Hammerfall

He walked out from the lee of the tent, staggering in the gusts—there was the hard part, maintaining his orientation when he was blown half off his feet and blinded by dust, but the wind itself was a direction marker, and he walked, with the wind battering his left shoulder.

He counted two intervening tents, the Ila’s servants or her guards had crowded up their tents between: he had not marked whowas in the tents, but he had remembered they were there.

He made his way past two groups of beshti in no better and no worse condition than their own, sandy, wind-scoured ghosts in the red murk that passed for daylight.

Now the way was straight out of that wind-shadow across a narrow gap of blowing sand, and to the Ila’s tent, with two others pitched up against it.

He was blind for a moment, then found the ropes, and followed the side of the main tent around to the sheltered east end, where the storm flap was laced tight. The wind gusted: canvas shook to a wind so hard and sand-edged it abraded his exposed hands. He saw fraying on a taut edge of the canvas itself, and bones— bones, scoured white, that had blown up against the tent wall, along with minute scraps of cloth tattered to rags, buried in sand.

“Memnanan!” he called out. “Captain!”

He could cut his way in, ruining precious cordage, risking the tent, but he waited at the door, and shouted twice more before a voice answered him and someone began to work at the lacings inside. In a moment more the storm flap lifted slightly, and one of the Ila’s servants looked at him, wide-eyed at the apparition that came to them out of the storm.

The servant did not release the flap or widen the opening. Marak thrust his arm in, to prevent the servant sealing it up again.

“I’m Marak Trin,” he said, pulling the aifad down, “and I’m here for Memnanan. His wife’s in labor. Bring him.”

“Stay there!” the servant told him, and disappeared.

Stay outside, in a storm that burned the skin, by bones the wind had scoured and dropped at the door.

Marak shoved the flap wider, tearing at the lacings he could reach, and widened it enough to step inside, into a canvas foyer lit with a brass lamp. He had brought the last of his cord-coil in with him, his link with Tofi. He cast it down there, brushed off enough sand from his robes to leave a haze on the figured carpet, and waited, fighting a dry cough and a mouth so dusty his tongue had stopped sticking to his teeth.

Memnanan came through to meet him, Memnanan—clean, well fed, showing none of the desperate condition of the rest of the camp, no more than the servant.

“Your wife,” Marak began, and coughed with the dryness of his throat: his voice shredded with it. “Your wife is in labor. She’s having some difficulty. I’ve rigged a guide rope. You can follow it over there.”

Memnanan’s worry was evident, but he made no move toward the door, rather had his hand on the curtain through which he had entered, as if at any instant he would go back to his duty. “I can’t,” Memnanan said. “I can’t go. Go back!”

Go back. A man dismissed his wife’s possible death with that go back. Aman stood with his hand on that curtain as if it concealed the secrets of heaven and earth.

Something was wrong in this tent. Something was damned wrong, give or take a man’s natural embarrassment at having water enough, and food enough.

“Is something the matter with the Ila?” he asked.

“For your own safety—” Memnanan’s voice dropped. “Go.”

He was ready to. He believed the captain. He had no reason to doubt Memnanan’s loyalty to the Ila had just met the edge of his personal debt, and Memnanan warned him the Ila was in no good mood.

But he stood there… on the edge of his own debt to this man, even to the Ila, he hesitated to wonder what wasbehind Memnanan’s refusal.

And it was one heartbeat too long. An au’it brushed aside the curtain the captain held: the au’it, with her book, stopped, looking steadily at Memnanan, and retreated.

“She’ll tell the Ila I’m here,” Marak said. “She’ll tell the Ila we talked. But the Ila doesn’t care, man. Get to your wife, while you have a wife!”

“Get out,” Memnanan said to him. “Go. Now.”

They had survived the hammerfall. They had not yet survived the storm, and the Ila kept secrets, or the Ila’s staff did. Memnanan was afraid of something here besides the sky that roared destruction against the tent walls.

And suddenly came a sound of a tent wide curtain singing back on its rings.

“Get out!” Memnanan repeated.

Their own parted in the same abrupt way and opened the tent all the way to where the Ila sat. A man stood by her, a man indistinct of origin, aifad wrapped up to the eyes, neither quite tribesman, not quite villager in what he wore.

But Marak stood stock-still, with no attention to the Ila, seated on her chair: his vision was all the man beside her, that figure dislocated from here and the Ila’s presence in memory of his own home, his own hearth. That man, that same figure, identical in the wrap of the aifad and the pitch of the shoulders, the stance of the feet… could not possibly be his father. It could not be, standing by the Ila, before the au’it, free, and armed.

But the companion reached up a hand and pulled down the aifad; and it washis father’s face. It was Tain, armed, and free, and in the Ila’s close company.

“Father,” Marak said. His thoughts skittered this way and that, helpless between surmise that the Ila was a prisoner and surmise that this improbable conjunction was a vision, like the star-fall, like the ring of fire and the pillar of cloud—or that the Ila had no idea who this man was.

“I said I might take a husband,” the Ila said with a wave of her hand. “Have I offended you, Marak Trin? Do you object?”

He pulled down his own aifad, and tried to find any advantage, even any sanity, on either side of this maneuver.

“You’re both mad,” he said, hesaid… the madman, in the presence of Tain Trin Tain, the arbiter of sanity.

“He has all your advantages,” the Ila said, “a leader, and desert-wise, and one more. He’s notLuz’s creature.”

“Whatever you say to me,” he reminded the Ila, appalled, thinking even then that the Ila might damn them all, “Luz knows.”

“Oh, I know she knows. But you don’t know as much as you think. Neither does she.” The Ila rose from her chair and stood, red-robed, not a tall woman, a figure of flame red silk, with that white, white skin unmarred by the desert. “ Memnananhas a new commander.”

There had been the instant in which thought simply failed him. But rational thought came back, began to assess the ground, the conditions, the hazards. There were curtains to either side of the Ila’s chair. He knew the configuration of the Ila’s tent from outside, how servants’ tents abutted. He knew his father’s tactics, he knew that curtain might never have gone back if his father was unwilling to have this confrontation, even if the Ila willed it.

There might be ten, twenty men behind those side curtains. Or au’it. Or simply servants.

Go back, Memnanan had warned him with all his might, and that had said everything about Memnanan’s situation… and the danger.

“My mother would warn you against your choice,” he said to the Ila, with all possible meaning. “You’re being a fool.”

Did that score on his father? Tain’s face, image of his own as it might someday be, held no expression for an enemy, and he had become that. Kaptai’s son, the madman, the embarrassment, had necessarily become the enemy.

“More,” he said, chasing whatever quarry he might have started in the Ila’s mind, “did I mention that he’d killed four otherHaga? Did he mention Menditak and Aigyan have sworn water peace on his account, and mean to kill him? Your ally brings you every tribesman alive for enemies.”