Hammerfall

Had some desperate band of travelers, as lost as they, attempted wells all over the plain?

“What creature made that?” Hati asked Tofi. “Have you ever seen the like?”

“No,” Tofi said, sounding for a moment like the boy he was. “Never in my life.”

Their downward path took them alongside one such pale spot, a shallow new depression in the sand, with dark red, unweathered sand thrown out around it. The beasts lowered their heads and nosed the area, odd behavior in itself, and pawed at it, but they found nothing buried there.

They pushed on across the plain, not liking the vicinity. They put it far behind them by next noon, when they pitched a belated camp.

The earth shook itself, like a beast shaking his skin; and they who had been stretching rope, and the two freedmen, who had been pounding a tent peg, stopped their work.

They all stood still, except Norit, who had sat down at the start of their work, and who sat like a stone. The peg, half-driven, pulled loose.

“What was that?” Tofi asked.

“The earth will shake,” Norit said, breaking days of silence. “The earth will crack like a pot and spill out fire.”

Marak looked at Hati, and lastly at Tofi, who stood with a tent stake in his hand. Stark fear was on his face.

“Should we sink the deep-irons?” Tofi asked.

“Do that,” Marak said. He himself had no idea what next would follow. The stars fell. The earth itself had turned unreliable. Whether deep-irons could pin them to the earth and keep a shelter over their heads he had no idea.

The earth shook again while they were setting the stakes, and the now-freedmen dropped their hammers and looked as if they would run for their lives, if they had any idea at all where to run.

“What will this bring?” Marak asked Norit, who had never stirred from where she sat. “What does this mean?”

“The end of the world.” Tears overwhelmed Norit, who began to sob quietly, covering her face with her hands. “Luz doesn’t think so. But I do.”

It was a whisper of Norit’s old self, free, for the moment. That in itself lent him encouragement.

“The end of the world it may be, but we’ll die well fed and well watered. Get under the tent, Norit. Go.”

Norit obeyed him quietly. It was her task, when she would do it, to unpack their noon meal, such as it was: dried fruit and grain-cake, and tea, if they chose to heat water.

He wielded a hammer, and Hati helped him. “Get to work!” Tofi chided his helpers. “You’re free men. Act like it!”

The earth gave a shudder, and the beasts bawled alarm as the poles swayed and strained the ropes of the tent. They pulled to steady them, and sat down hard on the sand. It was that violent a motion.

The shaking was brief, and left no apparent damage. If the earth would crack, there was no sign of it.

Marak, having fallen hard on his backside, gave a laugh. “Well, the earth tries, but it can’t shake us off.”

“If the earth cracks, what will we do?” Hati asked, with real fear in her voice. “Perhaps we willdie.”

“Maybe we won’t,” he said, sitting there, toe to toe with her. “ Idon’t intend to. You’re on your own if you do.”

Hati gave a shaken laugh of her own, threw her head, and got up, dusting herself off. “I’m not that easy to kill.”

They went under the shade of the tent, Tofi and the slaves as well. They broke grain-cakes and ate well, and drank. Twice more while they slept the earth shivered, and both times they waked.

“Perhaps at least the shaking is done,” Marak ventured to say, as dark fell with them still camped. They had been reluctant to pull up the deep-irons and venture out.

Just then another shudder ran through the earth, so that neither earth nor heavens seemed stable tonight.

“Speak of misfortune,” Marak muttered.

Tofi went outside the open sides of the tent to see to the beasts, and came ru

“The stars are all gone!” Tofi cried.

Marak gathered himself up in alarm, with Hati and Norit close by, and indeed, as he walked out beyond the edge of the tent, the whole heaven was black. All the land was dark.

“All the stars have fallen,” Hati said in dismay.

“They are there,” Norit said calmly. “The star-falls have kicked up the dust to the sky. That’s all.”

“That much dust?” Hati asked, but had no answer.

Marak could see nothing in the pitch-black, except shadows against shadow.

Then in the far west white fire chained through the murk in the west, and thunder cracked, as sometimes it would in the great western storms.

A storm was indeed coming, and weather-sense had failed him. Now he was very glad that they had driven down the deep-stakes.

“We should put on the side flaps,” he said, and, difficult as it was in the dark, they began to do that.

Before they were done, a sudden wind came and battered at the canvas, making it boom and rattle while they worked. “Make sure of the ropes!” Tofi shouted at the ex-slaves. “Do it right this time, or you go out alone to tie it down!”

The beasts got up and settled down in the lee of the tent. The food and water all had to be moved inside, for fear of it all being buried in blowing sand; they made a wall of the rest of the baggage, and the side flaps had to be battened down tight. As an added measure, feeling their way in the dark, they made the tent sides and the roof fast a second time to the baggage, and to a second line of stakes, which they drove down inside the tent.

Then, sitting against that wall of their possessions, they were ready for the earth to shake and the heavens to be carried away.

The wind roared and the thunder boomed above them. The canvas bucked and thumped away, anchored by the deep-irons and the heavy buffering on the windward wall, inside their tent. Having worked so hard and so quickly, and having nothing left to do, they ate an extra ration of sweet dried fruit and grain-cakes in the pitch blackness and settled down to rest through to the wind and the storm.

The air grew far cooler, even cold, strangely smelling of dust and water.

“It smells like the inside of a well,” Hati said in wonder.

It did. But rain never came to the Lakht, and only twice in his life in the western lowlands.

Thunder crashed over them, the wind roared, and in the overthrow of the heavens and the battering of the wind, Marak held Hati to him for warmth. They tried to gather Norit into their embrace, but like the au’it, Norit stayed apart, somewhere near the big tent pole, waiting, waiting. She began to sing to herself in the dark, a tuneless song like the wind, drowned intermittently by the thunder and the crack of the canvas.

Lightning flashes showed through the seams of the tent. A terrible crash of thunder hit their ears.

A pattering followed, as if pebbles were falling on the tent.

But in the rain of pebbles battering against the canvas over their heads, Marak realized the singing beside had stopped a moment ago.

He gathered himself up and felt toward the tent pole where Norit had sat.

“Norit?” he asked the dark, and the roaring and the thunder gave him no answer.

Were it Hati, he would have thought she had simply gone off to the corner of the tent on intimate business. But a moment ago Norit had been singing, and now she was not where she had been. That warned him something might be amiss.

Then he felt a sudden gust, and he knew for certain. The tent flap blew and moved in the dark, its cords loosed, admitting a dark less absolute than the dark inside, and a fitful flicker that picked out a horizon.

He went out it, flinching as pebbles struck him… not woundingly hard, but hard enough, and when he put a hand to his bare skin he felt his skin slick and gritted with sand that immediately stuck to it. In the lightning flashes he saw small shining objects lying about him, like jewels in the lightning. He saw others bounce as they hit, and felt the sting of others, an impact on his skull.