You wouldn’t know it from a Popular Science article deploying the familiar “archaeologists remain baffled” trope, but a recent analysis of a carved stone found in the Canadian wilderness in 2018 helps to bolster the case that the Kensington Runestone was part of a broader nineteenth-century trend of fake inscriptions.
Researcher study the rune stone. (Ryan Primrose / Ontario Centre for Archaeological Education)
Deep in the woods, nearly 500 miles northwest of Ottawa, sits a slab of stone on which the Lord’s Prayer and an image of a boat are carved in Furthark runes, the oldest type of rune. The stone slab only became visible when a tree fell, exposing where it had long been hidden beneath dirt and trees after it was deliberately buried long ago.
An interdisciplinary team that included Henrik Williams—the Uppsala University runologist readers with a long memory will remember from his long-ago critiques of Scott Wolter—examined the runes and kept quiet for several years as analysis progressed to prevent incomplete or incorrect information from leaking.
"We didn't want to release information publicly until we had done as much as we could at the time to understand exactly what it was," archaeologist Ryan Primrose told the CBC.
The team determined that the runes were most likely carved by a Swedish member of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early to middle nineteenth century, and the text—the Lord’s Prayer in Swedish—was copied from a version published in the later nineteenth century, derived from a 1611 original version. The text used a form of Furthark runes developed by Johannes Bureus in the 1600s, which Bureus had adapted for Swedish. (The original use of the alphabet in from the first millennium was not deciphered until 1865.) The team speculates that the stone may have been meant for a worship site for Swedish workers.
The discovery is especially important because it provides direct evidence that Swedish-speaking immigrants carved runestones during the nineteenth century and deliberately buried them. This is exactly what skeptics have long believed was the origin of the Kensington Runestone. If the dating of the Canadian stone is correct, the carving of rune stones dates back half a century or more before the Kensington Runestone’s “discovery,” and coincides closely with the period in the 1830s and 1840s when Carl Christian Rafn set off a craze for Scandinavian history when he claimed in Antiquitates Amercanae (1831) that the Norse had colonized North America.
This has existed for a while, but it’s been pretty quiet for most of its existence.
Now, though, I’ve set up some new channels and am spending more time in there!
I’m excited to do more casual chatting and sharing with fellow lovers of the curious and creative. Participating more in smaller communities is feeling increasingly important to me.
Recently I’ve been answering questions about my card game Bolted as well as admiring a lovely photo someone posted of a pregnant hedgehog.
Come share pictures of good animals and tell me about what you’re enjoying reading, making, doing these days! Those recommendations are always welcome.
I’ve also started re-running the entire Wondermark archive on Instagram:
It’s a bit of a strange feeling, posting 22-year-old work to an audience that may be seeing it for the first time.
I’ve chopped up the old comics in such a way that they are nearly impossible to read on a desktop browser, but swipe very satisfyingly on phones, which is how the vast majority of people use IG, I figure.
Hooray, now you have some links to click on! Or tap, if you are on your phone. Either interface option works; that is the promise of technology!
Last week, I wrote a bit about the origins of the name of the first pharaoh in medieval Arabic traditions, Naqrāūs. Well, that led me to the first pharaoh in the Greek tradition, which is a bit of a confusing mess. Herodotus, of course, famously named the first (human) king of Egypt as Menes, but in later Greek traditions, from roughly the fourth century BCE onward, the story changed and Sesostris took that position, establishing a kingship in Egypt after the first king in history, Ninus, did the same in Assyria. Sesostris, in the Greek tradition, was a world-conquering hero whose dominion stretched from Europe to Scythia and whose power was unrivaled.
I ended up here in a rather roundabout way, through the fifth-century work of Orosius, a Christian historian whose Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, which survives in the original, was also quoted by the Arabic-language historian al-Maqrizi around 1400 CE. When al-Maqrizi quoted Book 1, chapter 14, he gave the name of the ancient king as Berūbah. When I went back to Orosius’ original, I discovered the name given as “Vesozes.”
I have no idea how the Arabic translator whose work al-Maqrizi copied (he states explicitly that he is using a translation) got from Vesozes to Berūbah. But I did discover that Orosius apparently got his name from Justin, whose Epitome of the work of Pompeius Trogus gives the same figure’s name as Vezosis. This, everyone agrees, is supposed to be Sesostris.
