“We are ready,” Obidhen reported, bowing.

“The au’it will ride with us,” Marak said. “I doubt she knows how. I doubt many of the others do.”

“We have been advised,” Obidhen said. It was still a question of how much Obidhen had been advised, but Marak thought likely Obidhen had by now heard the nature of his party.

The sergeant commanding the Ila’s men, too, gave the necessary commands to the caravan master, and went off to secure their own riding beasts from somewhere near, while Obidhen began to appoint his party of madmen to their beasts.

That was the orderly beginning of the matter. Then Obidhen’s slaves, strong men, each, roused each of the forty-some riding beasts up, beginning with the au’it, and hoisted their passengers up, like children.

“Sit still!” Marak shouted out. “Let them settle!”

It was appalling confusion. The beasts, in the uncertainty of so many new riders, lost patience and moved away from nudging knees and elbows, adding to the bawling confusion. Two and three of the novice riders toppled hard onto the sand. Marak seized stray reins, and so did the freedmen and the sons and Obidhen himself, while onlookers gathered from the city gate to add to the confusion. The soldiers, riding up with shouts and derision, had to gather in reins to hold other bawling beasts.

Meanwhile no few riders let their beasts escape their inexpert reining, and those animals set to circling, ignoring tugs on their reins by the simple trick of laying their heads around. It was no surprise that several novices had their feet bitten, which brought howls and panic anew, and catcalls from the gate despite the presence of the au’it and the soldiers.

The madmen were mostly villagers, but they had walked the desert, not ridden it. Save a few desert-bred folk and two others who were clearly expert, the most of the madmen had never ridden in their lives, and the slaves had a great deal to do to convince any of the beasts thus mounted to keep a line.

Marak approached his own well-bred besha and took his quirt from the saddle. After the recent confusion his beast rolled a wary eye back, sizing him up.

Marak took the rein and stepped smoothly into the higher mounting loop. The besha, perhaps relieved to sense a rider who knew the fast way aboard, half straightened his forelegs and came up under him as he landed.

There was no need for hup-hup-hup! Marak sized the beast up, too, braced both hands against the double horn, one high, one low, as the back legs shifted.

The pitch forward reversed in the next breath as the forelegs straightened.

And just when an inexperienced rider would least expect it, the hind legs drove in one long shove, propelling the rider forward and all but upside down for an instant, testing the strength of the girth around the beast’s broad, deep chest.

Thatwas what the double horn and straight-armed brace of the hands was for, and thatwas why children and old folk mounted a besha only with assistance, while it was standing.

A fourth, a minor jolt, almost a hop, straightened the forelegs entirely, and at that, the rider’s whole body snapped back to view the world from twice a man’s height, poised on a stilt-limbed body four times his size. It all proceeded in a few blinks of the eye; and weary as he was, trembling as he held the rein, and surrounded by a band of madmen apt to fall in the dust or lose toes to vexed mounts, Marak still found a breath of freedom.

The beast under him, no common run of the herd, wanted to move. He held it back. The besha swayed back and forth under him, grumbling in its chest, as beshti would do when they were full of spirit and impatient with the lowly pack beasts. Marak allowed no nonsense, settled his right foot possessively on the besha’s curved neck, and heaved a deep and shaken sigh. The besha under him did the same.

They all were up. No one had been killed. Obidhen’s sons linked the animals that would move under halter, to loud complaints and the occasional outright squall of indignation from riding beasts unaccustomed to such treatment when they were under saddle.

The packs, meanwhile, all had their specific places, hung over the packsaddles, tied down with a few short turns of rope. The caravan slaves hastened, sometimes running from one beast to the other, beshti patience notoriously scant with imbalance or hesitation. Everything was packed, every packet balanced for the two sides of the saddle, everything apportioned to the individual beast’s capacity to carry: therewas the mark of a veteran caravanner. Every pack went on the first time, and every beast responded to the light snap, not the impact, of a quirt.

A last few madmen, desert-bred, mounted up on their own, and rode back and forth, free of the detested lead, restless, as anxious as the beasts.

Certainly the caravan master’s three sons had no need of help when the time came. “Bas!” the order was, making a standing beast simply put out one foreleg. That served as a footbridge to an unseen mounting loop and, by a quick turn, to the saddle. To the unknowing eye, in the dim light of dawn, the master’s eldest son had leapt to his besha’s back.

It was the trick of the young, the lithe, the desert-bred, and Marak doubted he could still do it himself. He had softened considerably in village life, since their retreat from the Lakht, and he knew now he had watched his father, too, grow soft, and angry, and settle in for the life of a village lord. There had been the start of the bitterness, a man always mourning the chance that had never come, the vengeance that had never fallen into his hands.

Thoughts muddled. Sounds became distant, and the weariness weighed down and down, numbing senses. The foot-braced attitude Marak held, keeping his beast at rest, was one in which he had slept many a ride, and of all things else he had left behind with his youthful confidence, his body had not forgotten how to keep centered on a swaying back. He shivered in the dawn, but at least no one noticed his weakness. The shivering was lack of sleep; it was the unaccountable shift of his fortunes. It was the roaring in his ears, that the Ila’s retaliation had brought on him, and now that he had done everything, now that there was nothing more for him to do but sleep, it was beyond him to fight his exhaustion. Body heat fled. He drew his robes close about him, even covering his fingers within that warmth and taking in the heat of the huge body under him.

The roaring increased within his ears. Pain had invaded his joints, down to his fingers and his toes, and reasserted itself, after so long ignoring it. But it was only exhaustion, so he argued with himself. It all would pass. The trembling would pass. Surely the roaring in his ears would pass with sleep.

“Are we going home?” one confused madman asked another in his hearing, as the line filed past, and the caravan set itself in motion. “Where shall we go?”

One madman answered another: “East, man. We go east. Everything is east. And then we go back and tell the Ila what we find. That’s the crazy part. Tain’s son is one of us. He claims he’ll figure it out.”

Chapter Four

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The law of the caravans is this: that the master of the caravan has the power of life and death over all who travel under his rule, except over a priest, except over an au’it, except over the Ila’s man. These lives belong to the Ila. The master of the caravan must preserve them at the cost of all others.

—The Book of Oburan

The sun rose as a vast, expanded disk and climbed above the Lakht in an unforgiving sky. The day’s heat grew and grew, and built toward that hour when prudent travelers pitched their tents. Marak had indeed slept in the saddle, an uneasy sleep, a sleep with a watchful eye on the mad and on the soldiers and the caravan master and his sons alike; but no greater disturbance demanded his attention than the passage of birds, shadows on the sand, and the track of a solitary belly-creeper headed for the reed-rimmed Mercy.