Tales of an Equestrian Mare

by Durandal

Chapter 3

The caravan paused, shortly after noon, as the desert heat reached its most unbearable. There was no rocky outcrop for shelter this time, just the cooler side of a dune and skins of flat water. The wagon-haulers were assisted out of their harnesses, ready for others to take their place when the journey resumed, and the atmosphere became far more social. It was a break: there was no camp to set up, no cooking or washing, no maintenance or repairs to be done, and once the caravaneers had regained their breath and begun to cool down in the relative shade, a steady hubbub of conversation took over from the quiet of their earlier stoic march. Amongst the idle chatter, some of the tribe began to recall the foreigner in their midst.

“So, who are you, stranger?” Hearthfire jumped guiltily. She and Cas had been pony-watching, taking advantage of the travellers being grouped together to get a good look at them all, and she hadn’t really been paying attention to those immediately around her. In her inattentiveness, she had hardly even realised that one of the camels had concertinaed down beside her. She was bad at distinguishing camels’ genders, and even their voices - the bulls and cows alike were universally raspy, as if they were constantly swallowing grit - made it difficult to tell them apart sometimes. Still, she was fairly certain this was a cow, something in the set of the snout. That, and the conspiratorial way it leaned in to ask the question spoke of a certain type of gossip common to all races.

“Oh, I didn’t see you there. My name’s Hearthfire.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Equestria. I was born in Manehattan.”

“Never heard of it. Manehattan. Not Equestria, obviously. Never been, though. And why did you come here? To fair Saddle Arabia?”

Hearthfire was preparing to formulate a simple answer, when her train of thought was severed by a cry from somewhere across the social melee.

“Hoy! Dima, stop your pestering!” Hearthfire recognised the voice of Sandborne, speaking in Equestrian, presumably for her benefit. “I can spot one of your interrogations from a mile away.”

“Just curious about our new visitor, oh esteemed elder,” the camel, Dima, called back with a grin, her voice dripping with mock reverence. “Are you not, also?”

“I have heard the short version. However, we are all curious to hear it from the pony’s mouth, as it were, not in whatever way you wish to tell it to make it sound the most juicy.”

The exchange had more or less halted all other conversation, and the two friendly opponents’ light barbs were drawing degrees of sniggering from the members of the troupe who understood Equestrian.

“Oh be reasonable, Sandborne -” Sandborne held up a hoof to stop her objection.

“So, rather than every last camel and pony demanding she tell her story over and over again, I propose that Hearthfire tell it now, in her own words.”

If the caravaneers had been paying rapt attention to the three of them before, that might as well have nailed their ears to Hearthfire’s muzzle. An approving murmur rippled through the crowd as the suggestion was translated for those who did not have the hang of Equestrian. Hearthfire could sense a smile creeping onto her face.

“I’m not the most interesting pony in the world,” she replied, feeling that a touch of humility was called for here. In truth she was beginning to feel the itch, the expectant tug of an interested audience, and found herself slipping into character without effort. Her voice rose and fell, forcing her listeners to lean closer to hear, “but I have travelled a very long way, and seen a great many things that are far more interesting and wondrous than I am. Regretfully, the full tale is much too long in the telling...”

“We are not going anywhere for at least another turn of the glass,” Sandborne pointed out, over the playful boos and jeers Hearthfire had drawn from the crowd. “Even a fragment of the whole would be welcome. Perhaps a cooling tale for the noon-day heat.”

She feigned indecision, and her audience egged her on, pretended not to know that she was always going to give in.

“We-ell... I’ve heard it said that stories are meant to be told, but I’m sure I am a rotten storyteller...”

* * *

The Floating City

The expanse of the Maneterranean sea absorbed the whole curve of the horizon, bluer even than the cloudless sky from which it borrowed its colour. Although the waves themselves were indistinct from this height, the water glittered and sparkled with swells conjured by the gentle on-shore breeze, the same wind that playfully set Swift’s wing-struts creaking and jittering in the crisp morning air. Inside the cockpit, the gentle thrumming vibrations put Hearthfire in mind of a cart-pony straining at the yoke, and she imagined that her faithful plane was as eager to arrive as she was. Cas, too, had picked up on her pony-friend’s excitement, and had relocated onto the dashboard to peer ahead, watching for signs of their arrival.

