Hammerfall

“I’ll instruct messengers to go back,” Memnanan said. “I don’t trust your written message.”

Marak had a vision of the line stringing out as they marched, farther and farther separated, the strong leaving the weak, and the villages begi

“There’ll be panic,” he said, thinking of the last messenger they had dispatched, and took a small, personal chance. “You might inquire of Tarsa, if someone gets as far as that village. Tell them ride through the column, not down the sides.”

“We do what we can,” Memnanan said, and they parted, and went each of them to see to their own necessities.

His were simple, to see everyone in his own tent mounted up and ready. Tofi had packed the tents. The beshti and the waiting riders stood like ghosts in the blowing sand.

He had no desire to imagine their collective situation if all the vermin in the world began to turn toward the only caravan in the world as their only source of food. He declined to mention the notion to Hati and Norit and the rest as he joined them: if Luz had not bothered to tell them in relentless detail, he kept the secret. Tofi looked at him questioningly, and he said: “The captain’s sending instructions back.”

By the time they began to move, behind the Haga and the Keran, the dust was blowing steadily at their backs, and the Keran, foremost, had surely gotten the message from Memnanan’s first messengers. The Keran moved out, and they did, and they set a faster-than-usual pace as the wind helped them along. The strong west wind was an assisting hand behind the weak in these first hours; but the dryland gusts carried moisture away from them, too, and made them drink more often. The wind stressed the weak, some of whom would die today. Marak could not but think of it.

Three times that morning the earth shook, but the line never faltered, not, at least, that the foremost could see when they looked back. At noon they made the ordinary measured rest, and pressed on.

The Ila through the day spoke rarely and was cross with everyone. The au’it went in healthy fear, and theirs was likely glad to be serving them, writing down their daily progress and little else, ignorant, perhaps, of what Memnanan had told the Ila. In the late afternoon Marak rode up a time to see his mother and his sister, and they had heard the news: the Keran had told everyone in their camp.

“Are we in danger?” Patya asked, being half a villager, and doubtless she had asked their mother the same question.

“Not us,” he said plainly. “The last ranks are dead men.”

The knowledge of the situation cast a pall on their meeting. Kais Tain might be among the last. He had never yet seen his own village in the lines. But they never mentioned Tain, and they never mentioned their village. He dropped back to ride with Hati and with Norit, and Luz was quiet, apprised of the hazard around them: so by then, might they be, but he told them.

“Vermin are moving in. The end of the caravan is in danger.”

He saw only Norit’s eyes above the aifad, but he imagined the worry. He raised no hopes, said no word of Norit’s lost Lelie, and neither did Norit.

By evening, the wind had sunk notably. The Keran had found a bitter spring in the rocks, and dug it out. The beshti drank, and the Keran marked the place for the other tribes and the villages as they moved. The spring scarcely kept up with the demand of the beshti, and no man could drink it, but the beshti, whose urine was at times poisonous even to vermin, were content with what they drank.

By morning, there was cloud above the blowing sand, and by the hour they camped, the cloud was such that they could not use the sun for the heating-mirrors, and could not cook their rations or boil water. Only the Ila had tea, using precious lamp oil for fuel as well as light.

Her tent, of all the rest, surely, in all the long line of all the tents left in the world, glowed in the gathering murk, stained with the light of lamps inside. It must be all of them lit, Marak judged, profligate waste.

“The Ila shouldn’t burn the fuel for tea,” he ventured to say to Memnanan. “Or light. We may need it in the storms. We’ve been lucky so far. Can anyone reason with her?”

“She’s angry,” Memnanan confided in Marak. “It’s become the tea, the clouds, the wind, the dust, but mostly it’s the situation. Men are dying behind us. She lights the lamps. Shewill have tea. I don’t know why. Sometimes I think this is how she grieves.”

The Ila’s messengers through the day had come in with news of lost tents, straggling walkers, and persistent vermin, and said four young villagers had died or would die as fools, drinking the bitter water—but as yet they had had no disasters beyond the loss of a few sacks of grain riddled with hardshells. They were not doing that badly. It was strange to hear Memnanan’s observation… that the living goddess grieved, and sipped tea.

He marked, too, that Memnanan had not visited his wife or his mother. Memnanan had only spoken to them outside the tent, obsessed strictly with duty, or perhaps commanded to that obsession. And still the Ila grieved.

“More useful if she saved the fuel,” Marak said. “We haven’t seen any excess of vermin this far forward, and that’s good news. But we can’t say about the weather.” The west had made him increasingly uneasy, in the steady wind. For two days he had been free of visions, but when he said that, he saw the ring of fire.

More, he saw the ring become a sheet and a wall of fire and rush across the land as high as a dust storm, towering up to the heavens. He took in his breath, lost to ordinary use of his eyes, lost to his sense of balance.

“What’s the matter?” Memnanan asked.

Out across the flat pan, with his eyes, he saw the streak of a falling star pierce the cloud, and fall and hit the earth. It shook him. He was not sure it was real. “Shall I talk to the Ila?” he asked. “I know how to give her bad news… and how to call her a fool. If she kills me, she loses her guide.”

“Not now,” Memnanan said soberly. “Not today. Not even you.”

“What, besides the haste?” he asked.

“The haste, the wind, all these things.” Memnanan heaved a sigh, looked at the sand under their feet and, looking up, gave a fourth reason. “The priests came. They call your wife a prophet. The Ila isn’t pleased.”

He had been aware of messengers coming and going. He remembered a visitation by priests, afoot. He had not reckoned that for the cause of the Ila’s mood, but it made sense. “I’ll speak to Norit,” he said, and knew that, far more than that, if the Ila was growing chancy and destructive, he had to speak to Luz about the danger.

“Say nothing of it,” Memnanan advised him. “The matter is settled now, and quiet. If she sends for you, you never witnessed such audiences as I did. She won’tsend for your wife.”

It was a statement begging for a question. “Why not?” he asked.

“Your wife speaks for the tower. The Ila is increasingly distraught. She finds the co

“So does my wife,” he confessed, in this moment of truths somewhat excessively given. “She doesn’t like what’s happened to her. But she does tolerate it, being mad, like the rest of us. She can’t help it. And she’s our guide.”

“Oh, the Ila knows that,” Memnanan said. “She knows it very well. I would even say she forgives your wife, if I had any belief in her forgiveness.”

“You don’t.”

“I don’t.”

“Yet you serve her.”

“So did my father’s father. And we’ve done very well, until now.”

They parted. They went their ways. Memnanan stopped for a word with his wife and his aunts and his mother. Marak settled down with Hati and Norit, and they slept a peaceful, abandoned sleep.

Marak, his voices said, for the first time in hours, and waked him and them all at the same moment. Marak. He saw the ring of fire.