Hammerfall (44 page)

“Let her go. She'll know when to go to cover, more than the rest of us, she'll know. Luz won't let her die. She moves everyone to work. We all have to do something when we hear that.”

“We can't have panic. We're going to need every hand in camp. Every clear wit.” Osan pulled at the reins, wanted his freedom, and his just reward, and Marak had not the strength left in him to unsaddle and care for him. He staggered to a stop.

Tofi took the rein from his hand without a word, and Patya took Hati's, as Tofi called Bosginde and Mogar to tend the beshti and get them unsaddled.

“I'll need another besha,” Marak said hoarsely, “one that hasn't trekked to Pori and back. I'm too tired to walk, and I've got to talk to Aigyan. To Memnanan and Menditak.”

“Then I need one, too,” Hati said, exhausted as she was, and Marak said not a word to stop her, knowing he might need her to reason with Aigyan. The hush about the camp, the near-stifling stillness of the wind, warred with the chaos in his vision and the racket in his ears, warning, continually warning him, if he knew how to hear it, how short the time was . . . but only Norit had that burden, to take the message straight in and not to shut it out.

And Norit ran mad among the tents.

Sensible men around him, however . . . sensible men around them did sensible jobs, the only sort of thing they knew how to do. In astonishingly short order there were beshti saddled and even more precious water offered, and it took as much strength to refuse that as it needed for him to get into the saddle again.

Tofi got under him and, in undignified fashion, shoved, not asking if he needed help. Hati made it up mostly on her own, at the last with Mogar's help, and Marak reined off into the dark, threading through the little space there was, past the resting beshti, in among the Keran tents—Aigyan first, Aigyan, whose lead the tribes might follow.

And Menditak, the canny, the quick, the old man who had outlived most of his enemies . . . and befriended the greatest of them.

And somewhere amid it all, he searched for the Ila's captain.

Any tent, when the storm comes.

—Kerani proverb

MARAK,
THE VOICES
dinned in his hearing, voices thrumming with anxiety and disaster, while the dark and the open flat resounded with the sound of hammers and mallets.

Deep-stakes went down; and over all the commotion ranged the hoarse voices of tribesmen shouting orders, and arranging a storm camp, tents placed for best protection in the likelihood of a wind from the west . . . west had become the source of danger: Marak was sure of it in his own heart. West for danger, east for salvation.

Beshti complained in the lack of water and food. Children cried in the tents, weary and hungry and thirsty, but the very little little water there was, the tribes guarded closely and would not give up.

The Ila's tent was up and secure, staked deep in the stony sand. Lights shone inside it, making the canvas glow . . . because the Ila had lamp oil, carried along where water would have been far more useful.

There were instead, Marak recalled, all those books, the weight of which would have supplied the whole camp—

For what? For a day, on short rations? What was one day?

For those caught above the cliff, it was everything. It was the difference, for thousands, between getting off the Lakht to shelter—or not: but water could not give them time. Only the skies could give them that. Only his decisions, to camp, to move on, all the decisions during all the trek, could have given them that time—and those were his, balanced against this necessity and that and the strength of the villagers to keep moving. Those were his. He did not know whether they were the wisest decisions—the best economy of lives.

And when he thought how very many must still be up there on the cliffs, still making the perilous descent, still trapped between thirst and vermin, he could scarcely wrap his mind about the enormity of what he had told Luz he would do and what consequence every decision of his might have had.

He wielded a hammer himself in the dark, as camp after camp went up. Every tribe took their hammers and set the tents of all those that arrived, so that as fast as weary tribes reached the edge of the camp, the camp swallowed them up and gained workers.

Hati swung a hammer with him. Like others, like Tofi and Mogar and Bosginde, like Antag and his brothers, and every able man and woman, they wrapped their hands and worked and still bled . . . but in the mad, the makers swelled their hands with fever and activity. He and Hati healed as they bled, and as they exhausted themselves, strength came from somewhere. Villagers began to arrive, and young men and old, urged by the tribes, began to join the effort.

As for Norit, she wandered wherever she wandered in the camps, never quite out of their awareness, as the visions were constantly in their awareness.

Hammer, hammer, and hammer against the deep-irons, image of the hammer to come against the earth. Luz spoke to the mad, constantly, a nuisance that became, strangely, a reassurance that the tower still stood. They knew Luz was aware. They knew they were not forgotten, not yet, not now: death was coming, but the hammerblow was not yet on them.

Another tent rose, men and women pulling on the ropes, shouting together as the center poles came up and another canvas peak aimed at the uncertain heavens. Webbing went on, tied to the deep-irons, weighted with rocks where they could lay hands on them, to secure the frail canvas from billowing up in a gust.

