Hammerfall (35 page)

“No, I don't. Not at all.”

In his dream he tried to look away from the breeding dots, the red and the blue and the yellow dots, endlessly fluttering and spiraling, and in them he could not find the sky.

Everyone alive has the makers,
Luz said.
Over enough time, the heavens will grow calm, and the earth will grow green, and clouded. Some of these stars that fall are water, only water. When the world is new, oases will go from horizon to horizon.

“Paradise,”
Marak said. He had no idea why so beautiful a thought should batter at his heart and make him long for things less safe. But then the word came to him.
“Freedom. What about freedom?”

Freedom is relative,
Luz said.
Can you leave your world? Can you see the things I've seen?—I gave my freedom up for you, you damned ingrate! So did Ian! Appreciate the gift!

He laughed. He saw no humor in Luz's situation, or in his, but still, he found a soul in the woman, and that was more than he had looked to find. The last that she said was true, and he believed it.

“You don't like paradise, either,”
he said.

For a moment the visions and the voices were utterly silent. The earth quaked, one of those small, frequent shudders, and was still again.

Your paradise is my hell,
Luz said.
And Ian and I have come into this hell to satisfy our consciences, because of what your Ila did, the fool.

There was another small pause, in which the wind was louder than thought, or than the slight whisper of Luz's voice, and the earth remained unsettled. He was nearly awake, and sank back again.

In the vermin, you see the result of makers run wild. They breed too well. They die too seldom. They eat up the world, and every generation of makers grows more adept, and more clever at what it does. Her makers are very, very good at living.

But so are mine. Her makers would destroy her, given another five hundred years. Destroy her, and all she's made. But mine will heal this world.

The wind battered at the tent. Something hit it, startled him, a piece of cloth, perhaps, or a loose mat. His heart sped. For the first time in many moments, he thought of Tain.

We do value you,
Luz said.
I tell you, we would deeply regret it, Marak Trin, if the hammer comes down before you get to safety. Get well. Sleep now, and get well.

“The hell,” he said.

He tried to move. Hati was there, washing his face with precious water, while somewhere in the distance, in the skies, something boomed and crashed.

“Hush,” she said. “You're talking to Luz, but I don't hear her.”

“She's dividing us one from the other.” That they had all heard one thing had been a curiosity, and then a comfort to them in their madness, and they were losing that. The makers changed things. The makers themselves changed. Was that not what Luz said?

“Hush, you're not making sense.”

“Where's the baby? What happened to her? Where's Norit?” He reached after Hati's hand and held it, held it fast. “I passed by Tarsa. I was there! The captain's men never got that far. I asked. Her husband has another wife. He let the baby go.” He wanted to see Norit with the baby. He wanted that desperately, but he could not lift his head. He remembered. “My father shot her, with me.”

“She's fevered. The bullet went through her leg. But she may have makers of her own. She should have died, and she's mending.”

“I bled into her,” he said. “Our makers overwhelm everything the Ila put into us. That's what Luz says.—Damn!” The pain overwhelmed him. “Is Patya all right?”

Hati gave a nod over her shoulder. “She's there. She's not left you. Norit's with the baby. So's Patya.”

“Good for Patya.” He tried to glance that far, but it hurt his side and his back.

He was due for a night and a day of misery, at least, healing at his ordinary pace. He expected a long, long misery.

But after that the pain began going away, and Hati grew quite dim, and he could not move his hand from hers.

“Has he fainted?” Patya asked, leaning over him. “Is he all right?”

“I think so,” Hati said. “I think he'll be well now. The makers are working. Go take the baby. Norit's left her.”

There was so much sharpness in that tone. So much he wished he could mend. He had rather have the pain back than to have his mind racing, and his body numb.

His eyes were still open. He saw Hati take Lelie from Patya's hands, and saw Hati hold her, and rock her, and talk to her, because Norit had walked away. The baby was as still as he was, and perhaps heard everything.

Luz!
he tried to shout, but could manage not a word.
Luz, let the woman alone! You call the Ila cruel . . . damn you, let Norit alone! This isn't a time to talk to her . . .

