Memnanan hesitated, perhaps weighing his choices, and asking himself where right was, or what he intended. Memnanan to this hour had not left the Ila, had not left the authority he had served, and defended, and obeyed all his life. And the storm still raged beyond the walls.
“Tell him to go,” Marak said to the Ila. ”His wife is in labor. She needs him. There’s a guide rope still at the door.“ Came a crash in the heavens, and a battering blast beat against the tent. ”Ila, tell him that. The sky’s getting worse. Send him! You owe him that!“
The Ila lifted her hand, red glove stained dark with blood, signaled Memnanan’s dismissal. That was all. The hand fell.
A breath more Memnanan hesitated, then turned and, hesitating for a last look, went back to the outer door.
Marak, the voices said. Marak.
And Marak reached down and drew the Ila to her feet and into his embrace, close, closer, body against body, blood into blood. He knew what the voices wanted. He knew what he had done with Lelie, and why Lelie had lived.
The Ila, no fool, must know. They stood that way for a long time, they stood there while the fever came, and the blood beat in Marak’s ears.
“This is war,” the Ila said in their long standing there, so that only he could hear. “This is war, Trin Tain.” Her lips met his and opened, and her mouth was moist, water-rich as his was dry. Blood mixed. Incredibly, there was passion in the kiss.
Au’it and servants moved around them, and Marak, his voices said, Marak, Marak. It waswar. His hands and arms and back took fever-fire. Pain enveloped him, enveloped her, a shared environment, and the ache in his side and his skull fed her hurts.
If the makers in his blood bred and multiplied to heal him, he thought they must exist in hordes and clots by now, his whole body become a furnace of healing.
And they met the Ila’s makers, and hers met his.
Marak, his voices said, thrumming in his head, Marak.
It might be his imagination, but the voices seemed perilously fainter, perhaps failing him—or appeased at last by what he had done, or perhaps just preoccupied.
He felt the ground. He had gone down on one knee and dragged the Ila with him, locked in his arms. He heard Norit in that moment as if she were right beside him. He was aware of Hati, and Patya and Tofi being near her.
Hati knew what had happened: she knew about the fight, about his father. Norit did. Memnanan told them. Memnanan, for some reason, was dripping wet; and when he wondered he knew what Hati saw, looking out, knew that that crack was lightning, that, outside their struggle, water poured down in sheets and blew in veils. They welcomed Memnanan into the tent. They besieged him with questions that made no sense.
Marak, his voices said, but he made no sense of what followed.
The water kept coming on the roof, and made pools and puddles. He heard it. The Ila did.
Luz knew. Luz told them.
The fever built in him, threatening to sweep everything away. Hati was running, alone, through the cold wet, and then Patya and Tofi had overtaken her, and they sprinted, soaked as they were, through a murky grayness and a grayed red of puddles. Norit came after, holding Lelie, all of them drenched.
Marak, his voices said, and he was aware of the Ila’s limbs, fever-hot, and the war they fought, each holding the other up.
“Why take up my father?” he asked, and, for his pride’s sake: “How long?”
The Ila laughed, not a pleasant laugh, near his ear. “During your search, mymen found him. I’ve always taken alternatives. Always alternatives. He was in and out of my tent, from time to time. He followed, outside the column, in a Haga’s robes. I’m tired. Lie down with me. See which of us wins.”
It was easier to sink down, both on their knees, then on the carpet, twined together. After a time he saw them lying there like the dead, two bloody figures locked in embrace. He saw, and knew he looked from outside himself, and that it was a vision of sorts, Luz’s vision, what Luz saw of him, but he had no idea how she saw.
Then Norit came and touched his forehead ever so gently. His wives and his sister Patya and his brother-in-law Tofi all came to that bloody place, and sat down near him and waited, and waited. They expected—they feared, perhaps, for him to lose consciousness in fever, or to die. The Ila’s servants moved about them. The au’it were there, perhaps their own au’it as well.
A moment of darkness. “Marak,” a voice said then, asking his attention, and someone lifted his head and gave him water, an abundance of water, as many drinks as he wanted. He was fever-hot. Heat swept through him then like a furnace, as if water were all the makers had waited to have.
Thunder walked overhead. Water dripped somewhere. It sounded like a fountain, dripping and gurgling like the Ila’s Mercy-water, the universal condition of life, had become that abundant.
Someone came at that point, someone who wanted Hati, and Norit, wanted them urgently. He thought it was Patya. He dreamed it was Patya, who bent and kissed him before she took away all his help, all his protection, leaving him entirely alone with the Ila.
But shadows immediately came and peered down at him, a handful of veiled, armed shadows, who had no possible reason for being where they were, in the Ila’s tent.
They retreated and sat, with their weapons, and they watched… Keran, he was sure. But were those Haga, sitting with them?
“Your helpers,” the Ila said to him, faintly, wryly, from beside him, in this makeshift bed they shared, of pillows and blankets and blood-soaked carpet. “I made a good throw, didn’t I? Now, one way or the other, webecome allies… and what will we dowith Luz, do you think? Or what will Luz do with you and me?—Or what, do you suppose, will we alldo with the ondat?”
“I don’t know,” he said, in pain, not knowing where to take the Ila’s words, or how to answer. The fever produced unbearable headache, and swelled the flesh around the wounds. He had nothing to do with the Ila’s questions. The makers were at work. He had to endure it.
And the way he had held Lelie, and shed makers into her blood, he had pressed his wounds to the Ila’s wounds, and hers to his—both of them, makers shared. Makers at all-out war not only with the wounds… but with each other, live or die, win or lose.
He understood the Ila’s dealing with Tain, when she caught him. What else was she to use for weapons, when her makers had consistently lost their battles with Luz’s makers?
What else was she to use, when Tain fell into her hands?
Tain, being Tain, to be sure, meant to seize power for himself… he had not made his move yet, but that had been his intention, and surely the Ila knew it, being old as the world and still alive.
But Tain was also her weakness: Tain had notknown how far Memnanan had allegiances elsewhere. Tain had not known how much a man could love a wife, that a man could have a friend against his own interests. Therewas Tain’s downfall, in every canny truth he thought he knew, in every lesson he had tried to teach his son about the world.
Kaptai, against all odds, had taught him otherwise.
His head throbbed. Pain shot through his ears and eyes. It might have been a skirmish his makers had just won. Or lost.
One au’it among the lot of au’it, perhaps their own, wrote and wrote. He was aware of the movement. The drip of water. The rumble of thunder.
And he became aware of Hati, of Hati and Norit, near Memnanan, and he saw a vision, Tofi struggling to heat a pan of water.
Hati’s impatience came through. And Norit’s.
They were not in his war. They had Luz’smakers in them. And he heard them, saw them.