Hammerfall (34 page)

“And ours, yours,” they answered with the ritual courtesy. “At any time.”

The storm battered them. They had said all that had to be said. He was within easy reach of his own camp, and he gave Osan the signal to move.

“He may be out there,” Antag said to his back. “Tain is a clever man. Be careful.”

“I will be.” He gave Osan his head, and they rode beside the column, he with Lelie, at a traveling clip. People in the Haga camp had put up the tent sides. Warnings about the weather had passed from Norit, or the tribes sensed it themselves, and not empty fear, either. From moment to moment the dust cut off all view: the sun was on the horizon now, at his back, and cast no shadow at all in the thick air.

He rode finally alongside his own tents, and Osan made a jogging, eager approach to the beshti he knew, the comfort of his own herd. The side flaps of these tents, too, were down: the wind was cold, and he hoped for help as he rode Osan in among the beshti of his own tent and began to get down.

A gun went off. He stopped in mid-dismount, with Lelie in his arm, and was thinking of having to unsaddle Osan on his own when that strange thing happened: he was still thinking of it as a bullet tore through him where he held Lelie. Osan shied, finishing the motion, and went out from under him.

He fell toward his back because Osan's motion had flung him that way, and the shot had, and he was conscious of holding Lelie, but not being sure he had her as he went down. He was astonished at the turn of fortunes.

Then he hit the sand full on his back, and hit his head, and heard Hati shout and swear . . . he thought it was Hati. He lay there winded, dimly trying to find out whether he held the child, and aware that she was wet and hot, and trying to cry, not fretfully, but in earnest—but she was as winded as he was, and could not somehow get her breath.

“Get them!” Hati shouted at someone, and immediately a hand came under his head and an arm tried to lift him.

“It's a baby,” someone said. “It's shot, too, right through the leg.”

He was shocked, and angry, and tried to see the damage the bullet had done, but he could not get his head up. He would not let go of Lelie. He had held her, he had protected her, and he went on doing it until Hati pried his hand off the baby. Her, he trusted. Norit, he would trust.

If he was shot, it was his father's doing. There was no one else. They were all in danger.

“Get him,” he tried to tell Hati. “Get under cover.
Someone get him.
”

“The captain's men are going after him,” Hati said. She understood him. Someone was trying to press a cloth against his side, where Lelie was lying, and wanted to pick her up. “Let go,” Hati said. “Marak. Let go. Let them take her.”

“It's Norit's baby,” he said. “It's that Lelie she asked for. Her baby.” But he was not at all sure Hati heard. He had no idea where anyone was, and that was unusual, as regarded his wives. His voices failed him. His whole sense of the world was fading. Their sense of presence had faded. He was sinking, and they tried to turn him over, which further confused his sense of the world.

“It went out his back,” Tofi's voice said. “That's good.”

“It could have carried threads into him. Heat some oil.”

Lelie had been shot, an innocent, if the world had one. The bullet had gone through her before it reached him. He had meant to save her, Lelie's father had failed her, and his father had meant to kill him, and this was the way it all came together. It was his own father who had done all this mischief, his father who had won the throw. He had no doubt of it. His father had been more clever, still more clever, after all these years. His father had won, at least the contest between them, and he might die. Not dying was the only way to spite Tain. He told himself that.

Men were still shouting and running around him. The beshti complained, that noise which had underlain half his life. He heard a cry, a thin, desperate kind of baby cry, absolute indignation, it seemed to him, and justified, if ever a cry was justified in the world. “How bad is the baby?” he asked Hati, when she leaned close.

“She's shot, too,” Hati said. “Norit. Norit,
take
her, damn it. Don't stand and stare like a fool!”

The baby still cried, more distantly. Pieces of his recollection scattered, like coins across a floor.

“Someone had better unsaddle Osan,” he said. “He's been under saddle since yesterday. Maybe longer.” He could not remember. “Rub his legs.”

“We'll see to him,” Hati promised him.