But Luz gave no evidence she heard him, and Norit stood in the edge of his vision, staring at the wall of the tent, alone with Luz, the two of them talking, numb to Lelie's pain and Lelie's distress.

“Lie still,” Patya told him. “Hati, he's sweating so much. Is he all right?”

“He will. It's what we crazy people do when we heal. Don't be afraid for him.”

Not be afraid for him. Not be afraid for Norit, or Lelie, or Hati? There was a great deal to fear.

The star fell from the heavens, again and again and again, and hit the sphere, and the ring of fire went out from it.

Again and again and again.

Every good beast and every grass that produces grain and every tree that produces fruit is the gift of the Ila. The grasses and the trees she gave to the villages and told them to build gardens, instructing them to make covered conduits and to make basins of fired brick.

—The Book of Pori

MARAK MENDED, IN
pain and fever. Patya stayed close by him while the storm wind blew and racketed about the canvas. Tofi came and laid a hand on his and reported to him in meticulous, quiet detail on the state of the camp and the Ila's temper.

The au'it sat nearby and wrote all these things.

Memnanan, too, came and stood over him, asking in the Ila's name how he was. Marak heard. He could not see Hati's answer to the captain, but he could hear it, and imagined Hati's shrug, which was Hati's characteristic answer to mysteries.

“Healing,” she said to Memnanan, and through him, to the Ila.

That visit meant the storm was not bad enough to prevent Memnanan reaching them from the Ila's tent. That meant they remained in camp and he knew they had to move: something was coming.
East, east, east,
the pitch came to him now, urgent and frequent. His inability to move was the decreed torment for his sin of desertion.

Priests came and looked at him. That, he could not account for, and thought he might have dreamed the visit in his fever. He saw three of them in their white robes sitting on a mat and contemplating his condition. He grew increasingly perturbed about the situation, and still could not wake far enough to tell them to go to hell.

He fretted and he sweated, and eventually Memnanan and the priests left him to Hati's care, saying that it was clear there was something remarkable about his healing, and about the child.

The au'it wrote. Norit remained as she was. In the distance he heard Lelie crying, and crying.

“Someone,” he tried to say, “someone take the baby.”

“Norit! See to that child!” Hati said sharply, but Norit sat still, lost in her visions. Hati herself got up and fetched Lelie and put the wounded child into Norit's grasp. “Take care of her!” Hati said.

Norit never waked from her visions, but held Lelie against her, her hands absently doing things a mother might do. Her eyes were still set on the distance, full of fire and fear, experiencing that place and time Norit saw more clearly than she saw the sights around her.

“We have to move,” Norit said, and said it more than once. He willed her to say so, when he could not. “Hati, we have to move.”

“I know we have to move,” Hati said. “Everyone knows we have to move. We can't see our own feet out there in the dark. We'll move when there's light.”

That was good. At least Hati knew. Marak wit-wandered, then, watched Norit with Lelie, with nothing else to watch. He was glad Norit had said it for him. He was glad Hati had agreed he should not slow the caravan.

He could only move his head. Hati came and wasted water, washing his face. Extravagance, he said to himself. She gave him water to drink. He had a burning thirst. He always did when he healed.

Lelie abruptly began to sleep, that hard, heavy-limbed sleep of a child. She hung like a doll in Norit's arms, and now Norit waked from her visions, spoke to the child, talked to her.

Now at last he saw the mother he had brought Lelie here to find, and now Norit perhaps realized what gift he had brought her at such effort.

“My baby,” Norit exclaimed, with tears pouring down her face. “Lelie, Lelie, Lelie.”

He was content. The world seemed very much kinder then, its natural laws restored. He trusted it enough to shut his eyes on it a time, though the tilting still bothered him, though he desperately wanted to tell Hati and Norit and Tofi to put him on Osan and move the caravan this hour, this moment.

But there was a weight on his senses, a wall between him and speech, and the will to speak grew faint and less frequent. Norit spoke for him, and even she found distraction in the dark, in the howling of the wind.

He waked as they moved him, and as they shifted him over something hard on the ground. This proved to be the pole of a litter, and the two freedmen carried him out into the wind under a sand-hazed sun, whether morning or evening he could not tell, but he thought it was dawn.

