The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,82

longer flesh. You resolve to do a better job of eating at every opportunity.

Three weeks into the desert, as expected, the highroad veers off to the west. From there on, Castrima must descend to the ground and contend with desert terrain up close and personal. It’s easier, in some ways, because at least the ground isn’t likely to crumble away beneath your feet. On the other hand, sand is harder to walk on than asphalt. Everyone slows down. Maxixe earns his keep by drawing enough of the moisture out of the topmost layer of sand and ash and icing it a few inches down, to firm it up beneath everyone’s feet. It exhausts him to do this on a constant basis, though, so he saves it for the worst patches. He tries to teach Temell how to do the same trick, but Temell’s an ordinary feral; he can’t manage the necessary precision. (You could have done it once. You don’t let yourself think about this.)

Scouts sent forth to try to find a better path all come back and report the same thing: rusting sand-ash-mud everywhere. There is no better path.

Three people got left behind on the highroad, unable to walk any further because of sprains or breaks. You don’t know them. In theory, they’ll catch up once they’ve recovered, but you can’t see how they’ll recover with no food or shelter. Here on the ground it’s worse: a half-dozen broken ankles, one broken leg, one wrenched back among the Strongbacks pulling the wagons, all in the first day. After a while, Lerna stops going to them unless they ask for his help. Most don’t ask. There’s nothing he can do, and everyone knows it.

On a chilly day, Ontrag the potter just sits down and says she doesn’t feel like going any further. Ykka actually argues with her, which you weren’t expecting. Ontrag has passed on her skill of pottery to two younger comm members. She’s redundant, long past childbearing; it should be an easy headwoman’s choice, by the rules of Old Sanze and the tenets of stonelore. But in the end, Ontrag herself has to tell Ykka to shut up and walk away.

It’s a warning sign. “I can’t do this anymore,” you hear Ykka say later, when Ontrag has fallen out of sight behind you. She plods forward, her pace steady and ground-eating as usual, but her head is down, hanks of wet ashblow hair obscuring her face. “I can’t. It isn’t right. It shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t just be—there’s more to being Castrima than being rusting useful, for Earth’s sake, she used to teach me in creche, she knows stories, I rusting can’t.”

Hjarka Leadership Castrima, who was taught from an early age to kill the few so the many might live, only touches her shoulder and says, “You’ll do what you have to do.”

Ykka doesn’t say anything for the next few miles, but maybe that’s just because there’s nothing to say.

The vegetables run out first. Then the meat. The cachebread Ykka tries to ration for as long as she can, but the plain fact is that people can’t travel at this speed on nothing. She has to give everyone at least a wafer a day. That’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing—until there is nothing. And you keep walking anyway.

In the absence of all else, people run on hope. On the other side of the desert, Danel tells everyone around a campfire one night, there’s another Imperial Road you can pick up. Easy traveling all the way to Rennanis. It’s a river delta region, too, with good soil, once the breadbasket of the Equatorials. Lots of now-abandoned farms outside of any comm. Danel’s army had good foraging there on its way south. If you can get through the desert, there will be food.

If you can get through the desert.

You know the end to this. Don’t you? How could you be here listening to this tale if you didn’t? But sometimes it is the how of a thing, not just the endgame, that matters most.

So this is the endgame: Of the nearly eleven hundred souls who went into the desert, a little over eight hundred and fifty reach the Imperial Road.

For a few days after that, the comm effectively dissolves. Desperate people, no longer willing to wait for orderly foraging by the Hunters, stagger off to dig through sour soil for half-rotted tubers and bitter grubs and barely chewable woody roots. The land around here is scraggly,