I wrote and revised this short coming-of-age tale for a creative-writing assignment back in the spring of 2013, during my studies at UCSD. The writing may be rough compared to more recent work I’ve posted here, but I’m still partial to the unique little world I created for it.
Mukondi Djata slipped out of her leather sleeping tent with a spear and machete in hand. A gold sliver of sunlight crept up from behind the eastern plains to stain the twilight sky red and warm the sleeping women’s camp. Despite this heat growing outside, streams of dread colder than spring water coursed within Mukondi’s veins. Her spear’s iron point ran longer than her feet, and she would need every inch of it for the test of womanhood that she would begin this morning.
The rest of the Djata clan’s camp stayed asleep in silence. Not even the most excitable of the little girls scampered between the tents before their older sisters, mothers, and aunts woke up yet. The crimson arrow-shaped head of Sambu the Allosaurus, the Djatas’ symbolic animal, emblazoned each tent. When she noted the emblem’s jagged teeth, Mukondi gulped down a mouthful of air. The last thing she needed now was yet another reminder of the First Hunt which lay just ahead for her.
The throaty and hoarse blare of a hollowed animal horn shattered the silence. “Mukondi? Are you coming?” It was her mother Dyese calling.
Mukondi jogged to the fat baobab tree which towered in the heart of the camp. Two other women, her mother and her elder cousin Azandu, awaited below the tree’s shade. Having reached her own womanhood six rainy seasons ago, Azandu looked exactly as Mukondi and every other Djata girl wished to look: tall and lithe, with firm muscles under skin as dark as a moonless midnight. Rings of fangs and claws from Azandu’s kills hung from her neck, something Mukondi also wished she could earn in years to come. As for Dyese, the hide shawl she draped over her shoulders marked her rank as the Djata clan’s matriarchal chieftain.
Dyese smiled as she patted Mukondi on the shoulder. “You can do it, my precious,” she said. “Oyosi Herself sees to it that you will.” She tilted her wizened face up to the sky where Oyosi Djata, the clan’s great ancestress, rested.
Mukondi pulled her mother’s hand off. “You told Nzinge that very same thing, didn’t you?”
“Don’t mention her again!” Azandu banged her spear’s butt against the ground. “You are smarter and wiser than your big sister ever was, Mukondi. You’ll succeed where she failed, trust me.”
A quivering Mukondi folded her arms together. “How can you feel so sure of that?”
Azandu groaned. “Look, do you want to be dropped off at a men’s village and grow crops in one place for the rest of your life? Or do you want to become a woman?”
“I am no man!” Mukondi pounded a fist onto her breasts.
“Then don’t whine like one. Now, while scouting last night, I spotted Sambu drinking from the river to the south.” Azandu pointed towards the southern horizon. “He might still prowl over there.” She laid her own hand on Mukondi’s shoulder. “When you meet him, you know what to do.”
“Aim for the breast or brain,” Mukondi recited. She sucked in a mouthful of air to swell her chest upward and smiled.
“One more thing before you leave, daughter.” Dyese pulled out from her hide belt the animal horn she had blown earlier and handed it to Mukondi. “It goes back to my mother’s mother. Blow it, and you shall lure Sambu towards you.”
“Isn’t that cheating?” Mukondi asked.
“Not at all, but use it sparingly,” Azandu said. “Blow it too many times together and Sambu will figure out what you’re up to.”
Mukondi slipped the horn under her own belt and bowed her head to Dyese. “I owe you so much for the gift, mother.”
Dyese wrapped her arms around her daughter in a gentle embrace. “You owe nothing at all. Now go forth on your First Hunt, Mukondi. You leave our camp a girl, but you shall come back a woman, with Sambu’s teeth in your hands. May Oyosi bless you.”
Mukondi hugged her mother back with all her strength while more tears dripped from her eyes. This could have been the last time in their whole lives that they would see each other. Mukondi rested her head against Dyese’s breasts while her mother in turn stroked her dreadlocks.
“If I do not come back alive, I shall always remain in your memories, mother,” Mukondi said.
