Текст книги "Hammerfall"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

The Ila neither ages nor suffers illness: from her all life flows, and life and health is her gift to those who keep her law.

–The Book of Priests

Tofi argued with the slaves. He cajoled, he raised a quirt, he threatened.

“Pack up,” Tofi said. “You’re fools here. You haven’t a trade, you don’t have relatives.” That availed nothing. “I’ll free you when we get to Oburan,” Tofi said. “You’ll be freedmen when you come back.”

There was no movement.

“Damn you, I’ll pay you wages when you’re free!”

The slaves looked at one another, then began to get up, one and the other. “Move!” Tofi said, and they moved, and went to work.

They took all the beshti, all Tofi’s goods. The beasts complained about being roused out for service, but not beyond the ordinary. They were well rested and well watered, and had eaten all they wished for the several days of their sojourn here. Gorging to their bellies’ contentment and moving on was the sum of what they did all their lives, and now the packs were lighter, the gear distributed out over those beasts that had no riders, by the simple change of running two deep-irons through saddle rings and lashing them down. The loads they made were so light that for a besha’s strength, it was as if they carried no weight at all.

The mad turned out to stare at the process. Some of them, understanding where they were going, even professed a thought of going with them.

But after all was said and settled, to a man, they chose the rich tables and the promise of safety. Only as the seven of them rode away, their former companions lined the cool edge of the tent, waving, calling out well-wishes to them. One, Maol, one of Tofi’s two women ran out to offer them fresh fruit for their journey and to shed tears at the parting. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for our lives.”

But the rest simply stood back to watch them go, as much as if to say that of all the mad, they counted their former guides the most afflicted.

Beyond the tents the beasts stretched out fully into that natural walk that could eat up so much ground a day. The slaves rode hindmost, loaded with food, which they ate with abandon, no one forbidding it. They had more than enough water to reach Pori, they had food enough for their whole journey: they had all Tofi’s wealth of tents.

The weather held fair.

That noon when they camped, they pitched only a single tent, heated water for tea and a good supper, and left the rest of the baggage packed and ready to put up on the beasts. The au’it wrote and wrote, seldom looking up, such was her haste and her concentration.

The sky was the brightest of blues, clear of dust. The wind was gentle, but enough to move beneath the canvas. If the world threatened to end, still, the day seemed uncommonly good, and peaceful, and lacking all desperation.

The time was already up, Luz had said, and Norit had heard it. Yet perhaps the tower-dwellers were fallible in their knowledge, or simply lying, to trap all the others in this paradise.

If there was anyone who might know, Marak said to himself, the Ila might know what the truth of things was. There shouldbe an answer, beyond folding the hands and sitting down under the white tents.

The world to be snuffed out? Extinguished by some nameless enemy? This ondat? And they should give it up with no more than Luz’s saying so?

He did not accept it. He refused to accept it. But try to save it, that he would.

He lay beside Hati and Norit and found his eyes shutting. He had not truly slept, not a natural sleep, and now it came on him irresistibly, like a drug.

Then he heard the voices, saying, Marak, hurry. Hurry, Marak. He had no strength to open his eyes. The vision came like nightmare.

Objects struck one another, impact repeated itself over and over and over. He rode the falling object down and down, and the sphere became land, and desert, and the desert plumed up like a fountain of sand and billowed up like a cloud that raced over the land, over dunes and villages.

Came a new vision: water flowed in the desert, over rocks burned black. A stream coursed, cascaded. He could hear it dripping, flowing, gurgling down the rocks and into a broad expanse of water that swelled, swelled, swelled.

He could see his father’s house, in Kais Tain, all of mud brick, sprawling around deep-floored gardens and wells that made that sound, that wonderful, rich sound of water that the dream made fearsome.

He visited his own rooms, and heard the women laughing as they prepared food for the house: there was always plenty laid out. There were always children.

He could see the stable yard, and the beasts he loved; and his little sister Patya fed Osan with her hand. She had to learn to flatten her hand, or lose fingers. She laughed at Osan’s questing lip. That laughter haunted him, and reminded him not all was well with that house, these days.

He could not see his mother, or his father. He searched the house for them.

The rocks above the house spilled down a dependable amount of water in every season, and the spring flowed from there down to a second well house. From there it went to the garden, which all the village tended. Each house had its own tree and its own vines, and everyone knew which was which, and whose grew best. The householders shared such secrets, and were generous with their surplus, beyond what they needed. The village was fed before it sold the excess. It was the custom.

