An acrid haze floated over the camp. Makena passed through it with her stomach knotting with nausea. Dark torrents of smoke billowing from the burning tents watered her eyes. Spatters of bloodshed, reeking to the heavens of a coppery odor, stained the sand red.
There lay all over the ruined camp the bodies of men and women, young and old, their once tawny skin having faded into an ashen pallor. Even infants lay in their mothers’ arms with faces still contorted in voiceless, unmoving cries. Javelins transfixing many of the dead testified to an atrocity at the hands of men. Plucking out one of the javelins, Makena recognized its leaf-bladed tip as being of Habeshan make.
She curled her lips into a snarl even as remorse pierced her heart. The Habesha were not her people, but as another people of eastern Afrika, they shared the same black skin and coiled hair as her own Azanians despite their narrower noses and thinner lips. By attacking these hapless Ahrab nomads with such brutality, the Habesha had made Makena regret her own distant kinship with them.
A wide road of human tracks, mixed with those of camels and sheep, led out of the camp southward through the desert. Upon reading the centermost line of tracks the way a scholar could read a scroll, Makena discerned that the walkers had laid it with a slow, shuffling gait. Some of the tracks’ dimensions matched the feet of women and children as well as men. Such were the telltale signs of captives of all ages and genders being herded in a line like cattle for slaughter. If Makena’s suspicions were correct, their fate would be no better.
She unslung her bow with a determined grip. Makena had traveled to the sandy Ahrabiyyan peninsula in search of an ancient treasure, the treasure of old Ubar, and she had hoped the people in this camp would guide her to that fabled ruin. Much as fate had banished all hope of that, so had it banished any thought of treasure from her mind. Who were left of these people needed justice. They needed their freedom back. Only Makena could give them that out in these barren wastes.
Beneath the sweltering white eye of Jua the sun, Makena followed the trail of tracks that undulated over the dunes. She maintained a half-crouched posture to avoid appearing conspicuous on the treeless landscape. Thankfully, while her red and bronze-colored halter top and wraparound skirt might have blazed in bright contrast with her dark skin, they blended into the desert’s earthy hues. Even her jewelry of gold, copper, and ivory did not gleam that much brighter than some of the grains of sand which twinkled beneath Jua’s light.
The scuffing of many footsteps on the desert floor rose from what had earlier been pure silence except for the whispering wind. Makena sank onto all fours, ignoring the burn of heated sand on her knees and hands, and crept up a dune beside the trail. As she peeked above the dune’s crest, she was careful not to expose too much of her face from behind.
What she saw below the dune’s opposite slope stabbed her in the heart. Habeshan men wrapped in white sanafil garments marched with spears and shotel swords on both sides of the line of captives. Wooden yokes on their necks and ropes on their wrists bound the poor Ahrabs to one another in a chain of misery, with their stolen livestock trailing behind. Some of the Habeshans prodded their victims with their weapons, drawing blood, to keep up the pace.
A young Ahrab woman stumbled onto her knees, bringing the horrible caravan to a halt. Even from her distant vantage, Makena could see the glisten of tears on the woman’s cheeks. A Habesha grabbed her by her headscarf, exposing her wavy raven hair, and slapped her.
“You keep slowing us down, woman, and I’ll give you worse than a whipping!” he barked.
“Can I join in on her punishment, then?” another slaver asked. He and the others snickered, as did the first Habesha. Knowing the nature of wicked men, Makena did not need to guess what they meant with that loathsome joke.
Her pity and disgust melted into a rage hotter than the desert sun. These Habeshan jackals were so vile, and yet Makena knew their cruelty would merely be the first iniquity the enslaved would have to suffer. Across the sea they would be shipped, crammed into a cage below deck, and then sold like chattel at some coastal bazaar, never to return to their homeland. That her own Azanian people partook in this same trade of human lives as the Habesha lay a burden of shame on Makena’s conscience.
She would not stoop to that level herself.
