Hammerfall

That a tent might be gone was no news to the boy. Two had escaped the ruined tent, and come here, and the boy might hope that his father and brothers had gotten to some other shelter. The report that dashed that hope was clearly a shock.

“Have you looked in the other tents?” the boy asked.

“Gone, I say! We need hands to dig. Turn out!”

There was no time for grief, none for assessing what had happened. They took shovels such as they had and used bare hands. Obidhen’s son.

It was the old, old story on the Lakht. Someone from the missing tent, Landhi’s tent, had straggled across to Obidhen during a lull to request help with an increasing problem. Obidhen, the slaves, and the two traders who had been in his tent had gone out to help, and whether or not they had ever even reached Landhi’s tent in time, or been carried away by the next gust when it blew loose, they had run a high risk in a storm and lost their wager. Perhaps some survivor had gone over to Rom in the fourth tent, fatal mistake, and now he was gone. Meanwhile two complete novices from Landhi’s tent, having made it clear and having lost their bearings, had run into Tofi’s tent downwind and told him as much as he knew, but by then the storm was fierce, making it folly to go out looking, and Tofi had wisely stayed put, refusing to go when he could not see.

As for the others, there was no question where survivors might be, if there were to be any survivors. When that tent had gone, it had become a mass of half-anchored canvas and cordage in the blinding sand, a lethal monster of canvas and whipping rope, and unless one side of the tent had remained anchored and unless that heap of sand concealed a canvas shelter between elements of the baggage and water stores, there was no hope for the rest at all.

Deep as the sand had accumulated where the tent had been, Marak had doubted from the begi

Obidhen’s tent had had its share of their remaining water and its share of their supplies, most of it gone, and Marak had no mercy, no more than Tofi, who railed on the well-fed slaves, beating them when they lagged.

“The storm may have force left,” Tofi shouted, flinging sand with a shovel. “Dig faster. All of you.”

They abandoned shovels and dug with their bare hands as they came near the supplies, and found the first of the dead, Tofi sobbing and swearing the while. The fifteen beasts that had belonged to the lost tent had sought shelter behind another tent, and they had survived. The supplies, bundled in canvas, turned up knee deep under sand. One corner of the bundle, wrapped solidly, had abraded to threads, but had not spoiled. The water, buried deepest in the stack, had survived, and that was a relief.

They found the bodies of most of the lost up against those bundles, the caravan master and his sons among the rest, a lump of sand and cloth, where all in the tent who had not wandered to safety or to their deaths had attempted to protect themselves. The sand had come over and smothered them, in the outermost bodies blasting skin from flesh and flesh from bone.

Tofi was beside himself with grief. “Murderers!” he cried when they found his brothers and his father. He ran and took a rope’s end to the slaves. They ran screaming, with Tofi chasing them through the remnant of the storm. He caught the slowest, and beat him with his fists; but Marak ran after and pulled him off the slave.

“They are slaves,” he reasoned with the boy. “They had no orders. They had no idea what to do!”

“They’re fools!” the boy wept.

“Take charge of them. Take charge, or lose all that you have from your father. What can your father pass to you, but this caravan, and these two slaves? They are your skilled workers! We need their work! Don’t kill them!”

The strength went out of the boy, and his hand fell, and he kicked the slave at his feet. “Get up! Get to work!”

The slave gathered himself up, still protecting his head, and backed away, preferring to run away into the desert, while the wind battered at all of them, while the voices insisted, Marak, Marak, Marak, and a tower built, and built and built.

The sand still blew so that farther figures were shadows, and invaded the eyes so a man only dared look out and breathe through the gauze headcloth. It was no time to be beating those who knew how to rig the tents and tend the beasts.

“You are your father’s heir,” Marak shouted at the boy, above the flap and thunder of the nearby tent, the wind momentarily gusting. He held the boy’s arm in a tight grip, compelling his attention. “Take charge of the caravan. The an’i Keran and I can ride on alone, and likely survive, but these other lives are all in your hand. Your father’s legacy is yours to keep or lose! What did he teach you?”

There still were sobs, but dry ones.

“Come back,” Marak shouted at the distant shadows that were the two slaves. “He will not kill you. You’ll die out there!”

Cautiously, shadows still, the slaves came closer.

“Get to work!” Tofi shouted in a broken voice still boyish in its pitch. “Get to work, you water-fat layabouts, or I’ll have the hide off you! I have all the water, now, you sons of devils! I have all the food, I have the tents, and damn your lazy souls, you’ll work for food and shelter!”

They came slinking back, avoiding the boy, but setting to work at the digging with might and main. The boy continued his sobs as he worked, and his headcloth was soaked with sweat and tears that gathered dust and blinded him. The only recourse was to tug the cloth and shift it about and try to stop the tears and the exertion that left a mouth taking in the raw, dry wind. Marak knew. He felt the boy’s grief with the memory of his own, every sting of frustration and self-blame: but in no wise was it Tofi’s fault. The Lakht killed, and it killed for small mistakes, which even Obidhen had made.

Some of the dead they could not find. They might have run for shelter in another tent and not been as lucky as the two who had reached Tofi, or they might simply have gotten turned around from the men they were trying to help. The battering of sand-laden wind disoriented even the experienced traveler. There was all the desert around them to search, and they had no resources to risk.

The entire toll, they found by counting heads, was twenty-one dead, and the water and supplies the two slaves had gorged themselves on.

Of resources, they had the two slaves, four tents secure, the irons and snarled cordage from the fifth, and all the beasts.

By the evening the storm blew past, so that the stars began to appear in the heavens, the brightest first, then a wealth of them, like jewels scattered through the heavens. It was never so clear as after a blow.

The twenty-one dead meant that number would not be eating and drinking. That meant they were not short of water or food. Amid other pieces of good news, the boy Tofi thought he knew the way to Pori village, and recited the stars that guided them, Kop and Luta, which were clear and cold above them. He had been there. He thought he could go back accurately, and they would have no shortage of food or water, or canvas, which was well: Hati avowed Pori was within the range of the Keran, but she had never been there.

But of skilled hands… there was a marked shortage.

“Give the order,” Marak said to the boy, and Tofi said, “Break camp.” Tofi said it louder, for the slaves. “Get up! Strike the tents!”

It was no small labor, when the deep-irons were driven. They had to be dug out; and it was brutal work. In the absence of the freedmen and the other, more senior slaves, near their freedom, all of them, men and women, dug with whatever they could, all of them anxious to be on their way out of this ill-omened place. The slaves who had eaten and drunk so well were obedient, now, and by no means weak from hunger. One might hope those two had grown wiser and learned from all their mistakes, but Marak doubted it. Once the wind blew, and men began thinking that other men were going to take more than their share, the impulses that governed were not always wise. In the case of the slaves who, alone of the work party, had gotten back to their tent alive, they had thought they were dead anyway. So they grabbed and consumed in panic, vying with each other for the last scrap and thought nothing about the next day.