The great house, too, had its vines and its bushes in a garden apart, and a few slaves tended them, freedmen on the house records, but they liked their work in the garden too well and their freedom was to do the work they loved. He learned that lesson from those men and women, that so long as they could not own the garden, their best way to be happy was to work in it for reasonable reward and a share of the fruit. They were richer than the Ila in her palace, wise in their own domain, respected throughout the village for their advice and their competence.

But they had no governance beyond their garden… and no power over its fate.

Tain, on the other hand, was born to power. Tain had to keep his holdings by force, fighting against those who wished to take the food from people’s mouths, fighting against bandits and the Ila’s taxmen; and so he fought, and so the villagers and people of the district fought at his command. Some died, and left widows and children who, but for Tain’s upkeep, were helpless. And in the end Tain cast out his wife and his son.

Perhaps after all it was better to be those freed slaves, content with the vines and each other’s company. They enjoyed as much as they wished of the fruit… and that was better than many had as daily fare. They were assured of beds, and knew every day what they had to do, which was to prune the vines and tend the trees. Every year of their lives was like the last.

That was the life of the mad at the tower, to have tables spread with every good thing, and to work only at need. The inhabitants of the white tents carried the names of villages with them. They brought their crafts and practiced them. They married and begat and might see their children grow.

But whence came the laws, and who made the food, and how long would it come so easily, if destruction came?

At the pleasure of Luz and Ian, how long would they eat as well and have everything their hearts desired?

He waked with a hard-beating heart and a remote, guilty regret for not urging more of the mad to come with them. Paradise was not enough for him. Not enough for Norit and Hati, not enough for Tofi, either, as it seemed. Least of all for the au’it, whose whole devotion was to the Ila.

But what was enough? What would be enough to give him peace of these dreams, these voices, this driving necessity to do, and escape, and move?

In the late afternoon they packed up in a very little time and rode on through the night at that same ground-devouring pace. By noon they camped.

Marak, Marak, Marak, the voices said, as if discontent at his stopping. The voices he heard during the day all sounded like Luz, until while they were setting up the tent he put his hands over his ears, trying not to hear; and squeezed his eyes until they flashed with red, trying not to see.

We have to sleep, he raged at Luz. He wished her to understand, to have some comprehension she was driving him beyond endurance, but Luz gave no sign of hearing him.

Water will fall from heaven, Luz told him, as he tossed and turned, attempting to sleep.

Hati waked and put an arm about him, and after that he tried not to move, but the voices kept up.

“Do you hear voices?” he asked Hati.

“Yes,” Hati whispered back. “I hear promises. And threats. I think it’s Luz. What kind of place has just two people, and it so huge? It never made sense.”

Norit, meanwhile, slept. Marak hugged Hati against him and tried to sleep, but he rose early, while the sun was still hot, and roused Tofi and the slaves out to get under way.

The beasts grumbled. Tofi grumbled not having had all their sleep. Haste, haste, haste, the voices said. Luz tormented them with threats, with visions, with promises: Norit suffered, too, and her eyes looked weary and worried.

They came to that rising of the land that led up to the Lakht, and to the path on the slope where they had lost the one beast.

“That’s where the besha fell,” Tofi said, pointing. “That’s our trail.”

They looked up, but nothing remained up on the shale where it had fallen, not a bone, not a scrap of cloth or a remnant of the saddle. Of vermin there was no other sign. They ate, and they dispersed… might have fought among themselves. The survivors would be sated. The crumbling rock gave no hint of past violence, only a single trail of bright reflection on the slope where broken shale marked the fatal slide.

They had arrived on the ascent by midmorning, as they hoped. They dismounted and led their beasts up, and climbed with caution: whoever had made the fragile path down off the Lakht, likely Pori’s hunters, had somewhat compacted the fragile rock, and their own passage had compacted it further, but it was steep and narrow, no place for a misstep, and one beast tended to rush up behind the beast higher up.

The slaves below, hindmost, were not helping. “Fools!” Tofi called out, looking back, and risked his life, descending the trail side to hold back one beast until the one ahead had vacated a foothold for it.

