Hammerfall

The sun grew fever-warm. The air seemed to give less sustenance than usual. At noon he lay beneath the tent, numbed his mind, and sweated: he rested with his arm pillowed on his head, secure in Hati’s presence beside him, and the au’it and Norit sleeping at his back.

For two more days it was like this, with the stars falling at night and the sun burning by day. Once more the priests came. He asked them the questions he had reserved, what they had seen, whether the people were keeping the line together: they were, the priests said. But the Ila’s messenger did not come back, and the priests had no news.

“I fear I’ve brought that man to grief,” Marak said to Memnanan when they discussed the matter. “I don’t know where or how an experienced man fell into difficulty, but I’m very sorry for it.”

“The desert has its dangers,” Memnanan said with a shrug, and that was the end of it: Memnanan showed no enthusiasm to send another man, and he would not ask it. So there was no answer about Lelie. There was no way to trace the man without risking another, and of the rumors that found their way up and down the line—of births, of deaths and calamities: vermin invading a village’s food store during rest, but they had not lost it all—for two more days there was no word, and they gave up hope. Luz was quiet, the au’it recorded little but the arduous routine of camp and cooking, and one tremor in the earth that lasted longer than any before. It did no damage, beyond the collapse of the soldiers’ tent and the disturbance of the beshti, who complained from camp to camp.

Escorted by two villagers, at the next morning, on a day of high wind and dusty haze, priests came into camp to seek the Ila, and failing her civil reception of them at this hour—wind had put out the small stove that heated the Ila’s tea, and she was indisposed—they came to Norit.

“Pesha village has lost two tents,” they said, speaking for two dour and mistrustful village men. “What shall we do?”

“Has Pesha lost its water and its food?” Norit asked, consulting no one, though Marak stood by and listened to this audience.

No, the man from Pesha insisted, and tried to present more of a case for being given tents from some other village. “We have elderly,” he said. “Our lord is an old man. We need the tents.”

Norit lifted a hand, as autocratic as the Ila herself. “If they lost two, give them no more to lose. Let them all go to other tents, and settle in the village behind them in line.”

Marak was astonished, and the Pesha villagers wildly outraged. It was a desert judgment from a softhearted village woman. And on that thought, Marak knew Norit had not made that choice.

“This isn’t just!” the men cried.

“The desert isn’t just. Those who lost two tents should have better leaders.”

“They have a book,” the priest said, over the protests of the villagers. “Shall they keep it? Or shall it also go to their hosts?”

“It should go to their hosts,” Luz said through Norit, but Marak thought it was Norit who added: “and the village lord should beg the pardon of Pesha village for losing the tents. He may be a wise man in his own village affairs, and he can command again after we reach the tower, where we’re safe, but he should leave pitching camp to those that kept all their tents, and thank them for keeping his safe.”

The priests and the chagrined villagers bowed and went away with their message.

Well judged, and well said, Marak thought to himself in their departure. Even Luz could learn the exigencies of the desert; and even Norit could moderate Luz’s harsh judgments.

But that disaster was not the worst. Tofi reported grimmer news relayed to him up from the tribes, a concern that small vermin had moved in near the caravan track back among the villages, and showed increasingly disturbing courage over the last two days. The tribes nearest the villages had warned them to be more careful with their waste, and the priests, in evidence of very bad judgment, had not reported it when they reported the lost tents.

Tofi, however, knew the dire seriousness of what the tribes observed, and stood waiting for a solution from him.

The vermin came to the moisture and waste of a caravan. They always followed caravans, but they never, almost never, attacked one on its march: the noise was too much, the activity too threatening. Vermin were interested in everything a caravan left or shed… starting with the latrines, and the small insect vermin that burrowed there, and the larger vermin that came to feed on them, and the largest that fed on the larger. They were habitual pests, no more than that, on the average route, at worst startling some carava

But no one had ever seen a caravan that took a day or more to march past a given point. No one knew what happened when the rule that vermin never mobbed a large caravan ran up against the rule that vermin always gathered and moved in on an abandoned campsite.

In their all-inclusive caravan, only the Ila’s party and the tribes and the villages in front marched over clean sand. Past the first half hundred or so camps, the entire route of march of those behind was through one continuous campsite, and Marak was appalled that they had not once thought of that ominous situation. They were fools.

He looked at Tofi, took a hitch of the aifad to obscure his dismay. The dust stung his eyes. It made the air itself smell like hot sand. “They’re marching over old ground,” Marak said. “There’s never been a caravan so large its back end marches over its own trail after breaking camp, not that I know.”

“We must stretch out at least a day’s march, maybe two,” Tofi said, over the thumping of the nearby tent, which slaves were working to take down. “It’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

“The city people, those afoot…” Marak shuddered to think of the situation of the hindmost: beshti were some defense. But for a man afoot…

“I’ll tell Memnanan,” he said to Tofi, and went and immediately called the Ila’s captain apart from his men, the two of them curtained in the blowing dust, partly sheltered by the Ila’s tent.

Memnanan listened grimly, as appalled as he. He had fought in the desert. He knew the hazards of vermin, and the rules of a clean camp, no matter what city people understood. “Wait,” Memnanan said, and went to talk to the Ila, reckless of her bad mood, and talked for several moments, urgently, before he came back.

“The Ila understands,” Memnanan said. “She gives us leave to do whatever is necessary.”

“If we increase the pace more than this,” Marak said, “we’ll lose lives. But if we don’t, we’ll lose villages. Send a letter back through the line. Tell the villages to dig their latrines as deep as they can. Cover everything they leave behind as deeply as they have the strength to dig. Let the strong dig for the weak, and let them make only as many pits as they can make doubly deep. Digging will delay the vermin and give us time… if only they don’t go for the stragglers: there may bea mobbing, but we won’t be there to see it.”

The earth shuddered. They had all but learned to ignore such moments.

“Kinder, perhaps,” Memnanan said, “to leave the weak behind all at once, and not to drag the inevitable out in days of misery.”

“Kinder to poison the lot of them this evening,” Marak said above the thumping of the wind-stirred canvas, “and not leave them for the vermin to eat alive. But we’re men, and we don’t give up. Sometimes we win. Sometimes even villagers win.”

“You were already safe at the tower,” Memnanan said, chasing that old question. “If it was safe. You knew you were risking everything. Why did you come back?”

“For my mother. For my sister. Wouldn’t you?”

“So you have them. Why don’t you ride off ahead of the rest?”

He had no idea why he stayed. But he shook his head again, thinking of thousands of the helpless, all the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and children in the world. “We do what we can,” he said with a shrug, “or nothing at all gets done, does it? Nothing ever gets done, and no one gets saved, if we aren’t fools at least some of the time. Why don’t you run for the tower with a few men and the best beasts? You know the route. Why does even the Ila march at this pace? We’re fools, is all.”