Azangi climbed onto a mossy mahogany bough which twisted over the treetops. Her lithe black figure, clad with brief strips of bark-cloth, glistened like polished obsidian from the equatorial sunlight. A leopard-skin sash bound an iron spear to her back while a machete rested under the side of her thong. The fangs and claws looped around Azangi's neck showed her triumphs as a Bayombi huntress, but today she hunted not for meat but for the man she loved.
All around her vantage, the Yombi rainforest spread to the horizons like an ocean of bushy greenery, broken only by winding rivers and jutting basalt crags. Eastward the terrain sloped into shallow hills, and atop one of these rose the jagged parapets of a great stone wall. A rampart like this would have girdled Mbanza Ulamba, capital of the Ulamba kingdom. Azangi had traveled many days east from her homeland, but never would she have expected to reach Ulamba near the Yombi's opposite edge!
Her heart pulsed like a talking drum. For all the distance Azangi had covered, her man James Blunt still eluded her. The promise of adventure, always a lure for white men into the continent's jungle-swathed center, must have seduced him further away than he first intended. Either that, or James had landed into some horrible fate from which he would never return.
Azangi clenched her fingers around an ivory charm on one of her necklaces. Under her breath she murmured a prayer to Nzambi Konda, goddess of the hunt, that James still lived.
A wisp of white smoke wavered from the canopy to the southeast. James and his men might have camped over there. Otherwise the smoke could have come from a Ulamba farming village, but even then the peasants might have seen him pass by. Either way Azangi's heart sped up to the tune of the drums.
She dropped from the mahogany branch, diving through the canopy, and seized a dangling liana vine. Henceforth she swung and jumped her way through the jungle's upper tangle of branches and creepers. Whenever she landed on a mossy tree limb, she would surf down it on her feet before darting over to the next one. Azangi savored the cooling breeze that washed past her as she moved.
Her thrill ended when the stench of carrion flooded into her nose. She swung off her last vine to land on her feet on the spongy jungle floor. A flock of Troodon, small feathered scavengers, scurried in the brush from her, and they left behind the body of a man in blood-stained safari clothes.
Though most of his face and arms had been pecked to the bone, the curls of red hair that still clung to his scalp could not have belonged to James Blunt. Instead they, together with the body's thickset physique, recalled James's comrade Dennis MacKenny. Out from his forehead stuck a forked throwing knife in native style.
Azangi shrunk back from the corpse with a knot twisting in her stomach. A couple of paces nearby, collapsed khaki tents encircled the ashy remains of a campfire. More bodies rotted between these, strewn among a mess of spears, throwing knives, and broken guns. Except for a handful of black porters, most of the dead were white men.
But none of them, so far as Azangi could scan, looked like James Blunt. Even after probing inside the tents and the foliage around the campsite, she could not find any trace of her love.
She cried out James's name with tears streaming down her cheeks. Her voice echoed between the trees, but received no response. Somehow he must have escaped while the rest of his safari got massacred. No, James would never desert his men like that. He would sooner take a spear through his own heart than let anyone else suffer the same. But what else could have happened to him?
Azangi tugged a spear off one of the dead bodies. Inscribed into the base of its point was the face of a Tyrannosaurus, the mightiest predator of the Yombi jungles. Many peoples of the Yombi regarded the tyrannosaur as the most regal beast, but the Ulambas went even further and declared it their totemic symbol.
So it must have been the Ulambas, the people whose country Azangi had entered, who slaughtered James's safari. If anyone knew his fate, they would.
With her anger swelling like a brush-fire within, Azangi reached for the nearest overhanging vine and continued eastward for Mbanza Ulamba.
##
The jungle gave way to a terraced stone platform on which a pair of obelisks stretched for the sky. Each of these basalt pillars had a snarling tyrannosaur face carved from its top, and from their sides descended coils of rope. Fragments of crushed bone littered the red-stained platform between the obelisks. Stories claimed that the Ulambas would bound young men and women to obelisks like these as offerings to a tyrannosaur every full moon, but Azangi had always dismissed these reports as sensationalism to make the Ulambas look barbaric. Upon seeing the obelisks and bones for herself, the blood in her veins flowed cold.
At least none of the bones looked fresh enough to belong to James.
