East Africa, 500 BC
Wangari felt a jolt as Kimani, her white rhinoceros, stopped in mid-canter. The animal lifted his horned head to sniff the air and let out a nervous, whinny-like groan. Smoke. Wangari could smell it too, and she could see black tongues of it licking the sky from behind the grassy hill to their left. It could have been a wildfire, or it could have been local villagers clearing their grounds to make way for crops or pasture. Or it might have been what Wangari dreaded it was.
The only way to find out was to investigate it herself.
She squeezed her legs on Kimani’s flanks, her usual way of commanding him to go. He stayed put with a stubborn snort. Wangari squeezed harder, flicking the rhino’s reins, but he still would not move. Not that she could blame him, for it was not in the nature of grazing beasts to approach signs of fire. If she could not force the rhino to go, she would have to encourage him somehow.
Wangari dug into the leather pouch under the sash around her waist, plucked out a handful of ripe green jackalberries, and tossed them toward the hill. Kimani burst into a jog in the direction his rider had thrown the fruit, carrying her uphill as he sucked up and devoured as many of them as he came across. After giving her mount a playful rub on his tough and pale gray forehead, Wangari hopped off him and secured his reins to a nearby raisin bush.
Beneath the hill’s opposite slope, laying in front of a low cliff, was a cluster of leather tents, several of which had caught fire. Squinting through the haze of smoke, Wangari could make out the mutilated bodies of men strewn between the tents, giving off the putrid stench of death. There were living men scrambling throughout the campsite as well. Some poured water from vases onto the fires while others hauled their dead or wounded brethren into the tents that remained unscorched.
Seeing all the slain people made Wangari’s eyes water even more than the stinging smoke did. It was all too much like what had happened to her own village when she was a teenager.
A troop of men from the camp charged up to her, armed with spears, sickle-bladed khopesh swords, and cowhide shields with square-shaped bottom edges and semicircular tops. Clad in white loincloths and gambesons of padded linen, their mahogany-colored skin was a shade or two lighter than Wangari’s own ebony complexion, and they glared at her with eyes lined with black kohl. The cobra figurines on their gold headbands suggested that they were from the land of Kemet further north in the continent.
“Who are you?” the foremost of the Kemetian warriors asked with a growl. “You’re not one of the Ateker, are you?”
“By Ngai, not at all!” Wangari answered in her best Kemetian. “I am Wangari of the Urewe. And this is my trusty steed, Kimani.” She patted her rhino’s shoulder.
“I don’t believe it, you’re able to ride one of those beasts?” Another of the Kemetians exclaimed. “How were you even able to tame him?”
“When I was a girl, I found him orphaned in the bush as a calf and took him in. Now, what would you Kemetians be doing here in Urewe lands? And what in Ngai’s name has happened to your camp?”
“Ateker marauders attacked us from the north this morning,” the first Kemetian soldier said. “Keku, our priest of Djehuti, will explain everything. That is, if you truly are not allied with those Ateker.”
“Far from it! The Ateker are our enemies. They even ransacked my village just like how they tried to ransack your camp. I’ve been keeping them out of our lands ever since.”
“That is good to hear. Perhaps you can even help us then. Come on in!”
Wangari followed the Kemetian soldiers into the camp until they arrived at the largest tent near the center. In front of it stood a middle-aged man with a shaven scalp and a leopard’s skin on his shoulders like a mantle. He held in one hand a tall copper scepter with the top shaped like an ibis’s head with its long, curving beak. Upon laying eyes on Wangari, he bowed his head with a gentle smile.
Wangari bowed back. “I am Wangari of the Urewe. I see those Ateker have done a lot of damage here.”
“Indeed, they have!” the man said. “And they’ve carried off a week’s worth of work! But first, let me introduce myself and our purpose here. I am Keku, faithful servant of Djehuti, the god of wisdom and knowledge. And I work for the House of Life, or library, in the city of Men-Nefer back in Kemet.”
