Текст книги "Hammerfall"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

That was good. So was the Haga’s added protection for the Ila’s camp. He raked his memory, trying to remember how long this area lasted, or where they were on their journey. He had no idea how long he had lain on the litter.

“It’s only been two days I’ve been out,” he said.

“It’s been two days you were gone, before that, omi,” Tofi said.

His brain had been rattled. Time had slipped away from him. Location-reckoning mingled with the trip back and forward in the line, and with the fever. For a moment of panic, he had trouble recalling even which trip this was, and which trail of the two possible routes they were following. That eye-blink lapse scared him.

But he remembered: he was clearheaded on the facts. It was the northern route. They were approaching an area of alkali pans, where concealment was much more difficult. The open land was a protection… for a time, and if the weather held. If the water did. The pans might hold some water. He hoped so. They had not tried here, on their way to Oburan.

Marak, the voices said, if only to let him know they were there. And dizziness assailed him with, East, east, east, so that he gripped the saddlebow.

“Would you truly have killed your father?” Tofi asked him, out of nothing. They were all in a group, he and Hati, Norit, and Tofi, with Patya not far distant. His family. His people. Would you have killed your father? Tofi asked him, and he gazed at the horizon, trying to steady himself in that answer and Tofi’s assault on his purpose.

“Yes,” he said, trying to mean it, trying to insist everything he had done had been a good idea.

But he suddenly discovered the limit of his detestation of his father, and perhaps the limit of his love of his mother, now that he had wives, now that he had others leaning on him. Now he found he agreed with Tofi… and hoped that somehow even with blood between him and his father, that the matter of his mother’s death would dwindle to a lifelong feud, with never any further action.

Shoot Tain if he had to… yes, that he still thought he would, and after all his father had done. He thought he would do it without regret. But he knew what Tofi was saying to him, a son who lately had buried his father. He had no wish to be a parricide, at any price, mother orfather, and his parents’ quarrel with each other had never been his. He had no idea the roots of it, only the bitter fruit.

“I feared you wouldn’tkill him,” Hati said under her breath, an’i Keran, and far harder than Tofi, from birth. “That was my greatest worry, all the time you were gone.”

“It was a question I asked myself,” he said. His time among the abjori, the killing-marks on his fingers, those had changed him in one direction—but Kaptai had changed him in another, reshaped all his father’s work in him year by year. And that, he decided, was his father’s ultimate and personal defeat. It was Kaptai who held all debts, now, forever; his father had nothing from him or in him, not even the desire to shoot him dead. “I know I would, now, if I had to, but I won’t look for him, not even for this. I don’t give a damn whether he lives or dies; that’s all it’s come down to. I don’t give a damn for him, not before the duty I have up here. I won’t take that chance again.”

That satisfied Hati, he thought. He wanted to set himself back where he had been, in the post he had deserted—not with a right to have it back, but understanding the way his obligations balanced, now, better than he ever had done. He was fitto lead, he said to himself, now. He was fit to lead: he understood things better than he ever had.

But the thought of riding forward, of reporting to the Ila, daunted him. He saw the red robes in the distance ahead of him, but he still felt a certain dizziness and unsteadiness, effects of the fever, and doubted whether he could deal with her subtleties and her threats. He felt a queasiness, too, in the voices that dinned in his ears, distracting him, as if to say he had deserted that duty, too, and earned trouble for himself and everyone under him. Fool, he imagined Luz saying, and he was put to asking Hati and young Tofi how the supplies stood, and how far they thought Pori might be… he knew they were on the track, but he had come loose from all his reckonings, and lost the threads of information that were life itself.

A ridge lay due east of them, uncrossable. East, the inner voices cried, but eastwas impossible, and Pori, south, was essential… they could not cut cross-country as they had on the journey from the tower: they had to reach Pori, had to, had to, no matter what the voices clamored. The sweet well there was life. He had seen the fragility of the camps behind them. He had a grasp now how very far that line stretched, how endangered, how little the skill of the village lords in the deep Lakht.

Pori was two, three days from this plain of stones, at the pace they had traveled on their way to Oburan. He knew that ridge. He began to know where the rim of the Lakht was, just beyond that horizon line, that implacable, uncrossable ridge.

Memnanan, meanwhile, dropped back in the line, reining in his besha until he fell in beside him and Hati and the rest… the Ila’s voice, it might be, the Ila’s curiosity personified.

Or Memnanan’s own.

“Faring better,” Memnanan observed. “No end of miracles, it seems.”

