“Lights,” Marak found to say to them. “A woman.” There were the new visions, andif the other madmen shared them there was no hint of it. The faces were happy, and their enthusiasm carried them along, all talking at once.
“We have these clothes, and no end of food and water.”
“We can wash. We can even wash in it.”
“And fruits,” the orchardman put in, “with not a blemish on them.”
“The tents cool the air,” the stonemason said. “This is the god’s paradise.”
They went down among those tents, in this babble of strangers and new clothes, and out from the shade under the white tents flowed an unnaturally cool air. Tables stood within the shade of one tent, the tent wholly devoted to that purpose, and on those tables sat a ravaged wealth of food.
Wealth and water had poured out on the madmen, the rejected of the world. Theirvisions had brought them only good, that Marak saw. He looked back and up at the foot of the tower, which was so large, and which to his own observation held only Ian and Luz.
So much wealth to give away.
Paradise, the stonemason said.
But was it? Where was the orchard to provide this? There must be far more to all that tower than they had been allowed to see. There must be answers they had never had, questions they had not had the least idea how to ask.
And there were the visions, and the explanations that roused more questions. Death, was Luz’s message.
“They gave us food and water at no cost,” Tofi exalted their hosts, “and these clothes, and as much food as we want, they give. Eat. Take anything.” Tofi took bread from the table to show them. “Whatever we eat, they give us more. It never spoils. No vermin come here.”
“How many of these strangers have you seen?” he asked Tofi.
“That bring the food and visit us? People like us. They come from all over, from Pori, too, and from the tribes. Malin and Kassan and Foragi are here, did you see them? They don’t remember how they found this place. They waked up here, under a white tent.”
All the mad. All those that wandered away from the villages, fed, and clothed, and kept in safety—if they survived the desert.
He was overwhelmed, surfeited with this babble of good fortune.
Hati and Norit were beset with questions and details of the wealth here, the au’it sat down and opened her book to record these wonders, and in a sudden need for escape, Marak walked out into the heat of the sun, where their beasts sat, well fed and supplied, by a pool of water that had no right to be where it was.
The sun warmed his shoulders. He walked where a multitude of feet had tracked the sand, and he climbed the sandstone slant to gain a vantage and a breath of the world’s own sun-heated wind.
He had to ask himself and his demons what he ought to do with Luz’s warning, what was truth, what was safe, what was a mirage that killed the fools that believed it… that was what he sought, simple solitude, on the safety of an often-used trail.
But as he climbed he saw a gleam of white, and a wider and a wider gleam, the other side of the rise on which the tower sat. A city of white canvas spread across the sand.
White tents. Shelter. People. A green-bordered river of water, shaded by palms.
He sat down. He did not even remember doing it. He simply sat and stared at that sight with shock spreading through him like the cold out of the tents.
Steps sounded behind them, so ordinary he failed to question them. Hati came and sat down, and after that Norit, and then the au’it, too, came and sat down by him. None of them spoke for a long time, looking at that sight, that clear evidence that Luz at least had told a part of the truth.
He could not leave this vision untested. He got up and began walking down the slant of the sand that rose up against the sandstone, down a well-trodden path that led him down to the level of those orderly white tents. Hati followed, and Norit and the au’it trailed them both, all the way to the edge of the encampment, where a green-banked pool stood. Beshti wandered at liberty at some distance around the pool, halterless, seeming to belong to no one. Children ran and played, and splashed in the water.
The children stopped and stared. In their gift-robes, they looked like everyone else in sight, but the au’it with them did not. When they walked by and into the rows of tents, people stopped their work and stared.
The people were like the people of any village. There was a potter at work, a weaver. There were all these ordinary activities.
“Where are you from?” Marak asked a potter, and with a clay-caked hand the potter indicated himself and several adults around him.
“From La Oshai,” the potter said with an anxious glance at the au’it. It was a village in the northwest. “My wife is from Elgi.” That was on the western edge of the Lakht. “We met here. Where are you from?”
“Kais Tain,” Marak said. He walked farther, with Hati and Norit, and the au’it trailing them. He asked names. He asked origins. The whole place was a mingling, and as far as he could tell it went on and on.
“The hammer will fall,” one weaver said suddenly, after naming his village. “This is the only safe place. This is the only place.”
“Are you happy here?” Norit asked, and the man’s overly anxious smile faded.
“I wish my wife would come. I wish I could go out there and tell her.”
“Can’t you?” Marak asked.
“I don’t know the way,” the man said.
It was the only unhappiness they had met face-to-face; and it was too painful, and brought back what Luz had said, that everyone who was not here would be under attack, and no one could save them.
Marak turned and walked away, out under the heat of the sun, and walked back to the pool and up toward the ridge, Hati and Norit and the au’it in his tracks.
He had become a void, a sheet of sand on which nothing at all was written.
The unfortunate man down among the tents, a weaver, had no idea of directions. Perhaps he had followed a vision to get here. He had none to take him home to his wife.
Marak climbed the steep sand to the ridge and looked back on wealth greater than he had ever imagined, on green-edged water, on the white, cooling tents, hundreds of them, and hundreds of individuals ripped up from their lives and set down in paradise… but it was a paradise without loved ones. All the villages, all the city, all the tribes had no warning, no knowledge of Luz and this place.
The hammer will fall, he heard in his head, and all at once the vision came, the rock and the shining sphere.
Marak, it said. Marak, Marak, the old refrain, the old restlessness. Peace here had no comfort.
“I have to go back,” he said to Hati and to Norit and the au’it. “The madness won’t stop for me. I have to go. I have to report what’s here. My mother and sister, that man’s wife… who’s to tell them, if I don’t go?”
He walked away down the slope, recklessly downhill toward their own camp, and under the white tent, Hati and Norit with him still trying to follow: he could not shake them with a declaration of madness. The au’it, too, fell in with them as they went, a small force that knifed straight to the heart of their small camp. He expected to be alone. He wantedto be alone in his folly.
Tofi was there, with a costly cup in his hand, and lifted it cheerfully. “So you’ve seen the sight from the ridge. They say we’ll join the rest. Perhaps we were waiting for you. Sit, sit down and drink.”
“I need two beasts,” Marak said, “mine, and two pack beasts, irons, and canvas.” He was more and more sure of his choice, however much it hurt. He had led the mad and the lost to safety; and with the alarm Luz had set seething inside him, and the voices dinning in his ears, he could not stay here, grazing on provided fodder like the beasts. He was never made to sit and fold his hands and ask for sweet fruit to land on the table.