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Sinbad and the Lost Continent – Excerpt

The following is an excerpted chapter from my upcoming novella Sinbad and the Lost Continent, a lost world adventure inspired by the 1001 Arabian Nights. Enjoy, and be sure to check out the full novella once it comes out!

It was before daybreak when I awoke. I climbed up from the hatch onto the Black Tiger’s upper deck. Not that I had been sleeping well the past several nights. It had nothing to do with the fact that there never was much else to do aboard our small and humble vessel. I had merged so deeply into the water’s simple and monotonous rhythm that I lost track of the many days that had flown past since we set sail from Baghdad. After we had entered the Persian Gulf from the mouth of the Tigris and then advanced eastward into the Indian Ocean, nothing but the sea’s blue vastness had surrounded us. A landsman like me could lose his sanity when faced with such endless horizons, unable to cope with its full enormity, but the sailors told me they relished it, seeing it as the ultimate freedom.

Omar had deduced on our compass two to three days before that we were nearing the world’s equator. I inferred that the geographic word “equator” meant the world’s waistline, assuming he and the scholars at the Madrasa in Baghdad were right in claiming it was round instead of flat. Beyond that, we did not know our precise location.

I started to wonder whether Kishore was right to doubt our destination’s existence. He had never bought the other Sinbad’s accounts of his seven voyages to exotic faraway lands and the riches he had earned from them, even if that other Sinbad’s small yet ample investment of those riches had allowed me to purchase that old Greek map as well as the provisions for our voyage. As Kishore himself had claimed, neither he nor his father had ever witnessed sights as fantastical as the other Sinbad, and so many of his fellow sailors, had boasted of. No rocs, no giants, nothing like those at all.

Still, I was happy that Kishore had not only let me use his father’s old dhow, but also came aboard with me himself. If we were to perish out here in the heart of the ocean, at least my dearest friend would be beside me.

I was still groggy when I traipsed to the gunwale on the dhow’s port side, expecting another day of nothing but the unending blue ocean in front of us. I rubbed my half-shut eyes, gazed at the sunlit horizon, and blinked in disbelief.

It was land! Or was it my blurry vision playing tricks on me again? I closed and reopened my eyes, rubbing them again on my tunic’s sleeve. Still the green sliver of a hilltop rose before the rising sun.

 As the Black Tiger drifted eastward, the sliver expanded into a thicker, dark green band. An unmistakably solid band, implanted as it rose from the water. The faint cawing of gulls rose over the splash of the boat’s wake.

My whole body trembled with excitement. “Land! Allah is merciful, for we have found land!” I yelled.

I rushed back to the hatch and opened it. Kishore was already scampering up to the deck, with the rest of the crew climbing the ladder behind him. “What is it, Sinbad?” he asked.

“Land!” I repeated as I thrust my finger through the air beyond the port side. “See for yourself, my friend!”

He adjusted his turban and rubbed his eyelids before squinting in the distance. His eyes widened and brightened in the middle, reflecting the glow of the rising sunlight behind the approaching island. “Holy Krishna, I don’t believe it!”

“It has to be it!” I spoke.

“What? Land? Of course it’s land!” Kishore said. “Must be an island.”

I shook my head like a swabbing mop. “No, no, my friend, it could only be Lemuria, the lost continent of legend, like on our map!”

Kishore’s smile vanished, with a dubious look at me replacing it. “Oh, I don’t know about that, Sinbad. You know we’ve never been to this part of the ocean before, so it could be any number of islands out here. It might even be one of those islands that other Sinbad spoke about in those stories he told everyone.”

“Well, then, let’s look at the map and then decide. Omar?”

Omar emerged on the deck upon calling, plucked out the old map from his sash, and unfolded it in his hands. I bent over next to him and followed his finger as it traced our course to date until it slowed to a point.

 “The latitude given here matches what I noted from the stars last night,” Omar said, his nasal voice brimming with confidence.” Right down on the equator. The longitude should be close as well.”

Earlier in our voyage, Omar told me that he could determine how far north or south our dhow stood relative to the globe’s equator, by calculating the angle between the horizon and one of the stars. He could also tell how far west or east we were from our destination, and even from Baghdad, by measuring the distance between the moon and a given star. Once he did that, he would pull out a book of tables, which he claimed was a copy by the mathematicians that studied what they called al-Jabr, and then compare its figures with his measurements. It left me feeling foolish to know that a man could find out where he stood in the vastness of the world the way Omar did.

