100 AD
A commotion buzzed at the edge of the trading souq next to the harbor of al-Mukha on the southwestern coast of Arabia. All eyes of the spectators followed a slender galley of ebony fringed with gold and inlaid ivory as it slid and anchored beside one of the earthen quays. On its billowing crimson sail glowered the gold face of a ram supporting the sun on its horns, the royal insignia of Kush.
It was by no means unusual for a Kushite vessel to dock at al-Mukha. Plenty of merchants from all sides of the Red Sea and beyond would flock to the Himyarite port to sell their wares and restock for the next trip. Yet the black galley that had come in was a rare giant that would have dwarfed the typical merchantman, never mind the puny native dhows. Above the deck glimmered the iron-bladed spears, axes, and swords of the soldiers aboard.
Once they laid the gangplank down, there descended a svelte woman whose skin was dark as the galley itself, with her short ringlets of frizzy hair reddened with ocher. The black-spotted red sashes over her bosom bound a bow and quiver to her back while a slim sword rested along her white linen skirt. From her neck hung a string of ivory fly-shaped medals that honored her as a fighting champion of Kush.
After the woman followed her entourage of spearmen with oval cowhide shields. As she and her bodyguards advanced up the quay, the audience that had watched their arrival parted to give them as broad a berth as they could, with nervous murmurs in Himyaritic passing between the spectators.
Placing both hands on her hip, the woman cleared her throat with her head held up. “I am Nensela, Admiral of Kush. You need not fear anything, for we mean you no harm. We come to al-Mukha with only two purposes: to resupply and to find information.”
From the ranks of the crowd, a white-bearded local shot his bony hand up. “What do you mean by ‘information’, my lady?”
Nensela pulled out a scroll of papyrus from her belt and unfolded it, revealing a painted illustration of a blue scorpion with claws serrated like a lobster’s. “Have any of you ever heard of the Scorpions of the Sea?”
Most of the people dispersed back to the souq while the old man squinted at the scroll, his tawny face blanching a shade paler. “By Rahmanan, who in al-Mukha hasn’t? They come here every season. Are they wanted?”
Nensela marched to him with her hand clenched on her sword’s hilt. “I hope you are not feigning ignorance with me, old man. You ought to know they’ve been a menace for generations. Why, I lost my little brother to them! So, please, tell me everything you know!”
The old Himyarite scratched the back of his keffiyeh and shook his head. “The truth is, I recall not when they last dropped by. But Hussein the pot merchant may know. He’s done business with them more than once. I’d look for him in the northeast part of the souq, over there.”
He pointed his walking stick in the direction of the souq‘s far corner.
Nensela tossed him a bag of silver. “May Amun bless you for your aid, then.”
The souq of al-Mukha was a bustling maze of people thronging between rows of stalls that were shaded with awnings of sagging cloth. Most of the traders and their customers were native Himyarites and other Arabians, along with similar-looking peoples such as Judaeans, Phoenicians, and Mesopotamians. Yet speckled amid the bronze-faced majority were darker-skinned nationalities such as Kemetians, Aksumites, and even a few Kushites, the latter of whom saluted Nensela and her men as they passed. The fragrances of perfume, fresh fruit, and cooked meat mixed in the air with the less pleasant odors of fish, musty cloth, and camels being dragged about on rope leashes.
Over the chatter of the customers and the music of trilling flutes, twanging lyres, and banging drums, Nensela heard a man yell about having the finest collection of ceramics along the Red Sea. That must have been the pot merchant the old man at the docks had cited.
Taking advantage of her feminine wile, she smiled and swayed her hips as she sauntered towards his stall. “You wouldn’t happen to be a handsome gentleman by the name of Hussein, would you?”
A toothy grin spread across the man’s pudgy face as he nodded. “Well, aren’t you a welcome sight around here! Of course, it is I, Hussein bin Abdullah. Why, did someone recommend my wares to you?”
All over his stall and beside it stood stacks of almost every ceramic form that could be found all over the known world. Wide-topped Kemetian jars inscribed with hieroglyphic texts sat beside orange-and-black Greek vases, Chinese porcelain, and native Arabian oil lamps with elongated nozzles. Nensela noticed there were also some Kushite bowls on display, distinguished from the rest by their black tops grading to red towards the bottom. She could not help but pick one of them up, for it had reminded her of the bowls her mother would make for her and her brother Akhraten to eat from when they were children.
Those were simpler, happier times. But they had fallen into the past. With them had gone Akhraten, all courtesy of the vile Sea Scorpions.
“My mother made pots like this,” Nensela said. “Where do you get these, my dear Hussein?”
