C J Cherryh - Gene Wars 1 - Hammerfall Page 9

  Marak had had the twitching affliction, to some minor degree, when he was resting; he had labored from boyhood to conceal it, tucking his arms tightly as he slept, blaming it on nightmares.

  Sometimes his head ached; that was so for the lot of them. His had ached fiercely in his early years, blinding headaches, but so did his mother's.

  Was she mad? He had never thought so.

  There was a gift, too, to being mad. All the mad, when they suffered small wounds, healed without a scar, and they all suffered brief, sometimes quite high, fever when they did so.

  Ontori, a stonemason, said he had broken both legs falling as a boy. He walked demonstrably without a limp.

  Hati showed him her hand at their next setting-forth. "I cut this badly when I was a child. Across the palm. I was trimming gola root and the knife slipped. There is no scar."

  He had taken sword cuts, too, one egregious one, which his father had dealt him in practice. He has good skin, his mother had said defensively, when all trace of it vanished in a month. He always heals, his mother had said, and said it fiercely: she knew it was not right.

  He had healed of everything but the clan mark, which was dye. High fever had followed the tattooing, however, and a great deal of swelling had ensued. It had healed and come out faded within the month, as if it were decades old. Some men had always thought him older than he was because of it. His mother had said maybe the fever had broken up the color. His father thought the dye had been weak, and blamed the artist.

  "Some say we can't die," Hati said. "But I know we can. Three in my group died on the march. I'm sure those who left us the first night both died."

  "We die," Marak said, with no doubt at all. "Some died on our march. Of accident. Of age, maybe. There was a boy, too. He wasn't the same as us, I never thought so. But he was a good boy." He wished he could have asked the boy if his vision, too, was different. He thought of the old man who had died. His vision had seemed different. He had not twitched when the rest of them did.

  The Ila had begun the questions. All under thirty, she said. He himself was as old as the oldest of the most of the madmen. Only the old man who had died, whose madness had seemed different, too-the old man and the boy had not moved when the mad moved, had never seemed to feel the pitch eastward.

  The affliction itself wove a web that had tied the true madmen all together: he had never known how much so, until he asked himself what the Ila had asked.

  But more, the mad themselves were amazed to hear such accurate questions from one like them, and began to ask and answer questions they had hidden all their lives. Yes, yes, and yes, the answers were. It's like that. I see that, too.

  It brought a strange elation. Even delighted laughter.

  But it brought anxiousness, too. There was one question none of them could answer, and that was why the east, and why the madness should exist at all.

  "The gods are leading us," the stonemason said, without a doubt in the world.

  Marak wished he had that simple faith. He disliked thinking about the tower. He had no notion why.

  Voices whispered quietly, the while he thought about it, Marak, Marak, Marak.

  These seemed to warned him of danger, as sometimes the voices did.

  But he could not tell where it was.

  In Hati? He thought not.

  East, the voices whispered to him, and the skin tightened on his arms.

  East, east, east. Go faster.

  Chapter Seven

  No man may foul a well. The defiler of a well shall be cast out with no provision and no tent, and no tribe and no village may shelter him.

  -The Book of Priests

  The night of that day came hazy and hot as a furnace, the stars shimmering in the heavens. The beshti, water-short, were ill-tempered. One slave had an arm bitten for no worse offense than walking past a pack beast in the dark. The caravan master took great pains to attend the wound, and to cover the bite with salves to keep away insects, and worse. It was not only the act of a reasonable master. Wind carried the smell of blood into the desert, and blood drew vermin.

  West, west, west, the voices said, contrary, but with a smell of danger, not allure.

  "The wind is coming," Hati said, with a twitch of her shoulders, and at last Marak put a name to what had been prickling at his senses all day.

  Wind. Weather-sense had served him once before in the campaign on the Lakht. He had refused to lead his men out on a certain day. The enemy, the Ila's men, had perished.

  It was like that now.

  "How soon?" he asked Hati, and Hati shrugged.

  "A day, perhaps as much as two. Sunset may show it."

  He had not spoken much to Obidhen. The master and his sons, the freedmen and the slaves, all kept to their own company, ruling over separate tents, riding together, the freedmen riding last, to be sure no one fell behind unnoticed. They doled out water and supplies to him for his tent without much converse. They were not pleased today: the bitter well they hoped to find for the beasts' use had failed them.

  He decided he should say something to the caravan master, a warning, however Obidhen might receive it. "I have a bad feeling about the weather," was the only shape he could put to it. "So does the an'i Keran."

  They rested. And toward the evening, when they ordinarily should ride out again, Obidhen called out to his sons and his helpers:

  "Drive in the deep-stakes."

  Then, walking over to Marak with his hands tucked in his belt-band, he said, "I agree. There will come a blow. We won't budge tonight."

  "So," Marak said. "We understand."