“Better than I expected,” Marak said.

“The Ila was not pleased,” Memnanan said.

“My apologies,” Marak said, not contritely enough; but his own stubborn will would not admit to her what he had learned about himself. “Well enough that the tribes stepped in where I wasn’t.—How does the Ila view our escort?”

“She knows,” Memnanan said. “Where they ride is nothing to her.”

It was the Ila’s sort of answer. That meant the Ila knew she had no practical way to stop them, and would not try.

“She wishes to speak to you,” Memnanan said.

“I’ve no doubt,” Marak said. He was sore and entirely unwilling to deal with the Ila today. His head spun. But he valued Memnanan’s goodwill, and he knew he had tested it to its limits in the last several days.

“He’s not recovered,” Hati said. “He needs his rest.”

Useless excuses with the Ila. “No, I’ll go,” Marak said.

“Then I’ll go with you,” Hati said.

“Best not.” Hati and the Ila alike had hot tempers, and Hati’s, like the Ila’s, had been sorely tried. “Do me the favor: stay here.”

Hati frowned. He fixed that dusky stare in his heart and rode off with Memnanan, alone, and straight up through the column, among the red robes.

The head of that group was the Ila herself, veiled in red, gloved against the sun.

“Ila,” Memnanan said. “I’ve brought him, at your order.”

Marak drew alongside. “I’m here.”

“I sent last night!” the Ila said peevishly. “And where were you?”

“Dying.”

“Deservedly! You left against my order!”

“I’m here now.” It was the old give-and-take with her, not unreasoning anger. He was reassured in her purposes, her demeanor, her control of her anger. “You wanted something?”

“What is this baby?”

“My wife’s baby,” he said. “Mine. I take it for mine.”

The Ila did not look at him, rather sniffed and stared straight ahead, thinking what, he could not guess, until she asked: “And Tain? Tain shot you. Taingot the best of you, Marak Trin.”

“He did.” There was no denying it. “The Haga lost four men on the trail, shot from ambush, and I don’t think he was alone. The Rhonandin helped me search back along the track as far as I was willing to go, but he wove back and forth through the column. We lost them in the storm.”

“Those helping him.”

“I know he gathered certain followers. Not an army, I think. If I thought that… I’d be concerned.”

“Water is running short among the villages,” the Ila said, still in a prickly mood, and waved a red-gloved hand, an elegant spiral of evanescence toward the heavens. “Even for drinking. So I am told. But in your travels you may have discovered it.”

“We’ll come to water at Pori. As we planned. There’s the well, the only good well we’ll meet.”

“You need not inform mewhere the springs are,” the Ila said in all hauteur. “I’m aware of Pori.”

“We’re on schedule,” he said. “More or less. Some villages may have drunk more than they ought. They’re not experienced in the Lakht. But what can we do, but shorten our own supply?” He spoke to the woman who had her baths, daily, whose daily tea delayed the column. “Luxury for one may be life and death for a village, Ila.”

“Luxury, you say.”

“I say go unwashed, Ila! It’s not that long to water. A little dust is bearable.”

A flutter of red fingers. “Is it bearable for you?”

“And for all of us, Ila. Give up your noon tea. Make somesacrifice!”

“To what end? Will it bring water to the hindmost? Will you ride back and carry it there? Leave it for the vermin? Oh, I know your villages. Some may take to robbing their neighbors, and Tain Trin Tain is back there fomenting trouble. Certain villages have decided to squabble, when even the unlettered tribesband together to defend us.”

“And the tribes will not respect a leader who washes her body in water people might drink,” he retorted. “There’s the truth for you, Ila.”

“And do they respect a man who leaves off guiding the caravan on a whim and a fit of anger?”

“My wives know the way,” he said. “They know it. We were never lost. Trust Norit, if no one.”

“Trust Luz,” the Ila scoffed. “Trust the all-seeing Luz, who prepares a shelter for us, who mediates for the ondatand liesto them. Tell me why you should live.”

It came to him like one of his visions, a dizzying perspective that came so clearly, so absolutely: he ought to fear the threat and failed to, utterly.

