The demons brought the tower vision to the surface so easily now.
There was the tower, there was the star, there was the cave of suns, always in the east. He felt that pitch toward it, morning and evening, always the same sense that the world had tipped precariously.
But the voices that called his name evidently called others.
Clearly they called Hati’s.
There had been a time he had believed in the god, believing the god spoke to him, in those years when the young so readily formed belief; and in one small part of his heart he found he resented discovering the voices were not his alone. He knew now that he was not the center and focus of their desire, and he began to know that his severance from his father was no greater a calamity than the potter’s, say, or Hati’s. A common potter had lost his family and trade to the same visions, the same urging.
So the potter was found out in his difference, and either he turned himself in to the Ila’s men or his community had done it. Was that not worth as much regret, as much bitterness? Was it not as great a 6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 66
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betrayal, one’s lifelong neighbors and customers, against an honest craftsman?
He waited to hear what Hati would find out, and yet he guessed the answer. Had not the mad all moved together, all twitched at once, when they were gathered together?
One wished one’s life-changing affliction to be unique. And after Hati reported to him, all of them knew it was not.
Of common visions there was the high place, so Hati reported and so the au’it wrote. There was the light, the sun, the star, multiple moons aloft and in a row. These were all the second vision. There was the cave, the hall, the hollow place, that was the third, though for Marak the cave had always held the lights. He did not have that vision independently, but combined with another common theme.
Of forty-some madmen, regarding most of the visions, they all agreed.
They agreed that the pitch when it came was always to the east, though some had thought it was toward the rising sun.
And the voices indeed called them each by name, from childhood.
From childhood they had had the lines of fire building structures in their vision, as if lines were engraved on their eyes like patterns on a pot: the same lines repeated and repeated, sometimes enlivened with fire, sometimes not. And the vision when it came was in red.
From childhood they had heard a noise in their ears, and that noise sooner or later had become a voice calling their names.
So it was not their madness that made them unique. In fact, their affliction was a leveler, and it made them much the same.
Sometimes, they confessed, their hands and bodies moved invol-untarily, in small twitches. In some it had affected their trade or their craft. One, the farmwife, Maol, had learned to draw strange symbols, the same that he saw behind his eyelids.
Marak had had the twitching affliction, to some minor degree, when he was resting; he had labored from boyhood to conceal it, tucking his arms tightly as he slept, blaming it on nightmares.
Sometimes his head ached; that was so for the lot of them. His had ached fiercely in his early years, blinding headaches, but so did his mother’s.
Was she mad? He had never thought so.
There was a gift, too, to being mad. All the mad, when they suf-
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fered small wounds, healed without a scar, and they all suffered brief, sometimes quite high, fever when they did so.
Ontori, a stonemason, said he had broken both legs falling as a boy. He walked demonstrably without a limp.
Hati showed him her hand at their next setting-forth. “I cut this badly when I was a child. Across the palm. I was trimming gola root and the knife slipped. There is no scar.”
He had taken sword cuts, too, one egregious one, which his father had dealt him in practice. He has good skin, his mother had said de-fensively, when all trace of it vanished in a month. He always heals, his mother had said, and said it fiercely: she knew it was not right.
He had healed of everything but the clan mark, which was dye.
High fever had followed the tattooing, however, and a great deal of swelling had ensued. It had healed and come out faded within the month, as if it were decades old. Some men had always thought him older than he was because of it. His mother had said maybe the fever had broken up the color. His father thought the dye had been weak, and blamed the artist.
“Some say we can’t die,” Hati said. “But I know we can. Three in my group died on the march. I’m sure those who left us the first night both died.”
“We die,” Marak said, with no doubt at all. “Some died on our march. Of accident. Of age, maybe. There was a boy, too. He wasn’t the same as us, I never thought so. But he was a good boy.” He wished he could have asked the boy if his vision, too, was different.
He thought of the old man who had died. His vision had seemed different. He had not twitched when the rest of them did.
The Ila had begun the questions. All under thirty, she said. He himself was as old as the oldest of the most of the madmen. Only the old man who had died, whose madness had seemed different, too—the old man and the boy had not moved when the mad moved, had never seemed to feel the pitch eastward.
The affliction itself wove a web that had tied the true madmen all together: he had never known how much so, until he asked himself what the Ila had asked.
But more, the mad themselves were amazed to hear such accurate questions from one like them, and began to ask and answer questions they had hidden all their lives. Yes, yes, and yes, the answers were. It is like that. I see that, too.
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It brought a strange elation. Even delighted laughter.
But it brought anxiousness, too. There was one question none of them could answer, and that was why the east, and why the madness should exist at all.
“The gods are leading us,” the stonemason said, without a doubt in the world.
Marak wished he had that simple faith. He disliked thinking about the tower. He had no notion why.