Captain Rabih looked over our shoulders and stroked a long, matted beard as fierce as his eyes. “Even if it isn’t your fabled Lemuria, it’s as good a place to rest as any,” he said. “Not to mention restocking our provisions. There might even be fresh water there.”

The corners of Kishore’s lip turned downward in a concerned frown. “Those gulls… those gulls…”

“What about the gulls?” I asked.

“They sound strange. Not like gulls at all. Or like any kind of bird I’ve ever heard. Can’t you hear them?”

He was right. They did not sound like the typical persistent, annoying caws of seagulls I had heard when our dhow sailed along the Persian Gulf, but rather a more prolonged screeching. I would have dismissed it as simply a different species of gull had I not recalled what Theognostos had claimed as he sold me the map.

If you think the giant birds of prey, great serpents, and oversized fish of that other Sinbad’s tales are terrible, or hard to believe without first seeing them, you’ve not yet heard a word yet about the creatures of Lemuria.

I looked down at the map again, taking in the assortment of hideous dragons, crocodiles, serpents, and other reptiles that populated it the way sea monsters would populate the seas in other charts. Those were parts of the legend I had never taken so seriously, or even paid much attention to. Why would I, when my thoughts and eyes were focused on the treasure supposed to be hidden throughout the continent? Treasure was real. Jewels, coins, bracelets, and amulets I could touch with my own fingers and carry in my own hands, but not dragons or other monsters.

The green slopes continued to reach up from the horizon toward the rising sun as we watched from behind the gunwale. I made out a peak higher than the others with gray smoke billowing from its summit, much like the range of mountains on the map. My hope soared that we had sighted Lemuria itself, my confidence swelling with it. Somewhere deep in the legendary island’s tropical forests before us awaited treasure more ancient and more valuable than the other Sinbad and his fantastical stories could imagine, at least if the Greek merchant’s story was true.

I imagined us loading the Black Tiger to her very limits with heaps of treasure and returning to Baghdad rich as the Caliph himself. Or at least rich enough that when they praised Sinbad the sailor’s wealth, they would not know which Sinbad they were talking about. No longer would I have to steal, or to make the barest living carrying loads on my head as a porter. Furthermore, I could also come back with stories as fantastic as the other Sinbad’s, though I did not know what those stories would be yet.

Bestial cries of immense volume interrupted my thoughts, screeches and yells that were drawing closer. The tar-black likenesses of birds flapped their wings toward us from the shore, their caws louder and clearer than earlier. Their bodies expanded before us while they advanced, their wingspans appearing to stretch longer than a riverman’s raft. I realized to my amazement that they were bigger than any birds I had ever seen—if they even were birds. Their ebony wings, which sprouted triplets of glinting claws from their bends, shone like thick leather rather than feathers beneath the morning sunlight.

What could such creatures be? Not even the other Sinbad had described anything like them in his stories. At least the giant rocs were just an oversized kind of eagle according to him, but these bizarre leather-winged creatures on the other hand could not even be called birds!

“The map has a picture of one of those labeled in Greek,” Omar said. “It’s called a pterodactyl.”

“A what?” I asked.

“Pterodactyl. A ‘winged-finger’.”

“You mean like a bat? And do you know what they eat?”

Omar frowned, his olive complexion turning pale. “I am afraid not.”

Nonetheless, the creatures’ beaks, long and piercing like spear points, suggested an answer to my question that chilled my blood.

If Kishore’s face were not as dark as it was, it would have blanched like a washed-out sky the way he looked at the approaching pterodactyls. “Why are they coming toward us? Like they’re attacking us?”

The captain grabbed the hilt of his saber. “Because they’re hungry. We ‘re food to them. Draw your weapons and prepare to defend ourselves!”

Sinbad faces off against pterosaurs near the coast of the lost continent of Lemuria!

