Author: Brandon Pilcher

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The Black Mask

A flute whistled in the dead of night.

Catherine jolted up from her bed and panted. Only the glowing blue digits on her clock, which read 11:22 pm, broke up the bedroom’s blackness. It was still enough light to show the contours of the plastic dolls and stuffed animals she’d kept from childhood on her shelves, and shine off the posters of pop stars off her wall. Not one of the shadows cast faint against the pink walls moved.

It must have been some kind of bird. With a relieved sigh, Catherine sank back into bed.

The flute whistled again.

It had a shrill and hoarse voice, almost like those tribal flutes they played for jungle movies. It sounded at the same time a reddish light flashed from her phone’s screen. Bolting to the desk where she kept it charged, Catherine unplugged it with one yank and hammered away its password. A text message appeared in blood-red letters with a scratchy font like scars:

TELL HIM THE TRUTH.

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Blessing of the Moon

Faraji wiped the last speck of blood off his scimitar and held it up against the campfire’s light. Even after all the nicks and scratches it had collected over years of combat, it still shone with an almost heavenly brilliance. The inscriptions in its blade, written in cursive Aradyic, invoked the Moon’s blessing of strength towards whomever wielded the sword. Thus far it had never failed Faraji, and certainly not during his latest raid.

Around the fire, his warriors bantered, joked, and laughed with each other, as warriors across the world always did when resting at camp. They were all Kiswahans like himself, dark brown-skinned with off-white kanzu tunics and turbans over their black, tightly curled hair. In truth, their physical features differed little from the miserable heathens they had yoked and manacled to one another in the darkness at the camp’s edge.

But those sad-eyed idolaters, naked but for loincloths of woven bark and jewelry fashioned from cowrie shells and dinosaur teeth, were not lovely to look at. Even the nubile young women in their ranks had their skin blemished with hideous scarifications of pagan significance. They may have been kin to the Kiswahan race by blood, but the old superstitions they clung to made for a very different, barbaric culture.

A faint yet high-pitched cry, almost like some kind of flute, whistled from the black depths of the surrounding rainforest. Even with the nocturnal humidity and the campfire’s warmth, Faraji could not deny the chill prickling his skin from that eerie noise. He had made a whole career of penetrating these jungles from the east, braving an immense variety of beasts and heathens alike. But never in all his previous ventures had the Kishawan slaver heard such a sound.

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The Peril of Kush

For the first time in his life, Teriahi laid one foot upon the summit of Amun’s Mount. His leg wobbled under the burden of nervous shame the instant his leather sandal contacted the sandstone. Only royalty and priests could set a single step atop this ancient plateau, the first outcropping of land the Creator had drawn up from the floodwaters of primordial chaos. Any mortal commoner, even a captain of the armies like himself, would profane this hallowed ground with his mere presence. So had maintained generations upon generations of tradition.

Nonetheless, desperate times called for desperate measures. And seldom before had times been so desperate for the people of Kush. Amun, in all his divine wisdom, must have understood that. And indeed, despite Teriahi’s worst fears, the creator god had not dissolved his leg or inflicted any other punishment for his trespassing. He sighed in relief.

His soldiers marched behind him, some equipped with gleaming bronze spears and ox-hide shields, others with the bows and quivers of arrows that were the pride of the Kushite nation. The hides of lions and leopards, the ruling predators of the desert, fluttered in the wind over their linen loincloths. They would need all the bravery of those beasts, and then some more, for the battle that awaited them.

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The Perfect Shot

Rain pounded like drumbeats onto the thatched roof of the bamboo observation tower. It must have been the seventh or eighth rainfall Sid Francis had seen over the first two days of his safari. Supposedly, this was what passed for the middle of the dry season deep in the Musiyinti country. Small wonder they called it the rainforest.

