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.
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.
Cleopatra and Amanirenas have discovered the Brood of Apep, a clutch of old “dragon eggs”!
33 BC
The head of a sandstone python reared high as a giraffe from the desert floor. Although centuries of wind and entropy had dulled the fangs in its open maw, the sculpture’s unblinking glare nonetheless sent a chill slithering up Amanirenas’s spine despite the balminess of early evening. If the old legends had spoken the truth, this idol represented the likeness of Apep, the giant serpent of chaos that lorded over the underworld and attacked the sun god Ra every night. And the earthen edifice that mounted the hill behind it was its shrine.
How could our ancestors have venerated such a monster? Amanirenas thought. Even allowing the ruined temple dated to the time when both the people of Kush and Kemet roamed the grasslands that had become the desert around them, she could not fathom that they worshiped the one being both cultures now considered the most malevolent in their whole pantheon. There had to have been a misunderstanding, or a meaning that her people and the Kemetians had forgotten over millennia. But what could it be?
Cleopatra, for her part, pouted her lip as she regarded the ruin behind the megalithic statue. “I was expecting something bigger, more magnificent.”
“Both our ancestors were nomads when they built this, remember?” Amanirenas said. “They only had so much time in their wandering lives to build it. What were you expecting, Cleo, something like your Khufu’s great pyramid?”
“Fair enough. I only hope the treasure turns out to be worth our trip.”
Princesses Cleopatra and Amanirenas must flee hostile Libyan tribesmen out in the Egyptian desert!
54 BC
The sun burned white hot from its zenith in the sky, yet the cool wind brushing past Cleopatra provided refreshing opposition to its baking wrath, even if the wind did blow dust into her eyes. She flipped the reins that were tied around her waist to keep her two horses galloping at top speed even as they maneuvered between the boulders strewn over the barren plain. The strength of the animals pulling on the reins while she gripped them was all that kept her stable in her chariot despite its constant shaking and bouncing.
Her friend Amanirenas was quickly closing the distance between them from behind. The way the Kushite princess’s horses, both of which she had brought with her from her homeland far up the Nile, were gaining ground, it would only be moments before she wrested the lead from her Kemetian counterpart. Already she had drawn close enough that, even through the billowing clouds of dust, Cleopatra could make out the details of her gold, carnelian, and ivory jewelry, including the twin cobras that reared on her gold skullcap crown. It had to be conceded, what they said about the Kushites’ horses was true. They really were among the fastest in the world.
The archaeologist Latonya Coleman must fend off a pack of hungry hyenas in the plains of the Ivory Coast!
Latonya Coleman lifted her eyes from the yellowed parchment map in her hands to gaze through the jeep window. The grassy plains of the northern Ivory Coast spread beyond her, reaching all the way to the horizon beneath a gold sky. Every so often, she spotted herds of wildlife cavorting through the tall grass, as well as the occasional cluster of thatch-roofed mud huts in the distance. Latonya wondered if any of her ancestors, before they were captured and shipped across the Atlantic in chains, would have called at least one of these little villages home centuries ago.
Like so many of her people, she had little if any way of knowing for sure. Even genetic tests were not always as reliable as their advertisers claimed.
She went back to studying the map, comparing it to the landscape in front of her eyes. So far, despite its medieval age and the stylized depictions of people, trees, and animals populating it, the old document of Malian origin had so far proven accurate regarding the position of settlements, waterholes, and other features of the region. In truth, it was a historical treasure no less priceless than the artifact Latonya had tucked in her knapsack. Once she was done with her mission, she would donate the map back to Timbuktu, where it belonged.
“We are coming as far as we can get,” the driver said with a thick Ivorian accent. “Any further and the road curves away from the ruins. Shall I accompany you to them, Mademoiselle Coleman?”
“No need for that,” Latonya replied. “I’d rather you stay here and guard the jeep.”
“Très bien, then. You stay safe out there. There might be predators about, or worse.”
“Which is why I always bring these beauties with me.”
With a proud smirk, Latonya pulled out both of her pistols from her thigh holsters and twirled them in her hands. The driver chuckled, more out of admiration than mockery.
After the jeep decelerated to a halt, Latonya hopped out and landed in grass as high as her waist. She scanned the surrounding savanna for any signs of life, human or animal. Given her line of work, she had to watch out for both, but even more so the former. Many men and women would be after what Latonya carried in her knapsack — and would kill for it. Some, she knew, already had.
Once Latonya was confident the coast was clear, she waded through the grass toward the hills on the horizon, holding the map out as she walked. If she read it correctly, it indicated that the ruins lay somewhere on the other side of the hills. She could already see a thin, finger-shaped silhouette sticking up from one of them like a monolithic marker.