The hammer-wielders advanced on another row of stakes, as women took another bundle cast from another packsaddle, and those villagers whose old and weak they had just scarcely sheltered joined them like the rest and took their efforts to another bundled tent, villagers unfurling canvas side by side with the tribes.

Another tent, and another. The camp spread and spread outward and sideways, onto every patch of sand that would take the stakes: the camp grew broader and deeper at a pace that had now the repetition of a machine, a pace that left the workers breathless, and a determination that continually sucked new workers into the frenzy. Any man, any woman who could unpack canvas or haul on rope surely became ashamed to sit still.

Still the new arrivals came down, and spread out, and kept spreading with that breathless speed—now and again a worker fell half-conscious on the sand, and lay with the weak, in a strange tent, cared for, given meager help, and two and three and four more newly arrived villagers took his place.

Hammer-sound echoed off the cliff face along a broad front, and beshti filed by, some laden with baggage, and riding beasts carrying the old and the young and led by the hale and fit: they worked through all this, and the earth shook, and shook again, and stars fell so near they lit the sky in untimely dawns, noons, and twilights, but they never ceased: men rested when they must, drove in stakes as they could regain their strength, as the villagers came down, staggering, some clinging to the beshti's mounting loops, scarcely able to point out their tents amid the baggage, and their water-starved beshti so anxious to sit down it was difficult to get the saddles off them.

Here was reason to keep working. Even the pragmatic tribesmen found reason to press their strength further, to provide minimal shelter, if not lifesaving water, and, in the way of the tribes in extremity, they pitched tents now in common, long constructions webbed down with whatever cordage they could manage, for villagers to pool resources and stay alive if they could.

But even men who had come in staggering with weakness managed to haul cord to shelter their families, and a few, the hardiest, having caught a little wind, joined the rest of them as they hammered and unpacked and spread canvas and snugged it down.

Here and there villages more prudent and better-led than the rest came in better condition, and some gave their water to strangers' children, because, one young idealist said, paradise was close and there would be no end of water.

Paradise was
not
close. The hammerfall was.
Marak, Marak,
the voices began to say, and while the cliffs cut all view of the Lakht, Marak could feel the fall like doom hanging over his shoulder. Closer, now, closer and closer.

Hati still worked with him. She placed the stakes and he hammered, and sometimes she directed villagers who grew confused in handling the ropes, an art she knew in her sleep, if she had had the strength left to manage it. Her hands bled. Marak's did.

Marak!
the warning came to him. He saw the ring of fire, three times repeated. He saw the fall of stone on sphere, and it seemed he knew where Norit was, that she had found a besha and came desperately toward them.

Then he did see her: in the dark, mad as ever she was, Norit came riding toward him, but she came with Tofi, with Patya, and them leading beshti with them.

“The star is coming down,” Norit said, Luz said. “Get to shelter
now
! Everyone get to shelter. It's coming.
It's coming down!
”

In his own vision he saw what he had always seen. But he believed her. He stopped his work and stood still, dazed, seeing all these men, tribesmen, who had come farther and farther from their tents and from safety . . . that was his first clear thought at the warning, that it was not only a question of his safety, and above that, Hati's, but of Tofi and all these other men.

But other men had heard the prophet. A panic began in that moment, even among the brave.

It tried to rise in him, the moment he gave it any room. “Hati,” he said. “Spread the word. Then get home.”
Home,
he said, like a villager fool, when Norit, their beacon, had come out here, so that in all this expanse of tents neither of them knew where that was.

But suddenly he did know. He knew, Norit knew, he thought Hati knew, and he thought strangely enough that, in the heart of all the world, a baby with the makers in her knew where the ones who loved her were standing at this very moment.

“Lelie's our beacon home,” he said on a hoarse breath, and climbed to the saddle and took the offered rein. “Follow it! Spread the word: the storm's coming. Get to cover!
Now!
” He turned and waved and lifted his voice in the loudest shout he could make clear. “Hindmost tents, take in all comers! Spread the word! Spread the word! Get the beshti sheltered! Take in the stranger! Take in your worst enemy! In all the world, there's only us, and the storm!”

Men began shouting one to another, and what had been methodical work became hasty, then frantic effort, the last tents going up, the last webbing snugged down, the last-arrived wailing about their safety, their relatives, their belongings still without shelter.

Marak rode north, along the face of the camp, shouting at villagers just getting to shelter and at men still working. He heard the warning spreading up and down the rows, and back deep among the farther tents.
Take cover, take cover,
men shouted, when the night seemed as clear as any morning in the world, and not a breath of wind stirred.

