Or they did as Memnanan’s great-grandson had done, before he died: he’d destroyed an entire laboratory and taken three lives before he’d gone down, angry at his life and his long train of reverses. It was sad and pointless, the waste of a life that could have meant something and that had held so much promise. But Memnanan refused to change himself while the world changed around him, and saddest of all, everyone was relieved when Memnanan was gone, even, one feared to say, Memnanan himself.
So a wise immortal embraced the howling wind and the dust out here in the wide land as he embraced his wife. And he took the delay as a variation in a world that otherwise was too stable, and cherished the reverses that inevitably came as absolute proof there were still surprises to be had in the world—since without surprises, immortality grew unbearable. Memnanan had shut himself away from the desert, sealed himself in his work, and met small reverses with increasing anger in his metal corridors. Lack of humor, Marak believed, had been his undoing, right along with confinement under a roof.
But there were, mortal and immortal, those blessed with the true spark of curiosity. The boys they had chosen for this trek gathered close on this night of wailing wind and begged for stories, to carry the old tales forward to their children.
Hati told the best stories. She had a gift for it. She painted the great storms of ages ago. She told a half ring of listening faces by lanternlight how, in those days, the dark, sand-laden wind wore metal away and stripped flesh from bone in an hour. She told how the tribes had had no battery lights, only flame that flickered perilously low as the great gusts sucked the very air out of the tent. There were so many ordinary things this generation had never seen or felt. She told them about villages that now only turned up as half-buried ruins, and how life was then, villagers making gardens in soil-filled stone basins, to waste no drop of water.
Every word of memory was precious, and Hati never recited: she told the tales with her heart for another generation of eager faces, so many generations by now that the individuals within them grew difficult to remember. Marak himself struggled with names, and mistook people alive now for people generations dead, attributing to the new and innocent, too, the baggage of lives past. Perhaps he cared less for individuals than Hati. Perhaps he saw them as an endless succession of similar lives, so that one generation of listening, earnest youth filled the place of another within the tent, and nothing was lost forever.
He loved young people in general. He was particularly patient with the young ones who volunteered for such long treks with them, young people whose questions repeated the silly questions of generations before them and whose jokes echoed the amusements of generations stretching away into trackless time. Truly new jokes grew like the mountains, slowly, out of cataclysm, and lived for centuries, changing as they aged. When the wind blew and they were shut in like this, they soon wore out the jokes they had, but a wise man laughed all the same, and meant it, simply because they were alive.
Drusus had said the storm would spend itself by morning. And like most southern storms in these years, the wind lessened enough for them to wrap up close and go out under the morning sky to see what the wind had done to their plans, and how deep it had piled the sand around the base of the relay unit.
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 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 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.