An acrid haze floated over the camp. Makena passed through it with her stomach knotting with nausea. Dark torrents of smoke billowing from the burning tents watered her eyes. Spatters of bloodshed, reeking to the heavens of a coppery odor, stained the sand red.
There lay all over the ruined camp the bodies of men and women, young and old, their once tawny skin having faded into an ashen pallor. Even infants lay in their mothers’ arms with faces still contorted in voiceless, unmoving cries. Javelins transfixing many of the dead testified to an atrocity at the hands of men. Plucking out one of the javelins, Makena recognized its leaf-bladed tip as being of Habeshan make.
She curled her lips into a snarl even as remorse pierced her heart. The Habesha were not her people, but as another people of eastern Afrika, they shared the same black skin and coiled hair as her own Azanians despite their narrower noses and thinner lips. By attacking these hapless Ahrab nomads with such brutality, the Habesha had made Makena regret her own distant kinship with them.
A wide road of human tracks, mixed with those of camels and sheep, led out of the camp southward through the desert. Upon reading the centermost line of tracks the way a scholar could read a scroll, Makena discerned that the walkers had laid it with a slow, shuffling gait. Some of the tracks’ dimensions matched the feet of women and children as well as men. Such were the telltale signs of captives of all ages and genders being herded in a line like cattle for slaughter. If Makena’s suspicions were correct, their fate would be no better.
She unslung her bow with a determined grip. Makena had traveled to the sandy Ahrabiyyan peninsula in search of an ancient treasure, the treasure of old Ubar, and she had hoped the people in this camp would guide her to that fabled ruin. Much as fate had banished all hope of that, so had it banished any thought of treasure from her mind. Who were left of these people needed justice. They needed their freedom back. Only Makena could give them that out in these barren wastes.