The afternoon drill moved from the heavy draft mules to the smaller, more unpredictable livestock of the caravan camp.
While forty-two people and twenty-eight mules represented the bulk of the caravan’s muscle, nine freight wagons on a long desert crossing carried an entire traveling ecosystem. In the wicker cages lashed beneath the wagon boxes lived sixty laying hens, four roosters, twelve geese, and half a dozen desert terriers and mastiff crosses kept by the drivers to guard cargo and hunt scorpions.
Kezra Venn stood beside the second wagon with Paxa Sel and Fellis Dain, inspecting the wicker chicken crates that Joric Thane had ordered unloaded onto the gravel.
“Small animals are the greatest danger to an exchange,” Kezra explained to the group of camp women who managed the poultry. “The class safeguard doesn’t care whether a creature weighs a thousand pounds or half a pound. If it’s larger than a man’s palm and possesses free living agency, its presence inside the boundary without a travel tag invalidates the sign-off.”
She reached down and picked up a brown hen from an open wicker basket. The bird squawked indignantly, flapping its wings and scattering grey feathers and dust across Kezra’s boots.
“If this hen hops out of its basket while the chime is sounding and pecks at a beetle inside the sixty-four-pace square,” Kezra said, holding the bird securely under her forearm, “the notebook refuses the terrain. The swap aborts, the boundary locks for three days. We sit in the heat for…