Voices whispered quietly, the while he thought about it, Marak, Marak, Marak.
These seemed to warned him of danger, as sometimes the voices did.
But he could not tell where it was.
In Hati? He thought not.
East, the voices whispered to him, and the skin tightened on his arms.
East, east, east. Go faster.
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7
No man may foul a well. The defiler of a well shall be cast out with no provision and no tent, and no tribe and no village may shelter him.
—The Book of Priests
THE NIGHT OF THAT DAY CAME HAZY AND HOT AS A furnace, the stars shimmering in the heavens. The beshti, water-short, were ill-tempered. One slave had an arm bitten for no worse offense than walking past a pack beast in the dark. The caravan master took great pains to attend the wound, and to cover the bite with salves to keep away insects, and worse. It was not only the act of a reasonable master. Wind carried the smell of blood into the desert, and blood drew vermin.
West, west, west, the voices said, contrary, but with a smell of danger, not allure.
“The wind is coming,” Hati said, with a twitch of her shoulders, and at last Marak put a name to what had been prickling at his senses all day.
Wind. Weather-sense had served him once before in the campaign on the Lakht. He had refused to lead his men out on a certain day.
The enemy, the Ila’s men, had perished.
It was like that now.
“How soon?” he asked Hati, and Hati shrugged.
“A day, perhaps as much as two. Sunset may show it.”
He had not spoken much to Obidhen. The master and his sons, the freedmen and the slaves, all kept to their own company,
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sure no one fell behind unnoticed. They doled out water and supplies to him for his tent without much converse. They were not pleased today: the bitter well they hoped to find for the beasts’ use had failed them.
He decided he should say something to the caravan master, a warning, however Obidhen might receive it. “I have a bad feeling about the weather,” was the only shape he could put to it. “So does the an’i Keran.”
They rested. And toward the evening, when they ordinarily should ride out again, Obidhen called out to his sons and his helpers:
“Drive in the deep-stakes.”
Then, walking over to Marak with his hands tucked in his belt-band, he said, “I agree. There will come a blow. We won’t budge tonight.”
“So,” Marak said. “We understand.”
There were expressions of relief throughout his tent when they heard the news, and that relief pervaded the camp, tent to tent. The nameless fear had taken a shape, and he heard others claim they felt bad weather, even vying with one another as to how early they had known. The subterfuges they had used, the lies they had told, the discipline they had exerted not to betray their affliction were all cast away. They had begun to compete with one another in their madness. The desert was the collective enemy, and their inner demons had become guides, protectors, allies.
The slaves had the deep-stakes out, and more cordage, and Marak turned the men out to help sort cordage as the caravan master’s son and the slaves drove the long anchoring stakes down and down into the sand. They anchored to them with more cord, and ran cordage up and over the canvas with laced hitches, so that when the wind blew there would be a good webwork of rope to hold the canvas from tearing. The sun lowered in fire, a glow all along the west: Hati was right.
Last, they unbundled the side flaps and lashed them into place along the sides of the tent, ready to unfurl when the wind came, as come it would.
This will be one to remember, some said, in their new weather-wisdom.
It will be bad, Hati said, and her estimation, Marak readily believed. Obidhen ordered two water packs given to the beshti, the sweet water they carried for themselves, carefully measured.
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Fear was still there. Any man, lowlander or Lakhtanin, feared the west wind in summer, but they were as ready as they could be. Some joked. The jokes rang hollow in the storm-sense that all but smothered cheer, yet they laughed.
It was coming, and there was nothing they could do more than they had done.
Marak, for one, decided to rest and take advantage of a night without traveling, and sleep another few hours. The air was stiflingly still; men talked in low voices off across the shelter of the open-sided tent. The au’it, who had written their preparations, wrote something else now, while the dim light lasted.
Hati lay down to sleep by him, as she had slept for days.
But now in the sense of storm that quieted the whole tent, Norit, too, moved her mat closer, and whispered, “I’m afraid.”
“Settle,” Marak said. “The tents will be safe. The tribes survive these winds many times a year.”
Hati shifted against him to make room for Norit. It was hot, and still at the moment.
It was not that Norit particularly chose him, he thought, but that Hati had formed a friendship. Norit had become her lieutenant as Hati had become his, and took to that responsibility. In Tarsa a cast-off wife was no one’s and nothing, of no honor, no estate, no support at all. In Hati, Norit had found anchor against a different kind of storm.
And in the process he had acquired unlooked-for obligations.
Hati co-opted him, placing herself between him and all others. Now Norit added herself, and he found, as in the vision, the random pieces made unexpected structure, not one he would have chosen.
