“Flatterer!”
“I’ve become a prophet, uncle. And I tell you both the truth. Keep the peace, and be there, by the Besh Karat!”
He kept nothing from them. If he had resources, he poured them out to those that knew how to use them.
But he believed his own urging, and delayed no longer. “Hati!” he shouted. “Norit!” He gave Osan a whack of the quirt, trusting him to find its way down from the ridge, trusting the two feuding lords to find their way to their own tribes, Memnanan to find the Ila, and the two women with him to stay behind him.
But another rider barred his path. He saw his sister among the Haga riders, and his sister saw him, there at the very foot of the ridge.
“Patya!” In utter astonishment he reined Osan to a halt and dropped to the ground by the mounting loops. His sister slid down, her feet within knee height of the ground, but Patya, silly girl, failed to know it, and held on.
He simply swept her up in both his arms like a child, flung her rightwise about to look at her, and hugged her breathless.
“Marak!” His mother, Kaptai, dismounted beside them, a plummeting of brown veils and a clash of bracelets. He caught her, too, and swung them both around, veils flying. He pressed their faces against his, and he smelled the smells of home and hearth about them, everything that had kept him alive on the trek to Oburan.
“You’re safe,” he said. “The Ila kept her promise!”
“They said you were back,” Patya said, still hugging him. “No one believed you’d come back, but we believed.”
“I love you,” he said to her. “I love you,” to his mother. As far as he remembered he had never said that word to either of them, and least of all to his father, but now it had become a word he owned; and when he said it he knew he had forgotten Hati in a moment in which he was home again, before Hati, before everything had changed.
“You came back,” his mother said. “You said you would come back, and you did.”
What had he said? He had made a hundred promises when he left them, all lies; but unlikely as they were, he had kept them all, every one.
Hati had gotten down. He felt her familiar arm slip around him. He took her hand, and put it in his mother’s. “This is Hati,” he said in utter, untrammeled joy—then saw the dismay, the look from head to foot.
An’i Keran, tribal enemy under this foreign sky.
But his mother, of the Haga, hesitated only for a heartbeat, and gave her an embrace, his mother rattling with the wealth of a lord’s daughter, a lord’s wife: she had come away with everything, and Hati with only the bracelets he had given her.
Patya embraced Hati, too. “For Marak,” Patya said. “For him.”
There was another rider near them. Norit was there, and her, too, he showed to his mother. “This is Norit, from Tarsa. I have twowives.”
“Two?” said Patya, a child of the west. But his mother never blinked. “Daughter,” Kaptai said, while the earth shivered. She reached up a hand, the token of an embrace, but Norit for whatever reason did not get down, and Menditak had come down, urgent to be away.
“Damn this shaking!” Menditak said. “Bargains with the omi Keran! Come on, there! Will you delay for a damned festival?”
“Up.” Marak heaved his sister up to her saddle. His mother, like Hati, needed no help. He made Osan extend a foreleg, and caught the strap and got up, recklessly, pridefully mounting like a tribesman in front of this arrogant old man, and Hati did the same.
“Away!” Menditak shouted, above the rumble from the skies and the earth, and the earth shuddered as Menditak took his company toward the north and east and Marak rode ahead of Hati and Norit toward the north and west.
“The god’s vengeance on the Ila’s enemies!” some lingering priest cried from the side of the ridge. “Salvation for the righteous! Pray for the Ila! Pray for our salvation!”
Tents were already beginning to collapse on the edge of the camp, adding to the confusion an unintended consequence. Essential landmarks were disappearing. Confusion multiplied. He rode through the diminishing crowd, past a camp edge that itself was blurred by so many, many people milling about trying to find the lost, the strayed, the ones who had to know what they had just heard. People shouted at one another, waved arms, cursed or pleaded. The noise of their confusion went up to the heavens.
Someone recognized them as they rode. People ran at them. Hands caught at their legs, at their beasts’ harness. People shouted questions, what they were to do, what the Ila might do. The lifesaving frenzy he had helped create threatened to overwhelm them.
“Pack and get to the south road!” Marak shouted, and brought his quirt down sharply on his beast’s hindquarters.
Osan leapt forward, scattering men who were closing in ahead of them, and Marak took that gift, rode after, trusting Hati to keep Norit with her and both of them behind him. A man went down, knocked aside: it was not his concern. He had held the visions at bay, he had spilled out everything he knew to two tribes of twenty, and now that the need to speak was past, he could no longer think, or see anything but the ring of fire.
Marak, the voices cried, wanting, demanding something more of him, urgent with this new, this ill-timed vision. Marak!
He and Memnanan had created this panic. They had primed the people with fear and uncertainty and the sense of one essential escape from their plight, one door by which they might exit, and it to the south. He had used every tactic, every wile he had, he had said he knew not what in the urgency of saying something, promising something to get the people to move. He had abandoned his own mother and his sister to the safety they could find, and now his only companions were companions in the madness: he was through with dealing with sane people, ignorant people, desperate people.
Tofi, who had seen the tower, Tofi, who had the tents, was the missing piece, of all the structure he still had to assemble, and he knew where Tofi had said he would be, one young man and a handful of beasts and two slaves, on whom he depended, out across the flat, to the southwest of the city and imperiled by men desperate for tents and transport.
Leave me alone! he raged at the voices and the visions, and rubbed his eyes until they were shot full of dark and red stars. Let me alone! Let us alone! Let me see and hear!
“There’s Tofi!” Hati cried, riding up even with him and pointing ahead, on the flat where Tofi had said they would be.
There, through a haze of dust and the running figures of men bound for the tents, Marak saw beasts, all seated, all ready for their packs, and Tofi, who was waiting for them, waving them in while confused and desperate men ran past his goods and his beasts.
“Omi!” Tofi cried, as they rode in. “Omi, we’re here. We have everything. What are we to do?”
“Stay where we are,” Marak said, though Tofi was clearly ready to load on the instant. The ex-slaves, Mogar and Bosginde, were with him; so were older, hard-faced men, caravanners who might know their trade, and more slaves, young and strong ones as anxious in this confusion and the threat of the heavens as any free man. All this Marak saw with a glance. “The captain’s on his way back to the Ila. He’ll manage that part. She’ll arrive with her tents.” He reined Osan about before leaving the vantage of Osan’s high back, with Hati by him, but Norit was nowhere in sight, and Hati was looking anxiously behind them, scanning all the way they had come, through a milling crowd.
He did not immediately see Norit, but he knew her coming, knew her presence as a magnet knew iron. He saw her riding through a gust-borne cloud of dust and waved to her, signaling her.
She rode toward them, and priests labored in her wake, white-clad men afoot, crying out after her, but a surge of running people poured between and cut them off.
Norit reached them, her besha wild-eyed and still trembling from fright. But they were made whole, the three of them together again, and safe for the moment. Their madness had become linked, one to the other, and where one was, the others would come, and where Luz was, they would know Luz’s intentions, all three of them: there had been no chance they would lose her while she was free to ride, Marak was sure of that now.