The waterhole glimmered like gold beneath the setting sun. Eadric admired it with a lick of his lips while he guided his steed down to the bank. After a sweltering day spent riding across the savanna the Saracens called Bilad as-Sudan, or the Land of the Black People, even a pond as small as this one was a welcome blessing. While his horse lapped away at the waterhole’s surface, Eadric cupped his hands together and scooped up as much water as he could. He took a swig of the cool, if earthy-tasting, fluid and splashed the rest onto his sunburned face with a satisfied moan.
Thus rehydrated, Eadric unsheathed his iron sword, planted its tip into the muddy bank, and knelt with one hand on its hilt. He murmured his thanks to Woden, the Allfather, and all the other gods for his good fortune. Unlike most of their countryfolk back in distant Saxony, Eadric and the people of his village were never willing to surrender their old faith in favor of the new Frankish god Christ, no matter how the Franks might have threatened him. Alas, they had made good on their threats, and only by fleeing to the ends of the known world had Eadric evaded the same fate that had befallen everyone he knew and loved.
He could still hear, and feel, the hot roaring flames engulfing his village, as well as the screams of men, women, and children fleeing the Frankish ambush. One woman’s scream in particular rang louder than the rest. It might have been Eadric’s dear sister Hilda, whom the Franks ravished before butchering her. He would never forgive himself for not being able to cut down the Christ-worshipers and save her in time.
No, wait, that was not a scream from his memories. It was a real woman’s scream, in the here and now, piercing out from somewhere nearby!
Yandi stood poised with her bone-tipped spear and watched the river’s surface for movement. The lukewarm current licked her thighs while the perspiration on her black skin fended off the steamy heat. Weighing down on her hip beneath a thong of twisted plant fibers was a butchering knife fashioned from a deathjaw’s serrated tooth.
A long shadow drifted through the water in front of her. Drawing her spear overhead to build momentum, Yandi struck with lightning swiftness and pierced her prey in the head. She drew out a violet legfin larger than her forearm, more than enough to feed her family for the night. Watching the fish flail its leg-like fins about, she smacked her lips as she anticipated savoring its tangy flavor.
A flurry of frantic splashing shattered the calm, flinging droplets of water onto Yandi’s side. Her sister Benje, younger than her by five rainy seasons, was attacking the river’s surface while yelling with frustration. The tiny silhouettes of Benje’s intended targets all darted away from her with every desperate jab.
Looking up to see what Yandi had caught, Benje pouted. “Why does the river favor you so, Yandi?”
Yandi gave her sister a playful chuckle. “Because I don’t attack it the way you do. Remember what our mother taught us. Stay still until the fish comes to you.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing, and yet the fish don’t come to me at all. What have I done wrong?”
“Nothing, Benje. You only need patience. I was that way once, remember?”
Yandi closed her eyes and prayed thanks to the river for offering her its bounty, imploring it to bless her sister as well. It was only a few heartbeats later that Benje yelped with triumph.
Benje had skewered a young watersnapper. The squirming creature was scarcely larger than Yandi’s legfin, nowhere near as massive as its kind could grow upon reaching adulthood. It was still plump for its young age. Both sisters had eaten watersnapper meat before and knew it to taste as good as any fish. Together, the two sisters would bring back to camp more than enough river meat for their family.
Yandi waded to her sister and laid a hand on her shoulder, stretching her lips into a proud beam. “It seems the river favors you too, Benje.”
Her heart jolted within her chest when a flat black form, as long as a man stood tall, surfaced with an eruption of foam behind her sister. A pair of green eyes with slitted pupils glared from its far end with what could have been either hunger or parental rage. As it zoomed toward Benje, drawing a steep wake behind it, the great watersnapper twisted its head aside and parted sharp-toothed jaws, ready to chomp down on her with crushing force.
Yandi yanked her sibling out of the way. The watersnapper’s jaws clamped a narrow breadth away from them, their closure blowing out a gust of wind that almost shoved them off their feet. Together the two sisters jogged toward the riverbank as fast as the water would allow them. Swimming faster than either woman could run, the great watersnapper caught up to their rears in little time.