Hussein’s eyes twitched sideways. “I’m afraid my suppliers wish to remain anonymous.”
“Oh, is that so? Because I’ve been informed that you have connections with those known as the Sea Scorpions…”
“What? Don’t be silly, woman!”
Nensela slammed her hands onto the stall, shaking the stacks of pottery until some of it fell and shattered on the ground. “Tell me the truth, Hussein bin Abdullah. When did you last deal with them?”
“I can’t say, but it isn’t them! I swear by Rahmanan, I would never profit from piracy!”
Nensela grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and hauled him off his feet. “Do not lie to me anymore! Tell me, for the safety of all around the Red Sea, whom you get your goods from. Do you hear me? Talk!”
Hands clapped as loud as the crack of thunder, and then the whole souq fell silent.
The one who had clapped was a stout Himyarite man, robed in black, with a white keffiyeh draped over the sides of his head. Everyone else in the souq stepped back to make way for him as he hurried towards Nensela and Hussein with a gentle smile under his gray-streaked mustache.
“There is no need for violence, my child,” he said. “Please put him down.”
Nensela obeyed with a grumble. “Please, do not call me ‘child’, for I am the Admiral of Kush. And I’ve good reason to believe this Hussein character is collaborating with pirates!”
“It is a lie, I assure you!” Hussein yelped.
“I will assess the truth of the matter later, Hussein bin Abdullah,” the black-robed man said. “Pardon me for my condescension there, O Admiral of Kush, but I am the Sheikh of al-Mukha. These are all my people, so I must implore you that you treat them with care while you are here.”
“You are the Sheikh?” Nensela bowed at the waist before him. “Then I must apologize for my behavior. I must admit I have little love for pirates, or those I am told are involved with their crimes.”
From the corner of her eye, she cast a glare at Hussein while he was picking up pieces of broken pottery. He repaid with a rude look of his own.
“You speak of pirates, Admiral? It so happens that I have information of my own on them,” the Sheikh of al-Mukha said. “And unlike that gentleman over there, I’ll be more than willing to share it…within the privacy of my own home, mind you. Why don’t you and your men come over for some refreshment after your long voyage?”
The palace of Faruq bin Hakim, the Sheikh of al-Mukha, blazed a blinding white beneath the Arabian sun, with a dome of gold crowning its highest roof. It reminded Nensela of the dazzling temples and palaces in her native Kush, but this was no less brilliant. When she was a child, she had grown up imagining the peoples of Arabia to be marauding barbarians prowling the desert for prey and sleeping in simple goat-hair tents, but people like that could never have settled down to construct an edifice like that which reared before her.
“Your home is quite beautiful, O Sheikh of al-Mukha,” she said as they passed through the palace’s arched entrance.
“Trust me, my lady, you have only seen it from the outside,” the Sheikh said. “As the old saying goes, the greatest beauty is found within.”
He led Nensela and her men into an open courtyard shaded by date palm and frankincense trees around a central pool of sparkling water, with columned arches forming galleries around the courtyard’s flanks. Vivid blues, greens, and yellows made up elaborate geometric patterns on the tiled floors.
From one of the side galleries wafted a multitude of appetizing aromas.
“Your servants sure set up lunch quick,” Nensela said.
The Sheikh laughed. “It would be more accurate to say we prepared ahead of time. The moment your ship was sighted before landing, we anticipated special guests. Why else would I have come down to the souq in the first place?”
Under the cool shade of the gallery, carpets held down by cushions surrounded a longer rug on which awaited a variety of pots, bowls, and plates holding a rich assortment of Arabian cuisine. On the Sheikh’s request, Nensela seated herself on one of the cushions, letting herself sink into its velvety plushness. From one of the bowls, she snatched a pomegranate, savoring its sweet and juicy flavor, while her men helped themselves to kebabs of mutton and beef.
The Sheikh clapped, and a veiled serving girl arrived with a pitcher from whence a stream of steam floated out. She winked and exchanged flirtatious words with some of Nensela’s Kushite guards while pouring dark brown liquid into their cups.
When Nensela received a filling of her own, she noted its unique scent. “May I ask what this is?”
“Why, we call it coffee,” the Sheikh said. “It’s a popular Aksumite beverage which livens the spirit.”
Nensela took a sip of the coffee and grimaced from its intense bitter flavor. “I guess I need to let it cool for a bit. Do you have any wine or beer around here?”
“I am afraid not. We of Himyar spurn any drink that clouds the mind. As for your coffee, why don’t you add some cream and honey to improve the flavor? It is what I do.”
Nensela shrugged. “Now, about the pirates…what do you know about them?”
