Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh Page B

having it. “And aim is a matter of training.”
    â€œI have no time for that,” he said, and put aside that piece that, itself, could have hired a regiment.
    A bow—there were numerous good ones—might give him both range and rapidity of fire, but nothing to defeat a mobbing among the vermin, and it was a lowland weapon. In the summer heat of the Lakht the laminations outright melted and gave way.
    In the end he settled for the machai , a light, thin blade, as much tool as weapon, that he hung from his belt, and a good harness-knife.
    The captain looked at him oddly, and honestly tried to press at least a spear on him.
    â€œAn encumbrance,” Marak said. It was the same reason he wished none of the Ila’s regiments, which encumbered themselves with all these things and baked in hardened leather besides, in the desert heat. “I want only this. For the rest of us, good boots. We’ll ride. We’ll all ride. But good boots. One never knows.”
    â€œAs you wish,” the captain said, but after that the captain seemed worried, as if he had failed somehow in his duty, in sending him out short of equipment with an army of well-shod madmen, of which he was chief. The captain tried to make up for it in other offerings, silver heating-mirrors, a burning-glass, two fine blankets, and a personal, leather-bound kit of salves and medicines, all of which Marak did take.
    Then the captain walked him out to the pens, a fair distance, and pulled a riding beast from the reserve pens, a creature of a quality Kais Tain rarely saw.
    That, he prized, and found that he and the captain had reached an accommodation of practical cooperation. Under other circumstances they would have been aiming weapons at one another. But now the captain seemed to understand he was not there to steal away goods, but to carry out the Ila’s wishes, economically, and asking no great show about it.
    In that understanding they became almost amiable, and the captain chided sergeants who hid back the better harness. They laid out the best. The captain’s name, he learned, was Memnanan. He had spent all his life in the Ila’s service as he had spent his in Tain’s.
    They walked companionably through areas of the Beykaskh that Marak knew his father would spend a hundred men’s lives to see. He looked up against the night sky at the high defenses, the strong walls and observed a series of latchless gates that sighed with steam.
    They had never even come close to piercing these defenses. Only their raids on caravans had gained notice, and that, likely, for its inconvenience, unless they should have threatened the flow of goods for a full year.
    The storerooms they visited and those they passed were immense. All the wealth in the world was here. They passed the kitchens. The vermin of the city ignored morsels of bread cast in a drainway. It lay and rotted. He found that as much a wonder as the steam-driven doors.
    â€œWe have sent for a caravan master,” Memnanan said. “We count forty-one who will make the whole journey, including yourself. Getting them outfitted will take hours, at the quickest.”
    The captain ordered a midnight supper and shared it with him under an awning near the kitchens, the two of them drinking beer that finally numbed the pain, both getting a small degree drunk, and debating seriously about the merits of the western forges and the balance of their blades. In pride of opinion, they each cast at a target, the back of a strong-room door.
    They were within a finger of each other and the center of the target. Another beer and they might have sworn themselves brothers. And in that thought, Marak recoiled from the notion, and sobered, as the captain must surely do.
    A sergeant reported that the caravan master had come into the outer courtyard. This arrival turned out to be a one-eyed man with his three sons, who together owned fifty beasts, six slaves, and five tents, with two