up and work while Rasa slept. She did not want to be the pampered wife of the ruler, she wanted to be a full participant in the community. Surely Volemak understood that.
"Please, call everyone together. Point me to the kitchen tent first, of course. I'll bring a little bread to the gathering."
She heard Dol as she wandered off, calling out at the top of her lungs - with full theatrical training in projecting her voice - "Aunt Rasa's up now! Aunt Rasa's up!"
Rasa cringed inwardly. Why not announce to everybody exactly how late I slept in?
She found the kitchen tent easily enough - it was the one with a stone oven outside, where Zdorab was baking bread.
He looked up at her rather shamefacedly. "I must apologize, Lady Rasa. I never said I was a baker."
"But the bread smells wonderful," said Rasa.
"Smells, yes. I can do smells. You should catch a whiff of my favorite - I call it 'burning fish.'"
Rasa laughed. She liked this fellow. "You get fish from this stream?"
"Your husband thought of doing some shore fishing down there." He pointed toward where the stream flowed into the placid waters of the Scour Sea.
"So you had some luck?"
"Not really," said Zdorab. "We caught fish, but they weren't very good."
"Even the ones that didn't get turned into your favorite smell..."
"Even the ones we stewed. There just isn't enough life on the land here. The fish would gather at the stream mouth if there were more organic material in the sediment being deposited by the stream."
"You're a geologist?" asked Rasa, rather surprised.
"A librarian, so I'm a little bit of everything, I guess," said Zdorab. "I was trying to figure out why this place doesn't have a permanent human settlement, and the reason came from the Index, some old maps from the last time there was a major culture in this area. They always grow up on the big river just over that mountain range." He pointed east. "Right now there are still a couple of minor cities there. The reason they don't use this spot is because there isn't enough plantable land. And the river fails one year in five. That's too often to maintain a steady population."
"What do the baboons do?" asked Rasa.
"The Index doesn't really track baboons," said Zdorab.
"I guess not," said Rasa. "I guess the baboons will have to build their own Oversoul someday, eh?"
"I guess." He looked mildly puzzled. "It'd help if they'd just build their own latrine."
Rasa raised an eyebrow.
"We have to keep an eye on them, so one of them doesn't wander upstream of us and then foul our drinking water."
"Mm," said Rasa. "That reminds me. I'm thirsty."
"And hungry too, I'll bet," said Zdorab. "Well, help yourself. Cool water and yesterday's bread in the kitchen tent, locked up."
"Well, if it's locked up ... "
"Locked to baboons. For humans, it should be easy enough."
When Rasa got into the kitchen tent she found he was right. The "lock" was nothing but a twist of wire holding the solar-powered cold chest closed. So why did they stress the fact that it was locked? Perhaps just to remind her to close it after her.
She opened the lid and found several dozen loaves of bread, as well as quite a few other cloth-wrapped parcels of food - frozen meat, perhaps? No, it couldn't be frozen, it wasn't cold enough inside. She reached down and opened one of the packages and found, of course, camel's milk cheese. Nasty stuff - she had eaten it once before, at Volemak's house, when she was visiting him once between the two times they were married. "See how much I loved you?" he had teased her. "The whole time we were married, and I never made you taste this!" But she knew now that she'd need the protein and the fat - they'd be on lean rations through most of the journey, and they had to eat everything that had nutritional value. Taking a flat round bread, she tore off half, rewrapped the rest, and then stuffed the part she meant to eat with a few chunks from the cheese. The bread was dry and harsh enough to mask much of the taste of the cheese, so all in all it wasn't as nauseating a breakfast as it could have been. Welcome to the desert, Rasa.
She closed the lid and turned toward the door.
"Aaah!" she screeched, quite without meaning to. There in the doorway was a baboon on all fours, looking at her intently and