And the mad, once rested, wandered about with more energy than before, carrying their own mats, some even helping with the tents now that the soldiers were gone, now that they were sure they were no longer prisoners.

Everyone was out and about, finally, except the wife from Tarsa, Norit, who sat and rocked, rocked, rocked, as the boy had used to.

The caravan master came cautiously to inform him they must strike this tent, too, if they were to move, and asking him would he persuade the madwoman to get up.

Marak saw from the tail of his eye that the au’it made a note in her book. He wondered what she wrote, and for whom she wrote it.

He went and assisted the wife, Norit, to her feet. And the au’it made another note.

Marak, Marak, Marak. The sound went on, maddening. The lights within his skull outshone the sun, a long, long tunnel of suns.

The slaves had saddled his riding beast. In this gathering bout of madness he thought it was Osan, the name of his very first, when he was a boy; and as he settled himself in the saddle and endured the neck-snapping jolts of the beast rising, he decided that that was its name. His life had come to a new beginning. He had cast away responsibility to his father, and taken up responsibility for madmen… he knew he could not cure them, no more than he could heal himself. But here he was. He had achieved the command for which his affliction fitted him.

A breeze rose with the lowering of the sun, the first breath of air, a reminder of life in the midst of the great flat, and it roused Osan’s spirits, too. Marak took in the rein and walked Osan in a circle until all the mad were up and until the caravan masters had mounted their own beasts. Then he let Osan go, riding first with the master’s sons, and then alone, striking a good traveling pace.

He had used to ride into the western desert for days. Where have you been? his father would ask, and he would lie and call it hunting, when his hunting was voices and the visions. He would kill something at the last, and bring it back, and his father would believe him.

He recalled killing a bird, and remembered how he had stroked its head and thought if he were not mad it would not be dead, because there was precious little good to him in killing it. He had stamped it into the sand. He had thrown rocks at it. Then, in cowardice, he had killed another, to have something to show his father for his day in the wilderness.