Hammerfall

He healed. He always healed. Even the madness healed itself to its old terms, as if it were an inescapable condition of his good health.

He lay on his mat and listened to his voices until the sun sank and the caravan master and his sons began to strike tents. Then it was time to move. The soldiers gathered their water-plump flesh up onto riding beasts and rode back the way they had come, returning to the city. No one was sorry for that.

And the mad, once rested, wandered about with more energy than before, carrying their own mats, some even helping with the tents now that the soldiers were gone, now that they were sure they were no longer prisoners.

Everyone was out and about, finally, except the wife from Tarsa, Norit, who sat and rocked, rocked, rocked, as the boy had used to.

The caravan master came cautiously to inform him they must strike this tent, too, if they were to move, and asking him would he persuade the madwoman to get up.

Marak saw from the tail of his eye that the au’it made a note in her book. He wondered what she wrote, and for whom she wrote it.

He went and assisted the wife, Norit, to her feet. And the au’it made another note.

Marak, Marak, Marak. The sound went on, maddening. The lights within his skull outshone the sun, a long, long tu

The slaves had saddled his riding beast. In this gathering bout of madness he thought it was Osan, the name of his very first, when he was a boy; and as he settled himself in the saddle and endured the neck-snapping jolts of the beast rising, he decided that that was its name. His life had come to a new begi

A breeze rose with the lowering of the sun, the first breath of air, a reminder of life in the midst of the great flat, and it roused Osan’s spirits, too. Marak took in the rein and walked Osan in a circle until all the mad were up and until the caravan masters had mounted their own beasts. Then he let Osan go, riding first with the master’s sons, and then alone, striking a good traveling pace.

He had used to ride into the western desert for days. Where have you been? his father would ask, and he would lie and call it hunting, when his hunting was voices and the visions. He would kill something at the last, and bring it back, and his father would believe him.

He recalled killing a bird, and remembered how he had stroked its head and thought if he were not mad it would not be dead, because there was precious little good to him in killing it. He had stamped it into the sand. He had thrown rocks at it. Then, in cowardice, he had killed another, to have something to show his father for his day in the wilderness.

Osan, his companion of prior lies and deceptions about his madness, was bone and dust now. The shoulder on which he used to lean was gone. There was no more help from that quarter. There was this beast, which would live or die with him. So with all these men. He need not go anywhere to explain himself this night. No more. No more lies. He was what he was, and the soldiers, their last tie to the city, had left them. Only the caravan master could dispute his word, and Obidhen, set under his orders, called him lord.

They were well equipped, like the best of caravans. There were no walkers to slow them. There were no wagons. Out away from the wells as a fast, well-equipped caravan could travel, there was less chance of bandits. It was water that drew predators.

Marak, the voices said, past the roaring in his ears. Marak. This way.

East where the sun rose. East where the world slid. East, east, east, and an end of questions, for men and women in universal agreement, a handful of souls all set desperately toward the identical, desperate, crazed obsession.

So his jagged reasoning went as they traveled on into the night, when every man was isolate and when the dark cooled the land to shadow and starlight.

At times he slept in the saddle. At times he waked to look at the stars and realize that nothing known lay in front of him.

In the enduring dark this new Osan called up emotions in him that he thought the drugs and the march had killed. Osan made his hands remember love and his body remember freedom, and those two things stirred other feelings.

Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said. His body fell into a rhythm it had known from before he could remember, a rhythm he had learned in his father’s arms, when that had been the safe place, the shaded place, the secure place.

Now that of all things was the deadliest place, the most painful place for memory to go.

There was only Osan.

Freedom was all he had ever asked of his father.

A cave of suns beckoned him, blinding bright: he squinted his eyes even in the dark, and it made no more sense than it ever had.

A tower rose up against the stars, a black shape, a vacancy of light. Marak, the voices said.

He had fought the voices’ advice, smothered the images, hidden them all his life, and now he had nothing to learn of the world but the truth of what they meant. It was as if they, he and the madmen, all shed their clothes and ran naked in the dark. The au’it had told him all their names, and he knew now he was not alone. He had sisters. He had brothers. The truly mad had walked away to die and now he was left with those who, like him, had wit enough to dominate the visions, and will enough to live.

They were going to find the answers. Together, in the east, they would find the answers.

Chapter Five

« ^ »

In the wisdom of the Ila, the Holy City first sent out the tribes to discover the land, and to them the Holy City appointed the skill to rule the high Lakht. The next to go out from the Holy City were the lords of villages, with their households, and they went to the wells of sweet water that the tribes had found and occupied them. For that reason no village may deny water to the tribes. To the caravans it may sell water, but the tribes may take what they need.

—The Book of Goson

Day came. the world might resume its sanity, but the mad continued in their course, and the beasts continued their patient, easy stride.

So, so, so, Marak thought, as the sun warmed the tense muscles of his shoulders: so, after all, the sun came up, and he, who had thought himself above the mad, was after all no different, no more and no less fit to survive.

He was reconciled. He began to look at faces. He learned them. He matched them with names.

The sun came up and rose higher and they camped at greater leisure, cooking, eating, and sleeping, a close row of five tents. When the air cooled, they rode on again. A few of the mad even attempted to mount as the more experienced riders did. One, the potter, fell. But he had courage, and the others felt the impact in their bones. They laughed only when he laughed.

A few riders continually caused their beasts more trouble than guidance with the rein. The wife from Tarsa, Norit, kept hers too tight, perhaps afraid that the beast would bolt and carry her away into the deep desert.

“No,” Marak said, having seen the caravan master’s vain effort to change her habit. “No. Hold the rein this way, over your hand. A simple turn of the wrist signals the beast. If you always twitch, he stops hearing you, like a child who shouts too much. Let your back give. Let the rein flow unless you have an order. I assure you, you haven’t strength enough in your arm to pull him back if he wanted to run. He doesn’t want to. It’s much too hot.”

She gripped the rein, all the same. Her hands must ache.