Hammerfall (3 page)

They had roused up a band of the Ila's men by mischance and fought them, drunk as they were. His father had hit him when he found out, but not been greatly angry, since none of them had died, and they had killed the Ila's men.

Hup-hup-hup,
the word came.

The wife was dully compliant now, having had a double ration of beer, and they set her on her feet and had her walk.

The potter, equally drunk, asked after his mother. “Be still,” others of the mad shouted at him, and the Ila's men laughed and rode down on either side of the potter, picked him up by either arm, and carried him far ahead of them, where they dropped him.

The potter sat down until the column overtook him, and then they roused him good-naturedly to his feet. The Ila's men were in high spirits, with the city so near. They gave their sour beer to their prisoners and planned on better in the city that ran with water.

The old man fell down just before dawn and died, so it seemed: no one had touched him. The Ila's men argued among themselves and decided they needed to bring the body along, all the same. It might draw vermin, and it was a danger. They had abandoned the others that had died. But the Ila would pay them a bounty for each madman, and they might argue a little gold even out of the body, proving there was one less of their kind in the world. The city was close. So was reward.

Marak ate what he was given at dawn, drank what water he was given. The sun came slipping over the Qarain's saw-toothed ridge with morning, red fingers lancing across the powder sand, and the city that spread itself like a seam of light now was no mirage. Many of the mad cried out, but some, once fooled, disbelieved it in silence.

In the light and the trickery of the land Marak walked, walked, walked. The city grew nearer all day, the Lakht never seeming narrower, or the city nearer. The sun beat down, blinding, and now, having been generous, the Ila's men turned impatient. They did not camp at noon, but pressed onward in the blazing sun.

The boy from Tijanan, whose sight was dimmer than the rest, at last saw the city the rest of them had seen for hours. “The holy city!” he shouted, and began to dance about, waving his arms, but the guards, out of humor, beat him, and shoved him ahead.

The boy, Pogi, walked, striking his head with his hands.

Marak likewise found in the city walls, however distant, an inspiration. He no longer trudged blindly. He walked as a man walks toward an encounter with his lifelong enemy, full of righteous anger.

“Look at him,” one of the Ila's men said. “Does he know where he's going? He's as crazy as the boy.”

The boy kept his course when the world tilted. The boy never had moved to the visions that stirred the rest. His madness was of a different kind. He was innocent, if their madness was a crime.

Marak felt the world slide, but he kept his course as well. He looked at the walls and ignored the pitch.

They reached the stone-paved road. There was no escape at all, now, and now if never before the dullest must ask themselves what waited for them. But Marak knew. There was comfort in knowing there would be a reason for his dying. There was even a satisfaction in it, when all other purpose had left.

See, Father? I am not that mad. I am not that useless. I lied. All my life was a lie, but it was a rational lie.

What pretenses do the sane make?

What did you pretend, Mother, knowing from my birth that I was not like the rest of you?

And what did you pretend to yourself, Tain Trin Tain, when time after time you believed my lies? You kept asking, but you took all the lies. Why now are you angry?

The sun sank as they walked. The walls of the holy city, slanted and crested with imbedded shards of glass, caught the sunlight and sent light knifing into the eyes as if all the walls were hedged with divine fire. The dome of the Beykaskh, the dome of the Ila's Grace, was wholly tiled with glass, and it blazed like the sun itself. A man could no more look at it by noon than at the burning Eye of Heaven itself.

The mad and the guards alike began to walk with heads lowered, not from shame, but to protect their eyes from the glory of the city.

Birds flew thick about the walls, black spots in the glare. The southern wall was where the gallows were: the city gave the birds its unwanted, its malefactors, and its garbage.

In its wealth it threw out in a day, men said, what whole villages could thrive on for a year. A pool of water stood by the gates, rimmed in stone and overflowing into the sand a good ways out: and out across the sand, on a bed of sandstone, a green-rimmed pond stood always filled.

