Another active method involves explosives used to create avalanches in areas away from human habitation, which will redirect the pressure and the weight of the layered snow in a safer direction. This is like diverting a stream before a flood sweeps homes and lives away.
Passive methods of avalanche control include building terraces, or at least, snow fences, that cause the snow to accumulate in drifts away from areas dangerous to humans. The fences also add stability to the snow; they are not unlike inserting toothpicks into a cake to hold the layers in place, to continue my former analogy. In areas where boulders are more likely to fall than snow? Nets are strung along the mountainsides, to keep them from raining down. And finally, humans build catchments. A catchment is an ancient concept, really—a cistern built to capture rain in the desert, a canal built along the Nile to bring water to the fields—or in this case, a depression dug to try to capture drifting snow, and once again, control where it goes.
Used individually, each method only has a limited probability of successfully averting disaster. Used in an integrated fashion? The potential for catastrophe is enormously lessened.
When I regained awareness, I was all too aware of the potential for catastrophe hanging in the air around me. And since then, I have worked with humans and gods alike to try to reduce the probability of it. We have tried active methods, akin to explosive charges, by directly confronting mad gods. These have met with limited local success—four of the original fifteen have been dispersed, though in two cases, smaller versions of them fled the scene—like smaller avalanches, instead of a single large, destructive one. I count these as partial victories. The alliance between the gods of Valhalla and the gods of the Gauls allows them to defend both their regions and their people more systematically.
The central problem remains, that there is simply too much snow accumulating. Too many attacks. Too many different kinds of attacks—we are being barraged, metaphorically, with snow, ice, hail, sleet, and sometimes monsoonal rains, it seems. Active responses are not enough. Passive measures must be implemented. And, to my fascination, it seems as if the humans understand this instinctively. They are gathering in protected places. Rome, Burgundoi, Alexandria, Tyre, Beijing, Divodurum, Lutetia, and Jerusalem. And now they huddle together, to wait out the storm.
My probability analysis indicates, at this point in time, a forty-percent likelihood of at least one of these catchment sites surviving. I hope that more than one will. The likelihood increases as we continue with active measures of protection and control, but the overall probability at this point in time of multiple population centers surviving what Sophia Caetia has foreseen as the ‘end of the world’ still remains less than seven percent.
—Prometheus the Fire-Bringer. Address at the Odinhall, 1994 AC. Recorded by Dvalin, Keeper of the Runes.
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Maius 4-11 1992 AC
Latirian had been in the medical evacuation center south of Palmyra that morning, and the first thing that the young medic was aware of, really, was that the ground began to shake. At first she thought a convoy of tanks was passing by, or several cargo planes were landing at the temporary airfield, but the rumbling and shaking just went on and on. Fragile glass jars and their metal lids clattered and trembled in their cabinets, and several shelves of equipment toppled before nurses could get to them. “What’s going on?” Latirian demanded, looking up from the chart she had been reviewing. She put the clipboard back on the end of the metal bed and gave the legionnaire in front of her a quick pat on his elevated foot—the other one was missing. She’d had to amputate it the day before. There had simply been too much damage for her to heal, and while she knew she’d done her best, she still felt wretched that she hadn’t been able to do more.
“I’ll be right back,” she told the young hasta, and headed for a window. These were not glass, of course, but sheets of clear resin film, plant-based, which were portable and flexible, and kept out dust and debris, if not heat or cold. Latirian lifted the light-blocking curtains out of her way, and just stared, as the world continued to shake around her.
Palmyra had been an oasis city, an important caravan stop on the way through the Assyrian desert, for centuries. There had been, thus, a stand of trees on the eastern side of the city, but the other three sides had been the brutal khaki of the desert. The handful of low hills atop which some of the oldest buildings had perched had worn creamy, sandstone tones, and all the Roman-style pillars and buildings of this ancient city had been built of the bones of the earth. The more modern buildings had been constructed along the mercilessly flat plains below the hills, and the newer structures had all been glass and steel with some mellow, weathered clay-toned brick. It had been a beautiful city, until it had become a warzone. And the Roman main camp had been situated south of the outskirts, right in the middle of the desert. Flat, khaki, hot, and desolate.
What Latirian now saw made no sense to her. There were translucent trees, huge, ancient oaks and pines, appearing in the middle of the rigid rows and columns that made up a Roman camp. Her eyes, starved for green after months in the desert, widened as the trees began to solidify, and their branches and leaves cast welcome shadows on the parched ground. The ground itself began to ripple and buckle before her eyes, and then skewed entirely, as new hills swelled. Temporary buildings and tents erected on what had been flat ground suddenly assumed angles and pitches not intended by the engineers who’d set them up, and Latirian could hear floorboards snapping behind her. “This is some kind of Persian magic!” one of the nurses shouted, from another window.
Latirian doubted that. She could feel energy in the air, vast amounts of it, and for some reason, it felt like home to her. It felt like safety, refuge, and summers spent in Britannia. “Get the patients moved outside!” she called. “I don’t know if the roof’s going to hold!”