Within sight from the platform reared the city wall of Mbanza Ulamba, and it seemed even more colossal once Azangi approached it. Not even the most enormous Brontosaurus could crane its long neck high enough to peer over the wall's parapet, where tiny Ulamba archers marched in blood-red sarongs. Within an archway going through the wall gleamed a door of polished ebony.
"Who goes there?" one of the Ulambas on the parapet shouted through his ivory horn. "You look like some forest woman come to trade."
"I am Azangi, a Bayombi huntress from the far west," Azangi shouted back. "But I don't seek trade. I seek the man named James Blunt."
"Wait, I may know whom you're talking about. Yesterday our patrol dragged in a white man they caught poaching in the jungle. He should be still stuck in his prison-hut."
"Then I must talk with him. I need to know how in Nzambi Konda's name he got himself trapped in this faraway country."
"First you'll need permission from our King, and he doesn't give that stuff out with much generosity. But if it's really so important to you, then you may enter."
The gates ground open to let Azangi through. Behind them ran a dirt avenue with tyrannosaur sculptures roaring in silence alongside it. The streets shooting off this avenue lead to clusters of mud roundhouses with plaster blazing white from the sun. Every one of these huts must have spread twice as wide as any in Azangi's village of birth, enough to house an entire extended family in one room!
As if the monumental quality of Mbanza Ulamba's architecture did not steal enough of Azangi's breath, there were the people that bustled around her. Gold, copper, and ivory ornaments dazzled on their limbs, necks, and foreheads. The colors splashed on their loincloths equaled this jewelry in vibrancy. Yet for all Azangi marveled at them, the Ulambas did not repay her in kind. They all stepped aside to give her a wide berth and stare at her. They either wrinkled their noses in grimaces or, in the case of young men, leered at her as if she were a hunk of bush-meat.
Back in Azangi's home village, the people always gazed in awe at their finest huntress. The citizens of Mbanza Ulamba may have showered her with attention too, but every drop of it bruised her pride instead.
The city's central avenue ramped up a platform where more huts sat on top. One of these sprawled even wider than the rest in the whole city, almost big enough to shelter a brontosaur's body, or maybe a king and his pride. Before this giant house some older men and women chattered on their stools in a circle, but they stopped their conversation to gawk at Azangi once she neared them.
"May I speak to the King?" she asked once she cleared her throat.
Two of the elders scooted aside to reveal the man seated on the circle's opposite end. Like all the Ulambas, he decorated himself with liberal amounts of jewelry, but his leopard-skin mantle and headdress of multicolored plumage gave him an additional magnificence that suggested kingship. His bulging stomach, smeared with grease, could only have grown so large from eating the finest food that could be found in any kingdom.
With eyes narrowed into slits at Azangi, the crowned man smacked his lips as if hungry. "I would take pleasure from landing my eyes on such an untamed forest beauty, except you barged in here without proper invitation. Who are you who dares interrupt King Mutswe's council?" The boom of his voice blew Azangi back a couple of steps.
"I am dearly sorry, Your Majesty of Ulamba," she said with a bow. "One of your soldiers directed me to your audience. Apparently I need your permission to see a certain white man in your captivity."
Mutswe had taken a swig of palm wine from a gourd, but he spurted it out like a geyser. "You mean that ringleader of trespassing poachers? What could you want with that piss-haired scum?"
"James is no poacher!" Azangi took a deep inhale to relax herself. "Easily led astray, perhaps, but he might not have known he was in your country."
"Are you really so sure? The way I see it, all white men are guilty of poaching and thievery, and that's when they're not blasting away villages with their cannons. Hence my decree that no white man can set foot in Ulamba without my summons!"
"I understand why you may think that, but James is not like other white men. Why, he wouldn't have even left his native Murica had he not objected to his countrymen's greed!"
The King's belly shook like a full water-skin when he laughed. "For a woman of the forest, you are naive like a child. Even white men who pretend to care about black people will leak out their ingrained prejudice sooner or later. They are more venomous than cobras. Why else would your James break into our territory without regard for our law?"
"Like I said, he wouldn't have known it was yours!"
"Then why didn't he ever think to ask our villagers where he was? Such is the white man's arrogance!"
"May I ask why you're so defensive of this James fellow, forest woman?" one of the council elders asked.
"Because I love him," Azangi said.
The entire council stared at her without comment. Birds twittered in the trees that shaded the royal platform, but no people spoke. Not even the townspeople who had gathered around to watch this scene whispered anything.
