Sinbad and the Lost Continent – Excerpt

The following is an excerpted chapter from my upcoming novella Sinbad and the Lost Continent, a lost world adventure inspired by the 1001 Arabian Nights. Enjoy, and be sure to check out the full novella once it comes out!


It was before daybreak when I awoke. I climbed up from the hatch onto the Black Tiger’s upper deck. Not that I had been sleeping well the past several nights. It had nothing to do with the fact that there never was much else to do aboard our small and humble vessel. I had merged so deeply into the water’s simple and monotonous rhythm that I lost track of the many days that had flown past since we set sail from Baghdad. After we had entered the Persian Gulf from the mouth of the Tigris and then advanced eastward into the Indian Ocean, nothing but the sea’s blue vastness had surrounded us. A landsman like me could lose his sanity when faced with such endless horizons, unable to cope with its full enormity, but the sailors told me they relished it, seeing it as the ultimate freedom.

Omar had deduced on our compass two to three days before that we were nearing the world’s equator. I inferred that the geographic word “equator” meant the world’s waistline, assuming he and the scholars at the Madrasa in Baghdad were right in claiming it was round instead of flat. Beyond that, we did not know our precise location.

I started to wonder whether Kishore was right to doubt our destination’s existence. He had never bought the other Sinbad’s accounts of his seven voyages to exotic faraway lands and the riches he had earned from them, even if that other Sinbad’s small yet ample investment of those riches had allowed me to purchase that old Greek map as well as the provisions for our voyage. As Kishore himself had claimed, neither he nor his father had ever witnessed sights as fantastical as the other Sinbad, and so many of his fellow sailors, had boasted of. No rocs, no giants, nothing like those at all.

Still, I was happy that Kishore had not only let me use his father’s old dhow, but also came aboard with me himself. If we were to perish out here in the heart of the ocean, at least my dearest friend would be beside me.

I was still groggy when I traipsed to the gunwale on the dhow’s port side, expecting another day of nothing but the unending blue ocean in front of us. I rubbed my half-shut eyes, gazed at the sunlit horizon, and blinked in disbelief.

It was land! Or was it my blurry vision playing tricks on me again? I closed and reopened my eyes, rubbing them again on my tunic’s sleeve. Still the green sliver of a hilltop rose before the rising sun.

 As the Black Tiger drifted eastward, the sliver expanded into a thicker, dark green band. An unmistakably solid band, implanted as it rose from the water. The faint cawing of gulls rose over the splash of the boat’s wake.

My whole body trembled with excitement. “Land! Allah is merciful, for we have found land!” I yelled.

I rushed back to the hatch and opened it. Kishore was already scampering up to the deck, with the rest of the crew climbing the ladder behind him. “What is it, Sinbad?” he asked.

“Land!” I repeated as I thrust my finger through the air beyond the port side. “See for yourself, my friend!”

He adjusted his turban and rubbed his eyelids before squinting in the distance. His eyes widened and brightened in the middle, reflecting the glow of the rising sunlight behind the approaching island. “Holy Krishna, I don’t believe it!”

“It has to be it!” I spoke.

“What? Land? Of course it’s land!” Kishore said. “Must be an island.”

I shook my head like a swabbing mop. “No, no, my friend, it could only be Lemuria, the lost continent of legend, like on our map!”

Kishore’s smile vanished, with a dubious look at me replacing it. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Sinbad. You know we’ve never been to this part of the ocean before, so it could be any number of islands out here. It might even be one of those islands that other Sinbad spoke about in those stories he told everyone.”

“Well, then, let’s look at the map and then decide. Omar?”

Omar emerged on the deck upon calling, plucked out the old map from his sash, and unfolded it in his hands. I bent over next to him and followed his finger as it traced our course to date until it slowed to a point.

 “The latitude given here matches what I noted from the stars last night,” Omar said, his nasal voice brimming with confidence.” Right down on the equator. The longitude should be close as well.”