There vermin of every sort came to water, and to serve as sport for the Ila's archers and her riflemen. That spillage, that pond, was the most profligate consumption of resource possible, and the mad wondered at it, and called that reed-rimmed pool a mirage.

But a pipe ran beside the road, and whereas villages measured and sold every drop, whereas they pressed moisture out of every bit of waste and distilled it in huge stills, it was not the way things were done in Oburan. They sent it out to the pool, to draw vermin.

And as they came up under the shadow of Oburan, they met that rumored wonder greater than the blazing dome and the glass-edged walls. Beside the gate, that fountain known as the Mercy of the Ila gushed from stonework mouths and ran out so profligately that it splashed from the fountain bowl to the troughs and some onto the stones of the street, to be trampled underfoot.

There travelers and traders were free to drink, while the remnant continually overflowed and ran from the trough through tiles until, Marak knew, it reached that distant, reed-rimmed pond.

The beasts had not drunk for ten days. Here, at the long troughs, they crowded one another and pushed and snapped, asserting dominance, while at the upper bowl, the Ila's men wet their hands and wiped their faces at no charge, spilling water as they did. Then the caravanners drank, and here, scrabbling for double handfuls, elbowing one another and frantic with greed and fear and haste, the mad also drank at the bowl.

Marak filled his cupped hands and drank from the troughs the beasts used, having no disdain for a little besha-spit. More, while others were jostling one another and worrying about their share of what was boundless, he filled both hands, first wiped a coating of dust into mud on his face and neck, and then sluiced more up, the cold water running down beneath the shirt.

He was not the common sort of madman, to elbow the others for drink. Here at the lower outflow he had it all to himself. He saw the wife from Tarsa shoved to the ground by the potter, and he seized the man by the collar and held him back until the wife had gotten up, bruised.

“There is no scarcity,” he said to the potter. “Are you a man at all, or not?”

The potter's profane answer proved he was a fool, at least, and Marak showed his contempt for the water of the Ila's Mercy by dumping the potter bodily into the beast's trough, perhaps the first water bath the potter had had since his birth. The guards laughed, in far better humor with their bellies full of water, and no one rebuked him for the act.

With that act, he had waked somewhat from the drug in the food they fed him. He felt his heart beating and the blood moving in his veins. Beyond the immediate noise of the beasts, he heard the noise of the curious of the city and the passersby, heard the jeers of a gathering crowd while the potter clawed his way out of more water than he had ever sat in, and dripped onto the pavings. Marak heard young voices squealing as a besha snapped at a tormenting child, and heard the ting and clash of belled harnesses, the sound of a caravan all about them. All the bystanders laughed, having gathered to watch the potter's bath, and had no idea, perhaps, that they were entertained by the mad.

Marak stretched his back and arched it and looked up and up at the threat of the walls, the high barricade that had thwarted Tain's rebellion after all their plans and their ambitions.

He saw from this vantage the glass-edged defenses he and Tain had once tried to breach, and with a soldier's cold eye, too, looked up at the scars he and Tain had left on the limestone walls of the holy city, the jewel of the Lakht. They were no few scars, and lasting ones, but not mortal, no, far from mortal wounds against this city.

They had not known, then, about the guns, or the launchers.

He imagined there were things about the city he did not guess yet. The very reason for this summons was one.

Did the Ila in her power shrug off the war out of the west, and yet seek out the mad on a whim? Was it mere curiosity?

So now the damned and the mad gathered at the Ila's request, to live or to die, and the son of the Ila's enemy was here, one among many, and yet not unknown, he was sure. He was in the records these men had made, and he was sure someone would inform the Ila what a prize her men had gathered in the west. He wondered if the Ila's men would single him out before the Ila knew; would they make his name known in the streets? And he wondered if that happened what the people would do, who had lived through the years of the attack?

Would they resent him?

Attack him, if he shouted out, I am Marak Trin Tain?

He was tempted to do it, if only to die with a name and to make the most trouble possible in his dying. But he had another purpose yet to accomplish.

The guards moved the other prisoners on, and he bowed his head like the rest and walked with them, led like the beasts.