But slowly, from the darkest dark of night, the detail of ropes and irons began to seem clearer, and clearer, and he realized to his horror that the dawn was coming out of the west, not the east.

He looked back toward the cliffs and up, where climbers still labored downward . . . still they came, with shelter so close, and it was too late.

His voices clamored at him, and it might have been a moment, a heartbeat, the blink of an eye that he stared, but then he laid his quirt to the besha he rode and put the terror at his back.

Light sheeted above them, went on across the face of the world, throwing distant mountains into relief, showing them the whole world in a lightning stroke, leaving him nothing but the will to get the ones with him to shelter, where Lelie was—center of the world, that place, that refuge, that safety where Hati would go, and Norit. He saw tents around him, sitting beshti, exhausted, lifting their heads toward the strange dawn.

Marak tucked low, ready for quake or wind or whatever might come, rode and rode past tents and men straggling back to their own families, their own tribes, running now, desperately.

This light instead of fading only increased, and as he rode to the last tents, as he slid down to stand on the earth and looked up next to his own beshti, he saw a murky fire above the cliffs in the west, a fire shedding that unnatural glow in the sky above their heads.

He saw Norit and Hati arrive, and seized their reins, and helped them down. Tofi and Patya followed.

“The sea boils up!” Norit cried, her face turned up to that red-glowing sky. “A pillar of cloud goes up and burns with light, up and up and up, and the bitter water and heavens are overturned.” She lifted up arms bare against that red, western dawn, and for a moment she seemed caught in that vision, spread against the sky, dyed in light.

Marak seized her, pulled her toward the tent.

The earth suddenly shook as if the world had broken. Beshti went down, some sitting down, one, Norit's, thrown down off its feet. Marak lost his footing, and protected Norit with his elbows. The tent and shelter was just next to them, while the shaking continued, and continued, and continued.

Then stopped. The whole world, lit red, caught its breath. The air was still. Marak moved, got a knee under him, got the other to bear and got up. Their tent was still standing. The au'it stood at the doorway, red-robed, expressionless recorder of all she saw.

Hati and Patya and Tofi tried to help him up, and he got up, hauled Norit to the doorway, used her body to brush the storm flap out of his path. Hati was at his back, all of them were there, and they tried to help him in the blind dark inside. It was all he could do, to carry Norit. His strength was flowing out of him fast; and when he reached what he thought was their place, their mats, he fell, trying to kneel, and bruised his knees in doing it.

He let Norit down from hands numb with swelling.

“Lelie,” Norit said. “Lelie, Lelie, Lelie!”

She wanted her baby. Luz had left her. But Lelie was not his at the moment to give, and he knew at least Lelie was there, and Hati was. It was dark in the tent, while fire raced across the skies. He called for Patya, to be sure she was there, and Tofi; and hearing answers he fell down on the mat and lay there, only breathing, thinking of the beshti, still under saddle, and the people still on the road, and worst of all, caught on the cliffs with the storm still coming . . . since come it would.

They could still get behind rocks, at a last resort. He wished them to think of it, simply to snug down with whatever canvas they could secure against something strong—but he was powerless to help them, powerless in all events now. If the sky was burning—if the earth shook like that—what hope was there?

He shut his eyes, but the visions persisted. Stone had hit the sphere. The ring of fire had gone out, and that was what sheeted over them. He knew it now. He got up on a fevered, exhausted effort, and put his head out to see what he could.

There was as yet no sign of storm, only that unnatural glow in the sky, a glow enough now to cast a shadow.

The hammer of heaven had struck a spark to set the sky afire. But the wind—the wind was yet to come. A few more might straggle into the tents. A few more might live.

He knelt in the doorway of the tent, on knees numb with exhaustion, his arms and back afire with fever, and he felt Hati take his arm. He felt her presence, felt Norit's, Lelie's, continually. Norit and Lelie had found each other.

A new vision came: a pillar of cloud, lit red, spreading light across the heavens.

The bitter water, Norit had said. The hammer of heaven would come down in the bitter water, and the fountain would go up, and the earth would crack like a pot, pouring out fire.

Had they not felt the earth break?

“It shines like a lamp,” Norit said. “The heat of it goes out and the ashes will fall and fall. The hammer is down.”

If it were himself alone he might sit down in the doorway in a fit of shivering and watch what came next. As it was, he felt Hati's hand, and moved his hand to Hati's, felt her fingers, as swollen and rough and wounded as his own, and dragged his gaze away from the awful sky and toward the look she gave him.