119 The Haboub

Ky ducked low against his bird’s neck.  It was his back-up riding bird, a younger blue and grey male that had more black stripes than Pikro and was a great deal faster.  “Faster!  We need to get under cover!”  The air was clear, but the low growl of distant thunder was continuous.  His da and the Amir had realized they were in trouble almost simultaneously.

The wind howled around them and their clothing and their bird’s feathers snapped and cracked like banners in a hurricane. Its a dust storm, but it's not a flenser yet.  Light and Dark I don't want to end up as eroded bone particles floating in the upper atmosphere.

“It’s the haboub!  We might be lucky to get only that! Ride!  Everybody ride!”  The slowest birds, the pack bearing birds, were trailed out behind them honking and hissing mournfully as the riding flock pulled closer together, drew their heads in or stretched them out straight and long parallel to the ground.  Riders pulled back and locked their reins wide open and curled up tight to become the smallest bump on their careening mounts.  It was almost as bad as when his bird ran away.

“Ride!  Don’t...” slow down. Ky finished in his mind, since he couldn’t hear the words any longer, torn out of zon Maya’s mouth as her bird began to slow. “Go! Go!”  Skittering veils of sand already blew around the knees of the birds.

Where they were racing to, trying to outrun the wind, he had no idea.  A hide, perhaps. Unless it was right before them, they weren't going to make it. There were hides all along the Empire road, but he couldn't see a road under his bird's claws. He didn't know if they were still on it.

The sky was orange and lightning crackled all around them, great bellows rumbling like hunting horns in the sky.  Dust hung in the air already and all the yellow and orange vegetation around them showed pale needles and undersides of leaves to the sky, ripped at by the wind.

His full veil pressed hard against his face and his eyes, open a crack, felt buffed and sanded dry.  He dared not close his eyes for longer than blinks to relieve them.  Hara’s bird was on his left, just ahead, parallel to Werfas, with zon Merzhad’s birds in front, right under his bird’s beak.  He could see the Amir and Ilax and da just ahead of that, but everybody else was to either side or behind.

Then he could see the wall of dirt looming off to his right, all the way from horizon to horizon.  It was taller than the highest Loggia as far as he could see, and it snapped off and swallowed up trees like an army of bird’s grazing, if the trees were like grass blades.

There was a bellow... a scream of agony in the cacophony... a bird’s.  A bird had fallen, whose? He couldn’t even slow, when he started to straighten, his da whistled “NO! RIDE!” The sound could cut through even the high-pitched shriek of the wind.

The wind fleeing the front of the storm, a lesser predator fleeing a greater one, tore his breath right out of his mouth.

Though it looked like a solid wall bearing down on them, the air was full of dust and it was harder and harder to see anyone around him. He could hear nothing but the roar of the storm, the wind and the thunder pounding on his ears.  He pulled up on the reins, preparing to force the bird down on top of him when an eerie silence caught him short.  The air around him cleared as the wind disappeared and every grain of sand and dust dropped straight to the ground.

There was a clear airspace around them all, stretched back as far as the Emir-al who’d been on rear guard.  Ilax and da were holding hands, crossed in front of them, their insect creatures, dragonflies and bees both swarmed around them and on the inside of what suddenly looked like a dome of sand.   

Maya flung herself off her bird and ran, floundered through the drifts, toward the two of them, just as the flensing wind arrived.

Ilax sank to his knees, almost losing his grip on his husband's hands and the wind scowered a hole in the shield the two men had flung up over the entire caravan.  Sand and dust and glass particles raged in through the hole, tearing it wider.