He pointed to the cliff beyond the camp’s far side. “We came here to excavate the petrified bones of the earliest human beings and their relatives. So far, we haven’t found any of those, but we have found something no less impressive. It’s the skull of a giant hyaenodont, a meat-eating creature that would have grown almost as big as your rhino over there.”
Wangari’s eyes widened. “By Ngai, I haven’t even heard of such a monster. It sounds even more terrible than a lion!”
“Thankfully, we believe they died out thousands if not millions of years ago, after which their bones have become stone. I wish I could show you myself, but that’s where the problem comes in. When the Ateker raided our camp, they carried it off. I can’t imagine what those cattle-herding barbarians plan to do with it, but it’s too valuable of a discovery to lose. I’ll spare no expense to get it back.”
Like Keku, Wangari had no idea what value the nomadic Ateker would find in an ancient skull that had turned to stone long ago. Nonetheless, she had even less love for those murderous marauders than the rest of the Urewe people, and she could see the destruction their latest attack had wrought all around her now. They could not get away with such crimes.
“You need not worry about expenses, O Priest of Djehuti,” Wangari said. “I will head north and obtain the skull for you. And I will have those Ateker who attacked you crushed underfoot!”
She raised one of the javelins from the quiver slung around her to the sky in a clenched fist, and the surviving Kemetians clapped all around her.
Once the full moon had climbed up from the savanna to the east, the calmness of the evening gave way to an echoing chant. From atop her rhino, Wangari could see an orange sliver of firelight bouncing on the crest of the hill before them, standing out against the darkening sky. As she rode toward the source of the light, she tightened her grip on her javelin, with perspiration chilling her brow despite the air’s balmy temperature.
When she and Kimani had ascended the hill, she tugged the reins to have him stop behind the cover of an acacia tree. Sitting on the plain below them was a circle of grass domes, which were the Ateker people’s idea of shelter, with the warriors in their blood-red tunics assembled in a semicircle in front of a central bonfire. They stamped their feet and banged the butts of their spears on the earth as they chanted in a hooting unison.
Behind the fire lay a flat stone altar on which lay another hunk of rock that looked to be as big as Kimani’s head. An Ateker shaman crowned with a lion-mane headdress approached this altar carrying a young goat with bound hooves, its terrified bleating almost audible over the music the warriors made. Laying the kid on the altar before the big stone, the shaman pulled out a dagger that glowed bright green and held it to the ascendant moon.
“My warriors, for too long, the Urewe woman named Wangari has harassed us with the aid of her rhinoceros,” the shaman announced. “Over the past several rains, she has taken the lives of way too many of our mightiest fighters. The time has come to bring her reign of terror to an end.
“What you see on the altar before you, encased in stone, is the skull of a beast which roamed the land before the time of men, a flesh-eater as big as the rhino Wangari rides. What I intend to do is bring this creature back to life with my Dagger of Akuj so that we can use it against her. No longer shall we fear that woman and her steed!”
He plunged his incandescent dagger into the kid, and the warriors’ chanting and stamping reached a thunderous crescendo. Tendrils of bright green smoke rose from where he had stabbed the young goat and flowed into the lump of rock on the altar, revealing the oversized dog-or hyena-like skull within it. The rock casing fractured and fell off the skull, which rose to hover over the altar with green light bursting from its sockets and sharp-toothed jaws. From behind the skull stretched a chain of vertebrae and ribs, and then shoulder, hip, and limb bones. Red flesh grew to envelop this resurrected skeleton, and then came a hide of yellow fur with black spots and stripes.
The shaman cackled as he beheld the hyaenodont standing before him. It was indeed as big as Kimani, but with a catlike body and a big doglike head. It raised its snout to smell the air and let out a howling roar that drowned out the Ateker warriors’ jubilant cheers.
Wangari had watched the scene unfold in rapt disbelief long enough. It was time to act.
She squeezed her legs on Kimani with a flick of reins, and the rhino galloped toward the Ateker encampment with his horned head lowered. He burst through the ring of grass huts, trampling one of them and splintering its wooden supports. Ateker warriors screamed as they fell beneath the creature’s bulk, their bones and spears crunching under his feet, while his horns slashed at their ranks. To further add to the carnage, Wangari chucked javelin after javelin at the enemy, with each of the iron-pointed missiles running through its victim’s body or skull.
