Hammerfall (19 page)

Hati had laid a hand on her knife, alarmed; but Marak seized Norit's hand, hard.

“Wake up,” he said, and Norit blinked twice, and looked astonished at herself, on the edge of tears.

“Luz spoke through you,” Hati said.

“I heard,” Norit said, and shivered and ran her fingers into her hair, clenching it, pulling it, self-distraction. “I hear her. I don't want to hear her.”

“Damn Luz,” he said. “We'll go on to Pori. Never mind what Luz wants.”

Norit flashed him a look of terror. “No,” Norit said, and pain rushed through him, and through Hati, and through Norit, until pain was all there was, and he was descended to mere creature, wallowing on the ground where he had fallen. Lights flashed in his eyes and pain roared in his ears.

“Listen to advice,” Luz said fiercely in that sound, Norit leaning above him with unwonted fierceness. “It's already begun! I can't stop it! Do what I say!”

Pain racked him. He dragged himself up, appalled and angry. He strode out from under the tent, into the sun, and began kicking loose the tent stakes, blindly, even before the slaves had gathered up their goods.

“Wait, wait!” Tofi cried, waving his arms. “What's wrong with her? What's wrong with any of you?”

Marak knew his act was as mad as Norit's. The pain reached his ears and his skull and hammered at him. He spun about, arms wide, looking up at the eye of heaven as if he flew, as if he were bound to nothing but the blue-white air, as if he were caught between the hammer of the sun and the anvil of the earth. He would fling himself down and die before he became utterly mad. He would cast himself off the cliffs before he became a mindless slave to the voices.

“You'll have nothing!” he shouted at the heavens.
“You'll have nothing from me!”

The pain in his head became pain in his chest and in his spine and in his gut, and the noise in his ears became a light like the sun. He spun and he spun and he spun until he fell.

He lay on the sun-scorched sand, whole, and unbroken.

Luz said, into his ears:
Listen to me. Lives are at risk. It's already begun. Someone will see to Pori. Go north, away from danger.

Hati dragged his head into her lap, shading him with her body, touching his face with precious water. “Marak. Marak. Wake up. Wake up! Don't leave us.”

Don't leave us, don't leave us, don't leave us.

“Marak,” Hati said, and fear was in her voice, where fear was a stranger. “Marak, wake up. Do you hear me?”

He could not leave Hati lost. He could not leave Norit possessed of devils, with no one to understand her.

He drew several great breaths and slowly blinked at Hati's shadowed face, against the sunglare. He saw Norit beyond her shoulder, a plain, sweet, woman's face dim to his eyes, wild-haired and bareheaded, haloed by the sun.

He reached back with his hands and pushed himself up, gathered a knee under him with Hati's help and then Tofi's.

He looked dazedly at Norit, wondering if he was looking at the same time at Luz.

But if it was not also Norit within that body, he reasoned, then Norit had no other place to be, and whatever she carried within her, he could not turn on her. He had no power to drive out his own vision. He certainly had no power to condemn hers.

“We will pass by Pori,” he said, to Tofi, to Hati, to whoever cared. In that promise, the pressure in his head eased, and Luz grew silent. Tofi had a frightened look.

He staggered upright, staggered as he walked toward the tent to continue ripping up the stakes, still dizzied by his looking at the sun. He was not accustomed to defeat. He burned from the shame of his actions.

And for what, he asked himself, for what reason?

Tofi yelled at the slaves to help, and lent a hand. Together, with Hati and with Norit, all of them helping, they folded the tent and packed it. They loaded the beasts, and roused them to their feet, ready to move.

“This northern way,” Marak said to Tofi. “Do you know it?”

“There is a shorter way across the highland,” Tofi said. “My father never used it. I can
try
to find it.”

Try, in an unforgiving waste. But it seemed to him he knew.

And Luz knew. Luz knew exactly where they were, and where she wanted them to go.

Tofi had a worried look and clearly waited for him to say, No, no, let us go the sane and reasonable passage, but he waited in vain.

“We have guidance,” Marak said. He had never been more angry in his life, but never in his life had any man more deserved a plain answer from him than young Tofi. “The woman in the tower speaks to Norit. I don't trust it, but she wants us to go to Oburan. At least we're agreed in that.”

