Tofi went outside the open sides of the tent to see to the beasts, and came running under the tent again, a shadow in the dark.

“The stars are all gone!” Tofi cried.

Marak gathered himself up in alarm, with Hati and Norit close by, and indeed, as he walked out beyond the edge of the tent, the whole heaven was black. All the land was dark.

“All the stars have fallen,” Hati said in dismay.

“They are there,” Norit said calmly. “The star-falls have kicked up the dust to the sky. That’s all.”

“That much dust?” Hati asked, but had no answer.

Marak could see nothing in the pitch-black, except shadows against shadow.

Then in the far west white fire chained through the murk in the west, and thunder cracked, as sometimes it would in the great western storms.

A storm was indeed coming, and weather-sense had failed him. Now he was very glad that they had driven down the deep-stakes.

“We should put on the side flaps,” he said, and, difficult as it was in the dark, they began to do that.

Before they were done, a sudden wind came and battered at the canvas, making it boom and rattle while they worked. “Make sure of the ropes!” Tofi shouted at the ex-slaves. “Do it right this time, or you go out alone to tie it down!”

The beasts got up and settled down in the lee of the tent. The food and water all had to be moved inside, for fear of it all being buried in blowing sand; they made a wall of the rest of the baggage, and the side flaps had to be battened down tight. As an added measure, feeling their way in the dark, they made the tent sides and the roof fast a second time to the baggage, and to a second line of stakes, which they drove down inside the tent.

Then, sitting against that wall of their possessions, they were ready for the earth to shake and the heavens to be carried away.

The wind roared and the thunder boomed above them. The canvas bucked and thumped away, anchored by the deep-irons and the heavy buffering on the windward wall, inside their tent. Having worked so hard and so quickly, and having nothing left to do, they ate an extra ration of sweet dried fruit and grain-cakes in the pitch blackness and settled down to rest through to the wind and the storm.

The air grew far cooler, even cold, strangely smelling of dust and water.

“It smells like the inside of a well,” Hati said in wonder.

It did. But rain never came to the Lakht, and only twice in his life in the western lowlands.