“Is he going to die?” That wail was his sister's voice. He could not remember why she was there. “Is he going to die?” He tried to answer her for himself, though he could not see her. “No,” he said.

But after that men picked him up by the edges of his robe and carried him into the walled tent, where they had an oil light.

They let him down. He was content simply to breathe. The wind failed to reach here. The noise and the dust was less. He could have sunk into sleep, quite gladly.

But they brought hot oil, and poured it into the wound, repeated doses. He felt other faculties dimming as a fierce throbbing attended the hurt.

“It's swelling,” someone said. “It won't take the oil.”

The makers were at work. His makers. His protectors. About the baby he had no idea. He simply lay still, shut his eyes, tried to ride through the pain while they probed and cleaned: he fainted, and came back, and fainted again, but by the second waking there were wet compresses on the wound, and they had given up on the hot oil.

Hati was by him. He found no need to talk. The pain was all, for a while, and he could not organize his thoughts to want or wish anything beyond that. He simply lay still, wondering whether they had delayed for the storm, or for him. He vaguely knew Hati could answer that one question, but he had no wish to open a conversation he could not carry further. He was growing delirious with the fever, and his head hurt worse than any headache in his life. He decided he was willing to die, so long as no one disturbed him or hurt his head. The veins in his temples and in his ears seemed apt to rupture, the pressure was so great, and tears leaked from his burning eyes simply because there was nowhere else for the pressure to go.

The makers might not win this one, he thought, and if that was so, then he urgently had to muster the wherewithal to talk to Hati. There were instructions he had to give.

“We can't stay camped,” he said, and what he tried to say was: “The moment the weather allows, we have to move out of here. Something's coming.”

“I know,” Hati said. “Be still. Sleep.”

“Did you hear me?” he tried to ask. He still heard Lelie crying, and he lost the thread of communication with Hati for a while, but he thought about it while he rested.

Marak,
the voices said, and he tried to listen and learn this time. He hoped Luz could reach him, explain to him, understand their situation and get them to safety. He saw dots before his eyes, but it was one of those kind of visions he thought came from fever, not from Luz.

Then the dots, red and blue, mostly, acquired significance, individuality. They moved, and followed patterns. Life depended on them, and they made chains, spiraling like the flight of vermin.

It was surely fever. In a remote part of his mind he knew he was delirious.

Marak,
the voices said again.
Marak
.

And in his dream, “I'm listening,” he said aloud. “Tell me what to do.”

You've been foolish,
Luz said.

“I know that,”
he said in this dream, but he was mesmerized by the dots, wholly absorbed by them, as if they were the secret to all the world, just revealed to him.

You're looking at the nanisims,
Luz said to him.
These are the makers. Are you listening this time?

“Yes,”
he said.
“Help us get out of here.”

They heal you when you're injured. They're my creatures, at work now, patching the damage you've done.

“I've done. I didn't do it. My father did.”

Small difference.

“That's fine. I'll get well. Go away. I'm in too much pain to talk.”

The swelling can't be helped. Your body does that when the nanisms rush to an injury: there are so many they congest the area. They diverge, you know: the makers aren't the only sort. The makers make other makers, some of them the body's own nanisms, if you like.

“If I live I'm sure I'll appreciate it.”

I'm sure you will,
Luz said.
Are you hearing me now? It's rare that I can get your whole attention.

“I'm trying.”

I'm sure you are. But know this: you carry these nanisms wherever you go, and shed them into the soil and the water. Or into blood. They work very efficiently in the bloodstream.

“Nice.”

You took it on yourself to bring Norit's baby. You risked every life in the world for one child.

“As you did, to get the Ila.”
Now he roused almost to consciousness, and for a moment the dots and their movements were not the whole world.
“The baby is Norit's child. She misses her child. Is that such an offense to you?”

It's certainly an inconvenience to her. But we have the child now: your blood shed new makers into her, not the old sort, not the sort she had from being in Norit's body, rather the new ones we gave you at the tower. An unintended gift, and we get very little of sense from her, but she does try.