  There were expressions of relief throughout his tent when they heard the news, and that relief pervaded the camp, tent to tent. The nameless fear had taken a shape, and he heard others claim they felt bad weather, even vying with one another as to how early they had known. The subterfuges they had used, the lies they had told, the discipline they had exerted not to betray their affliction were all cast away. They had begun to compete with one another in their madness. The desert was the collective enemy, and their inner demons had become guides, protectors, allies.

  The slaves had the deep-stakes out, and more cordage, and Marak turned the men out to help sort cordage as the caravan master's son and the slaves drove the long anchoring stakes down and down into the sand. They anchored to them with more cord, and ran cordage up and over the canvas with laced hitches, so that when the wind blew there would be a good webwork of rope to hold the canvas from tearing. The sun lowered in fire, a glow all along the west: Hati was right.

  Last, they unbundled the side flaps and lashed them into place along the sides of the tent, ready to unfurl when the wind came, as come it would.

  This will be one to remember, some said, in their new weather-wisdom.

  It will be bad, Hati said, and her estimation, Marak readily believed. Obidhen ordered two water packs given to the beshti, the sweet water they carried for themselves, carefully measured.

  Fear was still there. Any man, lowlander or Lakhtanin, feared the west wind in summer, but they were as ready as they could be. Some joked. The jokes rang hollow in the storm-sense that all but smothered cheer, yet they laughed.

  It was coming, and there was nothing they could do more than they had done.

  Marak, for one, decided to rest and take advantage of a night without traveling, and sleep another few hours. The air was stiflingly still; men talked in low voices off across the shelter of the open-sided tent. The au'it, who had written their preparations, wrote something else now, while the dim light lasted.

  Hati lay down to sleep by him, as she had slept for days.

  But now in the sense of storm that quieted the whole tent, Norit, too, moved her mat closer, and whispered, "I'm afraid."

  "Settle," Marak said. "The tents will be safe. The tribes survive these winds many times a year."

  Hati shifted against him to make room for Norit. It was hot, and still at the moment.

  It was not that Norit part
icularly chose him, he thought, but that Hati had formed a friendship. Norit had become her lieutenant as Hati had become his, and took to that responsibility. In Tarsa a cast-off wife was no one's and nothing, of no honor, no estate, no support at all. In Hati, Norit had found anchor against a different kind of storm.

  And in the process he had acquired unlooked-for obligations. Hati co-opted him, placing herself between him and all others. Now Norit added herself, and he found, as in the vision, the random pieces made unexpected structure, not one he would have chosen.

  Norit suffered from her madness. She no longer sang to herself aloud, but made small sounds as she talked to her visions. No one dressed her hair: by day, as she rode, she combed her black mane obsessively with her fingers, until it straggled in some order over her shoulders. She combed it now as she rested on her back, staring at the visions that came. She plucked at her fingers as if taking off rings. She talked to the unseen. She was not the most wholesome of their company.

  But if Norit had a virtue, it was persistence, even in living, and he respected that, and tolerated her strangeness. Of all the marches they had made on their way to the holy city, theirs had been the harshest, under the worst of the Ila's men, in provinces once hostile to the Ila, where rebellion was still recent in memory. The common run of the Ila's men had treated the mad as enemies, and devils, and had no mercy. They had driven the fragile sense from some before they died. Love, Norit had sung. Let us find love.

  And having been launched on another long march without her will, Norit spoke to no one but Hati at any length at all, but if Hati waved a hand, Norit carried this or that and if the baggage wanted moving, Norit moved it. Sometimes her eyes stared at things not even another madman could guess. She had learned the besha, and rode from sitting start to kneeling. All that Hati did, Norit did. If Hati groomed her beast, Norit did. If Hati went to interfere in the slaves' cooking, Norit went and listened.

  "It builds," Norit said to the gathering dark. "It builds. It carries away villages."

  Elsewhere he heard men talking. There was little movement in the tent. They had worked hard getting the deep-stakes in. There was a thin sandstone under the sand beneath this tent. They had worn the skin from their hands weaving the web of cordage and snugging it down. Now they lay, nursed their blisters, and listened to a slight stir and flap of the canvas.

  "Perhaps it won't come," the potter said.

  The orchardman said, "Shut up. At least we get to sleep a few more hours."

  The time dragged by.

  Little gusts stirred the tent against the web of cordage. The beasts complained and moaned, and moved behind the tents, where they would take shelter for the duration.

  Marak got up and went out from under the tent to see what was coming, in the murky last of the light. A red wall of dust spread over half the sky, deceptive in its very size.

  Hati had come out, and Norit did, and the rest came after her, with the wind stirring their garments.

  The boys and the slaves had turned out from the other four tents, too, with the onset of the wind. They set to tightening the web of rope, which had stretched out in the heat.

