But before their noon meal Norit had Lelie sleeping in her lap, and smoothed Lelie’s fine hair… unthought, repeated gesture.

“Come,” he said to Norit, to Hati. “Lie down. The baby, too.”

They did, their mats set together. Lelie squirmed and fretted, still fevered with her wound, and found a new soft place between Norit and him. Memnanan’s mother and that household sat at one end of the tent, and Tofi and he and his at the other, but when they went out to get their bowls filled at the common pot, with the rest, and came back to sit and eat, they made one circle.

There Lelie, still fretful, injured, discovered willing sympathy in Memnanan’s mother, and left off scratching her healing wound to sit and be coddled on the old lady’s knees. The mother of the Ila’s own exalted captain fed a village waif, and Memnanan’s wife, uncomfortable at every angle, carrying a child of her own, smiled, a transformation of a plain, thin face into a remarkable woman.

Patya and Tofi sat and talked together. Marak lay down with Hati, alone with Hati, at peace for a little time. He wondered at himself at times, that he could go through such a day and suddenly think of making love to his wife. But thinking was as far as it got.

Come to bed, he wished Norit without saying so.

Babies grew and changed so quickly. Perhaps Norit could not figure where the missing weeks had gone. Two months, and three, and the child was not the infant she remembered. None of them had recovered what they had lost. Everything fell through their grasp so quickly.

Fire blazed through his vision. Rings of fire spread outward.

Marak, his voices said, and something else. Lovemaking became impossible.

Damn the Ila, damn Luz, damn the ondat. He saw the structures start to build in his eyes. He shut Luz out, remembering music, remembering voices, remembering the courtyard and the garden, and the old slaves gathering fruit. Go to hell, he said to Luz. Lines became the base of the garden wall. Voices became the sound of water.

The earth trembled, reminding him it was the Lakht, after all, and that hours of sleep were hours of life irrevocably lost.

Chapter Twenty-Two

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The Anlakht is the land of death, but it is also the mother of wells and waters. Fortunate for the world that mountains rise beyond the Qarain and trap the water that rises in the wind. That gift, passing through the hard rock of the Qarain, feeds the wells of the Lakht.

In the same way the Lakht sends water down to the lowlands, turning bitter water into sweet. The unkindest land feeds all the rest. On that one circumstance the whole world lives.

I am the Anlakht of my own creation.

—The Book of the Ila