The Sheikh’s expression faded to a grave frown as he lowered his head. “If you mean the Sea Scorpions…I am ashamed to admit it in front of my people, but my own connections to them run deeper than trade. You see, I bear some of the responsibility for their current prominence—though I did not intend it. Let me explain…
“Once I had a beautiful daughter named Yasmina, who should be about your age now. A good father should cherish all his children equally, but I couldn’t help but adore her as my personal favorite, even more than any of my sons. Indeed, I cared for her so much that I sought the wealthiest merchant in all of al-Mukha to have her hand in marriage.
“But how Yasmina despised him! She thought him too frail, greedy, and lecherous, and she might have been right all along. To this day, the last words she ever told me taunt my memories. ‘I would sooner die old alone than in the bed of that old dog!’ And then she ran off, never to set foot here again.”
“And what does that have to do with the Scorpions?” Nensela asked, though she had a nervous feeling brewing within.
“As you should know, it can be very difficult for an unwed woman to make a living in this unjust world,” the Sheikh continued. “At least through honest means. Instead, it seems that Yasmina turned to crime. I know this because, loath as I am to recognize this truth, my daughter has become none other than the very mistress of the Sea Scorpions.”
The banter and laughter between everyone gathered in the gallery gave way to a solemn silence. Nensela’s cup of coffee fell and broke apart on the floor, spilling the hot drink over it.
“Haven’t you at least tried to do something about her?” she asked. “Surely, you can’t let your own daughter run amok around a whole sea, burning towns and sending people and ships down to the bottom.”
The Sheikh hesitated. “The forces we have here in al-Mukha are not as strong as yours, Admiral of Kush. She’d crush them the way a tigress could crush a cur with one swat of her paw. And, I should not lie, I worry about letting a single finger harm my beloved daughter. Yet, if you must hunt her down, I can disclose to you where I believe she operates now.
“When Yasmina was a small girl, we would sail together to the island of Socotra every year to marvel at the landscape and the local dragon’s blood trees. How she admired that place like none other in the world! I also know that the waters around that isle have more pirates than the rest of this sea. So, if I were you, I would sail southeastward to Socotra.
“But make me one promise, Nensela of Kush. If you do come upon my daughter, please bring her back to me. I don’t care whether she returns alive or as a severed skull. Living or dead, I must see my child’s face one last time.”
Nensela could see the rivulets of tears flowing down the Sheikh’s weathered face. She could read into them the same sorrow of familial loss that she had experienced over her own brother. For both she and the Sheikh had lost someone they cared about to the same gang of pillaging cutthroats.
She laid a hand on the Sheikh’s and nodded. “By the grace of Amun and all the other gods of Kush, I make my promise to you. We will conquer the Scorpions of the Sea, and we will bring your daughter back, alive or dead.”
“Then may Rahmanan bless you on your adventure,” he said.
After half a week of rest and restocking at al-Mukha, the Kushite expedition left to glide down the sea towards the southeast, propelled both by marine breezes and the tireless churning of oars. The thumping of the drivers’ drums both controlled the rowers’ pace and gave them music for their singing as they worked.
The sailors ended their shanties once a voice among them hollered from the galley’s bow. “Shipwreck ahoy!”
Everyone aboard saw the pillars of smoke rising to the heavens from the flames that crackled on pieces of driftwood up ahead. Strewn among the floating shreds of sail and charred planks were corpses and hunks of human flesh that dyed the sea red. Most of the dead appeared to be mahogany-skinned Kemetians in white loincloths, with a few Greek and Aksumite sailors mixed in with them.
Nensela looked over the galley’s gunwale and noticed a seagull pecking flesh off the face of a female figure. The butchered Kemetian woman still cradled in her arms an infant bundled in cloth, its eyes shut as if in deep sleep it would never wake from. Both had a broken arrow shaft running through their bodies.
Even after losing Akhraten, the Admiral of Kush had seen death many times in her years of service. This was the first time she had seen it claim a child and its mother together. It was a horror that flooded her insides with nauseous grief.
Pinodjem, the galley’s wiry captain of middle years, walked over to Nensela to lay a hand of consolation onto her shoulder. “I’ve found no survivors. Not even one. May all of them rejoin their ancestors in the afterlife.”
“You think the pirates did this?” Nensela asked.
“It may not be the Scorpions, necessarily. These waters swarmed with brigands before them, and they will afterward. It’s not unlikely, but it’d be quite a coincidence if they were the ones leaving this on their trail.”
The gloomy peace of the moment shattered with the blaring skirl of an ivory horn. Soon after, drums rumbled, but it was not the drivers aboard the Kushite vessel that had beaten them.