Earlier in our voyage, Omar told me that he could determine how far north or south our dhow stood relative to the globe’s equator, by calculating the angle between the horizon and one of the stars. He could also tell how far west or east we were from our destination, and even from Baghdad, by measuring the distance between the moon and a given star. Once he did that, he would pull out a book of tables, which he claimed was a copy by the mathematicians that studied what they called al-Jabr, and then compare its figures with his measurements. It left me feeling foolish to know that a man could find out where he stood in the vastness of the world the way Omar did.

Captain Rabih looked over our shoulders and stroked a long, matted beard as fierce as his eyes. “Even if it isn’t your fabled Lemuria, it’s as good a place to rest as any,” he said. “Not to mention restocking our provisions. There might even be fresh water there.”

The corners of Kishore’s lip turned downward in a concerned frown. “Those gulls… those gulls…”

“What about the gulls?” I asked.

“They sound strange. Not like gulls at all. Or like any kind of bird I’ve ever heard. Can’t you hear them?”

He was right. They did not sound like the typical persistent, annoying caws of seagulls I had heard when our dhow sailed along the Persian Gulf, but rather a more prolonged screeching. I would have dismissed it as simply a different species of gull had I not recalled what Theognostos had claimed as he sold me the map.

If you think the giant birds of prey, great serpents, and oversized fish of that other Sinbad’s tales are terrible, or hard to believe without first seeing them, you’ve not yet heard a word yet about the creatures of Lemuria.

I looked down at the map again, taking in the assortment of hideous dragons, crocodiles, serpents, and other reptiles that populated it the way sea monsters would populate the seas in other charts. Those were parts of the legend I had never taken so seriously, or even paid much attention to. Why would I, when my thoughts and eyes were focused on the treasure supposed to be hidden throughout the continent? Treasure was real. Jewels, coins, bracelets, and amulets I could touch with my own fingers and carry in my own hands, but not dragons or other monsters.

The green slopes continued to reach up from the horizon toward the rising sun as we watched from behind the gunwale. I made out a peak higher than the others with gray smoke billowing from its summit, much like the range of mountains on the map. My hope soared that we had sighted Lemuria itself, my confidence swelling with it. Somewhere deep in the legendary island’s tropical forests before us awaited treasure more ancient and more valuable than the other Sinbad and his fantastical stories could imagine, at least if the Greek merchant’s story was true.

I imagined us loading the Black Tiger to her very limits with heaps of treasure and returning to Baghdad rich as the Caliph himself. Or at least rich enough that when they praised Sinbad the sailor’s wealth, they would not know which Sinbad they were talking about. No longer would I have to steal, or to make the barest living carrying loads on my head as a porter. Furthermore, I could also come back with stories as fantastic as the other Sinbad’s, though I did not know what those stories would be yet.

Bestial cries of immense volume interrupted my thoughts, screeches and yells that were drawing closer. The tar-black likenesses of birds flapped their wings toward us from the shore, their caws louder and clearer than earlier. Their bodies expanded before us while they advanced, their wingspans appearing to stretch longer than a riverman’s raft. I realized to my amazement that they were bigger than any birds I had ever seen—if they even were birds. Their ebony wings, which sprouted triplets of glinting claws from their bends, shone like thick leather rather than feathers beneath the morning sunlight.

What could such creatures be? Not even the other Sinbad had described anything like them in his stories. At least the giant rocs were just an oversized kind of eagle according to him, but these bizarre leather-winged creatures on the other hand could not even be called birds!

“The map has a picture of one of those labeled in Greek,” Omar said. “It’s called a pterodactyl.”

“A what?” I asked.

“Pterodactyl. A ‘winged-finger’.”

“You mean like a bat? And do you know what they eat?”

Omar frowned, his olive complexion turning pale. “I am afraid not.”

Nonetheless, the creatures’ beaks, long and piercing like spear points, suggested an answer to my question that chilled my blood.