They didn’t waste any time. As soon as we grabbed our weapons, the foremost of the flying creatures reared for a moment, spreading out its wings before folding them inward and diving toward me. I sidestepped out of the way, but its beak slashed across my flank like a sword’s stroke, cutting through the fabric of my tunic and skin to draw hot blood. I flinched and began to hunch over, sharp pain slicing through me as I gripped the hilt of the scimitar I had acquired aboard the dhow and slid it out of my belted sash. Before I could fully draw my weapon, another pterodactyl grabbed my right forearm with its beak and tugged at it. I punched one of its beady, violent yellow eyes with my free fist to break its hold. I then freed the scimitar from my sash and slashed off the leather-winged devil’s head.

That only seemed to infuriate the flock even more. They swarmed around us like wasps over the deck. We brandished swords and knives while the airborne reptiles bombarded us with their stabbing beaks and razor-sharp finger-claws. Over the increasing din of cursing men and shrieking creatures, a sailor screamed when one of the beasts impaled him through chest like a stake through the heart, then lifted his body vertically above the boat and flew off. 

Another pterodactyl swooped toward Captain Rabih from behind. The captain would have met the same fate as the first sailor had another sailor not stopped his attacker by puncturing and then slicing its wing with his sword. A third creature ambushed this sailor from behind, pinching his tunic’s collar with its beak until it tore off. Just when the pterodactyl jabbed again at him, I threw myself at it and sent my sword through its neck exactly like the last one I had killed.

It seemed that for every one of the flying monsters we slew, at least two more darted in to take its place. My muscles burned with strain and sweat, with sprayed blood slickening my skin, as the creatures’ wings flapped furiously, whipping up an evil zephyr over me. If they did not massacre us with their relentless diving attacks, I realized, the pterodactyls would fight us to exhaustion. Then they would swoop down and feast on our flesh. All we could do was endure them the best we could.

Just behind me, I heard a desperate holler. It was Kishore! A pterodactyl had snatched him by the arm and picked him up from the deck like an eagle might hoist a snake with its beak. He thrashed his limbs and kept screaming for a help we could not provide as we watched the infernal demon haul him back toward the continent’s shore.

I closed my eyes for a brief second, trying to erase the picture of his upcoming death from my mind.

I could not let him go like that. I quickly hacked my way through more of the pterodactyls to the port side, leaped over the gunwale and plunged into the tropical water below, my scimitar’s blade in my teeth. The times Kishore and I swam across the Tigris jogged my memory as I threw out my arms in breast strokes in the direction the pterodactyl had flown with him. My arms burned as I swam, my mind filling like an endless foundation with our days as boys in the slums racing down the streets, chasing dogs, and pilfering only what we needed, but never more, from merchants’ stalls or patrons’ purses in the bazaar. I swam and swam, recalling the stories we told while feasting on whatever we could obtain either through purchase or plunder.

Even our secrets we shared, not least of which was Kishore coming to feel for men the way I felt for women. It was an admission that shocked me at first, as I had been raised to consider such feelings as sinful, but in the end, it had no bearing on our friendship. Besides, for all I knew, Kishore’s faith minded it less than mine did.

Those memories, and secrets, kept feeding me like nectar, giving me the strength I needed to propel myself all the way to the beach. When my fingers first dug into the damp sand beneath the surf, I could hear my old friend’s screams persist overhead, even though his voice was hoarse. While catching my breath, I exhaled a quick sigh of relief that Kishore still lived. The pterodactyl was taking him to a tongue of headland atop some slate-gray cliffs to my right, with several more of its kind bedded down on top of it. That had to be the creatures’ nesting site.

I scurried to the shade of coconut palm trees that bordered the opposite side of the white sandy beach and wove my way around them toward the headland’s cliffs. Vines thick as rope festooned the cliff that touched the jungle further inland, allowing me to scramble up the jagged face using the same holds and moves that enabled Kishore and I to climb Baghdad’s buildings, where we would gaze at stars as big as dates from the rooftops while he taught me his native Tamil. Still, the cliff must have reared at least twenty feet from foot to lip, so it was with stretched and aching forelimbs, left even more painful by the long swim, that I reached the headland’s top.

I peeked carefully across the stony surface. Pterodactyls watched over nests of branches, leaves, and seaweed, with numerous bones and chalk-white droppings strewn between them. The creatures did not nestle on the ground with wings folded along their sides like birds, but instead stood on all fours like bats, the claws on their wings’ bends acting as front feet. One of the nests had a lively brood of tinier pterodactyls hopping around on it, chirping with gleeful hunger as their mother began lowering her catch to them.