All of the references in the literature suggest that there is some body of common knowledge of how this mangling of names happened, but no one will say what it is. The closest any source came was to give page numbers to a French-language article by Gaston Maspero from 1901 in which he reviews a German-language book, Sesostris, by Kurt Sethe, which apparently attempted trace the etymology of various forms of the king’s name. I don’t have access to the book, so a translation of Maspero’s summary will need to suffice:
In 1867, [Georg] Unger adopted the thesis of these scholars, and he attempted to prove its accuracy by carefully comparing all Greco-Roman texts with all known Egyptian documents at the time. He observed that classical tradition traced its hero further back than the Ramesside line. He came to believe that Osirtasen III was the successor whom this tradition attributed to its Sesostris—Sesostris, Marachos, Narachos, Nakkaros, Nencoreus. He showed that most of the features of the legend were also visible in the kings of the Twelfth and Twenty-Eighth Dynasties, and he concluded that Sesostris really belonged to the Twelfth Dynasty, just as Manetho had asserted: he was Osirtasen or, as pronounced according to Lauth, Vesourtesen III. Sesostris would have been a popular corruption of Vesourtesen, but by derivation of the second part Sen from the official form; the first part responding, as Eratosthenes had it, to an Egyptian term meaning "powerful, vigorous": Ses-Sis, perhaps an abbreviation of the name of the god Khonsu, Schonsou, Epupis or Psamphis. Unger henceforth had no doubt that Manetho had indeed meant a Sesostris from the XIIth Dynasty; most Egyptologists continued nonetheless to believe that the hero of Herodotus had been modeled primarily, if not uniquely, on Ramses II of the monuments.
Mr. Sethe has just revisited the question and added a new point. The most important fact, he says, is that all readings of the name transcribed until now as Osirtasen, Osortesen, Vesourtesen—all consist first of the name of a goddess, Ousret–Ousret, later followed by the feminine termination –t, Ousreté, the powerful one; and second, an element SEN, possibly from the root snj, to resemble, to be equal to…, which appears in many theophoric names under the first Theban empire: Sn-t-Imn, the one who is equal to Amon, Sn-t-Bȝ, the one who is equal to the Ram of Mendes, Sn-t-Mȝᶜ.t, the one who is equal to the goddess Maat.
The name of the goddess, written at the beginning of the word, does not take second place in pronunciation, due to the principle of honor usually applied in such cases: hence one wrote Ousresen but said Sen-Ousret, then Sen-wosret, she who is equal to the goddess Wosre. Σεσωστρις is therefore not much further from Sen-wosre than most good transcriptions of Egyptian names are from their original Egyptian forms. “S” for the auxiliary vowel in the middle of words, long “e” for the short “o” in an open syllable, “e” for “a” in the feminine ending –at, the final “ou” in Greek instead of Egyptian “w” are all fully regular. Elsewhere we find the Greek combination σε for an Egyptian or Semitic “w”: especially when it is placed at the beginning, as in this case, which is nothing but natural. … There is no real difference between Senwosret and Sesostris than that of the second part, corresponding to w and t in Egyptian.
Mr. Sethe supposes that the name fell into the hands of those who themselves misunderstood it and transformed it—as did Ausone, in the form Sesostris; to avoid the hiatus resulting from the fall of an n in Se(n)ostris–Sostris, an extra s was inserted between o and t, and one arrived at Sesostris, Sesostris, and then Sésostris, Sésostris. The versions without t or n, Sésosis–Sésosis, derived from a misunderstood Egyptian model where the root wsr, strong, powerful, would have been kept and perhaps even reinforced; as is often the case in other names: Senwosre–Senwosre would have gradually changed into Sewose, then into Sesose, Sésostris and Sésostros.
