Hati lay down to sleep by him, as she had slept for days.

But now in the sense of storm that quieted the whole tent, Norit, too, moved her mat closer, and whispered, “I’m afraid.”

“Settle,” Marak said. “The tents will be safe. The tribes survive these winds many times a year.”

Hati shifted against him to make room for Norit. It was hot, and still at the moment.

It was not that Norit particularly chose him, he thought, but that Hati had formed a friendship. Norit had become her lieutenant as Hati had become his, and took to that responsibility. In Tarsa a cast-off wife was no one’s and nothing, of no honor, no estate, no support at all. In Hati, Norit had found anchor against a different kind of storm.

And in the process he had acquired unlooked-for obligations. Hati co-opted him, placing herself between him and all others. Now Norit added herself, and he found, as in the vision, the random pieces made unexpected structure, not one he would have chosen.

Norit suffered from her madness. She no longer sang to herself aloud, but made small sounds as she talked to her visions. No one dressed her hair: by day, as she rode, she combed her black mane obsessively with her fingers, until it straggled in some order over her shoulders. She combed it now as she rested on her back, staring at the visions that came. She plucked at her fingers as if taking off rings. She talked to the unseen. She was not the most wholesome of their company.

But if Norit had a virtue, it was persistence, even in living, and he respected that, and tolerated her strangeness. Of all the marches they had made on their way to the holy city, theirs had been the harshest, under the worst of the Ila’s men, in provinces once hostile to the Ila, where rebellion was still recent in memory. The common run of the Ila’s men had treated the mad as enemies, and devils, and had no mercy. They had driven the fragile sense from some before they died. Love, Norit had sung. Let us find love.

And having been launched on another long march without her will, Norit spoke to no one but Hati at any length at all, but if Hati waved a hand, Norit carried this or that and if the baggage wanted moving, Norit moved it. Sometimes her eyes stared at things not even another madman could guess. She had learned the besha, and rode from sitting start to kneeling. All that Hati did, Norit did. If Hati groomed her beast, Norit did. If Hati went to interfere in the slaves’ cooking, Norit went and listened.

“It builds,” Norit said to the gathering dark. “It builds. It carries away villages.”

Elsewhere he heard men talking. There was little movement in the tent. They had worked hard getting the deep-stakes in. There was a thin sandstone under the sand beneath this tent. They had worn the skin from their hands weaving the web of cordage and snugging it down. Now they lay, nursed their blisters, and listened to a slight stir and flap of the canvas.

“Perhaps it won’t come,” the potter said.

The orchardman said, “Shut up. At least we get to sleep a few more hours.”

The time dragged by.

Little gusts stirred the tent against the web of cordage. The beasts complained and moaned, and moved behind the tents, where they would take shelter for the duration.

Marak got up and went out from under the tent to see what was coming, in the murky last of the light. A red wall of dust spread over half the sky, deceptive in its very size.

Hati had come out, and Norit did, and the rest came after her, with the wind stirring their garments.

The boys and the slaves had turned out from the other four tents, too, with the onset of the wind. They set to tightening the web of rope, which had stretched out in the heat.

“Put down the sides!” they shouted. It was time. They unrolled the sides of the tents, and made those fast by their rings and by cords.

Then they all went inside their smothering dark tents and settled down to wait. The storm light came, a sickly twilight outside the single opening they had left. At his order, each of them piled his own waterskin with the common stores, some reluctantly, but they obeyed. Then they lay ready to seal the tent entirely once the blow started. The light fell on the edges of faces and bodies: they looked toward the light as a precious commodity about to vanish.

The beasts moaned outside as the wind set up its own complaint, thumping at the canvas in a sudden violence.

“We can have rations every morning and every evening,” Marak said so all could hear him. “Look at where your mat is, and where the water and food is. The au’it will sleep by the water. There will be water at the same times each day, no other, so don’t plan otherwise. It may be days, and it will be dark, so get your bearings before the light goes.”

There was no complaint. They had had their midday supper. They would take their rations cold, no luxury of cooking at all in the utter lack of sunlight, and short water for drinking. Even the villages knew the lowland storms, and feared these as they feared the god himself.

The gust carried sand, the wind turning redder and redder outside, veiling all detail between themselves and the world. The light slowly diminished both by sunset and by storm until the dark outside was deep and violent, leaving the merest hint of a doorway to good eyes.

Marak went and drew the flap shut and laced it down by feel. The wind howled, and the canvas thumped and strained. Some man inside wailed, a frightened human voice appealing to the god, and others joined it in querulous chatter.

“It’s nothing but the wind,” Marak said, walking the carefully memorized track back to his mat. “The poles are set and the stakes are deep. Be quiet. You from the villages, the Lakht throws storms such as you’ve not seen. This may last all through tomorrow and the day after that, and perhaps a third. Storms often come in the summer, on the Lakht, but the stakes will hold, and we will last it out. Go to sleep. Sleep as much as you can.”

The wind all but drowned his voice at the last. His eyes could find no light at all. If he had not known where his mat was, he never could have found it.

He sat down. The wind acquired the voices that resounded in his head: Marak, Marak, Marak, endlessly. He felt Hati’s touch, and lay down on his back, listening to the voices and to the thumping of the canvas. He had the waterskins at his back, and all the rations for the tent positioned there, with the au’it, the impartial, the incorruptible witness, sitting directly against them.

He hoped the master’s sons and the slaves had done their work well. He had seen nothing to fault in their work. But now they knew they were very small, and the desert wind was a towering devil, thumping and battering all about the edges of their shelter, trying to get fingers within the lacings.

For about a half an hour he rested and listened to the fury build.

An arm came about him, and a warm body shaped itself to him on his left, and he knew the culprit as he moved an arm to send her back to her own mat.

A knee intruded, however, and lips found his bare neck.

Hati whispered something, interrupted breath against his neck. Perhaps she told him they were going nowhere. Perhaps she said no one could see or hear what they did, and that this answered to a roof. He rolled over, seized a slender arm, drew the offender close by the neck until he had a fistful of long braids and knew for certain it was Hati.

Then he took a deep breath and brought his lips where he judged hers waited. His guess was right.

The intruder’s arms came about him, and lips drew breath at last in the moment he allowed, then renewed the kiss before he was ready.

In the same moment a lithe body shed robes and wriggled beneath him.

“This is no roof,” he said, vexed at her breach of their agreement. People at rest all around them could not be that deaf, even if they were blind.