Within hours, however, the wind was quieter. A look out the flap proved there was something like light beyond the walls, a transparent red promising the storm had indeed eased, but there was no view of anything farther than the tent stake nearest the door, and a man dared not expose the eyes or any more of the skin than he must.
Marak ducked his head back inside, and answered anxious questions with, “It’s a little quieter.”
One could hear it. The thunder of the canvas was muted: it had boomed and racketed so he thought he would lose what he had left of his reason, and now it was an occasional spate of wind.
But, chilled, he was doubly glad to find his mat and his comfort again, and find Hati’s arms and Norit’s to comfort him and to brush the dust from his hair and his clothing.
His throat was dry as the dust he had breathed. He was keeper of the food and water and could have had more; he could have given more to the men who had helped with the rope, but he honestly had no notion who they were and wished to open no doors to dispute. He simply advised himself and all of them to the same ration.
He slept, exhausted, the whole world seeming to spin about and fall to the east.
And after that short sleep, he waked to a near silence in the wind.
He stirred, drew on his robe against the chill, and pulled up his aifad against the dust that must still be moving. He unlaced the flap as others of their tentmates stirred, and he peered out at the other tents through the reddened, dust-choked air.
There had been four tents in his field of view when the storm began. Now there were only three. He tried to figure their positions, thinking one might still be veiled in dust. But there was a gap, right next to them.
Ropes had failed. The tent nearest them had gone.
He took a lap of the aifad about his head to shield his eyes from the grit and dust, went out and scanned nearer the ground, looking for any lump of canvas where survivors might have secured a secondary hold against the wind.
Hati had come out behind him, so had the au’it, and so had the several who had helped him save their own tent.
“Stay here!” he said to Hati, not wishing to leave the water and food to chance or the desires of villagers, and most of all wanting someone sensible who could shout him back to his own tent if the wind rose up again, as it might, in the few moments he meant to be away from shelter.
Hati raised no objection, well understanding. “Stay here,” she said to the others. “The wind may come up. Stay close!”
The beasts had survived. Rare the storm that could wear them down. They were lumps of sand, tucked noses to the wind, in the lee of their own tent and the other, and roused as they saw movement, standing up to stretch cramped limbs.
Obidhen’s tent was still standing, past the place where the other had stood. He went to that tent, and shouted outside it until, within, someone unlaced the flap.
Two slaves were there. No one else. Not Obidhen, not his son Rom, not the freedmen or the four other slaves.
“Where is master Obidhen?” Marak asked.
“Give us water,” the slaves there begged, and he knew that tale instantly, without the caravan master to govern the water, these two fools had fallen to the whole tent’s water stores and consumed them. Their suffering was deserved, and far from fatal.
“Out and dig!” he said. “Or die!” He threatened a blow of his fist to the foremost, and the pair moved, ducking after gear.
Marak, Marak, the voices cried, and the whole world was threat and danger.
He left them immediately, went to the fourth tent in the blowing dust, careful not to lose his bearings, for intermittently the fifth and farther tent vanished in the sand red haze.
There, too, he got a man to unlace the flap, and expected Obidhen’s son Rom, but the two ex-soldiers roused out to do the job, and light poured past them onto stark, frightened faces… among the rest, he saw three women disheveled, half-clothed, terrified. He began to form a notion of utter disaster. He imagined someone from the tent in difficulty making it as far as the caravan master, who attempted to help, and then engaged his other sons.
“Ontari.” Marak ignored the disheveled soldiers and addressed the man he knew best, the stonecutter, who had good sense. “Take charge here.” What had gone on for three days between these women and the soldiers and perhaps several others, he suspected and deplored, but there were still their lives to lose if this was only an abate merit of the storm. “Turn out and dig, all of you. We have to recover the supplies. The fool slaves have eaten and drunk for three days!”
“Omi,” Ontari said, and rallied the rest. Ontari was a big man. Marak gave the three women a long look that told them he knew, while he asked himself what he could possibly do about their difficulty. He found no answer except to set Hati to find out the truth. In the meanwhile all their lives were at risk.
“The storm may have force left,” he said to the women. “Whatever happened here, we don’t know how much time we have and we’ve lost a good portion of our water, buried in that tent. Out and dig! Everyone!”
Marak! The voices assumed a tone of panic, and his heart beat like something trapped.
He went to the fifth tent, and there found the youngest of Obidhen’s sons, Tofi, alive, and a company larger by two than he had left it.
“Your father and your brothers are gone,” Marak said, rendered blunt in the hammering of the voices and the threat of the wind. “Get out and direct the slaves! We’ve lost them, and we’ve lost a tent!”
That a tent might be gone was no news to the boy. Two had escaped the ruined tent, and come here, and the boy might hope that his father and brothers had gotten to some other shelter. The report that dashed that hope was clearly a shock.
“Have you looked in the other tents?” the boy asked.
“Gone, I say! We need hands to dig. Turn out!”
There was no time for grief, none for assessing what had happened. They took shovels such as they had and used bare hands. Obidhen’s son.
It was the old, old story on the Lakht. Someone from the missing tent, Landhi’s tent, had straggled across to Obidhen during a lull to request help with an increasing problem. Obidhen, the slaves, and the two traders who had been in his tent had gone out to help, and whether or not they had ever even reached Landhi’s tent in time, or been carried away by the next gust when it blew loose, they had run a high risk in a storm and lost their wager. Perhaps some survivor had gone over to Rom in the fourth tent, fatal mistake, and now he was gone. Meanwhile two complete novices from Landhi’s tent, having made it clear and having lost their bearings, had run into Tofi’s tent downwind and told him as much as he knew, but by then the storm was fierce, making it folly to go out looking, and Tofi had wisely stayed put, refusing to go when he could not see.
As for the others, there was no question where survivors might be, if there were to be any survivors. When that tent had gone, it had become a mass of half-anchored canvas and cordage in the blinding sand, a lethal monster of canvas and whipping rope, and unless one side of the tent had remained anchored and unless that heap of sand concealed a canvas shelter between elements of the baggage and water stores, there was no hope for the rest at all.
Deep as the sand had accumulated where the tent had been, Marak had doubted from the beginning that anyone could survive, and nine men had been in that tent with Landhi, not counting Obidhen, the freedmen, his older son Rom, and the four slaves who had come to their aid.
Obidhen’s tent had had its share of their remaining water and its share of their supplies, most of it gone, and Marak had no mercy, no more than Tofi, who railed on the well-fed slaves, beating them when they lagged.
“The storm may have force left,” Tofi shouted, flinging sand with a shovel. “Dig faster. All of you.”
They abandoned shovels and dug with their bare hands as they came near the supplies, and found the first of the dead, Tofi sobbing and swearing the while. The fifteen beasts that had belonged to the lost tent had sought shelter behind another tent, and they had survived. The supplies, bundled in canvas, turned up knee deep under sand. One corner of the bundle, wrapped solidly, had abraded to threads, but had not spoiled. The water, buried deepest in the stack, had survived, and that was a relief.