That catch was Kishore, his movements now slow, fighting with every ounce of energy to stay alive.

I clutched my scimitar and raced toward the nest, maneuvering around the younger creatures while dodging their winged architects’ piercing beaks. The mother pterodactyl dumped Kishore into her nest, and her famished brood pounced on him. I didn’t know if I could get to my old friend before the little devils pecked out his eyes, or his life. They were hungry and wasted no time swarming over him.

By the time I scampered to his side, they had already pocked his skin with cuts and deep wounds that bled while he shielded his face with his arms.

I swung my weapon over Kishore, slicing one of the hatchlings in half. Its mother screeched the loudest I’d heard yet, her fury absolute over her baby’s death. She launched herself at me. I ducked underneath her, grabbed Kishore by his shoulders, and propped him up while he shook off the other hatchlings. The puny creatures continued to peck at and harangue him, while their mother and her companions did the same to me, despite my best efforts to keep them at bay with my sword. I sliced it through the air, over and over.

A pterodactyl snapped onto my sword-arm and pulled me off the headland, my arm still wrapped around Kishore. It began carrying both of us, the flapping of its wings unsteady as we weighed it down, two men apparently too much for her to carry. Yet, to our utter amazement, the creature lifted us higher into the sky. The world began to shrink beneath our dangling legs.

“What’s it planning to do, Sinbad?” Kishore cried over the beating of the reptile’s wings.

The pterodactyl shook its head furiously, reminding me again of the fury of eagles holding snakes in their beaks.

“Whatever it is, don’t look down!” I yelled.

A thin dark shaft whizzed up from the jungle’s edge to puncture the pterodactyl’s breast. After emitting a pain-filled screech that diminished into a staccato croak, the aerial beast released its grip on me, and we plummeted alongside its limp body into the ocean.

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Barrow of the Grail

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.”

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The Raid on Camp Struthers

British East Africa, 1896 AD

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.

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Family Reunion

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.

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The Skull of Stone

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.

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Racing Into Trouble

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.

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Carthage Atlantica – Opening Excerpts

Cover design for my alternate history novella Carthage Atlantica

These are the first two chapters from my newest novella, Carthage Atlantica, an alternate-history story about ancient Carthaginians from North Africa discovering North America (“Atlantis”) in 200 BC. You can purchase the full novella on Amazon.

If you wish to hear these chapters read aloud, check out this reading by Brian Cole on YouTube.

Chapter One

200 BC, in an alternate timeline

The deckhouse door slammed open as the navigator barged in, his russet-brown face soaked with sweat. “Baal-Hammon be praised, we’ve sighted land at last!”

Isceradin’s cup of wine slipped down from his grasp as he took in the sailor’s words. It took his wife Arishat’s lightning reflexes to catch it before it could shatter on the floor. Not that he would miss it too much if it did spill and break, since the liquid was well over halfway to turning into vinegar at this point. Another week at sea, and they would have nothing left to drink unless they figured out how to turn seawater fresh.

Baal-Hammon be praised, indeed.

Gisco, the stout old captain, rose from his bench and laid both hands on the navigator’s shoulder. “Are you sure you haven’t gone mad?”

“You should see for yourself, Captain,” the navigator said. “One could mistake it for nothing else!”

Little Nikkal tugged on Isceradin’s arm, her eyes gleaming with innocence and wonder. “Did they really say they’ve found land, Abba?”

He gave his daughter’s crown of curly black hair a playful rub. “We can only hope so. Let’s find out for ourselves.”

Together, Isceradin and his family followed the captain and navigator out of the deckhouse to the bow of the galley and squinted at the western horizon. It first appeared as a green line on top of the dark blue sea that grew thicker with every rhythm of the drivers’ drumming. From underneath the drumming and the sailors’ chanted shanties, there rose the frantic cawing of distant seagulls.

“You see, beloved? I told you the gods would always be at our side,” Arishat said.

“Either that, or fate has been kinder to us than usual,” Isceradin said.

He wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and pecked the black tattooed lines on her mahogany-skinned cheek with his lips. She repaid the favor, and then their mouths locked together in an embrace tighter than the one they made with their arms. Although they had been wed for eighteen years, Isceradin had been away at the war with Rome for fifteen of those years, so Isceradin had come to savor every moment of affection like this.

