Avalon, p.1
Avalon, page 1
Avalon
Yasmin of the Desert: Book 1
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
1. The War Machine
2. A Young Girl’s Dreams
3. Traveler
4. Ruins
5. A Fool’s Errand
6. A King’s Blade
7. Lady of the Lake
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
To Dominic, for the inspiration
One
The War Machine
She hustled him up the last few steps, holding one ancient, wrinkled hand in her own, even though Yasmin knew that her grandfather could still see well enough to climb the hot stones. Her longrifle she carried easily in her other hand, used to its weight when she climbed.
Yasmin hoped that the stranger, possibly an invader, had not moved far from where she had seen it before.
Grandfather Ardashir claimed to have been the get of a mountain goat more than once, so stone steps like this were nothing, especially as Yasmin had taken him along the safer path, and not the one her seventeen-year-old legs used daily to race to the top of the watch rock.
“Patience, child,” Ardashir growled at her as she tugged at him again. “You said they moved slower than this old man.”
“But the afternoon sun will fade soon, grandfather,” she replied impatiently. “And I do not know what deviltry they will get up to after dark.”
That spurred his heels, as she knew it would. The true devils came out at night, after the tremendous heat of the desert day had faded.
It was frequently unsafe to be above ground during the daytime hours, but that was the sun baking the endless desert to fifty-five degrees, like today. Yasmin had found a shaded spot on the north face of a large stone and used it to watch out over the desert wastes when her chores were done. It was here she dreamed.
Even ancient Ardashir did not believe that raiders would return, but he humored her parents by reminding them occasionally that her eyes were better than anyone else in the keep when she thought she saw something.
Usually, that was wild game that could be hunted, but today it had been something far more frightening.
Finally, she got to the top of the bluff. Found her nook unmolested save by the winds that whistled as the heat drove the atmosphere back and forth over the hills and rocks like a tide. Her left-behind tea mug was warm, but she had emptied it earlier when it was still cold from the icehouse at the bottom of the keep.
“Show me,” Grandfather declared as they came onto what Yasmin thought of as her watch platform.
Yasmin rested the longrifle to one side, making sure again that the safety was set. It was not loaded, but Ardashir himself had taught her to respect this weapon, itself a relic of the wars that Ardashir had seen as a child barely older than she was today.
She picked up the ancient binoculars and checked the thing moving in the desert once again. Electronics had died in the war, killed by the invisible djinn summoned by nuclear weapons. The Electromagnetic Pulse that had even reached deep underground and killed most of modern society.
Back when the world had been more than this mountain keep and the few trade routes and brave merchants that survived.
There. She had never seen such a thing in her life, but Grandfather had described it in his horror stories of the fall of the world.
A War Machine.
Ninety meters long. Thirty-five meters wide. Ten meters tall to the hull, with a head atop that that contained a great weapon in a turret.
“There,” she pointed with one bony arm as she placed the binoculars in his hands.
Ardashir muttered to himself as he adjusted the lenses.
“It comes from the west,” he observed with surprise. “I had thought the many Satans of the West destroyed in the great wars.”
Yasmin recited the histories in her head as Ardashir continued to study the distant object.
The many conflicts for the magical petroleum under the desert sands, wars that only ended when mankind found another source of power and no longer needed oil.
The coming of the Sunmasters with their fusion reactors, like the one deep beneath her feet. It powered the village hidden inside the mountain, once known to the outside world by the nearby village Aynalo, and kept them all safe and warm and almost civilized.
But men were evil and fought for other things after oil. Water became more important as the world grew hotter and dryer. The Water Wars broke even countries down as each sought enough to drink and grow their crops.
Then Green things became less able to survive the rising heat, so the farmers had to seek cooler climes, generally moving north.
The people that already lived in those places objected. So the Green Wars had destroyed most of the rest.
Only quiet, lonely holdings like Aynalo remained of what had been a mighty kingdom once. A mighty world.
And now a war machine approached.
“My eyes see the beast,” Ardashir proclaimed. “But they have grown dim with the decades. I cannot tell.”
He thrust the binoculars into her hands.
“Describe to me what you see below,” he ordered her.
Yasmin took a deep gulp and brought the lenses to her eyes, shifting things until it all came back into focus.
That desert-colored hide meant to hide against rocks. Four mighty treads underneath to bear the weight, where Grandfather had said that once only two were necessary on the smaller vehicles. Four small turrets at the corners like a moving castle. Four more sticking out of the sides that he had called sponsons. The great turret atop the head.
She described the damage the beast had seen. Blast marks on the sides that appeared to have been welded over with plate a different color. The strange clear domes over the top of the hull, connected by glass tunnels. The way the top of the turret appeared not as smooth hillock of stone, but a metal lattice.