A pack of greenish-blue sails, curved and pointed like sharks’ fins, cut through the smoky haze. Each had emblazoned on it the insignia of the blue scorpion which brandished its serrated claws over the waving canvas. Pushing the dhows across the water were multicolored teams of oarsmen chanting in Himyaritic with warlike intensity. Among them bristled the bows, spears, and glinting scimitars of warriors in blue tunics hooting with bloodlust on the decks.
“We are outnumbered,” Pinodjem said. “We must retreat!”
“What, like cowards? By Apedemak, we’ve some of the finest fighting men and women from anywhere in Kush,” Nensela said. “They can weather a few gangs of cutthroats.”
“I’m afraid we’re dealing with more than a few gangs. I beg of you, Admiral, don’t condemn us all to a massacre.”
Nensela gaped in horror as she looked behind her captain with widened eyes. “I don’t think we have much choice anymore!”
The instant she had spoken, the Sea Scorpions had already launched their first volley. The arrows descended in a flurry upon the Kushite oarsmen, and cries and croaks of death broke out together with the clonks of metal points onto the ship’s ebon planks. Emboldened roars rose from the pirate dhows that now circled the galley.
On Pinodjem’s order, the Kushite infantry raised their cowhide shields to form a protective shell over the deck while the surviving rowers withdrew to hide behind their comrades. Within this ring of shields, Nensela unslung her bow and quiver while commanding the archers aboard to do the same. Together, they aimed up in all directions around the galley, drawing their bowstrings taut and then sending off their revenge against the attacking pirates.
It was now the Scorpions’ turn to yell in terror and agony. Despite her conscience’s admonitions, Nensela took vindictive pleasure in hearing the brutes’ cries. All the innocents they had slaughtered in their pursuit of plunder, and all the young women they had carried off for themselves, would be avenged.
Her glee ended when she heard the thud of Pinodjem’s body collapsing onto the deck. A pirate’s arrow, sent forth in their next volley, had punctured him in the breast.
“Don’t…try to save…me,” he stammered with a wince as he struggled to pull the shaft out. “We are…doomed!”
More arrows flew between the Kushite galley and the Scorpions’ dhows, with each of the latter’s showers taking down more defenders than the last. As men fell around her, Nensela’s arm muscles stretched and burned with strain in her frenzy to shoot down as many of the encroaching sea brigands as possible. Even her fingertips bled with scrapes from plucking away at her bowstring.
Another of the corsairs’ arrows zipped straight towards her. Bolting away, Nensela slipped over the blood-slicked deck and fell onto her back. She shut her eyes and mouthed a prayer to Amun, the highest god of Kush, that she would not suffer the same fate as her captain and so many of their men.
The ivory horn sounded again, and the blizzard of arrows had stopped at last. Nensela, to her surprise, felt Pinodjem’s rough hand grab her own and pull her back onto her footing. He no longer had the arrow embedded in his wound.
“A crewmate got it out,” he said. “But no time to celebrate.”
The galley lurched between port and starboard as two of the Scorpions’ dhows banged against its hull on opposite sides. After flinging grappling hooks over the gunwales, the pirates laid their gangplanks between the vessels and began to pour in for the kill.
Ripping out her sword, Nensela growled her foulest curse. “Come and get us, sea-jackals!”
All the pain and strain in the Admiral of Kush’s muscles vanished beneath the scalding tide of her fury. Pirate blood sprayed and spattered from her iron blade as she hacked her way throughout the enclosing horde, breaking through scimitars and cleaving through limbs, skulls, and wicker shields. The stench of the entrails she and her remaining defenders spilled refueled her valor. Apedemak, the lion-masked god of war, could not have slaughtered these seafaring devils with more brutal passion.
A man’s head flew past her eyes. It was not one of the corsairs. No, it was her captain Pinodjem! Nensela froze in cold, mortified shock until the blunt hilt of a pirate’s mace rammed onto her brow.
When she lashed back at her attacker, he sidestepped away and delivered an even harder blow to the back of her neck. Sparks flashed in her vision as she toppled over onto the deck again, her sword flung out of her hand.
Somebody snatched her weapon before she could. “Looking for this?”
The young man who towered before Nensela, clutching her bloodied sword while crunching her captain’s skull beneath a sandaled foot, was a Kushite in the same blue tunic as the rest of the pirates, with the same lapis-lazuli scorpion hanging from his necklace. Yet there seemed an uncanny familiarity about the features of his sneering face, despite the diagonal scar that streaked across it.
“Who are you?” Nensela asked.
The man knelt to her with a sinister smile. “You don’t remember me, sister? Such a shame. I’d thought you’d delight in this little family reunion.”
