Welcome to Equestria! The second part of the Origin of the Rom.

by De Writer

Chapter 2 : Rain!

The horses of the band leaped to the task and had the newly made rain flies out and set well before the cloud got here. As the rain began to pound on our cover, the whole band got out flutes, drums and lyres. I was afraid that they were going to try dancing in the small dry space that we had. Nope. Songs.

Gyptian is a melodious language already. The songs had a sweet, almost plaintive wailing quality, truly lovely to hear.

We were rudely interrupted by voices from above. “Foul Ground Pounders!” was about the mildest epithet.

Nore let her voice trail off and then leaned to where lungs trained by a lifetime of trills could shout back up, “Look, Love! Feather Dusters! Can we pluck them?”

That caused a flurry of panicked fluttering as pegassi tried to get out of possible unicorn magic’s reach!

Nore, grinning at her return prank, rejoined the songs.

The rain was going on long enough and heavy enough that I was beginning to wonder about it. The canyon complex that we were in came out at the Red Branch Notch. The new irrigation dam there was not done and not ready for a water load yet.

Several hours into the downpour, Nore stopped singing again. She took up one of the awning poles that we had made of very dense wood. Silently as a specter, she slipped out into the rain.

There was a loud thwap! It was followed by the sound of something hitting the muddy ground outside. Stepping out, I saw that the rain was slowly abating. Flopping in the mud was a furious Ground Nest! There was a knife laying in the grass a little way off. As he attempted to rise each time, Nore fouled him with the pole and kept him down.

Maina, our excellent wheelwright and profane horse, observed, “This is a pegasus? It looks like a mud mop to me!” Glancing about at the severely soaked glade, she added, “This pony seems to be as bad as the wheels that ponies make!”

As she saw the knife, Sarel dashed around to the other side of the wagon.

She came back with drooping steps. “He ruined it, The other fly is slashed badly. Three days of work destroyed.”

She turned a gaze onto the pegasus that was so venomous that he should have bloated up and died on the spot. Instead he crowed, “Then all you gotta do is put in another three days and you got it took care of!”

He was trying to get to his feet to take off. Nore tangled him with the pole and face planted him in the mud again. Firmly she rejoined, “NO! You shall pay for your harm or fix it yourself!”

He reared his head up and snapped, “YOU fix it! Little thread, couple of stitches and it good as new!”

We were joined by a voice from the air. “No, Ground Nest, it is not that easy. A watertight seam is expensive to do.”

A gray pegasus mare with a yellow mane and tail fluttered down to a soft landing beside the one that Nore was keeping grounded.

She did a double take when she saw me. “Marchhare! What are you doing here? Last that I heard you were taking food and water to Gyptia! How did that work out!”

“Pretty well, Sunbreak. I see that you are supervising this delivery.”

He face fell. “This idiot and his three buddies have turned it into a disaster. The entire crew is working to contain the damage.”

I said sympathetically, “I saw a left hand vortex used to poit this bit of cloud over us. Don’t tell me that it got away from them. How bad is it?”

Sunbreak actually put her face into her hooves and wept. “It didn’t ‘get away’ from them. They abandoned the vortex. Positve feedback from it drained and destroyed our transportation vortices. We lost over a third of this entire 600 square mile, two week slow soak into this single canyon complex in under three hours! Just down from here, it dumped 8 feet of water in that tiny bit of time!”

Ground Nest sassed, “So what? You wanted the water in the mountains, you got water in the mountains! Big deal!”

I turned to him and said softly, “Yes, Ground Nest. A VERY big deal. That much water can’t be absorbed. It has to come out into the farmlands below as a flood. At the least, fields and orchards will be destroyed.”

Sunbreak said brokenly, “We are still getting damage reports. I don’t know how bad the disaster is, yet.”

Ground Nest sneered, “Disaster? How so? It’s just a bit of extra water.”

Sunbreak snapped, “We Were supposed to keep ALL rainfall out of this canyon complex! There is dam UNDER CONSTRUCTION down there! The Red Branch Project is not ready for any water load yet!”

An all red pegasus came flying in at flank speed. His landing was messy from haste. He gave Sunbreak a thick sheaf of papers. “This is an incomplete, preliminary assessment, Supervisor. We have not found any reports of deaths, only six known injuries and one missing foal.

“The worst downstream damage came when the nearly finished Red Branch Irrigation Project dam failed. It overtopped at the incomplete north end. The whole dam was completely full because of the flood. It failed in under three minutes. The irrigation channels under construction spread the flood into Hay Market village and the farms around it.

Down the Red Branch, the wash overflowed the low pass in Morton’s Hills and destroyed a major farm on the other side.

“The missing foal is from that farm. He was a pegasus, just past fluttering. Gone without a trace.”

Sunbreak took a deep, shuddering breath and asked, “What of all the streamside farms down the Red Branch?”

“Looks from the aerial survey to be between 70 and 90 percent loss, so far. Could be worse when final figures come in.”

“What about the town of Haulmarket?”

“They lost some commons and a few fields. They were built high enough up to be spared the worst of it.”

Sunbreak studied the papers and said, “Thank you, Stafford. How is the situation in the delivery? Are we going to have to break it up or can we salvage any of the water?”

