Free Hammerfall by C. J. Cherryh

of dawn, the master’s eldest son had leapt to his besha’s back.
    It was the trick of the young, the lithe, the desert-bred, and Marak doubted he could still do it himself. He had softened considerably in village life, since their retreat from the Lakht, and he knew now he had watched his father, too, grow soft, and angry, and settle in for the life of a village lord. There had been the start of the bitterness, a man always mourning the chance that had never come, the vengeance that had never fallen into his hands.
    Thoughts muddled. Sounds became distant, and the weariness weighed down and down, numbing senses. The foot-braced attitude Marak held, keeping his beast at rest, was one in which he had slept many a ride, and of all things else he had left behind with his youthful confidence, his body had not forgotten how to keep centered on a swaying back. He shivered in the dawn, but at least no one noticed his weakness. The shivering was lack of sleep; it was the unaccountable shift of his fortunes. It was the roaring in his ears, that the Ila’s retaliation had brought on him, and now that he had done everything, now that there was nothing more for him to do but sleep, it was beyond him to fight his exhaustion. Body heat fled. He drew his robes close about him, even covering his fingers within that warmth and taking in the heat of the huge body under him.
    The roaring increased within his ears. Pain had invaded his joints, down to his fingers and his toes, and reasserted itself, after so long ignoring it. But it was only exhaustion, so he argued with himself. It all would pass. The trembling would pass. Surely the roaring in his ears would pass with sleep.
    â€œAre we going home?” one confused madman asked another in his hearing, as the line filed past, and the caravan set itself in motion. “Where shall we go?”
    One madman answered another: “East, man. We go east. Everything is east. And then we go back and tell the Ila what we find. That’s the crazy part. Tain’s son is one of us. He claims he’ll figure it out.”

4
    The law of the caravans is this: that the master of the caravan has the power of life and death over all who travel under his rule, except over a priest, except over an au’it, except over the Ila’s man. These lives belong to the Ila. The master of the caravan must preserve them at the cost of all others.
    â€”The Book of Oburan
    THE SUN ROSE as a vast, expanded disk and climbed above the Lakht in an unforgiving sky. The day’s heat grew and grew, and built toward that hour when prudent travelers pitched their tents. Marak had indeed slept in the saddle, an uneasy sleep, a sleep with a watchful eye on the mad and on the soldiers and the caravan master and his sons alike; but no greater disturbance demanded his attention than the passage of birds, shadows on the sand, and the track of a solitary belly-creeper headed for the reed-rimmed Mercy.
    Past midday, with the pond behind them, the heat only increased. The caravan master ordered a halt until the heat of the day had passed, and Marak, among the rest, was glad to bid his beast kneel and to step down from the saddle.
    In the jolt of the beast’s kneeling down, his own knees and elbows ached with remembered fire. He sat down on the burning sand against his beast’s broad side while the caravan master and the servants pitched the tents.
    The au’it settled near him, book and kit in her lap.
    There would be nothing remarkable in this camp to record. He was determined on that point.
    He said to her, instead, “Write the names of the mad.” It seemed a harmless question. “Write the names of their cities. Write what they look for.” It might keep her from hovering near him.
    The au’it bowed her head and went on her mission, visiting the rest, who disposed themselves in a tight, sweaty huddle under the first canvas stretched . . . forty madmen, all in a space for