He hoped the master’s sons and the slaves had done their work well. He had seen nothing to fault in their work. But now they knew they were very small, and the desert wind was a towering devil, thumping and battering all about the edges of their shelter, trying to get fingers within the lacings.

For about a half an hour he rested and listened to the fury build.

An arm came about him, and a warm body shaped itself to him on his left, and he knew the culprit as he moved an arm to send her back to her own mat.

A knee intruded, however, and lips found his bare neck.

Hati whispered something, interrupted breath against his neck. Perhaps she told him they were going nowhere. Perhaps she said no one could see or hear what they did, and that this answered to a roof. He rolled over, seized a slender arm, drew the offender close by the neck until he had a fistful of long braids and knew for certain it was Hati.

Then he took a deep breath and brought his lips where he judged hers waited. His guess was right.

The intruder’s arms came about him, and lips drew breath at last in the moment he allowed, then renewed the kiss before he was ready.

In the same moment a lithe body shed robes and wriggled beneath him.

“This is no roof,” he said, vexed at her breach of their agreement. People at rest all around them could not be that deaf, even if they were blind.

But the dark was so absolute and the howl of the wind and the thump of canvas so enveloped them he was not sure even she heard him. She came around him, having loosened her clothes, and his push at her met bare breasts, a skin as smooth, as fine, as sweet and soft as he had thought. Her warmth settled about him and the canvas beat and thumped around them with the flutter of a heart that had been running a long, long race.

Why object, the storm said, why refuse, why should anyone care? We are cast out there, but not yet dead.

He found his way through her clothes, and she found hers. He felt the force of her let loose in the dark, saw the burning lines of his delusions, and he heard above the wind the voices that made them both mad. Marak, they said, Marak. Hati. Hati.

Others might witness, if the madness of together-seeing pierced the dark. They two held no secrets, held nothing back, all the way to a long thunderous battering of the wind above them, then an ebb into dark and sound and overheated flesh.