He was still fevered, and this waking brought him acute pain, so he knew this healing was longer and this wound was probably worse than any other in his life. He thought he should get up and ride, but he failed, and lay there thinking that someone would move him sooner or later.

Strange sights passed his eyes meanwhile. A good number of Haga were in the camp—surely they were still in the Ila's camp. Then he thought no, he was mistaken, there were tribesmen, but they were Keran. It was curious. It seemed one, and then the other, when neither belonged there.

The camp meanwhile packed down the tents and loaded them on the beshti. A second time he tried to get up and walk so that he could get to the saddle on his own, to save everyone the trouble of getting him up there as a dead weight.

But having lifted his shoulders perhaps a handbreadth off the mat, he simply fell back, weak, with his head throbbing and the desert alternately showing twilight and sunlight around him, and the tribes still coming and going.

It was not the star-fall, he decided: it was his own head, feeling as if it expanded, and with it all the sky expanded and then contracted.

He might have fainted. But in what seemed only a moment he heard Hati giving orders, and Memnanan and Tofi shouting, a comfortable and ordinary sound. The camp was moving. At any moment he had to get up and ride.

Then someone else overshadowed him and picked up the poles of the litter.

This was a priest, a presence which he found almost as strange as tribesmen coming and going. He could not see who had the poles at his head, but he thought it likely another priest.

It was the Ila who ordered all priests, and if there were priests doing useful work, that was probably not a bad thing.

But why priests?

They brought Lelie, too, and laid her on him. She was a heavy weight, and it hurt, but she was not overall a burden. Lelie was fast asleep and he could see the wound in her leg, too, ugly and swollen . . . but healing, as he healed.

He was bemused by that fact. They had bled into one another. Maker fought maker. Or Norit's were in the child, potent from conception. Could the makers pass like that . . . through a mother's blood, if not through a father?

Marak, Marak! East, east, east!
The world swung, and his head did, and he fell flat. He saw the rock hit the sphere, again and again and again. He heard the rhythmic sound of water, and saw a shore where endless water washed against the sand.

It might be the bitter sea. Stars fell into that sea and extinguished themselves. Plumes of water and smoke went up and joined the clouds. The sun went down in sullen red, and more stars fell.

He remembered where they had to be. They had to reach Pori. He tried to tell Hati so, to be sure he remembered the truth, and had not come adrift in visions. There was water at Pori, water necessary to all these people, whose ranks marched on and on, stretching across a star-battered plain, whose dead lay in rows beside their road.

The priests changed off with other priests from time to time. He waked at such moments, and blinked at the priests, and wondered at the vision. Intermittently, too, the caravan suffered from the wind, which gusted, and blew red ropes of sand across his vision. The priests staggered, and sometimes jolted the litter. Lelie waked at one such jolt, frightened by the wind, hungry and out of sorts.

“Hush,” he said to her tear-stained face, and she knew his voice, and broke into a loud wail, in pain and crying for her mother. But Luz had her mother, and he could bring her to Norit, but he could not get Norit back . . . he failed in that, continually, and tried to comfort her.

But Lelie cried and snuffled against him, weak and miserable.

“Call Norit,” he said to the priest at his feet, wincing as Lelie hit his wound. But before the priest could decide to obey him, Lelie fell abruptly asleep, perhaps Luz's work. Then he slid down into sleep, too, and that was the end of that.

When he next waked it was at the shift between bearers, and Lelie was still asleep, her spritelike face shaded by the aifad. The sun warming them in a clear sky.

It was afternoon, he decided. He tried to reckon where they were, and tried to fit an east direction into the angle of the distant ridge and the flat expanse of pitted sand. He could lift his head, he discovered. He moved a leg and a shoulder grown unbearably stiff with lying compressed between the litter poles, and found the pain of his side and his back was less, the swelling diminished.

The war of the makers for his life and health seemed won. And where were they? And how many days had it been? He began to know fear, and to care where he was. If it was not toward Pori, he thought, then he had to do something. He had to know.

“Where are we going?” he asked the man at his head, but, tilting his head, he saw only a back, and had no answer. Riders on beshti moved at the limits of his vision. That was as it should be.