An arrow through her heart would have struck the Admiral of Kush with a much duller pain than what she had heard. She mouthed all manner of vile curses against the one she thought she had lost all this time, but she could not force a single word out of her lips.
“Fortunately for you, sister, I’m going to spare you.” Akhraten said. “On the condition that you come with us to Socotra. Suffice to say that Yasmina will be very delighted to see you in person.”
Nensela lunged at her brother, but two pirates locked their arms around hers and kept her back. All she could do was snarl.
“Why does that sea bitch need me?” she asked. “Why don’t you simply kill me this instant?”
Akhraten paused. For a fleeting moment, the wicked grin on his face seemed to fade. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taken by surprise when a certain Hussein of al-Mukha spoke of your name before me. You wouldn’t happen to have met the man, would you?”
In her paralysis, Nensela could not even nod.
“Regardless, all I had to do from that point onward was lure you in with a little scene of massacre to pull your heartstrings,” Akhraten said. “And so here we meet again, my sister.”
It was not only shock that overwhelmed Nensela like a tsunami cresting over a beach. It was shame. So many lives had been lost because of her. And it had not only been her fighting men who paid the price.
Before following her brother back onto his dhow, she cast a final look over to where the Kemetian woman and her baby still floated on the surface of the sea, now accompanied by the bodies of many new dead. The next time Nensela blinked, both mother and child had vanished into the deep.
A forest of dragon’s blood trees, all shaped like toadstools with spiky green foliage at the top, hemmed in the clearing where the weathered megaliths stood like colossal gravestones. No one, not even the native Soqotri whose stone huts squatted alongside the island’s coast, knew what bygone people had quarried and erected these tongues of limestone some uncounted centuries ago. Nor could anyone read the lines of faded inscriptions that ran down their height, if they even were writing at all.
All the local population of Socotra knew of the ancient gathering of giant stones was that a most unsavory motley of men and women had set up their own town of goat-hair tents and rude hovels among them, with one larger tent striped with gold and red sprawling across the very center of the place. It was toward this tent that Akhraten brought his sister, her wrists bound together with rope so coarse that it cut her skin.
Two burly copper-skinned guardsmen, both recruited from the nearest Soqotri village, opened the tent’s flaps to let him and his captive in. Out drifted the fragrances of incense and sweetened wine that contrasted with the more putrid odors of sweat, old beer, and human feces that pervaded the rest of the pirate settlement. Yet it was the more pleasant scents that sent the coldest shiver down Nensela’s back.
Oil lamps on teakwood counters radiated firelight that glimmered on the gold, silver, and bronze furnishings filling up the tent’s interior. A scrawny old Indian man, whose umber-colored back bore a hideous mass of crisscrossing scars and welts, moaned an almost plaintive song in his native language while playing the sitar on his lap. He sat cross-legged next to an ebony sofa, cushioned with crimson upholstery, on which reclined a young Arabian woman in a dark blue tunic and hijab.
The Arabian girl rose to an upright posture and flashed an eager grin. “And who has my trustiest captain reeled in today?”
“This would be Nensela, the Admiral of Kush,” Akhraten said. “We caught her right before she could attack us, dear Yasmina.”
Yasmina stroked Nensela’s chin with her finger. “Admiral of Kush, you say? She does indeed appear to be your finest catch, in more ways than one. Not only would she fetch us all a lifetime’s worth of coin…”
“Don’t you even think about it!” Nensela growled. “I’d sooner take my own life than let myself be sold away!”
Yasmina’s cackle would have frightened a hyena. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t sell you to anyone. At least not in the usual way. But think, O Admiral, of what the Qore of Kush himself would pay for your release! And I daresay that a lady as comely as yourself would make great entertainment for my men in the meantime…”
The revulsion rose in Nensela’s insides like a tide of foul liquid. She could find no kind words to say to that seaborne demon. For that matter, even the vilest curses Nensela could imagine would inflict less damage than her captor deserved. Yet neither would the Admiral of Kush let Yasmina and her jackals abuse her anymore, much less in the way men so often abused women.
“If any of your men so much as touches me for his ‘entertainment’, I will bite his manhood off like a bitch, mark my words!” Nensela said.
Yasmina tapped her lip with her finger in thought. “Nah, that wouldn’t do. But there are more ways to entertain men than with your body. Akhraten, have her taken to the dragon pit this evening.”
“But, but Yasmina, she could die—” Akhraten said.
“Oh, she need not live for us to profit from her. Now, do as I command, or I’ll have your title stripped!”
It was with a confused shrug that Akhraten dragged his sister back out of the tent.