“Your eyes see truth, granddaughter,” Ardashir said after she spoke. “That is not one of the great destroyers of my youth. Or it was and has become something else now.”
“What is it, then?” she asked, stunned to stillness that something moved across the desert, even if a man walking might be faster, so slowly had it traversed the valley below her.
“That, we must seek,” he said with a grim smile. “I fear the wars might have returned.”
Night had fallen. Yasmin had added a heavy cloak over the robes and hijab she normally wore outside when she sought quiet and peace in her watch post, sitting in the shade away from the sun. The temperature would plummet soon, now that the sun was down.
Grandfather had spoken to the other tribal elders, but she had not been allowed in to witness. The yelling and anger had still been audible through a closed door.
No others accompanied the two of them outside, although she wondered at the wisdom of that. Grandfather was very old, and she still thought of herself as a child, even at seventeen. Still, the two of them moved through the rocks and loose, stone scree in a silence that surprised her. Granted, Grandfather had taught her how to stalk the various goats and wild creatures that they shot occasionally for game to supplement the vegetables and livestock kept below inside. She had killed several beasts in the last few years.
But still…
Yasmin had a new appreciation of the stories of Ardashir as a great desert warrior in his youth, helping to found and protect the underground fortress at Aynalo even as the wars still raged on the surface. Certainly, he knew many secrets, one of which she had learned tonight as they exited the underground fortress via a hidden gate she had never known existed.
Night. A biting chill wind came out of the north, as they did so frequently, cutting any exposed skin worse than sand. Yasmin pulled her gloves tighter and her hijab close as they crept down the side of the mountain from where they had emerged.
Grandfather had also taught her a sign language used by hunters to stalk prey with good ears. He used it now to direct her.
Trail below, moving right, he signed as she followed the obvious place where the war machine had churned the ground.
Yasmin refrained from retorting with an eyeroll sign. He was following the lessons that had been hammered into him fifty years ago. The ones that had kept him alive when he was not much older than Yasmin was today.
Cut corners bleed you, he liked to say about the importance of patience.
Nobody had seen a war machine in decades. And yet, the two of them stalked the mighty, elusive beast by the light of the moon that would set in another two hours.
Yasmin heard nothing but the wind. At least it was just hissing at her, and not screaming in anger like it did on the harsher nights.
The smells of the desert were different, tonight. The tan beast was upwind of them, as you should always hunt. She smelled things she associated with technology: the gunky smell of lubricants churning, the ozone smell of electrical batteries and generators putting out their power.
For a moment, she even dreamed she smelled water, but that was silly. The Caspian had dried up decades ago, according to Grandfather. Only the salty oceans remained, but they were marching inland every year in their anger at what mankind had done to his world.
Sometimes, Yasmin dreamed of waking on the shore of a new ocean. Building herself a sailboat that would take her to the fabled, forgotten lands, like New Zealand. If it had survived the collapse that had destroyed so much.
Tonight there was only sand and stone in which to hide.
And a wa r machine to stalk.
Hold, Grandfather signed.
Yasmin had not chambered a round in her rifle before they moved. If the war machine detected them, it had armor that would laugh off her puny 8mm. The one that had bruised her shoulder until she learned to become one with the weapon when she fired.
Again, she imagined she smelled the same wetness that she found when she went down to the well room to draw fresh water. Aynalo had some pipes, but those were for the kitchens and bathrooms. And while men and women worked every day to drill the mountain for more space in which to live, the young still carried buckets to the top of the mountain for their familial cisterns.
But the wind carried the sea to her. And dreams of sailboats.
Yasmin looked at the ground near her feet. Great, regular divots had been pressed into the sand, only slowly fading as the winds fought to erase them. Loose stones had been crushed under immense weight.
She had walked this broad valley before, so her mind registered that a new hill had taken up residence. That was the measure in her mind of how huge the war machine was, watching it lurk in the darkness like a mighty elephant asleep.
We approach, Ardashir informed her.
Somehow, the ancient elder was no longer her grandfather, but a mighty war leader taking her into the desert on of the great raids he had once been famous for. Places like Armenia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Lebanon, Syria, or even the greatest satan of all: Israel.
Ardashir made even less sound than her silence as he moved, if that was possible. Just another djinn dancing on the winds, while she had to carefully place each foot to keep the noise damped.
Another sound intruded, carried to her by the same wind that promised New Zealand. It hummed, deep and earthy, pulsing regularly.
Yasmin knelt and placed a hand flat against the ground. Yes, it was in the soil, coming through her boots. The stones themselves hummed with the power. Her mind triangulated it on the war machine, so the great satan was doing something fell in the night.
Just as she had warned Grandfather, before he had turned into Ardashir of the Desert.
She followed in his wake, up the trail the war machine had crushed into the valley floor.
