57 - Terra Infirma

Jashi grinned wide all across his face, plunked himself onto the overlapping blankets between Haraklez and Kyrus and popped his jug open, obviously feeling very grown up. “I did, didn’t I? Werfas you shouldn’t let anybody see you taking the farva jug out.” He used the Milari word for the alcohol, brewed from fermented goat and sheep milk.

“Right, squirt. You must have been hiding when I did that because I made sure no one could see me!” 

Tizrav was refusing to settle down on any of her favourite people. Since Kyrus had started training with and staying with his father more often, she’d adopted him and often rode in and slept in his shirt. This time she was restless, even for a ferret.

**

One never knows the trigger for some things. No human foot could have set it off, on the brutal razor-edged slopes of Hvardehaye mountain. Perhaps a neovole ran over a rock. Perhaps a gust of wind finally set up a wave. Perhaps a Milari Ancestor ghost finally managed to affect the physical world.

The mountain groaned a note so deep it was almost unheard. The voles tried to hide in their hole, frozen, even as it collapsed in on them, a hand-span of motion that crushed their tiny lives. A small shift.

The crows and ravens leaped for the sky, screaming, while a stork and his mate shrieked as their nest, on a massive boulder tipped, burying their eggs in the muck as the foreign biomaterial slipped on the substrate.

Muck. Mud and water slipped a double hand span on the mountain. Then a full man height and the height of a hundred men, faster and faster, the groan spiralling up as mud and stones and water at first scraped, then banged then tumbled against one other, a churning, boiling, crushing mass.

**

Haraklez sat up abruptly. “What’s that?”

Jashi jumped up as Tizrav screamed and darted away from them. Werfas caught her with one outflung hand, as Kyrus and Haraklez seized Jashi and each other as the ground began to shake under them. Werfas looked up, his eyes growing round and appalled, even as he hurled the ferret toward Kyrus and himself after, arms spread to pin everyone against the vertical face of the rock behind them.

Mud and water and stones and boulders exploded past them on either side, thundered up over their heads, arching over them, traveling far faster than a Moa could run, carrying rocks the size of small houses, all around them as they cowered against the meagre lee of outcropping. If anyone screamed anymore it was completely lost in the monster roar of the mud-slide batting aside the outer baffles, roaring down to devour part of Viltaria.

The noise went on and on and on, the dirt and rocks and water roaring like a mountain bellowing, a basso hiss as well, and with it the pounding, crushing, sensations battering them from three sides as the slide leapt over their heads and down, curled in-grasping fingers from either side. Kyrus struggled to breathe, clinging hard to unseen arms and backs and the whole world full of muck and water and stones. He jammed his nose tight, tight to his chest, trying to draw air out of the gap between his arm and his chest. If anyone screamed or yelled or sobbed, it was lost in the howl.

Then it stopped. Not all at once. The fading echoes of disaster cracked back and forth through the valleys drawing out the earth’s apparent rage. Stones clicked and settled slowly. Water and mud that had been kicked into the air rained down on the scar across the mountain, a brown, gray, red, black, dirty white flood, now almost motionless. In the distance the ravens and crows were a distant and retreating screeching. A weird silence held for a long, long moment.

Jashi stirred, coughed, coughed again and struggled to stand up. 

Kyrus unlocked his fingers slowly, one at a time, felt everyone doing the same, raised his head slowly, pried his glued together eyes open and looked up into Werfas’s dazed face, Haraklez’s closed eyes. Everyone coughed. “Tizzie bit me,” Jashi said. “She bit me!”

The four of them were buried almost to the waist in mud where it had flowed in on either side of them and over their heads as it plunged down the mountainside. A stone the size of a head rested just beside them. “Ouch.” That was Werfas. “If she bit me I don’t know it. I hurt all over.” His head had been jammed tight against the outcropping and so spared but his back had taken a beating as he’d hunched over them.

“I’m scraped and bashed,” Haraklez said. “But nothing’s broken that I can tell.”

Jashi managed to stand up in the middle of the protective knot, thrashing, took a step and fell down on hands and knees, vomiting muck, dirt pouring out of his mouth and nose. Haraklez set her hands on the new surface of earth and pulled herself out, groaning.

The three of them checked Jashi who managed to get all the dirt out of his throat and mouth and lungs and stomach, crying. Tiz dragged herself up Kyrus’s muck-solid shirt and plastered her drying mud self under his drying mud hair. The surface of the mud was just beginning to steam. Screams from below echoed up to them as they struggled out of the dirt. Screams and cries and a wild, drawn out wailing, the echoes making all words disappear into a broken cry of distress, rising louder and louder.

Half of the ancestor stones were buried by the mudslide. The avalanche baffles had almost done their job, the first dozen angled stone walls that could re-direct snow and ice had been overwhelmed by sliding earth and water. A muddy figure fought its way out of the half buried crack in the rock face.

The four on the mountain took in the extent of the devastation. “Oh Light and Dark!—“ “--Ancestors!” “—oh shit!” Haraklez heaved herself up to her feet, painfully, bruised. “Maks! Ilia! The house! The town! Oh, my Ancestors!” They could see that the west end of town, the scattering of houses, had vanished under the mud. She half fell, scrambling down the mountain. 

“Wait! Careful!”Werfas yelled hard enough that she stopped. “Remember! It can slide again! Stop!” As much as she wept and wanted to run down at top speed, they had to test each foot, pick their way to the edge of the flow, toward the first of the baffles that had held.