The next hour was a flurry of activity. Helping with stretchers and wheelchairs and everything else, Latirian didn’t have a chance to think. And by the time they got everyone out, the shaking had finally subsided, and she crouched down and ran a hand through the dirt at her feet. Not sand. Not clay. She rubbed it between her fingers, and found that the rich brown soil held leaf debris, and that while the wind that rushed through her hair was warm—a solid seventy-seven degrees in spite of the early hour—it seemed less arid. The trees breathed out moisture, and all around her, the land smelled different. Dead leaves and living ones, mosses, flowers, and grass, all baking in the sun. A hot day in late summer in the highlands that had been her father’s home, and not an early spring morning in the desert. “This is far too real to be an illusion,” Latirian told the people around her, as Roman legionnaires appeared with axes, looking to cut down trees that now impeded their vehicles. “No!” she shouted at one of them, trying to work her way through the crowds of patients still in hospital gowns. “Don’t!” The whole area still tingled. She could feel something else, something alive, in a way that she didn’t entirely associate with plants.
“Doctor, we can’t get vehicles through the camp like this. We can’t get tanks or personnel carriers through to the front, let alone supply trucks and ambulances. I don’t care where these trees came from, they are currently in the way. And they’ll make for firewood, if nothing else.” The junior centurion in front of her gave her a shrug, and turned back to direct his men to begin clearing the way.
The first man took off his uniform tunic and tossed it away. Hefted his axe, took a practice swing, and then the metal head bit deeply into the bark of the oak tree in front of him. Latirian cringed. Red sap sprayed out of the wound, back into the man’s face, and he yelped in surprise, letting go of the axe and staggering back, clutching at his face. “It burns!” The fluid was still translucent, as sap should be, but it was the color of blood. And then the tree moved. A branch swept down and struck him, flinging the man back into a parked ambulance, and a second branch churned around, waving wildly at the other legionnaires in the area. “My eyes!” th
e man howled, and Latirian saw a nurse moving to him, trying to rinse his face off with saline. Everyone in the area had just pulled away, the whites of their eyes showing all the way around. Even for combat-hardened soldiers . . . this was out of their ken.
She swallowed, and took off her outer white medical robe, stripping down to her sleeveless undertunic. Her clan markings were clearly evident on her pale skin; Himi didn’t have clan markings for her to have added, else the area below the Matrugena bear on her forearms would have born the markings of the Eshmunazar clan. She’d instead opted to have a caduceus added, several years before, one on each arm, for symmetry, done in Gallic knot-work style. “I’m going to take the axe out,” she told the tree, or the spirit in the tree, if one were present. “Then I’m going to fix the wound, all right? Don’t be . . . afraid.” She felt like a complete idiot, but she stepped forwards, her hands raised, tentatively, and the oak stopped lashing out with its branches. One step. Two steps. The branches churned as if there were a storm lashing it with wind, and Latirian stopped entirely. Waited for her patient to calm. And then gently worked the axe free, before putting her hand over the deep cut, which was bleeding out red sap freely, and concentrated. Found the fire-of-life inside of her, and poured it into the wound. It wasn’t altogether different from healing a dryad. Dryads had two or three times as many major blood vessels as a regular human, but they were all smaller. More redundancy. A single cut to the thigh, and they probably wouldn’t bleed out. She was just surprised at how much pressure was in the tree’s fluid systems. That shouldn’t be the case without a heart. Plants just use . . . gravity and osmosis, I thought, and turgor pressure. Gods. What is going on here?
The oak trembled a little, its leaves shifting in an unseen wind, as she took her hand away. Nothing but clean, new-grown bark. “Pass the word,” she told the centurion, shortly, as he staggered upright, his eyes so swollen, she didn’t know if he could see. “Leave the trees alone.”
Solinus and his men had been sent back into Palmyra, this time with Rig’s company; their objective this time was to get behind Persian lines and see if they could capture any of the current Persian magi for questioning. Legion commanders wanted to know how they were raising as many ghul as they were, all at once. Spirits had become chary of manifesting in the mortal realm the past few years, and with good reason.
They were, as such, holed up in a pair of abandoned, ruined apartment buildings. Two halves of Sol’s team were divided up between the third floor of each, on overwatch duty, while Rig and his team of seasoned infiltrators were out, looking for a Persian patrol with ghul and a summoner to try to lead them back into a trap. Nervous work, especially considering that the last time Solinus had been this deep into the city, he and his men had been the ones walking into the ambush. He used a small mirror to get a look at the street below, and listened on the radio for the terse voices of his men checking in from their various vantage points. They’d taken most of the night to get in position, and a couple of hours after dawn, the ground trembled. Solinus took his eyes off the road below for an instant to check the stability of the charred wood floor beneath him, remembering the earthquakes that had followed Baal-Hamon’s death, and a cold dread clutched at his stomach for an instant. Who died this time?
