“Is your father nearby?”

A call sounded nearby, “Yalima?”

“Yes Tashi, he’s nearby. Are you going to be OK? I’ve got to go.”

Talashi had come a long way. It had been a hazardous, arduous journey. He had got lost more than once. He had led all that remained of his pride to this place. His mate, lightly with cub, lay resting, all but exhausted, at the edge of the trees. The void had claimed his mother high on the mountainside. He had got his mate this far, only to lead her into terrible danger into some pride’s territory and now that pride’s male was bearing down on him. Maybe he could somehow lead him off, giving her a chance to get away.

The cub ran off. Talashi could barely stand, let alone fight. He wondered if his father’s words, “No one who asks for help deserves it” were really true. If so he was in deadly trouble.

The next few minutes were confused for Talashi. His haunch shot him through with piercing pain. His tiredness blurred everything. Sounds floated through him. He lay down, his final reserves of energy, determination and spirit finally gone. He heard muffled voices, confused and fragmentary, “…and didn’t I tell you not to talk to strange lions...?”, “…he’s not strange… smells like you.” He waited for the lion to come and kill him.

“Tashi? Come on, you’ve got to get up, we’ve got to get you home.”

Talashi showed no sign of movement, indeed little sign of any life at all. Nengwe ran his nose over the lion’s cheek, sniffing the slumped form and feeling for movement with his whiskers. Then he licked his lion’s neck with the tip of his tongue, but there was no response from the still warm flesh below.

Yalima nuzzled the lion, “Yeah Talashi, come on. You can get up. Please.”

The lion opened an eye; barely, but definitely open. He thought for a moment he saw his mother.

“Mother? I thought we’d lost you.”

Falana was surprised, and worried for him. He was clearly very weak and delirious. He seemed in very poor condition, but still carried a ghost of athleticism: tall but strongly built. “I’m not your mother. My name is Falana.”

“Melakwe? Help me,” the lion said weakly, with all the little hope he had left.

“Melakwe?” asked Nengwe incredulously.

“Later Nengwe, later,” said Falana seriously. “This lion need our help. Who is he?”

Nengwe really couldn’t believe what he was about to say: “He’s Talashi.” Here, on the very edge of the Pridelands, was, well, he it simply couldn’t be happening. He lay down, supporting the lion’s head gently with his shoulder. “He’s… he’s my brother.”

Yalima and Nengwa gathered round their parents, and now, their uncle. Soon, they would gather in the sunset shadow of Shaha’s Rest to hear the story.

As night drew in under a new moon; to find food for her family, the huntress set out once more.

Afterword

 

The Huntress at Sunset started as an idea for a story I shared with my friend David Morris in an email in late 1997. I still have a copy of that email.

My idea was to follow a few characters intensely, to get into their heads and under their skins, over a period of weeks rather than to range wide over many more over years. David challenged me to write something, anything that my main character, then the unnamed young lion was up to, “What is he doing now?” In an hour or so I wrote back with what was eventually become the opening of “Llasani”.

For a while we overflowed with ideas, wrote sketches, outlined chapters and worked them up. It couldn’t last forever, but did last for a few years, then my life changed and I put it to one side… for a long time. Every now and again I’d read and edit a bit of it: some parts over and over. After a while I’d put it to one side again. The last time that happened was in 2005 when I put about two thirds of it online for a short time under its original title, Visions of The Pridelands. My life was then in turmoil and I felt that as I hadn’t finished my journey in life I couldn’t finish Nengwe’s.

It then rested, unread, on my various computers for years. Abandoned but not forgotten. I had always had the feeling that it deserved to be read, but over the years I had lost sight of who would want to read it. Nengwalamwe and Falana, however, never quite took their claws out of me and insisted on their story being heard.