“Yuck, Abba and Amma!” Nikkal cried out with her tongue sticking out.

Isceradin withdrew from the kiss with a sheepish grin. “Sorry, little one, we forgot you were watching.”

Gisco slapped Isceradin’s shoulder with a laugh. “The girl’s got to find out about those things sooner or later, my Iberian friend. And I can’t say I blame you, either. It’s a good occasion to get another taste of that sweet, dark Carthaginian flesh, isn’t it?”

The captain winked with a jab of his elbow into Isceradin’s ribs. For his part, Isceradin’s only reply was a low groan. No matter how much he considered himself a citizen of Carthage, having wetted his blade with Roman blood many times under none other than Hannibal Barca himself, Carthage would never let him forget his family’s Iberian roots. Not that he could hide them, either. Given his light tan complexion and wavy brown hair, most people would sooner confuse him with a Latin or Greek than a typical Carthaginian from Africa. For that reason, he would always appear a foreigner among his own countrymen.

Nikkal walked up to the ship’s gunwale and jumped to get a better look at the approaching landmass. “What are we going to call this place, Captain?”

“Ever heard of the story of Atlantis, young one?” Gisco answered. “This Greek philosopher named Plato wrote about it a long time ago. He said they lived on a continent in the middle of this very ocean before the god Baal-Saphon—whom the Greeks call Poseidon—sank it to punish them for their greed. So, maybe we’ll call it Atlantis in honor of that?”

“What if there are people living there?” Arishat asked. “They might have a name for it already.”

The captain held his hand over his eyes as he scanned the coastline. “If there’s people over there, I don’t see any sign of them. Not even one trail of campfire smoke coming from the trees. But, even if they were, it would probably take a while to learn their language so we could ask them. Learning languages is never quick, you know. So, we’ve got to call the place something until then.”

Isceradin shrugged. “Atlantis is as good a name as any, I suppose. Though, in the end, it’ll be up to the Sophets to decide.”

“Then I’ll pitch it to them once we reach land.”

The drivers sped up the pace of their drumming, causing the ship to accelerate towards the awaiting shore. It was the foremost of a fleet of seventy that cut westward through the sea, the violet image of the fertility goddess Tanit dancing with outspread arms on their billowing sails. Together, their drumming, chanting, and the splashing of oars merged into a cacophony as festive as any banquet back in Carthage.

When the water beneath them had faded from dark to light blue closer to the coast, all the fleet wheeled around so that their sterns faced land before backing up. Each jolted as their keels began slicing through the alabaster beach. Sailors threw down the gangplanks, and everyone aboard the vessels filed down to the sand whooping and praising Baal-Hammon and the other gods of Carthage for their merciful fortune.

From the largest and grandest of the fleet strutted Absalon and Himilco, both of whom the Senate of Carthage had appointed as Sophets to govern this new colony. Numidian youths kept the two elders cool with ostrich-plumed fans while spearmen in bronze breastplates marched before and behind them. Once the trumpets had summoned all the people onto the beach, they arranged themselves into an audience encircling the Sophets like spectators at a Greek theater.

Absalon, after taking a deep inhale of the salty air through his nostrils, was the first to speak. “My people, once citizens and subjects of Carthage, none of us can overestimate the gratitude we owe our gods for our safe passage here. Many back home said we could not make it to the end of the western ocean alive, and yet here we are, without having suffered even one casualty to the best of our knowledge.”

“And yet, our journey has only begun,” Himilco said. “We have much work to do. We have land to clear, crops to grow, and a city to build. We trust that, with all our hard work, we can claim this land for Carthage and bring forth a new age of power and prosperity for our civilization. May Baal-Hammon and all the gods continue to watch over us!”

A Gallic servant handed the pair the banner of Carthage, which hung from a mast-like cross and displayed the icon of Tanit in purple, and they planted it into the sand together. All in the audience thundered with applause.

“But first, we must learn more about this new world we’ve landed on,” Absalon said. “Who among you offers to scout for us?”

From within the crowd, Isceradin raised his hand. “I’ll lead a party inland until sundown. We’ll take note of everything this country has to offer, and maybe see if there are any human inhabitants. Then we’ll make our way back.”

Nikkal pulled at his hand. “But what if you run into trouble, Abba?”