They made the crest. They were on the Lakht. Tofi, bedraggled and dusty, came up last. “I said get before them!” Tofi shouted at the slaves. “I said hold the line back! I said be a gateway, not an open door! Shall I free fools? How will you make a living in the world?”

The slaves were chagrined, and hung their heads; but it came to Marak with sudden force that Tofi believed the world would go on, and that he himself went on believing it, at heart… while if Luz was right there would be no continuation, no order of life such as they knew—

If Luz was right. If she was, then Tofi’s promises were a mirage, Tofi’s promises, his beliefs… all mirage, all blind faith. After a rest full of nightmares and visions it came to him like a blow to the heart, and for an instant the question devastated him: How will you make a living in the world?

How would they deal with a changed desert, and this enemy, and Luz’s protection.

What would he say to the Ila if he could reach her?

Is Luz telling the truth? That would be the first thing.

To find his mother and get her into his hands… that was where he was going.

But for what? For what better life?

He sat down on a convenient flat shelf of rock, and tried not to find deeper answers. He had to rest; they all had to rest. The beasts were weak-legged from the climb, and sat down under their burdens. It was no time for prolonged thinking. It could only lead to despair.

“We should pitch the tent,” Tofi came to him to say. “We have plenty of water, no lack of food. The sun is not quite at noon, but it makes sense to stop.”

Did it? Did it, when Luz said it might already be too late to carry their message? Despair and urgency wavered back and forth in his brain like chill and fever, an approaching panic.

There was no reason to lame the beasts or drive themselves to collapse: that was no help to them.

“Pitch the tent,” Marak said, and resolved on less desperate speed and a steady progress for the days ahead. They would reach Pori in the night, and then expect no more diversions until Oburan, not diverting or stopping for any wells, since they still had sufficient water and a wealth of supplies. They were making good time, having cut two days off their trek already.

They had their supper while the burning light of noon came in under the tent edges. They ate well, even extravagantly, and lay down to sleep.

But in early afternoon, Norit sat up, waking both of them with her sharp gasp.

“We should not go to Pori,” she said.

“Not go to Pori,” Hati said in amazement, when it was their chief watering stop on the way to the holy city. Marak was half-asleep, having achieved rest, and cudgeled his brain toward coherent action.

“We should not go there,” Norit said in a whisper, and seemed to look into the distance, at something not evident to them. “When we bring the rest, we need Pori, but not now. Go north.”

Norit was not the one to give them orders. Norit had expressed few opinions, until now. Marak got to one knee and put out a hand and turned her head gently until she did look at him.

“There’s no time,” she said. “We can’t wait. Take the northern trail. Tofi will know.”

When did Norit know any trails on the Lakht? “Luz!” he said, and Norit blinked, and took a deep breath.

“Take my advice,” Norit said as if she were god-on-earth, and with a lift of her chin. She drew her shoulder from under his hand as if he polluted her with his touch.

Hati had laid a hand on her knife, alarmed; but Marak seized Norit’s hand, hard.

“Wake up,” he said, and Norit blinked twice, and looked astonished at herself, on the edge of tears.

“Luz spoke through you,” Hati said.

“I heard,” Norit said, and shivered and ran her fingers into her hair, clenching it, pulling it, self-distraction. “I hear her. I don’t want to hear her.”

“Damn Luz,” he said. “We’ll go on to Pori. Never mind what Luz wants.”

Norit flashed him a look of terror. “No,” Norit said, and pain rushed through him, and through Hati, and through Norit, until pain was all there was, and he was descended to mere creature, wallowing on the ground where he had fallen. Lights flashed in his eyes and pain roared in his ears.

“Listen to advice,” Luz said fiercely in that sound, Norit leaning above him with unwonted fierceness. “It’s already begun! I can’t stop it! Do what I say!”

Pain racked him. He dragged himself up, appalled and angry. He strode out from under the tent, into the sun, and began kicking loose the tent stakes, blindly, even before the slaves had gathered up their goods.

“Wait, wait!” Tofi cried, waving his arms. “What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with any of you?”

Marak knew his act was as mad as Norit’s. The pain reached his ears and his skull and hammered at him. He spun about, arms wide, looking up at the eye of heaven as if he flew, as if he were bound to nothing but the blue-white air, as if he were caught between the hammer of the sun and the anvil of the earth. He would fling himself down and die before he became utterly mad. He would cast himself off the cliffs before he became a mindless slave to the voices.

