Gene Wars - Hammerfall Part 41

And if Norit was not enough, if they lost Hati, too, what application of common sense were all these people going to get in their leaders.h.i.+p?

None from the Ila, nothing that did not favor her own comfort, her own survival above all. The people deserved some leader who cared about them? And did that attribute make him holy? Or better?

He ceased to have answers. He thought that he should go down. He thought that he should stay alive as long as he could, and do the most that he could, because he had no way of knowing what might happen after they reached the bottom, or where he might find a use.

But if he went down, what mancould he ask to stay? Or should he ask any man who might live to risk his life?

He was looking at the ex-slaves, at Mogar and Bosginde, men who least of all had relatives depending on them, but they had each other, and could he ask those two men to risk their lives, even when no village would value those two lives?He knew what good men they had come to be, and how, in any other time, if therewere time left in the world, those two would turn up masters of their own caravans... but there was no time left for good men to do anything but scramble with the rest and stay alive. If all the good perished, it left only the rest to have their way. And wasthat good?

He was still thinking that when Tofi came to him and squatted down to talk, and he realized Tofi and Patya had been sitting off to themselves, and that now Patya was hovering suspiciously in the background. Marak shaded his eyes to look up at the young man.

"Omi," Tofi began. "We may all die."

"I don't certainly intend to."

"I don't either," Tofi said sensibly, while Patya, hovered behind him in unaccustomed silence. "Your sister,omi , she doesn't intend to, either. But-we don't know about tomorrow. A star could fall on us."

He suddenly realized where this was going. He understood Patya's desperate, anxious silence. They were young, and there was no time for decent understandings-that was the very point. The desperation in the air drove more than one older, more sober couple to their mats, trying to beget their way to immortality. The desperation gave no time for joy, or hope-or patience with custom, or modesty.

"Out with it," he said. "Time's short. You're using it all up."

"Patya and I..." Tofi tripped over his own need to breathe, or the need to remember what he had meant to say, exactly those desperate, calculated words.

"Patya and you," he said. He looked at Patya. "Is this your idea, as well as his?"

"I want-" she said.

"You want. Everybody wants. Go to it. Good luck to you." He got up from his mat and took Patya's face between his hands, kissed her on the forehead. "Thebest of luck," he said, and knew, for himself, in the back of his moiling thoughts, that he could not risk himself for more than the immediate needs, either... he had more than a wife to constrain him.

He had the Ila on his hands, and her dealings with Luz. And not Memnanan nor Norit nor any of the tribal lords could deal with her as he did.

Patya blushed. Tofi did. Patya hugged him. He clapped Tofi on the shoulder and sent them away. There was no privacy in the whole camp.

But lovers managed. They went off among the beshti. Inventive. He expected that of them.

"That was sweet," Hati murmured, beside him. "I like him. I like your sister, too."

"He's a good young man," he said. He fought off despair for their situation and exhaustion deeper than any since he had come on this trek. He touched Hati's shoulder, just touched her, wanting comfort for himself. He had not even spared half a thought for the appropriateness of his sister's choice. Kaptai would have married her daughter to a young man of more prospects than Tofi had. But who, in this hour, had more than Tofi?

He was thinking of the deaths of hundreds and thousands. He had begun to plan for that carnage as inevitable. What share had Patya in his obligations?

Obligations all came cras.h.i.+ng down on him with a smothering weight, all the first ride to Pori, the trip back, Kaptai's death, and his failure to do anything for the ones who most relied on him, like Norit, like Patya. And Hati.

Marak, the voices said, always there in these hours, along with the urgency to move, move, move, go east, and he would, he had to, but ultimately he had no power to save the weak, the f.e.c.kless, the ignorant. He tried to call what he felt in his soulresponsibility; but it was beyond any sense of responsibility: it was simply doing what he could do, as long as he could do it, like a man walking on his last strength.

They settled. Norit, meanwhile, rocked, rocked, singing, quietly, mad as they came. Her head dropped several times, and a final time, and she slept, Lelie sprawled in her lap. There was nothing he could do for them, either. Hati slept, and he knew it was his own duty to rest and to become sane again, butMarak, Marak, Marak was all through his brain, and it would not let him go. Thoughts raced and circled through his head, what to do, whether he could find the exact spot where they had descended off the Lakht the last time.

Most of all-the chance that storm might come while they were exposed to that edge, that the earth might shake while they were on that climb-all these things.

