Deep-stakes went down; and over all the commotion ranged the hoarse voices of tribesmen shouting orders, and arranging a storm camp, tents placed for best protection in the likelihood of a wind from the west… west had become the source of danger: Marak was sure of it in his own heart. West for danger, east for salvation.
Beshti complained in the lack of water and food. Children cried in the tents, weary and hungry and thirsty, but the very little little water there was, the tribes guarded closely and would not give up.
The Ila’s tent was up and secure, staked deep in the stony sand. Lights shone inside it, making the canvas glow… because the Ila had lamp oil, carried along where water would have been far more useful.
There were instead, Marak recalled, all those books, the weight of which would have supplied the whole camp—
For what? For a day, on short rations? What was one day?
For those caught above the cliff, it was everything. It was the difference, for thousands, between getting off the Lakht to shelter—or not: but water could not give them time. Only the skies could give them that. Only his decisions, to camp, to move on, all the decisions during all the trek, could have given them that time—and those were his, balanced against this necessity and that and the strength of the villagers to keep moving. Those were his. He did not know whether they were the wisest decisions—the best economy of lives.
And when he thought how very many must still be up there on the cliffs, still making the perilous descent, still trapped between thirst and vermin, he could scarcely wrap his mind about the enormity of what he had told Luz he would do and what consequence every decision of his might have had.
He wielded a hammer himself in the dark, as camp after camp went up. Every tribe took their hammers and set the tents of all those that arrived, so that as fast as weary tribes reached the edge of the camp, the camp swallowed them up and gained workers.
Hati swung a hammer with him. Like others, like Tofi and Mogar and Bosginde, like Antag and his brothers, and every able man and woman, they wrapped their hands and worked and still bled… but in the mad, the makers swelled their hands with fever and activity. He and Hati healed as they bled, and as they exhausted themselves, strength came from somewhere. Villagers began to arrive, and young men and old, urged by the tribes, began to join the effort.
As for Norit, she wandered wherever she wandered in the camps, never quite out of their awareness, as the visions were constantly in their awareness.
Hammer, hammer, and hammer against the deep-irons, image of the hammer to come against the earth. Luz spoke to the mad, constantly, a nuisance that became, strangely, a reassurance that the tower still stood. They knew Luz was aware. They knew they were not forgotten, not yet, not now: death was coming, but the hammerblow was not yet on them.
Another tent rose, men and women pulling on the ropes, shouting together as the center poles came up and another canvas peak aimed at the uncertain heavens. Webbing went on, tied to the deep-irons, weighted with rocks where they could lay hands on them, to secure the frail canvas from billowing up in a gust.
The hammer-wielders advanced on another row of stakes, as women took another bundle cast from another packsaddle, and those villagers whose old and weak they had just scarcely sheltered joined them like the rest and took their efforts to another bundled tent, villagers unfurling canvas side by side with the tribes.
Another tent, and another. The camp spread and spread outward and sideways, onto every patch of sand that would take the stakes: the camp grew broader and deeper at a pace that had now the repetition of a machine, a pace that left the workers breathless, and a determination that continually sucked new workers into the frenzy. Any man, any woman who could unpack canvas or haul on rope surely became ashamed to sit still.
Still the new arrivals came down, and spread out, and kept spreading with that breathless speed—now and again a worker fell half-conscious on the sand, and lay with the weak, in a strange tent, cared for, given meager help, and two and three and four more newly arrived villagers took his place.
Hammer-sound echoed off the cliff face along a broad front, and beshti filed by, some laden with baggage, and riding beasts carrying the old and the young and led by the hale and fit: they worked through all this, and the earth shook, and shook again, and stars fell so near they lit the sky in untimely dawns, noons, and twilights, but they never ceased: men rested when they must, drove in stakes as they could regain their strength, as the villagers came down, staggering, some clinging to the beshti’s mounting loops, scarcely able to point out their tents amid the baggage, and their water-starved beshti so anxious to sit down it was difficult to get the saddles off them.
Here was reason to keep working. Even the pragmatic tribesmen found reason to press their strength further, to provide minimal shelter, if not lifesaving water, and, in the way of the tribes in extremity, they pitched tents now in common, long constructions webbed down with whatever cordage they could manage, for villagers to pool resources and stay alive if they could.
But even men who had come in staggering with weakness managed to haul cord to shelter their families, and a few, the hardiest, having caught a little wind, joined the rest of them as they hammered and unpacked and spread canvas and snugged it down.
Here and there villages more prudent and better-led than the rest came in better condition, and some gave their water to strangers’ children, because, one young idealist said, paradise was close and there would be no end of water.
Paradise was notclose. The hammerfall was. Marak, Marak, the voices began to say, and while the cliffs cut all view of the Lakht, Marak could feel the fall like doom hanging over his shoulder. Closer, now, closer and closer.
Hati still worked with him. She placed the stakes and he hammered, and sometimes she directed villagers who grew confused in handling the ropes, an art she knew in her sleep, if she had had the strength left to manage it. Her hands bled. Marak’s did.
Marak! the warning came to him. He saw the ring of fire, three times repeated. He saw the fall of stone on sphere, and it seemed he knew where Norit was, that she had found a besha and came desperately toward them.
Then he did see her: in the dark, mad as ever she was, Norit came riding toward him, but she came with Tofi, with Patya, and them leading beshti with them.
“The star is coming down,” Norit said, Luz said. “Get to shelter now! Everyone get to shelter. It’s coming. It’s coming down!”
In his own vision he saw what he had always seen. But he believed her. He stopped his work and stood still, dazed, seeing all these men, tribesmen, who had come farther and farther from their tents and from safety… that was his first clear thought at the warning, that it was not only a question of his safety, and above that, Hati’s, but of Tofi and all these other men.
But other men had heard the prophet. A panic began in that moment, even among the brave.
It tried to rise in him, the moment he gave it any room. “Hati,” he said. “Spread the word. Then get home.” Home, he said, like a villager fool, when Norit, their beacon, had come out here, so that in all this expanse of tents neither of them knew where that was.
But suddenly he did know. He knew, Norit knew, he thought Hati knew, and he thought strangely enough that, in the heart of all the world, a baby with the makers in her knew where the ones who loved her were standing at this very moment.
“Lelie’s our beacon home,” he said on a hoarse breath, and climbed to the saddle and took the offered rein. “Follow it! Spread the word: the storm’s coming. Get to cover! Now!” He turned and waved and lifted his voice in the loudest shout he could make clear. “Hindmost tents, take in all comers! Spread the word! Spread the word! Get the beshti sheltered! Take in the stranger! Take in your worst enemy! In all the world, there’s only us, and the storm!”