Gene Wars - Hammerfall Part 9

But now he owned himself met, matched, mated with a creature that would never give back a step from his most outrageous actions, never fear his madness, never hesitate.

Hati, he said to himself, but there was no speech in the howling thunder above them.

On the next day, that day he had been so sure the storm would pa.s.s, a pole tore loose and they had to go out, the four or five among them who understood how to pitch a tent, and secure the ropes. The air had chilled. The sun had been cut off from the sand so long the air and the sand itself had turned bitter cold. With fingernails broken to the quick by the dry sand they dug for the eye of the deep-stake bolt and found it by the ragged sc.r.a.p of rope left to it, still warm from the heat of days ago. They dug down to it and rigged a new line.

Then they retreated, s.h.i.+vering and coughing and wiping grit from their eyes and their noses and the edges of their mouths.

The storm continued to batter them, and his two days bid now to be a lie. He was ashamed of having promised those who trusted him a relief he could not deliver; but at least they had saved the tent.

Within hours, however, the wind was quieter. A look out the flap proved there was something like light beyond the walls, a transparent red promising the storm had indeed eased, but there was no view of anything farther than the tent stake nearest the door, and a man dared not expose the eyes or any more of the skin than he must.

Marak ducked his head back inside, and answered anxious questions with, "It's a little quieter."

One could hear it. The thunder of the canvas was muted: it had boomed and racketed so he thought he would lose what he had left of his reason, and now it was an occasional spate of wind.

But, chilled, he was doubly glad to find his mat and his comfort again, and find Hati's arms and Norit's to comfort him and to brush the dust from his hair and his clothing.

His throat was dry as the dust he had breathed. He was keeper of the food and water and could have had more; he could have given more to the men who had helped with the rope, but he honestly had no notion who they were and wished to open no doors to dispute. He simply advised himself and all of them to the same ration.

He slept, exhausted, the whole world seeming to spin about and fall to the east.

And after that short sleep, he waked to a near silence in the wind.

He stirred, drew on his robe against the chill, and pulled up his aifad against the dust that must still be moving. He unlaced the flap as others of their tentmates stirred, and he peered out at the other tents through the reddened, dust-choked air.

There had been four tents in his field of view when the storm began. Now there were only three. He tried to figure their positions, thinking one might still be veiled in dust. But there was a gap, right next to them.

Ropes had failed. The tent nearest them had gone.

He took a lap of the aifad about his head to s.h.i.+eld his eyes from the grit and dust, went out and scanned nearer the ground, looking for any lump of canvas where survivors might have secured a secondary hold against the wind.

Hati had come out behind him, so had the au'it, and so had the several who had helped him save their own tent.

"Stay here!" he said to Hati, not wis.h.i.+ng to leave the water and food to chance or the desires of villagers, and most of all wanting someone sensible who could shout him back to his own tent if the wind rose up again, as it might, in the few moments he meant to be away from shelter.

Hati raised no objection, well understanding. "Stay here," she said to the others. "The wind may come up. Stay close!"

The beasts had survived. Rare the storm that could wear them down. They were lumps of sand, tucked noses to the wind, in the lee of their own tent and the other, and roused as they saw movement, standing up to stretch cramped limbs.

Obidhen's tent was still standing, past the place where the other had stood. He went to that tent, and shouted outside it until, within, someone unlaced the flap.

Two slaves were there. No one else. Not Obidhen, not his son Rom, not the freedmen or the four other slaves.

"Where is master Obidhen?" Marak asked.

"Give us water," the slaves there begged, and he knew that tale instantly, without the caravan master to govern the water, these two fools had fallen to the whole tent's water stores and consumed them. Their suffering was deserved, and far from fatal.

"Out and dig!" he said. "Or die!" He threatened a blow of his fist to the foremost, and the pair moved, ducking after gear.

Marak, Marak, the voices cried, and the whole world was threat and danger.

He left them immediately, went to the fourth tent in the blowing dust, careful not to lose his bearings, for intermittently the fifth and farther tent vanished in the sand red haze.

There, too, he got a man to unlace the flap, and expected Obidhen's son Rom, but the two ex-soldiers roused out to do the job, and light poured past them onto stark, frightened faces... among the rest, he saw three women disheveled, half-clothed, terrified. He began to form a notion of utter disaster. He imagined someone from the tent in difficulty making it as far as the caravan master, who attempted to help, and then engaged his other sons.