“We have transport vortices numbers 1, 4 and 5 under control but they have lost from thirty to fifty percent of moisture. It looks as if number 3 will have to be given up as a total.

“Acting on your order, we have sent to Cloudsdale for a hydrological expert to assess the situation in both the delivery clouds and the intended delivery zones.”

Nore, Rom and the others were looking in awe at Sunbreak and Stafford. They had never seen such beings up close, except for Ground Nest.

Rom quietly asked, “If I am hearing correctly about this sad disaster, you have a huge amount of clouds with water that you may have to dispose of. Is that correct?”

Sunbreak nodded sadly.

Rom suggested gently, “You could save many lives and do much good with that water if you could get it to the Godolphin’s land of Gyptia. They have a deadly drought and famine there.”

To our surprise, Sunbreak made some notes. “I can promise nothing, Sir. I will suggest it. Such a decision will be up to the Princesses.”

Weeping again, she said, “I hope that we can do that. I would treasure knowing that some good came of this terrible mess.”

Ground Nest actually was listening, at least a little. He fastened on the Red Branch Dam first. “Wait up. Something’s wrong here. Red Branch Dam is, like, maybe twenty miles south of here. This here water shoulda gone down way north and west of the dam.”

I stuck a hoof up his rump, as the crude ones say. “I hauled provisions for the survey teams when Cloudsdale did the hydrological studies for the Red Branch Project. That is how I met Sunbreak, Heroine of South Peak Gryphon War, again. Back then, she was still recovering from some of the wounds that she got.

“What made the Red Branch Dam so attractive to build is this canyon complex. It is officially known as the Maze. For a span of over fifty miles, all of the interconnected canyons come out at one place. The Red Branch Notch.

“According to the reports that Sunbreak just got, the dam filled. That means that seven canyons, all over a mile wide filled up to a hundred and seventy feet deep. They all fed into the Red Branch canyon. It is over fifteen miles long, with an average depth of one hundred and eighty five feet.

“The wonder is that the unfinished dam lasted long enough to fill. Once it started to fail, it only took three minutes with that mass of water behind it. Congratulations, Ground Nest! You and your cohorts have just created the largest flood from a broken dam in Equestrian history!”

Turning to Sunbreak I asked, “We are going to need to get these wagons down this complex to Riten’s notch and go over there to get down to the flats and the Royal Roads. Can you have that scouted for us? Everything that Rom’s band saved from their old lives is in these wagons.”

Sunbreak nodded soberly. “I will have that done Marchhare. You will need to bide here a while. I fear that we have higher priorities, just now.”

I agreed. “We will need to move a little. We will have better foraging down at Rollmire marsh. We will set up our camp there.”

Showing that she really did not miss much of anything, she asked, “I saw the slashed rain fly when I came in. What is the damage cost, Marchhare? I will see that it is taken care of by the Hydrological Authority. Even if they were disobeying direct orders, those four were working for us.”

I gestured for her to follow me. We both looked over the slashes in the rain fly. Suddenly, Sunbreak reached up and felt the fabric. She checked my new sashes too. “What is this? I have never seen a fabric like this. How expensive is it?”

“This? Gyptian Broadweave. The secret of the fiber comes from Gyptia. I know that Sarel spent four days preparing the threads and setting up the loom. The weaving took another three days. I think that it can be sewed tight again. No idea if Sarel has enough supplies to make another.”

Sunbreak nodded soberly. “I will asses the damage as four golden bits.”

I agreed. “We were planning to sell some bolt stock at three gold, five per ell. The ell is how the Gyptians measure the cloth. It is pretty close to our cloth yards and meters.”

She made a wry face. “That idiot Ground Nest just tried to tell me that this flood is all YOUR fault, Marchhare. If you weren’t there, they wouldn’t have tried the prank. What did he mean, 'it never went like this before’?”

“Oh, Ground Nest and his gang like to prank the donkeys that trade around the whole Red Branch District. Same stunt that he tried here. Gather a few clouds, fly down and slash the wagon covers and drop a bunch of rain on our trade goods to mess them up.

“He has driven most of the donkey cart traders out of the whole Red Branch District.”

Sunbreak whistled softly in astonishment. “That is going to hurt the district almost as much as the flood. I know that a lot of ponies look down on you donkeys but without your network of small trade and seed deliveries, most farms would be in far worse shape, if they survived at all.”

“I know that. I quit myself because there was no profit left after Ground Nest’s assorted pranks. I got the Gyptian famine tip from a friend of mine and took a few loads that way instead. Made out quite well. On my last trip, I met these good horses who had lost their livelihoods to the drought and famine. They were starving so I brought them here .

“Our plan is to earn a bit of coin from fairs, get some land and settle down somewhere.

“Seeing my wife’s reaction to Ground Nest, here, I think that we will look for something FAR AWAY from where he used to live.”

Sunbreak nodded sagely. “I can understand that, Marchhare … Wait! Did the old bachelor just say WIFE?”

Nore smiled and stood proud. “I have that honor. By the traditions of our kind, I asked to be by his side and he has agreed. We all celebrated it and so it was done. I am the wife of Marchhare, the Ghost Who Guides.”

Sunbreak watched with horror as Ground Nest squalled, “He ain’t no ghost! He’s a worthless donkey!” He drove a powerful forehoof strike at my head, his whole weight behind it.