Even so, the wind was falling. The ache in his ears subsided. He had no knowledge of birthing babies, but he knew beshti, and he knew the storm that had rolled over them might have brought it on. His ears might clear, but the woman had no such relief. The birth pangs were not likely to stop, once started, no matter what the storm did, no matter the things that could go terribly wrong if the baby was not ready to come.

He heard a commotion among the women. Lelie, apparently shunted aside in the confusion and the dark, wailed her distress and her fear in the dark, but he thought Norit had her. The women asked each other advice, gathered about Memnanan’s wife: Norit had birthed a child. Memnanan’s mother assuredly had.

“What can we do?” he heard Tofi ask, and he heard Patya and Hati and then even Bosginde talking to Memnanan’s mother, their voices even so smothered by the wind and the racket of the canvas, and by the bubbles that seemed lodged painfully inside his ears.

Memnanan was out of reach. It was folly to try to bring him: their tent had stopped trying to fly away, but it still shuddered to gusts strong enough for any storm. The sand would be too thick to breathe out there.

Marak cautiously released the rope he had held, forced locked, swollen fingers to move. His mouth was so dry his throat felt coated with dust. He rubbed at a coating of fine, dry dust on his face and about his eyes, and made matters worse. He hardly had strength left to lift his arms.

“Can we get a light?” Memnanan’s mother pleaded.

They had a lamp, the most basic sort of lamp, as every tent had, in their dwindling store of supplies. It was something men could do. Feeling their way in the raucous dark, he and Tofi and the slaves got the elements together from their baggage.

Then it was another lengthy and doubtful process to light it while the wind ripped and battered at the canvas. Mogar carried a small flintwheel, that most elementary of firestarters in a desert night, but drafts through the tent lacings quenched the sparks they raised.

They lacked quick-fire, or any other element to make it easy. Bosginde, however, said he could do it, and they were able, finally, to bring fire to a dry nest of fibers and what seemed strands of Bosginde’s hair, and then to a piece of oil-soaked wick. All the while the tent shook under the gusts, and they used their bodies for a windbreak.