//------------------------------// // Chapter 3 : You Missed! Or did you? // Story: Welcome to Equestria! The second part of the Origin of the Rom. // by De Writer //------------------------------// His hoof passed through my head like it was air. With his weight in the strike, he overbalanced and fell splat on his face in the mud. Again. I hopped onto his neck to hold him down. “You missed, Ground Nest. Good thing too. Hitting an old donkey that hard could have killed him. Not even you rurals can overlook cold-blooded murder. Especially not with so many witnesses, including your work supervisor, Sunbreak.” “I did not miss!” Suddenly what he said penetrated into his otherwise empty skull. “You didn’t dodge! You ain’t there!” He tried to get up. My weight prevented him from rising but he raised his rear enough for Nore to buck him between the hind legs. Hard. Suddenly I did not need to hold him down any longer. He was curled around the pain in his private parts. I noticed that Rom was conferencing with Sunbreak. I overheard, “He says it was just a nap.” She came back over to us. Unsympathetically she directed, “Get up. You are going to go with the next damage survey team. If you try to leave or disobey any order at all, you will placed under arrest or have criminal wanted bulletins formally posted over all of Equestria. You are going to see, first hoof, what you and your stupid buddies did.” They left, Ground Nest flying a bit unsteadily. Rom quietly told me, “We are now packing for our move to the next place, Marchhare. I hope that you do not mind too much, but I did tell your friend Sunbreak about your nap.” “I am aware of it, my friend. Let us get things together. We should be able to get about half way there before darkness falls.” The way was not too bad. The real damage from the flood was going to be further down. The awestruck horses of Rom’s band camped among the roots of some of Equestria’s oldest and biggest trees. I was not even surprised at what they did. First, they scouted the area for anything that might be useful in some way. Then they set up the cooking gear and turned out a truly terrific feed from what they brought and found. And they danced. They got out their instruments, hoofed me a set of their drums and began. The ancient trees echoed the sweet wail of their music as the dances and songs began. Nore led off with a solo dance, while the others both played and began a chanted narration. It was soon to become a favorite dance for me. Shehan Ja Rom. The Salvation of the Rom. It ended to the sound of trills whose echoes chased each other about the giant trees. Fire light glowed and flashed off the brilliantly dyed fabrics of the sashes of the dancing mares and stallions. Sando and Rom took their turns. Nore dragged me out to make a fool of myself in front of the rest. It was fun, too! Even if I am a tangle hoof of a dancer. The next day, as Nore and I scouted the way ahead for the wagons, we began to find some early signs of the massive rainfall. Wide eyed, Nore pointed incredulously. “How could such a thing fall? That branch is the size a tree!” I observed, “A tree from Gyptia, yes. Here? A biggish branch. See the scar up there on that trunk? That is where it came from.” She stared. Her jaw dropped almost as far as that branch had! We got the whole caravan through to the meadow without incident. The spring there, which was normally quiet and small, was roaring up in a steady gush about two feet high. At least the water was clean. The creek that it fed was pretty foul down about a quarter mile more. While the rest set up camp to await Sunbreak’s return, Nore and I continued to clear the way that we knew would be needed. The brush and tree lined banks were washed away. Boulders, some quite large, were sitting up in the stream and on exposed rock that had been covered by proper stream banks. Sand and gravel was built up on the downstream sides of many of them. Many trees that had not been washed away were down, roots ripped from the saturated earth. Far more were leaning at dangerous and crazy angles. Few were left standing straight and tall. It looked like some wondrous castle after being looted by barbarians. Not a bad analogy, come to think. Nore saw my sad survey of the ruined forest and let me think for quite some time. At last, as she assisted with the removal of yet another trunk in the way of the wagons that would follow us, she said softly, “I am so sorry. This must have been amazingly beautiful when you came up over the pass to save us. It is still a wonder to me but it had to be far more amazing then.” “It was. I did not pay it proper attention when I came through. I wish that I had. Sometimes you have to lose something to really appreciate what it was that you had.” I stopped. Blinked a few times, then said, “Dear, I came this way planning to sell food to the Godolphin’s Court in Gyptia.” Nore booped me gently on the old schnozzle. “That may have been your plan but you changed it. I am young, not stupid. When you found us in the desert, you were two days away from your earlier and successful route. Something or somehorse guided you to us. Some wonderful thing. “I noticed it at once when we rejoined your old track. That was when your uncertainty vanished. We made far