"Ontari." Marak ignored the disheveled soldiers and addressed the man he knew best, the stonecutter, who had good sense. "Take charge here." What had gone on for three days between these women and the soldiers and perhaps several others, he suspected and deplored, but there were still their lives to lose if this was only an abate merit of the storm. "Turn out and dig, all of you. We have to recover the supplies. The fool slaves have eaten and drunk for three days!"

"Omi," Ontari said, and rallied the rest. Ontari was a big man. Marak gave the three women a long look that told them he knew, while he asked himself what he could possibly do about their difficulty. He found no answer except to set Hati to find out the truth. In the meanwhile all their lives were at risk.

"The storm may have force left," he said to the women. "Whatever happened here, we don't know how much time we have and we've lost a good portion of our water, buried in that tent. Out and dig!

Everyone!"

Marak! The voices a.s.sumed a tone of panic, and his heart beat like something trapped.

He went to the fifth tent, and there found the youngest of Obidhen's sons, Tofi, alive, and a company larger by two than he had left it.

"Your father and your brothers are gone," Marak said, rendered blunt in the hammering of the voices and the threat of the wind. "Get out and direct the slaves! We've lost them, and we've lost a tent!"

That a tent might be gone was no news to the boy. Two had escaped the ruined tent, and come here, and the boy might hope that his father and brothers had gotten to some other shelter. The report that dashed that hope was clearly a shock.

"Have you looked in the other tents?" the boy asked.

"Gone, I say! We need hands to dig. Turn out!"

There was no time for grief, none for a.s.sessing what had happened. They took shovels such as they had and used bare hands. Obidhen's son.

It was the old, old story on the Lakht. Someone from the missing tent, Landhi's tent, had straggled across to Obidhen during a lull to request help with an increasing problem. Obidhen, the slaves, and the two traders who had been in his tent had gone out to help, and whether or not they had ever even reached Landhi's tent in time, or been carried away by the next gust when it blew loose, they had run a high risk in a storm and lost their wager. Perhaps some survivor had gone over to Rom in the fourth tent, fatal mistake, and now he was gone. Meanwhile two complete novices from Landhi's tent, having made it clear and having lost their bearings, had run into Tofi's tent downwind and told him as much as he knew, but by then the storm was fierce, making it folly to go out looking, and Tofi had wisely stayed put, refusing to go when he could not see.

As for the others, there was no question where survivors might be, if there were to be any survivors.

When that tent had gone, it had become a ma.s.s of half-anch.o.r.ed canvas and cordage in the blinding sand, a lethal monster of canvas and whipping rope, and unless one side of the tent had remained anch.o.r.ed and unless that heap of sand concealed a canvas shelter between elements of the baggage and water stores, there was no hope for the rest at all.

Deep as the sand had acc.u.mulated where the tent had been, Marak had doubted from the beginning that anyone could survive, and nine men had been in that tent with Landhi, not counting Obid-hen, the freedmen, his older son Rom, and the four slaves who had come to their aid.

Obidhen's tent had had its share of their remaining water and its share of their supplies, most of it gone, and Marak had no mercy, no more than Tofi, who railed on the well-fed slaves, beating them when they lagged.

"The storm may have force left," Tofi shouted, flinging sand with a shovel. "Dig faster. All of you."

They abandoned shovels and dug with their bare hands as they came near the supplies, and found the first of the dead, Tofi sobbing and swearing the while. The fifteen beasts that had belonged to the lost tent had sought shelter behind another tent, and they had survived. The supplies, bundled in canvas, turned up knee deep under sand. One corner of the bundle, wrapped solidly, had abraded to threads, but had not spoiled. The water, buried deepest in the stack, had survived, and that was a relief.

They found the bodies of most of the lost up against those bundles, the caravan master and his sons among the rest, a lump of sand and cloth, where all in the tent who had not wandered to safety or to their deaths had attempted to protect themselves. The sand had come over and smothered them, in the outermost bodies blasting skin from flesh and flesh from bone.

Tofi was beside himself with grief. "Murderers!" he cried when they found his brothers and his father. He ran and took a rope's end to the slaves. They ran screaming, with Tofi chasing them through the remnant of the storm. He caught the slowest, and beat him with his fists; but Marak ran after and pulled him off the slave.

"They are slaves," he reasoned with the boy. "They had no orders. They had no idea what to do!"

