Hammerfall

Then they counted themselves truly escaped, and fortunate.

They did not overtake Malin and the ex-soldiers.

They did not camp at noon, either. They kept going with minor rests, taking a little of the dried fruit for their meal, and a little water, enduring the heat of the sun, and even the beasts did not complain. The distance between them and the disturbance still seemed perilously scant, the beasts still were skittish, and they rode until they had put the whole afternoon behind them.

Then they settled down for a shortened rest, with no tents pitched, lying on their mats until the stars came out.

In the distance a hunter howled, and most all the still bodies in the camp roused and turned and looked toward that horizon.

So did the beasts, lifting their heads in perfect unison.

Marak saw nothing but a flat, endless, wind-scoured land.

He let his head back and trusted the beasts to raise a fuss if danger came close. The voices urged him, pleaded with him, Hurry, hurry, hurry! even now, and rest came hard.

Fear was on the wind tonight. The tower built itself, and the cave of suns was in it, and he heard voices multiplying.

Then he gained the strangest notion that he should get up, and take his beast and keep traveling.

Certain of the sleeping madmen sat up, too. Hati had gotten to her feet, and then Norit, who plunged her head into her hands and shook her head, refusing the vision, perhaps, or perhaps only weary beyond words.

The beasts themselves, not being mad, could not sustain such a pace. But after all the fright and terror of the day, still, the mad rose up, not listening, locked in that intensity of purpose that drove men to walk to their deaths.

Malin and the soldiers had been the first.

“No,” Marak said. He went to them, seized one arm and the other, and shook at them. “Wake up. Don’t follow it afoot like Malin and Kassan. You saw what happened with the beast. You know what happened to those that walked out. In a few hours we will go. But not straggling off by twos and threes like fools! Listen to me!”

Two heard him. The orchardman began to walk, and the potter followed.

He caught the orchardman and hit him hard with his, fist, pitching the man down. He overtook the potter, a slighter man, and hit him, the same. The man went down unconscious, and that was the end of his walking off in the night.

The orchardman sat nursing a bloody lip and muttering to himself, but sane enough with the pain of a chipped tooth to know he had been a fool.

Marak went back with a sore hand and sat down to suck at a cut knuckle.

“Let them go,” Hati said.

“Why should you care?” Norit asked. “Why should any of us care?”

The erosion was reaching the rest of them, a slippage of what kept their company together, a bleeding of reason and sanity.

“Because we shouldcare,” he said. “Because when they brought us from the villages we became beasts. I don’t wish to be a beast again. And I won’tbe a beast. Damn the visions! I may not go to the tower, and damn them all. It’s my choice! It’s become my choice, and I may not choose what they want me to choose!”

Hati thought about that. And in his mind, at least, the visions had become quiet.

Sanity seemed to have settled over them all for the while.

“It’s our choice,” Hati echoed him. “I can make it. I decide.”

Norit said, “There’s no use dying before we know what it is we’re looking for, is there?”

“No,” he said. “There is not.” He gathered them both against him, Hati against his side, Norit against his knees. They were beyond passion, since Pori. The intervening days they had had no strength to spare. Things had assumed a haste that had no reason, and now he reminded himself he had company, and had lives in his hand, and could not make Kassan’s choices.

Within the hour, all the same, they saddled up the beasts again and rode on, but sensibly so, to use the cool of the night while they had it and to stop again close to their ordinary schedule. They rode on into the day and by then, though the chipped tooth stayed chipped, the orchardman’s lip showed healed. More, the orchardman and the potter were quarreling again and calling one another fools, and the whole company seemed in better humor.

The sun went to noon, and they pitched the tents precisely as they needed to, on a sandy flat. They were still on the storm track: the recent debris of oasis fiber-palms where no trees grew showed how very far the winds had carried debris. It had likely come from the palms at Pori. Usually the sun heated their tea; they lit the fiber for fuel, and it brewed up a fine spiced porridge with the added flavor of smoke.

In the afternoon, however, and before they could break camp and have the tents safely folded, the wind began to blow. The breeze was a relief from the heat, but it gusted and battered at them and made more work with the tents.

The wind grew worse with the evening. Dry and hot, it wearied the bones, blew up the dust, and made the deep-irons a serious consideration by the next noonday, if they were to pitch the tents.

“It’s only a small blow,” Marak said, when Tofi hesitated, and feared they might misjudge the weather. The urge to move was so strong his skin itched. “Wrap up in mats. We can do without the tents.”

“No, omi. If we misjudge, it’s the death of us. We have to pitch the tents.”

He knew better. As he had known the storm’s limit, he knew the limit of this, and so Hati argued his point, and so many of the mad joined him, all grumbling: no one wanted the delay. The visions came and went; but east, east, east! the madness shrieked, and there was anger, and there were sulking faces. Tofi flung wide his arms and shouted at them all, “All right, all right, we will not use the deep irons, at least, and may the god have mercy on our lives!”

They pitched the two tents, which billowed and bucked as if they had a life of their own, in the lee of a low ridge, which they had somewhat between them and the wind. The animals settled peacefully to their noontime meal, and the lot of them, mad and sane, had dried fruit and a little grain-cake.

Marak, the voices said. Every noontime they spoke. They spoke to Maol, Tofi’s woman, who stood in the dusty noon sun, battered and shaken by the wind. She had forgotten Tofi, forgotten who she was. Norit watched her, singing to herself, her fingers measuring all along the hem of her robe, as if this were somehow important.

Every man, every woman, seemed numb. There was no strength, no time amid the visions: passion ebbed and evaporated with every trace of moisture shed into the wind.

Norit sang of water, of a stream and a lost love, and her voice, childlike at times, haunted the wind. The woman, Maol, swayed, as if dancing to that music.

Marak!

He looked up, his heart beating hard. All at once he wished more than life to rise up and walk toward that summons.

Instead he doggedly lowered his chin into the muffling, protective aifad and fingered the stitching on his boot, losing himself in the patterns. Hati, likewise veiled, was against his side. Norit was with him, sitting, swaying. The au’it slept nearby, the Ila’s eyes and ears, in company with madmen who thought of nothing more than losing themselves in the desert and becoming food for the hunters.

Marak!

Now he rose to his feet without even thinking. So had Hati, and Norit, and all the mad. Only Tofi slept, only the slaves, and the au’it.

Marak’s heart sped. No, he said to himself. No! But the voices said yes.

Hati began to walk. He reached out to stop her, and shook at her, and seized Norit by the arm as Norit began to walk past him. The dust had begun to rise. It obscured all the horizon.

And in the blowing dust, a ghost, a spirit, a mirage without the sun, a figure stood.