Since the first century, the name Sesostris has most often been attached to the heroes named Sesosis, Sesostris, Sesonchosis, Sesou, and Sesetsourai, all supposedly drawn from the Ramesside name (like Rameses I, II, or III). Mr. Sethe rejects this etymology and substitutes the one he just explained. This is the core of his study. When it comes to laying out the dates, wars, reforms, all the historical material attributed to Sesostris by classical authors, the facts better match what we know of the Pharaohs of the Twelfth Dynasty and especially of Osirtasen I than the “history of Ramses,” which is supported only by indirect testimonies collected by Bunsen and, more recently, by Wiedemann. If we add to that what we owe to Sethe’s analysis, it is all the hypotheses that attributed to Ramses II the portions of the Sesostris legend that Unger thought he could attribute to another.
This, apparently, is the underlying scholarly analysis that is now conventional wisdom about the origins of the name Sesostris.
That didn’t really help, unless the argument is that Trogus ignored Greek tradition and rendered the name from a transliteration of a partly understood hieroglyphic original, Vesourtesen. That’s possible, but probably not the answer, not least because Trogus’ sources were Greek, not Egyptian.
In checking into Justin’s Epitome, it seems that there are two hundred ancient and medieval copies of it, and “Vezosis” is only one variant. According to an 1898 article by the German scholar Fritz Hommel, the same name is given as “Vexoris,” “Uesosis,” and “Sesosis” in other manuscripts. It might have saved me quite a bit of time if anyone had just said that it was most likely a gradual scribal corruption by copyists who didn’t realize he was talking about Sesostris rather than scholars being super coy about it and giving long lists of references that refer to one another and ultimately go nowhere.
For well over a decade now, I’ve had a special interest in the medieval Arabic-language legends of ancient Egypt, particularly their mysterious origins. While the particular story of Sūrīd and his building of the Great Pyramid has received more scholarly attention than the rest, for the most part, it is not a subject that attracts a lot of deep analysis. I was surprised to discover an old 1903 analysis that provided me with an interesting insight into one of the odder parts of the story, at least in a somewhat roundabout way.
It is widely assumed that the history of Egypt preserved in such texts as theAkhbār al-zamānand al-Maqrizi’s Description of Egyptoriginated in a lost Greek-language Christian account of Egypt, specific details are difficult to pin down since the text as we have it is quite difficult to analyze. Most surviving Greek texts follow the list of kings given by Manetho in the third century BCE, beginning with the gods who ruled Egypt, under their Greek names, starting with Hephaestus and Helios. (See, e.g., Eusebius’ Chronicle, John Malalas’ Chronicle, the Excerpta Latina Barbari, etc.) Scholars have tried, and often failed, to suggest plausible Greek origins for the names of the pharaohs given in the Arabic texts. The final part of the list of kings is self-evidently a corrupt but still recognizable copy of Manetho’s list of kings, from the twentieth dynasty on down. Those names are easy enough to trace back. M. A. Murray provided a list in 1924.
The trouble is the earlier kings, who bear no obvious connection either to Manetho or to reality. (Manetho’s mythical pharaohs before Menes were often removed from Christian summaries as fictitious.) In 1903, Ahmed Kamal, then the curator of the Egyptian Museum, and the first major native-born Egyptologist, published a rambling article in which he attempted to show that the earlier kings were correctly transcribed from cartouches on Egyptian monuments or from Greek lists of kings. Some of his efforts to find correspondences were a stretch. He tries to assert, for instance, that Queen Charoba (as Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf calls her) or Hūriā (as the Akhbār calls her), daughter of the evil Ṭūṭīs was really Hatshepsut, daughter of Thutmose I, though their lives have no real similarities other than their femaleness. He ends up quoting her story from Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf to compare the two, but this is one rare case where the texts vary wildly, and the version in the much earlier Akhbār bears but scant resemblance to the similarities Kamal claimed to see in Murtaḍā’s text. (The later texts were apparently rewritten to reassert male primacy and recast Hūriā as more submissive to men.) Kamal, citing Murtaḍā, compares the next monarch, Dalic, to Thutmose III and purports to see many similarities. However, “Dalic” was a rewrite of the original Dulaīfah, as given in the Akhbār two centuries earlier, and acknowledged by Murtaḍā; she was a woman, so obviously not Thutmose III.
That’s not to say Ṭūṭīs isn’t an Arabic version of a Greek corruption of Thutmose or Thoth or something similar, a common enough name. But the stories just don’t support the preservation of the lost history of Hatshepsut, otherwise unattested from her own time down to its modern recovery in the nineteenth century.