“You’ll have nothing!” he shouted at the heavens. “ You’ll have nothing from me!”

The pain in his head became pain in his chest and in his spine and in his gut, and the noise in his ears became a light like the sun. He spun and he spun and he spun until he fell.

He lay on the sun-scorched sand, whole, and unbroken.

Luz said, into his ears: Listen to me. Lives are at risk. It’s already begun. Someone will see to Pori. Go north, away from danger.

Hati dragged his head into her lap, shading him with her body, touching his face with precious water. “Marak. Marak. Wake up. Wake up! Don’t leave us.”

Don’t leave us, don’t leave us, don’t leave us.

“Marak,” Hati said, and fear was in her voice, where fear was a stranger. “Marak, wake up. Do you hear me?”

He could not leave Hati lost. He could not leave Norit possessed of devils, with no one to understand her.

He drew several great breaths and slowly blinked at Hati’s shadowed face, against the sunglare. He saw Norit beyond her shoulder, a plain, sweet, woman’s face dim to his eyes, wild-haired and bareheaded, haloed by the sun.

He reached back with his hands and pushed himself up, gathered a knee under him with Hati’s help and then Tofi’s.

He looked dazedly at Norit, wondering if he was looking at the same time at Luz. But if it was not also Norit within that body, he reasoned, then Norit had no other place to be, and whatever she carried within her, he could not turn on her. He had no power to drive out his own vision. He certainly had no power to condemn hers.

“We will pass by Pori,” he said, to Tofi, to Hati, to whoever cared. In that promise, the pressure in his head eased, and Luz grew silent. Tofi had a frightened look.

He staggered upright, staggered as he walked toward the tent to continue ripping up the stakes, still dizzied by his looking at the sun. He was not accustomed to defeat. He burned from the shame of his actions.

And for what, he asked himself, for what reason?

Tofi yelled at the slaves to help, and lent a hand. Together, with Hati and with Norit, all of them helping, they folded the tent and packed it. They loaded the beasts, and roused them to their feet, ready to move.

“This northern way,” Marak said to Tofi. “Do you know it?”

“There is a shorter way across the highland,” Tofi said. “My father never used it. I can tryto find it.”

Try, in an unforgiving waste. But it seemed to him he knew.

And Luz knew. Luz knew exactly where they were, and where she wanted them to go.

Tofi had a worried look and clearly waited for him to say, No, no, let us go the sane and reasonable passage, but he waited in vain.

“We have guidance,” Marak said. He had never been more angry in his life, but never in his life had any man more deserved a plain answer from him than young Tofi. “The woman in the tower speaks to Norit. I don’t trust it, but she wants us to go to Oburan. At least we’re agreed in that.”

“I suppose we have water enough to make mistakes,” Tofi said faintly, and shook his head and walked off to mount up.

They set the au’it into the saddle; and helped Norit, who seemed dazed and hesitant: Luz or Norit, it would be Norit’s bones that broke, and they roused her besha up and set her securely on it.

The rest of them got up, and Tofi turned them north. Beasts that had anticipated one road and now were turned onto another bellowed their frustration to the skies, as much as to say that they remembered Pori, and fools forgot where the water was.

The complaints gradually faded. The sun sank and vanished in a brassy dusk.

“Look!” Hati said, as a star fell.

They looked aloft for falling stars, then, that sign of overthrow and change, and saw another, and a third and a fourth.

Then a fifth blazed bright, and stuttered a trail of fire across the sky. The beasts saw it in alarm, and their heads swung up.

A seventh and an eighth, as bright, traced a path from horizon to horizon.

Marak had viewed the first falling stars as a curiosity, but now he saw a ninth fall, bright and leaving a trail behind it.

A tenth, and thunder cracked among the stars, making everyone jump, and then laugh, caught in foolish fear.

Everyone had seen falling stars. They happened in the sixth and the eighth month, very many a night, but, Marak said to himself, this was the fourth month, no more than early in the fourth month, at that, and the heavens lit up in bright trails, one after another, interspersed with bright interrupted ones.

Another star fell, this one in a crack of thunder, and shattered in a cloud that blotted out the stars along its track.

“This will continue,” Norit said in a tone both cold and assured, and yet trembling with Norit’s chin. “This will continue. It will likely miss Pori. But the plain beyond isn’t safe.”