It was at the twilight of evening when they dumped Nensela into the pit, her body throwing up dust as she landed on the sandy floor. Mounted torches burning along the pit’s upper rim bathed it with reddish orange light like a scene from the underworld, with the encirclement of spectators jeering at her with the torturous cruelty of demons. Some even pelted her with pebbles or slimy pieces of half-chewed food, as if these vulgar corsairs had not already buried the Admiral of Kush with enough layers of insult.
It was not unlike how she had always imagined the arenas of Rome, where men fought beasts or each other to appease the crowds. Apparently, the Romans, as depraved as they were said to be, were not the only culture in the world who reveled in witnessing butchery. Would Nensela’s own people have been above it? Perhaps not.
As she pushed herself back up, her palm pressed onto the roof of a weathered skull, one of the innumerable bones scattered over the pit. Even with no flesh remaining on any of them, a faint effluvium of decay and blood flooded the area, mingling with the more pungent stench coming off white-coated pellets of dung. From within a wide rectangular opening in the pit’s stone-lined wall, behind a gate of wooden stakes, Nensela could make out the shimmer of scales and the twinkle of tiny eyes.
Yasmina had called this place the dragon pit. Were dragons not creatures of make-believe, belonging in old myths and legends right alongside sphinxes and griffins? Or had there lain a grain of truth to those stories after all?
Something bounced on the pit floor right next to Nensela’s feet. It was her old sword. Standing over the edge of the pit behind her was Akhraten. For once since they had first reencountered one another, her brother was not glowering or sneering down at her. If anything, there was an almost remorseful gleam in his gaze.
Someone from the audience on the opposite side shouted above the din, and the gate creaked as men pulled it up with ropes. All the watching pirates stamped their feet while chanting in repetition the phrase, “Tananin kumudu!” Himyaritic for, “Dragons of Komodo!”
From the darkness within the opening that had been behind the grate, a pair of forked tongues lashed out to lick the air. Afterward emerged scaly heads on long wrinkly necks attached to thick low-slung bodies, each of which advanced on four sprawling limbs which scarred the sand with saber-like talons. Behind them brushed serpentine tails over the arena floor. In general form, these two creatures resembled the monitor lizards which scavenged along the Nile River back in Kush, yet both seemed as immense as young crocodiles, their bodies longer than men stood tall.
Wait a moment, the Admiral of Kush had heard of creatures like these. They were supposed to live on islands in the distant east beyond India, preying on deer, buffalo, and even human beings. They must have been brought halfway across the world to end up here on Socotra!
Once they had crawled out of the darkness, the dragons accelerated into a dash, their speed frightening for such huge reptiles. Nensela grabbed her sword and sidestepped to escape their path. One of them nonetheless got close enough to chomp onto her gauntlet of gold bracelets, the pressure of its jaws squeezing down on her forearm as it pulled onto her. The second lizard circled around to lunge at her from the left.
Nensela banged her elbow into its open maw and punched the other in the snout. As the first dragon withdrew, she stabbed it in the neck right below the jugular. Its claws slashed across her breast in retaliation, shooting sharp pain through her. She drew her sword-arm back for another thrust until the second beast tugged her away, its knife-like teeth piercing the skin on her upper arm.
Something sizzled where it had bitten her, seeping deep into her flesh. Were these monsters venomous like snakes? Or was it the filthiness of their carnivorous mouths that was infecting her? The cheering of the onlookers above added to Nensela’s suffering, taunting her with the assurance that she would not be able to fight her way out.
She would not give up then. Not for their entertainment.
Kicking her heel into the dragon’s flank, the Admiral of Kush twirled herself free and drove her sword through its eye, slicing through bone into its little brain. The big lizard’s body convulsed before it fell limp, with a stream of scarlet staining the sand under its head. The crowd fell silent as they gawked at Nensela with their jaws dropped. She was ready to answer them with a defiant shriek of triumph when the remaining dragon pounced on her from behind.
As she fell beneath it, her weapon rolled out of her grip. She stretched her arm to retrieve it until a flick of the reptile’s tail batted it far out of her reach. She could only squirm as the dragon savaged her with its teeth and claws, her ribcage buckling under its weight.
A whooshing whistle through the air, punctuated by the clonk of something piercing scaled flesh. The dragon tumbled off Nensela with an arrow in its jugular. After another silent pause, the spectators booed and shook their fists in fury while they all faced Akhraten, who had a bow in his hand.
He slung it over his back and tossed a rope down the height of the pit, waving his hand at Nensela toward himself. “Get up here, sister!”
She hurried up the rope to where Akhraten stood. “What in Amun’s name is up with you?”
“Now’s not the time. We must leave now. Follow me!”
