C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Read online

  When they stopped to spread the tents at noon, Hati encouraged the wife, Norit, to ride the beast down to his sitting rest, and not to be handed off like baggage. Norit stayed in the saddle, and stepped off without help, and when the men still mounted saw that, they all did the same, though the orchardman was pitched off at the very last and sprawled gently flat on the sand.

  Hati went and stood over the unfortunate man, hands on her hips, flung back her veil, and offered her sober opinion that he was learning, but should not have moved his hand from the saddlebow just yet.

  Marak, just having slid down from his own beast, began to laugh then, a dazed, unanticipated laughter that seeped upward like water from the ground.

  And once he laughed, others of the mad laughed. The orchardman got up and dusted himself off, taking the taunts of the potter in glowering good humor, and finally with a grin.

  Then seeing the orchardman in better humor, madmen sat down on the burning hot sand and laughed until they rolled.

  They were free. He had freed them all. Even the two who had walked off to die. they were free.

  And once they had laughed, and wiped their eyes, then after all these days they began to talk to one another, except, always, the au'it.

  More, the tribeswoman, Hati, having let down her veil, did not put it back. She had acquired authority despite the lack of bracelets on her arms and rings on her fingers. And her whole being expanded. Her eyes flashed. Her walk became a stride.

  That woman was his lieutenant, Marak decided. If he was omi, in the mind of Obidhen and his sons, and if this was the company he led, he had now seen the one he would rely on to back him in an emergency. She had the wits and the courage. The two ex-soldiers that he might have chosen were both duller men, good fighters, perhaps, but if they had no clear objective to gain and no one to provide the idea, or to shout orders moment by moment, they sat inert. They watched the women, however, with predatory eyes. and then bent wary glances in his direction, and in the master's, clearly sizing up their will to prevent them. It was clear where their source of initiative rested. He would not trust them with food, water, or women.

  Most damning regarding any reliance on them in extremity, when the voices came, they twitched violently and stared at the east, the worst afflicted of all the party, following that lead when many of the others sat, still resolute and possessed of their dignity.

  Hati was indeed the one. He had watched her move, watched her gestures expand and her strides become confident. He saw, in those expanded movements, the natural grace and shape of the woman. Today he saw her face, and it was a darkly beautiful face, which his eyes dwelt on and followed with thoughts. He was not dead. If he had doubted his manhood had survived the desert, he did not now.

  Chapter Six

  Or if any tree shall be deformed of its nature, the fruit of that tree shall not be eaten. It must be rooted up and given to a priest.

  -The Book of the Priests

  The mad shall be searched out. Everyone that bears the affliction shall be saved alive and shall not be hidden, but given to the Ila's messengers. No man shall conceal madness in his wife, or his son, or his daughter, or his father. Every one must be delivered up. Also if any beast should have the madness, it shall be kept from harm and delivered alive to the Ila's messengers, or if dead, its flesh shall not be eaten: it shall be saved intact and delivered to the Ila's messengers.

  -The Book of the Ila's Au'it

  After this camp they left the pans, and if it was flat and featureless before, the Lakht began to take on a red sameness, the very heart of the midland plateau, endless low ridges of dunes that stood as obstacles to their progress, red, powdery sand that was almost dust. They walked the ridges, a maze that led them generally east.

  There was not a bird, not a track on the sand in this region. They were far from any well, any source of water. Wind turned up bones along the route, the bones of beshti, three of them together with no trace of harness, proving even wild beshti met their match in the storms of the Lakht.

  The voices came louder, as the days went. Marak, they said, Marak, do you hear us?

  Or again, mindless noise, Marak, Marak, Marak.

  The voices were back, clearer than they had ever been. There seemed a satisfaction in them, finally. In a sense Marak felt safer than he had ever felt, truer to what had made demands all his life, and more settled on his course. He no longer thought of bolting. But he had equally dismissed thought of the journey ever coming to an end. It had become its own world. It enveloped all purpose, all planning.

  The beasts went single file on the dunes, but on the crusted pan they tended to spread out and to go by twos and threes, and to sort that order by a kind of slow drifting in pace, a tendency of one beast to move a little faster than the next, or one rider to grow tired of the backside of the next beast, and to seek another view.

  In that way, on a certain day, Hati drifted up close to him and said nothing, only cast eyes on him as they rode, at fairly close range, unveiled.

  He knew suddenly by those looks what she bid for. And now that it was offered, he drew back, asking himself how it would be, and what they would set loose. There were no partners within their company. There never had been. Dealings between them had assumed a quiet sameness, her own rule, and she violated it.

  In the economy of the desert he had grown averse to changing anything that worked. He found nothing to say, pretending not to see, while his thoughts raced in a kind of panic. They rode together a time, and then Hati fell back again.

