But because they shared the visions, they went together, and wondered together what they might come to.

“Do you suppose there is a tower?” Hati asked. “Or is it a spire of rock?”

“If it’s a tower, men built it,” he said. “And the stars are clearly the stars we follow. And what shall we find?”

“Great treasure,” Hati said expansively, with the wave of a hand toward the dark, “and we won’t go back to the Ila. We’ll be rich, and have fifty white beshti and lie on dyed cloth, under tents with gold fittings. We’ll have a hundred slaves to do the work, and we’ll eat melons twice a day.”

The au’it slept, gently snoring. It was safe to talk treason.

“We’ll grow fat,” he said, and asked Norit, who lay at his other side, “What would you have if you were rich?”

“A house with a vineyard,” Norit said, “and a fine bed with a mattress.”

“No slaves?” asked Hati.

“Oh, four. They can work in the vineyard,” Norit said, ”and every one of them will have a house and a good soft bed and wine with supper.“

“You’re too kind,” Hati said. “They’ll cut your throat if you don’t beat them.”

“I was wishing,” Norit defended herself. “If I’m wishing, I can wish them to be honest workers.”

“If we’re wishing,” Marak said, entranced with this folly, “we can wish for peace between the Lakht and the lowlands, and sane minds for all of us.”

“Perhaps the visions will stop when we see this high place,” Hati said, putting an arm over him and snuggling close. “Most of us hope so. Those of us who have hope. And I do.”

“I hope so,” Marak said. He had not put it in words before, but that was the promise in the madness, that there was something to find, something to do, something to see that they must see, and once they had found it and done it and seen it they would be sane, and at peace, and free forever.

There was a flaw in this notion, of which he was keenly aware. He had promised the Ila his return, and a report. More, on the Lakht and around it for as far as the lands stretched, he knew nowhere else to go to postpone that report, especially since he had the au’it in his care.

Live as an’i Keran? He could, but he would reject the tribal life. He had no wish to fight their battles, when he had had his belly full of his father’s.

Besides, he had made a pledge, and still kept it, and knew that this freedom of his lasted as long as the journey… at least, he had had it clear in his mind until there was Hati; and now his pledge left him a tangled maze of choices.

The Ila had promised him his mother’s life, and his sister’s, and he had bargained for that.

What had he bargained?

“And what would you have?” Norit asked him. “What would you have if you could have anything in the world?”

“My freedom,” he said.

“Nothing else?” Norit asked, disappointed. Her father had owned her; then a husband did. He supposed now he owned, in some measure, in Norit’s sight. He tried to set her free, but freedom was not even within her imagination. When she was free to do what she wished, she sang to herself, and looked at no one, and was maddest of the mad.

But Hati, he thought, well understood what he meant. They understood each other; and were both free; and that was what he loved in her.

“If I were rich,” he said, “I think I would be Tofi, with a good number of beasts and tents, and the whole desert in front of me.”

“A good wish,” Hati said, with her fingers laced in his, and gave a sigh, and clearly intended to sleep.

He shut his eyes. They had three days to go before the village, so Tofi thought, and the concern they had lest they miss their trail, at least, was done. They would not die of the storm, and it had taken them seven days since to be sure of it.

The sick man, Proffa the tailor, died on the next day, and they laid him out on the sand where he had fallen from his beast. He had been dead before he hit the ground, so Marak judged, two days short of Pori village, where they all might rest.

The Lakht had no mercy on the weak. That was always the truth. The vermin of the air were already circling, waiting for them to leave the body. After they left, the larger vermin would come, and when they gave up, the insects would move in, and the creepers that preyed on those.

Still they laid out Proffa and gave him that small respect. It was a hot day, and most stood in the shadow of their beasts. But some made it a chance to walk about and stretch their legs, and others to take a rationed drink. The prostitute, Malin, moistened her scarf from her waterskin and wiped the dust from her face and neck.

Two days to the village, and some thought their arrival was that sure… or perhaps, contrary to his orders, she thought her water supply was that sure.

Tofi walked to his side, grimacing in the sun reflecting off the alkali of a crusted pan. “We should camp farther on,” Tofi said, although it was about the time they should have stopped. It begged trouble to stay near the dead, however, and the distance they ought to keep meant another hour or two of riding. It was in the high heat of the day, but Marak himself raised no objection.

“We should do that,” he agreed, and passed the order. “We’ll move on. Two hours.”

There were complaints, a general murmur from the inexperienced, loudest from Malin.

He mounted up; Hati did; and likewise Norit. He saw Malin demanding the ex-soldiers lift her up to her saddle.

In her he saw a woman grown reckless and demanding of her two chief debtors.

He saw a sign of death in her extravagance, too, but did not know whether it was Malin’s.

Chapter Eight

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In the beginning of days the Ila gave the tribes the secrets of water, where it might lie and how they might render bitter water into sweet. Likewise she appointed them their districts and their wells, which they maintain as their own, provided only that caravans may pass through their territories without hindrance and provided that only villages may levy a water-charge.

—The Book of Priests

In the conduct of a caravan there is one master, and the word of the master when he is in the desert is like the word of a priest. The Ila has given the master this authority.

—The Book of the Ila

In the next night they arrived on a road of sorts: and by dawn even a villager could see it. The caravans had traveled this way so often and so long they had worn a depression on the earth, a trench that the great storms both covered and uncovered. At times they rode in this depressed line for hours.

On the next afternoon they went over deep dunes, but Tofi found the road again, and it led east.

Other roads converged with it at a low spot, a small pile of stones that marked where, if one dug, one might find water… for it was not villages that determined the route of the caravans: it was water, trickles of it too small to sustain a village, but enough for a caravan. Wherever a highland loomed up, whenever the land generally tended down from that, springs might exist, often hidden in sand like this one, or making mere wet spots in the rocks, or again, crusts of white on the sand, where minerals had leached. The caravan roads met at such places. At such places the beshti could drink. So could the vermin, and there was some danger in approaching the center of the place, but they went, the beshti’s feet cracking the white crust, the beshti’s voices making a loud threat, clearing the vicinity.

There they gathered, sucking up the water that might kill a man, drinking so fast and so deep they drained the shallow pool and waited for more.

This water they might distill if they were desperate, using the sun ovens. They were at a place that could save them if they were out of resources. But the stale remnant of sweet water in their skins would last long enough, so Tofi said, by all he knew: this well was the marker, and the village was indeed that close.