Hammerfall

The Ila rode beside him, veiled, a riddle of intentions, in command of armed men, on her way to an enemy’s refuge, an enemy whose deeper motives he also did not know.

And all his experience told him that nothing was as fatal as lying to the Ila, that her sanity, like his, was precarious, and that he, and Memnanan, and all he loved were in danger at every moment he failed to keep her wondering.

“Are you mine?” the Ila asked him.

“I am not hers,” he answered.

“What if I said to you that sheis the enemy of the ondat?”

“Why would they save her tower and ruin yours, if that were true?”

The Ila cast back her veil, precisely, with red-gloved hands: exposed her face to the wind and her eyes to his curiosity.

“Indeed?” she said. “Do you know they do things as reasonable men would do them? And are these ondatyour friends?”

“No,” he said. “They’re not likely to be. We agree on that.”

“Ah,” the Ila said. “Indeed. Is shethe enemy of the ondat, who destroy us to carry out their law… and the rest of our kind—and there are others, Marak Trin!—allow it, in their lax-handed way? But only so you think on it, Marak Trin, I tell you something I believe Memnanan understands, too. If he doesn’t, explain it to him. I trust nothing but a man’s own best interests. And I believe you’ve discovered yours, and mine. You’ve made yourself safe in my company. You’ve made yourself essential, personally essential. Go on amusing me, Marak Trin. On that thread your life hangs, and will continue to hang. I’ve not had a husband in a hundred years. Do you feel lucky?”

Marak, his voices said, outraged. Marak, Marak, Marak, as if they would not let him think deeper, ask deeper, act on those thoughts and those questions, or countenance sanely the Ila’s outrageous proposition. The world swung east, east! with a vengeance. He swayed in the saddle, all but fainted in the dizziness, and caught at the saddlebow to save himself.

Memnanan also caught at him, riding close on his left.

“I’ve a

“Ila,” he said, and had no idea what Luz thought, or what the Ila thought, or what either of them meant. He talked about the safety of every living soul in the world, and the Ila reduced it to a personal argument.

It was like bathing in the drinking water. It took the question of survival to an individual one.

But did they refuse to drink the water? None of them refused.

He reined back. He understood her conditions, and the points of her argument. She did what they allowed her to do, and they allowed her, because she was the god on earth… because without her they had no god, no devil, either, except the ondat, and no man in the caravan wanted to contemplate dealing with them: most failed even to understand the ondatexisted. For them it was all the Ila, and not even Luz was real.

“Memnanan,” the Ila said as he retreated. “Watch him. On your life, watch him. Don’t let him disobey.”

Nothing protected Memnanan. And she threatened her own captain. Where there was leverage, she found it.

And she was right: those who destroyed so many lives were no friends. Those who woulddestroy this many lives were no fit rulers. That was all his battered wits came up with for an answer: that their fit ruler was madder than the mad, and had been saner in her long life, but she was still—for reasons most of them never understood—their god, their precious ruler, the definition of what they were. Was it virtue in her, some last remnant of sanity, that she bent every effort to make them hate her, and spared them when they failed to kill her?

He, on the other hand, held Luz’s makers. And what had he just tried to do? He had ridden after Tain, and now he defied the Ila.

Now he committed himself to one more mad act, and rode toward the head of the column, increasing Osan’s pace to a run that jolted his side. It hurt: it jarred to the roots of his teeth, but he was not done being mad: he rode up among Hati’s tribe, up where Aigyan rode among his household, all on lofty, richly ornamented beasts. Bells attended their going. Swords and the occasional long barrel glinted in the sun. This was armed might the likes of which Tain and the Ila herself had to reckon with, and it did not obey Hati, or him.

But it had arrived in his camp, and pitched tents around him, and he meant it should justify its presence with him and with the Ila.

“Omi,” he said, bowing in the saddle, respectfully enough, and the au’it, his au’it, who had chased after him into the Ila’s presence, now arrived after him in some disorder, and unfolded her book to write when he had said no more than that word.

Marak, his voices said, however, and could the au’it write that Luz was agitated, perhaps outraged? She had asked for his attention. The Ila had stirred her up, and now she was back, a ceaseless din. He set Luz and her complaints to the back of his attention, and meant to have command of his own camp back.

“Awake and alive,” Aigyan said, looking him over as he rode. “Bullets, then, have as little power over you as the Ila’s orders.”

“The mad heal well.” The voices rose nearly to a point of distraction, irate, and he fought stubbornly for his purpose. “I came up here to pay my proper respects, omi. I’ve had your help, the help of the Haga, the Rhonandin, when I rode back to settle with my father. They sent out four men, too, and lost them to Tain; and I owe them for those lives as well as for my mother. That’s four lives besides hers.” With the tribes, the tally of favors and grievances mattered: he was aware of that priority from days long before his dealings with Hati. “The Rhonandin were with me when I recovered my wife Norit’s daughter. Tarsa village had the child. The Rhonan helped me get her back, but I failed to find Tain. For my obligations here, I had every confidence in the an’i Keran, my wife. Nothing disappointed me, not her and not my in-laws. We’re growing short of water, but we’re not that far from Pori.”

Aigyan shrugged, a mirror of Hati’s gesture, an answer for a good many things: I accept what you say, whether happy or unhappy. “Give greetings to Menditak when you see him… if you haven’t.”

“I will.” That was a question, as much as a request to know which he had answered first, whether kinship or official precedence; and his answer, indicating that he had not yet seen Menditak, seemed to please Aigyan. The reasons Aigyan and Menditak had for making water peace might be broader and deeper than either admitted. They used their kinships. They moved in on them, and neither let the other have all the advantage. And they sat in power, now, both tribes. “Get us to Pori, omi. Beyond that, there’s a trail over the rim. There’s no mistaking our way. But water, first. The villages back there are stringing far back, and it’ll only get worse. No matter what the Ila does, no matter what you hear from the priests or anyone else…” The din in his head already debated him. “We’ve got to get to water.”

And Aigyan studied him, the madman, his relation-by-marriage. “Off the edge of the Lakht,” Aigyan said. No ruling tribe had ever left the Lakht, the center of their range. “To this tower in the middle of the lowlands. So we find this paradise, do we? Wish that water thief your uncle the peace of the day.”

“I will.” He understood the uneasy agreement, one in which Aigyan had only moderate faith. Aigyan challenged him, since he had made the gesture to come up here and assert direction of the caravan. He had made himself Aigyan’s equal, if he was not the Ila’s, and he had not gotten full courtesy out of Aigyan… being an upstart, in Aigyan’s eyes. The tribes were here for kinship’s sake to the dead, and for rivalry to each other, but not to rescue him. Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said, urging him to the east. And he defied those, too. “Pori,” he said. “If we get there, those can stay that want to and those can part that want to.” Those that stayed or parted from them would die, he was convinced of that. His responsibility was to the caravan, and east, the voices urged him, no matter that east of here was a long, uncrossable ridge and a drop down a cliff. Pori, he insisted, and reined back, dropping back through the ranks. “I’ll see you, father-by-marriage. I’ll see you there.”