Hammerfall

His eyes were still open. He saw Hati take Lelie from Patya’s hands, and saw Hati hold her, and rock her, and talk to her, because Norit had walked away. The baby was as still as he was, and perhaps heard everything.

Luz! he tried to shout, but could manage not a word. Luz, let the woman alone! You call the Ila cruel… damn you, let Norit alone! This isn’t a time to talk to her…

But Luz gave no evidence she heard him, and Norit stood in the edge of his vision, staring at the wall of the tent, alone with Luz, the two of them talking, numb to Lelie’s pain and Lelie’s distress.

“Lie still,” Patya told him. “Hati, he’s sweating so much. Is he all right?”

“He will. It’s what we crazy people do when we heal. Don’t be afraid for him.”

Not be afraid for him. Not be afraid for Norit, or Lelie, or Hati? There was a great deal to fear.

The star fell from the heavens, again and again and again, and hit the sphere, and the ring of fire went out from it.

Again and again and again.

Chapter Twenty-One

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Every good beast and every grass that produces grain and every tree that produces fruit is the gift of the Ila. The grasses and the treesshe gave to the villages and told them to build gardens, instructing them to make covered conduits and to make basins of fired brick.

—The Book of Pori

Marak mended, in pain and fever. patya stayed close by him while the storm wind blew and racketed about the canvas. Tofi came and laid a hand on his and reported to him in meticulous, quiet detail on the state of the camp and the Ila’s temper.

The au’it sat nearby and wrote all these things.

Memnanan, too, came and stood over him, asking in the Ila’s name how he was. Marak heard. He could not see Hati’s answer to the captain, but he could hear it, and imagined Hati’s shrug, which was Hati’s characteristic answer to mysteries.

“Healing,” she said to Memnanan, and through him, to the Ila.

That visit meant the storm was not bad enough to prevent Memnanan reaching them from the Ila’s tent. That meant they remained in camp and he knew they had to move: something was coming. East, east, east, the pitch came to him now, urgent and frequent. His inability to move was the decreed torment for his sin of desertion.

Priests came and looked at him. That, he could not account for, and thought he might have dreamed the visit in his fever. He saw three of them in their white robes sitting on a mat and contemplating his condition. He grew increasingly perturbed about the situation, and still could not wake far enough to tell them to go to hell.

He fretted and he sweated, and eventually Memnanan and the priests left him to Hati’s care, saying that it was clear there was something remarkable about his healing, and about the child.

The au’it wrote. Norit remained as she was. In the distance he heard Lelie crying, and crying.

“Someone,” he tried to say, “someone take the baby.”

“Norit! See to that child!” Hati said sharply, but Norit sat still, lost in her visions. Hati herself got up and fetched Lelie and put the wounded child into Norit’s grasp. “Take care of her!” Hati said.

Norit never waked from her visions, but held Lelie against her, her hands absently doing things a mother might do. Her eyes were still set on the distance, full of fire and fear, experiencing that place and time Norit saw more clearly than she saw the sights around her.

“We have to move,” Norit said, and said it more than once. He willed her to say so, when he could not. “Hati, we have to move.”

“I know we have to move,” Hati said. “Everyone knows we have to move. We can’t see our own feet out there in the dark. We’ll move when there’s light.”

That was good. At least Hati knew. Marak wit-wandered, then, watched Norit with Lelie, with nothing else to watch. He was glad Norit had said it for him. He was glad Hati had agreed he should not slow the caravan.

He could only move his head. Hati came and wasted water, washing his face. Extravagance, he said to himself. She gave him water to drink. He had a burning thirst. He always did when he healed.

Lelie abruptly began to sleep, that hard, heavy-limbed sleep of a child. She hung like a doll in Norit’s arms, and now Norit waked from her visions, spoke to the child, talked to her.

Now at last he saw the mother he had brought Lelie here to find, and now Norit perhaps realized what gift he had brought her at such effort.

“My baby,” Norit exclaimed, with tears pouring down her face. “Lelie, Lelie, Lelie.”

He was content. The world seemed very much kinder then, its natural laws restored. He trusted it enough to shut his eyes on it a time, though the tilting still bothered him, though he desperately wanted to tell Hati and Norit and Tofi to put him on Osan and move the caravan this hour, this moment.

But there was a weight on his senses, a wall between him and speech, and the will to speak grew faint and less frequent. Norit spoke for him, and even she found distraction in the dark, in the howling of the wind.

He waked as they moved him, and as they shifted him over something hard on the ground. This proved to be the pole of a litter, and the two freedmen carried him out into the wind under a sand-hazed sun, whether morning or evening he could not tell, but he thought it was dawn.

He was still fevered, and this waking brought him acute pain, so he knew this healing was longer and this wound was probably worse than any other in his life. He thought he should get up and ride, but he failed, and lay there thinking that someone would move him sooner or later.

Strange sights passed his eyes meanwhile. A good number of Haga were in the camp—surely they were still in the Ila’s camp. Then he thought no, he was mistaken, there were tribesmen, but they were Keran. It was curious. It seemed one, and then the other, when neither belonged there.

The camp meanwhile packed down the tents and loaded them on the beshti. A second time he tried to get up and walk so that he could get to the saddle on his own, to save everyone the trouble of getting him up there as a dead weight.

But having lifted his shoulders perhaps a handbreadth off the mat, he simply fell back, weak, with his head throbbing and the desert alternately showing twilight and sunlight around him, and the tribes still coming and going.

It was not the star-fall, he decided: it was his own head, feeling as if it expanded, and with it all the sky expanded and then contracted.

He might have fainted. But in what seemed only a moment he heard Hati giving orders, and Memnanan and Tofi shouting, a comfortable and ordinary sound. The camp was moving. At any moment he had to get up and ride.

Then someone else overshadowed him and picked up the poles of the litter.

This was a priest, a presence which he found almost as strange as tribesmen coming and going. He could not see who had the poles at his head, but he thought it likely another priest.

It was the Ila who ordered all priests, and if there were priests doing useful work, that was probably not a bad thing.

But why priests?

They brought Lelie, too, and laid her on him. She was a heavy weight, and it hurt, but she was not overall a burden. Lelie was fast asleep and he could see the wound in her leg, too, ugly and swollen… but healing, as he healed.

He was bemused by that fact. They had bled into one another. Maker fought maker. Or Norit’s were in the child, potent from conception. Could the makers pass like that… through a mother’s blood, if not through a father?

Marak, Marak! East, east, east! The world swung, and his head did, and he fell flat. He saw the rock hit the sphere, again and again and again. He heard the rhythmic sound of water, and saw a shore where endless water washed against the sand.