Forty Thousand in Gehenna (46 page)

The sun arrived, spread its rays through the ruin of a forest before them, where the trees had been cast down, undermined. They plunged over this, like a living torrent, with hissings and scramblings; but greater were the rocks down by the sea that she had climbed on Scar. Grays, not their own, vacated the Pattern and fled before the browns, through the brush, over the ridges, among trees still standing.

Scar’s collar flashed up. Taem’s brown plunged ahead. The hisses of browns broke like water hitting hot metal.

Her riders surged about her. Whistles split the air; younger calibans took their riders to the fore as they climbed the mounds, refusing the patterns they met now.

Elai clamped her knees taut as they met soft ground where grays were at work and Scar lurched down and up again, past the roots of overthrown trees, past brush that raked harmlessly on her leather-clad legs.

“Hai!” She caught the fever and shouted with her young men’s cries, with the high-pitched yelps of the young women as they came down the banks among grays that froze under the browns’ scrabbling claws, confused and immobile. She couched her spear, held her seat, for now other shapes hove up, rider-bearing calibans, shapes bristling with raised collars, with spears in human hands. Darts flew, struck her leathered arm.

She shouted, not knowing what she yelled, but all at once the fear was gone, every dread was gone. “
Ellai
!” she was yelling at the last, which was her mother’s name; and “
Cloud
!”

More darts; she shook them off; they struck Scar in vain, useless on his hide. Lesser browns fled Scar’s approach, bearing their riders out of his path. Scar trod others down, mounted over them, clawing their riders heedlessly underfoot, with riders yelling and calibans lurching this way and that through the ruin of trees.

Scar lurched, taxed her weak leg. She held as the earth opened, and grays came up, some calibans losing their riders as they slid into the undermining, and over all the hisses and the screams.

But she knew where she was going. Paeia was beside her, was delayed by one of the Styxsiders so that she lost that guard; but then came a clearing of bodies, a withdrawing except for the rider coming toward her, a caliban larger than the rest.

Jin.

Scar lurched aside, almost unseated her. One of her riders rushed by in the whirl of day and trees and plunging bodies. Her spearshaft cracked hard against another, and Scar bore her out of the path of that attack as another of her riders took it. Taem was out there, Taem’s brown trying Jin’s, circling.

“Scar!” she yelled, her spear tucked again beneath her arm. She drove with her heels, less to Scar’s tough hide than the darts that spattered about them. “Scar!”

Scar moved, shied off as Jin overrode Taem, kept retreating, retreating, disordering their lines.

Jin’s brown scrambled forward, lunged low as Scar shied off, presenting his belly. Elai fought for balance, dug with her heel and rammed the spear at the Styxsider; but Scar was still rising, up and over the collar crest of Jin’s caliban.

The lame leg betrayed her as Scar twisted, as he reared up with the Styxsider in his jaws and the Styxside caliban lunging and clawing at his gut. She hit the ground, winded, tucked low as a tail skimmed her back, melded herself in the gouged earth as it came back again, as the battle rolled over her. She spat mud from her mouth and scrambled for her life as the feet came near, as the rolling mass lashed the ground and calibans raked each other.

She fell again, legs too shaken to bear her weight, used the spear to lever herself up, sorted caliban from caliban in the mass and the one with the throat-grip had a starlike scar shining on his side. She rammed the spear into the soft spot of the other’s neck, heaved her weight against it, and the mass all came her way: a tail hit her, but she was already going down, half-senseless as calibans poured over her, to the sharing of the kill.

She scrambled out of the mire—wild, blind struggle: hands seized her, pulled her to safety, and she leaned on offered arms—Dain was one. They pulled her further, away from the heaving mass that had become a ball of calibans, huge browns biting and rolling like ariels about a prize. She could not see Scar.

“They’ve run,” Maeri said, one of her own. “First, they’re
down.”

There was chaos everywhere, no rider able to stay mounted, calibans pursuing fugitives, fighting each other, humans in pursuit of humankind, the earth thundering to the impacts of the massed bodies in that knot before them. She saw Scar pull free of it, saw him seize another throat in his jaws and plunge into the mass.

