“Do you hear?” he asked Hati. “Do you hear them?”
She moved her head against his arm. He thought it was a yes.
The sun, relentless, came up as sane as ever. They unfastened the lee-side tent flaps and let in light, welcoming the sun, and where Marak had expected half-healed wounds, he found no fever and no swelling. Where he expected blood from the stones, he saw no blood, rather a patchwork of dirt on his arms and his clothing, and on Norit’s, and on Hati’s, as if they had been pelted with mud.
He walked outside, seeing the ground all likewise splotched and spattered, and the canvas the same. The beasts were all but laughable, having a coating of dried mud all over their backs, and the pale, spread canvas was a patchwork of red and rust like him and like Hati.
“Raindrops!” he exclaimed in astonishment. He laughed aloud, having expected blood and bruises, and finding them marked like fools. “Water drops. No wonder we were wet!”
“In the far north,” Hati said, “sweet water fell hard as stones, and became water again in the sun. So the grandfathers tell it.”
Norit had come out, and so now did Tofi and his men. Norit, too, was splotched with huge dollops of rust, and at some point tears had run down from her eyes, trails through the red smears. Now her eyes, red as fire, were fierce as Hati’s.
“So it has rained on the Lakht,” Norit said in a low, hoarse voice, “and it will rain. The floodgates of the heavens will pour it out. A man can dieof too much water.”
That was almost the last of his patience. Of all Luz’s utterances, this one seemed sinister, intended to frighten them, he still had bruises on his skull, and for a moment he vowed he had made his last effort for Norit, as a vessel for Luz. But a second thought showed him Norit beneath the dirt and behind the burning eyes, and he said to himself that her skull likely had more bruises than his, and her head rang with worse than voices and a useful sense of where to go.
“Go sit and wait,” he said gently, to the wife from Tarsa, not to Luz. “Rest. Dust yourself off. We’ll be moving on.”
The animals had to be brushed clean of grit so sand would not gall their hides under the packs. The mud had to be swept off the tent canvas, or it became a heavy weight of dirt for the beast that carried it. Before all was done they all had bleeding hands and sore arms, but they dug out the deep-irons, packed the tent, reorganized their baggage, and moved, over a rise and down across a landscape dotted with thousands of small pits.
This morning, however, they saw wild creatures, furtive shadows that dived beneath rocks at their passing: the water-fall had brought them to this plain. A handful of plants bloomed and withered with the day’s heat, leaving a gold spatter of their life-bearing dust on the rocks. Water spilling on stones. Spheres falling into spheres. Gold dust scattering on the wind.
West by northwest. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry, Marak.
Marak tucked his foot up and rested his arms on his knee as he rode, rested his forehead so, trying not to think, to hear, wanting not to imagine what would be their fate if they had been on this plain when the stars fell.
Luz bore no grudge. And could he fault Norit, after all? Had harm come? It was only water. It was only pride. They had laughed, and the laughter, half-crazed and weak as it was, had healed them.
Had Luz, in driving Norit to the edge of collapse, managed their escape from the falling stars? Had she preserved their lives as mindfully as she preserved Norit from harm, and had she directed them around the region of worst damage? He wondered what had become of Pori, and the plain beyond.
A trail of fire went across the heavens. A star fell by daylight, smoking as it went. It went to the south: it was one whose direction was clear, and it fell beyond the hills, like a guide.
Two days later they rode again within view of the Qarain by sunrise, and the day after that found one of those caravan traces that led toward the holy city.
The au’it had learned to accommodate the beast’s rocking gait and now used her journeys as well as her rests to record her observations.
And this, too, she wrote.
All the things they had seen and done the au’it had recorded. All these things she would present to the Ila, the unprecedented fall of rain and mud, the fall of stars alike.
And what would her book say?
That the stars fell? That their hope of safety lay in the tower, in the white tents?
The one even the Ila could surely see for herself, and of the other, Marak thought, they had no proof, even for themselves.
Chapter Thirteen
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We have seen the stars fall in their thousands. The book contains no event like this.
—The Book of Oburan
The ragged upthrust of the qarain, that division from the Anlakht, was a wall on their right hand as they went. They were on the edge of desolation.
And by the next day they joined a recently used caravan trace and followed it in an abrupt turn toward the north, toward the Qarain.
Marak thought he had crossed this place before. He thought he recognized the vast, stone-littered pan and the rocks beside it.
Tofi recognized it, too. “Besh Karat,” he said excitedly, pointing a thin arm to the left of the trail, where a ridge of rounded rocks stood, looking like its name, a burdened, sulking beast. “We’re at Besh Karat, at the bitter spring. And these last tracks are only a day ahead of us. Another caravan.”
A little after that Norit suddenly reined back her beast, which squalled a protest and fought the rein. “Stop,” she said. “Stop here.”
Marak shifted his foot back and took in the rein. Osan stopped, putting his ears up and laying them down. They were just passing among the rocks, an easy hiding place for vermin, and they were short of the bitter spring. It was not ordinarily a point to rest, and the beasts knew it, and complained.
“A little farther,” Marak said, which was only common sense. “Not in the rocks.”
“No. Here. Now.” Norit tried to get her reluctant beast to kneeclass="underline" it would not, and came close to veering off the trail in besha obstinacy, but stopped as she began to dismount all the same.
“Damn,” Marak said, and slid down and went to rescue Norit. Tofi and Hati dismounted, and Hati assisted the au’it to dismount. They were at a stop. The freedmen got down.
“For what do we wait now?” he asked Norit, apprehensive and impatient both.
She answered him with one of those cold, clear stares that said Luz, more than Norit, was hearing him.
The vision of rocks and spheres followed, one crashing into the other, the sphere with fire at the point of damage, and a spreading ring of disturbance, like a stone cast into a fountain.
“Make the beasts sit down,” Norit said.
“Why?” he asked.
Norit said nothing. She only sat down, herself, her legs tucked up at a slant to avoid the heat of the sand.
Marak looked at Hati, both his temper and his dread reaching a near boil. They were so close to reaching Oburan: they were on the very trail to the holy city, and was there another calamity?
“Can she not explain, damn her?” he muttered under his breath, meaning Luz, and complaining to no one but the wind and the desert heat. “Do we need the tents? Is a star about to fall on top of us?” They were sitting next to Besh Karat, which indubitably housed vermin… he hoped they were small and timid vermin, nothing larger.
The vision came to him, the ring of fire, so vividly it blotted out the sun. He ground his hands against his eyes, fighting for a sight of Osan’s rein as he tried to grasp it, and shook his head to clear it.
He settled Osan, and if Osan sat, Hati’s beast and the au’it’s settled, complaining. The pack beasts were always willing to settle, in hopes of shedding their packs for a rest, but here they were uneasy, and circled and made trouble, two of them wanting to stray off from their accustomed order. But they settled.