I am starting to shout, dropping onto the ground, trying to warn the others, when a blast of wind thuds against the column and a scintillating cloud shoots up into the sky like a snapped sheet. It tinkles and crashes with a demon noise. Makemin is stock still between me and a hurtling wave of glass.

“Get into the bags—the leather bags!” he screams.

I am released—already I can feel stings, hear cries—I pull my bag from my pack unroll it and scramble in headfirst, trying to gather it around my boots, the way they showed us. I turn my back to the wind, pulling up my legs and lying on my side. The bag is pitch black, hot and stinking—I feel the wind battering me, stings on my uppermost arm and leg, I can feel the leather flap, catch, pluck loose, but it’s very thick. There was a welter of voices, screams and shouting, as I climbed into the bag—but now I hear nothing but the roar of the wind, the tinging and crashing of glass ...

Gradually the wind dies. The bag is stifling, but I don’t want to leave it. I am rebreathing my own breath, sweltering in my own heat, but I can’t move.

A hand shakes my shoulder loosely through the stiff leather. I am the medic.

I crawl backwards out of the bag, pushing the soil back with my boots so as not to crawl too much on glass. I don’t look up. The soil before my face has no glass at all in it. I turn my head warily to one side and the other without raising it too much, and see no glass on the ground anywhere. Now I am hearing groans. Despite myself I look up, see a soldier a few feet away sobbing, bent over a livid, tranquil-faced head. The body attached to the head dribbles away along the ground, churned to a red morass. I blink at the soldier.

“I told you so,” I say, “I told you so.”

*

“There was nothing to see. How did you see?” Makemin staring me in the eye.

I stare back at him. My hatred for him, my contempt of his opinion, are giving me strength, weight, steadiness. “I don’t know,” I say.

Makemin and Saskia glare at me almost with outrage.

“How could you have known?” Makemin asks.

“I saw it,” I say bluntly.

Makemin grimaces and, with a glance up at the descending sun, turns abruptly. “Up! We march!”