Isceradin held his daughter up in his arms and squeezed her with loving firmness. “Then they’ll send more men to rescue us if things get too bad. But don’t you worry, if the gods have kept us alive across a whole ocean, they shouldn’t let us down here on this new land either.”

Beyond the far side of the beach, the thick greenery of deciduous trees such as oak, hickory, and chestnut rose as a towering wall. There was no telling what—or who—awaited in the shadowy depths of the forest. And, in truth, the gods had let Carthage down before. They wouldn’t have lost two wars with Rome had that not been so, despite all the sacrifices the priests had made—including the lives of dozens of noble-born children. But then, who had the heart to trouble their own child with such worry?

Isceradin gave his wife and daughter another kiss each. “If I don’t come back before sundown, keep praying for me. I’ll need all the blessings I can get.”

Chapter Two

It was not the first time Phameas had ventured into a forest. He, Isceradin, and most of the men who now made up their troop had trudged through more of that than he cared for when they were marching through northern Iberia and Gaul on their way to Rome. The muggy summertime warmth, the brushing of foliage against his face and limbs, and all the squealing mosquitoes which kept pelting his skin with itching dark bumps, were like unpleasant memories that had come back to haunt him after almost twenty years.

Back in Europe, they had to keep constant watch for packs of ravenous wolves, giant brown bears, and most of all the local Gauls, those white-skinned barbarians who were always skulking around for heads to lop off with their broadswords and claim as trophies to mount on their huts’ walls. Did such savage beasts and men lurk in the darkness beneath the woodland canopy here as well? Or maybe even worse? What was the Senate back in Carthage thinking when they sent men to this faraway place without knowing what even lay in wait?

Then again, perhaps that was the whole point of exploration. When Dido and her Phoenician expedition came to Africa to establish the trading colony that would become Carthage six centuries ago, they would have undertaken similar risks. And, it had to be admitted, back in those days, it was the very native Africans from whom Phameas and most other Carthaginians were descended that those Phoenician colonists had to fear.

So far, an hour had passed since the scouting party first penetrated the forest from the beach. Other than the occasional scurrying small creature or fluttering bird, they had yet to spot anything of interest. If nothing else, the profusion of trees here would make plentiful timber for building the new colony. Phameas had overheard some suggesting the name Atlantis, after the legendary continent that had sunk under the sea, but he would have preferred something that didn’t imply an eventual doomsday. On the other hand, “New Carthage” had already been given to a colony set up on the southern Iberian coast, and he’d be hard pressed to think of something more imaginative himself.

Another mosquito buzzed too close to Phameas’s neck for comfort. He slapped it down into a tiny pulp. “This remind you of home, Iberian?”

Isceradin snorted. “For the last time, my family is from the southern part of the peninsula, near New Carthage. It’s scrubland over there, not dense forest like this. You of all men should know that, Phameas.”

“Sorry, then, my officer. It’s only that I’m still getting used to the thought of you bedding my sister.”

“Really? You’ve had eighteen years to ‘get used to it’. And, not to boast, but she couldn’t be better off nowadays. If there really are any natives here, she’ll make quite a killing selling her textiles to them.”

“If they have anything worthy to buy them with.”

An unpleasant whiff slithered into Phameas’s nose. It was the stench of decayed flesh, like a body that lain on the battlefield for too long. Something must have died nearby. He unsheathed his falcata and probed the undergrowth with it, following the smell the way a bloodhound might.

Something cracked under his sandal. Bone. Right there, where the rotting stink was strongest, a whole human skeleton lay. Blood and scraps of flesh were still clinging to the remains, and the skull had cracked in half to reveal moldy, wrinkled fragments of brain tissue. Even after all the Romans and others he’d mutilated as a soldier of Carthage, Phameas recoiled from the sight with a yelp, nausea pouring into his insides.

“We’ve got to go back!” he said. “I’m not walking around here any longer!”

The other scouts huddled close to him, gasping and stuttering with horror as they looked upon the morbid remains. Even Isceradin’s face blanched a shade paler than usual. With a grimace, the Iberian knelt over the bones and picked up a wooden stick that lay near the skull. Hafted to it was a flint point stained dark red with dried blood.

“There are people in this land, we know that from this,” Isceradin said. “But it appears they’re still using stone tools.”

