The smoke from the hearth trench didn’t rise straight into the dawn sky. It hung low over the white crust, caught in the morning inversion that trapped the fumes of burning tamarisk roots and dried camel-thorn against the salt pan.
Tomas stood beside the northern drainage ditch, sleeves rolled past his elbows, his leather apron buckled over his wool tunic. His hands were gray with wood ash and red with clay dug from the dry wash three feet down.
Beside him, Mistress Marda dropped an armload of dry thorn scrub into the fire trench. Her eyes were swollen with sleeplessness, the dark circles beneath them bruised from forty-eight hours in the sick marquee.
“Three more down since midnight,” Marda said, wiping her soot-stained knuckles on her apron. “Little Janna, Bran’s youngest boy, and old Mother Vane. All three vomiting yellow bile, their flanks knotted so tight you could crack an acorn on their lower ribs. If we give them another pint of that well water, Tax clerk, they will be cold before tomorrow’s bell.”
“They won’t drink from the pit,” Tomas said. He set a heavy cast-iron cooking pot onto the limestone hearth stones spanning the trench.
The cooking pot was a forty-gallon soap-boiler’s pot salvaged from an abandoned animal fat cart. Its black iron flanks were pitted by rust. But the bottom was sound—half an inch of solid metal capable of enduring direct flame.
