praying for their lives. She couldn’t breathe and bent low in a fit of coughing.
Caleb rubbed and clapped her back, even as they sped. He nuzzled his face close to her ear and whispered soothing, gentle words that calmed her labored breath. When he slowed their horses a few minutes later, she lifted her head from his chest, but whatever she was going to say drifted away on the smoky air like dried leaves on a breeze when she looked around.
There were hundreds of people riding toward them, commoners and traders alike. The ground shook beneath the weight of their number and behind at least half the mighty army, tied to their saddles, were long hollow tubes made of thick rubber. Each was at least five hundred feet long and uncoiling out of the ground as they were dragged away from the trading city.
“What…?”
“Fire blowers.” Caleb almost smiled triumphantly when he said the word before he leaped from his saddle. Jonas was at his side in seconds and both men raced toward the others who had stopped and also dismounted. Everyone moved in a frenzied speed pulling the long tubes toward the fire. It took at least ten people to hold just one fire blower and Willow counted at least fifty of the enormous tubes along the ground. They were spread out for miles from east to west, creating a wall as wide as the fire itself. She looked on in amazement as the two walls closed in on each other. One end of each fire blower was connected to a hole in the ground that had been topped a few minutes earlier with a heavy metal cover.
Each rubber tube had a steel ring at its end and a small lever attached to the nozzle. One by one the levers were thrown, releasing a continuous blast of sand so powerful each group of people holding their fire blower was thrown backward, almost falling to their bottoms. Willow could feel the tiny grains filling her nose, her lungs. She covered her face with her sleeve. It seemed as if the sand was being drained all the way from the desert countries as tons of it kept on coming like an ocean, smothering the flames in an endless sea of yellow waves.
Willow sat motionless on Caleb’s horse twenty minutes later, stunned to silence. The fire was out and nothing remained of it but smoke and ashes and the black devastation it left on the land behind it. The fire blowers were dropped to the ground by hundreds of weary hands, but there was rejoicing on the plains as everyone embraced the person next to him in a joyful show of victory over the powerful battle with nature.
They all thanked Caleb for the fire blowers, but he told them to give thanks to his god. “From whom all good things come.”
She remembered her father saying that Yahweh was Predaria’s god. Was it because Caleb was going around doing good things and teaching people about his Yahweh?
She returned her attention to him. Walking over mountains of sand where the fire had been, he surveyed the destruction. He wiped his soot-stained brow and rubbed his stinging eyes. He saved her horse. Willow could see the anguish lining his handsome face. It was over for now, but Predaria was dying for water and with each new violent act of nature against it, the land was being destroyed more and more before their eyes. When he brought his shaking hands to his face, she wanted to go to him.
Jonas made his way to her and rested his hand on the horse’s bridle. He gave Willow a thoughtful look and then turned to watch Caleb. “He raced back to save you.”
“I know,” she answered quietly and wiped her eyes. “He cares much for others.”
“Yes, he does.” Jonas glanced at her and there was a tiny hint of a smile curling the ends of his thick mustache. Then he sighed. “It is too much burden for one man to carry. The burden of the land falls upon his shoulders.”
Willow found Caleb again tugging at a deflated fire blower with Jarod’s assistance. “Why?” she asked, almost whispering. “Why does it fall upon his shoulders?”
“Because he chooses it to,” Jonas answered simply.
She watched as the villagers inserted the mouths of the great fire blowers into the mounds of sand and switched the levers in the opposite direction as they had before. The sand was sucked up into the long tubes from