better time because you were returning by a way that you knew.” We did not stop working while Nore told me how very poorly I had deceived her. It was a relief, in a way. There was less to hide from my very perceptive wife. Together we heaved another tangled mass of broken branches and destroyed brush out of the way. Getting the wagons through here was going to be a nightmare but one that we could manage. It was an utter shock when we came to the end of the trees. The overly sodden soil had collapsed in a huge pair of landslides, one on each side of the canyon. Nore stared in disbelief. “The land fell. That I grasp, sort of.” She whimpered as she went on, “The water took it all but the largest stones, I think. Is that really what happened? I do not see any of the big trees left. Did trees so huge really get washed away, just like that?” I sympathized, “Yes, Dear, that is exactly what happened.” I sort of curled in on myself around the hurt that I felt. Unlike Nore, I remembered the cathedral like forest. The tremendous amount and variety of life. I knew what was lost. In her practical way, Nore observed, “At least we have gravel in plenty to level the worst spots. See it there in big sort of wedges behind the boulders?” “Yes, my dear, I do see it. Good thinking there. This bedrock is not terribly smooth. We can make the way easier when the time comes to move on.” We took the time to try her idea on a few of the worst hollows in the exposed rock. As we began to shift the gravel, I noticed something. Glints of yellow. Small nuggets of it. I showed one to Nore, who as a young slave, had never seen raw gold. She was intrigued. She was also observant. “I see more, Marchhare, my husband. Some of it is very tiny. How can we gather such small bits of the gold?” “I know of some arts for that, Nore, my dear. We need to go back to the camp. We will need to make a few things, fortunately, we do have the means to do so.” Going back up the way that we had scouted and cleared, we found a few more minor problem spots. While pausing to fix one of them, Nore observed, “You do not seem to be in much of a hurry. What about the gold?” I shrugged, “It is not too likely that others will happen on to it. They are more concerned with all of the downstream damage, out in the farm lands. If we seem in a rush or concerned about it, we could draw the very attention that we want to avoid.” Working together to lift another small trunk out of the way, to give the wagons of the caravan an easier route, Nore nodded. “I see it now. It would be easy to draw the attention of the surveying crews and lose all, the same way that we lost the wells back in Gyptia.” Soon we were back to the camp. Some of the horses were happily immersed in the bog, rooting out iron rich root nodules. Phapa was directing the proper laying of a charcoal burn to get a good quality charcoal out of it. It was the same hive of happy activity that I had come to expect of them. Rom looked up from stacking wood chunks under Phapa’s direction and observed with a sideways smile, “You are back sooner than we expected. Is something wrong? More specifically, worse than we expected?” I looked to Nore and nodded. She explained, “We were shifting some gravel to fill low spots in the flood bared rock. The gravel we used came from the downstream sides of large boulders that the flood left behind. There was more than just gravel. We found some gold mixed with the sand and gravel behind at least some of the boulders.” I observed, “The damage surveys for this area are already done. We have several days before we can expect to hear from Sunbreak. We need to make up some simple devices to get as much of the gold as we can before they return. “We need some dishes of wood or the like, with roughened bottoms. As we swirl sand and such with water, the gold, being heavy, will stay behind. Another device is a long box with riffles along the bottom that will catch the gold as water washes the sand and gravel away.” Malit, dripping mud from her marsh wading, trotted up, while we were talking and she nodded, “If you guide my work, I can make the box and sand washing dishes.” She frowned only a little as she stared up at the empty sky, “We need things that we can hide or explain easily, if the pegassi return unexpectedly.” I had to agree. “Well thought of, Malit. We will put our tailings, as they call the cleaned rock and sand, into the bad spots in the way that we are preparing. We will say that Princess Luna’s Manual of Road Building and Maintenance says to use washed gravel. That is true, by the way.” It took Malit and Maina several hours to get things made as well as I knew how to make them. It was actually three days before Sunbreak and some of the weather hydrology survey team did return. A much subdued Ground Nest accompanied them. His tears had run out long ago. Not his guilt. Shuddering, he told me, “T'wan’t supposed to go like that. We thought it was just a prank. “Only meant for a tiny bit to dampen your camp. We thought that vortex thingy would just stop when we let it go. 