“That might not be too bad for us,” one of the other soldiers said. “It means that, if we get into trouble with them, we can hit them harder than they hit us.”

“But we don’t want to get into trouble with them,” Phameas said. “We ought to head back and stay away from those savages. I knew coming here was a bad idea!”

Isceradin held his palm out. “Hold on, we don’t know for sure how this man died. He might have been a criminal they put to death. Even if he’s a war casualty, one side might have the nobler cause. We can’t assume they’re all savages to be avoided.”

“Maybe, but I still wouldn’t want to mess with them. I say again, we should get back to camp. All those in favor?”

Phameas and almost everyone else in the party but Isceradin raised their hands, waving them about.

With a shake of his head, the Iberian muttered something in his native language. “Fair enough if that’s how you all vote. But we could’ve pressed on to find fresh water, at least.”

As the party hiked over the tracks their sandals had already left in the damp and spongy earth, the forest interior grew darker, and not only because the sunbeams arrowing through the canopy had dimmed with time’s passage. If the tribes here were anything like the Gauls, or even those Iberians who prowled the peninsula beyond the areas under Carthaginian influence, they would be worse than the most rabid wolves. Even the more civilized nations could be treacherous, the Romans being the exemplar par excellence of that. It was an experience Phameas had hoped to have left behind in the past.

A whistling cry pierced the calm within the forest. All the Carthaginians halted. Phameas’s heart pounded like a stampede of feral horses across the grasslands of Numidia back in Africa, the sweat on his brow chillier than a breeze among the Alps. Ahead of him, leaves in the undergrowth rustled, with shadows flashing between the trees and bushes.

From the cover of the brush emerged men in deerskin loincloths and trousers. Their muscular, stocky bodies were of a bronze hue, perhaps a little darker than Isceradin, the Iberian, but much less so than the Carthaginians proper, with their faces and limbs striped with tattooed black lines. Their straight black hair was shorn into crests with feathers attached to them, and many had pieces of bone or ivory piercing their noses and ears. Gripping spears tipped with flint points, these strange men stared at the Carthaginian party with narrowed eyes.

Phameas held his empty hands up in a gesture of surrender. “We won’t hurt you, see? Please, I beg you, have mercy on us…”

The local warriors blinked at one another, whispering in a language Phameas had never heard in his life.

“I doubt they know a word of Carthaginian,” Isceradin said.

“Fair enough,” Phameas said.

He patted himself on his breastplate of toughened linen while looking into the eyes of the native man nearest him. “Phameas. My name is Phameas.”

The warrior squinted at him. “Fah-me-us?”

“Yes, Phameas!” Phameas tapped his correspondent on the shoulder. “And you?”

“Huh, ‘and you’?” The native had less luck pronouncing the Carthaginian right.

Isceradin shook his head. “He wouldn’t know what ‘and you’ means yet, Phameas.”

The foremost of the native troop, a tall man with a necklace of bear claws and teeth, pointed his finger up with a nod, as if he had figured something out. He then tapped his own breast. “Sukamek.”

“Sue-ka-meck,” Isceradin repeated while pointing to the man.

The one who called himself Sukamek nodded with a smile, and then pointed back to the Iberian.

Isceradin replied with his own name and hand to his breastplate. He then drew an invisible circle that, from their point of view, would include the whole Carthaginian troop. “Carthaginians.”

“Carthaginians,” Sukamek repeated. He then drew a similar circle around his own companions. “Inu’naabe.”

“In-new-knob-bay?” Phameas recited.

The other Inu’naabe men snickered among themselves, but Sukamek gave Phameas an affirming nod while touching his shoulder. “Phameas.”

It warmed Phameas inside to see that the native had gotten his name right. Assuming he understood it to be a name, of course. Regardless, Phameas showed his gratitude by touching Sukamek in turn while saying his name the best he could. This time, not one of the Inu’naabe even so much as sneered or tittered.

These strange locals, as primitive as their attire and weaponry may have appeared, didn’t seem like such a bad lot after all. There were civilized men out there who could be far less welcoming than them.

Sukamek turned to face the forest behind his band and waved his hand toward it, a clear signal requesting that they follow him.

“I think he’s inviting us to his village, or wherever they live,” Isceradin said. “It can’t hurt to pay them a quick visit before sundown.”

