There was not a bird, not a track on the sand in this region. They were far from any well, any source of water. Wind turned up bones along the route, the bones of beshti, three of them together with no trace of harness, proving even wild beshti met their match in the storms of the Lakht.

The voices came louder, as the days went. Marak, they said, Marak, do you hear us?

Or again, mindless noise, Marak, Marak, Marak.

The voices were back, clearer than they had ever been. There seemed a satisfaction in them, finally. In a sense Marak felt safer than he had ever felt, truer to what had made demands all his life, and more settled on his course. He no longer thought of bolting. But he had equally dismissed thought of the journey ever coming to an end. It had become its own world. It enveloped all purpose, all planning.

The beasts went single file on the dunes, but on the crusted pan they tended to spread out and to go by twos and threes, and to sort that order by a kind of slow drifting in pace, a tendency of one beast to move a little faster than the next, or one rider to grow tired of the backside of the next beast, and to seek another view.

In that way, on a certain day, Hati drifted up close to him and said nothing, only cast eyes on him as they rode, at fairly close range, unveiled.

He knew suddenly by those looks what she bid for. And now that it was offered, he drew back, asking himself how it would be, and what they would set loose. There were no partners within their company. There never had been. Dealings between them had assumed a quiet sameness, her own rule, and she violated it.

In the economy of the desert he had grown averse to changing anything that worked. He found nothing to say, pretending not to see, while his thoughts raced in a kind of panic. They rode together a time, and then Hati fell back again.

What stopped him, he decided, lying on his mat at noon, arms under his head, might be the notion of sharing a mat with a madness as great and as quiet as his own.

And there was the question of doing it by broad daylight and under the eyes of all the rest. There was no place but the tent he shared with her and Norit, with the au’it, the potter and the orchardman and the other men. Going aside into the dunes for privacy was complete foolishness, a good way to meet the desert’s lethal surprises. The most privacy they had was a curtain at one corner of each tent, which was the latrine, and no one went farther, or expected to be unobserved elsewhere. Clearly, others would observe them.