Hammerfall

Patya gave a great sob and tried to chafe life back into their mother’s hand. His, damp with blood, tested for pulse and breath, and he knew that Patya’s tears would bring nothing of their mother back, ever.

He let their mother slide to the ground and got up, conscious of all the witnesses around them, the Haga, and Menditak himself… conscious of rage, and grief, and a mind slipping toward unreason.

“It was Father,” Patya said. “He did it. He came into the tent while everyone was sleeping. He wanted Mother to come outside with him, and she did, and I did, I knew it wasn’t good, and she said run.”

Kaptai had known enough to leave her husband. But, prideful to the last, she had not known enough to cry out and wake her tribe to deal with Tain. No, she had gone out to deal with him herself, sending her daughter to safety, to get his help. As a consequence, she was dead, and Patya might have been.

Why? screamed inside his head. Why would she not turn the Haga on Tain? He had deserved it. He had entirely deserved the shame, and being driven out like intruding vermin.

For love? For love, even yet, had she gone out to meet with him, even knowing to send Patya to safety?

“We missed catching him,” Menditak said grimly. “We’ve sent men out, looking.”

“See to Patya!” Marak said to Hati, and turned and ran back to Tofi’s tents as fast as he had run getting to the Haga, blinded by dust that stuck to his face and collected about his eyes.

Inside his tent, he snatched up his aifad from where he had been sleeping and put that on. He put on his belt, and snatched up the machaiand his waterskin, all the gear an abjori needed in the desert.

Tofi was awake and on his feet, staring at him in dismay. “Wake the captain,” Marak said, measuring his breaths and ordering his information as if he were back in the war, hiding and fighting among the dunes. “Tain’s killed my mother. Tell him!”

Tofi ran to do that.

The au’it had come back with him, and sat down on the sand, writing, writing all of it, in that heavy book. Hati and Norit came back, bringing Patya, who was convulsed in tears, but his began to dry, and his mind ordered matters in small, precise packets.

“He’s gone to the south side of the column,” he said to Hati. “He’ll likely cross it again when he reaches some village band, and cross it several times after to confuse the track. He’ll hang off our flank and wait his chance at me, at Patya, at the Ila. I should have dealt with him before we set out.”

“What are you going to do?” Hati asked.

“Find him. And kill him.”

“No,” Norit said sharply, and not Norit, but Luz. “No! You have a responsibility.”

“The hell with my responsibility!” He strode out the door, with Hati hurrying after him, and Patya seizing his arm. He shook them both off, and rounded on Norit, who had followed as far as the doorway of the tent. “The hell with my responsibility to the whole damned world! This is mine. This is my responsibility! You can do what I do. You hear Luz. She talks to you nowadays. So do it! And, Hati, don’t you follow me! Don’t do that to me. I know his tricks. He’ll be after me, and you, and the Ila, next. I count on you to take precautions, and keep this camp safe!” It was on Hati he relied most, Hati’s interference he most had to stop cold, Hati’s life that mattered most to him, even above Patya’s. “Guard my sister. Hear me? Don’t make me lose her, too! Patya, behave yourself. I’ll be back.”

“Don’t go out there alone!” Hati said to him. “Get Memnanan.”

“I knowwhat my father will do, and the Ila’s men don’t. I know he’s not alone. And I don’t want Memnanan’s men out there: it stirs up the old abjori, and that gives my father what he wants.” He reached Osan among the beshti and got him up. The saddle was near. He flung it on, adjusted its padding. “He’ll go to supporters in other villages. He’ll persuade some here and there along the line to come out beside the column.” He tightened the girth. “He’ll take tents, and gear, and beshti, and he’ll createhis army to harass the line. This is war he’s declared. And the Ila’s soldiers aren’t well loved in the villages he’d try to convert, but I have friends there. Trust me that I know.” He made Osan put a leg out, and seized the mounting loop and swung up. He saw Memnanan coming through the dust, with Tofi, in haste. “You explain it to him,” he said to Hati. “You’re in charge.”

“Marak, be careful!” Patya cried. “Don’t die out there! Please don’t die.”

“Do everything Hati tells you. Stay with her and don’t be stupid.”

He took up the quirt and gave Osan a hard hit, leaving before he had to explain anything. The Ila might not forgive him. Memnanan might not.

He might not forgive himself if he let his father do to all these people what he knew his father intended.

The dust came between them. It had veiled his father. Now it veiled him as he rode.

Chapter Nineteen

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A bitter tree must be cut down. Its shade has become tainted. Its soil shall be dug out and cast away. None of its leaves and none of its fruit shall be eaten or pressed for water. All its substance and progeny shall be burned.

—The Book of the Law

Asmall band of haga had already ridden out on Tain’s track. Even in the blowing dust and the rapid fill of the surface, the traces of their passage were plain in the sand, where no other track had been, out between the dunes and then back alongside the caravan track.

But it was more than footprints that Marak used. A besha tracked others: set a besha on the trail, persuade him not to go back to the main caravan, which was his initial and overriding instinct, and by sight or by scent he tended to follow any other track where other beshti had gone, the strongest and most persistent trail as his first choice. It was a useful instinct in a native of the deep Lakht. It was useful to the riders as well as to the beasts, and Marak rode quickly, confident of Osan’s senses.

But it was not Tain Trin Tain he found. Haga lay at the end of that trail, four of them, in among the dunes, dead on the ground, half-sand-covered. Vermin were already worrying at their bodies. Those scattered as he rode onto the scene, but he delayed for no rescue of the dead and no moment of sympathy or respect, either. He knew Tain’s tricks, and the skin between his shoulders felt the threat of ambush. He turned Osan away quickly, seeking the side of the wind that his father would use.

But in the dunes he only found the tracks of beshti going away from there, as beshti would, back to the caravan, reporting their own dead. There was the track of one, only one, going to the west, back along the caravan trace. That was his father, doing what he thought his father would do.

So now the toll was five.

It might be the politic and prudent course for him to go back to the Haga, to rouse all of them in indignation at this killing and lead them out on the track, but that kind of massive excursion had never availed anything against Tain’s subtle kind of work. He had a single hot trail back toward the tents of the encamped line, and he knew Tain would move quickly to lose himself where it would cost lives to get him out.

He chose not to go back. He followed Tain’s tracks, as he thought, and that trail took him back beside the tents, not crossing the line of march yet, but proceeding straight back alongside the encamped tribes.

Among the foremost there had as yet been no detectable movement to resume the march, and none came for a long time. Whatever was proceeding, whether the Haga had recovered the four riderless beshti and had left his mother’s burial to go out hunting on their own, it was early in their noon routine. Tribes behind the Haga in line were still asleep, still unaware what had happened up in the Haga camp.