"They're fools!" the boy wept.

"Take charge of them. Take charge, or lose all that you have from your father. What can your father pa.s.s to you, but this caravan, and these two slaves? They are your skilled workers! We need their work!

Don't kill them!"

The strength went out of the boy, and his hand fell, and he kicked the slave at his feet. "Get up! Get to work!"

The slave gathered himself up, still protecting his head, and backed away, preferring to run away into the desert, while the wind battered at all of them, while the voices insisted,Marak, Marak, Marak , and a tower built, and built and built.

The sand still blew so that farther figures were shadows, and invaded the eyes so a man only dared look out and breathe through the gauze headcloth. It was no time to be beating those who knew how to rig the tents and tend the beasts.

"You are your father's heir," Marak shouted at the boy, above the flap and thunder of the nearby tent, the wind momentarily gusting. He held the boy's arm in a tight grip, compelling his attention. "Take charge of the caravan. The an'i Keran and I can ride on alone, and likely survive, but these other lives are all in your hand. Your father's legacy is yours to keep or lose! What did he teach you?"

There still were sobs, but dry ones.

"Come back," Marak shouted at the distant shadows that were the two slaves. "He will not kill you.

You'll die out there!"

Cautiously, shadows still, the slaves came closer.

"Get to work!" Tofi shouted in a broken voice still boyish in its pitch. "Get to work, you water-fat layabouts, or I'll have the hide off you! I have all the water, now, you sons of devils! I have all the food, I have the tents, and d.a.m.n your lazy souls, you'll work for food and shelter!"

They came slinking back, avoiding the boy, but setting to work at the digging with might and main. The boy continued his sobs as he worked, and his headcloth was soaked with sweat and tears that gathered dust and blinded him. The only recourse was to tug the cloth and s.h.i.+ft it about and try to stop the tears and the exertion that left a mouth taking in the raw, dry wind. Marak knew. He felt the boy's grief with the memory of his own, every sting of frustration and self-blame: but in no wise was it Tofi's fault. The Lakht killed, and it killed for small mistakes, which even Obidhen had made.

Some of the dead they could not find. They might have run for shelter in another tent and not been as lucky as the two who had reached Tofi, or they might simply have gotten turned around from the men they were trying to help. The battering of sand-laden wind disoriented even the experienced traveler.

There was all the desert around them to search, and they had no resources to risk.

The entire toll, they found by counting heads, was twenty-one dead, and the water and supplies the two slaves had gorged themselves on.

Of resources, they had the two slaves, four tents secure, the irons and snarled cordage from the fifth, and all the beasts.

By the evening the storm blew past, so that the stars began to appear in the heavens, the brightest first, then a wealth of them, like jewels scattered through the heavens. It was never so clear as after a blow.

The twenty-one dead meant that number would not be eating and drinking. That meant they were not short of water or food. Amid other pieces of good news, the boy Tofi thought he knew the way to Pori village, and recited the stars that guided them, Kop and Luta, which were clear and cold above them. He had been there. He thought he could go back accurately, and they would have no shortage of food or water, or canvas, which was well: Hati avowed Pori was within the range of the Keran, but she had never been there.

But of skilled hands... there was a marked shortage.

"Give the order," Marak said to the boy, and Tofi said, "Break camp." Tofi said it louder, for the slaves.

"Get up! Strike the tents!"

It was no small labor, when the deep-irons were driven. They had to be dug out; and it was brutal work.

In the absence of the freedmen and the other, more senior slaves, near their freedom, all of them, men and women, dug with whatever they could, all of them anxious to be on their way out of this ill-omened place. The slaves who had eaten and drunk so well were obedient, now, and by no means weak from hunger. One might hope those two had grown wiser and learned from all their mistakes, but Marak doubted it. Once the wind blew, and men began thinking that other men were going to take more than their share, the impulses that governed were not always wise. In the case of the slaves who, alone of the work party, had gotten back to their tent alive, they had thought they were dead anyway. So they grabbed and consumed in panic, vying with each other for the last sc.r.a.p and thought nothing about the next day.

They learned now or both of them were dead, in Marak's reckoning. The boy could think of mercy, once he realized the slaves had likely had nothing to do with his father's death, and were guilty of nothing but surviving. But the Lakht was merciless even to the skilled, like Obidhen, let alone to fools who drank their water up for fear of dying, and there were few second chances.

