Daedalus Krane and the Hand of God

Chapter 4

'If one candle reflects the hopes of a single soul, a million capture the dreams of an entire people.'  

Flo Braithwaite  

Daedalus turned away from the amber sun, his body forewarning him of something far away, an approaching danger. He could feel its heat against his back, his shirt was stuck wet and clammy to the skin across his shoulders. Shielding his eyes with his arm the skin wrinkled up around the corners of his eyes as he drew them into slits and searched the dust blown flats beyond the scrubland. Wavering mirages played with the horizon, it folded and creased, showing itself for an instant and then like a magical effect disappearing into a grey ashen powder void. A rusty ragged red chalk mark crawled languidly across the meeting point of earth and sky and then disappeared. When it reappeared it was stronger and bolder. A resolute strip of bloodshot ribbon stretched over the edge of the world.  

Flo started to speak but Daedalus cut her off with a slight wave of his good hand. Flo could not see what Daedelus was looking at. She looked at Azad who shrugged his long arms and squinted into the dazzling pallidity.  

Daedalus watched as the wavering thickening ribbon rolled, fluttered and distended itself, breaking into rolling balls of rubicund and white extending its spread further still.  

Flo could see it now and stepped up next to Daedalus, pulling herself to her full height next to his sturdy fame and resting her hand on her colt. The children had stopped giggling, pushing and shoving to get close to Azad. They turned and fell silent, watching apprehensively the advancing spectres.  

The shapes grew incessantly in the shimmering haze graduating from the spectral blurring of moths wings, to soft white feathers of light upon which vermilion figures glinted and flashed in the gasps of the ethereal rays of late afternoon sun. Daedelus could feel the ground shaking under his feet long before he could discern the figures.  

He knew the feeling well -the rhythmic beat of galloping horses.  

Sixteen horsemen emerged like phantoms rising from the ground below them and the swirling dust flumes the horses hooves threw up around them.  

As they closed Daedalus could make them out more clearly. Each man astride a white charger was adorned in a highly polished steel breastplate that sucked in the sun's rays and spat them back out in sprays of glints and flashes, a scarlet jacket with high braided gold collars and tanned riding boots caulked powder white. The ground shook under them as they closed.  

The horsemen came to a halt in a wide arc in front of them. Now they could see them, crimsoned cloaked, borne on a fine white stallions with tall silk ochre turbans wrapped tight against the choking dust, all bearing a single steel tipped lance.  

The crowd shrank close together around them, intimidated, afraid.  

Their leader nudged his horse one step forward and pulled down the mask from his face. He was burlier than the rest, and an expert horseman to boot. In one hand he held his lance, the other rested casually on the top of his thigh. He had no need to use the reigns. His belt was stuffed with knives and pistols, a large cutlass flapped against his horses flanks, over his shoulders were slung two battered well used bandoliers. His face held an enormous bulbous nose under which hung a wild curling moustache that spread from ear to ear and rambled out three inches each side of his head. One eye was an unseeing milky white, the other, bright as a silver bubble on a stream bobbed this way and that as it took them and the scattered burning remnants behind them. On his high saddle pommel hung leather straps carrying three leather water bottles, his horse's harnesses clinked with brass charms, fat naked female deities, strange multi-limbed gods, the all seeing eye of Horus. The horses around him shuddered and danced, snorted, and butted the vapid air, flecks of sweat foam rose on their necks like the foam on a windblown beach.