Kanana Read online

  I was at the edge of the woods, not knowing whether my original camp was to the left or right of me, not knowing how far I had travelled, and most importantly, not knowing where Kanana was and why she hadn’t returned. Thinking about it, I decided that it wasn’t important that I wasn’t in the exact spot in which I had started. I couldn’t have travelled very far, and Kanana’s skills in navigating the jungle were surely such that she would be able to find me were I ten times as far as I could walk in a day.

  These thoughts soothed me for all of thirty seconds, for just as I stepped from the edge of the forest, I was surrounded by a dozen fierce looking natives, each with a stone-tipped spear pointed in my direction. They looked very much like the Tokayana people of the coast, copper-skinned with jet-black hair, tall, graceful, and muscular. Unlike the citizens of Abbeyport, these warriors wore clothing of animal skins—usually nothing more than a loincloth, but sometimes a vest or pants.

  I was weighing the possibility of pulling out my pistol and shooting one or two of them before they stabbed me, when the largest among them reached out and snatched the weapon from my holster. This fellow, who was evidently in charge, tall and I had to admit, handsome, said something to me and pointed across the grassland. That he was ordering me to move was emphasized when he poked me with his spear. I gave no argument, but started walking, surrounded by my captors.

  I marched all day long through the waist high-grass, and while I was constantly on the lookout for any opportunity in which to escape, none came. Every so often, the warriors allowed me a drink of water from an animal skin canteen, but they gave me nothing to eat until that night. When we at last stopped beneath a little copse of trees, they handed me a piece of dried meat. When I had finished it, I was bound hand and foot.

  I didn’t sleep much that night. I was uncomfortable. I was worried. And I was constantly watching and listening for any sign of Kanana. None came. In the morning, after short preparations, we started off again. Though they untied my feet, this time they left my hands fastened behind me. Though again I was given water, this second day took quite a toll on me. I was weak, and it became increasingly difficult to pay attention to what I was doing. I tripped several times. By the time we came to a halt on the second day, my shoulders were so sore that I could barely lift what small bit of food I was given. Thankfully when I had eaten, though they tied me again, this time they did so with my hands in front of me.

  On the third day, we reached the village of the warriors in whose grasp I now found myself. I didn’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly didn’t expect what I saw. Village was not nearly a lofty enough word to describe it, though perhaps city would be too extravagant. Five hundred round huts were gathered together inside a great wooden palisade. In the very center was a small hillock and at its top, a hut, similar to all the others, though larger. This town, as I shall now call it, had been built at the juxtaposition of the grassland and the forest. Now though, neither looked very close. The ground in and all around the town had been beaten to bare earth by a thousand footfalls, and all that remained of several miles of what had once been forest were the burnt stumps of large trees with tilled farmland running between them.

  The warriors led me to the center of the town, where I was surrounded by the citizens, men, women, and children all chattering away in a language that I didn’t understand. Several men and women approached and examined me. I assumed they were local dignitaries because their clothing was finer and more highly decorated than most. They poked and prodded me and then apparently gave orders for my disposal.

  I was led to one of the nearby huts, placed inside, and ropes around my hand were fastened to a pole in the center of the room. Looking around, I determined that this hut was a storage space. Along one wall was an enormous pile of animal skins. Against the back, opposite the door, were twenty or so large pottery jars. Standing against the wall opposite the skins were twenty or so stone-tipped spears.

  After about an hour, a boy entered the room carrying bowls of fruit and water. He sat it down beside me and looked into my face. I gasped. It was none other than Saral, my young friend and assistant from the coastal town of Abbeyport.

  “Drink, Mr. Henry,” he said, raising a bowl of water to my lips. “You look very bad.”

  “How did you get here, Saral?” I asked, after swallowing.

  “These are the same Chikuyana who attacked us at the river. They took me and five others prisoner and brought us here. That was nine days ago.”

  “Nine days?” I wondered. “Can it have been so long ago?”

  “Eat.” Saral handed me the bowl of fruit.

  “So, there are seven of us here.”

  “No Mr. Henry. “Sanshe, one of the porters, died. He had been hit with an arrow and became sick. The other four are gone too. They were traded to another tribe, the Dako, as slaves.”

  “I’m not hungry anymore,” I said, dropping the bowl.

  “Not to worry. They are not going to sell you into slavery. They are going to sacrifice you to Tumukua.”

  “Of course they are,” I said. “What about you? What are they going to do to you? If you get away, can you make it back to the coast?”

  “Not all alone. Maybe the two of us can make it. You came all this way by yourself.”

  “Um, well I didn’t exactly…”

  At that moment we were interrupted when one of the Chikuyana warriors stepped into the hut. He cuffed Saral and shoved him out the door. When I shouted at him, straining at my bonds, he turned and backhanded me across the mouth. I tasted blood, but what really got my blood up was his treatment of a fine young boy like Saral. After he had left, I sat and mused that for both the boy and me, a smack in the face wasn’t all that bad considering.