Alive, then, alive. And Jin was under that. She began to shiver, unable to stand.

They brought her an accounting of the dead: Taem was one; but she had known that. There were other names. “MaGee?” she asked. “Where’s Paeia?”

“Paeia’s hunting,” the man told her, kin of Paeia; and with a grin: “MaGee fell off way back. Must be safe.”

“Find her,” Elai said, never taking her eyes from the feeding that had begun on this hillside above the Cloud.

There were other things to do, but the calibans would tend to them; and the most of her young folk would not go so far as the Styx. Some would, to be sure the Pattern there shaped the way it should. Most would come back to her, here, in good time.

She gave a whistle, trying to retrieve Scar; but that was useless yet. It would be useless until there was nothing left but bones. So she sat there on the trampled hill to wait, numb and cold and aching when she moved. They brought her drink; they brought her the prizes of Jin’s camp: she took little interest in these things.

But they found MaGee, finally; and MaGee sat down near her in the dim morning with the calibans dragging the bones toward the river, leaving the trampled ground.

She offered MaGee her hand. MaGee’s eyes were bruised-looking, her face scratched and battered. Her hair hung loose from its braids, caked with mud.

So was her own, she reckoned.

“You’re all right,” MaGee said.

“All right,” she said, too weary to move an arm. She motioned with her eyes. “Got him chewed down to bone, that Thorn.”

Something distressed MaGee, the blood maybe, or getting thrown. Her mouth shook. “What happened?”

“Got him.” Elai drew a hard breath. Her ribs hurt. Clearly MaGee failed to understand much at all. She whistled up Scar, levering herself up again with the spear, because there was something starting on that bank, a new altercation among calibans—some of the Styxside lot, that might be, or some of their own from Cloudside, testing out who had the right to shove and who had to take. She was anxious. She wanted Scar out of there, but calibans were snapping and lashing at one another and she did not want the quarrel moved their way either. She could see Scar among the others; could see Paeia’s big brown throwing her weight around, sweeping lessers out of the way with her tail. The sniping attacks went on, lessers’ jaws closing on a hind or forelimb, dragging at the skin, worrying them from this side and that—

He’s old
, Elai thought. Her fists were clenched.
That Thorn got him in the belly
. She saw Scar bowl a rival over and get him belly up, after which the rival ran away, but others worried at him: he swept them with his tail, whirled and snapped. It went on.

“Is he all right out there?” MaGee asked.

“Of course he’s all right.” Elai whistled again. Others called their mounts, and some of the quarrelling quieted. But there was no recalling them, not yet. She turned, motioned with her spear downriver, and others gained their feet, of the elders.

“What now?” MaGee asked.

“Nothing now,” Elai said, looking at her in bewilderment. “Don’t you know? That’s Jin down there. We’ve won.”

Message: Gehenna Station to Base Director

Survey notes two movements this morning—one on a broad front toward the Styx and a second, smaller and more compact movement up the Cloud. The Styxward movement is of greater speed. Survey suggests contrary to expectations that the invasion may have been routed…

205 CR, day 215
Cloudside

Someone whistled, to the rear of the column, and heads turned: McGee looked, the while she limped beside Elai over the sand beside the Cloud: the calibans had come, swimming effortlessly down the current.

“Do we ride?” McGee asked. It seemed madness that they had left the calibans behind; or not madness: for her own part she had taken one fall, and that was enough for her bones. One fall; one nightmare of Brown trampling down a man. But no one said anything; they had left the calibans behind and walked at Elai’s order, as if it were sane; and she was not sure of that, was sure of nothing now.

Still the silence. Elai said little on the walk, nothing but monosyllables, stayed lost in her own thoughts, unlike a woman who had just won the world entire, who held all Gehenna in her hands.

The calibans paced them in the river, that was all.

“No,” Maeri answered her question, Dain’s sister of First Tower. “Don’t think so.”

They walked further. The calibans dived and surfaced, not coming in, but at last Scar did, strode out on the shore ahead of them.

Riverweed
, McGee thought at first. But it was his skin, hanging in rags about his belly, about his limbs. He walked with his collar down, his tail inscribing a serpentine in the sand.

