SWNOVELS Chapter Half-way between Golden, and Fenn.
Under cover of darkness, both sailing ships dropped anchor just out from the shore, and began to offload their cargoes of women and equipment into long boats.
They had been two weeks making a voyage that often took no more than two days, except they’d had to put into Weldon, and then into Sinden, to pick up more, armed passengers.
They’d been packed into close quarters below deck for far too long, thinking that their last minutes were coming at them. Each new wave lifted them high into the air; higher, higher, always higher, and then dropped them with a belly-lurching horror into the next trough. They instinctively moaned in unison, grabbing onto each other, or something solid; feeling themselves floating free, for a heart-wrenching second; wetting themselves involuntarily.
Sleep was out of the question. Food, or thought of it, was not something any of them could face.
As the crew changed shifts, they watched the drenched crew, now relieved, stagger down the steep ladder from the deck and tumble into the swinging hammocks that their shipmates had just left. They were asleep within seconds.
After a few days of that, they were resigned to dying; gave up, and managed to both eat and sleep.
Now, the voyage was ended.
Once on shore, they had to learn to walk again, pausing only briefly to give thanks and to kiss the ground, as others offloaded their equipment.
They would make camp, back from the shore in a sheltered place, catch up on sleep and make up for all of the meals they had missed.
The first thing they all noticed, was that they could see no trees. There was sand everywhere, but no trees.
They had been warned that once they walked away from the coast, they would face many miles of hot desert without a drop of water to drink. The nights would be unbearably cold, but they could light a fire for the first few nights.
Meg, and some of her crew had disembarked with them to help them settle.
Everything was strange to them, but that had been the story ever since they’d set out.
Fenn lay to the southeast of where they’d landed. Meg gave them a compass.
Two crew members would stay with them for a day or two, and let them know how to survive in the desert as the ships returned to sea. The ships would not be needed again.
These warriors would have to learn to live off the desert and learn what was edible; what, not; what was poisonous; how to build a thorn boma to keep the Frexes away.
’What was a ‘boma’? What was a Frex?’
They would soon find out, as they listened to the four-legged hunters around them, and the ever-present sounds of life and death that would keep them awake all night, or where a sudden scream in the night would wake them all up in a sweat of terror, wondering which one of their comrades had been picked off in the dark.
It wouldn’t matter much. The Kelts would keep an eye on them, but out of their sight, and make sure none of them came to harm as they traversed the desert and learned of its difficulties.
As Meg and her fellow sailors raised anchor and departed, she touched at her necklace again.
Liam was there. He usually was.
‘They’ve landed. It’s up to you now. They’re a soft bunch of landlubbers, so go easy on them. It was a rough voyage that beat the stuffing out of them. It might take them a week or more to rediscover their land legs and get to you, even if they don’t get lost, rather than the two or three days it should take.’
Liam hadn’t liked to hear that. He didn’t want to spend any longer than he had to, kicking his heels in the desert at this time of year waiting for them. He’d have to think of something else.