There is beauty to a desert sunrise, one that belies the brutal day to come, but still makes it something to enjoy. The clouds, usually high feathery ones, tend to glow orange or gold as the sun begins his daily voyage, after his underworld passing the legends tell of. Then the light blooms across the landscape, turning the nighttime grays to gold or shadowy black. Sandstones blaze their redness like torches as the buttes to our west caught the sun before the ground below them. And the dust raised by the various folks using the coolest part of the day to travel the Sands were like silver bushes on the horizon around me. Shiny silver to the west and south, blue to the north and east.
I took a deep breath, having rode hard for three days across the Riparian Neck, which is a tongue of the desert that extends east between the rivers of the land. It was north we sought, as we left Radixium further behind us with every turning of the horas. This long neck of sands and desert between the rivers was not as deadly as the rest of the desert we would face later, but still worse than the gentle lands near the Amnis Radix along the foot of the Last Mountains. We had rode east, not out of need, the faster path was due north, along the edge of the eastern most of the Grey Mesas. But one had paid a price I had avoided in my fight in the city of the foothills.
Quintas Marinius Varamadis, a distant cousin from these lands, had met my foe before the duel. Despite knowing the fate he would face, he had confronted the assassin. Marinius job with us here was as the local Castrorum Preafectus, the one charged with ensuring the supplies to the outposts and one of only five animas trusted with delivering payrolls to our posts every third hebdoma. So I had one last job as a Custos, one I had been trusted with several times before of late, due to my record of service. One I did more for a lost relative than duty, and to aid out my former colleagues, then from allegiance to the Custos.
So we had ridden the river's valley for two days, before turning north again up the Valles Favillae, the long brush filled series of draws as the land climbed up to the small volcano in the center of the Callix. We were halfway up it, the point where the dense briers gave way to scattered cactus and sage, with some scrub oak and other trees. At least it was not a place loaded with fire grass, which I would have hated. Not to mention having to dig into the supplies I had for the desert crossing to come yet. We had at least six or seven leagues of sand, depending upon the winds and recent eruptions of the volcano, to ride over. And those would be hard milles to make in one day.
But for now the worst of it all was the four extra pack animals. Marinius had no skill at choosing animals, and these four tried my patience at every stop or turn of the draws. Skittish, mean tempered, and if Pater thought Turbator kicked too often, he should try to shoe these beasts. Not that shoes were needed on a vartengi. Their clawed feet had thick pads of tough scaled leather. Claws that Marinius never had covered with blunt sheaths, but at least we had muzzles so they could not bite us.
Yes, us. Didius Lorcius was with me, as he had promised. Thankfully. These beasts were more than I could handle, for my doni was not of calming animals. Barely pack broken and every night they looked over my onagers with hungry eyes, ready to leap into their dinner, or chase it down. While the pack beast was one they scared, Turbator just gave them the look only a stallion of his kind can. The one that says "I can out run you, and come back and kick you into a pulp". When we had mounted up before first light, the Triari kept me from letting Turbator have his go at all four at once, and help me fix my left boot as we rode. One of the vargenti had stepped on it and tore the outer leathers to shreds. As well as the linings, and my socks.
Luckily I had a concoction from a alchemist in Vepresium, who had noted the beasts. It was a reddish liquid he said prevented wounds from becoming gangrenous. It smelled awful and hurt like the fires of hell, so I was fairly sure it was real medicine for a change, not some snake-oil unguent. Then again, some said snakes were put on the world to aid in cures and healing. People that believe that way should be tossed into a pit of snakes, and see how they feel afterwards. I admit to using the oil, venoms and even shed skins in the field to preserve a life, but not to the point of worshiping the legless lizards.
As we rode, I noted that despite my own skills at leather working, developed by trial and error over my decadi here doing my own repairs, Didius was better. The touch of the Lorcius was swift and deft. Fine little stitches of his repair, almost perfect as new, gave the boots a new life beyond the next town. Pulling them on, I barely noted any tightness. It made me wonder where the Triari had learned such a skill, or if my own fumbling would improve with age as his must have.
This left me worried again about why he was with me. He had not again brought up the subject, but I knew he felt that the call of the gods was upon me to return to Jai’ and serve them in the temples. Not just any temple, he had mentioned the imperial ones, up above the desert, further north from my home ranges. Jugosium was a place I had gone to only by need, carrying messages, taking my oath. The city of hills and broken dreams, some called it, others called it the fog bound island town it once had been.