  What stopped him, he decided, lying on his mat at noon, arms under his head, might be the notion of sharing a mat with a madness as great and as quiet as his own.

  And there was the question of doing it by broad daylight and under the eyes of all the rest. There was no place but the tent he shared with her and Norit, with the au'it, the potter and the orchardman and the other men. Going aside into the dunes for privacy was complete foolishness, a good way to meet the desert's lethal surprises. The most privacy they had was a curtain at one corner of each tent, which was the latrine, and no one went farther, or expected to be unobserved elsewhere. Clearly, others would observe them.

  He turned his head and found her, as he feared she would be, lying on her side, watching him.

  That evening, as they rode across a red, rippled flat, she rode next to him, not even using the excuse of the beasts' wandering in line.

  "Why do you look away?" she asked him. Those eyes could melt brass. And they were not dark. They were clear brown. He found himself noticing that fact for the first time, in the light of evening, and admiring what he saw. His blood was moving faster. He found he was in increasing difficulty in refusing her, and had to decide now. to send her away with a firm rebuff.

  Or not.

  "I don't look away," he said, and then committed himself. Halfway. "But not here."

  "Where?" she asked. She passed a dark hand about her, at all the Lakht, and seemed to laugh at him. "If not here, where? The latrine? I think not."

  "We'll come to a village," he said. "Under a roof."

  "A roof," she said in wonder, as if that were the least necessary thing he could have named.

  "I'm from the villages."

  "You don't ride like it," she said. "Under a roof." It still seemed to amaze her.

  "Or if we find some safe place."

  She laughed at his foolishness, the notion of finding anywhere alone in the desert a safe place, and he knew she was right. Rocks held predators: the empty sand held predators. Beyond a dune was an invitation to disaster. There was no place, and now he wanted one, badly.

  "Hati is my name. Hati Makri an'i Keran."

  From Keran, that was, Makri her mother-name and Keran her tribe-name. Hearing it, he was surprised, and not surprised: he knew the customs of the Keran, who refused all outsider wars and as often as not refused the Ila's taxes and levies. They were wild people, fierce, apt to fight singly, if not as a tribe.

  And had the madne
ss that afflicted the villages crept even there, to the wildest, least sociable people in the world?

  "Peace," he said. That was the first thing strangers said when they met in the desert.

  "Peace," she said. Her eyes shone with satisfaction, having won him. "Under a roof, then." Then she added: "The woman from Tarsa also."

  In the Keran a woman could demand a second wife or a second husband, or an agreement of spouses could demand a third or a fourth, for that matter. He had seen how Hati had taken to Norit, to the soft-handed wife from Tarsa, and instructed her, until now Norit could mount and dismount and ride far better than he had ever thought. Norit was surely a puzzle to Hati, and she had become a friend, of sorts.

  He saw how he had committed himself. He was not a coward, to back away. He was not in Kais Tain, where marriage was singular and women, but not men, could die for a mere suspicion of infidelity.

  To what, then, had he agreed? To a night under a roof? To a lifetime, and two women? And a breach with all the customs of the west? His father would be appalled.

  "I am not an'i Keran," he said.

  "Once we sleep together, you are," Hati said, and added a confidence which sent a warmth through him that was by no means the sinking sun: "I am initiate."

  Did they not say, for a proverb of the unfindable, a Kerani virgin? The women of that tribe took care there were none. But she had not called herself wife, or widow. She had not had a man before him.

  No one but the au'it had slept near him. But when next they pitched the tents Hati unrolled her mat next to his. Without a word, assuming the right, she lay down in her robes and her veil.

  Not until a roof, he had said, but he had given her a certain right by the agreement they had made together, and he had no notion quite what to do to prevent this steady, purposeful assault on his senses.

  With the furnace-warm air blowing through the open sides of the tent, she turned on her side facing him. He turned on his back and stared at the canvas above them.

  Above it the noon sun was a light shining through the heavy fabric, and the sideless tent billowed and bucked in occasional gusts. A rope needed tightening. But that was the slaves' job, not his. It was the master's job to see to it.

  It was better to be here, lying at ease, than riding against the furnace-hot wind.

  It was better to have a woman than to be alone.

  He had no wish to drive her away. He had no wish to end this proposal in a quarrel before they had even shared a bed.

  A hand touched his. Her fingers ran from his open palm to his arm and his shoulder. He lay still and ignored her enticement, finding it on the one hand pleasant and on the other vexing, an assault on his mind, as well as his body.

  Suddenly, subtly, the voices spoke. He heard them and knew what stopped her hand wandering, what made her rest a moment, too, eyes shut. every line of her expression said she hated that intrusion, resented it, detested its timing.

