Hammerfall

But thinking once meant thinking twice, and thinking twice told him that if it had been rash to come out here, it was increasingly his father’s territory, back here among the villages, among men whose loyalties were in question. His loss might lose all the rest, and he had something to live for… he had two women, and a young man, and even the Ila’s captain, who had trusted him with all he personally cared about.

He could not go back to Kais Tain. Having seen a father part with his daughter and a village agree with that act, he could no longer delude himself that Kais Tain would ever confess their own guilt for turning him out. They would never change their minds, or give up their allegiance to Tain. He had rescued Lelie, but no one would rescue him, if he went on into territory where Tain’s word had more credit than his, and where a man who spoke for the Ila was the enemy.

He hugged the child more gently, a living prize, when the ride had begun with a death. He knew Kaptai would have hugged Lelie. Kaptai had had a large soul. Kaptai had loved his father, which took particular persistence and patience—and too much patience, and too much belief. He knew now what she had never confessed: that she never should have left her tribe, and now Kaptai lay somewhere ahead of him in the dark, that, for all her love and her loyalty… not prey to vermin, not now, not like those shallow-buried others… not when the sand got up like this, and not when, knowing it, the Haga raised a mound over their dead. The sand would cover her, make her the heart of a dune, turn her to one of those strange dead the sand gave up rarely. She had loved the high desert, and now it took her in, and he could do nothing to mend her death and nothing to get her back.

“This is my wife’s baby,” he said to Antag, shouting over a gust. “She’s divorced from her husband. He’d kept the child and didn’t want it. At least there’s this.”

“A good thing,” Antag said, as they moved along beside the next village in the line. The baby’s wail for a moment was louder than the wind. “She’s likely scared. The wind’s no lullaby.”

“She’ll sleep,” Marak said. Her struggles were wearying, but they were nothing to him. “She’ll grow tired.”

“So do the beshti,” Antag shouted back. “We can gain a little distance, still, tonight, but we ought to camp with one of the villages next noon, and maybe get that baby some milk or something. Not to mention changing her.”

There was a young man who knew infants with complete common sense. Camping with one of the villages was also better sense than he had been thinking of.

And he was willing to do that.

“We should pick a group now and keep their pace,” he shouted at Antag and the brothers. “No sense wearing the beshti down. We’ll sleep, gain back a little tomorrow, ride back if we can.”

“That’s good!” Antag yelled back at him.

So they fell in with the pace of the third contingent up from where they were. The village was Kais Kurta, a western village, and Andisak was its lord: one of his father’s veterans, a man of his father’s generation, but one who had broken with Tain before this. Marak was dismayed, meeting Andisak, to know where he had arrived.

“It’s possible I shouldn’t be here,” Marak said. “Tain has killed my mother in the Haga camp. I’ve hunted him for my mother’s life as far as the tracks lasted and found nothing that tells me we’ll come on him tonight. So I’m going back to my camp, but we can’t make it all the way tonight. And I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known this was Kais Kurta. What do you want? Will you take us into your camp until the next rest? Or shall we move on? I’ll take no offense if you decide that’s best.”

“Stay with us,” Andisak said, and he was western, so that was that: if Andisak himself invited them, there would be no treachery within the camp, on the offender’s life. Andisak’s reputation was at stake. “Give me the news,” Andisak said, “what the state of affairs is between you and my old ally.”

Marak began to, in the sinking of the wind for a space, and they rode at that pace the night long, resting sometimes, talking with Andisak in the intervals when the wind allowed easier speech, and they kept very close to the contingent in front, even commingling ranks with that village in the confusion of the wind and the blowing sand. Andisak was wise, and allowed no gap between his village and the next, but that spoke only of Kais Kurta. If any village let themselves lag behind, they could stray off the track in the storm and consequently lose all the rest of the caravan, never to find their way again.

It was a terrifying realization. For the first time Marak understood how fragile the chain of life was, far back in the line. The tribes would never break and lose their way… but the villages had no experience at this business of caravans. For most the only journey they had ever made in their lives was the matter of getting to Oburan on a well-traveled trade path. Now the weakest village lord, and his bad decisions, could kill all the rest of the people in the world, and vermin had begun to be a threat, much bolder than ordinary, much bolder than they had been since the war, when they had gathered thick about the battles and preyed on the wounded… the vermin could change their habits, and had begun to encroach, even within the line, where beshti feet cracked shells and where seething masses in the night and the blowing sand denoted some latrine left by a prior tribe.

That was not ordinary. Nothing of the sort was ordinary.

And where was Kais Tain? Somewhere at the rear of the line of march, at least far enough back that a day of riding against the flow of villagers had not located them. Kais Tain was in danger, and those who walked were doomed.

“Have you seen anything of messengers?” Marak asked Andisak, and Andisak said he had.

“They went on down the line, but never came back,” Andisak said. “And the priests come and go, the Ila’s priests.”

The priests were never well loved in the west.

“We have one of the Ila’s books,” Andisak remarked at one point. “At your urging we took it. If you ask me, as the priests did, but I didn’t say, it’s damned dull. Court proceedings. Are they all like that?”

“To my knowledge, probably,” Marak said.

“I’m not sure I want to be written in the Ila’s book,” Andisak said. “What if I keep this book?”

“I’m sure it won’t be that much use. It’s what’s in it that matters; it’s all the books together. The Ila wants that.” So did Luz. So, very much, did Luz, who suffered through this dialogue and nagged him, saying his name over and over: Marak, Marak, until he grew distracted. East, east, east, Luz chided him, impatient of the delay.

Chapter Twenty

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Every child must be written down by the au’it and its shape accounted. When a child is born the priest must see it.

—The Book of the Ila’s Au’it

They talked at times, marak and the lord of kais Kurta. They rode at that easy pace the night long, into a sandy, murky dawn, and on into the day, letting the beshti rest from their long trek back in the line.

At dawn, when Lelie became fretful, Andisak found a woman to take Norit’s baby and tend it, and Marak let it go. He had not known how heavy that load had been, in all senses. He slept in the saddle after he had turned the hungry, fretting child over to a strange woman. He slept the sleep of the exhausted, and at the same time Antag and his brothers slept, trusting Andisak’s honor.

All that morning, at Marak’s intermittent waking, the wind blew and the sand still moved. They went over a desert continually being rewritten, discouraging the vermin, making the vermin’s constant hunt for leavings more difficult. The pickings were constantly richer toward the end of the caravan.