Forge of Heaven (19 page)

The new day was still filmy with the lightest dust when they went out of the tent to see how much they would have to dig.

Sand had blown through the anchor legs of the observation station, but the station sat undamaged, deep-anchored. Sand had completely buried the greenbush of yesterday, except that along the rim, where the windblown grains had fallen into the gorge.

The beshti had gotten up when they stirred out of the tent. The beshti would sit like lumps through the worst of the wind; but now, confirming the storm was fading, they gathered themselves up on their long legs, stretching themselves, shaking the sand out of their coats, weaving their long-cramped necks about and complaining. A beshta complained if the wind blew, or if the sun shone, or if it disliked a smell in the air, and if one beshta complained, the rest complained about its racket. It was an ordinary morning.

There came, however, a strange lull in that ritual complaint, heads lifted, shadows in the red-brown haze of shaken coats, all the beshti staring in one direction.

There were no other beasts in the land but their kind. There was 1 2 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

no moving creature walking the wide world for the beshti to take sudden alarm like that.

And seeing that ancient, instinctive alert in a herd made ghosts by the filmy dust, Marak’s nape suddenly prickled in ancient alarm.

“Quake,” he called out, and began to move toward the herd.

Hati moved. The boys stared about them as if they could discover the oncoming threat somewhere in the lingering dust.

The beshti were tethered to a long-line. If they hit that rope it would foul and there would be wild chaos, not to mention broken bones. Marak gathered his own beshta’s halter rope and unclipped it from the line. Hati did the same. The boys were a little behind them.

A shiver ran deep in the earth. It reached his feet. The beshta shied as the rolling shake began.

He grabbed the beshta’s halter rope up close to the chin, pulled his beshta’s head down and around against its shoulder as it squalled. Other beshti tangled with the long-line and went down in a flailing heap, and the tether-line snapped right off the deep-irons. “Get them!” Hati yelled, not a hurt yell, a furiously angry one. “Cut the line! You can never hold them all!”

Marak half saw, in his own struggle, in dust like mist, another battle going on, beshti scrambling up, two and three together snapping free of a line unable to withstand their strength.

Hati had held on to her beast’s halter, too, and the fouling tether line had popped her beshta hard with a flying knot, then wrapped about its hindquarters, driving the beast mad. The boys struggled to coordinate their efforts, which beshta to free, which to attempt to hold. One boy reached Marak, as he struggled to bring his beshta’s head around and down to the gust-clouded sand.

Downing a beshta was one thing. Keeping it down was another trick. Marak sprawled over its bony jaw, pressing its jaw and neck to the sand as it kicked the boy who’d helped him from the wrong side.

The boy had courage—he crawled back again and added his weight to the flailing forequarters.

“Use the aifad!” Marak yelled, too busy keeping the boy from getting killed to use his own. The beshta heaved, trying to roll, and kicked his hind feet at the air with all his might, while the fool boy Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 2 3

fumbled about, thinking that he should use his scarf to blind the beast, without the practical experience to get it there across another man’s body. The earth heaved, the beshta struggled, and Marak pinned its bony head with all his strength, covering its eyes with his arm, suffering a hard nose-butt into his gut.

The boy must finally have used his head and gotten the hind feet tied with the strip of scarf. The beshta, deprived of vision, hind legs bound, smothered first under his coat and now another boy’s late-arrived aifad, finally quit struggling, lay panting, muscles hard, waiting a chance to explode if he had any notion which way was up.

“Hati?” Marak asked, half-blind and teary-eyed from the dust, and not daring, at the moment, to risk his grip by turning his head.

“I have mine,” Hati said. “The others all ran.” She was not in any way pleased. “Fashti, help Marak.”

Fashti arrived to add his weight to the struggle. All the other boys but Argid seemed to have gone to Hati’s aid, and they had, in sum, two of their beshti caught, held down by a weight of bodies as a second rumbling became a general shaking.

It went on and on. Then quit.

“The others broke the ropes and ran,” Fashti said, out of breath.