Despite the waning evening temperature, it remained humid enough for perspiration to slather Latonya’s dark sienna-brown skin quickly, staining damp spots into her crop-top and shorts. Even the breezes that blew across the plains were too warm to provide any relief. As the sky darkened to deep red, the crickets and other nocturnal creatures began chirping and hooting songs of farewell to the sun and greetings to the rising moon. If there was anything that made Latonya feel slightly chilled at all, it was the knowledge that many of the savanna’s most infamous predators preferred to hunt at night.
An hour later, she reached the pillar on the hill. Though shaped like a slim cylindrical column, it had lines of glyphs chiseled down its sides like an Egyptian obelisk. It could have denoted the ancient city’s territorial limits, or maybe a milestone like those the Romans installed along their marvelously engineered roads to mark distances. Latonya turned on her phone flashlight and took several pictures of the inscriptions, which she would ask Scott to look at once she returned to their university. If anyone could help Latonya decipher them, it was her attentive boyfriend.
She unslung her knapsack and opened it for a moment to reveal the artifact within. “You’re almost home.”
A high-pitched whooping cry, almost like a laugh, shot a chill up Latonya’s spine. She unholstered her pistols, gripping the guns tight with cooling damp hands. Her heart thumped while the grass around her rustled and shook, parting in several places to make way for hunched doglike forms speeding toward her, laughing with predatory zeal.
They were spotted hyenas, the marauding wolves of Africa. Within moments, they surrounded her, their instinctive knack for herding and then attacking their prey playing out in front of her.
One of the beasts jumped at her with jaws open, baring sharp blood-stained fangs. She fired one pistol round into its mouth, dropping it to the ground. Another hyena lunged at her from the side. After sidestepping out of its reach, she swung her arm hard onto its skull, dazing it, and then finished it off with both guns. A third animal grabbed the cuff of her shorts with its teeth and pulled her until she kicked it off with the heel of her boot, losing a mouthful of cloth in the process.
More hyenas attacked, and Latonya banged more rounds at them. Even after she killed a few of the spotted monsters, they kept up their onslaught, forming a ring of snapping bloodthirsty jaws which tightened around their prey until they closed the space between her and them. They would not relent until they wore the fight out of her. Or until she ran out of rounds, whichever came sooner.
Latonya fired more double rounds into the circle of gnashing fangs. She then burst through the opening she had punched out and raced down the hill, the beasts giving chase. As Latonya ran, she shot back at the hyenas, whittling away at their numbers until only a small fraction of the original pack remained. It was at that point when they turned to retreat, their whooping and fierce yellow eyes giving way to panicked yelping as they disappeared into the distance.
Latonya leaned against an outcropping of rock to catch her breath and rest. She felt a pitted texture on the rock and shone her flashlight on it, illuminating more inscribed glyphs like those of the monolith on the hill. This time, the glyphs were on a stout pedestal that supported a tall sculpture, humanoid in body shape, but with a monstrous crocodile- or hippopotamus-like head that yawned with a mouth of gleaming iron teeth. She recognized it as one of two colossi that guarded an opening in a stone rampart that was as high as a giraffe’s head.
Latonya did not need to look at her map again to realize that she had found what she was looking for: the ancient city, known as the City of the Mother Goddess, which many dismissed as little more than legend. They’d done the same to Timbuktu, too, until it was excavated and dated to the 12th century. Yet the City of the Mother Goddess was standing right in front of her, ready to receive what had been unjustly stolen from it.
She drifted through the gateway in the city wall and entered a wide avenue overgrown with tall grass. Terraced stone platforms supported the eroded walls, columns, and sculptures that had once formed monumental buildings, presumably the homes and workhouses of the bygone people who had built and lived in this city centuries if not millennia ago. Latonya could not help but wonder if their descendants remained in the region, or if her own ancestors were among them. Maybe they were related to the local Senufo people?
As much as this ancient heritage needed protection, it could not hurt to study it some more. Study, not plunder.
The avenue ended before the steps leading up to the tallest structure within the city, a towering rotunda. It was capped with a stepped dome so enormous that it could put the Pantheon in Rome to shame. Columns inscribed with more of the cryptic glyphs framed a high portal in the edifice’s front wall, with the lintel bearing an image of the Mother Goddess herself in relief.
This had to be the temple she sought within the city, the Temple of the Mother Goddess.