Regardless, it was not my intention. The Desert and the Plains were for me, not an island on an inland sea of fresh water. Folks on islands eat more fish than I care to taste. What can I say, not all folks like all foods. To each is a taste that is unique to them when it comes to foods. I knew my family would have horrors at my love of dwarven pastries. But the Pumillo's made such wonderful ones. That more than anything else I would miss during the journey. The ovens and special cookers for making such could not be transported easily, nor used very much in a desert with little fuel, save that which could rage into a wildfire around one in the space of a sneeze.
Two days of struggling up draw, the ground began to shake from time to time, with sounds accompanying the motions I knew too well from some anni spent upon the patrols of the edge of the Rima Magna, that great cliff that was the boundary between my home plains and this desert far to the north. Cracks and booms of rocks breaking. The beasts were jittery, I was worried. Even Didius seemed to have lines of concern around his eyes, but that could just have been the fumes that were filling the draw.
The winds came from the west most of the time in the desert, but this was a rare calm spell, when the air had only faint and erratic motion in it. That could just be from being below the vast flats of the desert as we climbed into its realm, or something more dangerous. One thing I knew for sure, this draw would fill with the fumes of the volcano, for that smoke did not just rise, but more often sunk into low places around the portals to the Realms of Fire and Lava. Fumes that formed clouds and fogs known to kill entire civilizations in the past. We needed to be up on the hard-pan of the desert, where we could move as needed to avoid the rage of the volcano. If the gods allowed it.
East and West there were draws, Didius was too busy keeping the vargenti under control to speak, so I would have to make the decision. East lay the Head of the Sands, the Callix, a dangerous area of shifting dunes, known to be filled with dangers. To the west was hard-pan of the Shallow Sand Arm, a place where only a few dunes and little sand accumulated, reaching to Amnis Radix to the south in a narrow plain between this valley and the Campi Fornax used by the desperate herders when they dared the fire-grass to feed their beasts. It widened as it met the Neck, but the Arm was my best choice. In this season the winds most commonly blew west to east, so passing west of the Favilus Vulcan was the safest.
Unless I was wrong. Much depended upon my choice, but I made it.
"Sinistra, Triari! We have to get out of here." I shouted, but it was already too late.
A cloud of hot ash rushed around the bend above us, telling me we were statistics, as my cousin and companion of my youth Norbanus would say. That was a tomb maker coming towards us. I had helped dig out hamlets and caravans from a hot ash avalanche before, it was not survivable, nor was it pretty in its aftermath. Such a blast could be confined to the draw we were in, or spread across the whole of the area if the mountain was viscious. I could ask the gods, or my donum of foresight, but these were things I was not eager to try. The gods were fickle, and my doni were untrained.
The vargenti needed no encouragement to leave the draw, just herding to keep them from spreading out into every gulley out of the place. Lorcius raced by me, disappearing into the first stinging wall of the ash-flow. Driving the lizards and back beasts before us, Turbator and I entered it next. Thankfully this was a light one, but a darkness to the north and east boded ill for the next part, as the eruption continued. Inside the ash fog I was reminded of the great wildfire my cousins and I had caused in our younger days. Cinders burned into my flesh, the tang of iron was in the air, which was not a good thing. There were many villages of my folk nearby who could die if exposed, or suffer long illnesses. Turbator hated dust storms, and was trying to race ahead of the others, which I could not do, lest the pack beasts turn back down the washout. As we rose up the gully to its head wall, luckily one all the beasts could leap up. There I yelled into to air, driving the beasts west from the lower ground we had left.
It was a good choice, as the wind rose at last. Or so I thought as we broke out of the cloud. Only to find that Didius was not stopping, but urging the beasts further towards the west, looking back in fear every few beats of a heart. Looking towards Favillus, I knew my own fear. We had been lucky, already the earth shook more, as a pillar of fire, ash, and ruined mountain climbed into the sky. This was not a small blast, and already i could see the outer edges of the column of destruction falling back to the ground around whatever would be left of Favillus.
The distant buttes to our west and north marked the cliff above the Campi Fornax were suddenly very inviting, I just hoped that the devastation did not reach Statiheranae and the rest of the hamlets scattered around the Callix and the few safe havens within it. We would have to detour north and mak a longer crossing than I had hoped. But the Desert never co-operated with the plans of any save the gods, and some say it fought even them.
Turbator bunched under me, then showed his strides
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