“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.
It seemed to be a man in thick gauzy robes, in the colors of the sand.
No tribesman. The vision of the tower rose up, built itself in Marak’s eyes where the man stood.
And vanished.
Marak blinked the blowing dust into tears, resisted the impulse to wipe, that would abrade his eyes. The slack of the gust showed him the shape again.
Hati pointed. She saw the same. Norit stood close to him, held to him, pressed against his side, and all the while this vision came walking down the slope, and became clearer and clearer to their eyes.
“He is no tribe I know,” Hati said.
In an an’i Keran, that was remarkable enough. The Keran were masters of the Lakht, and there were means to tell one tribe from the other: to know those differences was life and death.
The stranger came ahead with confidence, and that also was remarkable, and ominous.
“We might be bandits,” Marak said. “We have no prosperous look. And we are no tribe.” The man was trusting… or there were more of them beyond that hall.
But as the man came, the voices clamored. East, east, east, became here. Now. This place. This man. Marak’s heart beat like a smith’s hammer.
Marak dropped his veil, a villager’s friendliness, despite the choking dust; he lifted a hand in token of peace, and the vision, or the man, whatever it might be, likewise lifted his right hand and walked into their camp.
The mad were all on their feet, and drew back from this visitor, not far back, but far enough.
“Togin, Kosul, Kofan, Ontori, Edan.” The visitor named their names for them, as if he had always known them. “Marak, Hati, Norit.” The incantation went on, inexplicable, accurate, and complete, as the veiled man faced them one by one.
“Tofi,” the man said, among the last. He even named the slaves. “Bosginde, and Mogar. Not least, the au’it.”
It was the only name that remained secret among them, as the au’it had never confessed one. She had waked, and reached for her kit, and her book, and, shocked out of her rest in a gale of sand by this vision, spat onto her ink-cake and began to write.
“Who are you?” Marak asked. Their visitor showed his power and his knowledge of them, but gave them nothing of his own nature. This was not necessarily the indication of a friend. “Where do you come from?”
“Ian is my name.” The visitor reached up and took down his veil. “As for where I come from, from the wind and the air is where I come from, and from the empty place behind the wind.”
That was to say, the land of ghosts, by the priests’ way of saying. No few of the villagers blessed themselves in fear, and nothing the man said comforted any of them, but Marak had no inclination to fall on his face to save his life, or to believe this man because he quoted the writings. He had come to the east, after so much, and so long, and was thishis answer, Marak asked himself, this arrogant man with clever riddles and an appeal to superstition?