“I suppose we have water enough to make mistakes,” Tofi said faintly, and shook his head and walked off to mount up.

They set the au'it into the saddle; and helped Norit, who seemed dazed and hesitant: Luz or Norit, it would be Norit's bones that broke, and they roused her besha up and set her securely on it.

The rest of them got up, and Tofi turned them north. Beasts that had anticipated one road and now were turned onto another bellowed their frustration to the skies, as much as to say that they remembered Pori, and fools forgot where the water was.

The complaints gradually faded. The sun sank and vanished in a brassy dusk.

“Look!” Hati said, as a star fell.

They looked aloft for falling stars, then, that sign of overthrow and change, and saw another, and a third and a fourth.

Then a fifth blazed bright, and stuttered a trail of fire across the sky. The beasts saw it in alarm, and their heads swung up.

A seventh and an eighth, as bright, traced a path from horizon to horizon.

Marak had viewed the first falling stars as a curiosity, but now he saw a ninth fall, bright and leaving a trail behind it.

A tenth, and thunder cracked among the stars, making everyone jump, and then laugh, caught in foolish fear.

Everyone had seen falling stars. They happened in the sixth and the eighth month, very many a night, but, Marak said to himself, this was the fourth month, no more than early in the fourth month, at that, and the heavens lit up in bright trails, one after another, interspersed with bright interrupted ones.

Another star fell, this one in a crack of thunder, and shattered in a cloud that blotted out the stars along its track.

“This will continue,” Norit said in a tone both cold and assured, and yet trembling with Norit's chin. “This will continue. It will likely miss Pori. But the plain beyond isn't safe.”

Now the heavens showed streaks of a star-fall denser than anything Marak had ever seen. At every moment the sky showed another, and another, and another, then five, ten at once, and more and more and more, faster than a man could count.

“Is this the world ending?” Tofi asked. He had his arms folded over his head as he rode, as if that could make him safe from plummeting stars. The slaves cried out in alarm as another of the bright ones came down, and burst in a long trail of fire.

“Keep moving,” Norit said, and that new vision came, overwhelming, of rock hurtling into sphere, then a swarm of rocks, again and again and again. “This is the lightest of the fall. This is what will happen, here, and across the world, far worse.”

Marak all but lost his balance riding as his eyes revised the scale of those rocks of the vision as equal to the stars above them, careening down in dizzying succession.

And what was the sphere?

“The falling rocks,” he said: those were the only words he could find for what he saw, and the import of them he could not measure by any attack he had ever seen. “The spheres.”

“The death of all of us,” Tofi moaned, hiding his head, and the slaves rode up close to them, pointing at the largest, waiting to die. “Look!” they cried. “Look!” until they ran out of astonishment.

It went on for hours: at times there seemed thousands at once, until the whole heavens were streaked with light, even while the sun was coming up. Norit hugged her arms against herself like a beaten child as she rode, rocking to the besha's gait.

And the sun rose and reached its height.

They reached a flat, and spread the tent, but kept looking toward the white-hot heavens as they hammered home the stakes. They had lost confidence in the sky. It was long before they slept, and waked and exited the tent to break camp as the sky began to shadow.

Another star fell, herald of another such night.

The slaves cried out. The au'it opened her book and recorded the fall. But a second and a third followed.

“Let us be on our way,” Marak said to Tofi. “If the heavens fall, what can we do? Let's go.”

But now the slaves went about their work with fearful looks at the sky, while the beasts, often reluctant, put up a mindful resistance and bawled and circled away from attempts to load them.

At a great boom out of the sky, the beasts bolted.

“They know they're going to die,” the slaves cried. “We're all going to die!”

“I will free you
now!”
Tofi cried. “I will pay you wages
now!
Catch them!”

The slaves took out, running. Hati raced out, caught her own beast, managed to get into the saddle, and rode out and got ahead of the most of the strays, driving them back with blows of her quirt, to Tofi's effusive gratitude. The slaves caught the others and led them back, panting and staggering, too exhausted and too frightened, perhaps, to attempt to ride.

Meanwhile the rain of fire continued in the heavens, and a strange cloud hung where the star had burst.

Marak put Norit up on her beast, and the au'it onto hers. He mounted up on Osan as the slaves struggled with the packs and, with Hati, kept the frightened younger animals in place while the slaves made the older of the pack beasts kneel, and loaded up such of the baggage as waited ready.

