Another star fell, this one in a crack of thunder, and shattered in a cloud that blotted out the stars along its track.
“This will continue,” Norit said in a tone both cold and assured, and yet trembling with Norit’s chin. “This will continue. It will likely miss Pori. But the plain beyond isn’t safe.”
Now the heavens showed streaks of a star-fall denser than anything Marak had ever seen. At every moment the sky showed another, and another, and another, then five, ten at once, and more and more and more, faster than a man could count.
“Is this the world ending?” Tofi asked. He had his arms folded over his head as he rode, as if that could make him safe from plummeting stars. The slaves cried out in alarm as another of the bright ones came down, and burst in a long trail of fire.
“Keep moving,” Norit said, and that new vision came, overwhelming, of rock hurtling into sphere, then a swarm of rocks, again and again and again. “This is the lightest of the fall. This is what will happen, here, and across the world, far worse.”
Marak all but lost his balance riding as his eyes revised the scale of those rocks of the vision as equal to the stars above them, careening down in dizzying succession.
And what was the sphere?
“The falling rocks,” he said: those were the only words he could find for what he saw, and the import of them he could not measure by any attack he had ever seen. “The spheres.”
“The death of all of us,” Tofi moaned, hiding his head, and the slaves rode up close to them, pointing at the largest, waiting to die. “Look!” they cried. “Look!” until they ran out of astonishment.
It went on for hours: at times there seemed thousands at once, until the whole heavens were streaked with light, even while the sun was coming up. Norit hugged her arms against herself like a beaten child as she rode, rocking to the besha’s gait.
And the sun rose and reached its height.
They reached a flat, and spread the tent, but kept looking toward the white-hot heavens as they hammered home the stakes. They had lost confidence in the sky. It was long before they slept, and waked and exited the tent to break camp as the sky began to shadow.
Another star fell, herald of another such night.
The slaves cried out. The au’it opened her book and recorded the fall. But a second and a third followed.
“Let us be on our way,” Marak said to Tofi. “If the heavens fall, what can we do? Let’s go.”
But now the slaves went about their work with fearful looks at the sky, while the beasts, often reluctant, put up a mindful resistance and bawled and circled away from attempts to load them.
At a great boom out of the sky, the beasts bolted.
“They know they’re going to die,” the slaves cried. “We’re all going to die!”
“I will free you now!” Tofi cried. “I will pay you wages now! Catch them!”
The slaves took out, running. Hati raced out, caught her own beast, managed to get into the saddle, and rode out and got ahead of the most of the strays, driving them back with blows of her quirt, to Tofi’s effusive gratitude. The slaves caught the others and led them back, panting and staggering, too exhausted and too frightened, perhaps, to attempt to ride.
Meanwhile the rain of fire continued in the heavens, and a strange cloud hung where the star had burst.
Marak put Norit up on her beast, and the au’it onto hers. He mounted up on Osan as the slaves struggled with the packs and, with Hati, kept the frightened younger animals in place while the slaves made the older of the pack beasts kneel, and loaded up such of the baggage as waited ready.
Seeing the other beasts sitting calmly under their packs, then, the skittish ones began to kneel on their own, the habit of their kind.
They struck the tent. The rest of the baggage went on.
Then they set themselves under way, under the overthrow of heaven, making all possible speed.
Chapter Twelve
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In the afternoon sky in the third day of the third cycle of the first season a strange pale light appeared and the sun seemed to set in the east in daylight. The light endured as a sunset and faded as a sunset fades, but pale throughout. The lord of the tribe asked the grandmothers whether the tribe should go to know the source of this light, but it was near calving time and the grandmothers said it was far away and the walk would risk the calves and mothers. The lord of the tribe asked whether they should tell a village, and the grandmothers said the village priest would make trouble for the tribe.
—The Spoken Traditions of the Andesar
The sky whitened into day, and they reached an alkali pan. They had no need to drink, and would not drink of the well that they could dig in this place, not at the most desperate. They simply used the stony flat for a noontime camp, just off the clinging white powder, and the au’it sat and wrote in her book, flicking now and again at windblown white dust that fell on her pages.
The three slaves bickered with Tofi, who swore he had never freed them, that he had only said he might free them if they caught all the beasts, but Marak, seeing unhappiness and surly workers, took the slaves’ side. “You did say it. They’re free men. Now they have to earn their food.”
Neither side liked that completely, and the beasts sat bawling and complaining while Tofi and the slaves, now freedmen, bartered over wages in the hot sun.
“Pay them what you pay any hireling!” Marak said, to end the dispute. “And no more!” He pointed at the au’it and made such a gesture as the Ila herself might make. “Write it! Besides, the world is ending. What does a little extravagance matter?”
The au’it wrote.
It was the first time he had said it in those terms. The slaves fell into silence. Tofi did, and after the beasts were unladed and the tent was up, Tofi on the spot untied a wrapped string and counted out gold rings. “If you have any sense,” Tofi muttered to the new freed-men as he did so, “don’t spend anything on drink. Buy goods when we get to Oburan and sell them where we’re going. You know how it’s done. If the world is ending, one can still make a profit. Think of what the white tents don’thave, buy it cheap as you can and sell that.”
“Master,” they still called him, when they were happy with him. They went away and compared the rings they had, content, as if the world might, after all, go on.
Marak settled down with Hati and Norit, and, taking some cheer from Tofi’s pragmatic wisdom, he stretched himself out to sleep. Meanwhile the au’it, tucked up with her book, settled against the tent pole and unwrapped a new cake of ink: she had written up the old one until there was nothing left but the corners. She sharpened a new pen.
They all were exhausted, after chasing panicked beshti and watching the heavens come down in fragments: they had used deep-irons to tether the beasts this time, and they slept more deeply in that confidence.
Marak, the voices began; and Norit shook at him, and waked him.
There was still ample light. He looked at the angle of the shadows and grimaced, incoherent with sleep, but Norit had waked Hati, too, and then Tofi.
Haste, the voices said, too disquieting for rest. Tofi looked like the risen dead. Hati scowled, and the slaves-now-freedmen moaned and resisted. But they were awake. There was reason, so Marak said to himself, and gathered himself up to his feet, out under a sun only a quarter down the sky and a heat still shimmering on the sand.
It was no good to curse. Norit did as Luz did, and was, herself, exhausted. They struck their sole tent, loaded the beasts, and dug up the stakes, sweating.
Then they began their daily trek to the west, under a sky still too bright for stars. Marak slept, nodding. So Hati did, and Tofi, from time to time, until they acquired a better mood and had some sense of rest. Norit managed: at least her head drooped, and Marak kept an eye on her for fear she might fall off; but she stayed, and waked, and rubbed her eyes, adjusting the aifad to shade them. There was little talk, little to distract them in a monotony of riding.