Latonya passed through the portal. A silver moonlight beam shone down from a circular aperture at the peak of the domed rotunda, falling upon a pedestal in the middle of the interior. Switching on her flashlight, Latonya could make out the portraits of forgotten deities mounted on the inner walls, the gazes of their unblinking eyes converging on the central pedestal. She did not need to read the gold-flecked inscriptions on the pedestal to guess that something was supposed to lay upon it.
Walking up to the pedestal, Latonya opened her knapsack and pulled out the one object the hallowed temple needed to again be complete. In her hands, underneath the moonlight, glistened the gold flesh of the Mother Goddess, her arms cradling a swollen stomach bearing the world and all its inhabitants, her onyx eyes twinkling with love for what she would bring into existence. Looking down at the Goddess’s plump face and full-lipped smile, Latonya thought it resembled her own mother.
A tear crept into her eye. “Welcome home, Mother Goddess,” she said as she placed the gold idol onto the pedestal. After it landed with the gentle clink of metal touching stone, the click of a cocked gun followed. Below the ends of her braids, the tiny hairs on the back of Latonya’s neck prickled.
Another woman stepped into the temple, her high-heeled boots clipping on the mossy stone floor. A khaki jacket and trousers hugged her slender, barely tanned figure, with wheat-yellow hair flowing down from beneath her wide-brimmed hat. Her eyes blazed like sapphire flames as she pointed her revolver at Latonya, her thin lips curling into a sneer.
Karen Cunningham, an English socialite and heiress who is my archaeologist heroine Latonya Coleman’s nemesis.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Latonya Coleman, the ‘Tomb Savior’, at last,” Karen Cunningham spoke, her accent posh English. “I must admit, my swarthy old friend, you’re jolly good at stealing things from me, whether that be priceless artifacts…or men.”
Latonya bared her teeth in a snarl. “For your information, Scott was never your man. And neither were any of those artifacts. Certainly not this one. I’m putting it back where it belongs!”
“I admire your commitment to defending people’s heritages, Miss Coleman, I really do. But the people who made that old idol don’t even exist anymore. In which case, I’d say it’s ripe for the taking. You know how it goes: hand it back to me, along with the map, and nobody gets hurt.”
Latonya whipped out both of her pistols and aimed them at Karen’s head. “You’ll have to try harder than that!”
“Very well. If anything can talk louder than gunshots, it’s money. How about my father and I personally fund every expedition you’ll ever go on? As you know, we’ve plenty to spare.”
Though Latonya still had her guns drawn, the tension in her arm muscles relaxed. Funding for her archaeological endeavors had never been easy to come by, and then there was rent and other expenses she needed to juggle back home. She needed every cent she could collect, wherever it came from. Furthermore, the Cunningham family had gathered as much esteem for their philanthropy as they had their business success. Connecting with them could benefit Latonya’s department in more ways than simple finances.
The Mother Goddess watched from the pedestal which Latonya had placed her. Was protecting the idol worth it if it flew in the way of riches and prestige? Was it even worth having a billionaire’s pampered daughter shoot at you, especially right after escaping a pack of ravenous hyenas? What was it worth, anyway? Maybe the old hunk of gold did deserve to collect dust somewhere in an English manor, little more than yet another piece of exotic décor. Like so many other treasures pillaged from the peoples of the world, being reduced to trophies and tokens of First World domination.
The glint of determination and reignited fury returned to Latonya’s eyes. “No matter what price you name, no matter what pain you inflict upon me, I will never let you steal any people’s heritage,” she said forcefully. “People like you and your family have raped and robbed the world for far too long, and the world still bleeds from it. Why, families like yours owe almost their entire fortune to the blood and sweat of the Global South, and that’s without accounting for all the ancient treasures they like to ‘collect’ for their own vanity. Well, sorry, Karen Cunningham, but other people’s heritages are not yours to exploit. And I will pay with blood to defend them if I must!”
Karen’s sneer widened into a haughty grin as she tapped her finger on her revolver’s trigger. “So, a duel it is, then.”
Latonya smirked. “Unfortunately for you, I brought more guns than you did.”
She pulled both her pistol’s triggers. They did not fire, but instead clacked empty. She had used up their magazines on the hyenas!
With a mocking cackle, Karen fired her revolver. Latonya dove to the temple floor as the bullet grazed a red streak across her shoulder. She covered the wound with her hand as she rolled her body toward the shadows on the far side of the rotunda, escaping another of the Englishwoman’s shots. As Karen banged three more rounds at her, Latonya maneuvered all around the chamber, dodging not only bullets but also chunks of masonry that the missed shots broke off from the walls.
