A truffle is a lumpy, rounded tuber from the size of a walnut to a child’s fist, with a thin, smooth skin of pale buff to reddish brown, sandy where the soil clings to it. Cut, the flesh is firm, cream to pinkish, marbled with paler veins. It lies a hand or so below the surface, and as it swells it lifts the crust above it into a low mound with a star of cracks. It smells of damp earth and, faintly, of nuts.

It grows in the sandy and silty floors and lower slopes of the basins, joined to the roots of the small rock-roses and scrub that hold the ground, and it is found only where storm water has soaked in.

Its threads live in the ground with the scrub’s roots through the long dry, and a soaking rain wakes them; within a few weeks the truffles swell, and if they are not dug they rot or are taken by beasts, loosing their spores into the soil. Years without a good storm bring none.

They are eaten roasted in the ashes, boiled with milk, or sliced and dried for the dry months, and they are a welcome change in a diet of herd milk, meat, and stores. Gathering them is children’s work and a children’s game: who finds the most, who finds the largest. Herders let their beasts root for them on the outer slopes. They are harmless; the danger of the truffle grounds is the heat of the open floors and the snakes and scorpions that shelter in the same cracks.

Orc households say the storm plants them, that each truffle is a hailstone that did not melt, and children are told it to make them look. A family’s truffle grounds are as well known as its place in the camp rings, and a camp that takes another’s grounds after a storm has started a feud. The first truffles of a season are shared, never sold.