The Thorian Sagas. 2. Insurrection.

There was still almost an hour to dusk.

They settled themselves about half a mile out from the city wall and waited.

No matter what Monique said to Bradshaw to try and explain why they were returning empty-handed, there would be trouble.

She would ask Liam what they could do if Bradshaw took the extreme step of banishing them all from the city for their failure, though Bradshaw would make it look as though she were doing that to punish them for having gone out of the city, and risking all of their lives with that treaty.

There was no way they could win this one.

It would not have mattered whether they had gone out or not. Bradshaw had been determined to have someone’s head, except there would be twenty of them made to suffer for this. Bradshaw had been too judgmental over what she had seen, in the mood she had been in.

Liam was not responding.

No one was. That was unusual. There had almost always been a response when she had reached out before.

They broke out their rations and their water, and waited, speaking silently, overawed by the extensiveness of this desert wasteland now that they could see it in daylight, and by the majesty of everything they had seen, the farther out they had gone.

The shimmering outlines of the distant hills had been much better defined and more rugged, up close, than they had imagined from what they had seen of them from the city walls. These hills had once been the source of building materials, possibly for the city walls as well as for most of the structures within the city.

There were times of a morning and evening where more detail was visible, where one could see clearly for miles in the dry desert air, but mostly, the heat during the day distorted many things with distance.

There had been obvious, deeper cuttings taken into the rock cliffs from which immense quantities of materials had been removed eons before. It was the same rock used in many of the buildings in the city.

It did not seem likely that the Kelts, alone, could have managed such an undertaking; first quarrying that stone, shaping the large blocks that had become the city ramparts, moving them, or even undertaking all of the labor that had built up the city and laid out its agricultural grounds. However, they had done that, according to Stoker and Liam, both. They had also been the first agriculturalists, yet all of that history was lost in the depths of time.

Something had displaced the Kelts, causing them to leave the city that they had laid out and constructed, from what Liam had said.

Considering the relatively diminutive stature of the Kelts, they had built for a much larger race of people. Maybe even for the dark-skinned women in it now, almost as though they were building it for the present occupants.

That possibility defied understanding.

If Monique and her warriors came out again in daylight, for whatever reason, they would push farther out, maybe even climb those hills to see what lay beyond them. Surely there would be nothing wrong with doing that. They would then see what lay on the other side, between those nearer hills and the distant mountains, and how far away were those mountains, with their snow-capped peaks?

Already, they were being consumed by that age-old curiosity to explore farther and the desire to add to what they already knew; to see what was over that next hill; over that next river or stream, though they had never seen either of those kinds of water flows, outside of the books they had read.

They knew of the trees and the bushes bearing fruit in their own gardens, but they had never seen forests of endless trees, covering a landscape as large as the wastelands themselves. Nor had they seen grassy plains, or any of the larger animals that grazed them, and that provided the milk, the cheese, or the butter that was brought in from Saltash, along with the meat that they consumed. The supplies came in on that one day the Trader was in their city, but the milk had to be consumed within a day or two, or it soured, and then was used in cooking. Nothing was ever wasted.

As they sat and spoke in low voices waiting for dusk, exchanging memories and wondering; they could see distant, swirling pillars of sand, being sucked up into the dry air by those gentle zephyrs of evening that flitted across the desert’s surface, one after the other, in the fading heat of the day.

Others of them were moving closer, and they could feel the small sand particles stinging their faces, causing them to blink and to cover their mouths to breathe.

It would soon die down.

But it didn’t.

The other animals, and the insects that they had seen, were now no longer to be seen or heard. They had known what was approaching.

It became stronger around them as the breeze picked up, making it more difficult to breathe. Sand got into their eyes; their ears, and their mouths and hair.

Before they knew it, they were sitting in the middle of one of those Zephyrs, as the sand swirled around them with a roaring sound, continually becoming thicker and less comfortable, stinging them like a thousand stinging insects.

They huddled closer together for shelter as the swirling wall closed in upon them, dancing around them, buffeting them.

It was confusing and disorienting once their view of the city was obscured.

Liam’s words came back to Monique.

Wasn’t that what he’d said of Sand Serpents? They confused and disoriented you?

They were certainly doing that, as well as making life difficult in the midst of a swirling sandstorm.

Monique shouted, so that all could hear her.

“Keep those sticks at the ready. This must be caused by those Sand Serpents that Liam warned us about.

“If you sense anything that seems substantial in any way then lunge at it, touch it, but do not leave this group.”

They backed into a more tightly knit group, side by side and back to back, waiting, watching as far as they could; heads down, blinking to keep the sand out of their eyes and fighting to breathe, as the sand whipped closer around them, stinging them always harder.

More solid forms appeared then, as though they were being embraced, enfolded, and wrapped in the many tentacles of some mythical desert beast, ready to be devoured.

Monique kept telling herself and her friends, that Liam had said that Sand Serpents were mostly harmless and that they could be discouraged by a touch of those sticks.

They watched and waited as the walls of the twister grew closer around them, firming up to become more and more substantial.

“Now!”

They lunged, as one, extending out to touch the thicker, heavier parts of what was flying around them.