After Dyese withdrew her warm arms from her daughter, the chill returned to sting Mukondi’s blood. Nonetheless she jogged away from the camp, looking back only once.
Philip J. Covington, CEO of Global Petroleum Inc., smirked when he strutted out of his limousine and laid his eyes on the new museum. It amused him how literally his contractors and architects had taken the word “museum” when designing the place. The building’s Romanesque portico of marble columns, gleaming silver from the moonlight, seemed more evocative of a prestigious old museum nested deep in his native London than a solitary edifice erected in the central Texas heartland. They had even gone so far as to decorate the premises with trimmed hedges and topiaries to reinforce the illusion of prestigious aristocracy. Or perhaps those were meant to disguise the distant landscape of prairie and pipeline tracks.
Not that Covington truly had a problem with any of it. He
would rather feel at home than be reminded that he was in the rustic middle of
America.
There was one feature he noticed that contradicted the
structure’s predominantly Neoclassical pretensions. Poking up from behind the
museum’s main body was the dazzling summit of a glass dome. Covington did not
remember arranging for anything like that when he first ordered the building’s
construction.
“Mr. Covington! You’re even more on time than I
expected.”
Elias Marshall hurried down the museum’s front steps and
offered his plump hand for a shake. Except for his weathered suntanned
complexion, the Texan local appeared as a figure of glossy white, from his
three-piece suit to his cowboy’s hat and boots of faux snakeskin down to the
holster for his revolver. Even his hair had turned white to match his fashion
sensibilities. It was all in stark contrast to his pale-skinned, dark-haired,
and black-suited superior.
“That would be Sir Covington to you, Mr.
Marshall,” Covington said, placing special emphasis on his English accent
for the American’s hearing pleasure. “But I must say I admire what you’ve
assembled together so far, at least from the outside. A bit incongruous with
its surroundings, but I suppose a place like this could use a bit more, shall we
say, class?”
Marshall chuckled with a slight touch of nervousness.
“Trust me, sir, you haven’t seen what we’ve got in store inside.”
Covington was about to shake Marshall’s hand when a faint,
prolonged moan reverberated from somewhere, followed by the apparent rattle of
window panes. The noise reminded him of a whale’s song, except it eventually
trailed into a rumble more like an elephant’s. At least it was a more pleasant
sound than the country music his limo’s chauffeur had been playing all night.
“What the bloody blazes was that?” Covington said.
“Some sort of machinery?”
“No, that’s from the big greenhouse we have behind the
museum.” Marshall pointed over to the peak of the glass dome. “A
little surprise we planned for you. The kids should love it way more than any
of our other exhibits, for reasons that shall become obvious. May I give you a
sneak peek tonight after our little tour, Sir Covington?”
Covington nodded. “Why not take me there straight away?
I’ll inspect the rest later.”
Together they went through the museum, following corridor
after corridor that lit up automatically with their entrance. The exhibits they
passed ranged from diagrams explaining how fossilized marine organisms became
petroleum over millions of years, models depicting the process of extracting,
refining, and transporting the oil, and then screens and walls of text
explaining how the new pipeline nearby would be far safer and more
environmentally friendly than those silly tree-huggers, social justice
warriors, and restless “Native American” savages would have the public believe.
Of course, the language the displays used was far more politically correct, but
Covington had always wished he could throw far viler terminology at those
troublemakers.
The last hallway he and Marshall went down ended with a
closed doorway twice as high as the rest, framed by blocks of dark stone that
tapered towards the top for an almost Egyptian-looking slant, unlike the
straight Greco-Roman pillars that prevailed elsewhere in the establishment.
Little braziers mounted on the sides flickered holographic flames while the
entablature above had bold red letters impressed into it that read,
“Welcome to the Fossil Age”.
Covington snickered. “What do you have in there,
Godzilla?”
“Not quite, sir. Just wait and see.”
Marshall clapped his hands, and the doors opened with a
grinding sound effect playing alongside a looping track of tribal drumbeats.