As the slavers gathered around the fallen Ahrab woman, running their filthy fingers through her hair with predatory laughter, Makena drew an arrow against her bow. One Habesha even tugged at the neckline of the woman’s kaftan with a smack of his lips loud enough for Makena to hear.
Makena let her arrow soar straight into the back of the brute’s skull. He dropped face-first onto the sand without so much as a death rattle.
The other slavers stood there gawking at their slain fellow while Makena readied another arrow. Her second shot was as easy as the first, since it took advantage of their shock. She was preparing her third arrow when the Habesha shook themselves out of their stupor and charged up the dune brandishing their weapons. They accelerated up the slope faster than Makena had expected, but she stood put twanging away at their ranks. Slaver after slaver fell and tumbled down the sand with an arrow in their breast or brow.
Her momentum crashed when a tall Habesha reached the dune’s summit and slashed his shotel at her. With one backstep, Makena dodged the hooked blade by a slim breadth. She lost her balance and toppled onto her back, sliding down the dune’s rear slope while her remaining arrows spilled out of their quiver. The Habesha warriors descended after her like a roaring avalanche of iron and bloodlust.
A slaver grabbed Makena’s left arm with a squeezing grip. She flung her right fist into his face, flattening his nose with a crack, and tore herself free to retrieve her bow. Even with her arrows gone missing, its stave proved useful for conking the Habesha’s senses out of him with a swift blow to his head.
“You think you can defeat us all, woman?” another slaver growled. “You’ve lost all your arrows, and you’re outnumbered. You might as well surrender!”
“I bet she would fetch more at the bazaar than any of those Ahrabs,” a third said with a sinister cackle.
Makena slung her bow away and plucked out from its scabbard her sidearm, an iron seme dagger. She jabbed and swiped it at the enclosing Habesha to keep them back. One of them thrust a spear at her. In a flashing arc, she chopped its point off. A second lunged with his shotel. Sparks like little stars shot from their blades’ echoing clang, followed by a spurt of blood as the seme ran through his neck.
Even as Makena sliced away at her attackers, more Habesha were coming down the dune. There were too many of those dogs for Makena to kill them all, and strain was eating away at her strength and agility. She could not keep up the fight for much longer.
A slaver deflected her seme with a strike of his own blade. Makena staggered back, rattled by the percussion. She ducked another Habesha’s attack from behind and drove her weapon into the first one’s abdomen. Leaping over his body, she ran out of the fray with a kick of dusty sand behind her. Warriors hurled javelins and taunts in their pursuit as she wove her way between the dunes. Her calves burned like a savanna brushfire, but the wind cooled her enough to aid her persistence. More than anything else, it was the fear of capture that drove her forward.
After what seemed like half the day’s passing, Makena’s pace broke up into an awkward wobble with labored panting. Despite her fatigue, she was grateful that the Habesha were no longer anywhere to be seen behind her. They must have given up the chase long ago. She took a swig from her waterskin, washing away the dryness in her throat, and plopped herself onto an outcropping of rock for rest.
It was not an isolated boulder, for there were several like it lying nearby. They were not strewn around with a natural randomness but rather formed straight and angled rows like the bases of architectural columns. No, these were the bases of columns! There were also lines of rubble forming squares and rectangles, and standing here and there were taller pillars of rock with a weathered resemblance to statues of men and desert creatures.
Makena had forgotten all about it, but she had found it at last. The ruins of old Ubar, the once grand city of deepest Ahrabiyya, lay all around her.
Overlooking the ruin was a towering, solitary butte with the columned facade of a temple or palace chiseled into its side. Two lion sculptures guarded a rectangular doorway at the facade’s bottom that had a slab of rock blocking it. They watched with unblinking eyes and open fanged maws as Makena walked over to the rock-hewn edifice and wedged her bloodied seme into the crease between the stone door and frame. If Ubar’s legendary riches lay anywhere in its ruins, it would have to be in this marvelous structure.
