It would not be quite accurate to say Elizabeth Blake had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. A spoon of pure gold, encrusted with diamonds, would do her upbringing more justice. All her life she had luxuriated within her family’s mansion of dazzling white marble out in the countryside, supported by the labor of their cotton plantation’s loyal and industrious workforce. Indeed, the Blakes had amassed so much wealth that finding a suitable husband for their darling princess Elizabeth was like mining for gems in a pigsty.
True, armies of men would flock to the Blake estate to court her, showering her with praise for her ginger locks, fern-green eyes, and cherry-red lips. But a proper belle like Elizabeth cared little for all those smelly, sun-weathered rednecks, and her old father cared for them even less. It was not until after her twenty-fifth birthday had passed when one worthy young gentleman, an enterprising doctor by the name of Thomas Henderson, had moved into her neighborhood from the north.
As they say, a bachelor in possession of a good fortune is highly wanted as a husband by women like Elizabeth Blake. But every time she and Mr. Henderson crossed paths, despite her best efforts to grin and bat her eyelashes at him, the boy would simply smile back and continue with his business. At most Thomas would nod and compliment her dress upon request. This she found most peculiar; how could the one marriageable man she had ever seen not fall for her charms like all those hicks before him?
All her life, every time Elizabeth had asked for something, she would get her way no matter what. She would do anything she could to win this handsome newcomer over, even if it meant venturing deep into the dark overgrown swamp that stretched beyond her estate. For within that wetland lived a young voodoo priestess named Izegbe. Elizabeth would never let herself touch this savage heathen’s sooty hand, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
“O Priestess of Voodoo, do you know how to make a man fall in love with me?” Elizabeth asked. “I love no man other than Thomas Henderson, yet I fear he doesn’t love me.”
The priestess bit her lip at first, but then smiled before fetching a flask of clear liquid from her medicine cabinet. “Take this love potion free of charge, my sweet Miss Blake. Take a few strands of your hair and mix them into it, and then give it to the man you love. One drink will make him fall for you.”
Elizabeth went home to do as the priestess instructed. She opened the flask, wincing from the potion’s awfully pungent odor, and stirred strands of her own hair into it. She cackled with eager glee as she prepared the potion thus.
The next evening, Elizabeth went down to the local bar where Thomas was enjoying his usual drink after a hard day’s work. She handed to him the potion, wrapped with a glittery red ribbon as if it were a Christmas present. “It’s a special gift just for you, Dr. Henderson.”
Dr Henderson scratched his hair with befuddlement, but shrugged and opened the flask. But after he sniffed its contents, he did not take even one sip.
“Why, this is none other than chloral hydrate—a common date rape drug!” he roared. “I know what you’re up to, Miss Blake! Someone call the marshal!”
“No! I didn’t mean to rape you, Thomas,” Elizabeth said. “I was tricked by that sooty whore Izegbe!”
At that very moment Izegbe, who stepped forth from the shadows. “It was for good reason. You wanted a way to manipulate his feelings to benefit yourself. That, Miss Blake, is the textbook definition of date rape, and I had to trap you for it! And besides, Thomas is seeing me.”
As the police marched in to drag Elizabeth Blake away, the last she saw of Thomas Henderson was Izegbe embracing him with ebony arms and kissing him with a lover’s passion.
A woman climbed onto the bough of a kapok tree, which twisted up from the treetop canopy. Her lissome dark umber figure, clad with a barkcloth skirt and halter-top, sparkled with droplets of perspiration beneath the hot glow of the sun piercing through the overcast sky. She raised her hand over her eyes, surveying the green ocean of jungle as it rolled in choppy waves all around her high vantage.
To the east rose a jagged range of overgrown crags, which ran in a ring like a caldera. Covering the basin within was a vast, terraced dome glimmering of corroded gold, with a circular hole in its summit. Under the shadow cast by the crater walls, the green-stained spires and roofs of ruined masonry poked through the jungle, but there appeared no evidence of a living settlement in the proximity of these ruins.