Out wafted a gust of humid and balmy air that carried with it the fragrance of
tropical flora together with the mustier odor of decaying leaves.
They passed through the open gate onto a wooden walkway held
up on stilts over the ground, with pairs of tiki torches providing genuine
firelight along the railing. Overhead arced the dome of glass that Covington
had seen earlier, but only upon entering its interior could he appreciate its
vast and towering scale. The space it enclosed would have easily dwarfed the
rest of the museum! Speakers hanging interspersed between the glass panes
played the unending chorus of a primordial wilderness, with bird-like squawks
and screeches punctuating the chirping of nocturnal insects.
And then there returned the echoing moan Covington had heard
earlier, but louder and deeper than before. His flesh trembled all the way down
to the bone.
Beyond both sides of the walkway grew a verdant savanna of
ferns with scattered cycad, tree-fern, and monkey-puzzle trees. Dragonflies
fluttered around little ponds fenced with horsetail reeds while flies buzzed
over balls of wet rock mottled with white fluid and shreds of leaves. At least
Covington hoped those were only rocks. They had more than an uncanny
resemblance to bird droppings and exuded a much more potent, pungent odor.
“You sure spared no expense on the scenic authenticity,
Mr. Marshall,” he muttered. “I could’ve sworn those were real dung.”
“Oh, those are real, all right.” Marshall pointed
up ahead, where the path ended in a circular plaza like a cul-de-sac. “Look
over there.”
Covington squinted past the railing on the walkway’s end
until he caught a glimpse of a broad and scaly surface rearing up from the
other side, shimmering like a wall of pebbles from the torches’ light. As he
traced the contours of the form before him with his eyes, he could hear the
crackling of soil beneath heavy footsteps and the rustle of leaves attached to
creaking trees.
His pace slowed to a stagger until he gave into the
paralysis of incredulous shock. The only muscles Covington could move were his
blinking eyelids.
He could confuse the hulking behemoth for nothing else. The
long and tubular neck with a tiny head, the rotund torso supported by four legs
like pillars, and the even longer tail that hovered over the ground with the
tip twirling like a lasso. All in all, the beast must have surpassed all but
the very largest whales in mass.
Covington would have taken it for an animatronic like one
would find in countless museums and theme parks around the world. But then,
with a smooth fluidity too flawless for any machine, the animal craned its neck
up to browse from one of the monkey-puzzle trees.
“What the bloody hell is…that?” Covington forced
himself to say at last. “Is that real?”
“Every bit of flesh, blood, and bone in him is real, I
tell you,” Marshall replied. “Like you said, we spared no expense.
Not even when it was more expensive than the museum itself.”
“I can easily imagine why…but why? Why would you bring
a bloody dinosaur, of all things, into this?”
“Why not? We deal in fossil fuels after all. Of course, as you know, most oil comes from
tiny sea critters rather than dinosaurs. But if you’re going to win hearts and
minds over to your new pipeline, you might as well win them over with the kind
of fossil they love. Most of all the kids.”
The dinosaur turned away from its meal and lowered its head
right down to where Covington and Marshall stood, examining them with little
coppery eyes while sniffing them like a curious dog. Covington froze still
again when the creature’s snout brushed against his suit.
“At least it’s the plant-eating kind,” he said.
“What do you call them, Apatosaurus?”
“Actually, mate, this one’s a Brontosaurus excelsus. Closely related, but the paleontologists now
consider them different genera again.”
It was a woman who had addressed Covington. Her khaki shorts
and top hugged her tall and slender, dark brown figure while wavy black hair
streamed beside her face underneath her slouch hat. She marched down the
walkway up to the Brontosaurus and gave the cracked scales on its muzzle a
gentle stroke of her hand as if it were a horse, murmuring soft words into its
earhole.
“Sir Covington, I’d like you to meet Charlotte Elanora,
a tough Aboriginal gal from down under,” Marshall said. “She led the
team to capture our big attraction back in the Jurassic, and now she’s its
primary caretaker.”