“Because, Ila, no one else serves you and Luz at the same time and very few tell you the truth. You know and I know that I could have led the people away from you days ago and left you to travel at odds with the tribes; you know I could have left that very first day with my own tent and a handful of friends—but I didn’t do that. I didn’t do it because youhave importance to the world, and what do I know else? Only what Luz tells me, and I don’t think that’s enough to go through the rest of our lives with—so I want you to get there alive. I want you and Luz both to settle the ondatand save what’s left of us. So I stay and I tell you the truth. Stop taking baths with our water and pay attention to what the tribes tell you and, most of all, win their loyalty, Ila!—which you damned well won’t do by bathing in the drinking water. Win theirloyalty, since you created us, and bethe god on earth. Youknow us as our mother andour god. Youmade the makers that made this world, and apart from you we can’t hope to know who we are and what’s right and wrong for us to do. Call in the au’it if you want to know the secrets I tell my wives, and have Memnanan shoot me dead if you think I threaten your life or your authority. But I think I support it. I think you wantsomeone to say what I say, and tell you the unpleasant truth, or you wouldn’t call me in to talk to me. You’re not mad, and I’m not mad. We’re both terribly, unhealthily sane, and we’re going to go on living, because we haveno illusions and shooting us doesn’t kill us, does it?”

There was a lengthy silence, and the red gauze veil obscured the nuances of her expression. He saw her in profile, considering all he had said.

“Oh, we have a great many illusions,” she said. “We shape them and make them, and now one of them has risen up to call himself my equal.”

“Equal to you and to Luz,” he said. He was utterly reckless at the moment, whether Luz possessed him or whether it was his dive toward death and back, but he saw all life hanging by a thread, and tired of this woman threatening it. “Because without me, and without Hati, you and she would sit still, and most of the world would die. You don’t know how to be loved. I can tell you: save these people’s lives. Do something with your makers, if you can do it: make them strong enough to get to the tower, and then what you and Luz do with each other is your affair. Until we get there, it’s mine.”

“Marak,” Memnanan said quietly, a late, a desperate warning. “Be still.”

“Dare you order him be still?” the Ila asked. “Dare you?”

“He’s our guide, Ila. We need to keep him safe.”

“Then see to it he doesn’t leave,” the Ila said sharply. “See to it he’s not twice a fool.”

“I will,” Memnanan said.

“Tain knows which tent is mine,” Marak said, seeing dismissal coming. “He was lying in wait. That means he’s watching. He knows the layout of this camp, and that means he knows which is your tent.” He saw he had the Ila’s attention a second time. He knew he would have Memnanan’s. “Tain may be near there to this hour, likely stalking us and wondering what he can do about the Haga and the Keran moving in to guard you. If the men with him are sensible, they’ve seen the tribes in this camp and they know—”

“I’m not a fool!”

“Then you’ll listen to advice.”

“How many men do youthink he has?”

“Twenty, perhaps, perhaps more. He rarely likes to move with more. How many may be loyal to him… reliably so… perhaps a hundred. I doubt he’ll gain more who have the strength to ride with him.”

“Do you know their names?”

Suddenly, knowing the Ila’s ruthlessness, he knew what direction this was going. And refused it. “Folly to go back there and deal with them. Make one mistake, oneinnocent man, and there isa war, where right now there isn’t.”

“Captain!”

“Ila,” Memnanan said, as au’it all around them wrote zealously.

“Hear me instruct him! Don’t ride out again, Marak Trin Tain. You will not leave this camp without my direct permission. Write it!”

“I don’t intend to,” Marak said. “Unless I see an immediate way to end the threat to the Ila.”

“Did I say not? I think I said not!”

“He would have shot you instead of me, if he could get so far into the camp and be sure of getting out again! He’s not a fool. He wants to rule, not die. I’m not sure youcare which.”

“Marak,” Memnanan said again.

“No, let him say what he wishes. And let him hear! I saved the lives of everyone alive in the world. I’ve preserved the lives of their children’s children, and for my comfort and long life, it was a sensible transaction. Now after all this time, it seems I offend enemies I never met, that Inever fought. Luz blames methat these enemies rain destruction down on the world. Tain Trin Tain blames me that I take tax. Yet a farmer comes to me if a windstorm flattens his fields and say, ‘Ila, we have no food.’ And what should I say? We have no warehouses? Will Luz have warehouses? And wherein is shevirtuous, above me? Wherein is Tain, and what will he do for the world, in my place?”

“I can’t talk about Tain,” he said in a faint voice. “I don’t understand Luz. I only know where water is, and where safety is. That’s allI know, but it makes me your match, out here. Once I’ve gotten you to Luz, my job is ended, and I lose all importance. It’s my greatest ambition, to lose all importance.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“What is, then?”