The woman shuddered slightly as she tightened her grip on her perch. She had heard the legends, but never considered them anything more than village storytellers’ way of frightening children into good behavior. Neither had she imagined that she would ever venture within sight of a place like they had described.
Dinanga, huntress of the village of Mungu, had spent the better half of the past moon-cycle searching for her younger sister Kazadi. The memory of the girl’s abduction, with men in blood-red loincloths lunging out of the undergrowth to seize and drag her away, had haunted Dinanga’s every dream with a vivid clarity that never faded. She would have taken those men for common marauders had she not tracked them all the way to such mysterious ruins. If the old myths had spoken the truth all that time, an even more terrible fate would await Kazadi.
Within the jungle to the southwest, someone screamed.
This is meant to be a sequel to an earlier story of mine titled The Battle Roar of Sekhmet, which you can also read on this website’s blog.
Reference sheet for Takhaet, an Egyptian warrior who is the protagonist of my short stories “The Battle Roar of Sekhmet” and “Mayhem at the Menagerie”.
Egypt, 1345 BC
I crouched at the edge of our raft of woven papyrus and
peered down at the dark green-blue water with harpoon in hand. Near the reeds
along the river’s edge, there drifted a plump tilapia almost two feet in
length. I licked my lips at the thought of chowing down on its succulent flesh.
The fish would feed both Nebet and I for at least one whole day, if not two.
I stabbed after the tilapia. It escaped by darting over to
the reeds where it vanished. Under my breath, I cursed Sutekh’s mischief for
hexing my aim yet again. The aardvark-faced Lord of Chaos had caused me nothing
but grief and disappointment since we had set out on the day’s expedition this
morning.
Nebet, my niece of ten years, held up a line of rope with a
hook that transfixed a tiny morsel of mutton. “You sure you don’t want to use
the lure, Aunt Takhi?”
I gave her a half-serious scowl while accepting her lure
with a grumble. I would always protect the child with my life, but I had to
admit that she had grown into quite the smart mouth over the last few years.
I plopped the hook into the water. “I must have
underestimated how rusted my fishing skills have grown. When I was your age,
Nebet, I would put all the boys to shame at this!”
“Maybe find yourself a man who would do the fishing for
you?” Nebet asked. “There should be plenty to go around, and most of them seem
to like you.”
I raised my eyebrow. “How would you know that?”
“Whenever you go by, they always seem to look at you twice.
And you know that old Vizier Ay from way back? I remember he sounded like he wanted
you for himself.”
The memory of that shriveled husk of a man, that lecherous lackey of the false Pharaoh, flooded the inside of my mouth with a sour flavor. The passage of five years since we last crossed paths had not softened my distaste for him and his minions. I would sooner swim with crocodiles than occupy the same room as him.
“You have seen much more than any child your age should see,
my little niece,” I said. “As far as men are concerned, the problem I have isn’t
that I can’t attract any. If anything, they like me more than I like any of them.”
“Then maybe you like women more, Aunt Takhi?” Nebet said. “Maybe
you could have another woman in place of a man?”
I rolled my eyes with a laugh. “No, no, I prefer men in the
way you mean. It is only that I haven’t found a man worthy of our house. Maybe
I should consult the priestesses of Hetheru. They might know why.”
For most of my life, it was Sekhmet I had served more than
any of the other old gods or goddesses. Yet the stories held that Sekhmet, she
of the lion mask and blood-stained gown, was in truth another guise of the
loving bovine Hetheru. Perhaps calling upon my patron goddess would convince
her to shift forms and answer my prayer for love.
“I thought there weren’t any more priestesses of Hetheru?”
Nebet said. “The Pharaoh shut all their temples down long ago. Don’t you
remember?”
She was right. Too often, my mind drifted back to the better
days of my youth, before the false Pharaoh had assumed the throne and desecrated
everything his righteous father had built and maintained. I had to return to the
present, not think too much of the past or future, and get back to fishing.