“His primary
caretaker,” Elanora corrected him. “I named him Big Ben, after my old
man. Ain’t he a handsome bloke?”
“A Brontosaurus named Big Ben…it’s alliterative, at
least,” Covington said. “How can you tell his gender though?”
“Easy. You can’t see it so well in this lighting, but
the males tend to have brighter purple stripes than the females.” Elanora
tapped the nape of the dinosaur’s neck behind its head. “Though if we’re
going to keep him penned up here, I think we ought to get him a mate soon.
Wouldn’t you want that, Big Ben? A nice and pretty sheila to keep you
company?”
Benny rumbled and then let out another of his moaning
bellows. The volume of the call almost burst through Covington’s eardrums now
that had had gotten so close to the dinosaur.
“Truth be told, I think he’s homesick,” Elanora
went on. “Though I suppose he’ll be safer in captivity. You can’t see it
from this side, but on his left thigh he has some scratches from an Allosaurus
attack. Allosaurus, by the way, is one of the big meat-eating dinosaurs, though
they’re a bit smaller and nimbler than the Cretaceous T. rex.”
“Good thing we don’t have one of those in here,
then,” Covington said. “Now this is all lovely and magnificent, but
don’t you think it might be, well, a bit of a challenge to keep him in this
place? We’ve all seen those movies, if you know what I mean. Not to mention,
the sheer cost of maintaining a beast that big…”
Marshall wrapped an arm around Covington’s shoulder and laughed. “Like I said, it’ll be the biggest draw we can throw at them. The admission tickets alone should pay for everything. And besides, the Brontosaurus is a gentle plant-eater. What could go wrong with his kind?”
Maia of Alodia, the protagonist of my short story “Arrows of Alodia”. By the way, Alodia was the southernmost of three Christianized kingdoms that sprung up in Sudan during the Middle Ages, after the fall of the kingdom of Kush.
Japan, 1500 AD The walls of the castle glowed pale yellow before the face of the setting sun, with blue shingles sparkling on its stacks of curved roofs. This radiance conferred onto the structure the semblance of a tall gold crown encrusted with lapis-lazuli gems. Atop a wooded hill it sat, overlooking the fields, forests, and scattered peasants’ villages like an emperor surveying his rural domain.
A young woman hiked up the series of stone steps which zigzagged up the hill’s northern slope, cradling in her arms a yew chest. Her hooded waist-length kimono and trousers, both dull green like the trees sheltering the path, protected her both from the evening’s damp chill and from any eyes which might be spying on her. Not that the woman had noticed anyone giving her a second glance so far, but nobody in her line of work could afford to let their guard down.
She reached the summit of the hill, strolled across the short bridge over the castle’s moat, and then paused to gaze over the countryside sprawling behind. The verdant beauty of the Japanese landscape would never leave her eyes in entirety, yet years of experience had scraped away much of its original allure. For underneath its lush and tranquil veneer lay a cutthroat and lawless world of cruelty and treachery. This would be the last evening she would spend in this land. The next day, she would set sail for civilization.
Among the irregular mass of rocks which built up the castle’s base, there stood a more rectangular slab as tall and wide as a man. The woman inserted her fingers along its edge and pushed it aside as if it were a regular Japanese sliding door. Ahead ran a narrow corridor lit with paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, a small courtesy she had not expected.
Underneath the more pleasing scent of the cherry blossoms, there leaked the stink of dead flesh through the chest’s lid. The woman hugged it against her breast, with queasy nausea swelling in her stomach. Grisly as the odor was, it was only part of the price she had to pay for her upcoming escape.
The gong rang and reverberated, and the gates to the arena ground open. In rode Huan Xi, Imperial Prince of Zhongguo, on his elephant Longwei. Both he and his mount glimmered with platelets of polished leather armor under the afternoon sun, with bronze blades glinting on the elephant’s tusks. Spreading a proud smile across his pale yellow-brown face, Huan Xi waved with lance in hand to the audience that filled the terraced seating to his right.