“Meziq has his leg broken, I think.”

“They didn’t take the tent. They didn’t take the food or water.”

Marak found himself short-winded. Long since he’d fought for his life, or taken a beshta’s knee in the ribs. It was a curious, even ex-hilarating feeling. “We have two beshti. We’ll catch the others. Are you all right, Hati?”

“Very well,” Hati said. “Which shall we let up?”

“Mine.” He didn’t have to explain anything to Hati. Everything was a mystery to the boys. They’d doubtless heard what to do, but never had to depend for their lives on the old wisdom. A man afoot was a dead man, and getting only one beshta down and secured meant they could catch the rest . . . if things went well.

Now it was a matter of getting their two beshti up and saddled, which meant letting go very carefully and only one at a time.

“Let go,” he instructed Argid. “Loose the hind feet when Fashti brings my tack. Move easily. Don’t hurry.”

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There was a quick to-do, sorting tack, and Fashti brought the saddle. Marak eased his pressure across the beshta’s eyes, and it wanted up all at once as the boy loosed the hind feet. Long legs started to flail, looking for purchase.

It rolled upward. He gathered himself up with a death grip on the halter and kept the beshta’s head exactly where it had to be to assist the beshta up without its breaking its own bones or a bystander’s. It had to get its front feet tucked and its hind feet under it, first.

Up it came then, reliant on his pull, dependent on him all the way, and continually under control. While he held it steady, Fashti bravely eased the saddle pad on, as another boy waited with the saddle.

“Watch that girth.” It was swinging free, and the beshta’s patience with objects hitting him in the groin was slim at the moment.

The beshta was ready to explode, and another shaking in the earth could send him sky-high. Fashti made a fast reach under, risking his head, and got the girth strap threaded through the steel ring.

Then Fashti hauled up hard, once, twice, three times. The beshta, however, took it with a deep sigh, wove from side to side, beginning his general lament at the winds and the dust and the thunder of the canvas tent, and most of all at his own deep misfortune, being caught and saddled when all but one of his mates had run, lured off by a young rival male.

“Lai, lai,” Marak said, as a parent would to an infant, while hanging on to the rein with all his strength. “Argid, get hold of his head on the other side.”

The saddle was on, straight and secure. Fashti handed Marak his long quirt. He let go the cheek strap, slipped the quirt’s loop onto his wrist, and tapped the beshta’s foreleg, keeping the long rein in hand. The beshta offered a partial, distracted obedience, answering to its training and extending its left leg in a bow. It was more interested in getting up, pulling and turning, but the slight bob it gave was enough. Marak seized the mounting loop, hurled himself up like the tribesmen of old and landed firmly in the saddle, rein in hand.

“Let him go,” he said immediately, and reined the beshta in a circle, pulling its head around against its own deep-chested body.

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 2 5

The beshta only managed a little lurch forward and around, a motion that, in the veiling dust, took them in the general direction of the canyon rim.

“Fool,” he named it, and used heel and rein to hold it back.

“Help Hati,” he said to the boys, and the whole process began again, getting their second beshta up onto her feet and saddled.

Hati got up to the saddle as a little jolt hit: a tall rider and a long-legged beshta necessarily swayed in the aftershock. The two beshti staggered, squalled and fought the reins, heads aloft.

“How is Meziq?” Marak asked the boys from his high perch. His dust-hazed view of the camp moved from windblown canvas to the relay installation as the beshta under him restlessly turned half-about and squalled. He saw Meziq lying beside the tent, the other boys hovering over him.

“The femur is broken, but not through the skin.” The boy who stood up, bare-faced, to report it had a sand-scrape on his cheek, and a renewed gust of wind battered at him, rocking him on his feet. “We shall take care of him, omi.”

The stack of baggage and saddles was safe. Their supplies and water were safe in the tent. They had two beshti. In the old days, even if the worst happened, a man only needed to stay in camp with the only water in a wide, arid land. The runaway beshti would tend in again in a matter of days to get a drink and a browse, leaving it to a man’s cleverness and strength to catch one and afterward track down the others.

