Hammerfall

He was still thinking that when Tofi came to him and squatted down to talk, and he realized Tofi and Patya had been sitting off to themselves, and that now Patya was hovering suspiciously in the background. Marak shaded his eyes to look up at the young man.

“ Omi,” Tofi began. “We may all die.”

“I don’t certainly intend to.”

“I don’t either,” Tofi said sensibly, while Patya, hovered behind him in unaccustomed silence. “Your sister, omi, she doesn’t intend to, either. But—we don’t know about tomorrow. A star could fall on us.”

He suddenly realized where this was going. He understood Patya’s desperate, anxious silence. They were young, and there was no time for decent understandings—that was the very point. The desperation in the air drove more than one older, more sober couple to their mats, trying to beget their way to immortality. The desperation gave no time for joy, or hope—or patience with custom, or modesty.

“Out with it,” he said. “Time’s short. You’re using it all up.”

“Patya and I…” Tofi tripped over his own need to breathe, or the need to remember what he had meant to say, exactly those desperate, calculated words.

“Patya and you,” he said. He looked at Patya. “Is this your idea, as well as his?”

“I want—” she said.

“You want. Everybody wants. Go to it. Good luck to you.” He got up from his mat and took Patya’s face between his hands, kissed her on the forehead. “The bestof luck,” he said, and knew, for himself, in the back of his moiling thoughts, that he could not risk himself for more than the immediate needs, either… he had more than a wife to constrain him.

He had the Ila on his hands, and her dealings with Luz. And not Memnanan nor Norit nor any of the tribal lords could deal with her as he did.

Patya blushed. Tofi did. Patya hugged him. He clapped Tofi on the shoulder and sent them away. There was no privacy in the whole camp.

But lovers managed. They went off among the beshti. Inventive. He expected that of them.

“That was sweet,” Hati murmured, beside him. “I like him. I like your sister, too.”

“He’s a good young man,” he said. He fought off despair for their situation and exhaustion deeper than any since he had come on this trek. He touched Hati’s shoulder, just touched her, wanting comfort for himself. He had not even spared half a thought for the appropriateness of his sister’s choice. Kaptai would have married her daughter to a young man of more prospects than Tofi had. But who, in this hour, had more than Tofi?

He was thinking of the deaths of hundreds and thousands. He had begun to plan for that carnage as inevitable. What share had Patya in his obligations?

Obligations all came crashing down on him with a smothering weight, all the first ride to Pori, the trip back, Kaptai’s death, and his failure to do anything for the ones who most relied on him, like Norit, like Patya. And Hati.

Marak, the voices said, always there in these hours, along with the urgency to move, move, move, go east, and he would, he had to, but ultimately he had no power to save the weak, the feckless, the ignorant. He tried to call what he felt in his soul responsibility;but it was beyond any sense of responsibility: it was simply doing what he could do, as long as he could do it, like a man walking on his last strength.

They settled. Norit, meanwhile, rocked, rocked, singing, quietly, mad as they came. Her head dropped several times, and a final time, and she slept, Lelie sprawled in her lap. There was nothing he could do for them, either. Hati slept, and he knew it was his own duty to rest and to become sane again, but Marak, Marak, Marakwas all through his brain, and it would not let him go. Thoughts raced and circled through his head, what to do, whether he could find the exact spot where they had descended off the Lakht the last time.

Most of all—the chance that storm might come while they were exposed to that edge, that the earth might shake while they were on that climb—all these things.

And the sand-fall below the cliffs—he had forgotten that. Sand came off the Lakht, wind-carried. They could get down and find that their tame slope, their trail, was under a wind-borne waterfall of sand, the trail changing under them and a weight of sand simply crushing them down—but if they were too far away from the cliffs, the sand-charged wind would kill them. He struggled to imagine what the balance was, how close they dared be, whether the fiercest wind that ever blew might simply carry all the sand-fall up into the storm. Might it be the best gamble to pitch tents closer to the cliffs and risk being buried?

What was right? What could Luz know about conditions no one had everseen?

“Marak,” Hati said, and sat up and tugged at him, wanting him to lie down and be reasonable. He would not. Could not rest. Not with that realization. They had to do more than just reach the bottom. They had to get a camp pitched that would save their lives.

And he had to guess right.

She leaned against him, and put her arm about him, her head against his shoulder. “Luz is noisy today. She should shut up.”

“It’s coming,” he said. “It’s coming for sure. Luz wants us to move now. She’s never walked this desert. She doesn’t know what she’s asking of us. But we don’t know what we’re facing.”

“She should shut up,” Hati said, laying her head against his heart. “She should let us alone. We’re doing all we possibly can.”

“If there’s no water down below, before we reach the tower—” The worries obstructed clear reason, his thoughts going back and back again to the cardinal points. “She’s got to do something, is all. I can’t. I can’tget the villages to move faster than they will. And if we don’t camp close enough to the rocks at the bottom, the wind will kill us, and if all the sand falls off the cliffs, it may bury us. What’s the answer for us? How far is safe?”

“We’ve done all we can,” Hati said. “We’ll go down, is all. We’ll do what we can, by what we see.”

Norit, who might know, who might hear Luz’s answer, only rocked and sang to herself.

There was nowhere any peace. He could look to the edges of the camp and see the furtive action of a few creepers, harmless things, but their disturbance could trigger others—all that mass at Pori, which stayed near the water, preying on itself, the stronger on the weaker. They had not walked into it. The chance that they might have walked in with the villages behind them still haunted him. But he tried to do what Hati said: he tried not to think.

A wind blew, sulfurous and unpleasant. It might have stormed for days during their passage, and instead the weather had favored them, their one piece of blind luck. Not even Luz could have arranged that. He thought that calamities were piling up on him, but if he looked, he saw a few signs of luck still with him, a few signs that the odds could be shoved into better advantage. If a man paid attention. If he did think of all the possibilities.

He kissed his wife, rested his head against her, shut his eyes a moment.

“Up,” Hati said after a dark space, giving him a little shake, and he realized she had held him, bracing his weight for however long he had slept, steady and sure. “We’re moving,” she said, and they were: the Keran were rolling up their mats. The Ila’s servants had struck her shelter.

A little sleep seemed for a moment worse than none. It was hard to move. He gathered his scattered wits, helped Hati up, waked Norit, but not Lelie—her he picked up, and heaved her, still sleeping, to his shoulder, to hand her up to Norit once Norit was mounted.

Hati rolled up their mats and went and tied them on, and led the beshti back.

Marak saw Tofi help Patya up. The aifad cheated him of the sight of Patya’s face, but Tofi looked happy, and the language of their hands, not quick to part, was a reassurance. They looked only at each other.