It made him aware that his own vision stopped at Norit’s ham merfall, again, and again, and again repeated in his sight: it reached that point and stopped, just stopped, with the scouring of everything he knew from off the face of the earth. Antag and his brothers asked him questions, What will we do? Where will we trade, when we’re there? and he could not answer any of them, except to laugh hollowly and say that he supposed they would lie under palm trees in paradise and eat until they had an idea.

Antag laughed at the joke, somewhat desperately, gallantly. Marak reached inside his coat and held his hand on Lelie’s back, and felt her breathe, quiet as she was. Now he was afraid of what-next. What about Lelie? What about the children? What about the books, safe in the hands of every elder?

Antag had asked him, “What do we do when we get there?” and he had said, “Lie under the palm trees,” but what resounded in his brain over and over again, with the visions of damnation, was the building of a city, a city like Oburan, around the Tower.

We make a city. We grow strong. We build, woman, and we make, and we do, no matter this enemy we never asked to have. We fight against our ruin, woman. And we get children to inherit what we build, and we live, woman. I give you a vision. This is what we have to have.

Marak, Marak, Marak, hurry, the voices said now. We’re waiting. Keep coming. Weather’s moving in. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

He picked up the pace as they came across the first camp of the tribes. The caravan still waited, lashed down tight against the storm that was coming. And if that stayed true, Osan would have his rest at the end of the ride, and if it was not, if he had to stop to rest, then he would camp beside the moving caravan and wait until Osan was fit. Antag and his brothers asked no questions of his intentions. But they kept with him; and “Mama,” Lelie wailed against his heart.

Had she never ceased to call that, in all the time since the Ila’s men had taken her mother away?

And had the man in Norit’s songs waited so little time before taking another wife?

“Hush,” he said to her, just beneath the wind, just beneath what his companions could hear. “Hush.”

Your mother’s waiting, he said to Lelie in his mind. Luz won’t have all her attention now. It’s not fair, what she does to your mother.

“Be still,” he said, “be patient. It’s only the wind, and the beshti can see the way, if we can’t. They always know the way.”