Seeing the other beasts sitting calmly under their packs, then, the skittish ones began to kneel on their own, the habit of their kind.

They struck the tent. The rest of the baggage went on.

Then they set themselves under way, under the overthrow of heaven, making all possible speed.

In the afternoon sky in the third day of the third cycle of the first season a strange pale light appeared and the sun seemed to set in the east in daylight. The light endured as a sunset and faded as a sunset fades, but pale throughout. The lord of the tribe asked the grandmothers whether the tribe should go to know the source of this light, but it was near calving time and the grandmothers said it was far away and the walk would risk the calves and mothers. The lord of the tribe asked whether they should tell a village, and the grandmothers said the village priest would make trouble for the tribe.

—The Spoken Traditions of the Andesar

THE SKY WHITENED
into day, and they reached an alkali pan. They had no need to drink, and would not drink of the well that they could dig in this place, not at the most desperate. They simply used the stony flat for a noontime camp, just off the clinging white powder, and the au'it sat and wrote in her book, flicking now and again at windblown white dust that fell on her pages.

The three slaves bickered with Tofi, who swore he had never freed them, that he had only said he might free them if they caught all the beasts, but Marak, seeing unhappiness and surly workers, took the slaves' side. “You did say it. They're free men. Now they have to earn their food.”

Neither side liked that completely, and the beasts sat bawling and complaining while Tofi and the slaves, now freedmen, bartered over wages in the hot sun.

“Pay them what you pay any hireling!” Marak said, to end the dispute. “And no more!” He pointed at the au'it and made such a gesture as the Ila herself might make. “Write it! Besides, the world is ending. What does a little extravagance matter?”

The au'it wrote.

It was the first time he had said it in those terms. The slaves fell into silence. Tofi did, and after the beasts were unladed and the tent was up, Tofi on the spot untied a wrapped string and counted out gold rings. “If you have any sense,” Tofi muttered to the new freedmen as he did so, “don't spend anything on drink. Buy goods when we get to Oburan and sell them where we're going. You know how it's done. If the world is ending, one can still make a profit. Think of what the white tents
don't
have, buy it cheap as you can and sell
that.
”

“Master,” they still called him, when they were happy with him. They went away and compared the rings they had, content, as if the world might, after all, go on.

Marak settled down with Hati and Norit, and, taking some cheer from Tofi's pragmatic wisdom, he stretched himself out to sleep. Meanwhile the au'it, tucked up with her book, settled against the tent pole and unwrapped a new cake of ink: she had written up the old one until there was nothing left but the corners. She sharpened a new pen.

They all were exhausted, after chasing panicked beshti and watching the heavens come down in fragments: they had used deep-irons to tether the beasts this time, and they slept more deeply in that confidence.

Marak,
the voices began; and Norit shook at him, and waked him.

There was still ample light. He looked at the angle of the shadows and grimaced, incoherent with sleep, but Norit had waked Hati, too, and then Tofi.

Haste,
the voices said, too disquieting for rest. Tofi looked like the risen dead. Hati scowled, and the slaves-now-freedmen moaned and resisted. But they were awake. There was reason, so Marak said to himself, and gathered himself up to his feet, out under a sun only a quarter down the sky and a heat still shimmering on the sand.

It was no good to curse. Norit did as Luz did, and was, herself, exhausted. They struck their sole tent, loaded the beasts, and dug up the stakes, sweating.

Then they began their daily trek to the west, under a sky still too bright for stars. Marak slept, nodding. So Hati did, and Tofi, from time to time, until they acquired a better mood and had some sense of rest. Norit managed: at least her head drooped, and Marak kept an eye on her for fear she might fall off; but she stayed, and waked, and rubbed her eyes, adjusting the aifad to shade them. There was little talk, little to distract them in a monotony of riding.

Hati pointed after a time to something Marak's eye had begun to pick out far to the west, in the sunset, a particularly bright seam of light. But they had no notion, any of them, what that was. The au'it wrote, clutching her book and her pen and her ink-cake despite the lurch of the beast under her, in the absolutely last of the light.

As the sun faded and the stars showed, that glow persisted.

“Like fire,” one of the freedmen said. “What's out there to burn?”