Where Kamal is right, it tends to be because he quoting from Gaston Maspero, the French archaeologist who explored some of these questions a few years earlier. Kamal’s discussion of the first of the (imaginary) kings of Egypt is one such example: “NAQRĀŪS, or simply Craos, according to Murtaḍā, is the first king of Egypt, named Nαραχώ = Naracho among the Byzantines.” There is a lot in that sentence, but for now, let us note that it comes from Maspero, who in 1899 decided that he had found the origin of Naqrāūs: “[T]he name of Naqrāūs is of Egyptian-Greek origin, Nachēros, Nachôr, Narachos. A Nachēros has a part in the Alexandrian romance of Moses, and a Nachor or Naracho is indicated by the Christian chronographic histories (Chronicon Paschale [p. 86], Cedrenus 1.47, etc.) as the successor of Sesostris.”
Now, both men are partly wrong, not because they have the completely wrongheaded idea but because they didn’t trace things quite far enough.
First, let us dispense with the Greek chronographers. The seventh-century Chronicon Paschale gives “Nachor” and George Cedernus, writing three centuries later, gives Narecho. (Other variants include Maracho and Karacho.) Both texts are copying from the sixth-century work of John Malalas, who claimed that Naracho was the successor of an otherwise unknown Assyrian king named “Sostris”: “The emperor Sostris reached Egypt after his victory and died. After him Pharaoh, also called Naracho, reigned over the land of the Egyptians, and successors from his family reigned over the Egyptians” (Chronicle 2.6, trans. Jeffreys, Jeffreys, and Scott). Naracho was an Assyrian by birth, from the tribe of Shem, and lived at the same time as the patriarch Abraham. He was emperor of Assyria before becoming king of Egypt. Some have suggested that Naracho is a corruption of a pharaoh from Manetho’s list, known as Necherocheus from the Excerpta Latina Barbari, where the text is corrupt, or Necherophes in Eusebius.
Malalas himself (Chron. 3.6) attributes information about Naracho not to Manetho’s list but to Theophilus, a chronographer, who was probably the Theophilus of Antioch who wrote Ad Autolycus (where he discusses, e.g., Manetho). However, Malalas almost certainly knew of Theophilus only through secondary sources. It is possible that Naracho was a character from the so-called Picus-Zeus narrative, attributed to the writer Bruttius, which featured a fantastical history of Egypt, particularly likely if the fourth-century Bruttius named the second-century Theophilus as a source, thus accounting for Malalas’s citations. But this can only be speculation.
All that being said, even with the popularity of John Malalas’s Chronicle in Byzantine circles, there is no good evidence that the Arab writers used his work in creating their own, particularly since none of the other names in the list seem to follow Malalas’s text. (They share only Misraim/Mestraim and Hermes in common.) Indeed, while Malalas says Naracho was the first “emperor from the tribe of Shem,” he does not call him the first king of Egypt, nor is he antediluvian in Malalas’s text. Malalas makes “Mestre” (Mestraim) from the tribe of Ham the first king and places him after the Flood. Naracho has in common with Naqrāūs only a foreign origin among Shem’s progeny—which turns out to be an interesting lead.
Maspero mentioned that “a Nachēros has a part in the Alexandrian romance of Moses,” but I admit that I had no idea what that was meant to refer to. It turns out that Maspero was referencing the fragments of the second-century BCE writer Artapanus, a Hellenized Jew who wrote a book about Jewish patriarchs in Egyptian history with some rather wild legends about the patriarchs apparently meant as a rejoinder to Ptolemaic works like Manetho’s. Aratapanus, whose work only survives in excerpts quoted by Eusebius, claimed that Moses “appointed Nacheros superintendent of the building” of the temples of Karnak and Luxor in Thebes (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 9.27.11).
Now, that is as far as Maspero and Kamal took it, with little more than a note about the similarity in sounds. However, because I hadn’t heard of Aratapanus before this, I started to do some reading about him, most of which was useless speculation. But Louis Ginzberg, the rabbi who wrote The Legends of the Jews (1913), noted in passing when retelling Aratapanus’s legend of Moses that “Nacheros” might have originated in the Hebrew word nekar, which means “foreigner.” He did not elaborate.