Together they raced away from the pit toward the edge of camp. Whipping out their weapons, the rest of the pirates coagulated into a vast wave that swept after them, trampling their own tents like antelopes stampeding over grass. The curses they roared, and the thunder of their footsteps, echoed in the night even after the pair had lost sight of them.
Still the two ran together, following the rising moon as the dragon’s blood trees flashed past them. Not even Nensela’s wounds, or any venom that the dragons might have injected into her, could slow her down.
“Where are we going?” she asked in mid-stride.
“To the nearest native village,” Akhraten said. “And then—”
Together, they plummeted into the blackness beneath their feet.
It was not a far fall, but they landed on a hard surface of stone. After mustering enough strength to stand up again, Nensela felt around her body to ensure that no bones had broken and then helped her brother onto his own feet. White moonlight shining from the very aperture they had fallen through was all that allowed them to see around themselves.
They were in a tunnel held up by a single line of megaliths, smaller cousins of the ones that had stood around the pirates’ camp. Behind Akhraten, the passageway continued into darkness that stretched for however long. Behind Nensela, it terminated into an alcove wherein rested a big slab of rock hewn into the crude approximation of a female figure striped with faded ocher lines. In the knob that represented the sculpture’s head, an open mouth had been excavated, with conical seashells suggesting sharp teeth.
Nensela stepped back from the snarling statue, the sweat on her face cold as the night.
“This must have been some kind of underground temple,” Akhraten said. “And that might have been their goddess, whomever these people were.”
Voices murmured. Nensela jumped in her sandals with a yelp. Were the ancients who created this place still haunting it?
Akhraten held one finger over his lips while pointing to the gash in the ceiling. “Hush, it’s them.”
Yellow firelight glowed down the open crack, with the corsairs’ scruffy faces peering over its edge and muttering among themselves in Himyaritic. Nensela and Akhraten both retreated deeper into the darkness, staying still and holding their breath. They stayed put even after the torchlight faded away, waiting until after the last of the pirates’ footsteps had died down.
Once confident the coast had cleared, Akhraten cut out strips of his tunic with the scimitar he had by his hip and wrapped them around Nensela’s wounds. He then tossed the remainder of the garment off himself, revealing a proper Kushite loincloth underneath it.
“All these years…you became one of them,” Nensela said. “Why?”
“I didn’t have much choice,” Akhraten said. “I could be either their captive or their crewmate. Most other pirates don’t even offer the latter as an option.”
“But still…how could you? Our mother and father raised us better than that. Why, if they were to see what you’ve become…”
Akhraten sighed with his head held low. “I know, and nothing I can do can make up for what I’ve done before. But, still, I never wanted you dead.”
“Neither did that ‘mistress’ of yours, and yet here you are, betraying her as you betrayed our family, our kingdom. Why, brother? What’s the matter with you?”
“You must understand, she never cared whether you were alive or dead. Suppose those lizards did kill you in that pit. So what? If she can get our Qore to pay her off first, she wouldn’t necessarily have to keep her end of the bargain. I’ve known her to cheat like that.”
“So, you turned your back on her, and all the Sea Scorpions, to save me, your sister. This, this doesn’t make any sense to me. But I owe you nonetheless.”
Nensela opened her arms to embrace her brother, but he backstepped from her with his hands blocking her. “You don’t owe me anything. All I want is for you and me to get off this damned island and come home. You can turn me in when you do. I know I deserve it.”
“No, what you deserve is your head off, traitor!”
It was Yasmina who had spoken last. Her glaring eyes scintillated like a demon from the light of the torches her mob of corsairs held behind her. She unsheathed her saber and pressed its tip into Akhraten’s neck, drawing blood.
“You know the score, my captain,” the mistress of the Sea Scorpions said. “Give her to me, unless you value her life over your own.”
“And what do you plan to do with her?” Akhraten said. “You should know she’s more useful to you alive than dead.”
“If I were an honest bargainer, yes. But since when were we ever honest? Besides, the other Scorpions feel they’ve been cheated in seeing her survive those dragons. It’s only fair to them that I make up for it.”
“You want to show them bloodshed, don’t you? Alright, then, bloodshed they shall have—right here at this very moment!”
With a sweep of his blade, Akhraten struck Yasmina’s off himself. He dove for another attack, but she parried him with an alacrity that matched his own. The tunnel reverberated with the ringing of their swords against each other and the hooting of her pirates, which Nensela countered by shrieking cheers in favor of her brother.
After several clashes, Yasmina cut across her former captain’s gullet. He crumpled onto his knees.
“One more chance,” she said.
Even as he coughed out blood, Akhraten narrowed his eyes at his opponent with bared teeth. “Kill me instead. That’ll give your men the blood they crave.”