None of them knew. In the dark, stars began to fall again, none of the noisy sort, only a steady, gentle, remorseless fall.

“Will they all fall?” Hati asked at last in distress, scanning the heavens as they rode. She pointed at bright Almar. “See, Almar is still up there.”

“They are not stars that fall,” Norit said. “Almar won't be among them.”

“What are they, then?” Marak asked, angry not at Norit, but at Luz. “What are they? Are they the vision?”

“Water,” Norit said. “Water, iron . . . stone and metals. A wealth of iron.”

Perhaps it was Norit that answered him, out of her madness. Or Luz told them the unlikely truth.

They never knew what the burning was. That next day, when they pitched the tent and lay down on their mats, Norit turned her back to both of them and lay apart.

Marak looked at Hati, questioning, and Hati at him, but neither of them knew what to do for her. He knew that within Luz's will, Norit suffered, and that knowledge left him sleepless as they rested.

He thought about it. He tried to think what to do.

The au'it slept. Tofi and the men slept. There were no witnesses. He gave Hati's hand a squeeze, one comrade asking leave of another, and moved to Norit's side, stroked Norit's arm, and after a time moved her hair aside from her ear to whisper into it: “Norit. Do you want to make love?”

Norit flinched and covered her eyes, turning away.

He was given a no, but not, he thought, from Norit, who had no choice about Luz, or the visions. He had never forced himself on a woman. But he knew the ravages of the madness, how it ate up sleep and gave no rest, and wore out the body without giving it any useful ease. He saw it happening to Norit, and he gathered Norit up in his arms and kissed her on the lips.

“Let me go!” Luz cried. She struck him with the heel of her hand, trying to break free.

“Let Norit go,” he retorted, and did not abate his attentions, not though Norit's body struggled and her mouth cursed as Norit never had, with words that made no sense in any dialect.

Her struggles, her outcries, waked Tofi and the slaves and the au'it, who stared in dismay. Had he not disapproved the soldiers for the very same act?

He spent no time explaining his actions. He swept Norit up and carried her out of the tent kicking and struggling. Gently, for Norit's sake, he set her down on the shaded sand outside and proceeded to what he intended.

“Damn you!” Luz cried.

Only when Norit pounded him with her fists and began to gasp after breath did he turn gentle with her, and then Norit simply lay in his arms and cried and sobbed. He had least of all intended to hurt her.

“You hate me,” she wept. “You hate me!”

“Never, Norit,” he said, and added honestly: “I'm not that sure about Luz.”

She struck at him, and he caught her fist easily within his, she was so small and her violence so slight. He lifted her face and tried to make her look at him, but she shut her eyes.

“Tell me the truth, Norit. Tell me the truth. Do you hear me? Look at me and tell me the truth. What do you want, and what does Luz want?”

Her eyes squeezed shut. She made no other struggle, no other response, either, as he tucked her clothing back to rights and smoothed her hair gently into place. He had no idea what he had won, or if he had won any relief for Norit—he had hoped if he could bring her back for an hour, Norit might have a chance, and he knew by what seethed in his own mind that she had less of a chance if Luz was always there.

But now he regretted doing what he had done. He had tried to help Norit. He had no idea now whether he had scared her instead of Luz, or offended her, or what vengeance he might have brought down on them all.

He led her back into the tent and let her go, and she sat down on her own mat. She sat staring at the wall for a long while before she lay down again and tucked her clothing tightly about her.

Tofi and the men likely were awake with all the commotion, but they were pretending otherwise. The au'it certainly had waked, and wrote, silent in her preoccupation.

Hati lay with one arm beneath her head, gazing at the sun through the canvas as he lay down beside her.

“Luz has her all the time,” he said. “I don't know which I dealt with. I tried to help. I don't think I did.”

“Norit knows what you do,” Hati said. “Norit wants help.”

“I think she does. But she can't push Luz out.”

“Norit can't say no to anyone, least of all to Luz. But she wants you. She wants you more than anything.”

“What can I do? What cure is there for her?”

“None,” Hati said, “until Norit says no to Luz.” Hati rolled over and opened her arms to him, and drew him in despite the heat.

At that small move, Norit moved, and leapt up, and shoved the au'it out of the way and sent the au'it's pen into the sand in her rush out of the tent.