The last of these was part of a god’s bust which plummeted onto Latonya’s back, filling her with intense pain while cutting her skin with its sharp edges. Karen laughed with cruel delight as she strutted over and pinned Latonya against the floor with her boot while pointing the barrel down at her victim.
“Any last words, my Negroid nemesis?” Karen asked.
Latonya heard more laughter. It was not the Englishwoman’s, nor was it human at all. It was more like a shrill whooping echoing from outside the temple, accompanied by pairs of glowing dots rushing toward the entry portal.
“I think your gunshots have invited some company over for dinner, Miss Cunningham,” Latonya said. “Or supper, as you Brits like to call it.”
After the pressure from Karen’s boot relaxed, Latonya rolled herself free, sprang back onto her feet, and whacked Karen onto the floor with a swipe of her forearm. The heiress to the Cunningham corporate empire scrambled to get up while the hyenas were pouring into the temple, their eyes glowing yellow with infernal hunger over their glistening wet fangs. The beasts’ laughter gained a diabolical reverberance within the rotunda walls.
Karen’s complexion turned white as alabaster while she held up her gun with a trembling hand. When she pulled the trigger, it clacked empty as Latonya’s pistols had earlier. She could only whimper and scream as the horde of beasts descended upon her.
Latonya frantically dug within her knapsack for another magazine so she could shoot the hyenas off her adversary. As much as she hated Karen and everything the Cunningham family stood for, it did not seem right to let the woman die. And if the Englishwoman’s arch-nemesis could save her, possibly she would have enough sense of honor to withdraw her pursuit of the idol as a token of gratitude.
By the time Latonya had her hand on a spare magazine, it was too late. She had already heard Karen Cunningham’s death rattle beneath the ripping of flesh and the crunching of bone.
Latonya hid in an alcove on the far side of the rotunda and waited until the pack had finished their meal, not daring to look at the pile of gore they left behind when they exited the temple. Horrifying as Karen’s death had been, it might have been a small mercy for Latonya that the beasts had eaten their fill and were showing no interest in seconds. It was a tragic shame that someone had to die to bring about peace here, but that would always be the price of imperialistic greed.
Before she left the temple and headed back to the jeep, Latonya Coleman took one last look at the Mother Goddess on the pedestal. If there was anything that would bring her peace that night, it was the knowledge that she had done her job, and that the Mother Goddess had returned home at last, right where she belonged.
Map of the setting of my short story, Scorpions of the Sea.
100 AD
A commotion buzzed at the edge of the trading souq next to the harbor of al-Mukha on the southwestern coast of Arabia. All eyes of the spectators followed a slender galley of ebony fringed with gold and inlaid ivory as it slid and anchored beside one of the earthen quays. On its billowing crimson sail glowered the gold face of a ram supporting the sun on its horns, the royal insignia of Kush.
It was by no means unusual for a Kushite vessel to dock at al-Mukha. Plenty of merchants from all sides of the Red Sea and beyond would flock to the Himyarite port to sell their wares and restock for the next trip. Yet the black galley that had come in was a rare giant that would have dwarfed the typical merchantman, never mind the puny native dhows. Above the deck glimmered the iron-bladed spears, axes, and swords of the soldiers aboard.
Once they laid the gangplank down, there descended a svelte woman whose skin was dark as the galley itself, with her short ringlets of frizzy hair reddened with ocher. The black-spotted red sashes over her bosom bound a bow and quiver to her back while a slim sword rested along her white linen skirt. From her neck hung a string of ivory fly-shaped medals that honored her as a fighting champion of Kush.
After the woman followed her entourage of spearmen with oval cowhide shields. As she and her bodyguards advanced up the quay, the audience that had watched their arrival parted to give them as broad a berth as they could, with nervous murmurs in Himyaritic passing between the spectators.
Placing both hands on her hip, the woman cleared her throat with her head held up. “I am Nensela, Admiral of Kush. You need not fear anything, for we mean you no harm. We come to al-Mukha with only two purposes: to resupply and to find information.”
From the ranks of the crowd, a white-bearded local shot his bony hand up. “What do you mean by ‘information’, my lady?”
Nensela pulled out a scroll of papyrus from her belt and unfolded it, revealing a painted illustration of a blue scorpion with claws serrated like a lobster’s. “Have any of you ever heard of the Scorpions of the Sea?”
Most of the people dispersed back to the souq while the old man squinted at the scroll, his tawny face blanching a shade paler. “By Rahmanan, who in al-Mukha hasn’t? They come here every season. Are they wanted?”