If Kishore’s face were not as dark as it was, it would have blanched like a washed-out sky the way he looked at the approaching pterodactyls. “Why are they coming toward us? Like they’re attacking us?”

The captain grabbed the hilt of his saber. “Because they’re hungry. We ‘re food to them. Draw your weapons and prepare to defend ourselves!”

Sinbad faces off against pterosaurs near the coast of the lost continent of Lemuria!

They didn’t waste any time. As soon as we grabbed our weapons, the foremost of the flying creatures reared for a moment, spreading out its wings before folding them inward and diving toward me. I sidestepped out of the way, but its beak slashed across my flank like a sword’s stroke, cutting through the fabric of my tunic and skin to draw hot blood. I flinched and began to hunch over, sharp pain slicing through me as I gripped the hilt of the scimitar I had acquired aboard the dhow and slid it out of my belted sash. Before I could fully draw my weapon, another pterodactyl grabbed my right forearm with its beak and tugged at it. I punched one of its beady, violent yellow eyes with my free fist to break its hold. I then freed the scimitar from my sash and slashed off the leather-winged devil’s head.

That only seemed to infuriate the flock even more. They swarmed around us like wasps over the deck. We brandished swords and knives while the airborne reptiles bombarded us with their stabbing beaks and razor-sharp finger-claws. Over the increasing din of cursing men and shrieking creatures, a sailor screamed when one of the beasts impaled him through chest like a stake through the heart, then lifted his body vertically above the boat and flew off. 

Another pterodactyl swooped toward Captain Rabih from behind. The captain would have met the same fate as the first sailor had another sailor not stopped his attacker by puncturing and then slicing its wing with his sword. A third creature ambushed this sailor from behind, pinching his tunic’s collar with its beak until it tore off. Just when the pterodactyl jabbed again at him, I threw myself at it and sent my sword through its neck exactly like the last one I had killed.

It seemed that for every one of the flying monsters we slew, at least two more darted in to take its place. My muscles burned with strain and sweat, with sprayed blood slickening my skin, as the creatures’ wings flapped furiously, whipping up an evil zephyr over me. If they did not massacre us with their relentless diving attacks, I realized, the pterodactyls would fight us to exhaustion. Then they would swoop down and feast on our flesh. All we could do was endure them the best we could.

Just behind me, I heard a desperate holler. It was Kishore! A pterodactyl had snatched him by the arm and picked him up from the deck like an eagle might hoist a snake with its beak. He thrashed his limbs and kept screaming for a help we could not provide as we watched the infernal demon haul him back toward the continent’s shore.

I closed my eyes for a brief second, trying to erase the picture of his upcoming death from my mind.

I could not let him go like that. I quickly hacked my way through more of the pterodactyls to the port side, leaped over the gunwale and plunged into the tropical water below, my scimitar’s blade in my teeth. The times Kishore and I swam across the Tigris jogged my memory as I threw out my arms in breast strokes in the direction the pterodactyl had flown with him. My arms burned as I swam, my mind filling like an endless foundation with our days as boys in the slums racing down the streets, chasing dogs, and pilfering only what we needed, but never more, from merchants’ stalls or patrons’ purses in the bazaar. I swam and swam, recalling the stories we told while feasting on whatever we could obtain either through purchase or plunder.

Even our secrets we shared, not least of which was Kishore coming to feel for men the way I felt for women. It was an admission that shocked me at first, as I had been raised to consider such feelings as sinful, but in the end, it had no bearing on our friendship. Besides, for all I knew, Kishore’s faith minded it less than mine did.

Those memories, and secrets, kept feeding me like nectar, giving me the strength I needed to propel myself all the way to the beach. When my fingers first dug into the damp sand beneath the surf, I could hear my old friend’s screams persist overhead, even though his voice was hoarse. While catching my breath, I exhaled a quick sigh of relief that Kishore still lived. The pterodactyl was taking him to a tongue of headland atop some slate-gray cliffs to my right, with several more of its kind bedded down on top of it. That had to be the creatures’ nesting site.