  With my arms and legs wrapped around the pole, I listened to the many voices outside speaking in a language I couldn’t understand. At last though, exhaustion won out and I fell asleep. I woke up in darkness. It was late in the night and most of the villagers had apparently long since gone to bed. I could hear snoring from several directions. I could still hear a few low conversations too. I salvaged the pieces of fruit that I had earlier dropped on the hut’s floor. They were dirty, but still edible. I remained awake until dawn, when the village began to come back to life. Saral arrived with more water and some dried meat.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Henry,” he said. “I am afraid that I will not have a chance to rescue you.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Saral. What’s to become of you?”

  “Not to worry. The Tokayana and the Chikuyana fight, but they also trade. I think they will trade me back to my family. Now hurry and eat. They are coming.”

  “Godspeed then, my boy.”

  Saral left. I drank the water he had provided and ate as fast as I could. I had just finished when four warriors entered the hut and unfastened me from the central pole, though they left my hands tied in front of me. Outside, I found myself in the center of quite a crowd of villagers. They guided me through the town and out the other side, the throng following along. Occasionally they would shove me if I was going too slowly, or if they just felt as though they wanted to.

  The entire crowd went along with me as I left through the far gate in the palisade, opposite the gate through which I had made my entrance. Then slowly, those who were tagging along fell off in ones and twos, until it was only me and my guard of a dozen dark-haired, bronze-skinned warriors.

  Here followed another four days of travel. I did not spend a great deal of time examining my surroundings or comparing landmarks. I was sure that I was marching ever closer to my demise and cared little for in what surroundings that end might take place. That the land sloped upward I only knew because the trek became increasingly difficult. Finally we left the grassland and entered another vast forest. It was thicker than any other that I had seen since arriving in Elizagaea. In places it was all but impassable.

  We had camped twice on the grassland and twice more in jungle. Each time, I was given a
small bit of dried meat and some water, but that was the only time I received either. The fourth evening, for the first time one of the warriors spoke to me in halting English.

  “Tomorrow… give you to the Tumukua.”

  “The Tumukua?” I had been thinking up till this point, based on what Saral had said, that Tumukua was a single individual, perhaps a tribal god. “Are the Tumukua a tribe?”

  The native nodded, but I didn’t know if he actually understood me.

  So at midmorning on the fifth day of this trek, we arrived at a clearing in the forest to find the ruins of an ancient stone building. It is tempting for me to describe it as Roman or Greek because it did have a few fallen columns lying on the ground, but honestly there wasn’t enough of it to tell. Two items amid the debris were fairly new—a metal pole that had been driven into the ground and an enormous horn on a stone platform. I was tied by the wrists to the pole. The horn, which was only a bit smaller than the alphorns I had seen used in Europe had a single looping curve. One of the warriors, not the one who had spoken to me in English, pressed his lips to the mouthpiece of the enormous instrument and blew. A single reverberating, somewhat mournful note, rang out over the forest.

  The Chikuyana turned, and without so much as a wave goodbye, disappeared back in the direction from which they had come. It was then that I began to feel that peculiar sensation in the back of my brain that reached down into my stomach and bowels. It doesn’t matter how much one may think that he wants to die, or in my case, that I didn’t much care whether I lived or died, there is still that ancient part of your brain that wants to survive no matter what. It’s not fear. It’s not courage either. Rather, it’s that feeling deep down inside that drives you to fear or courage, to fight or flight. I pulled at my bonds, but that only dug them deeper into my skin. I tried to cut through them, by rubbing the cords up and down the pole around which they were tied, but it was so smooth that it did nothing at all to them.

  I hadn’t been left alone for more than half an hour, when I heard the approach of someone or something. I say something because the primary sound that I heard coming toward me was a low guttural growling. It became louder, and as it did, I could tell that it wasn’t the simple sound set of an animal, but a language unlike anything I had ever heard before. Minutes later the foliage at the edge of the clearing parted, and out sprang what I could only assume were the Tumukua.

  It was a party of about twenty men, but the Tumukua were very different from the Tokayana, the Chikuyana, and the other inhabitants of Elizagaea. They were shorter, stockier, and heavier, with thick brow ridges and lantern jaws. Rather than the copper skin of the other natives, theirs was a deep umber color. It took me a moment, but at last I recognized them from the Boston Society of Natural History. Fossils of just such people had been found in Europe near the Neader Valley. They were cavemen!

  While one of the new arrivals began untying me, another spoke to me. I didn’t understand the low growls and grunts any better than I had understood the language that the natives had used in Abbeyport on the coast. My hands were retied in front of me, and then were attached to a rope used as a leash, and I was led on into the thick forest.

  We hadn’t gone far before it started raining. It continued raining the rest of the day. As darkness fell, I realized my new captors were not of a mind to stop and make camp. I wasn’t sure if this was just their custom or whether they just decided not to bother stopping in the rain. Either way, I couldn’t keep up. My body had reached the limit of its endurance. One moment I was walking as the world turned sideways. The next, I was on the ground in the mud and everything went black. For just a moment, I saw Trudy’s face, looking down at me and laughing. Then I passed into consciousness just long enough to realize that I was being carried over one of my new companion’s shoulders, like a sack of wheat.

