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see the clouds trailing sweeps of rain past the horizon.
    The camp sprang into motion, shaking her sharply out of her lethargy. In a riot of shouting and laughter the women brought all thirty tents of Stone Dancing Camp down in the middle of the day. Alldera stood aside with the cub slung warm against her back, and she watched Holdfaster Tent reduced swiftly to leather and rope, all stowed away in capacious saddle packs. The tent poles were hitched in bundles alongside the flanks of a brown horse, the butt ends trailing on the ground.
    Every tent was similarly transformed into a dozen laden pack ponies. Everywhere were horses, their noise, their smell, their bulky powerful bodies moving in the dust they raised. One round-bellied animal exploded twice out of the hands of its packer and was rapidly reloaded each time. Alldera was terrified of being trampled or kicked by a horse that she would not see until too late.
    She watched Shayeen, covered in dust, first tugging a cinch strap with both hands, then slugging the pony in the flank with her fist so that it gasped out its deeply held breath and the buckle on the cinch could be closed.
    To Alldera’s immense relief no one suggested putting her on top of a horse. She half lay, half sat on a sled of heavy leather slung between the tent poles out of reach of the brown horse’s heels. Cub in lap, she rode the jouncing progress of the pole-butts. The brown horse, urged on by Nenisi on a spotted mount, led a string of others from the emptying campground. Around Alldera groups of horses plodded in the charge of other mounted figures. She saw the childpack darting among them and heard the children’s shrieks of excitement.
    The whole crowd of mounted women and pack horses descended from the low ridge on which they had been camped. As they poured down onto the salt flat below, the group shook itself into a crowd of mixed riders and pack animals surrounded by a wide ring of scouts. Within this circle of outriders the childpack ranged freely.
    Alldera recalled something Nenisi had told her of another creature of the plains, one Alldera had not yet seen: a low running beast furred in all the colors of the plains. The women hunted these ‘sharu’ and wore their skins and ornaments made of their curved claws and teeth. The sharu ate anything, from grass and seeds to meat. That was why the childpack, which wandered at will all day, slept every night within the perimeter of the camp. She guessed that that was also why they ranged today inside the ring of scouts.
    This gave her a very secure feeling. She knew herself to be something of a child herself here, carried along while everyone else rode.
    Discomfited by the idea of Sheel seeing her in just that way, she asked where the rest of the family was. Nenisi pointed across the moving crowd at one of the scouts on the far side: ‘That’s Sheel.’ Then she waved in the direction of the long, low curtain of dust drifting ahead of them well to the left. ‘The others are helping to move the herds.
    ‘Pass our daughter up here to me – the air is fresher, and the sooner she gets the feel of a horse’s back the better.’
    Despite the miasma of heat and dust surrounding them the women talked and laughed as they traveled toward where they had seen the rain. Nenisi threw her head back once and sang part of a song about how when they got to the new campsite the grass would already be up.
    A pack horse up ahead got kicked by another and broke away squealing. The childpack swarmed after, getting in the way of the rider in charge of the pack string. The rider laughed and snapped her rein ends above their heads in mock threat.
    Alldera’s mouth tasted of earth; yet their exuberance was catching, and her heart beat fast. ‘Everyone’s in such good spirits,’ she said, wanting to show that she felt it too, but shy of intruding on a joy that she did not understand.
    ‘Of course,’ Nenisi answered, ‘the rain frees us from our wells, you see.