I scurried to the shade of coconut palm trees that bordered the opposite side of the white sandy beach and wove my way around them toward the headland’s cliffs. Vines thick as rope festooned the cliff that touched the jungle further inland, allowing me to scramble up the jagged face using the same holds and moves that enabled Kishore and I to climb Baghdad’s buildings, where we would gaze at stars as big as dates from the rooftops while he taught me his native Tamil. Still, the cliff must have reared at least twenty feet from foot to lip, so it was with stretched and aching forelimbs, left even more painful by the long swim, that I reached the headland’s top.

I peeked carefully across the stony surface. Pterodactyls watched over nests of branches, leaves, and seaweed, with numerous bones and chalk-white droppings strewn between them. The creatures did not nestle on the ground with wings folded along their sides like birds, but instead stood on all fours like bats, the claws on their wings’ bends acting as front feet. One of the nests had a lively brood of tinier pterodactyls hopping around on it, chirping with gleeful hunger as their mother began lowering her catch to them.

That catch was Kishore, his movements now slow, fighting with every ounce of energy to stay alive.

I clutched my scimitar and raced toward the nest, maneuvering around the younger creatures while dodging their winged architects’ piercing beaks. The mother pterodactyl dumped Kishore into her nest, and her famished brood pounced on him. I didn’t know if I could get to my old friend before the little devils pecked out his eyes, or his life. They were hungry and wasted no time swarming over him.

By the time I scampered to his side, they had already pocked his skin with cuts and deep wounds that bled while he shielded his face with his arms.

I swung my weapon over Kishore, slicing one of the hatchlings in half. Its mother screeched the loudest I’d heard yet, her fury absolute over her baby’s death. She launched herself at me. I ducked underneath her, grabbed Kishore by his shoulders, and propped him up while he shook off the other hatchlings. The puny creatures continued to peck at and harangue him, while their mother and her companions did the same to me, despite my best efforts to keep them at bay with my sword. I sliced it through the air, over and over.

A pterodactyl snapped onto my sword-arm and pulled me off the headland, my arm still wrapped around Kishore. It began carrying both of us, the flapping of its wings unsteady as we weighed it down, two men apparently too much for her to carry. Yet, to our utter amazement, the creature lifted us higher into the sky. The world began to shrink beneath our dangling legs.

“What’s it planning to do, Sinbad?” Kishore cried over the beating of the reptile’s wings.

The pterodactyl shook its head furiously, reminding me again of the fury of eagles holding snakes in their beaks.

“Whatever it is, don’t look down!” I yelled.

A thin dark shaft whizzed up from the jungle’s edge to puncture the pterodactyl’s breast. After emitting a pain-filled screech that diminished into a staccato croak, the aerial beast released its grip on me, and we plummeted alongside its limp body into the ocean.

Published in an anthology!

I am happy to report that an alternate-history short story of mine, “A Prayer to Auset”, has been published in the sci-fi/fantasy anthology Galaxy #18 by Clarendon House Publications! Please do check it out and leave them a review!

Galaxy #18: An Inner Writers’ Group Science Fiction and Fantasy Anthology

Reincarnation, the afterlife, mystical teachers saving the world, living concepts, alternate Egyptian history, apocalyptic futures, neighbourhood djinns, interplanetary pen-pals, alien invasions with a difference, witches, talking animals, mysterious other dimensions, murder and mercy in space, and a chance to revisit Alexander Marshall’s time-travel classic ‘Doctor Zenith and the Cerebrachrone’ – all this and more await you in this packed volume.

Goddesses of the Hunt

A loud blip from the sonar screen knocked Captain Tanaka Hideyo out of his semi-slumber. His eyelids fluttered like moth wings as he leaned from his chair to examine the screen. Whenever the sonar’s spinning “needle” swept over the lower right corner, a large green silhouette shaped like an elongated teardrop blinked into view. And each time it reappeared, the mysterious form appeared to have drifted one bit closer to the screen’s center.

