But the tribes of the eastern Lakht were fallible allies, so Tain had learned, and Marak remembered. We cannot come this year: the wells have failed. We cannot meet you; the westerners have offended us. We cannot send reinforcements: our priest is uneasy.
As for Pori, like any entity on the Lakht, it valued commerce and took it where it could, barring feuds or weather. And it kept its neutrality. Promising everything, it had not joined Tain, either.
Clearly the village had suffered from the recent storm, and was still digging out. Tall dunes stood against walls, rising up to the eaves of some houses. Sand choked the streets. Roofs were missing patches of tile. But the black netting was intact. That said everything. Pori would safeguard that so long as the village lived.
And as they rode down among the rocks, they at last saw villagers, tiles or shovels in hand, who stopped their work on the far side of a house, and at the first sight of them, shouted: “A caravan, a caravan!” so that the whole village poured out to see.
Tofi brought his caravan to a halt at the well, at the opening of the double crescent of houses, where they surrounded a wide, sandy commons.
Here stood a stone-covered well, with troughs for animals. Even water as abundant as fed a village could not be allowed to stand under the sun and be half-drunk up by the heat: it was too precious for that. Pori—in the lowlands it would have been Kais Pori—had built a fine stone vault above ground for its well, with walls thicker than the stretch of a man’s arms. That well house protected the water, and likely fed a great amount into a deep cistern. It ran out into troughs for the beasts only when a strong man pulled a lever and let it flow out.
Already there was no holding the beasts, who knew what was their due and who liked sweet water better than foul. They crowded up to the trough, where as yet there was no water, and pushed and shoved for dominance.
Meanwhile the authorities of the village had come out from a house nearest the well, many-walled and rich.
“I have a letter!” Tofi said, having gotten down with the agility of his years, and waved it for all to see, a crumpled paper they had saved from Obidhen’s death, bearing the Ila’s red seal.
The lord of the village came to Tofi, took the offered letter, and read it.
“A caravan from Oburan! The Ila’s charge!” the village lord cried with a wave of his hand. “The Ila’s charge, all they desire in water or in supplies! Open up the pipes!”
The water master had moved to his post, either to guard or to loose the precious commodity, and at that word, turned and hammered the tap open, letting the water flow from the stone mouth. It ran along the dry stone troughs. The stronger beasts, shouldering one another, trailing and treading on the reins that should have held them, moved in.
They drank with grunts of satisfaction and a great deal of jostling side to side to bully lesser animals, who tried to reach their long necks past. There was no charity among them, no more than among men on the Lakht: the strongest drank first.
The well continued to pour out water, abundant enough for all the beasts, and young girls came bringing cups full of water for them in the caravan, water they could drink freely, sweet water, cool from its underground cistern, in good brass cups.
In the end every beast had its fill, and Tofi’s slaves recovered their charges by the trailing leads.
Kais Tain, Marak thought, looking around him, was such a village as this… more prosperous by far; but the wonder was that any village survived here on the edge of the caravan routes, while the village spread an awning and they sat at their ease to enjoy the air from the veiled garden leaves.
At Kais Tain, beside the water house, was such a garden as stood here; in every village with a well there was such a garden. The remaining water from the troughs went out by a drain hole, and into a stone-lined pit where waste and wastewater of the whole village collected.
Nothing was wasted.
And from that rich, moist pit the gardeners hauled up a treasure that, gathered over centuries, enriched the pit of sand and carefully hoarded earth, deep pit floored and walled about with stone, roofed with wide-meshed woven nets against the vermin of the air.
In Pori the garden was so old and so deep it stretched on behind the best houses, a source of wealth and pride. Twenty-four tall palms ringed that stone wall on the side nearest the well, drinking with their slighter need any moisture that reached through cracks in the stone floor of the garden, and returning the gift in the form of fruits in their season and fiber for weaving.
Ruling all, even the official who governed the flow, a water-au’it sat guard by the drain, an old woman with a knotted cord in her hands, not a pen such as the Ila’s au’it used. She told the charge for the water. She chanted and counted the knots as they flowed through the fingers. It was so many knots of flow by a chant as old as the Lakht. It was so many dippers of water for the men. The caravan must pay, even at the Ila’s charge, and the water-au’it’s eyes missed nothing in the milling confusion.
More, with a caravan to feed and the Ila’s charge, the sellers spread out their wares under the palms. It might take them a season to collect their goods in pay, but they would be city goods, and the haste to show what they had to trade became a frenzy of voices.
“Come help our guide,” Marak said, and Hati and Norit and the au’it came with him, and walked beside their young caravan master, for even at the Ila’s charge, they were not anxious to be cheated. When a merchant proposed an outrageous price for palm-fiber cord, Hati sniffed, examined it minutely, and the price came down. Norit sniffed when the price of salve seemed high; and the word flowed by scarcely perceptible signals: the prices revised themselves to reason.
At the Ila’s charge Tofi bought a few dried fruits for the journey, per head, and dry-bread, and salt, and all these things were bundled up to stores.
But Marak, at the Ila’s charge, asked four silver rings from the trade master and gave them two each to Norit and to Hati, his one indiscretion. He was not surprised when Norit, exchanging them, came back with a fine striped aifad of the eastern Lakht pattern and a pot of cinnabar rouge.
Hati bought two silver bracelets, redemption for her honor. It was the bracelets he had intended, jewelry for Hati; but out of fairness he asked a gift for Norit as well. And Tofi, once he heard, bought bracelets each for his women, for Maol and Jurid. Then the ex-soldiers had grief from Malin, and Malin turned up with two bracelets. How had that happened? Marak asked himself with suspicion, and set the au’it to finding out where the money had come from, but to no avail. Even fear of the Ila could not unravel that mystery.
At such a spreading of coin and charges about, however, the whole of Kais Pori laid out a feast, dried and fresh fruit, and delicately spiced peas, with baked roots swimming in rare grease, a delicacy which some of the poor of the northwest had never sampled.
They all sat on the ground, farmer-style, and sucked grease from their fingers and dipped them in salt until they had had enough of both. Their au’it and the water-au’it had put their heads together, and talked, and talked, all through the meal. The villagers danced. Even they, the madmen, danced, and the prostitute and the women with Tofi danced, while the antheiri hummed their notes and the drums thumped a rapid rhythm.
The drums became a voice, however, and the voices called out of the east. They drank beer while the voices dinned names into their ears. The vision of the tower built itself out of the dung fire.
Afterward, shamelessly, in the open-sided tent, their own, and ignoring the roofs of the village, Marak lay down with two women of very different kind. Hati, with new bracelets shining in the dim light, silver against dark skin, let her skilled hands go wandering, and drew his where she wished them. Norit was shy, but cried out scandalously until Hati stopped her with her hand across her mouth, laughing, with embarrassed glances toward the nearby houses.