It cost a portion of her partly restored strength, but Makena was able to pry the door open and push it aside with a coarse grind over the sandy floor. Or was that the guardian lions’ growling at her intrusion? One could never be too sure with these haunted places. After tapping one of the sculptures to make sure it had not come to life, Makena stepped into the temple, appreciating the coolness within even if there was a chill inching up her spine.
The temple was not completely dark inside. Six dots of red light pulsated from the far end of the front vestibule, bright enough to reveal reliefs carved into the walls that must have depicted scenes from ancient Ubar’s corpus of myths and legends. Makena could have sworn the eyes of the people in those reliefs were following her movement down the hall. She forced herself to ignore them as she approached the red glow.
The vestibule opened into a spacious chamber filled with treasure. There were mountains of gold coins and ingots, gemstones of every color, and sweeping tusks of ivory which had stayed white as mountaintop snow for who knew how many ages. Bracelets of gold, necklaces of pearl and silver, and sparkling tiaras would have made even the world’s most glamorous queens seethe with envy. For that matter, one handful of this wealth would make Makena richer than the ruling Mfalme of Azania. Her childhood of struggling in the streets of Rhapta, the Azanian capital, would recede further into the past than it had before.
Carved into the rear wall above the piles of treasure was a triad of female idols whose glowing red eyes were the source of the room’s light. Makena recognized them as the three goddesses who watched over old Ubar, Al-Lat, Manat, and Al-Uzza. The story went that it was their displeasure that wiped out the city in the first place. It was with a wary eye on them that Makena reached her hand to the nearest gold ingot.
It singed her fingertips like heated metal. The chamber quaked, raining dust and fragments of rock from the ceiling, and the glow of the goddesses’ eyes flared brighter like a burst of flame.
“How dare you attempt to steal from the mothers of Ubar, mortal!” three female voices shrieked with echoing unison. “You shall suffer for your transgression!”
The voices merged into a leonine roar. One of the great treasure piles shook, shedding pieces of precious metal and jewelry as something emerged from within. It was the head of a giant lion with a mane of pure lustrous gold. Baring fangs of steel in its maw, the oversized cat launched itself at Makena. She jumped aside, but one of its steel claws grazed her arm. Her flesh sizzled with pain.
She slashed her seme at the gold lion’s flank. Her blade bounced off its fur without leaving even a scratch. She and the beast engaged in a dance of ducking and dodging around the chamber, their maneuvers splashing treasure everywhere. No matter how hard she struck, Makena could not penetrate the lion’s hide at all.
“There is no use trying to slay him,” the goddesses taunted together. “Our guardian is invincible to mortals.”
“If that is the case, then you can have your accursed treasure,” Makena said. “I want none of it anymore!”
She dove beneath the huge lion’s next pounce and dashed out the chamber. The monster did not give chase, and it could not have fit through the room’s entrance anyway. With the treasure chamber and the temple’s vestibule behind her, Makena shoved the stone door back into place and let out a breath of exhausted relief.
That relief did not last long. She may have gotten out alive, but she had failed. She had failed to save the enslaved Ahrabs from their Habesha captors, and she had failed to obtain even one coin of the treasure she had come here for. Makena would return to her home in Rhapta with empty hands. Hands empty of everything, that was, except for guilt.
If only she could draw that golden lion out of its lair to kill those horrible slavers! Or if there was a way to lure them in there.
An idea hatched in Makena’s head.
After an evening’s tracking, Makena found the Habesha huddling around a campfire at the foot of a dune. They were helping themselves to a fragrant meal of roasting goat and injera bread while their captives, both human and animal, sat tethered nearby. There were still quite a number of the warriors left even after all the ones she had slain earlier that day, but Makena had no intention of provoking them this time. She would take a different approach.
She brushed a hand over her hair and sauntered toward the Habesha with a whistle. The slavers turned to face her with grunts of confusion.