I checked our hook beneath the water’s surface. The bait had
disappeared, yet there was no fish still attached. They must had figured how to
bite off the meat without getting themselves caught. How foolish I had been to let
myself get distracted!
A wave rocked our raft from the side. Over by the far bank of the river, a man screamed while splashing and thrashing his arms in the air. Zipping through the water towards him was the bumpy, olive-brown wedge of a crocodile’s head.
It’s a ball game between two cultures. If our heroine loses, she might be put to death!
The sunset lent a warm, almost cozy glow to the stacks of scarlet-washed terraces that supported the buildings of Mutul. It was a city stuffed with more pyramids than any place Neith-Ka recalled from her native Khamit. Her people might have buried their Pharaohs in monuments of equal or even more mountainous scale, but then these peculiar Mayabans would lay every one of their structures on top of a stepped pyramid, none less than two stories high, with everyone having to hike up a succession of stone stairs to reach the summit.
Neith-Ka shook her foot to dull the pain chewing away at her tendons. Already the woven papyrus of her sandals had started to splinter apart from wear. The Khamitan people may have taken pride in the grandeur of their own monuments, but never would their architects dare subject anyone to so many tortuous steps. You weren’t even supposed to climb the royal tombs back home.
Huya, her high steward, clicked his tongue with a frown.
“You could feign a good attitude, Your Highness.”
Neith-Ka drew in a deep breath through her nostrils.
“I’ve done my best. Please show some understanding.”
“I saw you pouting. And, I swear by the scales of
Ma’at, I heard you mutter a curse while shaking that leg. You don’t seem to
remember that you’re representing your father, your family, and all the Black Land
here, princess. I’ll see no more lip from you tonight!”
With another inhale, Neith-Ka straightened herself up and
nodded to her steward. As he and their entourage of guards and servants marched
up yet another ramp of steps, she huddled close behind while keeping her focus
on their destination on top. Looking back down the pyramid’s height could only
intimidate her further. Even more so with the lighter brown locals crowding
behind her with the gawks of strangers who had never seen even one
darker-skinned person their entire lives.
The lip of the stairway connected to a platform that
supported a ring of rectangular buildings around a courtyard, all plastered
with a blazing red base. Yet these were not monochrome edifices, for each had
mounted on its walls and over its doorways elaborate reliefs of jade-plumed
gods, snarling gold leopards (or were those called jaguars over here?), and the
strings of complicated square images that constituted the Mayaban culture’s
written language.
To think that foreigners claimed that Khamit’s hieroglyphs
were impossible to read! No mortal could possibly even draw their
Mayabic equivalents.
From one short and wide building at the far end of the
complex floated a faint yet spicy odor, with thin trails of steam snaking out
from tiny windows in the walls towards its left edge. Dark green curtains,
splashed with reds, golds, and purples hung behind the gallery of square
columns that supported the remainder of the building’s length. Standing in
front were a pair of native guards, stocky men in padded cotton vests who
parted their obsidian-fringed spears upon noticing the Khamitans’ arrival.
Huya bowed at the waist to both guards. “Excuse me, my good
man, but where would His Majesty the Ahau and his family be?”
“Already inside, waiting with as much patience as they’ve
got,” one of the guards said.
The second glanced at Neith-Ka from the corner of his eye.
“And you’re the one he’s waiting on, I presume. Not so ugly as far as your kind
goes, if a bit overcooked. I’d advise you to stay clear of his youngest
daughter.”
Neith-Ka gave him a subtle smile to hide the prickling sensation that crept up her back. “I’ll…uh, keep that in mind…my undercooked friend.”
“Princess! What did I say?” Huya hammered the butt of his
high steward’s staff twice on the stone pavement.
“Aw, give your woman a pass,” the first guard said. “She was
only telling my friend to show more hospitality. Right, Yaxkin?”
Strutting away from the two guards as they argued with one another in the Mayabic language, Neith-Ka plunged herself through the curtains into the royal dining hall.
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.
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.