  "Put down the sides!" they shouted. It was time. They unrolled the sides of the tents, and made those fast by their rings and by cords.

  Then they all went inside their smothering dark tents and settled down to wait. The storm light came, a sickly twilight outside the single opening they had left. At his order, each of them piled his own waterskin with the common stores, some reluctantly, but they obeyed. Then they lay ready to seal the tent entirely once the blow started. The light fell on the edges of faces and bodies: they looked toward the light as a precious commodity about to vanish.

  The beasts moaned outside as the wind set up its own complaint, thumping at the canvas in a sudden violence.

  "We can have rations every morning and every evening," Marak said so all could hear him. "Look at where your mat is, and where the water and food is. The au'it will sleep by the water. There will be water at the same times each day, no other, so don't plan otherwise. It may be days, and it will be dark, so get your bearings before the light goes."

  There was no complaint. They had had their midday supper. They would take their rations cold, no luxury of cooking at all in the utter lack of sunlight, and short water for drinking. Even the villages knew the lowland storms, and feared these as they feared the god himself.

  The gust carried sand, the wind turning redder and redder outside, veiling all detail between themselves and the world. The light slowly diminished both by sunset and by storm until the dark outside was deep and violent, leaving the merest hint of a doorway to good eyes.

  Marak went and drew the flap shut and laced it down by feel. The wind howled, and the canvas thumped and strained. Some man inside wailed, a frightened human voice appealing to the god, and others joined it in querulous chatter.

  "It's nothing but the wind," Marak said, walking the carefully memorized track back to his mat. "The poles are set and the stakes are deep. Be quiet. You from the villages, the Lakht throws storms such as you've not seen. This may last all through tomorrow and the day after that, and perhaps a third. Storms often come in the summer, on the Lakht, but the stakes will hold, and we will last it out. Go to sleep. Sleep as much as you can."

  The wind all but drowned his voice at the last. His eyes could find no light at all. If he had not known where his mat was, he never could have found it.

  He sat down. The wind acquired the voices that resounded in his head: Marak, Marak, Marak, endlessly. He felt Hati's touch, and lay down on his back, listening to the voices and to the thumping of the canvas. He had the waterskins at his back, and all the rations for the tent positioned there, with the au'it, the impartial, the incorruptible witness, sitting directly against them.

  He hoped the master's sons and the slaves had done their work well. He had seen nothing to fault in their work. But now they knew they were very small, and the desert wind was a towering devil, thumping and battering all about the edges of their shelter, trying to get fingers within the lacings.

  For about a half an hour he rested and listened to the fury build.

  An arm came about him, and a warm body shaped itself to him on his left, and he knew the culprit as he moved an arm to send her back to her own mat.

  A knee intruded, however, and lips found his bare neck.

  Hati whispered something, interrupted breath against his neck. Perhaps she told him they were going nowhere. Perhaps she said no one could see or hear what they did, and that this answered to a roof. He rolled over, seized a slender arm, drew the offender close by the neck until he had a fistful of long braids and knew for certain it was Hati.

  Then he took a deep breath and brought his lips where he judged hers waited. His guess was right.

  The intruder's arms came about him, and lips drew breath at last in the moment he allowed, then renewed the kiss before he was ready.

  In the same moment a lithe body shed robes and wriggled beneath him.

  "This is no roof," he said, vexed at her breach of their agreement. People at rest all around them could not be that deaf, even if they were blind.

  But the dark was so absolute and the howl of the wind and the thump of canvas so enveloped them he was not sure even she heard him. She came around him, having loosened her clothes, and his push at her met bare breasts, a skin as smooth, as fine, as sweet and soft as he had thought. Her warmth settled about him and the canvas beat and thumped around them with the flutter of a heart that had been running a long, long race.

  Why object, the storm said, why refuse, why should anyone care? We are cast out there, but not yet dead.

  He found his way through her clothes, and she found hers. He felt the force of her let loose in the dark, saw the burning lines of his delusions, and he heard above the wind the voices that made them both mad. Marak, they said, Marak. Hati. Hati.

  Others might witness, if the madness of together-seeing pierced the dark
. They two held no secrets, held nothing back, all the way to a long thunderous battering of the wind above them, then an ebb into dark and sound and overheated flesh.

  He was through, then, but she found ways: she breathed into his sound-deafened ear and intruded a tongue, which drew his attention amazingly. Dutifully he returned the effort with a languid hand, but meanwhile she found places to touch no woman had tried with him and found places to be that no woman ever had managed.

  Initiate: she was that; an'i Keran, and he, being no virgin, either, found places to touch and hold that from moment to moment sent long, long shivers through the body he embraced.

  She had her satisfaction, he thought: a man might burn quicker, but for her there was no end yet, and certainly no lack of invention. did they not say it of the an'i Keran, that they could last the whole night?