Norit suffered from her madness. She no longer sang to herself aloud, but made small sounds as she talked to her visions. No one dressed her hair: by day, as she rode, she combed her black mane obsessively with her fingers, until it straggled in some order over her shoulders. She combed it now as she rested on her back, staring at the visions that came. She plucked at her fingers as if taking off rings. She talked to the unseen. She was not the most wholesome of their company.
But if Norit had a virtue, it was persistence, even in living, and he respected that, and tolerated her strangeness. Of all the marches the mad had made on their way to the holy city, theirs had been the 6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 72
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harshest, under the worst of the Ila’s men, in provinces once hostile to the Ila, where rebellion was still recent in memory. The common run of the Ila’s men had treated the mad as enemies, and devils, and had no mercy. They had driven the fragile sense from some before they died. Love, Norit had sung. Let us find love.
And having been launched on another long march without her will, Norit spoke to no one but Hati at any length at all, but if Hati waved a hand, Norit carried this or that and if the baggage wanted moving, Norit moved it. Sometimes her eyes stared at things not even another madman could guess. She had learned the besha, and rode from sitting start to kneeling. All that Hati did, Norit did. If Hati groomed her beast, Norit did. If Hati went to interfere in the slaves’
cooking, Norit went and listened.
“It builds,” Norit said to the gathering dark. “It builds. It carries away villages.”
Elsewhere he heard men talking. There was little movement in the tent. They had worked hard getting the deep-stakes in. There was a thin sandstone under the sand beneath this tent. They had worn the skin from their hands weaving the web of cordage and snugging it down. Now they lay, nursed their blisters, and listened to a slight stir and flap of the canvas.
“Perhaps it won’t come,” the potter said.
The orchardman said, “Shut up. At least we get to sleep a few more hours.”
The time dragged by.
Little gusts stirred the tent against the web of cordage. The beasts complained and moaned, and moved behind the tents, where they would take shelter for the duration.
Marak got up and went out from under the tent to see what was coming, in the murky last of the light. A red wall of dust spread over half the sky, deceptive in its very size.
Hati had come out, and Norit did, and the rest came after her, with the wind stirring their garments.
The boys and the slaves had turned out from the other four tents, too, with the onset of the wind. They set to tightening the web of rope, which had stretched out in the heat.
“Put down the sides!” they shouted. It was time. They unrolled the sides of the tents, and made those fast by their rings and by cords.
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down to wait. The storm light came, a sickly twilight outside the single opening they had left. At his order, each of them piled his own waterskin with the common stores, some reluctantly, but they obeyed. Then they lay ready to seal the tent entirely once the blow started. The light fell on the edges of faces and bodies: they looked toward the light as a precious commodity about to vanish.
The beasts moaned outside as the wind set up its own complaint, thumping at the canvas in a sudden violence.
“We can have rations every morning and every evening,” Marak said so all could hear him. “Look at where your mat is, and where the water and food is. The au’it will sleep by the water. There will be water at the same times each day, no other, so don’t plan otherwise. It may be days, and it will be dark, so get your bearings before the light goes.”
There was no complaint. They had had their midday supper.
They would take their rations cold, no luxury of cooking at all in the utter lack of
sunlight, and short water for drinking. Even the villages knew the lowland storms, and feared these as they feared the god himself.
The gust carried sand, the wind turning redder and redder outside, veiling all detail between themselves and the world. The light slowly diminished both by sunset and by storm until the dark outside was deep and violent, leaving the merest hint of a doorway to good eyes.
Marak went and drew the flap shut and laced it down by feel. The wind howled, and the canvas thumped and strained. Some man inside wailed, a frightened human voice appealing to the god, and others joined it in querulous chatter.
“It’s nothing but the wind,” Marak said, walking the carefully memorized track back to his mat. “The poles are set and the stakes are deep. Be quiet. You from the villages, the Lakht throws storms such as you’ve not seen. This may last all through tomorrow and the day after that, and perhaps a third. Storms often come in the summer, on the Lakht, but the stakes will hold, and we will last it out. Go to sleep. Sleep as much as you can.”
The wind all but drowned his voice at the last. His eyes could find no light at all. If he had not known where his mat was, he never could have found it.
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head: Marak, Marak, Marak, endlessly. He felt Hati’s touch, and lay down on his back, listening to the voices and to the thumping of the canvas. He had the waterskins at his back, and all the rations for the tent positioned there, with the au’it, the impartial, the incorruptible witness, sitting directly against them.
He hoped the master’s sons and the slaves had done their work well. He had seen nothing to fault in their work. But now they knew they were very small, and the desert wind was a towering devil, thumping and battering all about the edges of their shelter, trying to get fingers within the lacings.
For about a half an hour he rested and listened to the fury build.
An arm came about him, and a warm body shaped itself to him on his left, and he knew the culprit as he moved an arm to send her back to her own mat.