Memnanan listened grimly, as appalled as he. He had fought in the desert. He knew the hazards of vermin, and the rules of a clean camp, no matter what city people understood. “Wait,” Memnanan said, and went to talk to the Ila, reckless of her bad mood, and talked for several moments, urgently, before he came back.

“The Ila understands,” Memnanan said. “She gives us leave to do whatever is necessary.”

“If we increase the pace more than this,” Marak said, “we’ll lose lives. But if we don’t, we’ll lose villages. Send a letter back through the line. Tell the villages to dig their latrines as deep as they can. Cover everything they leave behind as deeply as they have the strength to dig. Let the strong dig for the weak, and let them make only as many pits as they can make doubly deep. Digging will delay the vermin and give us time… if only they don’t go for the stragglers: there may be a mobbing, but we won’t be there to see it.”

The earth shuddered. They had all but learned to ignore such moments.

“Kinder, perhaps,” Memnanan said, “to leave the weak behind all at once, and not to drag the inevitable out in days of misery.”

“Kinder to poison the lot of them this evening,” Marak said above the thumping of the wind-stirred canvas, “and not leave them for the vermin to eat alive. But we’re men, and we don’t give up. Sometimes we win. Sometimes even villagers win.”

“You were already safe at the tower,” Memnanan said, chasing that old question. “If it was safe. You knew you were risking everything. Why did you come back?”

“For my mother. For my sister. Wouldn’t you?”

“So you have them. Why don’t you ride off ahead of the rest?”

He had no idea why he stayed. But he shook his head again, thinking of thousands of the helpless, all the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and children in the world. “We do what we can,” he said with a shrug, “or nothing at all gets done, does it? Nothing ever gets done, and no one gets saved, if we aren’t fools at least some of the time. Why don’t you run for the tower with a few men and the best beasts? You know the route. Why does even the Ila march at this pace? We’re fools, is all.”

“I’ll instruct messengers to go back,” Memnanan said. “I don’t trust your written message.”

Marak had a vision of the line stringing out as they marched, farther and farther separated, the strong leaving the weak, and the villages beginning to know it.