His father Tain, the warlike, the defiant, the terrible man, simply acquiesced to all the terms, gave him away like a bartered mat, and signed a lasting armistice with the Ila’s men. It was only to his family and his officers that Tain Trin Tain revealed his rage and his affront. Before the whole assembly of his men he called his children’s mother a whore.

His mother, being Haga, had said not a word in her own defense, only wrapped her robe about her face, walked out, and refused to meet the stares of her slaves.

Being Haga, she said nothing of her plans. She refused to debate, refused to resist what she could not withstand.

But the desert was no terror to her. Nothing in the world could be a terror to Kaptai, after her husband.

The tilting of the world increased, then stopped as it would do, without warning.

Marak stared, wordless now, watching the world from far, far off. He watched false oases disintegrate and the sun turn the red sand to brass and haze.

A bird flew past, brief shadow, a scout from the holy city, where birds gathered thick and fattened off the refuse. Birds, like other vermin, would eat the dead, if they had dead; but they had none this day. Dissatisfied, it wheeled away.

At last, with the sun well past noon, the order came from the caravan master to strike the tents.

“Hay-up!” the man yelled. He and his family and his slaves came through waving their hands and uttering that hup-hup-hup they used on their beasts. Hup-hup-hup for the Ila’s men. Hup-hup-hup for the madmen, too. The wife, exhausted now, could not be roused from her lethargy, and when they loosed her from the pole she lay on the sand and babbled of fire and light and death.

No one cared, not even the other madmen, while they gathered up the tents.

The Ila’s men dragged the wife out under the sky, from under the imminent collapse of the last tent. The boy from Tijanan knelt, rhythmically striking his scabbed forehead on the ground, talking to the invisible. Sand stuck to his forehead and grew red with blood.

Today it was the wife who balked. Yesterday it had been the potter, and they had beaten him. The wife they only hit until she brought up her hands to cover her face. Then they knew she would stop fighting them.

Hup, the word was, when the tents were struck and the beasts were laded after their rest. Hup, and they took up the wife on one of the beasts, the smallest, packed on and tied on like cargo lest she harm herself. A soldier would walk: the wife was worth a bounty.