Sid swatted away at a mosquito which whined dangerously close to his face. Already the little devils had marred his pasty Kanuck complexion with a bombardment of red bumps, each and every one of them an itching reminder of his lacking the foresight to bring bug repellent. Or maybe he had simply been too cheap. Sid had already spent a third of his living on a suitable new camera and another third on reaching here from halfway across the world. It was too easy to gloss over a variety of important little details in that kind of hassle.

“Are they here yet?” Sid muttered as he continued to defend himself against the insect’s harassment with his bare hand.

His guide, a lithe Bayinti named Masengu, looked up from her handheld GPS to give him a disappointed frown. Her ebony-dark skin, though decorated with lines of traditional scarifications, remained fragrant with repellant and thus enviably unblemished by the bugs. Not to mention, the brief strips of bark-cloth she wore over her bosom and waist would have made for more comfortable attire in this humidity than the heavy khaki getup Sid had to put on.

“Ah, fuck.” Sid would have gotten out his pack of joints to smoke away the boredom, except he had no idea whether the scent of burning cannabis would attract or scare off the local wildlife. All he could do was continue to stand here on aching feet, watching for anything bigger than a colobus monkey to show up in the mess of foliage, mist, and shadow that was the surrounding jungle. And maybe glance at his guide’s curves a few more times from the corner of his eye.

On second thought, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

“Ever thought of a modeling career on the side, Masengu?” Sid asked, tapping a finger on his camera.

She thrust at him a glare almost fiercer than the tranquilizer rifle she had slung over her back. “You mzungu men are all the same.”

Sid laughed, not the least offended even if she had almost said the local word for white people like a slur. “It’s a compliment, trust me. A good shot of you would fetch as much as any tyrannosaur. Of course, I’ll split some of the profits with you, 50/50. What do you say?”

Masengu rolled her eyes with a smirk. “As long as you don’t ask me to pose nude.”

A deep rumbling groan resounded from the jungle. Except for the pulsing of his heart, every muscle in Sid’s body turned stiff as a rock from the surprise.

“They’re coming after all.” Masengu was looking at her GPS again. “It’s a whole herd. Get ready, and stay quiet.”

Bending his legs down at the knees, Sid held his camera to his eyes and peered through the lens. In spite of the mist and falling sheets of rain obscuring his view, he could make out the shaking and waving of vegetation down in the jungle understory. Not even the raindrops’ pattering on leaves and the tower’s roof could suppress the crackling of branches, or the rumbling and bellowing calls which made Sid quiver with every note.

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Punishment

Trumpets blared like the cries of elephants, and drums cracked louder than a thunderclap. The populace of Waset, capital of Egypt, poured out from their mudbrick houses to gather alongside the city’s main avenue. Fathers hauled their sons onto their shoulders, mothers let their daughters stand beside them, and youths stepped aside to make way for the elders on their walking sticks. Shaded by palm trees and the rearing statues of gods and past rulers, the people waited with buzzing eagerness for the procession’s arrival.

None of them looked behind to notice the white-robed stranger.

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The Battle Roar of Sekhmet

Egypt, 1350 BC

I entered the sanctuary area at the back of our hut with a bowl of gazelle meat. Beside me, my little niece Nebet hugged her miniature drum as if it were a doll. The likenesses of our forefathers and mothers watched our passage with painted eyes, their altars adorned with weapons and the gold flies their valor had earned them in life. But it was the gilded likeness of Sekhmet, she of the lion mask and blood-dyed gown, who awaited our arrival against the wall. Despite the dimming of the sunlight through our hut’s narrow windows, Sekhmet’s amber eyes blazed with the same fire that had emboldened generations of our ancestors.

Many times I had knelt before her as I did now, lighting the meat I laid at her feet. The scent of its burning recalled battle after battle of blazing tents and enemies being speared, shot, or cleaved into pieces. The warmth channeled the sun’s blazing heat, which glossed my dark brown skin with perspiration. Even the crackling of flesh breaking down into ash became the cracking of bones and shields as I yelled the battle roar of Sekhmet in my memories.