“To escape alive,” the Ila said. “How dear will you hold that ambition, in a hundred, in two hundred, in three hundred years? How dear will you hold it, when you’ve watched the whole world die, twice and three times? And how tempted will you be, to eliminate the fumbling and the foolishness and the damnable wasteof stupid creatures that repeat the same mistakes and die and feed the next generation of makers, and the next and the next and the next after that… I provoke you and you do nothing! I tread on you and you bleat that you need me! I save your world for you and you never learn! Do you want my power? Take it, and you’llbathe in the drinking water in half my life span.”

The Ila rode beside him, veiled, a riddle of intentions, in command of armed men, on her way to an enemy’s refuge, an enemy whose deeper motives he also did not know.

And all his experience told him that nothing was as fatal as lying to the Ila, that her sanity, like his, was precarious, and that he, and Memnanan, and all he loved were in danger at every moment he failed to keep her wondering.

“Are you mine?” the Ila asked him.

“I am not hers,” he answered.

“What if I said to you that sheis the enemy of the ondat?”

“Why would they save her tower and ruin yours, if that were true?”

The Ila cast back her veil, precisely, with red-gloved hands: exposed her face to the wind and her eyes to his curiosity.

“Indeed?” she said. “Do you know they do things as reasonable men would do them? And are these ondatyour friends?”

“No,” he said. “They’re not likely to be. We agree on that.”

“Ah,” the Ila said. “Indeed. Is shethe enemy of the ondat, who destroy us to carry out their law… and the rest of our kind—and there are others, Marak Trin!—allow it, in their lax-handed way? But only so you think on it, Marak Trin, I tell you something I believe Memnanan understands, too. If he doesn’t, explain it to him. I trust nothing but a man’s own best interests. And I believe you’ve discovered yours, and mine. You’ve made yourself safe in my company. You’ve made yourself essential, personally essential. Go on amusing me, Marak Trin. On that thread your life hangs, and will continue to hang. I’ve not had a husband in a hundred years. Do you feel lucky?”

Marak, his voices said, outraged. Marak, Marak, Marak, as if they would not let him think deeper, ask deeper, act on those thoughts and those questions, or countenance sanely the Ila’s outrageous proposition. The world swung east, east! with a vengeance. He swayed in the saddle, all but fainted in the dizziness, and caught at the saddlebow to save himself.

Memnanan also caught at him, riding close on his left.

“I’ve annoyed Luz,” the Ila said to Marak. “Poor Luz. Go console her. And don’t leave the column again.”

“Ila,” he said, and had no idea what Luz thought, or what the Ila thought, or what either of them meant. He talked about the safety of every living soul in the world, and the Ila reduced it to a personal argument.

It was like bathing in the drinking water. It took the question of survival to an individual one.

But did they refuse to drink the water? None of them refused.

He reined back. He understood her conditions, and the points of her argument. She did what they allowed her to do, and they allowed her, because she was the god on earth… because without her they had no god, no devil, either, except the ondat, and no man in the caravan wanted to contemplate dealing with them: most failed even to understand the ondatexisted. For them it was all the Ila, and not even Luz was real.

“Memnanan,” the Ila said as he retreated. “Watch him. On your life, watch him. Don’t let him disobey.”

Nothing protected Memnanan. And she threatened her own captain. Where there was leverage, she found it.

And she was right: those who destroyed so many lives were no friends. Those who woulddestroy this many lives were no fit rulers. That was all his battered wits came up with for an answer: that their fit ruler was madder than the mad, and had been saner in her long life, but she was still—for reasons most of them never understood—their god, their precious ruler, the definition of what they were. Was it virtue in her, some last remnant of sanity, that she bent every effort to make them hate her, and spared them when they failed to kill her?

He, on the other hand, held Luz’s makers. And what had he just tried to do? He had ridden after Tain, and now he defied the Ila.

Now he committed himself to one more mad act, and rode toward the head of the column, increasing Osan’s pace to a run that jolted his side. It hurt: it jarred to the roots of his teeth, but he was not done being mad: he rode up among Hati’s tribe, up where Aigyan rode among his household, all on lofty, richly ornamented beasts. Bells attended their going. Swords and the occasional long barrel glinted in the sun. This was armed might the likes of which Tain and the Ila herself had to reckon with, and it did not obey Hati, or him.

But it had arrived in his camp, and pitched tents around him, and he meant it should justify its presence with him and with the Ila.