  Suddenly I was on my back on the stony ground. My face was turned to the sky and a torrent of water was still falling. I opened my mouth and drank. Raising my hands to protect my eyes and keep the rain from going up my nose, I found them still tied. I just stayed where I was and continued to drink. The water was so good I drank too much. When rough hands jerked me to my feet, I vomited up a good deal of what I had swallowed. This was met by coarse laughter from the Tumukua.

  Looking around, I saw that I hadn’t been lying on the bare ground at all, but a platform of fitted stones. My eyes followed these stones as they formed a bridge, which connected to a road, and which then led through a great gate and into a vast city. The sheets of rain made it difficult to get a complete view, but what I could see filled me with wonder. It was like looking on the splendors of Rome or Athens as they had been two thousand years ago. But the architecture wasn’t quite the same. Still, I realized where I had seen similar stonework before. The style exactly matched the ancient construction of Kanana’s fortress, jutting up near the border between the savannah and the jungle somewhere to the east.

  “I suppose I’ll never see you again,” I said to myself.

  The only answer I received was a jerk on my leash, as I was guided the rest of the way across the bridge.

  “I hope you’re safe, Kanana.”

  “Kanana!” hissed one of the Tumukua. The others repeated her name in hushed tones, looking around as if they expected her to appear out of the torrential mists. “Kanana. Kanana.” After a moment, they continued on into the city. It could have been my imagination, but it didn’t seem as if they tugged quite as hard.

  Chapter Ten: The Lost Kingdom of Mu

  “Trudy, I’m home!” I called as I crossed the threshold.

  I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them into the pockets of the overcoat. Then taking the coat off, I handed it to Siobhan, our housekeeper, who carried it off to the closet. Walking into the living room, I stopped at the bar and poured myself a sherry. Though the doorway to the kitchen, I could see Gertrude talking to someone, but I couldn’t seem to whom. She saw me, turned, and walked through the two rooms to kiss me on the cheek.

  “Who are you visiting with in the kitchen?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, that was just Walter.”

  “Is your father here?”

  “No.”

  “Were you borrowing his car? Where have you been off to?”

  “No, I’ve been at home all day.”

  I swallowed my sherry while I looked at her. “Do you want to tell me why your father’s driver was here, or do I have to keep playing twenty questions?”

  “Walter is more than just my father’s driver,” she said. “He’s a dear friend. We’ve known each other for years.”

  “Do you think it’s appropriate for a married woman to have male friends at her house when her husband is away?”

  Her eyes flashed and for a moment she looked like she wanted to strike me. Then she twisted her lips into a smile. “I’ll see who I want to see. Dinner is at seven.”

  She turned and walked briskly toward the stairs.

  * * * * *

  As I was pulled through the stone streets, more and more people stepped out of the buildings on either side, braving the falling rain in order to catch a glimpse of me. Almost all were of the same race as my captors—Tumukua, though I could identify a few of the copper-skinned natives that might have belonged to any of the coastal or interior tribes. I was musing on this when a previous conversation popped into my head. I looked around at the great stone buildings. I could make out massive columns across the front of some of them and large domes of blue and gold. This had to have been what Saral had asked me about in my room at Abbeyport. He had asked if I was searching for the lost Kingdom of Mu. The word Mu was right in the middle of Tumukua. Whether I had been looking for lost Mu or not, it seemed that I had found it.

  Now that I was of a mind to think about it, I tried to pay more attention to my surroundings, though exhaustion and dehydration had left my mind anything but clear. It was tempting to describe the columned facades and domed structures as resembling Roman or Greek classical architec
ture, but there was something quite distinctive about it. I’m not a student of the architectural arts, so it is difficult for me to put my finger on what exactly was different, but there were definitely differences. To be sure there were similarities too, such as the great coliseum-like stadium, which was so large that at first I didn’t recognize it for what it was. It just sort of blended into the misty background. But this proved to be our destination.

  I was dragged through a door and then into a hallway, down several flights of stairs and finally into a stone room. Here I was fastened to the wall, with a heavy metal ring around my neck, chained to the wall. A single torch burning in a sconce gave enough light for me to determine that the room was quite large and that I was not the only prisoner here. There were at least a dozen others. When my captors left though, they took the torch with them, leaving me, and the others, in almost total darkness.

  The chain connecting my neck to the wall was long enough that I was able to sit down on the floor, and this I did. I fell sleep, but couldn’t have slept for long. When I woke, there was a sliver of light coming in through a window high up on the wall. I struggled back to my feet.

  "You are European?" I heard from nearby.

  “An American,” I said.

  “American, English… you are all European.” This time the words came from my other side.

  I looked this way and that, and discovered, illuminated in the dim light, men on either side of me shackled in the same way I was. The two closest to me had spoken. Shifting my weight a bit, I looked at the man to the right.

  “Are you Tokayana or Chikuyana?”

  “I am Tokayana.” He was a big fellow, fully six foot four, heavily muscled with broad shoulders. His shiny black hair hung loose around his neck.