The dead they had laid out decently, covering them under with the sand they dug out from around their supplies. They spent no extra labor at it, however. It was a burial only for the boy's comfort, and the boy knew as a matter of course that vermin of the sand, like the vermin of the air, were clever and persistent.

The company simply said the names of the lost a last time, and were done with ceremony.

One seemed apt to be the next casualty, Proffa the tailor. Until the storm he had been strong enough, but when they had packed, and the time came, in the mid of the night, to get up on a beast and ride, Proffa was scarcely able to sit the saddle.

So they set him on like baggage, well padded with their mats, and cared for him on the march. It seemed to Marak that the tailor's heart had failed him, perhaps as he understood the cost it was simply to go on living. The mad healed, but Proffa did not.

All these things the au'it wrote in her book the next day.

The caravan master, though rich by the desert's standards, had never been written down in his life, and now an au'it from the holy city had written down his death.

"Have you written his name?" the boy asked earnestly. "It's Obidhen Anfatin."

The au'it wrote, and the boy gave her one of his treasures, one of his father's bracelets.

Common folk had become uncommon, Marak thought, as they set up camp. Even the slaves had begun to grudge their own deaths, and now they had names: Mogar was the one Tofi had beaten, the least agile, but the strongest. The other slave was Bosginde.

They had begun to take note of one another. Friends.h.i.+ps and enmities had formed. Certain ones rode together, like sisters, like brothers. Two women of the last tent, having suffered from rough men in their last camp, had armed themselves with knives and clung to Hati and Norit.

More, there had been a lengthy, angry conversation among the women the nature of which Marak did not inquire.

But once they camped, in consideration of possible violence, he suggested to Tofi they pitch only two tents for shade, and close to one another. The women who had suffered were out of the northwest lowlands and certainly had no idea how to manage in the desert. He suggested the women join Tofi and the two slaves, and keep Tofi comforted, while the two ex-soldiers went to Ontori's tent.

The Lakht brought out the best or the worst in men, and men who had abused their tentmates for three days while they all were in danger of dying were fools. Likewise the women, who had lived through it all and still were on their feet, were not fools, and had gathered the means to defend themselves.

"If these women complain after this," Marak said to Ka.s.san, senior of the two ex-soldiers, the most likely instigators, in his opinion. "If they complain, you'll never see the east."

A suitable fear went across the man's face. "It wasn't me," Ka.s.san said. "It was Foragi."

"Then change his mind," Marak said, "or kill him. I've set the stonemason over you: Ontari. If either of you ever offends these women, I've given him authority to kill you both."

"Omi," Ka.s.san said. Ka.s.san was the one of the two soldiers with the wit to understand the proposition; and he hoped Ka.s.san had the wit to be afraid. Ka.s.san went away, doubtless to warn the other man they were in danger, and if his threat produced mutiny in the ex-soldiers, he was sure their looks would show it: they were not men for deep intrigue.

After noon, they broke camp, and the two soldiers avoided his gaze and ducked their heads.

It was, over all, the women who looked different. Hati had been talking to them, and one of them, Maol the farmwife, glowered and fingered something beneath her belt when she looked at those men.

As for Tofi, still mourning his father and his brothers, Maol and her friend among the three women took him as their special charge, a handsome, quick young lad, and in need of comfort. The third woman, whose name was Malin, seemed to have had a falling-out with the other two. She approached the soldiers, who tried to have nothing to do with her.

They broke camp at sunset and moved on, following the stars Tofi named.

Marak, the voices said,Marak, Marak , but they did not seem displeased. The voices still whispered-hourly now-and the visions still came, and he knew that Tofi's guide stars were the same stars they had followed, the bright ones, to the east.

And if the morning and the evening pitched him east so reliably he never could have lost his way, so with all of them: they were not lost, nor dissuaded, and needed not have worried about knowing the way. The boy Tofi, who owned the beasts and the tents, was increasingly confident of their direction.

So was Hati, who with Norit shared his mat at night. Since the storm, he had no shame left in that regard, only hung a robe for a curtain, and so he heard two of the three women did, with Tofi, and together they got along.

But one of the three, on the outs with the women from the start, had set up to content various other men, and had them, two and three an evening, outside near the beasts, before they would get under way for the night, so he wondered whether the soldiers had been entirely at fault in the tent and who had started the business during the storm.

"Malin takes pay," Hati said when he asked her opinion.