“What do you think it could be, Captain?” Lieutenant Suzuki Kenji asked. His tanned yellow-brown face had turned paler than usual.

“Probably a whale,” Tanaka said.

Suzuki shook his head. “I’ve never seen a whale leave a blip that big. Not even a blue whale. And it’s coming straight toward us!”

The captain groaned. “Don’t tell me it’s one of those fictional sea monsters, then. I keep telling you, Lieutenant, you watch way too many silly kaiju movies.”

“Maybe, but with all due respect, Captain, you should at least keep an open mind.”

Tanaka took a deep breath and stiffened his arms to suppress a desire to slap his subordinate for talking back. “Very well, you can check the stern. But do expect to be disappointed.”

Suzuki hurried out of the bridge with a flashlight to pierce through the nocturnal darkness. Tanaka shook his head with a mutter as he sank deeper into his chair. His lieutenant may have still been young, but nonetheless he should have had enough experience on board their vessel to know that kaiju, or sea serpents, or whatever it was he imagined did not exist outside of myth and movies. There were massive sea creatures such as the blue whale to be sure, but even the largest blue whale on record was less than a hundred feet long, or more than sixty-four feet shorter than the Hayabusha-class patrol boat they had manned.

Tanaka checked the sonar screen again. He had to admit, the blipping silhouette looked to be over twice the size of the last whale he remembered passing by. And it was still approaching their vessel.

The whole bridge jolted and rocked, almost pushing the captain off his seat. That was strange. As far as the boat’s masthead light could let him see through the darkness of the night beyond the bridge, the sea had been calm before, without any rain or howling wind. What Tanaka could hear was the crew shouting and the clapping of boots on the metal deck.

Lieutenant Suzuki burst back into the bridge from the starboard door, his face as pale as the snow on Mount Fuji and glossy with sweat. “It’s a kaiju, alright! And it’s surfacing!”

Tanaka ran out where his subordinate had entered and advanced along the boat’s starboard toward the stern, clinging to the railing as the vessel rocked and crewmen brushed past him. He had reached halfway to the stern when he froze in place, the blood draining from his face and leaving it cold. The boat’s sidelights shimmered on the surface of a giant spiked fin which pierced up from the ocean. In front of the fin rose a titanic scaly dome which parted to show a mouth lined with ivory spears longer than men stood tall, with the stench of rotten fish hitting Tanaka like a fetid gale. Above the cavernous gape burned a pair of luminous green eyes with snake-like slits for pupils.

If it was not a kaiju, or giant monster, then Tanaka would be at a loss to imagine it being anything else.

The kaiju from my short story “Goddesses of the Hunt”.

As the leviathan spurted toward the boat with a velocity impossible for such a giant creature, the two machine guns mounted behind the bridge sputtered at it. Their bullets bounced off the monster’s flesh without leaving even a dent, as did those of the crewmen’s rifles. Without any time being left to launch the boat’s guided missiles before the kaiju struck, Tanaka could think of only one way he and his men could come out alive.

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Barrow of the Grail

Al-Biritania, or early medieval Britain if the Moors had conquered it.

800 AD, in a parallel world…

A thumb of stone stuck up higher than a man from the forest floor. Halawa would have thought little of the outcropping had her companion, the old mawlawi Ishraq, thrust his finger at it while whistling for her attention.

“Look at it closely,” he said. “Do you not see the inscriptions?”

Halawa leaned her head toward the monolith and squinted where Ishraq pointed. Through the mossy crust which had grown over the course of centuries, she could indeed make out lines indented in its surface. After she dismounted her stripe-legged horse and approached the stone on foot, she used her scimitar to clear away the moss, exposing the eroded inscriptions underneath.

