Avalon by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward [Ward, Blaze]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644702352
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

Five

A Fool’s Errand

Yasmin walked at the rear of the little column and kept watch around them, as much as she could from this shallow wadi where they moved in the intense, noonday heat. Old rocks lay half-submerged in dried mud, threatening to trip her every time she looked at the horizon as her grandfather led, stalking through the scrub and rock as he moved ever closer to a small valley largely hidden from sight.

Behrooz walked between them. Like both Yasmin and Ardashir, her grandfather, the young Kurdish man was armed with a pistol. Unlike them he was a mechanic.

Yasmin Shir-Del was a warrior.

Ardashir Shir-Del had once been a name that made nations quake with fear, even if forty or more years had passed since then and the word had mostly died.

Oils Wars. Water Wars. Green Wars.

Persia today was a memory kept alive largely by men Ardashir’s age. Those who could remember a time before the satans of the west and their Sunni/Sa’udi allies had brought death and destruction with their final invasion. Much had she learned in the last few days.

Even the land had staggered, hammered by the onslaught of too much heat, too little water, and nuclear weapons soft enough to destroy cities but not large enough to kill everyone.

The group had left Ibn Rustah, the all-terrain greenhouse, a little more than a kilometer behind them, back behind another fold of land that would obscure it. As much as you could hide a former warmachine that was ninety meters long, thirty-five wide, and ten tall, plus the addition of clear plastic domes to turn the top deck into a hothouse for growing all manner of fruits and vegetables. And a few roses to keep the bees happy.

Ardashir raised a hand as he approached a gap in the dry riverbed they had been following.

Had this been a lake at one time? Dried up now when all the rivers started to fail? The terrain under her feet made more sense that way, given thirty or sixty years since water had flowed here daily.

Yasmin turned to one side and watched the area behind them, on the off-chance some fool had decided to stalk the most dangerous game they might ever see on this desert floor.

Nothing. Not even birds, although there were a pair of vultures that had flown in the vicinity of Ibn Rustah for the last two days. Yasmin wondered if they were looking for rabbits and small game flushed from cover by the immense machine crushing rocks and carving a new roadway through the empty Persian highlands.

“I was right in my estimation,” Ardashir called back to her quietly. “This was a supply base or outpost at some point, but my eyes are not sufficient today to tell you what it is that lies before us now.”

Yasmin nodded and slipped by Behrooz, always careful not to touch the man.

She was seventeen. He was twenty-six. Neither were wed, or even promised. Their only chaperon was a seventy-three year old former warrior who planned military campaigns measured in generations, she had come to understand.

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