And the sand-fall below the cliffs-he had forgotten that. Sand came off the Lakht, wind-carried. They could get down and find that their tame slope, their trail, was under a wind-borne waterfall of sand, the trail changing under them and a weight of sand simply crus.h.i.+ng them down-but if they were too far away from the cliffs, the sand-charged wind would kill them. He struggled to imagine what the balance was, how close they dared be, whether the fiercest wind that ever blew might simply carry all the sand-fall up into the storm. Might it be the best gamble to pitch tents closer to the cliffs and risk being buried?

What was right? What could Luz know about conditions no one hadever seen?

"Marak," Hati said, and sat up and tugged at him, wanting him to lie down and be reasonable. He would not. Could not rest. Not with that realization. They had to do more than just reach the bottom. They had to get a camp pitched that would save their lives.

And he had to guess right.

She leaned against him, and put her arm about him, her head against his shoulder. "Luz is noisy today.

She should shut up."

"It's coming," he said. "It's coming for sure. Luz wants us to move now. She's never walked this desert.

She doesn't know what she's asking of us. But we don't know what we're facing."

"She should shut up," Hati said, laying her head against his heart. "She should let us alone. We're doing all we possibly can."

"If there's no water down below, before we reach the tower-" The worries obstructed clear reason, his thoughts going back and back again to the cardinal points. "She's got to do something, is all. I can't. I can't get the villages to move faster than they will. And if we don't camp close enough to the rocks at the bottom, the wind will kill us, and if all the sand falls off the cliffs, it may bury us. What's the answer for us? How far is safe?"

"We've done all we can," Hati said. "We'll go down, is all. We'll do what we can, by what we see."

Norit, who might know, who might hear Luz's answer, only rocked and sang to herself.

There was nowhere any peace. He could look to the edges of the camp and see the furtive action of a few creepers, harmless things, but their disturbance could trigger others-all that ma.s.s at Pori, which stayed near the water, preying on itself, the stronger on the weaker. They had not walked into it. The chance that they might have walked in with the villages behind them still haunted him. But he tried to do what Hati said: he tried not to think.

A wind blew, sulfurous and unpleasant. It might have stormed for days during their pa.s.sage, and instead the weather had favored them, their one piece of blind luck. Not even Luz could have arranged that. He thought that calamities were piling up on him, but if he looked, he saw a few signs of luck still with him, a few signs that the odds could be shoved into better advantage. If a man paid attention. If he did think of all the possibilities.

He kissed his wife, rested his head against her, shut his eyes a moment.

"Up," Hati said after a dark s.p.a.ce, giving him a little shake, and he realized she had held him, bracing his weight for however long he had slept, steady and sure. "We're moving," she said, and they were: the Keran were rolling up their mats. The Ila's servants had struck her shelter.

A little sleep seemed for a moment worse than none. It was hard to move. He gathered his scattered wits, helped Hati up, waked Norit, but not Lelie-her he picked up, and heaved her, still sleeping, to his shoulder, to hand her up to Norit once Norit was mounted.

Hati rolled up their mats and went and tied them on, and led the beshti back.

Marak saw Tofi help Patya up. The aifad cheated him of the sight of Patya's face, but Tofi looked happy, and the language of their hands, not quick to part, was a rea.s.surance. They looked only at each other.

"Do your jobs," Marak said to Bosginde, who stood staring. "Hewon't give you orders." Meaning Tofi.

"You're in charge. Prove what you've got."

Bosginde went and with Mogar did his ordinary duty, and saw the girths were tight, then helped Memnanan's wife and mother up. Tofi became cognizant enough to join them, with looks back at Patya the while, the look of a young man with only one thing on his mind.

Bosginde elbowed Mogar, with a grin and a knowing look on his face, before they helped Norit up and both got to the saddle... as if it were any day, as if nothing in the world was unusual. The Keran, meanwhile, were setting themselves into motion, the Ila's servants were attempting to get her mounted, and Memnanan and his men were up. The Haga began to flow out around the edges of the lump that was the city-dwellers in their midst. Marak saw it all, the amus.e.m.e.nt of the slaves, Tofi and Patya with eyes for one another, and Hati's amus.e.m.e.nt, and all of a sudden there was a commotion in the Ila's camp, the Ila's white besha having escaped out through the camp, and two more followed it.

