Hammerfall

The weather held fair.

That noon when they camped, they pitched only a single tent, heated water for tea and a good supper, and left the rest of the baggage packed and ready to put up on the beasts. The au’it wrote and wrote, seldom looking up, such was her haste and her concentration.

The sky was the brightest of blues, clear of dust. The wind was gentle, but enough to move beneath the canvas. If the world threatened to end, still, the day seemed uncommonly good, and peaceful, and lacking all desperation.

The time was already up, Luz had said, and Norit had heard it. Yet perhaps the tower-dwellers were fallible in their knowledge, or simply lying, to trap all the others in this paradise.

If there was anyone who might know, Marak said to himself, the Ila might know what the truth of things was. There shouldbe an answer, beyond folding the hands and sitting down under the white tents.

The world to be snuffed out? Extinguished by some nameless enemy? This ondat? And they should give it up with no more than Luz’s saying so?

He did not accept it. He refused to accept it. But try to save it, that he would.

He lay beside Hati and Norit and found his eyes shutting. He had not truly slept, not a natural sleep, and now it came on him irresistibly, like a drug.

Then he heard the voices, saying, Marak, hurry. Hurry, Marak. He had no strength to open his eyes. The vision came like nightmare.

Objects struck one another, impact repeated itself over and over and over. He rode the falling object down and down, and the sphere became land, and desert, and the desert plumed up like a fountain of sand and billowed up like a cloud that raced over the land, over dunes and villages.

Came a new vision: water flowed in the desert, over rocks burned black. A stream coursed, cascaded. He could hear it dripping, flowing, gurgling down the rocks and into a broad expanse of water that swelled, swelled, swelled.

He could see his father’s house, in Kais Tain, all of mud brick, sprawling around deep-floored gardens and wells that made that sound, that wonderful, rich sound of water that the dream made fearsome.

He visited his own rooms, and heard the women laughing as they prepared food for the house: there was always plenty laid out. There were always children.

He could see the stable yard, and the beasts he loved; and his little sister Patya fed Osan with her hand. She had to learn to flatten her hand, or lose fingers. She laughed at Osan’s questing lip. That laughter haunted him, and reminded him not all was well with that house, these days.

He could not see his mother, or his father. He searched the house for them.

The rocks above the house spilled down a dependable amount of water in every season, and the spring flowed from there down to a second well house. From there it went to the garden, which all the village tended. Each house had its own tree and its own vines, and everyone knew which was which, and whose grew best. The householders shared such secrets, and were generous with their surplus, beyond what they needed. The village was fed before it sold the excess. It was the custom.

The great house, too, had its vines and its bushes in a garden apart, and a few slaves tended them, freedmen on the house records, but they liked their work in the garden too well and their freedom was to do the work they loved. He learned that lesson from those men and women, that so long as they could not own the garden, their best way to be happy was to work in it for reasonable reward and a share of the fruit. They were richer than the Ila in her palace, wise in their own domain, respected throughout the village for their advice and their competence.

But they had no governance beyond their garden… and no power over its fate.

Tain, on the other hand, was born to power. Tain had to keep his holdings by force, fighting against those who wished to take the food from people’s mouths, fighting against bandits and the Ila’s taxmen; and so he fought, and so the villagers and people of the district fought at his command. Some died, and left widows and children who, but for Tain’s upkeep, were helpless. And in the end Tain cast out his wife and his son.

Perhaps after all it was better to be those freed slaves, content with the vines and each other’s company. They enjoyed as much as they wished of the fruit… and that was better than many had as daily fare. They were assured of beds, and knew every day what they had to do, which was to prune the vines and tend the trees. Every year of their lives was like the last.

That was the life of the mad at the tower, to have tables spread with every good thing, and to work only at need. The inhabitants of the white tents carried the names of villages with them. They brought their crafts and practiced them. They married and begat and might see their children grow.

But whence came the laws, and who made the food, and how long would it come so easily, if destruction came?

At the pleasure of Luz and Ian, how long would they eat as well and have everything their hearts desired?

He waked with a hard-beating heart and a remote, guilty regret for not urging more of the mad to come with them. Paradise was not enough for him. Not enough for Norit and Hati, not enough for Tofi, either, as it seemed. Least of all for the au’it, whose whole devotion was to the Ila.

But what was enough? What would be enough to give him peace of these dreams, these voices, this driving necessity to do, and escape, and move?

In the late afternoon they packed up in a very little time and rode on through the night at that same ground-devouring pace. By noon they camped.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, as if discontent at his stopping. The voices he heard during the day all sounded like Luz, until while they were setting up the tent he put his hands over his ears, trying not to hear; and squeezed his eyes until they flashed with red, trying not to see.

We have to sleep, he raged at Luz. He wished her to understand, to have some comprehension she was driving him beyond endurance, but Luz gave no sign of hearing him.

Water will fall from heaven, Luz told him, as he tossed and turned, attempting to sleep.

Hati waked and put an arm about him, and after that he tried not to move, but the voices kept up.

“Do you hear voices?” he asked Hati.

“Yes,” Hati whispered back. “I hear promises. And threats. I think it’s Luz. What kind of place has just two people, and it so huge? It never made sense.”

Norit, meanwhile, slept. Marak hugged Hati against him and tried to sleep, but he rose early, while the sun was still hot, and roused Tofi and the slaves out to get under way.

The beasts grumbled. Tofi grumbled not having had all their sleep. Haste, haste, haste, the voices said. Luz tormented them with threats, with visions, with promises: Norit suffered, too, and her eyes looked weary and worried.

They came to that rising of the land that led up to the Lakht, and to the path on the slope where they had lost the one beast.

“That’s where the besha fell,” Tofi said, pointing. “That’s our trail.”

They looked up, but nothing remained up on the shale where it had fallen, not a bone, not a scrap of cloth or a remnant of the saddle. Of vermin there was no other sign. They ate, and they dispersed… might have fought among themselves. The survivors would be sated. The crumbling rock gave no hint of past violence, only a single trail of bright reflection on the slope where broken shale marked the fatal slide.

They had arrived on the ascent by midmorning, as they hoped. They dismounted and led their beasts up, and climbed with caution: whoever had made the fragile path down off the Lakht, likely Pori’s hunters, had somewhat compacted the fragile rock, and their own passage had compacted it further, but it was steep and narrow, no place for a misstep, and one beast tended to rush up behind the beast higher up.