But the rest had given up both hope and fear of an end to this journey, and walked in the rising sun at the same pace as they had walked all
this journey.
Marak was different than the rest. He bore across his heart the tattoo of the abjori, the fighters from rocks and hills. His garments, the long
shirt, the trousers, the aifad wrapped about his head against the hellish glare, were all the dye and the weave of Kais Tain, of his own mother’s
hand. Those patterns alone would have damned him in the days of the war. The tattoos on the backs of his fingers, six, were the number of the
Ila's guards he had personally sent down to the shadows. The Ila’s men knew it, and watched with special care for any look of rebellion. He
had a reputation in the lowlands and on the Lakht itself, a fighter as elusive as the mirage and as fast-moving as the sunrise wind.
He had ridden with his father to this very plain, and for three years had seen the walls of the holy city as a prize for the taking. He and his
father had laid their grandiose plans to end the Ila’s reign: they had fought. They had had their victories.
Now he stumbled in the ruin of boots made for riding.
His life was thirty summers on this earth and not likely to be longer. His own father had delivered him up to the Ila’s men.
“I see the city!” the woman cried to the rest. She was a wife, an honorable woman, among the last to join the march. “Can’t you see it? See it
rise up and up? We're at the end of this!”
Her name was Norit, and she was soft-skinned and veiled herself against the sun, but she was as mad as the rest of them that walked in this
shuffling chain. Like most of them, she had concealed her madness, hidden it successfully all her years, until the visions came thick and fast.
Perhaps she had turned to priests, and priests had frightened her into admission. Perhaps guilt had slowly poisoned her spirit. Or perhaps the
visions had become too strong and made concealment impossible. She had confessed in tears when the Ila’s men came asking for the mad, and
her husband had tried to kill her; but the Ila’s men said no. She was from the village of Tarsa, at the edge of the Lakht in the west.
Now increasingly the visions overwhelmed her, and she rocked and mourned her former life and poured out her story in her interludes of
sanity. Over and over she told the story of her husband, who was the richest man in Tarsa, who had married her when she was thirteen. She
wasted her strength crying, when the desert ate up all strength for grief and all water for tears. Her husband might have been relieved to cast
her out.
The old man next in line, crookbacked from old injury, had left an aged wife in Modi, a woman who would live, likely, as an unwelcome
guest on the charity of her children. The old man talked to spirits, and could not remember his wife’s name. He wept about this, and asked
others if they knew. “Magin,” they would tell him in disgust, but he would forget, and ask again in a few hours. He had hidden his madness
longest of all of them. Sometimes he forgot why they walked. But so did the rest of them. The walking had gone on so long it had become
ordinary, a condition of existence.
The boy, the young boy, Pogi, who rocked and talked to himself whenever they stopped and sat down… he had been the butt of village jokes
in Tijanan. Everyone had accounted him harmless, but in what the Ila’s men said, the village grew anxious and delivered him to their hands,
throwing rocks at him when he tried to go back to their street. He was no one’s son. The village had found him one morning by the well,
which they said was reason enough for suspicion. A devil might have put him there. So they thought, after the Ila’s men asked for the mad: he
was the only madman in that village.
The others all had their stories. The caravan was full of the cursed, the doomed, the rejected. Villages had tolerated them as long as they
dared. In Kais Tain long before this, Tain had issued a pogrom to cleanse his province of the mad, ten years ago; but the god laughed at him.
Now his own son and heir proved tainted. Tain of Kais Tain had successfully rebelled against the Ila and the Lakht, undefeated for ten years,
and had all the west under his hand. But his own son had a secret, and betrayed himself in increasing silences, in looks of abstraction, in
crying out in his sleep. He had been mad all along. His father had begun to suspect, perhaps, years ago, and denied it; but lately, after their
return from the war, the voices had grown too persistent, too consuming to keep the secret any longer. His father had found him out.
And when shortly afterward his father heard the Ila’s men were looking for the mad, his father had sent to the Ila’s men… had given him up,
his defiance of the Ila’s rule broken by the truth.
His own son, his own son, Tain said over and over. Tain blamed his wife, and sat gloomy and furious in his hall, a man of war finally seeking
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