Moonlight reflected off glass now. The mighty turret sat forward on those immense shoulders, with a deck large enough to play basketball behind that. All of it appeared to be covered over with glass, in hemidomes and corridors protecting what looked like two ruined smaller turrets.
The sponson on the right side had been destroyed by the same shot that had probably killed the beast originally, plated over more recently with steel a different shade than the rest.
Ardashir slipped into the beast’s trail and lifted his pistol. He had refused a rifle when offered, claiming with some merit that he could no longer shoot at great distances, but nobody doubted how dangerous the old man was in close.
Yasmin followed, until they were close enough that she could see the lighter spots underneath, between the treads, where she might walk between two of them if she ducked down some. She doubted that the weapons could reach her here, unless someone came outside.
But she had seen no evidence of a crew guarding the beast. Nobody outside challenging them as they stalked. Or even watching during the day as the beast had slowly lumbered across the desert stone like the world’s most impressive land snail.
Ardashir turned to her with a hard smile.
You climb silently, his hands said.
Yasmin gulped and nodded, moving to sling the rifle over her shoulder. Ardashir has taken them to a place at the rear of the beast where a ladder had been worked into the hull of the machine, folding down on a hinge to a level where even a teenage girl or a seventy-year-old man could ascend.
He signed for her to move. Yasmin guessed that the old man was hoping a soldier encountering a girl would hesitate before shooting. Ardashir had told stories about such lethal mistakes others had made in a war ended decades ago.
Climbing with buckets of water to her parents’ apartment had given her muscles other girls lacked. Getting to her watch stone for solitude when she finished her chores had given her silence.
Yasmin reached a thin arm up and caught the place where the ladder latched upright. She pushed it up, tense lest it make a noise, and careful that it didn’t slip out of her hands and bang against the hull, warning someone inside to look around.
The metal needed to be oiled, but the squeak was hardly enough to wake her parents’ cat from a nap. Yasmin pulled the ladder down and pulled herself up to the first step.
Ardashir had disappeared, but she was not surprised. Better a defender only take one of them before dying. More lessons from the wars.
She climbed, feeling how warm the metal of the bulk was under her hand. The Sunmasters generated fusion heat, which needed to be vented somehow. At Aynalo, that kept the internal air warm during the night hours, and was vented straight into the sky during the day.
Did the war machine run it through the skin? Was it like a dragon at rest, lit by internal fires until it breathed death? Or had the makers forged a hull so thick that it held the day’s heat until morning.
Hopefully, the truth could be known.
It was a short climb that felt like forever under her hands, straining to be perfectly silent in thought and motion. Yasmin peeked over the top and witnessed the platform where she dreamed of basketball.
Something interrupted her night, so she reached out a tentative, gloved hand. Glass, perhaps. Transparent and rigid.
She dared not tap it, unsure who might listen, so she ran her gloved hand across it instead. Smooth. It conveyed a sense of immense solidity under her fingers. Warm, though not so much as the steel below.
Yasmin studied the wall and saw the outlines of a door, with a simple handle in it.
Glass door, unlocked, she signed into the darkness below her, balanced precariously by holding the ladder with her shins.
She did not know where Ardashir lurked, but she knew in her soul that he could read her hands.
Yasmin dared not open the door yet, so she looked inside as well as she could. The top surface of the war machine was not the smooth elegance she had expected, but lumpy and dark in strange, random ways that the shadows hid inside the glass shell over it all.
A tap on her leg and the faintest tug. Ardashir suddenly on the ladder below, telling her to withdraw and approach from another direction. Yasmin climbed back down the ladder and found the elder underneath, squatting between two of the treads in utter darkness.
A mouth at her ear.
“Stalk forward walking underneath the machine,” he breathed at her. “I will follow.”
Point on a dangerous patrol. She nodded and immediately moved forward, unslinging the rifle to use as a club if necessary.
The vertical gap here was a meter and three-quarters on average. Yasmin found she could tilt her head and walk with care, one hand overhead brushing along the warm steel to guide her, the other holding her rifle so it didn’t bang.
The humming grew louder as she moved. More insistent. Hotter, even, even though that made no sense.
The great beast seemed to on forever as she walked. Heat and noise descended from the hull above her, transmitted even through her gloves.
The noise escalated slowly as she approached. She had chosen the right-hand-most of the three gaps under the hull, but sensed that whatever she sought was centered, so she allowed herself to drift further out, improving her angle of vision.
Someone had erected a monument in front of the war machine as she got close. That was how her brain interpreted it. The humming had turned into a dull roar now, a rhythmic pulsing that came to her through her feet when she stopped moving and tried to make sense of the thing she saw.
There was none, but she was not surprised. Yasmin had lived her entire life inside Aynalo in the aftermath of the wars that had destroyed most of the world. She had the stories of her grandfather from his youth, but even her parents had only seen the destruction, and not the magical times that preceded it.