“Omi,” he said, bowing in the saddle, respectfully enough, and the au’it, his au’it, who had chased after him into the Ila’s presence, now arrived after him in some disorder, and unfolded her book to write when he had said no more than that word.

Marak, his voices said, however, and could the au’it write that Luz was agitated, perhaps outraged? She had asked for his attention. The Ila had stirred her up, and now she was back, a ceaseless din. He set Luz and her complaints to the back of his attention, and meant to have command of his own camp back.

“Awake and alive,” Aigyan said, looking him over as he rode. “Bullets, then, have as little power over you as the Ila’s orders.”

“The mad heal well.” The voices rose nearly to a point of distraction, irate, and he fought stubbornly for his purpose. “I came up here to pay my proper respects, omi. I’ve had your help, the help of the Haga, the Rhonandin, when I rode back to settle with my father. They sent out four men, too, and lost them to Tain; and I owe them for those lives as well as for my mother. That’s four lives besides hers.” With the tribes, the tally of favors and grievances mattered: he was aware of that priority from days long before his dealings with Hati. “The Rhonandin were with me when I recovered my wife Norit’s daughter. Tarsa village had the child. The Rhonan helped me get her back, but I failed to find Tain. For my obligations here, I had every confidence in the an’i Keran, my wife. Nothing disappointed me, not her and not my in-laws. We’re growing short of water, but we’re not that far from Pori.”

Aigyan shrugged, a mirror of Hati’s gesture, an answer for a good many things: I accept what you say, whether happy or unhappy. “Give greetings to Menditak when you see him… if you haven’t.”

“I will.” That was a question, as much as a request to know which he had answered first, whether kinship or official precedence; and his answer, indicating that he had not yet seen Menditak, seemed to please Aigyan. The reasons Aigyan and Menditak had for making water peace might be broader and deeper than either admitted. They used their kinships. They moved in on them, and neither let the other have all the advantage. And they sat in power, now, both tribes. “Get us to Pori, omi. Beyond that, there’s a trail over the rim. There’s no mistaking our way. But water, first. The villages back there are stringing far back, and it’ll only get worse. No matter what the Ila does, no matter what you hear from the priests or anyone else…” The din in his head already debated him. “We’ve got to get to water.”

And Aigyan studied him, the madman, his relation-by-marriage. “Off the edge of the Lakht,” Aigyan said. No ruling tribe had ever left the Lakht, the center of their range. “To this tower in the middle of the lowlands. So we find this paradise, do we? Wish that water thief your uncle the peace of the day.”

“I will.” He understood the uneasy agreement, one in which Aigyan had only moderate faith. Aigyan challenged him, since he had made the gesture to come up here and assert direction of the caravan. He had made himself Aigyan’s equal, if he was not the Ila’s, and he had not gotten full courtesy out of Aigyan… being an upstart, in Aigyan’s eyes. The tribes were here for kinship’s sake to the dead, and for rivalry to each other, but not to rescue him. Marak, Marak, Marak, his voices said, urging him to the east. And he defied those, too. “Pori,” he said. “If we get there, those can stay that want to and those can part that want to.” Those that stayed or parted from them would die, he was convinced of that. His responsibility was to the caravan, and east, the voices urged him, no matter that east of here was a long, uncrossable ridge and a drop down a cliff. Pori, he insisted, and reined back, dropping back through the ranks. “I’ll see you, father-by-marriage. I’ll see you there.”

He fell back, dizzied, beset by contrary voices, having lost all capacity to argue with Aigyan: but no matter the Ila’s whims, no matter the priests, no matter Luz’s will, he had delivered their chief guide his direction, and meant it. The au’it who had followed him up in the ranks followed his retreat, struggling to rein back her besha, which wanted to follow the others. But he simply rode slower and slower, let beshti pass him, one after another, until finally he found Norit and Hati.

By now Patya was riding beside them, doubtless wondering whether he had gone mad again.

“What did the Ila want?” Hati asked him. “And what did Aigyan just have to do with it?”

“A courtesy, in both cases. They wanted to know how great a fool I mean to be after this. But I can’t offend Menditak, either. I’ll be back.” He threw a look at his sister Patya. “Stay with them. Keep where Hati and Norit can see you, at all times, hear me? If our father lays hands on you…”

“You’re the crazy one!” Patya shot back. “Be careful!”

“You’re right,” he said, while the au’it wrote, mercilessly recording, making casual utterance into lasting record. “I won’t do it again. And don’t you be as crazy. Hear?” He remembered what Patya could not: his mother’s worry when Patya was born a daughter; Tain sulking and drinking all night and breaking crockery because he had a daughter and not a second son.