Nensela marched to him with her hand clenched on her sword’s hilt. “I hope you are not feigning ignorance with me, old man. You ought to know they’ve been a menace for generations. Why, I lost my little brother to them! So, please, tell me everything you know!”
The old Himyarite scratched the back of his keffiyeh and shook his head. “The truth is, I recall not when they last dropped by. But Hussein the pot merchant may know. He’s done business with them more than once. I’d look for him in the northeast part of the souq, over there.”
He pointed his walking stick in the direction of the souq‘s far corner.
Nensela tossed him a bag of silver. “May Amun bless you for your aid, then.”
The souq of al-Mukha was a bustling maze of people thronging between rows of stalls that were shaded with awnings of sagging cloth. Most of the traders and their customers were native Himyarites and other Arabians, along with similar-looking peoples such as Judaeans, Phoenicians, and Mesopotamians. Yet speckled amid the bronze-faced majority were darker-skinned nationalities such as Kemetians, Aksumites, and even a few Kushites, the latter of whom saluted Nensela and her men as they passed. The fragrances of perfume, fresh fruit, and cooked meat mixed in the air with the less pleasant odors of fish, musty cloth, and camels being dragged about on rope leashes.
Over the chatter of the customers and the music of trilling flutes, twanging lyres, and banging drums, Nensela heard a man yell about having the finest collection of ceramics along the Red Sea. That must have been the pot merchant the old man at the docks had cited.
Taking advantage of her feminine wile, she smiled and swayed her hips as she sauntered towards his stall. “You wouldn’t happen to be a handsome gentleman by the name of Hussein, would you?”
A toothy grin spread across the man’s pudgy face as he nodded. “Well, aren’t you a welcome sight around here! Of course, it is I, Hussein bin Abdullah. Why, did someone recommend my wares to you?”
All over his stall and beside it stood stacks of almost every ceramic form that could be found all over the known world. Wide-topped Kemetian jars inscribed with hieroglyphic texts sat beside orange-and-black Greek vases, Chinese porcelain, and native Arabian oil lamps with elongated nozzles. Nensela noticed there were also some Kushite bowls on display, distinguished from the rest by their black tops grading to red towards the bottom. She could not help but pick one of them up, for it had reminded her of the bowls her mother would make for her and her brother Akhraten to eat from when they were children.
Those were simpler, happier times. But they had fallen into the past. With them had gone Akhraten, all courtesy of the vile Sea Scorpions.
“My mother made pots like this,” Nensela said. “Where do you get these, my dear Hussein?”
Hussein’s eyes twitched sideways. “I’m afraid my suppliers wish to remain anonymous.”
“Oh, is that so? Because I’ve been informed that you have connections with those known as the Sea Scorpions…”
“What? Don’t be silly, woman!”
Nensela slammed her hands onto the stall, shaking the stacks of pottery until some of it fell and shattered on the ground. “Tell me the truth, Hussein bin Abdullah. When did you last deal with them?”
“I can’t say, but it isn’t them! I swear by Rahmanan, I would never profit from piracy!”
Nensela grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and hauled him off his feet. “Do not lie to me anymore! Tell me, for the safety of all around the Red Sea, whom you get your goods from. Do you hear me? Talk!”
Hands clapped as loud as the crack of thunder, and then the whole souq fell silent.
The one who had clapped was a stout Himyarite man, robed in black, with a white keffiyeh draped over the sides of his head. Everyone else in the souq stepped back to make way for him as he hurried towards Nensela and Hussein with a gentle smile under his gray-streaked mustache.
“There is no need for violence, my child,” he said. “Please put him down.”
Nensela obeyed with a grumble. “Please, do not call me ‘child’, for I am the Admiral of Kush. And I’ve good reason to believe this Hussein character is collaborating with pirates!”
“It is a lie, I assure you!” Hussein yelped.
“I will assess the truth of the matter later, Hussein bin Abdullah,” the black-robed man said. “Pardon me for my condescension there, O Admiral of Kush, but I am the Sheikh of al-Mukha. These are all my people, so I must implore you that you treat them with care while you are here.”
“You are the Sheikh?” Nensela bowed at the waist before him. “Then I must apologize for my behavior. I must admit I have little love for pirates, or those I am told are involved with their crimes.”
From the corner of her eye, she cast a glare at Hussein while he was picking up pieces of broken pottery. He repaid with a rude look of his own.
“You speak of pirates, Admiral? It so happens that I have information of my own on them,” the Sheikh of al-Mukha said. “And unlike that gentleman over there, I’ll be more than willing to share it…within the privacy of my own home, mind you. Why don’t you and your men come over for some refreshment after your long voyage?”
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.
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.”