“Damn you, let the child alone.”

She'll heal, thanks to your makers. As you will. And you'll shed your makers wherever you pass. You constantly shed them into the sand, and beetles take them up . . . small use, those. But we can direct their structure. You shed them everywhere. You've begun what the ondat decreed. You
are
that change. You war with the Ila simply by breathing.

Dots built intricate structures, moved, shifted, built towers and strings and divided. Some beat like imprisoned birds, only fast, far, far faster. Some turned and shed pieces of themselves. It became incredibly sinister, the activity of those moving forms.

Big eaters eat little eaters and on they go, our makers, the Ila's makers. They carry on warfare, and that war spreads wherever you go, and they change what they touch. If the Ila offers a man a cup of water, these nanoceles, these makers, go with that touch.

If a man goes back to his village and sleeps with his wife, so the makers will spread, and spread when she prepares a meal, or goes to the well, or kisses her child. All through the world, these makers renew themselves and become newer kinds.

And all these things the Ila does, because she contains her master makers. As you contain mine. And mine are essential. You have to live.

“That's comforting to know.”

You have to live. Tain has become my enemy and her friend.

“Tain wouldn't like being the Ila's friend.”

Do you hear me? Repeat what I say.

“Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. God, I have your makers in me! The Ila has her own. And you're against my father and he's
for
her for some reason. But I don't understand. And I don't give a damn.” He wanted the rapid dots to stop, slow down, cease their actions. But he would not betray a weakness. His father had taught him that among his first lessons, never betray a weakness, never admit to one.

Had reticence and deceit helped Tain? Was it a reasonable way for a man to live, who hoped to be loved?

“Hush,” Hati said, and wiped his brow. “He's dreaming.”

The world became a treasure set way up on a shelf, something he could almost reach, and was not tall enough. His mother had used to put things above him, and frustrated his reach. He would sit below the counter, discontent with whatever was in his grasp. He remembered the tiles near the kitchen table. One was cracked. It sat not quite level. Out of such incredible fine detail a man built his life, his remembrances, his loves and his hostilities.

Once loosed into the world,
Luz said as he sat there,
the makers spread out to any creature, high or low. Your Ila came here with resources we now count primitive. She shaped the beshti to be what they are. She shaped men to survive the harshness of this world. Now we in turn shape you.

“I tell you I don't understand. You're saying the Ila has these things in her, that she put in everyone alive. But you put different ones in me, and where I go, I shed them and other creatures take them up and they have them. So how am I different than the Ila? How are you different?”

You aren't. And I'm not. That's the point, isn't it?

“Damned nonsense,”
he said to her in the dream.

But this is the tricky part. Her makers have fitted men and beasts not only to live in this world . . . but to destroy the ondat. That's what the ondat fear: a buried instruction. That's why they insist on raining destruction down. Nanoceles can simply lie hidden, a small handful of makers that won't not breed without a signal to do so, and that signal may come from outside, or inside themselves, and it may come today, or tomorrow, or in a hundred years. Do you see why they should worry?

He lay feeling the tides of pain, the waves of burning fever, deep in listening, in the deafening wind, in the thump of the canvas. He listened so hard he became remote from the chill, and the wind, and the pain.

But if the world changes,
Luz said,
the makers change. Life changes life. Life changes the makers. It must. It's what they do. Change the world and you change all its parts. Change the world and you change all that the makers do. To so alter this world that the rules of survival are utterly changed—that's the way the ondat intend to destroy the Ila's creation and scour it clean of all life. But we persuaded them we need to be here. They know nothing of guilt. Nothing of repentance. Nothing of redemption. They aren't like us. But they do know need, and they know we're more dangerous to them than the Ila, if we wished them harm. They need our knowledge to repair what the Ila's kind have done to them, and to win that knowledge, and not to have us do again what the Ila did, they've come to an agreement with us. That's the fine point of the matter. On that your life rests. Hers rests. All this world rests. Do you understand that?