However, when I stopped to think about it, this makes perfect sense. I could easily see an original legend or text in Hebrew that said that “Moses appointed a foreigner to oversee the building” and that a Greek (or even Arabic) translator with a shaky command of Hebrew mistook the descriptor for a proper name, turning “nekar” into “Nekaros” or “Nacheros” (the “ch” is a chi in the Greek text). This reading would not be without precedent, for the Pharaoh of Joseph appointed a foreigner, Joseph, to oversee Egypt, and thus having Moses do the same would be an obvious parallel. And the Greeks were notoriously bad at translation, often corrupting words in bizarre ways. For instance, they misheard the Persian fire-altars known as ayazana as “Jasonia,” mistakenly thinking the name referenced the hero Jason. The Arabic writers had the same problem. Al-Maqrizi, for instance, used a source that misunderstood one of the dynasties of “Diospolitan” (Theban) kings in Manetho as a single king named Diosqūlita. At any rate, both Greek Christians and especially Arabic writers were known to use Jewish sources in their works.
While it is doubtful that the Arabic writers used Aratapanus specifically—his book was apparently of very little interest outside of a couple of Christian clerics—it is entirely possible that the underlying Greek chronicle adapted by the Arab authors had made a similar error and had adapted Nacheros as the first king by mistranslating a Jewish text or legend about Egypt similar to those known to have existed, like those of Aratapanus, Abenephius, etc., in which the first king is described as a foreigner to the land of Egypt. This is one of the only points on which every legend agrees. In a completely different tradition, the historian Al-Tabari, writing in 915, called the first pharaoh Sinan, said he was a foreigner from Yemen, and placed him in the time of Abraham (the same time as Naracho). Al-Tarabi said he came (again, like Naracho) from the tribe of Shem. According to the later Arabic legend, Naqrāūs grew up in the Holy Land, was one of the Nephilim-giants, and traveled to the Nile to found a new country when the wicked descendants of Cain took control of the land (Akhbār 2.2).
It's not even particularly unusual that a character with a relatively lowly position in an early legend is raised to kingly status in medieval myth. Sūrīd, for instance, first appears as a philosopher in ibn Wahshiyya’s Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham (863 CE) before being assimilated to Manetho’s Suphis (Khufu) and being presented as a king in the Akhbār al-zamān.
Can we prove any of this with certainty? No, we cannot—not without the discovery of earlier texts that might offer more insight. There are other possibilities, too. The first Greek settlement in Egypt was called Naucratis, which became el-Niqrash in Arabic, a name that bears a certain similarity to Naqrāūs (Naqrāūsh in al-Maqrizi). But it’s certainly interesting that so many similar names clustered around the same idea of early foreign arrivals.
Sean Cahill is involved with yet another new UFO organization, following the failure of Skyfort and whatever followed that one. His new venture, announced this week on social media, for which he severs as a project advisor, is called Project Nanu, a social media space for everything from UFOs to cryptids to ancient history. Whether intentional or not, its risible name immediately calls to mind Robin Williams’s catchphrase from Mork & Mindy, in which his extraterrestrial character often yelled “Nanu, nanu!”
Meanwhile, Cahill’s ex-Skyfort partner, Lue Elizondo, spoke out via podcaster Matt Ford (since he has been on a social media break following his embarrassing false photo mishap before Congress) on the Wall Street Journal report suggesting much of the UFO material circulating through the Pentagon was an intentional fabrication. Elizondo called the story “absurd” and “a disingenuous piece,” and he claimed that “it appears to be well orchestrated with the usual players in the DoD.”
Elizondo added that he believes that the Department of Defense is engaged in a deception campaign against the American people, Congress, and “the president” (whom he apparently still hopes will appoint him UFO czar) and preemptively attacked the Journal for the forthcoming second part of their report, in which Elizondo expects to be criticized personally.
This came just days after Elizondo appeared on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show to admit that the government did in fact sometimes use fake UFO stories to cover up experimental technologies.
Coinciding with the celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival, this June 10th sees the release of my seventeenth novel, The Chili Bean Joss, a weird wuxia western set in 1870’s Arizona Territory in and around the town of (you guessed it, loyal readers) Delirium Tremens.