This evening I would consult our matron for a different battle. This time, our enemies were not Kushites with ochre-reddened hair and leopard-belted kilts. Nor were they easterners like the Hittites or Babylonians, with pale skin and loosely curled beards. No, they were Egyptians like us, fellow children of the Black Land who had fallen under the influence of the false Pharaoh Akhenaten.

Already they had dragged little Nebet’s father away to slave away in the lair that tyrant had built for himself and his cult of lies. I did not even want to guess what his minions had done to her mother. Only I remained to protect and teach the girl over the past year, and never would I let her suffer the same fate as her parents.

I gave her a nod and she pounded her drum with more unbridled passion than a temple ensemble. Together we sang our prayer for Sekhmet’s vigilance, for her guidance, for the courage with which she would imbue us in the face of war and persecution. The fire on my offering continued to flicker on our ancestors’ faces as their spirits’ voices joined ours in a greater chorus. The thumping of my heart became a rhythm complementing Nebet’s drum, as did the war drums that had thundered before all my past battles. Alongside the music’s growing fury there rose an energy within me that flamed as hot as Sekhmet’s gaze. As she opened her jaws to bare her fangs in my vision, so did I.

It built up from my breast to my throat, ready to be released over a climax of cracking drums and shrieking cries.

Instead came the hoarse bray of a royal trumpet. Then followed silence, and finally the rapping of a bony knuckle on our door.

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Tyrant Lord

North America, 67 million years ago

The sunrise’s golden glow drifted across the rolling sea of treetops. It descended through the canopy’s tangle of leaves, branches, and vines in scattered beams until it reached the forest understory. Within this maze of trees and tropical underbrush slept a giant.

A hide of black and dark green scales camouflaged his nine-ton bulk amidst the shadowed foliage until he cracked his flaming yellow eyes open. With the help of short yet brawny double-clawed arms, he propped himself off the forest floor onto even stronger hind legs, with his thick long tail hovering behind. He shook his head, stretching his neck muscles, and took in a great yawn with jaws lined with ivory spikes. Inside his cavernous stomach grumbled hollow.

He was Tyrannosaurus rex, tyrant lord of the jungle, and he had awoken hungry.

He craned his head up to scan his surroundings. Six monsoons had passed since he had carved his territory out after leaving his mother’s brood, and he had since mapped out its every tree, bush, and stone in his memory. He recognized that the ancient kapok tree he had rested underneath last night stood a few hours’ walking north of a river fed by waterfall, where game would gather to cool off once the heat reached its noontime peak. Between then and daybreak, they would browse the jungle glades for their morning meals.

And the tyrannosaur would make his own breakfast out of them.

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Why Europeans are Almost 1/3 African

Did you know that European people can attribute almost a third of their ancestry to additional migrations out of Africa?

It should be common knowledge by now that human beings in their modern form, Homo sapiens, first evolved in Africa. Exactly when we emerged on the scene remains uncertain (recent fossil discoveries suggest it may have happened over 300,000 years ago, a hundred millennia earlier than we originally thought), but whenever it was, most of our species’s history of existence would have played out on the so-called “Dark Continent”. It would have been no earlier than 70,000 years ago — and possibly as soon as 55,000 years ago — when the ancestors of all people outside of Africa would wander out of the continent and colonize the rest of the habitable world.

This would not have been the first dispersal of hominin apes out of Africa, mind you. Much in the press has been made of the fact that between 1–7% of modern human ancestry outside our ancestral continent comes from the descendants of earlier emigrants such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans. What may not be so widely publicized, however, is that the famous “Out of Africa” migration between 70–55,000 years ago would not have been the last movement of Homo sapiens from Africa into Eurasia and beyond, either. There is, in fact, a plethora of compelling evidence that humans from Africa continued to venture out and leave a permanent genetic mark on the ancestry of their Eurasian kin— even the “white” peoples of Europe.

I don’t mean a light dash, either. Almost one third of European ancestry descends from African admixture within the last 55,000 years.

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