The Fires of Beltane

By Richard Quarry

In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Gildas Wainwright revives an ancient religion in order to give the people of an isolated town the faith they need to carry on. But the thing about ancient religions, they tend to return to their roots.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215288962

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The Fires of Beltane

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Quarry

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

The Fires of Beltane

About the Author

Man Of Many Turnings

The Fires of Beltane

It took three men to hoist the transmission onto Llyr’s shoulder. The town’s one remaining spring scale showed the blocky chunk of metal, a bulbous cone shape polished to shine for the occasion, weighed one hundred and sixty-seven pounds. In the old days two men could have managed to lift it easily, but that good old red American blood wasn’t pumping as red as it used to anymore.

Bare-chested and already sweating in a heat so intense you could feel it throb though barely past April, Llyr leaned under his burden, then straightened. An old grease-stained blanket lay folded on his shoulder to pad his skin both from the hardness and the heat of the metal. He carried the transmission narrow end forward, the wide end, open to expose the complex of gears, expanding out behind his head.

He was last of the boys to undergo the trial. All the town’s healthy eighteen-year olds, nine of them, had drawn lots to determine the order. Taran Lundgren, big and blond but slightly rickety in the knees, was the current leader at fourteen circuits of the junkyard.

The yard, a mass grave of cars and pickups crammed cheek to jowl, was the secret to Dunbar’s Crossing’s prosperity. An endless source of metal, though you had to shovel away a lot of sand to get at it.

You shall beat your pickups into plowshares.

Of course there were even more trucks and cars lying dormant out among the farms and scattered houses, but who was going to push them all the way into town? And people didn’t travel to the outlying areas much anyway, except in armed groups pushing wheelbarrows as they gathered what little firewood remained from the few spindly trees. They worked in groups less on the off chance of running into marauders than to make sure no one was sneaking off to horde the wood on their own. Of course if there were any marauders prowling the low, shifting sand dunes that surrounded the town, you could bet they’d be hungry.

Llyr grimaced as the men took their hands away and he attemped his first step. His knees quivered, sending him side-stepping unsteadily. Two of the other boys had simply quit at this point; would Gildas’ son prove another such weakling?

Gildas Wainwright had a sickening moment of doubt, almost immediately dispelled. Llyr had grown up sincere, hard-working, and eager to please. One of those children who appeared born with an extra quotient of maturity. And an idealist. A lot like his mother, who he’d never known.

Gildas, in contrast, was more of a pragmatist. After the drought and the duststorms and the Big Silence, he became the town’s leader because while several other men wanted the role, not a one of them had any idea what to do with it but try and boss others around. They