He looked down past his feet at the priest carrying the litter, a strong man, a patient man. “I may be able to get up,” he said, under Lelie's peacefully sleeping weight. “To ride, if not to walk. Stop.”

The priest stopped, and the pair carrying him drew aside from those riders immediately to the rear. They set the litter down. They were at the heart of the column, and beshti had to move around them, a tall shadow of legs and undersides as Marak shifted Lelie aside and tried to lift himself.

He could not quite sit up straightway. He gathered his breath and rolled onto a knee and both knees and his hands on the dusty sand, encumbered by the litter poles. Slowly then, in blood-stiffened clothing, he attempted to disengage his shirttail from under Lelie on the litter and get up. The priests' belated help impeded as much as assisted him, and he shook off the offered arm, rested hands on his knee, shoved himself to his feet.

As he succeeded and dragged his shirttail free, Lelie waked, and sat up, too, rubbing her eyes with a bloody, grimy fist. He stood swaying on his feet in the passage of beshti on either hand—looked down at his little prize in numb curiosity, wondering what he was to do with her, and where Hati was.

Marak,
his voices said, beginning their normal litany. And the pitching feeling came, reliable as sunrise and destructive of balance.
East, east, east.

He saw Lelie catch her balance, too, and sit afterward wide-eyed, her small mouth open in dazed startlement.

“It's all right,” he told her: madness seemed to have grown in the child like a seed. “Your mama's here. You're all right.”

She cried. It was beyond him to pick her up. She reached up hands to be taken. It was the other priest who picked up the baby.

“She's Norit's,” Marak said. “My wife's. Norit. Let the baby ride with her.” He had no idea where anyone was, but he wanted not to be left afoot. “Where's my wife?”

They both, the one holding Lelie, and the other, looked at him as if they had seen the dead rise.

And perhaps, he thought, staggering into a first step, that was very nearly the case. He knew where east was. He knew that.

Then, arriving from behind, a rider shadowed them, and that was Hati, who slid down in a welter of windblown veils.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

“These men have blisters,” he said, meaning the priests: he had seen their hands. But he saw her face all exhausted and worried, too, and added, “I'm all right, wife. Trust my judgment. I'm all right.”

Hati did not embrace him, not in front of strangers and priests, but she came and put an arm about him, guiding him along with the walkers, leading her besha with the other hand. Bosginde, one of the freedmen, had ridden near, too. “Get Osan,” Hati ordered him, looking up. “My husband will ride now.”

Bosginde left in haste, applying the quirt, and still the riders streamed past.

“Someone may have to put me up,” he admitted to Hati, for her alone, and again, having become sane again, saw something was clearly different about the company in which they rode. Around them were more riders, dark-clothed riders. Tribesmen. He had not been dreaming that.

And he stumbled, trying to walk.

“I don't think I can hold on,” he said.

“Someone will help you,” she said. Her voice was tense. Her hand on his arm was gentle and anxious. She had changed her clothes for the dark-striped robes of her own tribe, and her arms flashed with gold and honor. “I thought you might die in spite of the makers.”

“Or to spite them.” It was a bad joke. He saw that in Hati's worried face. And among the accumulated confusion in the world he was unsure how much time had passed. “The makers won't let me die. Last night, it seemed a disadvantage. But I'm improving fast. I'll ride. Where are we?”

“Two days from where you found us.”

“Toward Pori.”

“Toward Pori,” she confirmed, and relieved his anxiety on that score, at least.

“The tribes are here.” It was assuredly the Ila's caravan. Bosginde was here. He saw beasts he knew. His memory could not account for her gold and her change of robes. He himself stood in changed clothing, a loose shirt, trousers not tucked into the boots . . . they tagged loose about his ankles, and blew in the wind. “The Keran have joined the camp?”

“When you were shot. The Haga came in. They were angry because the Ila's men couldn't protect the camp. Then Aigyan heard the Haga were here, so he came, in the storm and all, and he and Menditak talked. Then they got to arguing with the Ila's captain, and they got hot, but I said they were all fools.”

He could imagine the scene. Hati would say that. And Memnanan, who was not a fool, and Aigyan and Menditak, had all been in one council, while Hati had her say.