Well judged, and well said, Marak thought to himself in their departure. Even Luz could learn the exigencies of the desert; and even Norit could moderate Luz’s harsh judgments.

But that disaster was not the worst. Tofi reported grimmer news relayed to him up from the tribes, a concern that small vermin had moved in near the caravan track back among the villages, and showed increasingly disturbing courage over the last two days. The tribes nearest the villages had warned them to be more careful with their waste, and the priests, in evidence of very bad judgment, had not reported it when they reported the lost tents.

Tofi, however, knew the dire seriousness of what the tribes observed, and stood waiting for a solution from him.

The vermin came to the moisture and waste of a caravan. They always followed caravans, but they never, almost never, attacked one on its march: the noise was too much, the activity too threatening. Vermin were interested in everything a caravan left or shed… starting with the latrines, and the small insect vermin that burrowed there, and the larger vermin that came to feed on them, and the largest that fed on the larger. They were habitual pests, no more than that, on the average route, at worst startling some caravanner bent on private business in his tent’s latrine, in some three-day camp.

But no one had ever seen a caravan that took a day or more to march past a given point. No one knew what happened when the rule that vermin never mobbed a large caravan ran up against the rule that vermin always gathered and moved in on an abandoned campsite.

In their all-inclusive caravan, only the Ila’s party and the tribes and the villages in front marched over clean sand. Past the first half hundred or so camps, the entire route of march of those behind was through one continuous campsite, and Marak was appalled that they had not once thought of that ominous situation. They were fools.

He looked at Tofi, took a hitch of the aifad to obscure his dismay. The dust stung his eyes. It made the air itself smell like hot sand. “They’re marching over old ground,” Marak said. “There’s never been a caravan so large its back end marches over its own trail after breaking camp, not that I know.”

“We must stretch out at least a day’s march, maybe two,” Tofi said, over the thumping of the nearby tent, which slaves were working to take down. “It’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

“The city people, those afoot…” Marak shuddered to think of the situation of the hindmost: beshti were some defense. But for a man afoot…

“I’ll tell Memnanan,” he said to Tofi, and went and immediately called the Ila’s captain apart from his men, the two of them curtained in the blowing dust, partly sheltered by the Ila’s tent.