But the land had changed. Water and new green growth abounded down in the river chasm on one side and down among the pans on the other, the latter sheltered from this miserable northwest wind. Marak had no question what thoughts would come into their furry skulls once the panic of the quake wore off.

And one thing more he could predict. The young male, Fashti’s, would assert himself over the females of the group the moment he was out of range of Marak’s senior bull. Tolerated until the mass escape, he would find new and rebel thoughts entering his thick young head. He needed no water their former masters had to supply, and being with the females, he would keep the females with him, moving farther and farther from the threat of combat.

So as master of this small band, Marak had his own choice. They 1 2 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h

could pile food, water, and small canvas on their two beshti, having set up the one relay and disposed of its heavy components.

They could abandon the other relay yet unset and the bulk of the supplies as a cache for a later mission to the Southern Wall, such supplies as might survive the intervening storms. They could try again next year.

But that quake had been strong, a forewarning, it might be, that they had no next year, and going back now was not Marak’s first choice. Meziq could live and heal while on trek in either direction, back to the Refuge or on to their final site, where he could sit and heal. And which direction they went now, in his intentions, depended solely on their catching or not catching the fugitive beshti.

“They will go down to the pans, likeliest,” Hati called to him over the thunder of canvas. “They will go down at the first opportunity, away from this wind.”

“No question,” Marak said, and looked down at the boys caring for Meziq. “Set it, splint it. Wrap it with matting. Keep him still until I get back.”

“Yes, omi.”

If he now only cut his hand, if he set the bone straight and bled the makers in his blood into Meziq, he might greatly hasten Meziq’s recovery.

Or kill him with fever. That sometimes resulted. In either case he would change Meziq’s life. That always resulted, and it was worth Meziq thinking long and soberly about the consequences.

“Keep the tent,” Marak said further, “and finish the work here.

If one or two beshti should come back, and you can get them, do, but take no chances and do not try to follow us down. Stay here in comfort as best you can and save your resources.” He and Hati could talk directly to the watchers in the heavens. The boys could not, but they had the relay installation at hand, and could communicate with the Refuge by means of their hand units with no trouble at all, once the relay was up and working. They needed only get the power cell charged. “Finish the setup, call Ian and get his instructions. Find out what may have happened to the Southern Wall and use your wits. Expect more quakes, and trust Ian to ad-

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 1 2 7

vise me. Be moderate with food and water, and check the deep-stakes of the tent at every shaking. We shall need rope, supplies, and canvas. And a pistol.”

“Omi,” they said earnestly, and ran to do his bidding.

With the uncertainty of the earth, he elected to stay in the saddle, he and Hati, having the boys pass them up a couple of good coils of rope, enough to constitute lead ropes for the two key fugitives, the young male and the senior female of the escapees. Food, water, a small medical bundle, else, and a simple roll of good canvas, in case worse weather came through before they got back to the tent—that was the rest of the supplies they needed. They could survive without any of it, but the nights were cold with the wind sweeping in off the southern ocean, and he foresaw several nights on this trek, very possibly.

Absolute prudence, the rule in the old days, would have left one rider with the camp itself—but try to persuade Hati to stay behind, in anything less than direst circumstances? She would suggest he could stay, she who was of the tribes, blood and bone.

And would he have that? No. So there was no need going that circle.

Meziq was his worry. He rode near the boy, where he lay in pain.

“Three days, Meziq. Endure three days and from a clear head, when I come back, ask me favors, if you think you must.”

On that offer, he turned his beshta away. The canvas thundered in the wind, and Hati, moving ahead of him, was already a red-hazed ghost in the dust.

They rode away, tracking the fugitives easily and quickly so long as the tracks lasted in the blowing gusts, intent on overtaking the beshti on the straight and narrow of the spine.

But the tracks soon led to a slot on the south side of the ridge and vanished.

It was a long, sandy slope they had noted on the way to their camp. The tracks went down it, down toward the pans, vanishing among sandstone spires, along windswept terraces.