Elai whistled then; and Scar stopped.
He’s hurt
, McGee opened her mouth to ask, to protest; but she stood still, watched with dismay as Elai approached him, touched him, climbed up to her place despite the hanging skin.

They began to walk again, in Scar’s tracks on the shore, at Elai’s back, no more cheerful than Scar himself, while the calibans sported in the river.

They would know, back in Cloud Towers, who had won, McGee reckoned; the calibans would get there before them: ariels would pattern it, grays would build it for the people to see, out beyond the rows of dry fishnets.

But she looked at Elai riding ahead of them, at bowed shoulders, both rider and caliban hurting.

She was afraid then, the way she had been afraid before the battle; in a way that wiped out nightmares of what had been.

What’s happening
? she wondered. She stalked Dain, walked beside him in hope of answers, but he had none, only trudged along like the rest.

They camped early; more calibans became tractable and came in, seeking out their riders. Scar sulked alone, down by the riverside, and Elai huddled by the fire.

“Is everything all right?” McGee asked at last, crouching there.

“Jin’s dead,” said Elai tonelessly. “Styx towers will fall now.”

“You mean that’s where the others went.” McGee pursued the matter, knowing it was fragile ground. Elai held out her hand and opened the fingers. End of the matter. McGee sat and hugged her knees against her chest, in the fire warmth, surer and surer that something had been lost.

Scar, she kept thinking in growing chill, and restrained herself from a glance toward the river; she knew what she would see: an old caliban on the last of his strength, a caliban who had done well to survive his last battle. Some other caliban could take him now. Any other. If one were inclined to try.

Paeia—off hunting still. Paeia would come. Maybe others.

She lowered her head against her arms, feeling all her aches, a nagging sense that all the ground she relied on was undermined.

Other riders came before the dawn, quietly, bringing Styxsider prisoners who came and sat down across the fire, a handful of youths, sober and terrified. Elai thought about them a long time.

Speak up for them
, McGee thought; it was outsider-instinct. And then she clenched her fist in front of her mouth as she sat there and pressed her fist against her lips to hold herself from talking.
I could get Elai killed with wrong advice
.

But it was Elai let the boys live after all, with a gesture of her hand, and they sat there and shivered, all tucked up looking lost and scared and knowing that (if Elai told truth) there was nothing left to run to.

So other riders brought other prisoners. One ran: Parm was his name, at whose name the riders hissed…he took off running and the Calibans got him, down by the river in the dark.

McGee sat there and shivered, the same way she had sat through the rest, as if some vital link had been severed. She betrayed nothing, had no horror left.

It’s cold
, she told herself.
That’s all
.

She had learned to be practical about death, in these days, to deal it out, to watch it. It was like any other thing, to listen to a man die, a little sound, a little unpleasantness. A small, lost sound, compared to the battle on the shore, the earth shaking to the fall of the great browns. The air filled with their hisses. Soon done. Forgettable.

But they brought Mannin in, and that was different… “Found one of the starmen,” Paeia said, who had come with that group. And what they brought was a leather-clad, draggled man who did nothing but cough and shiver and tucked himself up like the teenaged boys. This thing—this wretched thing—she stared at him: it was only the dark hair, the height, that told her which it was.

“Let him live,” she said to Elai, in a voice gone hoarse and hard. So she discovered the measure of herself, that she could bear the death of natives, but not of her own kind. She was ashamed of that.

“He’s yours,” Elai said.

“Give him food and water,” McGee said, never moving from where she sat, never moving her fist from her chin, her limbs from the tightness that kept them warm. She never looked closely at Mannin, not being interested any longer. It was a horror she did not want, at the moment, to consider, how she had come to sit here passing life and death judgments, in the mud and the stink and the Calibans milling about ready for the kill.

It did not seem likely then that she could ever go back to white, clean walls, that she could unlearn what she knew, or be other than MaGee. MaGee. Healer. Killer. Dragon-rider left afoot. She saw the sunlit beach, there in the night, herself young, Elai a child, old Scar in his prime again, his hide throwing back the daylight.