Now the heavens showed streaks of a star-fall denser than anything Marak had ever seen. At every moment the sky showed another, and another, and another, then five, ten at once, and more and more and more, faster than a man could count.

“Is this the world ending?” Tofi asked. He had his arms folded over his head as he rode, as if that could make him safe from plummeting stars. The slaves cried out in alarm as another of the bright ones came down, and burst in a long trail of fire.

“Keep moving,” Norit said, and that new vision came, overwhelming, of rock hurtling into sphere, then a swarm of rocks, again and again and again. “This is the lightest of the fall. This is what will happen, here, and across the world, far worse.”

Marak all but lost his balance riding as his eyes revised the scale of those rocks of the vision as equal to the stars above them, careening down in dizzying succession.

And what was the sphere?

“The falling rocks,” he said: those were the only words he could find for what he saw, and the import of them he could not measure by any attack he had ever seen. “The spheres.”

“The death of all of us,” Tofi moaned, hiding his head, and the slaves rode up close to them, pointing at the largest, waiting to die. “Look!” they cried. “Look!” until they ran out of astonishment.

It went on for hours: at times there seemed thousands at once, until the whole heavens were streaked with light, even while the sun was coming up. Norit hugged her arms against herself like a beaten child as she rode, rocking to the besha’s gait.

And the sun rose and reached its height.

They reached a flat, and spread the tent, but kept looking toward the white-hot heavens as they hammered home the stakes. They had lost confidence in the sky. It was long before they slept, and waked and exited the tent to break camp as the sky began to shadow.

Another star fell, herald of another such night.

The slaves cried out. The au’it opened her book and recorded the fall. But a second and a third followed.

“Let us be on our way,” Marak said to Tofi. “If the heavens fall, what can we do? Let’s go.”

But now the slaves went about their work with fearful looks at the sky, while the beasts, often reluctant, put up a mindful resistance and bawled and circled away from attempts to load them.

At a great boom out of the sky, the beasts bolted.

“They know they’re going to die,” the slaves cried. “We’re all going to die!”

“I will free you now!” Tofi cried. “I will pay you wages now! Catch them!”

The slaves took out, running. Hati raced out, caught her own beast, managed to get into the saddle, and rode out and got ahead of the most of the strays, driving them back with blows of her quirt, to Tofi’s effusive gratitude. The slaves caught the others and led them back, panting and staggering, too exhausted and too frightened, perhaps, to attempt to ride.

Meanwhile the rain of fire continued in the heavens, and a strange cloud hung where the star had burst.

Marak put Norit up on her beast, and the au’it onto hers. He mounted up on Osan as the slaves struggled with the packs and, with Hati, kept the frightened younger animals in place while the slaves made the older of the pack beasts kneel, and loaded up such of the baggage as waited ready.

Seeing the other beasts sitting calmly under their packs, then, the skittish ones began to kneel on their own, the habit of their kind.

They struck the tent. The rest of the baggage went on.

Then they set themselves under way, under the overthrow of heaven, making all possible speed.

Chapter Twelve

« ^ »

In the afternoon sky in the third day of the third cycle of the first season a strange pale light appeared and the sun seemed to set in the east in daylight. The light endured as a sunset and faded as a sunset fades, but pale throughout. The lord of the tribe asked the grandmothers whether the tribe should go to know the source of this light, but it was near calving time and the grandmothers said it was far away and the walk would risk the calves and mothers. The lord of the tribe asked whether they should tell a village, and the grandmothers said the village priest would make trouble for the tribe.

–The Spoken Traditions of the Andesar

The sky whitened into day, and they reached an alkali pan. They had no need to drink, and would not drink of the well that they could dig in this place, not at the most desperate. They simply used the stony flat for a noontime camp, just off the clinging white powder, and the au’it sat and wrote in her book, flicking now and again at windblown white dust that fell on her pages.

The three slaves bickered with Tofi, who swore he had never freed them, that he had only said he might free them if they caught all the beasts, but Marak, seeing unhappiness and surly workers, took the slaves’ side. “You did say it. They’re free men. Now they have to earn their food.”

Neither side liked that completely, and the beasts sat bawling and complaining while Tofi and the slaves, now freedmen, bartered over wages in the hot sun.

