Hammerfall

Sometimes, they confessed, their hands and bodies moved involuntarily, 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 suffered 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 defensively, 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’s like that. I see that, too.

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.

Chapter Seven

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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, ruling over separate tents, riding together, the freedmen riding last, to be sure no one fell behind u

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 i

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.

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.