"Rescue my son, and you can have your freedom," the Moghul's great general had said to me. And now I clung to the top of the ruined wall that surrounded the rough cobbled yard in which the wiry Mongolian horsemen were holding him. The general's son was one of many the general had, but Kasim had been made a prince as he was the most handsome and most intelli...
The best hunting for lions in the Kingdom of Urartu was in the south, near the border with Assyria. This area was not the safest place to be in those years of Assyrian expansion into the region between the Caspian and Black seas, but it was where the lions were. So, when the prince of Urartu took his hunting party from the capital at Tushpa, on the Nairi Sea...
The Watchman sensed it as it was happening. Such was both the gift and bane the gods had given him—not only that he could see much of what was to come but also that he could sense and feel much of what was happening now beyond his sight. He should have known. Dila was a man and yet he was also a child. When he was a child, as he lay under the Watchman and pl...
The anger and determination of Qin Shih Huang was almost palpable as he unleashed his cavalry, war chariots, and bronze and iron weapons—all battlefield levelers that his enemies had never before encountered—on the rebel town of Anyi. Within hours of receiving the message that the Lord of Anyi would not send tribute and yield in the season of homage, Qin Shi...
He could not make out where the snarling and gravelly, throaty noise had come from as he stepped out of the rickety carriage early that dark moonless evening. It was as if somewhere in the acoustics of the steep ridge, someone old and throaty sounding were speaking in a primitive language, but just before the end, he could make out the words in English "fore...
The great General's favourite son Prince Kasim, had been kidnapped, and was being held for ransom by a party of wild Mongol raiders. They had carried him off to an abandoned fort in the rocky hills at the edge of the great desert plains. There the Mongol's leader had fucked the helpless young prince well, as the prince cried out for more. And he had then tol...
The following is a sequel to my entry in the Halloween story contest of 2007 submitted a year ago. The title was THE TABOOS OF TRANSYLVANIA. * He was so handsome and charming in his dinner jacket that night in August on his eighteenth birthday. Reginald has his mother's big brown eyes and his father's debonair strawberry blond looks. But he inherited his...
They were camped near the top of the ridge in a meadow, just below the forest line. Niu had said he wanted to be high up whenever he could be. He was standing there looking out over the thousands of cook fires and tents spread across the meadow when Shun, carrying the supplies for both of them, managed to trudge up the hillside from the road below. "I wonde...
"I think it's wreckage of a ship. From the storm last night." It wasn't strange to find ship wreckage on the Cefalu beach, in the kingdom of Akamantis, after a tempest like the one that had raged the previous night. Two scouts, on their regular patrol along the coastline of the island of Li' in vigilance against the forces of the Prince of Madness, which s...
On Sunday, April 28, 1793, the bells in towers of the harbor town of Charlotta rang out at 2 p.m. They were calling all nobles on the inland sea island of St. Silvus to the wedding of Reginald Reynolds, the governor-general's son, the most magnificently formed and handsome of the most physically gifted countrymen on the face of the earth. At that precise mom...