Everyone on that side of the arena waved back with cheering and hooting of his name. These men and women were all Zhongguans, Huan Xi’s subjects, come to see him joust for the prize he desired more than anything else. From the lowermost seating there watched the Empress herself, his mother, with a bright pink robe of silk and cherry blossoms in her bun of graying hair. Her eyes twinkled with both Imperial pride and maternal love, but Huan Xi noticed her wringing her hands together with nervous anticipation.
He would make her so proud. This he swore by Zhongdi, Lord of all the Heavens.
Another gong rang from atop the arena’s far end. Afterward there thundered exotic drums as an opposite pair of gates began to part. The right side of the arena fell silent, but the spectators seated along the left erupted into cheering and chanting in a very different language. These other people, dark brown-skinned with brief garments of white linen, hailed from the ancient kingdom of Khamit far to the southwest of Zhongguo. On their lowest seating was their old Pharaoh Kahotep, with his blue- and gold-striped crown and braided goatee. He flashed a smirk in Huan Xi’s direction.
The Prince of Zhongguo searched the Khamitans’ ranks for a glimpse of Berenib, the Pharaoh’s lovely young daughter. It was over her hand that the joust had been arranged, yet Huan Xi could not make her out anywhere. He could not even find her next to her father or any of his officials. From what he knew of her character, she did not seem like the type of woman who would avoid the sight of blood in the arena, but he was at a loss to explain her curious absence otherwise.
Maybe Kahotep had meant to present her only after the event, for whatever reason. Regardless, as long as Huan Xi had the memory of Berenib’s exquisite beauty in memory, he did not need to be reminded of why he fought.
Longwei the elephant raised his trunk with an anxious rumble. Huan Xi patted his brow while whispering the most soothing words he could muster. In spite of their size, elephants could be skittish animals, but the Prince had to wonder what had intimidated his steed all of a sudden.
Nyarai crept through the tall grass with her hunting bow in hand and an iron ax by her hip. Her tawny halter-top and skirt, both banded with wavy brown stripes, further hid her within the yellowed savanna. Perspiration dripped from her brow, chilling her dark umber skin in spite of the baking afternoon sun.
The other Vavhimi had chosen her too young. No way in Mwari’s name could Nyarai do this and survive.
Ahead of her, the stegosaurs ambled in the field amidst scattered aloe and cycad trees. Any single one of the lumbering giants could feed all her neighbors back in the city, with the pebbled hide providing shields for the Mambo’s royal guard. The pentagonal plates that shimmered like copper on their backs would bring in a fortune from merchants in all directions. So would the ebony spikes glinting at the tips of their tails…if they did not impale Nyarai first.
No, she could not let her fears drown her hope. She was a Muvhimi, a hunter of the Vazhona nation, and she could not let her peers down.
Nyarai slipped an arrow from her quiver and laid it atop the bow, aligning its head with one of the stegosaurs’ rumps. On the far side of the field, the savanna gave way to a woodland of mopane trees where the other Vavhimi awaited. They had sent her not to kill any of the stegosaurs, but to drive the herd into their trap.
It was a simple, classic strategy when described out loud. Nyarai could only plea to Mwari the Creator, and to the spirits of her foremothers, that it would be as simple to carry out.
She drew her bowstring with tender care, not letting it creak. The bow still wavered in her clammy grip. The stegosaurs lowed and grazed, and she prayed in murmurs that they would not smell her.
This was originally a paper I wrote for a Sociology course over at UCSD back in 2012. Even after the passage of several years, I still consider what I articulate in this paper to be representative of my current views on the topic.
Are Black Americans owed reparations for the oppression they have suffered throughout American history? Many if not most White Americans would say no, whereas many if not most Black Americans would say yes. The question of reparations is a racially polarizing one, and since Whites form the demographic majority and socioeconomically dominant ethnic group in America, this has meant that reparations have never been paid. This payment is long overdue. Since Black Americans have suffered from and continue to suffer today an ancient legacy of racial oppression, a reparations program for them is long overdue.
