Hammerfall

Marak held on. He had for days denied the voices, and now, like a penitent thief, he hoped for some answer from Luz: in extremity and fear for all their lives he begged for a voice, contritely, obediently, ready to surrender to his voices if only they would tell him what to do.

He held, and the wind that came now was not the slight coolth and strange smell of deep sands overturned. This wind stank with a stench that raised the fine hairs on his nape, an indescribable mix of scents, things that never have been carried into the light, the depth of the destruction of Pori, and Oburan, and the overthrow of the bitter water itself. It smelled like a forge confounded with a graveyard, it smelled of the wind off the high mountains and the rotting bottom of a garden. It was all these things, and the wind grew louder, and louder, and louder and his ears more and more congested, until he thought his head must burst in the next instant.

Then, like an immense weight on their shoulders, the storm began to let them go, and passed them with a roar so deep the ground seemed again to thump in its going.

Someone wept. Lelie set up a wail drowned by the wind.

Then a woman’s voice came clear in a sharp, gasping cry for help, and he began to realize that it was Memnanan’s wife.

“It’s now!” the lady cried, breathless, terrified, and then Marak understood the commotion and dismay. Her baby was on its way, in the dark, in the storm, in the noise that drowned everything but the loudest shouts.

Even so, the wind was falling. The ache in his ears subsided. He had no knowledge of birthing babies, but he knew beshti, and he knew the storm that had rolled over them might have brought it on. His ears might clear, but the woman had no such relief. The birth pangs were not likely to stop, once started, no matter what the storm did, no matter the things that could go terribly wrong if the baby was not ready to come.

He heard a commotion among the women. Lelie, apparently shunted aside in the confusion and the dark, wailed her distress and her fear in the dark, but he thought Norit had her. The women asked each other advice, gathered about Memnanan’s wife: Norit had birthed a child. Memnanan’s mother assuredly had.

“What can we do?” he heard Tofi ask, and he heard Patya and Hati and then even Bosginde talking to Memnanan’s mother, their voices even so smothered by the wind and the racket of the canvas, and by the bubbles that seemed lodged painfully inside his ears.

Memnanan was out of reach. It was folly to try to bring him: their tent had stopped trying to fly away, but it still shuddered to gusts strong enough for any storm. The sand would be too thick to breathe out there.

Marak cautiously released the rope he had held, forced locked, swollen fingers to move. His mouth was so dry his throat felt coated with dust. He rubbed at a coating of fine, dry dust on his face and about his eyes, and made matters worse. He hardly had strength left to lift his arms.

“Can we get a light?” Memnanan’s mother pleaded.

They had a lamp, the most basic sort of lamp, as every tent had, in their dwindling store of supplies. It was something men could do. Feeling their way in the raucous dark, he and Tofi and the slaves got the elements together from their baggage.

Then it was another lengthy and doubtful process to light it while the wind ripped and battered at the canvas. Mogar carried a small flintwheel, that most elementary of firestarters in a desert night, but drafts through the tent lacings quenched the sparks they raised.

They lacked quick-fire, or any other element to make it easy. Bosginde, however, said he could do it, and they were able, finally, to bring fire to a dry nest of fibers and what seemed strands of Bosginde’s hair, and then to a piece of oil-soaked wick. All the while the tent shook under the gusts, and they used their bodies for a windbreak.

The fibers in the cut end of the cord glowed minutely. It was a race between their fire going out and the wick taking light, and Marak yanked out a loop of his own hair to keep the little flame going; Tofi did, and the fire still went out, the middle of the hair loops burning through too quickly.

But the wick had just caught, and in their deep dark and the overthrow of the world, it cast comforting light on worried men’s faces—it reached up and illumined tent canvas that quivered under the steady onslaught of the wind, and it reached aside to the women’s circle.

Carefully, carefully, shielding the light all the way, Marak turned and gave it to Hati. It lit female faces, the lady’s, the mother, the aunts, and Hati and Patya and Norit—and, distressed and tremulous of lip, Lelie. The au’it, too, was there, frowning and without advice—the Ila’s virgin servant.

In the violence of a sudden gust the lady screamed, but the wind drowned the most of it, and Marak sat unhappily listening to a pain he could not help. It would be what it was. If there was anyone to intervene, the women knew, the women would.

“It’s her first,” Marak said to Tofi with a shake of his head. “It’s a month early. It’s the storm. I hope that baby is brave enough to be born.”

“They don’t ever change their minds, do they?” Tofi asked.

“Not often. Not when it’s this far.” Excluding some wisdom of the an’i Keran that he had never heard, the birth was in progress. Not to the good of the mother would the baby change its mind now.

The au’it, incredibly, spread her book and wrote, slanting it to the little light there was. The record resumed. The world went on. Marak drew a wider breath.

Tofi even dared take a brief look outside, through the lacings.

“They’re alive out there,” he reported of the beshti. “I don’t know how.”

They sat, waterless, without easy rest. The wind blew. The labor went on and on, until at last the women clearly despaired of what they saw, and roused the lady up and supported her from either side in a walk about the tent, around and around and around, while Bosginde sheltered the lamp for them.

The lady lay down again. Got up again.

“Is it any closer?” Marak asked Hati.

“No,” Hati said. “No. It isn’t.”

There was yet another circuit of the tent, but the lady failed and collapsed in the women’s arms, screaming in misery none of them could help, crying for her husband, her own mother, people none of them could find. Lelie began to cry, and the wind howled, never less than storm force.

“She wants her husband,” Marak said. “If she wants her husband, he’s not that far.”

“ Omi,” Tofi began to protest, but his voice trailed off under a series of gasping cries from the lady.

“If I can see the tent, I’ll make it.”

“Take a rope,” Tofi pleaded with him, Tofi, who had lost a father and brothers to an ill-advised venture out in a storm less than this one.

Hehad no need of a rope: he could find Hati blind and across the width of the Lakht… he had become convinced of that. But Tofi gave him a coil of cord otherwise set aside for repair, and he gave one end to Tofi to hold.

Then he took a tight wrap of his aifad, unlaced the storm flap and escaped the pain and anguish inside the tent into a hell on earth outside.

It had begun to be daylight. The air outside was all red dust, beshti half-buried and with windburn so bad the wounds were caked and plastered with the same red as the air.

He had lied. He could notsee the Ila’s tent, but he remembered where it had been when they set up camp; he ached with the need to do something more than sit waiting—and if it were Hati, he knew he would want to know; and there were debts, to the lady, to Memnanan. There were debts that asked a risk. There was, below it all, a need to know what the state of affairs was in the camp, a need to reach someone outside their tightly clenched world and reassure himself there were other living souls.