Yasmina grinned. “Will do.”
After one more stroke of hers, his head went off. Even after its parting, his steely defiance did not fade from his face. It remained as if it had been sculpted that way from the beginning.
Even as tears washed down her face, Nensela did not pause in the face of shock. Around her, the world blurred into a red haze, with her brother’s sword shining through it as she scraped it up and hacked away at his murderer in a flurry of continuous motion. Sparks flew with every screeching peal of iron against iron. Blood spurted with every squeal and snarl. It swirled around them along with the dust in a maelstrom of violence.
When the storm subsided, Yasmina bint Faruq, mistress of the Scorpions of the Sea, lay lifeless in a gleaming red pool at the feet of the ancient idol. The Admiral of Kush nudged her body forward with her foot as a final offering to whatever deity that sculpture had represented.
Silence hung within the tunnel as the Scorpions of the Sea gaped at Nensela, their faces paling by a shade or two. It did not last long. Like a flash flood in a ravine, they came at her with a deafening uproar, weapons drawn and thrashing in vengeful bloodlust. They had her trapped between them and the idol.
The only way out would be above them.
Climbing onto the old statue, Nensela sprang onto one of the megalithic columns, embracing its upper half right above the pirates’ reach. From there she leaped to the next column down the line, and then to the next onward, much like a chimpanzee would hop between the branches of jungle trees. As she jumped from column to column, the brigands continued to chase her down below, their torches letting her see up ahead.
With every leap, her confidence swelled, powering her to accelerate until she reached the tunnel’s exit. Having thus escaped, she would need to keep the pirates from pursuing her further. She could not keep running forever.
What she could do, instead, was trap them in there.
Nensela hauled up one of the numerous boulders which were strewn around outside the cave, her already exhausted muscles stretching with intense aching under its mass. With what remained of her womanly strength, she hurled it into the foremost of the megalithic columns, toppling it over. The ceiling it had once supported cracked and crumbled until it broke apart into a downpour of rock and soil, blocking the way out as it collapsed. The muffled screaming of men behind it gave way to the crunching of bone.
The Scorpions of the Sea, for so long the terror of these waters, had been vanquished at last, as the Admiral of Kush had set out to do. She had avenged her brother, whom they had stolen away when she was a child.
And she did not feel the gleeful surge of triumph she had expected all her life. Instead, Nensela could only plop down onto the ground, crushed by pain, exhaustion, and grief.
When Nensela returned to the souq of al-Mukha, it was not in a gold-fringed galley of ebony with the insignia of Kush on its red sail. Instead, it was in a humble dhow she had borrowed from one of the Soqotri villages, even smaller than the ones the Himyarites used. The people she passed as she made her way to the Sheikh’s palace looked at her not with fearful awe or respect, but with stupefied pity. Even Hussein bin Abdullah, who was still hawking his ceramic wares at his stall, clicked his tongue while shaking his head as she went by.
Even long after recovering from the dragons’ venom and everything else, she did not have the will or the strength to give him the thrashing he deserved. His business would suffer without the Scorpions, regardless.
When she reached the palace, the Sheikh let her in without any further questions. He had prepared for her a meal much as the one he had given her and her retinue of guards the day they first met, except the coffee was much sweeter than before. Or so it seemed, after everything Nensela had been through.
“Forgive me, but I presume your mission did not go as well as you hoped?” the Sheikh asked her while they were eating.
All Nensela could do was drop a lapis-lazuli scorpion into his hand. “It was your daughter’s. She…had no desire to come home. I am sorry, but—”
The Sheikh placed his hand over hers with a gentle smile, despite the moisture welling up in his eyes. “At least you brought something of hers back. May Rahmanan have mercy on her, no matter what she has done. And what of the Scorpions of the Sea?”
“They are no more. But we lost so much…and I lost a brother…may Amun watch over them in the afterlife.”
“I know your pain, young Admiral of Kush. I feel it, too. What matters is that you have ridden the sea beside us of its greatest pestilence. For at least a few more seasons, so many can sail these waters in peace. Is that not worth our sacrifice?”
Nensela thought back to the Kemetian woman and her infant, along with all the others she had seen floating in the water before her confrontation with the Scorpions. If nothing else, no more would suffer their fate for some time, whether it would be a few seasons or many more. Nor would anyone else have their siblings abducted at a young age and raised into a cutthroat life of brigandry.
Sooner or later, of course, piracy would return to dye the waters red. But even a brief respite was better than none.
The Sheikh Faruq bin Hakim held his cup of coffee up. “To peace on the Red Sea, for as long as it lasts.”
Nensela followed in suit, clanking her own cup against his. “For as long as it lasts.”
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