“Pay them what you pay any hireling!” Marak said, to end the dispute. “And no more!” He pointed at the au’it and made such a gesture as the Ila herself might make. “Write it! Besides, the world is ending. What does a little extravagance matter?”

The au’it wrote.

It was the first time he had said it in those terms. The slaves fell into silence. Tofi did, and after the beasts were unladed and the tent was up, Tofi on the spot untied a wrapped string and counted out gold rings. “If you have any sense,” Tofi muttered to the new freed-men as he did so, “don’t spend anything on drink. Buy goods when we get to Oburan and sell them where we’re going. You know how it’s done. If the world is ending, one can still make a profit. Think of what the white tents don’thave, buy it cheap as you can and sell that.”

“Master,” they still called him, when they were happy with him. They went away and compared the rings they had, content, as if the world might, after all, go on.

Marak settled down with Hati and Norit, and, taking some cheer from Tofi’s pragmatic wisdom, he stretched himself out to sleep. Meanwhile the au’it, tucked up with her book, settled against the tent pole and unwrapped a new cake of ink: she had written up the old one until there was nothing left but the corners. She sharpened a new pen.

They all were exhausted, after chasing panicked beshti and watching the heavens come down in fragments: they had used deep-irons to tether the beasts this time, and they slept more deeply in that confidence.

Marak, the voices began; and Norit shook at him, and waked him.

There was still ample light. He looked at the angle of the shadows and grimaced, incoherent with sleep, but Norit had waked Hati, too, and then Tofi.

Haste, the voices said, too disquieting for rest. Tofi looked like the risen dead. Hati scowled, and the slaves-now-freedmen moaned and resisted. But they were awake. There was reason, so Marak said to himself, and gathered himself up to his feet, out under a sun only a quarter down the sky and a heat still shimmering on the sand.

It was no good to curse. Norit did as Luz did, and was, herself, exhausted. They struck their sole tent, loaded the beasts, and dug up the stakes, sweating.

Then they began their daily trek to the west, under a sky still too bright for stars. Marak slept, nodding. So Hati did, and Tofi, from time to time, until they acquired a better mood and had some sense of rest. Norit managed: at least her head drooped, and Marak kept an eye on her for fear she might fall off; but she stayed, and waked, and rubbed her eyes, adjusting the aifad to shade them. There was little talk, little to distract them in a monotony of riding.

Hati pointed after a time to something Marak’s eye had begun to pick out far to the west, in the sunset, a particularly bright seam of light. But they had no notion, any of them, what that was. The au’it wrote, clutching her book and her pen and her ink-cake despite the lurch of the beast under her, in the absolutely last of the light.

As the sun faded and the stars showed, that glow persisted.

“Like fire,” one of the freedmen said. “What’s out there to burn?”

None of them knew. In the dark, stars began to fall again, none of the noisy sort, only a steady, gentle, remorseless fall.

“Will they all fall?” Hati asked at last in distress, scanning the heavens as they rode. She pointed at bright Almar. “See, Almar is still up there.”

“They are not stars that fall,” Norit said. “Almar won’t be among them.”

“What are they, then?” Marak asked, angry not at Norit, but at Luz. “What are they? Are they the vision?”

“Water,” Norit said. “Water, iron… stone and metals. A wealth of iron.”

Perhaps it was Norit that answered him, out of her madness. Or Luz told them the unlikely truth.

They never knew what the burning was. That next day, when they pitched the tent and lay down on their mats, Norit turned her back to both of them and lay apart.

Marak looked at Hati, questioning, and Hati at him, but neither of them knew what to do for her. He knew that within Luz’s will, Norit suffered, and that knowledge left him sleepless as they rested.

He thought about it. He tried to think what to do.

The au’it slept. Tofi and the men slept. There were no witnesses. He gave Hati’s hand a squeeze, one comrade asking leave of another, and moved to Norit’s side, stroked Norit’s arm, and after a time moved her hair aside from her ear to whisper into it: “Norit. Do you want to make love?”

Norit flinched and covered her eyes, turning away.

He was given a no, but not, he thought, from Norit, who had no choice about Luz, or the visions. He had never forced himself on a woman. But he knew the ravages of the madness, how it ate up sleep and gave no rest, and wore out the body without giving it any useful ease. He saw it happening to Norit, and he gathered Norit up in his arms and kissed her on the lips.