'Stead, it grew huge. It drained and ruined the whole delivery of a year’s water into just these few canyons. “It filed the Red Branch dam before it was ready. When the Red Branch dam went, the flood, I never even dreamed of anything so bad. When it come downstream it overtopped the low notch in Morton’s Hills. It come across the hills twenty feet deep and washed away my daddy’s whole farm. The big barn and everything in it gone entire. “Our farm house is over half gone. My brother was home and he still missing. Gray Feather was only just past fluttering. We still looking for him but his room at the stair top is gone…” He broke down and dry sobbed. Sunbreak shook her head. “His bravado and 'someone else’s fault’ foolishness broke when he saw what was left of his home. His dad’s orchards are basically gone. Maybe ten or fifteen percent of the trees can be saved. All of the fields are a total loss. They either washed away or got covered by a ghastly mix of mud, washed out branches, trunks and brush.” I sort of shuddered. “Hawkward had twenty years of his life in the building up of Morton Swale Farm. What is he going to do now?” Shaking her yellow mane, Sunbreak said, “He has not thought so far. He is still in shock.” Nore bluntly asked me, “Can the friend or whatever guided you to us in the desert, find the missing foal? Ground Nest here may deserve all that happens to him for this mess, but no foal, even his brother, deserves to die if he still lives.” Quietly I looked about and down at my hooves. “Not sure that I can, Nore. The one that you want me to get in touch with is called the Exile. I know him, yes. Sometimes he leaves me notes. Sometimes I leave him notes. Doesn’t always work. I can try, I guess.” “I will need some of your paper, ink and a brush to write with. We will leave the note inside our caravan. If we are fortunate, the Exile, De Writer, will answer it.” That quickly, I had brush, inkstone, and paper. I wrote: “De Writer, my friend, I have a problem that I want your help with. The young pegasus, Gray Feather, from Morton’s Swale Farm has gone missing since the Red Branch flood. Can you please give us any assistance in finding him, alive, if he still is, or his body if he is not. Signed, Marchhare.” We put the note, brush and ink into my wagon, my caravan, as the others insisted on calling both the group of wagons and the single wagons in the group. “All that we can do now, my friends, is wait. When he finds the note, De Writer will knock on the inside of the door. He will be gone before we can open it or see him.” I walked off a short way and sat in some nice shade. Even with over a thousand years of practice, dopelganging is trickier than I like. De Writer (that is really me, Marchhare is a disguise) is forever trapped in the absolute instant of the present. That is a moving mathematical point. What others see and react to is but a shadow cast on time. I can be Anywhere that the absolute instant of the present exists. Instantly. I can spend a tiny fraction of a second here, then there. Each one is actually a single point. To any observer, if the time spent between the two places is short enough, it appears that there are TWO of me. An illusion. But at times a truly useful one. Like now. Inside the caravan I produced the Orb of the Ages from its hiding place in time itself. It can see only the past but it can be really near past if needed. This was easy. Days past. Muttering, “The Future is Forbidden,” to activate the Orb, I homed in on Morton’s Swale Farmhouse, just before the flood hit. Gray Feather saw it coming, wrecking the barn. He fled in terror. Not far, though. He managed to flutter high enough to reach the attic at the end of the ruined house that was still standing. He was too frozen by terror to respond at all. Severely hungry and thirsty, he was still huddled in his hiding place. I quickly brushed a note in Gyptian on the same sheet as the question. I put the Orb of the Ages safely back into its hiding place in time. I knocked on the door and returned to myself, out in the shade. I looked up alertly as the sound of the knock reached us. I let the others answer the knock. I saw my dear Nore give me a very curious look before she joined the others. Ground Nest made a grab for the paper. His face clouded and he started to wad it up. “Just trash! Some damn scribble of ink! No proper words at all!” Sunbreak stopped him. “These horses are from a different and far away land. Maybe they can read what is there. Do not be so quick to ruin things that you do not understand, like major cloud systems with water transportation and delivery vortexes.” Ground Nest looked like he had been slapped. Indignantly, he demanded, “You ain’t going to ever let me forget that mistake, are you?” Coldly, Sunbreak retorted, “It was NOT a MISTAKE! It was a DIRECT ORDER VIOLATION! And NO. No pegasus or any other pony is EVER going to forget it! It is already being prepared as lessons for both kingdom and Cloudsdale schools. This was a history making disaster that would have been easily avoided except for simple stupidity and selfishness.” He took the wadded up paper and sourly said, “Can anypony here read this shit?” Nore snagged the paper, smoothing it back out. She snorted indignantly, “NO. No PONY here can read it. That old donkey over there can read it. I can read it. Every HORSE of this band can read it. “You behave worse than a pony made wheel. Tell me WHY we should bother to read it for YOU.”