Hammerfall

He saw how he had committed himself. He was not a coward, to back away. He was not in Kais Tain, where marriage was singular and women, but not men, could die for a mere suspicion of infidelity.

To what, then, had he agreed? To a night under a roof? To a lifetime, and two women? And a breach with all the customs of the west? His father would be appalled.

“I am not an’i Keran,” he said.

“Once we sleep together, you are,” Hati said, and added a confidence which sent a warmth through him that was by no means the sinking sun: “I am initiate.”

Did they not say, for a proverb of the unfindable, a Kerani virgin? The women of that tribe took care there were none. But she had not called herself wife, or widow. She had not had a man before him.

No one but the au’it had slept near him. But when next they pitched the tents Hati unrolled her mat next to his. Without a word, assuming the right, she lay down in her robes and her veil.

Not until a roof, he had said, but he had given her a certain right by the agreement they had made together, and he had no notion quite what to do to prevent this steady, purposeful assault on his senses.

With the furnace-warm air blowing through the open sides of the tent, she turned on her side facing him. He turned on his back and stared at the canvas above them.

Above it the noon sun was a light shining through the heavy fabric, and the sideless tent billowed and bucked in occasional gusts. A rope needed tightening. But that was the slaves’ job, not his. It was the master’s job to see to it.

It was better to be here, lying at ease, than riding against the furnace-hot wind.

It was better to have a woman than to be alone.

He had no wish to drive her away. He had no wish to end this proposal in a quarrel before they had even shared a bed.

A hand touched his. Her fingers ran from his open palm to his arm and his shoulder. He lay still and ignored her enticement, finding it on the one hand pleasant and on the other vexing, an assault on his mind, as well as his body.

Suddenly, subtly, the voices spoke. He heard them and knew what stopped her hand wandering, what made her rest a moment, too, eyes shut… every line of her expression said she hated that intrusion, resented it, detested its timing.

He observed the strong cast of her unveiled face, the long, slim hand that rested on a breast breathing hard, the offended pride of a woman who had been cast out, humiliated, but not broken.

The voices di

He had never taken the chance to talk directly to another of the afflicted on the one fact of their lives they all knew.

“They call my name,” he said to that closed, taut face. “Do they call yours?”

Her eyes opened, searched his. None of the mad was willing to speak about their affliction. It was all but rude to breach that silence.

“Yes,” she said. “They called my child-name and now they call my woman-name.”

“The same,” he confessed, which he had only admitted to his father. “Day and night.”

“If we walk east forever, what will we meet? The bitter water?”

“If we walk that far.” No one lived near the bitter water. No bird flew. The water-edge there was a land of white crusts and death. The toughest men in the world lived at the edge of the bitter plain and hammered out salt and breathed it and tasted it until they died. Everywhere in the world, men somehow found a way to live. Those men were free, at least. They traded with the Ila. They did not obey her.

The lines of fire built within his eyes. They made a form, rising up and up.

“Do you see a tower?” he asked the an’i Keran.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you see it now?”

“Yes,” she said. Two mad visions touched one another. Two were the same. He suspected they all were, and that every man heard his own name.

“I called it a spire,” she said, “before I saw the holy city. Could it be the Beykaskh?”

“Not the Beykaskh,” he said. He was as sure of that as he was sure the direction was east. “No tower that I know, so tall and thin. A spire. A rock spire?”

“So,” she said.

“I wonder what the others call it.” He stared at the sun through the coarse canvas, felt the heat of the wind touch the sweat on his throat and arms like a lover’s breath. “Ask the others what they see. Let the au’it write it for the Ila’s curiosity. And tell me what you learn. Gather all the visions.”

The au’it stirred on the mat nearby. She was unca

“Hati will ask the others. You write it. But rest now. Sleep.”

The woman eased back to her rest.

In the evening when they waked, Hati took the au’it and went about from one man to the other, asking the same question.

The au’it wrote in her book until dark made it too hard, and when the sun rose again, Hati moved her beast about among the company, taking the au’it with her. The au’it, bracing her book on the saddlebow, holding her ink-cake in one hand, wrote and wrote, at every encounter, as happy as Marak had ever seen that thin, sober face. Despite the sun, despite the heat, despite the wind that riffled the pages, the au’it listened and wrote, and satisfied her reason for going with them.

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 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.