When he lifted his eyes back to the street, he could see trees in his small mirror. Translucent, ephemeral trees, some taller than the building he was in, spreading out wide, unrestrained branches. A deer looked up, ghostly at first, and then startlingly solid, and apparently as confused by her own appearance in the middle of this ruined city street as he was. Solinus could see the doe’s nose twitch at the smell of char in the air, and she bolted, twitching her tail behind her. Solinus blinked, rapidly. If she were real, some hungry Roman or Persian soldier was apt to shoot her, if a ghul didn’t get her first.
“What the fuck?” The words over the radio, in Latin, broke him from his mesmerized state. Solinus could smell leaves now, hear their rustle, and the breeze coming in the shattered window was just a hint cooler. The earth continued to move under the building, however, going from a light vibration to a full buck and heave that sent bricks shearing from the outer walls. Solinus tabbed his own radio and said, sharply, “Hunting party, this is the lodge. Your illusions are getting really convincing, Umbra.” The nickname, meaning shadow or ghost, had been hung on Rig years ago by his own squad, and it made an apt radio name.
“Not me,” Rig replied, his voice just above a whisper. “We’ve got a Persian patrol in sight, and they look confused, too. There’s a tree in the middle of the crossroads here that’s glowing. And singing.” A pause, for everyone else to assimilate that. “It’s singing in Gallic, incidentally. Damned if I know what about. You want me to get the Persians’ attention and draw them back?”
Solinus grimaced. “Affirmative. Confirmation that they are or aren’t behind this . . . whatever this is . . . is going to be valuable.” He could feel . . . energy . . . all around him, and his skin tingled with it. “Umbra?”
“Yes, Dóiteán?” The term was Gallic, and meant conflagration. A joke from his various squadmates, for his talents, temperament, and family background.
“Don’t shoot anything that looks . . . out of the ordinary.”
“Don’t need telling.” Rig’s tone was grim. Solinus wasn’t entirely sure what Rig had been doing when Aunt Sig had pulled him off the lines a month ago, but he’d come back both wide-eyed and a bit off-temper. Rig would only say that he had a case of indigestion that Solinus wouldn’t believe. But he was still as solid as ever, and Sol was grateful to have him on this mission.
Shots fired in the distance, and Solinus put the shaking earth and strange trees out of his head, and got on with the mission. Maybe he’d get an explanation for this, someday. So long as it wasn’t a god’s cataclysmic death, with the potential to kill or distort anyone around him, or an attack by a mad godling, he’d get by, and keep doing what needed doing.
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On the Roman highways that cut across the land between Jerusalem, Tyre, and Damascus, there were relatively few drivers; life did go on, in spite of the war and mad godlings, but it was dies Veneris, a workday. Thus, few pleasure-travelers, but quite a few truckers were out, hauling food from farms near Meggido, almonds from orchards near the outskirts of Jerusalem heading north, melons and fish from the coastal regions heading south. A few military convoys were on the highways as well . . . and all of the various occupants of the vehicles, their eyes glazed over in the bored stare of the long-haul driver, suddenly flinched and slammed on the brakes. Freight-trucks skidded and rolled over, their befuddled drivers climbing out of the cabs to stare as what had been a long, flat road became a winding path up a rugged mountain-side. The highway’s poured-stone broke in places, and large gaps formed. A few unfortunate drivers were unable to stop their vehicles in time, and plummeted over embankments. The shaken survivors later reported a monkey climbing down and opening the doors of their motorcars, and offering them a vine with which to climb up to the main road once more. On any other day, they’d have been subjected to a psychiatric evaluation and then a counter-summoning interrogation at the local hospital, but not today. Today, there was too much chaos for any of that.
Just outside of Damascus, an entire new city had appeared. Modern enough, but the houses were built on alien lines, with steeply inclined roofs to deal with rain and snow, or rounded sides, interspersed with clearly Roman-influenced administrative buildings. Anyone looking at the impossible city through a spyglass would easily see rugged escarpments of rock around it, with piers to the north that jutted out into empty space. Chains stretched tautly from those piers, connected to large fishing boats which lay on their sides, keels and hulls broken, far below. A spyglass could also pick out people in that city, as well. All quite foreign-looking, with tattooed skin, braided hair, and colorful skirts and kilts.
The Carthaginian residents, and the Roman legionnaires tasked with defending the city
, gaped and finally sent out an armed and cautious delegation to speak with these creatures. It could very well be an illusion, covering Persian troop movements, after all. The lead envoy, the governor of Damascus, a Roman patrician, was quite relieved to hear the residents of the . . . illusory city, as he persisted in calling it . . . speak good solid Latin, if with an impenetrable Britannian accent he couldn’t entirely make out. After some trial and error, he discovered that they were Picts, and that this was the city of Tarvodubron. He’d never heard of it. A regional province’s current capital, if it wasn’t the region he was tasked with overseeing, really wasn’t his business. But the fact that they insisted that it was their capital, thank you, and that it was supposed to be located on the North Sea . . . ? “That’s not possible,” the governor said. “What kind of hoax is this? I demand to speak with whoever’s in charge.”
The Goddess Embraced (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 3) Page 25
