Hammerfall

Marak tucked low, ready for quake or wind or whatever might come, rode and rode past tents and men straggling back to their own families, their own tribes, ru

This light instead of fading only increased, and as he rode to the last tents, as he slid down to stand on the earth and looked up next to his own beshti, he saw a murky fire above the cliffs in the west, a fire shedding that u

He saw Norit and Hati arrive, and seized their reins, and helped them down. Tofi and Patya followed.

“The sea boils up!” Norit cried, her face turned up to that red-glowing sky. “A pillar of cloud goes up and burns with light, up and up and up, and the bitter water and heavens are overturned.” She lifted up arms bare against that red, western dawn, and for a moment she seemed caught in that vision, spread against the sky, dyed in light.

Marak seized her, pulled her toward the tent.

The earth suddenly shook as if the world had broken. Beshti went down, some sitting down, one, Norit’s, thrown down off its feet. Marak lost his footing, and protected Norit with his elbows. The tent and shelter was just next to them, while the shaking continued, and continued, and continued.

Then stopped. The whole world, lit red, caught its breath. The air was still. Marak moved, got a knee under him, got the other to bear and got up. Their tent was still standing. The au’it stood at the doorway, red-robed, expressionless recorder of all she saw.

Hati and Patya and Tofi tried to help him up, and he got up, hauled Norit to the doorway, used her body to brush the storm flap out of his path. Hati was at his back, all of them were there, and they tried to help him in the blind dark inside. It was all he could do, to carry Norit. His strength was flowing out of him fast; and when he reached what he thought was their place, their mats, he fell, trying to kneel, and bruised his knees in doing it.

He let Norit down from hands numb with swelling.

“Lelie,” Norit said. “Lelie, Lelie, Lelie!”

She wanted her baby. Luz had left her. But Lelie was not his at the moment to give, and he knew at least Lelie was there, and Hati was. It was dark in the tent, while fire raced across the skies. He called for Patya, to be sure she was there, and Tofi; and hearing answers he fell down on the mat and lay there, only breathing, thinking of the beshti, still under saddle, and the people still on the road, and worst of all, caught on the cliffs with the storm still coming… since come it would.

They could still get behind rocks, at a last resort. He wished them to think of it, simply to snug down with whatever canvas they could secure against something strong—but he was powerless to help them, powerless in all events now. If the sky was burning—if the earth shook like that—what hope was there?

He shut his eyes, but the visions persisted. Stone had hit the sphere. The ring of fire had gone out, and that was what sheeted over them. He knew it now. He got up on a fevered, exhausted effort, and put his head out to see what he could.

There was as yet no sign of storm, only that u

The hammer of heaven had struck a spark to set the sky afire. But the wind—the wind was yet to come. A few more might straggle into the tents. A few more might live.

He knelt in the doorway of the tent, on knees numb with exhaustion, his arms and back afire with fever, and he felt Hati take his arm. He felt her presence, felt Norit’s, Lelie’s, continually. Norit and Lelie had found each other.

A new vision came: a pillar of cloud, lit red, spreading light across the heavens.

The bitter water, Norit had said. The hammer of heaven would come down in the bitter water, and the fountain would go up, and the earth would crack like a pot, pouring out fire.

Had they not felt the earth break?

“It shines like a lamp,” Norit said. “The heat of it goes out and the ashes will fall and fall. The hammer is down.”

If it were himself alone he might sit down in the doorway in a fit of shivering and watch what came next. As it was, he felt Hati’s hand, and moved his hand to Hati’s, felt her fingers, as swollen and rough and wounded as his own, and dragged his gaze away from the awful sky and toward the look she gave him.

“We’re going to live,” she said, and set her jaw in that way Hati had, and he loved her, he loved her so much in that moment he could look away from the sky.

But vision came, a vision of sky and dark, and it came, and it came, a ring of darkness behind the ring of fire.

Marak! the voices cried all at once.

He pulled the storm flap shut, worked with swollen fingers to lace it tight.

It was coming, it was coming, he said to himself, seeing the ring of fire and the ring of darkness again and again and again. Inside, Tofi told Mogar and Bosginde to pull the storm lines tight and hold on, back at the weather side of the tent, back where they had put their baggage: storm rigging-lines co

They took their places inside, in the dark, with no lamp burning.

They braced. They sat ready. Marak joined those holding the lines. Hati did. Memnanan’s wife and aunts and mother held one another, and Norit with Lelie and the au’it as well he thought had moved near them.

Thunder came first—and the ground shuddered with that thunder, a rhythmic beating like that many footsteps: beshti from end to end of the camp bellowed alarm.

Wind hit like a fist, hit, and began to pull at the ropes, trying to lift the tent. The ropes began to vibrate, and hummed with the assault, and Marak gripped the rope, robbed of breath, as if the very strength of the air had been swept away around them. Ears congested; night-blind eyes seemed to swell in their sockets, and Marak shut his eyes tight, squinted down, to keep them from bursting, and pulled on the rope, and felt its vibration going through his arms, through his bones, and up from the sand under them. He might have shouted. Others might have. He was deaf, and his ears were bursting.

Debris hit the tent, a heart-stopping impact that hung and beat against them, threatening to destroy them. A wave of cold came. Still the wind beat at them, indistinguishable from earthquake. Marak bit his lip and hung on, and held on, feeling the line shake under the stress. Hearing had all but gone, but the vibration in his bones had a voice, the wind’s voice. Distanced by the congestion in his ears, it had voices wherever it found a chink, an inlet, and it wailed, it howled, it roared. Marak, his voices raged at him, but they were small against that voice. The visions showed him ruin and the ring of fire and the ring of darkness—and this was it, he thought, this surely must be the worst.

His hands gripping the rope were beyond pain: cord met raw flesh, and he would not let go, would not give up their tent to the wind. They were the outermost of the crescent of tents: they were the ones exposed to the greatest force of that wind coming off the cliffs, with no shelter at all but the tents behind them, and if their position was wrong, they were dead, but the sand was going past them…was going overtheir heads, in a wind greater than any wind that had ever blown.

A second object hit the back tent wall, something huge that flapped about and rumbled over the top of them with indistinct sound: it might have been a tent blown loose, its people dead in an instant in this wind, its goods carried away on the storm front. The seams of the tent strained, and sand rubbing against the canvas was a force that could wear away the threads, secure an opening, and if there began to be an opening, the wind could tear it wide.