The most commonly cited objections to reparations for African-Americans’ suffering are that slavery ended too long ago and that many White Americans’ ancestors never owned slaves, therefore absolving Whites as a collective of any responsibility over the issue. The former argument would be valid if slavery was the only historical crime against Black Americans and if modern Blacks did not suffer from its effects, but neither of these conditions have been met. The oppression and unfavorable treatment that Blacks received continued even after slavery was formally abolished and still affects the modern Black experience. As for the second argument, while Whites as a whole may not have been guilty of slavery, they have benefited from a racist social hierarchy that favored them over Blacks. This is not a question of making White people feel guilty about what a few of their ancestors did over 150 years ago. The fundamental issue is one of healing a larger legacy of racism that elevated Whites about Blacks.
Our heroine, Queen Butumbi of Djamba, shoots from the back of her tame T. rex Tambwe.
Tambwe craned his big head upward, inhaled through his nostrils, and let out a deep rumbling growl from his mouth of blade-like teeth. The tyrannosaur’s tail swayed behind him as he sat crouched within the wall of jungle that reared alongside a moss-stained road.
Butumbi, Queen of Djamba, stroked the deep green scales on her mount’s neck while murmuring an incantation to calm his temper. She could hear the giant predator’s stomach grumble with a hunger for fresh meat that had grown over the past week’s southward march. With a voice as soft as that of a mother reassuring her child, the young Queen promised Tambwe that he would have more than enough to gorge on before sundown.
Other than the normal chorus of bird squawks, insect chirps, and monkey hoots, the jungle lay silent on both sides of the road. Even from atop the saddle behind her tyrannosaur’s neck, Butumbi could see little of the force she had laid out before her. Armed men and women lay beneath the cover of undergrowth and creepers, as did the packs of feathered deinonychus that had been hired to protect their flanks. Only the tiniest glint of iron weaponry and jewelry of gold and copper could betray anyone’s presence.
It was as Butumbi had planned. The forces of Ntambwa would not know what struck them until it was too late.
An illustration I did for my short story “Staff of the Red Sun”.
Egypt, 1942 AD
The limestone door ground over the gravelly earth as the diggers pushed it open. The grating noise would not have been the most pleasant for most men to hear, but for Friedrich von Essen, it was music to his ears. After untold weeks of watching these chattering Arabs gouge a pit out of the desert beneath the roasting sun, he had found it at last.
The thought of presenting this discovery to those fools back in Berlin made him smirk with glee. Even the Führer himself, eager as he was for any leverage in the war, had shown a bit of hesitance before sponsoring the expedition. Even if Friedrich ended up finding nothing inside this tomb, he had at least confirmed its very existence.
A faint yet acrid smell flowed out from the black depths beyond the doorway. The Arab diggers jumped back with startled shouts and whimpered among themselves, their normally bronze faces slightly blanched.
Underneath the howl of the wind, Friedrich thought he had heard a soft whisper. It must have been one of the dozens of men behind him, but it did make the back of his neck prickle.
“What do those inscriptions say, Professor von Essen?” Colonel Hermann Schmidt pointed to the string of hieroglyphs chiseled into the entrance’s lintel.
“Oh, those simply identify the tomb as belonging to Nefrusheri,” Friedrich said. “Why?”
The colonel’s tanned face had turned a shade paler as well. “I only wanted to make sure it wasn’t something like a curse.”
“Oh, don’t believe such sensationalist rubbish. Curses aren’t as common on Egyptian tombs as you think. You might find a few in tombs from the Old Kingdom, but that’s about it.”
“Fair enough, Professor. I would’ve expected a fearsome sorceress like your Nefrusheri would have something protecting her resting place.”
Friedrich glanced back at the darkness within the tomb. If the departed sorceress truly possessed the sort of power he sought, it would seem strange if she had not taken measures to defend it somehow. What those would be, he could not even guess.
On the other hand, he could not let fear and paranoia keep anyone away. Not when there was a war to win and a world to conquer.
“In case she does, bring your men over here,” Friedrich said. “We’ll go in together.”
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:
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.
