He saw only Norit’s eyes above the aifad, but he imagined the worry. He raised no hopes, said no word of Norit’s lost Lelie, and neither did Norit.

By evening, the wind had sunk notably. The Keran had found a bitter spring in the rocks, and dug it out. The beshti drank, and the Keran marked the place for the other tribes and the villages as they moved. The spring scarcely kept up with the demand of the beshti, and no man could drink it, but the beshti, whose urine was at times poisonous even to vermin, were content with what they drank.

By morning, there was cloud above the blowing sand, and by the hour they camped, the cloud was such that they could not use the sun for the heating-mirrors, and could not cook their rations or boil water. Only the Ila had tea, using precious lamp oil for fuel as well as light.

Her tent, of all the rest, surely, in all the long line of all the tents left in the world, glowed in the gathering murk, stained with the light of lamps inside. It must be all of them lit, Marak judged, profligate waste.

“The Ila shouldn’t burn the fuel for tea,” he ventured to say to Memnanan. “Or light. We may need it in the storms. We’ve been lucky so far. Can anyone reason with her?”

“She’s angry,” Memnanan confided in Marak. “It’s become the tea, the clouds, the wind, the dust, but mostly it’s the situation. Men are dying behind us. She lights the lamps. She will have tea. I don’t know why. Sometimes I think this is how she grieves.”

The Ila’s messengers through the day had come in with news of lost tents, straggling walkers, and persistent vermin, and said four young villagers had died or would die as fools, drinking the bitter water—but as yet they had had no disasters beyond the loss of a few sacks of grain riddled with hardshells. They were not doing that badly. It was strange to hear Memnanan’s observation… that the living goddess grieved, and sipped tea.

He marked, too, that Memnanan had not visited his wife or his mother. Memnanan had only spoken to them outside the tent, obsessed strictly with duty, or perhaps commanded to that obsession. And still the Ila grieved.

“More useful if she saved the fuel,” Marak said. “We haven’t seen any excess of vermin this far forward, and that’s good news. But we can’t say about the weather.” The west had made him increasingly uneasy, in the steady wind. For two days he had been free of visions, but when he said that, he saw the ring of fire.