. The lights within his skull outshone the sun, a long, long tunnel of suns.

  The slaves had saddled his riding beast. In this gathering bout of madness he thought it was Osan, the name of his very first, when he was a boy; and as he settled himself in the saddle and endured the neck-snapping jolts of the beast rising, he decided that that was its name. His life had come to a new beginning. He had cast away responsibility to his father, and taken up responsibility for madmen. he knew he could not cure them, no more than he could heal himself. But here he was. He had achieved the command for which his affliction fitted him.

  A breeze rose with the lowering of the sun, the first breath of air, a reminder of life in the midst of the great flat, and it roused Osan's spirits, too. Marak took in the rein and walked Osan in a circle until all the mad were up and until the caravan masters had mounted their own beasts. Then he let Osan go, riding first with the master's sons, and then alone, striking a good traveling pace.

  He had used to ride into the western desert for days. Where have you been? his father would ask, and he would lie and call it hunting, when his hunting was voices and the visions. He would kill something at the last, and bring it back, and his father would believe him.

  He recalled killing a bird, and remembered how he had stroked its head and thought if he were not mad it would not be dead, because there was precious little good to him in killing it. He had stamped it into the sand. He had thrown rocks at it. Then, in cowardice, he had killed another, to have something to show his father for his day in the wilderness.

  Osan, his companion of prior lies and deceptions about his madness, was bone and dust now. The shoulder on which he used to lean was gone. There was no more help from that quarter. There was this beast, which would live or die with him. So with all these men. He need not go anywhere to explain himself this night. No more. No more lies. He was what he was, and the soldiers, their last tie to the city, had left them. Only the caravan master could dispute his word, and Obidhen, set under his orders, called him lord.

  They were well equipped, like the best of caravans. There were no walkers to slow them. There were no wagons. Out away from the wells as a fast, well-equipped caravan could travel, there was less chance of bandits. It was water that drew predators.

  Marak, the voices said, past the roaring in his ears. Marak. This way.

  East where the sun rose. East where the world slid. East, east, east, and an end of questions, for men and women in universal agreement, a handful of souls all set desperately toward the identical, desperate, crazed obsession.

  So his jagged reasoning went as they traveled on into the night, when every man was isolate and when the dark cooled the land to shadow and starlight.

  At times he slept in the saddle. At times he waked to look at the stars and realize that nothing known lay in front of him.

  In the enduring dark this new Osan called up emotions in him that he thought the drugs and the march had killed. Osan made his hands remember love and his body remember freedom, and those two things stirred other feelings.

  Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said. His body fell into a rhythm it had known from before he could remember, a rhythm he had learned in his father's arms, when that had been the safe place, the shaded place, the secure place.

  Now that of all things was the deadliest place, the most painful place for memory to go.

  There was only Osan.

  Freedom was all he had ever asked of his father.

  A cave of suns beckoned him, blinding bright: he squinted his eyes even in the dark, and it made no more sense than it ever had.

  A tower rose up against the stars, a black shape, a vacancy of light. Marak, the voices said.

  He had fought the voices' advice, smothered the images, hidd
en them all his life, and now he had nothing to learn of the world but the truth of what they meant. It was as if they, he and the madmen, all shed their clothes and ran naked in the dark. The au'it had told him all their names, and he knew now he was not alone. He had sisters. He had brothers. The truly mad had walked away to die and now he was left with those who, like him, had wit enough to dominate the visions, and will enough to live.

  They were going to find the answers. Together, in the east, they would find the answers.

  Chapter Five

  In the wisdom of the Ila, the Holy City first sent out the tribes to discover the land, and to them the Holy City appointed the skill to rule the high Lakht. The next to go out from the Holy City were the lords of villages, with their households, and they went to the wells of sweet water that the tribes had found and occupied them. For that reason no village may deny water to the tribes. To the caravans it may sell water, but the tribes may take what they need.

  -The Book of Goson

  Day came. the world might resume its sanity, but the mad continued in their course, and the beasts continued their patient, easy stride.

  So, so, so, Marak thought, as the sun warmed the tense muscles of his shoulders: so, after all, the sun came up, and he, who had thought himself above the mad, was after all no different, no more and no less fit to survive.

  He was reconciled. He began to look at faces. He learned them. He matched them with names.

  The sun came up and rose higher and they camped at greater leisure, cooking, eating, and sleeping, a close row of five tents. When the air cooled, they rode on again. A few of the mad even attempted to mount as the more experienced riders did. One, the potter, fell. But he had courage, and the others felt the impact in their bones. They laughed only when he laughed.

  A few riders continually caused their beasts more trouble than guidance with the rein. The wife from Tarsa, Norit, kept hers too tight, perhaps afraid that the beast would bolt and carry her away into the deep desert.

  "No," Marak said, having seen the caravan master's vain effort to change her habit. "No. Hold the rein this way, over your hand. A simple turn of the wrist signals the beast. If you always twitch, he stops hearing you, like a child who shouts too much. Let your back give. Let the rein flow unless you have an order. I assure you, you haven't strength enough in your arm to pull him back if he wanted to run. He doesn't want to. It's much too hot."

  She gripped the rein, all the same. Her hands must ache.

  "If you annoy him like that," Marak said, "he simply grows worse. But he will always turn his head to a gentle tug, like that, yes, that's enough. And if he hesitates to turn, use the quirt on the opposite shoulder, just a touch."

