Hammerfall

“Two days,” he said. He lied. He had no idea whether they could make that speed to the tower, or what would happen, or how long they would be encamped and under siege from the heavens once the hammer came down. “A storm’s coming. There’s no chance up here. The Keran will establish their tents down below.” He added, calmly, “Your mother and your wife and your aunts have gone down with Keran tribesmen to watch them. Aigyan’s in charge, below. Get yourself under shelter once you get there and then set up tents to welcome in those that have just come down. Then give them the same word, everything calm, but push as hard as you can to get canvas up. We will lose lives. The hammer is coming down. It’s on its way now. I don’t know what may happen next.”

“It’s coming.”

“It’s coming,” Marak said. He grew calmer in saying it aloud, to a man who understood him. “There’s no other consideration.”

“The Ila wishes to talk to you, once we’re down there.”

“I’ll come when I can,” Marak said. The Ila was, at the moment, the least of his concerns. “Go down with her. Get off the cliff face. Give whatever orders make sense down there, and listen to Aigyan about the camp. I’ll bethere.”

Memnanan left them, then, and all the while the sky weighed on their backs, heavy with disaster. The sunlight in a natural sunset had diminished to no more than a faint intimation of light, the sun long behind the western ridges. Below them the head of the column began to unload their tents, a little outward, but not that far from the cliffs, as he had said.

After Memnanan and his men the Haga began their descent: the trail was only wide enough for one at a time, one at a time, one at a time… for everyone alive in the world. For everyone who would survive.

The last of the Haga went down.

“Go down now,” Marak said to Hati.

“You go,” Hati said in a voice scarcely louder than the steady tramp of feet and the occasional complaint of beshti long on the trail and miserable with thirst. “Marak, come with me. Let’s not both die here. What are you going to do? Leave Tofi in charge?”

There was an appalling thought, clever as the young man was. Tofi would not forgive him. Tofi would curse him to hell. Patya would not forgive him, for settling the Ila on her husband.

The vision leapt up, the rock and the sphere, only now it was true, and imminent: it filled the sky and the ground. He was somewhere above it all, and saw it coming.

“It’s coming down,” Hati said. “It’s coming down. This is our chance. Please! Come with me!”

Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said to him, and to Hati, perhaps… perhaps to all the mad in the world at once, for all he knew. And he did not want to go, following the voices. All his life he had resisted the voices.

“Get down there,” he said to Hati. It was not yet. There was still time.

“You can’t help anyone anymore up here. Get down yourself, or I’ll stay here, too, I promise you. You’re being a fool!”

He looked back at the throng of tribes, not even with a sight of the villages yet, the villages with all they held, all the lives, their whole way of life. The line seemed to go on forever in the dusk, and Memnanan had warned him of increasing desperation and decreasing strength back there. He feared far, far worse might be happening just beyond his view: if the horde at Pori had heard the whisper in the earth of so much movement, caught scent of so many helpless and dying among the dead. What did it take from the heavens, to kill them? The vermin sufficed.

And only the tribes had thrown away their extra weight. To villagers, to the dwellers in houses, everything was precious, everything was necessary. And he could not even pass the word to the first of them, to send sanity back through the line.

“They don’t know,” he said in despair. “They’ve no experience—”

Rock hit sphere, and the ring of fire went out and a fountain of cloud went up, and that sphere was lands and water and the sky where the sun was coming over the rim of vast water…

It hit. In the vision it hit. It was still coming. But in his foresight it had come down.

And there was such a silence…

Soon, Luz said to him, one clear word. Soon.

The beshti and the plodding thousands never heard, never felt, not being mad. The au’it, still with them, making the Ila’s record, had written only what they said, in the last of the sunlight of an ordinary day.

“Listen to me,” Hati said. “I know what you’re doing. I know why you’re still up here. But the rest needyou to be down there, or it’s just them, fighting each other. You can’t stand up here like a fool waiting for the sky to fall on us. Come on. Come down.”

He had made up his mind. He knew he had to admit it was over, and go. But was it what he had wanted to hear, was it that he knew he wanted too much to listen, and save his own life?

“They’re not all going to die up here, if they’ll just toss the excess weight off the packs and walk the beshti down—”

“And some don’t have the sense, and if we wait long enough, they’ll slip off the trail and fall on us and damn the whole rest of the caravan! We can’t help it!”

Osan wanted to move. He wanted to, and even knowing better, could not find a way to abandon his responsibility. He searched the rocks, the sand, the sky for an inspiration, and he saw the au’it still writing, by the last of all light in what might be the last day of all the world.

He saw the tall pillar of rock that marked the way down, and the au’it, and he rode close to her and took the ink-cake from her hand, and rode close to that rock. He spat on the ink-cake, dry-mouthed as he was, and drew a line on the rock as high as his chest, and spat again and wrote, as Osan fretted and jolted his writing: No pack higher than this. Lead the beshti. Walk—

The ink-cake, half-used, shattered and left fragments in his hand. The coming night would obscure his warning. But all through the night the villages would come to this edge, and the slowest, the less adept would still be coming to it at dawn, if the sun ever rose again, and if the wind delayed, and some of them would listen.

He rode over to a passing tribesman, and showed him the writing, such as it was.

“It marks the safe height of a pack. It says lead the beshti and walk down. Make this the rule! Tell the next tribe! Tell the villages! Leave anything but your tents and your food and water, whatever you have!”

“Yes, Marak-omi,” the tribesman said, and looked up at the rock and the message, and rode and told another of his tribe. Among the villages, many read.

He had done all he could then. And knew it. He rode toward the gap, the start of the descent, and Hati and the au’it followed him as he rode down onto the trail.

But there, with tribes yet to come, with terror rushing at him in visions, he gripped sanity with both hands and followed his own just-made law, despite the others below him riding down the switchbacks. He slid down afoot, to lead Osan down, and Hati and the au’it dismounted, and so they walked the difficult, shadowed track, a trail only lit by the last glow in the sky.

Behind them the tribe was necessarily slowed in its descent. More, they dismounted and began to do the same, pride cast aside and prudence taking charge at this hazardous edge of night.

After all his worry and agony about the weak and the unskilled, it was that simple. If the tribes began to follow that one prudent example, the villagers would not be more daring or faster, and in the morning the sun would show those still to come the writing on the rock—surely the sun would come up, as surely as the fall of the hammer-stone had to make some change in the world.

Surely that would go on. And the line would come down as long as anyone could.

But it was as if his vision had cleared, as if all the self-made wall against Luz had broken down, and he heard the voices clearly, and he felt himself obeying the pull of the madness he had resisted—all the world seemed in motion again, and Luz was at last content. He walked, and walked with deliberation, thinking not what he could do, but sure now that he set the pace, and that he must not spread panic or make a misstep of his own.