Hearthfire flicked the cat’s tail to one side so she could see the compass clearly, and two minutes later, plane and pilot struck the coast and banked to the south-west, following the ragged, indistinct line that loosely delineated the verdant green marsh of the land from the cobalt blue of the sea. Here and there, sandy yellow beaches provided hard contrast, but for the most part the wetland swamps became gradually more and more water and less and less land, changing from terrain to ocean on a sliding scale.

And there. Several miles away but fast approaching, and distinct even as this distance. A lagoon, one of the largest on the entire coast, where the sea intruded far into the swamp, and at the heart of the sheltered bay, sparkling almost as much as the sea in which it was set, an island-city:

Whinnycia.

Her names were legendary, and the stories told about her were even more numerous than her many names: the Floating City, the City of Bridges, the Twin Cities, the City of Architects, a thousand more. It was said that there were buildings in Whinnycia carved wholly from glittering gems, that on one night in every year, the bells of her great towers would ring themselves without any pony to drive them, that crossing the wrong bridge on the wrong day could leave an incautious traveller stranded in another place or another time, lost with no hope of return.

At a touch from Hearthfire, Swift nosed lower and lower, until the rich vegetation below was a blur of colours a few tens of meters below the plane’s underbelly. The unicorn eased the throttle back, letting the plane’s air speed fall from its hundred mile per hour cruising speed to a sedate fifty-five.

They crossed over into the bay with the wind of their passage pressing the water briefly into a vee of ripples in their wake, and approached the city. Even from the air, Whinnycia was an impressive sight. It seemed that there was not a building in the city that had not been designed by a skilled artificer; indeed, the city as a whole had the look of an architect’s warzone, as a multitude of schools and styles fought to erect the most elegant edifice, to prove their own methods superior. If all the buildings of the city were game pieces, then the towers were the kings and queens of the board. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, some rising from civic buildings, others free-standing as clock towers or follies.

The other striking element of the civic design, aside from the pleasing clash of form and colour, and the thing for which the city was perhaps most famous, were the canals. Where an ordinary city had streets and roads, pavements and boulevards and alleys, Whinnycia had waterways. The sea surged straight to the very heart of the city, allowing watercraft free reign of all the metropolis’ thoroughfares.

Hearthfire took in the spectacular view as she carefully arced Swift in a long loop, circling the city. The bay below was alive with ships of all sizes, from wallowing square-sailed cogs, to fast, multi-masted clippers, and between them, the tiny fishing boats and skiffs darted back and forth in every direction. She straightened her course, allowing the city to fall behind her, and searched for a clear patch of the bay.

“I am almost certain that this is a good idea,” she muttered. Cas shot the pilot a despairing glance, and headed back into the fuselage to strap herself in.

As it turned out, the landing went surprisingly smoothly. She pointed Swift into the wind, and throttled down as low as she dared, letting the monoplane glide down towards the surface of the bay. There was a slight jolt as the left landing strut struck the water first and sank, but then the long cylindrical float, fixed in place of Swift’s usual landing gear, forced its way back to the surface, and the other float splashed down. The plane rocked alarmingly for a moment, before settling, swiftly bleeding speed as the water tugged away at its momentum.

Hearthfire patted the instrument panel, murmuring, “Good work.”

“Say... I think we have some admirers, Cas.”

It was true. By the time they reached the quay, Swift had a veritable flotilla of curious fishermen and passenger skiffs in tow. Aircraft were a rare sight in most parts of the world, and heavier-than-air craft even rarer, given the difficulty of finding suitable landing and takeoff strips. A sea-plane was a particular novelty.

Hearthfire had made arrangements for the use of a boat shed, a short distance inshore from the docks. There were a few tense moments as Hearthfire slowly navigated the waterways in her lumbering, ungainly aircraft-turned-boat, pleading for Swift’s wing span to be slim enough, but aside from the loss of a lick of paint, they made the shed without difficulty.

Comments

[Durandal]

I was giving this a quick once over, the import function had cut a line out from the middle of the chapter. I couldn't see anything else missing, but I suppose there might be.