Everyone began to laugh, he laughed, and then the earth shook them all to sobriety: that was what had startled the beshti, and the Keran quickly caught the fugitives. The Ila, veiled and angry, allowed herself to be helped up.

They could still laugh, the ex-slaves at the ex-master, the tribesmen at the city folk-all of them had laughed except Norit, who sat expressionless and staring blankly at the commotion. She would go where the besha went. Whether she herself got her baby down the descent safely-she had no particular care-but Luz would see Norit survived, if anyone did.

"Here." Marak made his decision and handed Lelie up to her mother, live or die, the best he could do: then he went and mounted up, the same. He turned Osan to follow the Keran, and Hati went with him, and Norit did, and Tofi and Patya, and the whole camp and the whole caravan began to set out.

The wind fell. The afternoon grew hot, and the air utterly still as they traveled. The edge of the world was in front of them, a horizon unnaturally clear now that the wind had let the air clear.

"Talk to me," he said to Hati. "Distract me."

Marak, Marak, his voices said to him, and he saw a vision, the fall of a great star, as it seemed, and the earth splitting, and fire running in the cracks.

"I think it's coming," Hati said, offering no comfort. "Something much bigger than the rest."

"It's coming," Norit confirmed, catching a breath. She hugged Lelie close. "In the bitter water. Not yet, but soon."

Conversation was no comfort, except to know the tormenting vision was the same for all of them. They saw the vision over and over and over, with the sun s.h.i.+ning at their backs as clearly and as brightly in a clear sky as if there were never a threat.

And by late afternoon the edge of the world developed a crack, and by evening that crack became a cliff edge, bright red with sunset where they were, and shadowed beyond, until the distant sand caught the light again.

It was the edge of the Lakht. It was the way they had to go down, and they were not yet where Marak hoped to reach, not near their former descent: that was southward, toward all the hazards of Pori.

"The climb down is at a notch," he said, riding up to Aigyan before Memnanan or any of the rest could question him. Only Hati came with him, and now he quickened the pace ahead of the Keran, and took the lead himself, with Hati, and then with Norit and Tofi and Patya, and last of all the au'it, all of them that had come this road before.

The light was leaving. The smallest stones cast strange, long shadows on sand turned red as fire. They were running out of daylight and farther from a downward path than he had hoped they would be.

But they rode up on a depression along the cliff edge, and there was their path, just as the sun was s.h.i.+ning its last, there where the sand had slipped away down the edge of the plateau, and rocks thrust up like giant sentinels.

"There it is!" Hati exclaimed: trust the an'i Keran to recognize a landmark she had once pa.s.sed. This was the place.East , the voices still urged them, and noweast was possible. Marak turned Osan about and looked back to the long line of tribesmen that followed them, and to the red among white that was the Ila's household, and Memnanan, and the dark of the Haga.

All the tribes would follow without question. All the villages had to, for good or for ill. The descent showed treacherously steep, a winding stair of sand and rock where they had lost a besha on the last descent: bad enough the last time, and now they had the old and the sick to get down.

Marak, his voices called out, demanding, urging him down that trail. His heart hammered in the disturbance the makers created. But he and his house all waited until Aigyan had reached them.

"Will you go first?" Aigyan asked, offering him the honor of the leader of all of them, and he shook his head, knowingthat was not his place.

"I'll wait,omi . Go down and set the edge of the camp closer to the cliffs than a sane man would dare, and drive down the deep-stakes and take every precaution: I don't think the sand will fall down. I think the wind will carry it to the ends of the earth. There's a storm coming. It's all I know-a wind stronger than any wind. Better be closer to the cliffs than not."

Aigyan heard him, and thought about it, and nodded, frowning in that consideration. He thought Aigyan understood him.

But he had second thoughts of Tofi and Patya, and when Aigyan and the Keran had started down that slope, he wanted to see his own charges go down early and be safe. "Take care. You'll have our tent.

See to it. Don't make any mistakes."

"Yes,omi ," Tofi said, and asked no questions. But Patya did. "When will you come?" she asked.

"When I've seen the most of our own camp come down. And the Haga. Don't worry about us. If anyone knows the time to go down, we do." He knew, when he had just said it, what compelled him to stay above, the simple drive to see what was coming, whether he was right about the choices he had made all along, and about what he had just asked Aigyan to do-to violate a basic rule of safety in all storms before.