“What in Ashtar’s name are you up to, woman?” one of them, a big scar-faced man with long ringlets of hair, asked. “You were the one attacking my men before, weren’t you?”
“Yes, and I still have little love for slavers like you,” Makena said. “However, by a twist of fate, it appears that I might need your help. You’ve heard of an old city named Ubar, haven’t you?”
The scar-faced Habesha snorted. “It’s just a story to amuse children.”
“Not at all. I’ve found its ruins, including where they kept their treasure. Piles of gold and silver, every color of gem, more than any man or woman could ever ask for. Certainly more than I can carry by myself.”
The Habesha slavers’ eyes lit up with the hunger of starving jackals.
“So…you’re asking for us to help carry your treasure for you,” the scar-faced one asked. “I assume you’re offering us a cut of it in exchange?”
Makena nodded. “It would be worth far more than what you would earn from those slaves.”
The scar-faced Habesha shook his head. “It must be a trap.”
“Why would I lead you to a trap? It’s not like the ruins are haunted. You said you didn’t believe in children’s stories.”
“I think we should give her the benefit of the doubt,” another Habesha said. “We could use that treasure to expand our enterprise. It’s a worthy investment if you ask me.”
“Fair enough,” the scar-faced man said. “You guard the slaves. Woman, if you speak the truth, do take us to the ruins. And if we find out you’re plotting anything…we’ll kill you.”
He held up his shotel, the tip of which glinted sharp under the moonlight, to emphasize his point.
Makena nodded with an undaunted smile. “Understood.”
The circle of Jua sank beneath the dunes to the west, taking with it the heat of the day, as she led the Habesha back through the desert. It was beneath an indigo sky sprinkled with stars around Mwezi’s silver crescent when they arrived at the ruins. The murmur of the breeze over the destroyed city reminded Makena of the songs of ancient voices, but tonight they encouraged rather than spooked her.
The scar-faced Habesha scoffed. “I see nothing here. Is this some kind of trick? Do you want to join the Ahrabs in their yokes, woman?”
Makena pointed to the face of the temple hewn into the butte. “Patience, my friend. Keep on following me.”
They crossed the ruins to the temple, and Makena opened the door blocking the way in as she had previously. The light coming from the goddesses’ eyes kept the interior as well-lit as before. The Habesha slavers’ eyes reflected that glow above their greedy grins. They wasted little time in rushing down the vestibule and falling upon the mounds of treasure with delighted cheers.
Again the chamber shook, and again the three goddesses of old Ubar castigated the thieving intruders. The lion of gold’s roar drowned out the Habesha’s screams behind Makena while she ran back out. Her closing of the stone door did little to muffle out the musical carnage of unjust men receiving their just reward.
Beneath Mwezi’s pale glow, Makena sprinted back to the Habesha’s campfire. It took a fling of her seme like a throwing knife to dispatch the slaver who had stayed behind to guard the captives. Upon tearing the weapon back out of his corpse, she used it to saw through the enslaved people’s ropes and yokes.
The foremost of the Ahrab captives, an old sheikh with a white keffiyeh cloth wrapped around his gray-bearded face, bowed to her. “Praise be all the Alihat for guiding your courage and compassion, young lady. But how did you get rid of all our captors?”
“It’s enough to say that I had indeed lured them into a trap,” Makena said. “Three of your Alihat, the goddesses of old Ubar, took care of the rest.”
The sheikh coughed out a chuckle. “So often does the greed for gold lead to men’s downfall, both in spirit and body. At least you, my heroine, have given us something more precious than gold.”
“And a greater reward too.”
“That being said, I would be remiss if I did not repay the favor at all. Have this for your troubles, and may the Alihat Almighty bless you forever.”
The sheikh handed Makena a purse of copper coins. Somehow, their gleam was more brilliant than any gold from that temple in Ubar could ever be. And she would come out of this adventure with something more valuable than any ancient treasure.
With the Ahrabs’ ululating jubilation behind her, Makena walked away into the desert far richer than she had ever been before.