posted
I have a new short story available to read titled "The Raid on Camp Struthers". It's an action-packed adventure set in the 1890s in which an American diamond prospector and an African warrior queen join forces to rescue her brother from the wrath of the British Empire! Character illustrations are included.
Allow me to quote the opening scene:
quote: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.
“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.
When Jack came out of the tunnel, his guide had fallen to his knees, holding up empty hands while whimpering like a terrified schoolboy. Before them stood a semicircle of warriors in leather loincloths who all had their spears thrust forward, forming a ring of sharp and barbed iron blades that were less than an inch away from stabbing Jack and Maulidi’s necks. Behind their oval buffalo-hide shields, their glaring eyes glinted with even more menacing brilliance than their weapons’ points.
Jack then knew he should never have fired that shot before he and his guide entered the ruins. They might have scared off the Swahili’s djinn, but in doing so, they had attracted other, even less welcome attention.
The warrior who stood in the center of the formation, unlike the rest, was a woman. A saffron-red loincloth and top hugged the curves of her sable-skinned figure, and ringlets of tightly coiled black hair framed her face like a lion’s mane. Embedded in the gold pendant that hung from the lowest of her necklaces, as well as the gold circlet around her head, were numerous diamonds which twinkled orange in the light of the sunset.
She smiled as she tapped Jack’s chin with the tip of her spear. “You are more handsome than most white men, I must admit,” she said in English flawless enough to surprise Jack. “What are you doing in the lands of the Sibour people?”
Jack dropped his rifle and held up his hands with a nervous grin. “Um…nothing that should concern you, ma’am.”
Her spear’s point dug into the skin of his neck. “Answer me, mzungu!”
“Alright, alright…just a little, um, prospecting for diamonds. Nothing more.”
“He speaks the truth,” Maulidi added. “Please, I beg you, let us go in peace.”
“Then it is as I feared,” the woman said. “You should know that the very ground you stand on belongs to our ancestors. With your trespassing and robbery, you defile their hallowed abode!”
“By digging up a few little sparkling rocks?” Jack retorted. “There’s no need to get so darn upset, ma’am. We don’t mean any harm, honestly. Let us go and we’ll be outta here in a hurry!”
The female warrior scoffed. “As if white men like you could ever be trusted. You mzungu are always barging in to steal from us. Why, it was white men like you who took my brother away!”
“Hold on, what in tarnation are you talking about?”
“I think I know what she means,” Maulidi said. “I heard that the British recently took a chieftain around her prisoner because he refused to pay their taxes.”
“That is true,” the warrior woman said. “He was my brother Oburu, King of the Sibour. I, Anyango, must take his place as regent until I can buy the British off. And their demands are much more than my people can meet right now.”
“Christ Almighty, that’s terrible!” Jack replied. “But please understand, Miss Anyango, that I’d nothing to do with that. I ain’t even British! I’m from the United States of America. We haven’t been British for more than a century now.”
“And yet you still have the same mindset that you can trespass on our land and plunder our wealth. Whether British or American, why should we trust any of you mzungu?”
After scratching the short brown hair under his Stetson hat in thought, Jack’s face lit up. “Because I can help free your brother.”
Anyango cocked her eyebrow while everyone else stood gaping at him.
“By Allah, you can’t be serious, Bwana Erwin,” Maulidi said.
“Think about it, I can infiltrate wherever the Brits are holding him better than any of you,” Jack said. “They’ll sooner lower their guard around any white man who can speak English like them.”
Anyango’s scowl relaxed as she and her warriors withdrew their spears. “That does make sense. You could slip into their camp without arousing suspicion and then free my brother.”
“Of course, just in case things turn sour, I might need some help. Miss Anyango, could you and your warriors attack the garrison upon my signal? That’ll give the Brits a diversion while I’m sneaking your brother out.”
The Sibour queen regent’s grin now stretched between her eyes. “Sounds like a sound strategy to me. If you can rescue my brother like you promise, mzungu, then we will let you go unharmed. Why, we might even let you bring home a handful of diamonds, if that really is all you came here for.”
“Then, as we Americans like to say, it’s a deal!” Jack and Anyango exchanged smiles, their eyes reflecting each other’s sparks.
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