But he could not overstay the margin of time they had. "Just take precautions," he said to Tofi. "I know there'll be a storm. The earth may shake. I don't know if the cliffs will stand, but they're all the windbreak we have. Be very sure of those stakes!"

Patya went with her husband. He was not easy until he saw the both of them pa.s.s that place where the besha had died, and until he knew they were down on the easier part of the trail.

Vision flashed across his senses, blinding him. Rock hit sphere.

Norit's besha started forward, compelled by so many beshti it saw moving. But Marak still reined back.

"Go down with her," he said to Hati. "See she doesn't break her neck, or the baby's."

"She doesn't need me," Hati said, defying him. The au'it, also, was having trouble holding her besha, but she held it, and Hati did: two stubborn, purposed women, each with their own intentions. But Norit-and Luz-left them.

Orders could not send Hati away. He knew that Norit had obeyed her voices. He had second thoughts about his own judgment, and wished now he had intervened to keep Lelie and give her to Hati, but Hati was in as much danger, staying with him... all of them up here were in danger, on the rim, when the wind came.

Memnanan rode over to them, right at the edge of the descent, as the Ila's servants began to pa.s.s onto the downward trail.

"It's bad news from behind us," Memnanan said. "We're hearing that vermin have moved in, right on the line. The priests absolve the living of the duty to bury the dead, and some have just sat down by the line of march. They're out of water. The vermin take them. It's all grim news back there. We're losing the ones we've saved. For the G.o.d's sake, Trin Tain, can we let them camp down there? The priests ask.

How soon will there be water?"

"Two days," he said. He lied. He had no idea whether they could make that speed to the tower, or what would happen, or how long they would be encamped and under siege from the heavens once the hammer came down. "A storm's coming. There's no chance up here. The Keran will establish their tents down below." He added, calmly, "Your mother and your wife and your aunts have gone down with Keran tribesmen to watch them. Aigyan's in charge, below. Get yourself under shelter once you get there and then set up tents to welcome in those that have just come down. Then give them the same word, everything calm, but push as hard as you can to get canvas up. We will lose lives. The hammer is coming down. It's on its way now. I don't know what may happen next."

"It's coming."

"It's coming," Marak said. He grew calmer in saying it aloud, to a man who understood him. "There's no other consideration."

"The Ila wishes to talk to you, once we're down there."

"I'll come when I can," Marak said. The Ila was, at the moment, the least of his concerns. "Go down with her. Get off the cliff face. Give whatever orders make sense down there, and listen to Aigyan about the camp. I'llbe there."

Memnanan left them, then, and all the while the sky weighed on their backs, heavy with disaster. The sunlight in a natural sunset had diminished to no more than a faint intimation of light, the sun long behind the western ridges. Below them the head of the column began to unload their tents, a little outward, but not that far from the cliffs, as he had said.

After Memnanan and his men the Haga began their descent: the trail was only wide enough for one at a time, one at a time, one at a time... for everyone alive in the world. For everyone who would survive.

The last of the Haga went down.

"Go down now," Marak said to Hati.

"You go," Hati said in a voice scarcely louder than the steady tramp of feet and the occasional complaint of beshti long on the trail and miserable with thirst. "Marak, come with me. Let's not both die here. What are you going to do? Leave Tofi in charge?"

There was an appalling thought, clever as the young man was. Tofi would not forgive him. Tofi would curse him to h.e.l.l. Patya would not forgive him, for settling the Ila on her husband.

The vision leapt up, the rock and the sphere, only now it was true, and imminent: it filled the sky and the ground. He was somewhere above it all, and saw it coming.

"It's coming down," Hati said. "It's coming down. This is our chance. Please! Come with me!"

Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said to him, and to Hati, perhaps... perhaps to all the mad in the world at once, for all he knew. And he did not want to go, following the voices. All his life he had resisted the voices.

"Get down there," he said to Hati. It was not yet. There was still time.

"You can't help anyone anymore up here. Get down yourself, or I'll stay here, too, I promise you.

You're being a fool!"

He looked back at the throng of tribes, not even with a sight of the villages yet, the villages with all they held, all the lives, their whole way of life. The line seemed to go on forever in the dusk, and Memnanan had warned him of increasing desperation and decreasing strength back there. He feared far, far worse might be happening just beyond his view: if the horde at Pori had heard the whisper in the earth of so much movement, caught scent of so many helpless and dying among the dead. What did it take from the heavens, to kill them? The vermin sufficed.