Some were strings of unintelligible symbols of circles, crescents, and notches, which Halawa guessed represented some ancient language. What she could recognize was the larger illustration chiseled into the rock above the rows of text, with scattered flecks of red paint clinging to it. It was a creature with the wings of a bat, the taloned legs of an eagle, and the sinuous tail and neck of a serpent, with the horned lizard-like head bearing sharp teeth in its gaping jaws. A sphere of amber embedded in the rock winked from where the beast’s eye would be, making Halawa’s dark brown skin creep over her body.

“The Red Dragon of the Brythons,” Halawa said under her breath. “Does this mean we’re nearby?”

“If the old map doesn’t deceive, Amira, then of course,” Ishraq said. “Keep your eyes out while we press on. The barrow could be anywhere around here.”

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The Raid on Camp Struthers

British East Africa, 1896 AD

The mountain rose from the plain as a rugged dome of black rock with a crater for a summit. Jack Erwin figured his old man, ever the amateur geologist, would have identified this natural edifice as a volcano long gone extinct. Comparing it and its surroundings to the drawing on the yellowed map he had bought in Mombasa, he smiled. This had to be it, Mlima Unaometa, known in English as the Sparkling Mountain.

Maulidi, the grizzled Swahili huntsman whom Jack had hired as his guide, hugged his musket with shivering arms the way a scared child might cling onto their doll. His eyes darted side to side as he faced the stone ruins that lay at the mountain’s southeastern foot.

“There could be djinn here,” Maulidi said, “Allah please watch over us.”

“I should’ve figured you’d be scared of ghosts, old man,” Jack muttered.

Even he had to admit, if there was any place out here that would be haunted, it would be these ruins. Lichen-stained walls formed rings in scattered clusters, with each ring enclosing a circle of crumbling columns. Here and there stood the weathered stone likeness of a human figure, or an animal of the savanna, or a fanciful hybrid with a human body and an animal head not unlike some ancient Egyptian gods. Whatever local people had erected this deserted city must have numbered in the hundreds if not thousands.

It recalled some of the ghost towns that peppered Jack’s native Kansas, right down to the yellow grass of the surrounding plains and the howl of the evening wind that blew between the abandoned structures. With the chill crawling up his spine, he wondered whether he should have been so dismissive of his guide’s discomfort.

Jack Erwin, the diamond-prospecting male lead from my short story “The Raid on Camp Struthers”.

“Just to be sure, I’ll try drawing them out,” Jack said.

He unslung his rifle and fired into the sky with a cracking report. Birds squawked as they fluttered from the nearby acacia and bushwillow trees, and a herd of impala galloped away from the ruins’ far side. Other than that, nothing suspicious. Even the wind fell silent.

Jack gave Maulidi a confident smirk. “Seems even your djinn fear gunfire.”

The guide gulped. “I can only hope you are right, Bwana Erwin.”

Guiding the donkey that carried their supplies, they advanced up a grassy avenue that divided the ruined city in half until they reached the foot of the mountain. A pair of obelisks inscribed with worn pictographs stood on opposite sides of a spherical boulder which blocked the entrance to a tunnel in the mountainside. When Jack slipped his hand into a crevice between the big outcropping and the tunnel wall and pushed on the former, the blockage would not budge.

“Ah, Christ, looks like we’ll need to get the pickaxes out,” he grumbled.

The donkey snorted with its long ears erect and twitching. Maulidi pointed his gun back at the far side of the avenue with narrowed eyes, whispering an anxious prayer in Swahili. Jack looked in the direction his guide and their animal were facing, while also holding his rifle out but saw nothing. All he could hear was the familiar buzzing of savanna insects and the return of the wind’s howl.

With a shrug each, both men slid their pickaxes off the donkey’s back and went to work wedging the tools’ long flat heads along the boulder’s sides. They groaned through their teeth and stretched their arm muscles taut as they pulled. It took several pulls before they finally got the big rock rolling out of the way and exposed the tunnel’s open maw.