Marak leapt up, and Hati did, dodging the au'it, half-stumbling over Tofi and his helpers, hurrying to stop her as she raced out of the shade of the tent.

Norit ran past the resting beasts, wasting strength and sweat in the heat, and Marak ran foremost after her. Hati ran behind him. There was a rock shelf beyond, where a careless foot might slip, and Norit sent herself straight for it, maybe knowing what was there, maybe forgetting that hazard.

Before she could reach that edge Marak caught her, and barely so. They fell down on the stony ground, full length.

Her clothing had saved her skin, except her hands bled. His arm bled. But the madness was in possession of her. She struck at him as he got up and dragged her to her feet, struck him hard, and then only halfheartedly. “I want to die,” Norit cried, as he held her, but Luz said, in the next breath, trying to stand erect: “She won't succeed. I won't let her come to harm.”

He still had possession of Norit's wrist. Hati arrived at a walk, now, ahead of Tofi and his two men. To their appalled looks, he shook his head and walked toward the camp, leading Norit by a firm grip.

Norit said not a thing, nor objected when he set her down on her mat and harshly told her to stay there. The blood on her hands was still fresh, but the wounds were already dry as if hours old.

The au'it had not ventured far from the tent. She had watched their return. She sat and wrote, now, a dry, persistent scratching, recording Norit's desperate rush toward death.

Marak, Marak, Marak
was in his head, then. He expected vengeance, pain, he had no idea what, but what he received was a dinning urgency to move on.
Haste,
the voices said.
Haste. Enough.
The vision of the falling star began again.

He went out and began kicking furiously at the tent stakes.

Then Tofi and Hati, outside, began to help him. He ripped his own hand bloody, pulling up a stake, and the pain scarcely reached him.

“Damn them!” he shouted at the white-hot sky. “Damn them all!”

But no one answered, no one came to offer reason. Hati went to bring out Norit and the au'it and their mats out before the tent went down.

It billowed flat, the former slaves folded it, packed it, and loaded it in rare, fearful silence. The sun was still high as they mounted up and rode on, and the beasts, ignorant of all the mistakes they had made, grumbled, disturbed early from their cud-chewing.

The whole afternoon long seemed to pass in numb, paralytic silence, inside and out, as if even the madness stood back from him and from Norit. Perhaps Luz was aghast at the violence.

His hand healed. By nightfall the flesh was sealed over. Norit showed no lasting injury. The stars began to fall and fell until the dawn.

Over the next several days the voices were silent, exhausted, perhaps, or Luz, distant in her tower, plotted some revenge. She gave no hint. Perhaps on her bed she thought about him. Perhaps she and Ian made love. Marak cared nothing for that, either. Perhaps they could hear him as he heard the visions. He wished only for their continued silence. Norit was more herself, fearful of the star-fall, tender in her dealings with everyone, lacking prophecies.

They reached the very heart of the Lakht, within sight of the Qarain itself, and the border of the Anlakht, and every night the stars still fell, stitching small streaks across the dusk and across the night, occasionally exploding into fire. Every day the au'it wrote, and wrote copiously, but what she might have to say Marak had no idea.

The days became hot, the hottest any of them remembered. The sky was a brazen dome above their heads, and, having no shortage of water, they let the wind blow over the sweat that ran on their limbs. The beasts, however, grew irritable in the heat, and the heat wore on them all: when they rested it was a numb sort of rest, more desperate unconsciousness than sleep. The open-sided tent offered shade, but gave far less relief when the wind failed. Heat rose shimmering from the sand. Light glared off the rocks, and hot air gathered under the canvas.

Marak found to his chagrin that he had lost all count of the days, but more worrisome, he had ceased to care. Habits on which life itself depended faded from importance in the oppressive air. The au'it never spoke, in all these days. Norit had grown increasingly quiet and hard to rouse. Hati moped in the weather. Tofi looked ten years older from sunburn and dirt, while the ex-slaves recalled the white tents, and safety, and sat listless in the shade. They found a bitter spring, and the beshti, well watered, disdained it. But their water supply had become, at least marginally, a concern, and after this they determined to reserve the good water and let the beshti go in want. Tofi harbored a secret worry, and still claimed he knew the way, but Marak began to suspect otherwise.