The giant reptile opened its jaws behind Benje for a second attack. Yandi hurried to punch it in the eye with the butt of her spear. The watersnapper threw its immense head back with a guttural bellow, letting the sisters rush all the way to the water’s edge. As they sprinted over the riverbank’s damp and sticky mud, the aggravated beast stormed out of the water after them on its sprawling legs.
It swung its head like an oversized club of bone and scaled flesh at Benje. She ducked with a stumble and slipped face-first onto the mud, losing hold of her spear. Scrambling to recover it, she rolled back onto her feet and brandished the weapon at the incoming beast. The baby watersnapper Benje had caught earlier flung off the spear’s tip and landed one pace in front of its huge parent.
Whether or not it recognized the young as its own, the elder creature scooped up the little carcass with its teeth and swallowed it as if it were an ordinary fish. In the meantime, both women had run to a safe distance farther up the riverbank. They watched with relief as the great watersnapper lurched and swam back into the river without giving further pursuit.
A panting Yandi patted her sister on the back. “That was swift thinking there, Benje.”
Benje brushed mud off her breasts with a disappointed frown. “A shame I had to give up my catch.”
“Don’t worry about that. The river will always offer more.”
“If only I could catch them as well as you can.”
“That’s only because I am older and have more experience than you, sister. You’ll catch up in time. It will get dark soon, so we should return to camp.”
Benje nodded. “And we wouldn’t want to be around if that watersnapper is still hungry.”
Yandi led her sister parallel to the river’s upstream course. Their path straddled the shaded juncture between the riverbank and the towering rainforest that walled its far edge. She kept her gaze swaying between the river and the forest undergrowth, never forgetting the myriad threats lurking in both.
Even the sky overhead could present danger should a great skinwing swoop down to pluck either of them up in its beak. Those soaring giants ruled the sky as much as the great watersnappers ruled the waterways and the deathjaws the deep jungle.
As she trailed behind her elder sister, Benje still held her head low with a gaze aimed at her spear’s empty tip. Yandi gave her a soft tap on the shoulder while cradling her necklace of fangs, claws, and eggshell beads in her hand. It was their late father who had strung each sister’s necklace after she had earned her facial scarifications of womanhood. Their necklaces were therefore the last tangible things the sisters had connecting them to his memory. Yandi would not lose Benje the way they had lost both their parents several rainy seasons ago. This she had sworn by Grandmother Sun and Grandfather Moon.
A subtle tremor shook the earth beneath their feet with a rumble. Far beyond the jungle along the river’s opposite bank, a gray stream of smoke meandered up from the summit of the eastern horizon’s tallest mountain. A chill slithered up Yandi’s spine. Never in her life had she seen that ancient dome of black rock leak smoke like that, but she recalled the elders’ stories well enough to recognize what it meant. It was something even the fiercest deathjaw or the most colossal longneck feared, something more powerful than any beast or man.
After generations of slumber, old Fire Mountain was stirring once more.
In prehistoric Africa, the huntress Ekan’e and her saber-toothed friend Orru attack a marauding party of Lovecraftian Deep Ones!
East Africa, 100,000 years ago
Ekan’e grimaced as she crunched a brittle strip of dried ostrich between her teeth. The meat’s flavor had all but faded, yet it had been all she and her blade-fanged companion Orru had had to eat for the past couple of days. It was the middle of the dry season, and both game and forage had been hard to come by on the savanna. Oh, how her stomach growled like a famished lion for the juicy tenderness of fresh meat or sweet berries! Ekan’e’s mouth turned to water even imagining such luxurious treats.
Slipping out the remainder of the dried meat from the small pouch she had hanging beside her short gazelle-hide sarong, she tossed it over her campfire to Orru. After it fell between his front paws, the cat lapped it up with his tongue and swallowed it whole. His whimpering moan afterward suggested that he too had grown tired of the stale leftovers and craved fresh, bloody meat.
Ekan’e gave him an empathetic smile and stroked the fur on his head with her fingers, receiving a satisfied purr in return. “We shall eat better before sunrise, my little Orru, I promise.”