After asking his guide to stand outside and guard the donkey, Jack lit a lantern and waded into the blackness of the mountain’s interior. He scanned the walls of igneous rock for the dimmest glimmer of diamonds, or maybe gold, or whatever precious rocks they had named the mountain for. Cold sweat streamed down his brow, for the pure silence within the tunnel could be even more eerie than the wind that wailed outside.

The darkness did not go on forever. The spark of daylight in the distance expanded until it flooded Jack’s vision with a brightness that almost blinded him after the hour or so he had spent following the tunnel’s crooked path. Once his eyes readjusted, he found himself on a ledge overlooking a vast pit that yawned into the earth, with sunlight pouring down the volcanic vent overhead. Terraces conjoined with ramps formed a spiraling path around the pit, leading to a pool of brown water at the bottom.

The sides of the terraces all sparkled. The legends were true, this would have been a mine far bigger and far older than the one over in Kimberley to the distant south. Cecil Rhodes himself would be red with envy if he were to see this.

Jack struck his pickax at a random twinkle in the rock beneath his feet. It did not take long for him to excavate the one thing he had spent half his family’s fortune coming to Africa for, the one thing that would lift them out of poverty back in Kansas. Plucking it out of the ground, he laughed with victorious glee as he held between his fingers a diamond bigger than a chicken egg.

There followed a scream and a donkey’s panicked braying, both shattering the silence even when muffled by the volcano’s stony walls. Pushing the diamond into his pocket, Jack hurried back through the tunnel, his heart palpitating even faster than his running. When the light of the entrance returned to his eyes, he tore out his rifle and accelerated despite the strain burning his legs.

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“Women of the Plains” is now released!

Today, my second full-length novel Women of the Plains has been published and is available in paperback and e-book format!

Set in eastern Africa 100,000 years ago, Women of the Plains tells the story of a confrontation between two cultures of early Homo sapiens, the ancestors of all modern human beings. When the young huntress Oja gets separated from her nomadic band after a hunting accident, she finds herself in a strange place where the people have settled into permanent villages. As she struggles to find her place in this new world, her old friends Uru and Namak go looking for her. Oja must eventually choose between the way of life she has always known and that of the people who have embraced her as one of their own.

Family Reunion

50,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, an ancestress of the East Eurasian peoples faces off against a tiger!

Southeast Asia, 50,000 years ago

A high-pitched scream pierced through the jungle. Ungu stopped in her tracks, stunned by the noise, and plucked out her ivory knife from under the deerskin bands around her thigh. She darted her eyes over the surrounding undergrowth, searching for the source, while chilled perspiration collected on her brow. She could mistake it for nothing other than a human cry.

The rattling of leaves and branches, the cracking of twigs, and the scuffing of little feet on the damp earth followed another scream. To her left, Ungu could see a nearby tree-fern’s feathery fronds slap a short, dark shadow that ran past it. Close behind shot a larger, orange blur that leaped and fell upon the former figure, with both disappearing behind a screen of thrashing foliage.

Ungu dashed toward the disturbance to find a little boy pinned beneath a tiger’s paws. The poor child yelled and squealed as he flailed his fists at the striped cat’s face. Undaunted by his pathetic efforts to keep it at bay, the huge feline opened its drooling maw, lowering its fangs to his gullet, while its claws cut into his body.

Shrieking her huntress’s cry, Ungu launched herself onto the tiger. She squeezed her arm onto its thick furry neck and pulled it away from its victim while drawing her knife overhead. Before she could stab the beast, it bucked her off, throwing her onto the jungle floor. Ungu rolled back to her feet and jumped to cut the cat off from the boy, who had in the meantime scurried to hide behind the buttress root of a tapang tree.

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The Skull of Stone

In ancient East Africa, this rhino-riding warrior is defending her home from intruding marauders!

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.

Continue reading “The Skull of Stone”