  "What if I make him angry?" Clearly this was an abiding fear.

  "Does a midge annoy you? Your pulling on his jaw annoys him, I say. It makes his mouth sore. Touch lightly. Pull lightly. But only when you want him to turn. Perhaps twice a day, when we camp and when we start out."

  She did try, and loosened the amount of rein, but the knuckles were still white in their grip on the loose rein.

  "All right. Let the rein fall to your lap," he said. "Let it drop." He saw now how it was, that this was a woman for whom the whole world had run away in chaos, and she was given one rein, and this one rein managed her course toward the edge of the world. She managed it with an iron grip. "Listen to me. Trust me. Let it drop."

  It was as if he asked her to leap over a cliff.

  "Drop it, I say."

  She carefully let the rein lie in her lap, and sat like a rock precariously balanced, awaiting disaster.

  "Foot up," he said, while their beasts walked side by side, "in the crook of his neck. That stops you leaning forward and him pitching you over his head. Shoulders behind the small of your back. That prevents you sliding back over his rump. Your hips move as he moves."

  She sat like a rock.

  "You've made love," he said. "You were a wife. Follow him."

  She gave him a shocked glance. Her eyes were wide and frightened.

  "There are worse things than falling off," he said while that silence persisted. "Let your back sway. Don't forget how."

  She gathered up the rein, having proved the beast would not bolt. He had robbed her, perhaps, of one sense of dominance over the world. Now he told her to make love to what she feared, and her spine was still stiff, her carriage eloquent of offense. But her spine began to give. She listened.

  "If you wish to live," he said, "make this beast your ally. If you should become separated from the rest, if you can stay with the besha, she'll shade you from the sun, she'll shelter you from the wind, and she'll inevitably carry you to water if you don't touch the rein. She's your greatest help. She might be your life."

  She did not want to hear that either, he thought. But she listened. Her besha was a good deal happier with the partnership.

  She was not the only offender. He showed the same lesson to an orchardman from Goson, whose name was Korin, to the potter, Kosul, from his own group, and to a woman from the west, Maol, a farmwife who blushed redder than sunburn, but who understood what he wished to say.

  There were five among the forty-odd that he had no need to show. These were riders. Two were traders, two had been soldiers: on them Obidhen had come to rely for help.

  And one was a Lakhtani woman, of the desert tribes, a dark-skinned woman named Hati, who was one of the nine others in his tent, with the au'it, the potter, and the orchardman, three farmers, a weaver, and the wife from Tarsa.

  Hati's mastery over the beasts was sure as instinct, and she had a seat a western lowlander admired. She occasionally assisted Obidhen when the beasts grew fractious, and he had seen her rouse the beasts and settle them again by voice alone, that strange call that the desert-bred beasts knew. She was a gift, among them, one whose knowledge Obidhen's sons attempted to gain, attempting to engage her in conversation. with intent of gaining more than knowledge, it might be.

  But she went veiled, and disconsolate, and brooded. Marak shared a tent with her and never had seen her face.

  They camped, and slept, and broke camp. The day seemed cooler than the last. The beasts were willing to move, throwing their heads and switching their tails with pent-up energy.

  They crossed a wide pan, where a memory of water had made a crust, and leached up alkali. The beast's feet grew white to the knee, and the caravan trail across this place was distinct, a track through the crust.

  They crossed it, and the dark came down again, the stars brightening. Everyone had forgotten their instruction during the evening ride, with the beasts in a fractious mood, and made themselves increasing trouble. Marak peevishly reminded a few, and included the soldiers, who caused a disturbance in the pace.

  But now they had entered a quieter time, pleasant, even cool air under the gathering dusk, and he found himself looking respectfully at Hati, and looking longer and longer. The hands were long and beautiful. The body beneath the veils seemed young. She was a puzzle, unique among those the Ila had gathered. The tribes stoned their madmen. Hati was here, alive. When he thought about that fact he could only be the more intrigued.

  "The beast is yours," he said, riding close to her. "Go with us or go your way. No one will prevent you."

  Hati said nothing, nor quite looked at him. In the deep dusk her dark hands showed lighter bands about the fingers and wrists. A tribeswoman's silver, her respectability, had doubtless banded her wrists, lifelong, and now left only the paler flesh.

  Her tribe had cast her out, he decided. They had kept what they wished, as they did the dead, from whom they stripped all ornament-silver being a useless distinction for the scavengers.

  "Or will you stay?" he asked her, persisting in his attempt to draw her out. "I need your help. You know the Lakht better than any of us. Do you understand at all?"

  The move of her head said yes.

  "Then teach the rest of these villagers good sense. I see how you ride. Teach them."

  "
Why?"

  Why was a good question. "Because I asked the Ila for their lives. Because hanging in the holy city is easier than breaking a leg out here."

  She looked straight at him, hearing him, at least. All he could see was her eyes. She might be anything, think anything, beneath the veils. And she was as mad as he was. There was that.

  "I'm Hati," she said.

  "Marak. Marak Trin."

  "I know." She said not a thing more, nor did she encourage conversation. He left her, finally, and gave up on the attempt.

  But during that night, by starlight, she rode by one and the other of the women, even the au'it, speaking in low tones, correcting posture, correcting a grip on the reins. The sun rose, and she spoke to men, more animated and more assured, even forceful in her corrections, even correcting the better riders. By midmorning the down-land men feared her direct reproof-never a loud reproof, but correct, and stinging, if she repeated it.