The beasts had not drunk for ten days. Here, at the long troughs, they crowded one another and pushed and snapped, asserting dominance, while at the upper bowl, the Ila’s men wet their hands and wiped their faces at no charge, spilling water as they did. Then the caravanners drank, and here, scrabbling for double handfuls, elbowing one another and frantic with greed and fear and haste, the mad also drank at the bowl.

Marak filled his cupped hands and drank from the troughs the beasts used, having no disdain for a little besha-spit. More, while others were jostling one another and worrying about their share of what was boundless, he filled both hands, first wiped a coating of dust into mud on his face and neck, and then sluiced more up, the cold water running down beneath the shirt.

He was not the common sort of madman, to elbow the others for drink. Here at the lower outflow he had it all to himself. He saw the wife from Tarsa shoved to the ground by the potter, and he seized the man by the collar and held him back until the wife had gotten up, bruised.

“There is no scarcity,” he said to the potter. “Are you a man at all, or not?”

The potter’s profane answer proved he was a fool, at least, and Marak showed his contempt for the water of the Ila’s Mercy by dumping the potter bodily into the beast’s trough, perhaps the first water bath the potter had had since his birth. The guards laughed, in far better humor with their bellies full of water, and no one rebuked him for the act.

With that act, he had waked somewhat from the drug in the food they fed him. He felt his heart beating and the blood moving in his veins. Beyond the immediate noise of the beasts, he heard the noise of the curious of the city and the passersby, heard the jeers of a gathering crowd while the potter clawed his way out of more water than he had ever sat in, and dripped onto the pavings. Marak heard young voices squealing as a besha snapped at a tormenting child, and heard the ting and clash of belled harnesses, the sound of a caravan all about them. All the bystanders laughed, having gathered to watch the potter’s bath, and had no idea, perhaps, that they were entertained by the mad.

Marak stretched his back and arched it and looked up and up at the threat of the walls, the high barricade that had thwarted Tain’s rebellion after all their plans and their ambitions.