Tofi got under him and, in undignified fashion, shoved, not asking if he needed help. Hati made it up mostly on her own, at the last with Mogar’s help, and Marak reined off into the dark, threading through the little space there was, past the resting beshti, in among the Keran tents—Aigyan first, Aigyan, whose lead the tribes might follow.

And Menditak, the canny, the quick, the old man who had outlived most of his enemies… and befriended the greatest of them.

And somewhere amid it all, he searched for the Ila’s captain.

Chapter Twenty-Four

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Any tent, when the storm comes.

—Kerani proverb

Marak, the voices dinned in his hearing, voices thrumming with anxiety and disaster, while the dark and the open flat resounded with the sound of hammers and mallets.

Deep-stakes went down; and over all the commotion ranged the hoarse voices of tribesmen shouting orders, and arranging a storm camp, tents placed for best protection in the likelihood of a wind from the west… west had become the source of danger: Marak was sure of it in his own heart. West for danger, east for salvation.

Beshti complained in the lack of water and food. Children cried in the tents, weary and hungry and thirsty, but the very little little water there was, the tribes guarded closely and would not give up.

The Ila’s tent was up and secure, staked deep in the stony sand. Lights shone inside it, making the canvas glow… because the Ila had lamp oil, carried along where water would have been far more useful.

There were instead, Marak recalled, all those books, the weight of which would have supplied the whole camp—

For what? For a day, on short rations? What was one day?

For those caught above the cliff, it was everything. It was the difference, for thousands, between getting off the Lakht to shelter—or not: but water could not give them time. Only the skies could give them that. Only his decisions, to camp, to move on, all the decisions during all the trek, could have given them that time—and those were his, balanced against this necessity and that and the strength of the villagers to keep moving. Those were his. He did not know whether they were the wisest decisions—the best economy of lives.

And when he thought how very many must still be up there on the cliffs, still making the perilous descent, still trapped between thirst and vermin, he could scarcely wrap his mind about the enormity of what he had told Luz he would do and what consequence every decision of his might have had.

He wielded a hammer himself in the dark, as camp after camp went up. Every tribe took their hammers and set the tents of all those that arrived, so that as fast as weary tribes reached the edge of the camp, the camp swallowed them up and gained workers.