He remembered things Patya might remember, too, Patya very early lamenting to him she was not born a boy. She was the one in the family without illusions. She was the sane one, and knew their father failed to love her. These things the au’it could not write. Not even Hati knew the pain that Tain had inflicted, long before he murdered Kaptai.

“There’s four of us of the household, now,” Marak said, lingering by Patya, deafening himself to the voices. “Tain’s not our father anymore. Hati and Norit are your sisters. That baby’s Lelie, and her father didn’t want her. I’m not sure Norit does, when she’s crazy. Help her.”

Patya’s eyes still carried shadows of Kaptai’s death and Tain’s hate. But there was courage in her. There always had been, a finer, steadier courage than his. “I’m fine,” Patya said, pressing her lips to a thin line. “I’ll get myself a husband. If a rock from the sky doesn’t fall on us. I’ll marry you some help.”

“I havehelp enough,” he said. “Marry for love. Bring some peace to the house. That’s what I want. And stay to the center of the camp. Don’t go on the outside edge, and I promise you won’t.” They both had to fear every night and every day from now on that their own father might be aiming at her life or his, or at anyone Tain thought they cared for. He put it in words, and knew that somewhere the feud had to have a bloody ending.

But not today. Not this moment. Marak, Marak, his voices nagged him, and east, east, east, when life and water lay south. Luz would make him crazier and crazier. She would drive Norit, and Hati, who must hear the same urge, and find it harder and harder to resist—off a cliff, no less. He would nothave Luz dictating Patya’s life. Patya was always and forever the sane one.

“Stay with Hati,” he said. “I’ll be back before we camp. I’m not going anywhere near the edge. Hati?”

Hati paid sharp attention.

“Water,” he said. “Water, at Pori, before everything.”

“Something’s going to happen,” Hati said, and Norit, with no sanity at all in her eyes: “There’s no time, Marak.”

“The hell.” He reined Osan back a second time, with the au’it lagging back after him. He let them slip farther and farther back, past the Ila’s pack train, and all the Ila’s servants, city-bred men and women wrapped in white, under the fierce, bright sun. Marak, the voices said, and the rock hit the sphere, vividly, persistently. Luz was increasingly upset with him.

“I understand you,” he said to Luz under his breath. “And you want the damned books, don’t you? Every village that dies, you’re losing a book.”

The vision came again, repeatedly, blinding him. He rubbed his eyes, coming among the Haga, among the most familiar of tribes.

He found Menditak, and Menditak went veiled in the aifad, withdrawn, in mourning or in anger: it was impossible to read. Dust was on Menditak’s shoulders. That, too, was mourning, for Kaptai, for four good men—he had no clear idea who those men might be, whether uncles of his, or close to Menditak. There was a debt here, and he had come riding in unveiled, mad, distracted by visions.

“Omi,” he said to Menditak, raking his sanity into one coherent heap. “I had to come back. I risked the caravan to keep chasing him. But I haven’t given up, either. I’ve carried my report to the Ila and to the Keran, forward: but you, omi, youare my father. I haven’t any other.”

“Tain Trin Tain will die,” Menditak said, from behind the veil. “Word is out, against him.”

“The Rhonan joined us,” Marak said, that usthat meant the tribe. “Certain of the villages have helped me, against him. He’s lost. He won’t be welcome where we’re going. We’ll come to water at Pori, and we’ll go on over the rim, and if he stays on the Lakht, he’ll die. If he comes in reach of us, he’ll die. He has no choice, omi. He won’t get anything from me.”

“He’ll die,” Menditak said again, and asked carefully what Aigyan had said, and about the Rhonan, and their lord, and all the while Menditak’s son was nearby, listening to everything, as the au’it wrote, and for the same purpose.

“I don’t know about your paradise,” Menditak said. “That water thief Aigyan moved in when we did, and insists he’s leading. It’s no time for a fight. The whore in camp bathes in water while honest mothers run short of drink. But we wait, Marak an Haga. We wait. Tell that to the Ila. There will be this paradise of yours.”

“Before that, there’s Pori,” Marak said, and the voices in his head put up an argument that made his temples ache. “You’ll live, and Tain won’t.” He could not muster courtesies, could not track the convolutions of tribal custom. He simply rode ahead, suddenly, his hands doing one thing, his mind distracted in visions and a whispering in his head that would not be still.