It took Mutswe's belly-laugh to break this silence. "So a black man was not good enough for you? Do you not love your own race? Or have you sold all your loyalty to those frost-eyed plunderers?"
Azangi hoisted one hand over her machete's hilt. The rage in her bubbled like magma within a volcano. "Listen, O King of Ulamba, I've had it up to here with your hateful rhetoric. Let us cut to the heart of this: I want to see James Blunt. At most I want to know what he's doing in your kingdom!"
"No, I can tell you want more than that. You want to save your precious white man from the jaws of justice, don't you?" Mutswe stroked his beard. "I might let you do that on one condition."
He rolled himself forward to pick up another gourd. This one had a circular hole on its top sealed with a cork of stone.
"The gourd I hold here contains a secret message bound for Bomna, on the other side of the eastern hills. If you can deliver this and return by the next full moon, I'll release James and you two can leave this country for good. Otherwise, we will carry out his sentence: death by tyrannosaur!"
The moon Azangi had seen last night was half-full, so she had only half the month to carry out this errand. If she failed, she would face the wrath of a monster far bigger and deadlier than anything she had hunted before---if said monster did not already devour James in its cavernous jaws. "You have a deal."
The King of Ulamba clapped his hands and tossed the message-gourd to Azangi. "Before you go, I shall let you see your man for one brief moment. You deserve to know his motives for trespassing, if nothing else."
##
The compound of prison-huts lay in the black shadow of the wall at Mbanza Ulamba's far end. Unlike the other houses in the city, these structures squatted lower than most men could stand and lacked whitewashing on their mud walls. Guards with spears and reptile-hide shields escorted Azangi to the hut at the very back end of the compound. Mounted on its roof was a white mask with a huge pointed nose and a tiny mouth, an exaggerated caricature of a white man's facial features. Azangi suppressed a desire to curse at this insulting image.
She knelt at the hut's entrance. "Are you there, James?"
From the darkness inside twinkled a pair of blue eyes under tousled yellow hair. Even with all the sweat and the stubble on his chin, James's face would never lose its square-jawed comeliness. He crawled towards Azangi with his muscled sun-bronzed arms. "Holy fuck, is that you, Azangi?"
"After all this time, I am blessed to see you alive again." Azangi ran her hand through James's mane, which shone like gold from the waning sunlight.
"Trust me, it's no blessing if the rest of your safari's rotting in the bush. That King Mutswe is almost as mad as President Custer Davis." James flashed his snow-white teeth in a smile. "But you're always a splendor for sore eyes, my dear."
"I have to ask what you were doing all the way here? You promised not to stray so far."
"True, I thought I would only pick up a few ceratopsian horns within a few days' hike from your village. But then I picked up these rumors about something in the hills east of here. Say, you wouldn't have heard anything about Nondo's Egg, would you?"
"You mean that giant diamond stashed in an ancient ruin? I've heard the legends, all right, but never bought them. You white men will believe anything when it comes to hidden treasures." Azangi held a hand over her mouth to muffle her giggling.
"Oh, come on. That's something Mutswe would say. Whether or not you buy into it, I thought it worth investigating, even if we had to cut straight through this damned Ulamba country." James withdrew his head back into the darkness. "I ought to face the truth. I've been a greedy fool again, and it cost my men their lives!"
Azangi reached her hand into the hut and wiped the tears off James's face with her fingertips. "Maybe your hunger for adventure distracted you again, but don't blame yourself for Mutswe's decree. Besides, you can still get out alive. I swear by the name of Nzambi Konda that I'll break you out of this before the full moon." She tapped her necklace's charm.
"And how do you plan to do that?"
"Mutswe sent me on an errand to Bomna across the hills. If I carry it out and return in time, he'll release you." Azangi held up the message-gourd.
"May I ask one additional favor? They say Nondo's Egg lies somewhere in the area between here and Bomna. Could you find time to check if it really exists?"
"I'll do the best I can. And then I shall see you after the full moon."
Azangi lowered herself onto her elbows and crept towards James in the hut. Slinging their arms around each other, they locked their lips together. So many days had passed since they last kissed like this, and still more awaited until their next. They would have to make the most of this one.
Once Azangi left the prison-hut behind, the moon that rose into the sky was more than half full.
Thanks for giving my stuff a try. 