An Ateker threw a spear of his own into the rhino’s hip. Kimani whinnied, shaking his rider off by accident. Wangari fell on the earth with a hard slam while warriors gathered around her with spears drawn, ready to rain stabbing blows on her. When one of the spears came down, she unsheathed the short, curved sword she had under her sash, chopped through the spear’s shaft, and clove down the warrior’s skull. Bursting through the opening she had created, Wangari slashed and hacked away at the Ateker closing in on her while her rhino continued crushing and goring them.
A big yellow blur flew over the bonfire and landed on Kimani. The rhino shook and bucked while the hyaenodont clung onto him with its claws and sharp teeth, tearing through his tough hide and biting into his neck. Wangari threw her spear at the monster, piercing its flank. With an infuriated yowl, the beast flung itself at her. She dodged its attack with a jump to the side, but then an Ateker grabbed her with his arm around her neck.
“We could resolve this without killing you, woman,” he said as he licked her skin. “I’m sure you’ll make a pleasant…captive.”
Wangari sank her teeth into the warrior’s forearm, tore herself free of his grapple, and shoved him into the charging hyaenodont’s path. The monster chomped onto the man and thrashed his body in its jaws, showing no awareness that the Ateker had wanted it to fight on their behalf. Perhaps it would be better to let that ancient creature terrorize them while Wangari and her rhino got away.
Through the dust the battle had kicked up, the shaman emerged, stretching his arm toward the hyaenodont while clutching his Dagger of Akuj. Both his eyes and the animal’s glowed green like the dagger.
“Do as I command!” the shaman shouted. “Attack her, not my men!”
The monster let go of the Ateker warrior it had slain and lunged at Wangari. She picked up a fallen spear and jabbed it at the hyaenodont, pricking its cheek. With a swat of its paw, the predator split her weapon into half. It snapped its jaws as she backed away while waving her compact sword at it.
She tripped over a man’s body and fell onto her back. The hyaenodont’s hot breath splashed onto Wangari, its eyes ablaze with green fire. Drool dripped from its fangs as it opened its jaws.
With an upward swing of her leg, Wangari kicked the side of the monster’s lower jaw, breaking off one of its teeth. It recoiled with a whimper, and she scrambled back onto her feet and sliced through one of the hyaenodont’s eyes with her sword. The beast retaliated with a swipe of its paw, its claws cutting across Wangari’s tunic and skin. Hot pain shot through her chest, causing her to stagger back while the creature bunched its body up in preparation for a pounce.
Before it could launch itself at her, Kimani rammed himself into the hyaenodont’s side, his horns puncturing its hide. The two giants clashed in a bloody contest of claws and fangs against horns and bulk. Even as his flesh-eating opponent drew crimson scars across his skin, Kimani kept hammering it across the ruined camp until it fell into the bonfire in the middle. The hyaenodont howled in agony as the flames enveloped its body, the green radiance in its good eye fading into nothing.
“No!” the Ateker shaman yelled. “No, it can’t be!”
He threw up his arms to curse the heavens, allowing Wangari to sprint up to him and lop off his head from behind. His Dagger of Akuj plummeted to the earth from his hand and shattered into tiny shards like glass. What little was left of the Ateker warriors ran out of the camp into the darkness of the night, screaming like terrified little boys. In her experience, that was how every confrontation with them would end. Whenever enough of them died, the surviving Ateker would lose all their famed warriors’ spirit and flee like the cowards they truly were.
A cloud of luminous green vapor drifted up into the star-dotted heavens from where the hyaenodont had burned to death. All that remained of the monster was a skull turned into stone that lay on the ground among ashes. Wangari picked it up and carried it as she remounted her rhinoceros and rode away from the Ateker camp toward the south.
“That Kemetian priest of Djehuti won’t believe the story I have to tell about this,” Wangari said to herself. “And thank you so much for saving my life back there, Kimani.”
She threw another jackalberry in front of him, and he galloped over and gobbled it up as he always would.