It was another change of my life that prompted me to finally finish Visions of The Pridelands. I took out almost all that linked it back to my earlier writings. Out too went almost all that harked back to Disney’s The Lion King which was the original inspiration for my writing. I refocused on the main story, that of Nengwalamwe and Falana. During this process I also changed the title, mainly to draw attention to that central aspect of the story. Who then is the huntress at sunset? It could be Shaha or even Melakwe, but no, it is Falana. Maybe not the real Falana; it is Nengwalamwe’s vision of perfection, his ideal lioness.

What kind of story is “Huntress”? It’s not a romance, it’s not tragedy, it’s not comedy, it’s not detective fiction, nor a drama. What it is, I realise after all these years, is actually a western: an anthropomorphic fantasy western. Nengwalamwe is the young stranger who rides into a corrupt declining mining town from over the mountains. He’s the son of a locally infamous gunslinger, who no one’s ever heard of anywhere else. Unlike his father, he isn’t keen to use his guns, and is run out of town. He gets on a train but something makes him get off and go back. You know it’s going to end in a shoot-out. You know he’s going to win over the heart of the local backwoods woman whose elderly mother was taken in by the local native people as a child and learned their ancient wisdom and culture. You know Nengwe will become the sheriff and in time will successfully run for mayor. You know there will be spectacular sunsets and lone trees and dusty trails, but then technically much of western USA is savannah.

It took a long time getting here, but I do hope you have enjoyed The Huntress at Sunset: a story that started life as a “next generation” fan-fiction idea but which grew up into something else; much as Nengwalamwe himself had to do.

 

Some Notes for Lion King Fans

 

Is this a Lion King fan-fiction story? No? If so, then what is it? At first sight no characters from The Lion King or its sequels appear nor are any even mentioned. There actually are some in this story, deeply buried. That means all the characters that you do meet are original. I want you to get to know them as individuals in their own right. I want the story to be about them, not about any of the characters of the films.

I started writing this story before Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride was released. I had already written my own sequel, in pseudo-script form, to The Lion King. In that script, called The Pridelands, I had created my own version of the pridelands.

I gave Simba and Nala three cubs, Nyala, Zenani and Thembekile: commonly known and Yali, Zeni and Thembi. As a twist – all the cubs in fan-fiction until then had been assumed to be male - I wanted the cub I used as the main story driver to be a female: Yali. As I had two daughters I decided to give her a sister, Zeni , and modelled as them on my children as they were at that time. Thembi was there because the new cub seen at the end was assumed to be male by the directors and others working on Lion King. Three cubs were also unusual for fan-fiction at the time, but I had no problem with it as it fitted with my more naturalistic approach. Yali has appeared in a number of my stories at various ages. In The Pridelands she was young, in Tales at Sunset she was equivalent to a mid teen in human terms. In Huntress she appears in what wild be for real lions very old age... in fact she appears as all these ages at one point or another.

So I carried on, for the most part ignoring the sequels. I had already, by giving my Simba and Nala a female cub of primary significance, and in my sequel making the antagonist a disturbed female closely relate to Scar, his mother in my case, predicted some of the route Disney went down with their sequels. I did that very much against the accepted expectations of the fan community and the fan-fiction it had already generated. I did not, and still do not feel any need to hack my writing to fit what happened later.

All that may not fit your idea of what “canon” is. It fits mine, which doesn’t include the sequels or the Six New Adventures, which were around but not available to me and are not internally self-consistent in any case, and I really don’t mind if you cannot handle that.

This story was inspired by The Lion King and plays out in its setting. I use many Lion King concepts, that of presentation, and that Shaha, through a certain old stick, is the repository of Rafiki’s knowledge for example. So I repeat, is this a Lion King fan-fiction story? Yes… and no. It’s a work of original fiction, albeit set in the world first seen in another story, but as I established in The Pridelands it’s not a fantasy world, it’s our “real” world, seen from a different viewpoint.

Being our world brings certain unexpected advantages, and problems. The advantages include my ability to make “magic” happen without magic. In my Lion King world Mufasa survived the stampede, and lived to rule

Previous Page

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Next page