She looked out to the ocean which sprawled eastward from below the cliff atop which she and her bladefang friend sat, the crests of its little waves glimmering pale yellow beneath a full moon and innumerable stars. Ekan’e and Orru had come to this coastline precisely to take advantage of its wealth in food, which they would harvest with her spear and his claws and fangs after going down to the nearest beach. It would be the first time Ekan’e had fished from the sea, but she had fished from streams before and figured it could not be that different.
Close to the bottom of the cliff, something sliced up through the water’s surface, shimmering wet. It was a thin and membranous ridge like the dorsal fin of a fish, and four more of them rose from behind it, forming a triangle that cut in a diagonal path toward the shoreline. Beneath her dark skin, Ekan’e blanched, the air around her turning cold. Those fins might not have been pointed like the fins of the ocean predators known as sharks, but they reminded her of even more terrifying denizens of the deep. Those were the ones that people had always spoken of in hushed tones in the campfire stories.
Luwi stalked with practiced silence through dry grass that grew high as her waist. With her spear in hand and a sheathed machete on her hip, she followed the lead of her two spotted hyenas, Kamfunti and Muzowa. The animals’ keen senses of smell would guide her toward potential game, and their bone-crushing jaws could be every bit as lethal as her iron-bladed weapons. Ever since she had raised them from cubhood, Luwi had found them to be far more dependable companions than any people she had known.
Al-Biritania, or early medieval Britain if the Moors had conquered it.
800 AD, in a parallel world…
A thumb of stone stuck up higher than a man from the forest floor. Halawa would have thought little of the outcropping had her companion, the old mawlawi Ishraq, thrust his finger at it while whistling for her attention.
“Look at it closely,” he said. “Do you not see the inscriptions?”
Halawa leaned her head toward the monolith and squinted where Ishraq pointed. Through the mossy crust which had grown over the course of centuries, she could indeed make out lines indented in its surface. After she dismounted her stripe-legged horse and approached the stone on foot, she used her scimitar to clear away the moss, exposing the eroded inscriptions underneath.
Some were strings of unintelligible symbols of circles, crescents, and notches, which Halawa guessed represented some ancient language. What she could recognize was the larger illustration chiseled into the rock above the rows of text, with scattered flecks of red paint clinging to it. It was a creature with the wings of a bat, the taloned legs of an eagle, and the sinuous tail and neck of a serpent, with the horned lizard-like head bearing sharp teeth in its gaping jaws. A sphere of amber embedded in the rock winked from where the beast’s eye would be, making Halawa’s dark brown skin creep over her body.
“The Red Dragon of the Brythons,” Halawa said under her breath. “Does this mean we’re nearby?”
“If the old map doesn’t deceive, Amira, then of course,” Ishraq said. “Keep your eyes out while we press on. The barrow could be anywhere around here.”
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.
50,000 years ago in Southeast Asia, an ancestress of the East Eurasian peoples faces off against a tiger!
Southeast Asia, 50,000 years ago
A high-pitched scream pierced through the jungle. Ungu stopped in her tracks, stunned by the noise, and plucked out her ivory knife from under the deerskin bands around her thigh. She darted her eyes over the surrounding undergrowth, searching for the source, while chilled perspiration collected on her brow. She could mistake it for nothing other than a human cry.
The rattling of leaves and branches, the cracking of twigs, and the scuffing of little feet on the damp earth followed another scream. To her left, Ungu could see a nearby tree-fern’s feathery fronds slap a short, dark shadow that ran past it. Close behind shot a larger, orange blur that leaped and fell upon the former figure, with both disappearing behind a screen of thrashing foliage.
Ungu dashed toward the disturbance to find a little boy pinned beneath a tiger’s paws. The poor child yelled and squealed as he flailed his fists at the striped cat’s face. Undaunted by his pathetic efforts to keep it at bay, the huge feline opened its drooling maw, lowering its fangs to his gullet, while its claws cut into his body.
Shrieking her huntress’s cry, Ungu launched herself onto the tiger. She squeezed her arm onto its thick furry neck and pulled it away from its victim while drawing her knife overhead. Before she could stab the beast, it bucked her off, throwing her onto the jungle floor. Ungu rolled back to her feet and jumped to cut the cat off from the boy, who had in the meantime scurried to hide behind the buttress root of a tapang tree.
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.
