That was good. At least Hati knew. Marak wit-wandered, then, watched Norit with Lelie, with nothing else to watch. He was glad Norit had said it for him. He was glad Hati had agreed he should not slow the caravan.

He could only move his head. Hati came and wasted water, washing his face. Extravagance, he said to himself. She gave him water to drink. He had a burning thirst. He always did when he healed.

Lelie abruptly began to sleep, that hard, heavy-limbed sleep of a child. She hung like a doll in Norit’s arms, and now Norit waked from her visions, spoke to the child, talked to her.

Now at last he saw the mother he had brought Lelie here to find, and now Norit perhaps realized what gift he had brought her at such effort.

“My baby,” Norit exclaimed, with tears pouring down her face. “Lelie, Lelie, Lelie.”

He was content. The world seemed very much kinder then, its natural laws restored. He trusted it enough to shut his eyes on it a time, though the tilting still bothered him, though he desperately wanted to tell Hati and Norit and Tofi to put him on Osan and move the caravan this hour, this moment.

But there was a weight on his senses, a wall between him and speech, and the will to speak grew faint and less frequent. Norit spoke for him, and even she found distraction in the dark, in the howling of the wind.

He waked as they moved him, and as they shifted him over something hard on the ground. This proved to be the pole of a litter, and the two freedmen carried him out into the wind under a sand-hazed sun, whether morning or evening he could not tell, but he thought it was dawn.

He was still fevered, and this waking brought him acute pain, so he knew this healing was longer and this wound was probably worse than any other in his life. He thought he should get up and ride, but he failed, and lay there thinking that someone would move him sooner or later.

Strange sights passed his eyes meanwhile. A good number of Haga were in the camp—surely they were still in the Ila’s camp. Then he thought no, he was mistaken, there were tribesmen, but they were Keran. It was curious. It seemed one, and then the other, when neither belonged there.

The camp meanwhile packed down the tents and loaded them on the beshti. A second time he tried to get up and walk so that he could get to the saddle on his own, to save everyone the trouble of getting him up there as a dead weight.

But having lifted his shoulders perhaps a handbreadth off the mat, he simply fell back, weak, with his head throbbing and the desert alternately showing twilight and sunlight around him, and the tribes still coming and going.