  He observed the strong cast of her unveiled face, the long, slim hand that rested on a breast breathing hard, the offended pride of a woman who had been cast out, humiliated, but not broken.

  The voices dinned in his own ears, Marak, Marak, Marak.

  He had never taken the chance to talk directly to another of the afflicted on the one fact of their lives they all knew.

  "They call my name," he said to that closed, taut face. "Do they call yours?"

  Her eyes opened, searched his. None of the mad was willing to speak about their affliction. It was all but rude to breach that silence.

  "Yes," she said. "They called my child-name and now they call my woman-name."

  "The same," he confessed, which he had only admitted to his father. "Day and night."

  "If we walk east forever, what will we meet? The bitter water?"

  "If we walk that far." No one lived near the bitter water. No bird flew. The water-edge there was a land of white crusts and death. The toughest men in the world lived at the edge of the bitter plain and hammered out salt and breathed it and tasted it until they died. Everywhere in the world, men somehow found a way to live. Those men were free, at least. They traded with the Ila. They did not obey her.

  The lines of fire built within his eyes. They made a form, rising up and up.

  "Do you see a tower?" he asked the an'i Keran.

  "Yes," she said.

  "Do you see it now?"

  "Yes," she said. Two mad visions touched one another. Two were the same. He suspected they all were, and that every man heard his own name.

  "I called it a spire," she said, "before I saw the holy city. Could it be the Beykaskh?"

  "Not the Beykaskh," he said. He was as sure of that as he was sure the direction was east. "No tower that I know, so tall and thin. A spire. A rock spire?"

  "So," she said.

  "I wonder what the others call it." He stared at the sun through the coarse canvas, felt the heat of the wind touch the sweat on his throat and arms like a lover's breath. "Ask the others what they see. Let the au'it write it for the Ila's curiosity. And tell me what you learn. Gather all the visions."

  The au'it stirred on the mat nearby. She was uncannily alert to her duty, but he had no further orders for her.

  "Hati will ask the others. You write it. But rest now. Sleep."

  The woman eased back to her rest.

  In the evening when they waked, Hati took the au'it and went about from one man to the other, asking the same question.

  The au'it wrote in her book until dark made it too hard, and when the sun rose again, Hati moved her beast about among the company, taking the au'it with her. The au'it, bracing her book on the saddlebow, holding her ink-cake in one hand, wrote and wrote, at every encounter, as happy as Marak had ever seen that thin, sober face. Despite the sun, despite the heat, despite the wind that riffled the pages, the au'it listened and wrote, and satisfied her reason for going with them.

  The demons brought the tower vision to the surface so easily now. There was the tower, there was the star, there was the cave of suns, always in the east. He felt that pitch toward it, morning and evening, always the same sense that the world had tipped precariously.

  But the voices that called his name evidently called others. Clearly they called Hati's.

  There had been a time he had believed in the god, believing the god spoke to him, in those years when the young so readily formed belief; and in one small part of his heart he found he resented discovering the voices were not his alone. He knew now that he was not the center and focus of their desire, and he began to know that his severance from his father was no greater a calamity than the potter's, say, or Hati's. A common potter had lost his family and trade to the same visions, the same urging.

  So the potter was found out in his difference, and either he turned himself in to the Ila's men or his community had done it. Was that not worth as much regret, as much bitterness? Was it not as great a betrayal, one's lifelong neighbors and customers, against an honest craftsman?

  He waited to hear what Hati would find out, and yet he guessed the answer. Had not the mad all moved together, all twitched at once, when they were gathered together?

  One wished one's life-changing affliction to be unique. And after Hati reported to him, all of them knew it was not.

  Of common visions there was the high place, so Hati reported and so the au'it wrote. There was the light, the sun, the star, multiple moons aloft and in a row. These were all the second vision. There was the cave, the hall, the hollow place, that was the third, though for Marak the cave had always held the lights. He did not have that vision independently, but combined with another common theme.

  Of forty-some madmen, regarding most of the visions, they all agreed.

  They agreed that the pitch when it came was always to the east, though some had thought it was toward the rising sun.

  And the voices indeed called them each by name, from childhood.

  From childhood they had had the lines of fire building structures in their vision
, as if lines were engraved on their eyes like patterns on a pot: the same lines repeated and repeated, sometimes enlivened with fire, sometimes not. And the vision when it came was in red.

  From childhood they had heard a noise in their ears, and that noise sooner or later had become a voice calling their names.

  So it was not their madness that made them unique. In fact, their affliction was a leveler, and it made them much the same.

  Sometimes, they confessed, their hands and bodies moved involuntarily, in small twitches. In some it had affected their trade or their craft. One, the farmwife, Maol, had learned to draw strange symbols, the same that he saw behind his eyelids.