“If you say so,” Phameas said. “They do seem the hospitable sort.”

Even so, he had not forgotten the spear they had found near the rotting skeleton. Or how, with its flint point, it so closely resembled the spears the Inu’naabe warriors carried.

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Return of the Mother Goddess

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.

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The Black Cross

Grayscale version of my illustration for “The Black Cross”.

1940

The uneven chopping of the rickety old fan was never enough to beat back the heat of a San Diego summer. I’ve been meaning to install a new one, but business hasn’t been too good for me since the big depression started. Most workdays see me baking in my little office for hours, waiting for a call, a visit, or anything else to liven things up. So far as the morning was proceeding, today looked like it wasn’t going to be much different from the usual.

I was ready to pour myself a glass of lukewarm bourbon for the slightest refreshment when Lizzie, my petite blonde secretary, chimed in with an announcement and a pearly smile. “Someone’s here to see you, Mr. O’Sullivan.”

I straightened myself in my chair and wiped the sweat off my brow. She held the door open, and there shuffled in a gentleman in a white robe with a tiny gold cross hanging from his neck. He was balding at the top, the hair on the side fading from black to gray, and his tawny complexion was typical for a Mexican or other mestizo. I don’t normally receive clients from the swarthier races, but my family’s always been Catholic, so as far as I was concerned, he would have been a brother by faith if not by blood.

“Well, well, it’s not every day I have a man of the cloth come down to my humble workplace,” I said. “Not that it’s an unwelcome change of pace, to be honest. How can I help you?”

The old priest entwined his hands with a calm smile. “Good morning to you, Señor O’Sullivan. Call me Father Manuel, of the Mission Santa Isabella, a little out into the countryside east of town. It’s small as the old missions go, I will admit, and not very remarkable until recently.”

“Until recently? How so?”

“I know a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Dupont who is like an explorer or antiquarian. He was in the Belgian Congo a year ago, and he was kind enough to donate to our establishment a special relic he’d uncovered there. But first, Señor, have you heard of the legend of Prester John?”

I scratched the back of my head. “Can’t say I recall the name.”

“They say he was descended from one the three wise men who visited baby Christ, ruling over a Christian kingdom hidden somewhere in the Orient. At first, people thought he was in India or perhaps Central Asia, but then the Portuguese started looking for him in darkest Africa. And now my friend Pierre believes he has located the ruins of Prester John’s kingdom, whence he obtained this.”

Father Manuel laid a photograph on my desk. Despite the picture’s murky quality, I could make out a dark artifact shaped like a thick cross or arithmetic plus sign, with an ovular human face sculpted in its center, standing on a stone altar amidst tropical vegetation. The face’s exaggerated features resembled those of a native African mask or idol, but situated on a cross like that, it did nonetheless recall the Crucifixion.

“Imagine, this holy Christian icon has lain rotting in the jungle, surrounded by pagan ignorance, for who knows how many centuries!” the priest said. “It is only by the grace of God that my friend Pierre has found it, brought it back to civilization, and entrusted our mission with protecting it. And protect it we have, until it went missing last night.”

I leaned forward. “Went missing? Any idea where it could have gone, Father?”

“That is where you come in, Señor. At first, we tried contacting the police, but they told us they were stretched too thin, and you know how they are with brown folk like us anyway. So, it is to you we turn. We need your keen eyes to examine the scene of the crime and find who may have taken the cross and why. If you can get it back, the mission would be most grateful.”

Father Manuel bowed his head with palms together as if in prayer. His case was more serious than what I usually received. This cross of his wouldn’t have been the first stolen article I’d been asked to retrieve, but it sounded much more significant than, say, a fancy necklace or a missing cat. The Lord Himself might judge me if I refused.

“I would be more than happy to help, but it’ll cost you a bit,” I said. “Nothing personal, it’s just business.”

“Oh, I expected as much, my child,” he replied. “How does five thousand sound?”

I could not help but grin like a schoolboy examining a shiny new toy he’d gotten for Christmas. “It’s more than what most folks offer me.”

“Excellent! You are truly blessed, Señor O’Sullivan. I must warn you, though, the scene is a bit grisly.”

For once, despite the summertime temperature, I felt a tingling chill in my back.

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Scorpions of the Sea

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?”

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