“Walk!” the Ila's men shouted at them. For the first time in a day they used their quirts, set afoot, moving among the mad to set them on their way through the gates.

The journey was over. The caravan masters would seek their pay of the offices, most likely, as in every town, when cargo was off-loaded. The Ila's men had assumed all command now: the beasts and their masters they left behind with the tents and the baggage, all except the beast that carried the old man. The boy, Pogi, stopped to stare at their parting; but the guards whipped him on.

A prudent man might be ready for whatever whim moved the Ila, and the sergeant in charge of the caravan was, over all, a prudent man. He shouted out curses at men who whipped the boy too hard; he shouted encouragement at the mad to walk. “Not so far now,” the sergeant said. “You'll sit up there! Move!”

Marak walked behind the beast carrying the dead man, with a view of its legs and underbelly, mostly, as the stone-paved street rose up and up the city's broad terracing, up between the frontages of craft shops and warehouses and the better dwellings.

In a turn more the sunlight dimmed with dusk and colors lost their brilliancy. The day was over. And Marak walked in the wake of the beast, which, watered, stopped a moment to do what beshti rarely did, and moved on. Those afoot got the worst of it.

In their war here, his father's war, not only had they never breached these walls, they had never imagined the teeming mass of people that lived inside the holy city. He walked now within deep shadow of tall buildings and dusk, within a stench of smoke and rot and urine. He felt the slight coolth of perpetually shadowed stone as well as the cooling of the air that followed the sun's descent. Noon could hardly reach this place. He had not appreciated his last view of the sun outside. If he saw it rise again, he was sure now it would be his great misfortune.

High, high up the winding turns of the street they passed now with little curiosity from the people, until the word must have passed, and the residents of the holy city came out to jeer at the madmen, and to pelt them with rotten fruit—with the incredible luxury of the holy city, where there was food discarded, where the middens were richer than villages. Precious moisture ran with common waste down the sides of the streets, and fruit pulp slicked the stones underfoot.

The boy picked up a half-rotten fruit and ate it. The wife fell and soiled her knees in the muddy pulp. Marak pulled her up in the next stride: it was no place to die, in such filth, after so long struggle to come here. She sang to herself as they walked, as water ran between the stones, as better food than many villages ever knew pelted them as common refuse.

“The devils will come down!” the potter yelled at their tormentors. “The devils live on the high hill, in the tower, and they will come down and dance at your funerals!”

At that defiance, the crowd flung more serious missiles. Marak fended a potsherd with his arm, but one of the mad went down: a barber, the man was, and a broken brick struck him in the head, toppling him in his blood.

At that the Ila's men shoved at the crowd and hauled the attacker out, bringing him along, too, beating him with their sticks.

Marak sheltered the wife from Tarsa against his side, away from the more accurate stone-throwers. “Where is love?” she sang unevenly, faintly, as she climbed. “Where is shade in the desert? Where is my love gone?”

They suddenly passed a gate, into a large square, before those who flung stares, not stones; and those were better behaved, but more chilling.

After that they came through a second gate, into the shadow of inner walls, and the reek of asphalt and oil. Steam went up here in rolling clouds. Rumor was true. Such was the wealth of the holy city that they had fuel to spare for furnaces, and gates moved by steam and not the strength of men or beasts. He had heard of it but never seen it.

He bore up the wife, who staggered against him. “Please,” she said, “let me rest. Let me rest.”

“Soon,” he said. He could wish she had died quietly as the old man had died. She was a gentle soul. She had no imagining of the possibilities in this place.

“What is that sound?” she asked when the gates groaned and gave a tortured sound, iron on iron.

“Machines,” he said. “The machines of the Beykaskh.”

She seemed not to understand him. Perhaps she had never heard how the Beykaskh made gates of iron and boiled water to make them move, or how the Ila, displeased, flung deposed ministers into the works of those machines. The wife from Tarsa wavered in her steps, and looked numb, exhausted as they passed through the last gates, through the heart of the machines.