A put upon orphaned ranch cook, Xue Wan Shu, happens upon a 3,000 year old sentient gin seng plant named Sang hiding out in back of the local Chinese apothecary. Sang pleads with Wan Shu to protect him from a sorcerous tong boss out to cultivate and consume his children for immortality. Wan Shu reluctantly agrees, and finds himself dodging hatchetmen, vengeful gunfighters, Apache warriors, and oodles of Chinese sorcery, all while trying to keep his cowboy employers oblivious.
If you dig old school wuxia action comedies like Heroes of The East, Legendary Weapons of China, and Mr. Vampire, and the culture clash of Big Trouble In Little China, you’ll probably find something to like here.
Here’s the opening chapter – – – – – –
It was a near perfect evening for tea in the garden behind Cho’s Trivialities off Celestial Street in the Chinese quarter of Delirium Tremens. The stone lanterns gave off a comforting, soft glow.
Few even knew of this strange oasis of water, rock, and green. The dirty Drucker and Dobbs Company miners that trudged at dawn and dusk between the saloons and subterra certainly could not have imagined it, and most of the Chinese patrons who came to Cho’s for traditional medicines or nostalgic oddments imported from their homeland were unaware of the back garden tucked away behind the shop.
The high clapboard fence hid it entirely from the depressing surroundings of offal-strewn alleyways and ramshackle company cabins.
Its owner called it The Dune Garden of Eccentric Taste. It was in no way a traditional Chinese garden. The great landscaper Ji Cheng might have scoffed at its prickly desert plants, its yucca and diminutive pinyon pines. Perhaps the famously tacky King Zhou of Wine Pool and Meat Tree fame would have praised its audacity, but it did not impose itself on the dry Arizona landscape in which it was situated, and indeed, reflected, for good or ill, the tastes of its singular custodian, old Daifu Fan Shung Song, the inheritor and proprietor of Cho’s Trivialities.
“I think this is a surpassingly ugly garden,” said Sang, the short, stocky guest who sat with his feet dangling from the chair, sharing tea with Daifu Fan on this particularly clear, breezy midnight hour. “The raised cabbage beds and the bok choy border on offensive.”
“I had to work within the confines of the space,” said Daifu Fan.
“I must admit,” Sang went on, “the pink bayberries are pleasing to the eye. A pity their only use is to induce vomiting.”
“If they are pleasing to your eye,” said Daifu Fan, pouring tea into his cup, “then being a purgative is not their only use.”
“How do you keep them alive in this detestable dryness?”
“The mulched needles of the pinyon pines encourage them to thrive,” said Daifu Fan. “It is a thing I have learned through years of trial and error.”
“Commendable, I suppose, but it seems like years of trial have only resulted in error in the end. I wonder why you bother with aesthetics and do not simply keep to your herbs. There is no hope of magnolia blossoms. Fish would boil in your pond under the accursed sun. And it is so tiny!”
“I have done my utmost to make it a pleasant home for you,” Daifu Fan said.
“Oh, I mean no offense,” said Sang, waving the old man off. “I am grateful, of course. But it takes so much work and skill for so little yield. Do you think that mutton head Wan Shu will be able to tend it alone? I think it will all wither under his clumsy care. The boy has a black thumb.”
Daifu Fan knew of course that it was simply his old friend’s surly nature. He was used to it, but he was troubled tonight. The hexagrams of the I-Ching had produced a remarkably unfavorable reading, and his mind was preoccupied. Sang’s talk of succession seemed a further ill portent.
“If he chooses to keep it, it will thrive, I’m sure,” said Daifu Fan, sipping and watching the moonlight on the small crescent pond which emulated in miniature the oasis of Yueya Lake, nestled amid the Singing Mountain Dunes of faraway Nanjing. “And if it does not, I will be beyond caring.”
There was no room for a full sized pavilion, but Daifu Fan had modeled a dainty tower near the banks of the lake, as the real two story structure stood at the actual oasis. In the center of the lake there was a ten pound boulder of Mexican Crazy Lace, a uniquely formed polished agate stone of scintillating colors, representing to him, the magical peak of Mount Penglai, the legendary home of the eight immortals.
“I think that boy is good for nothing,” Sang continued. “He should remain a cook, and you should find a worthier apprentice. Maybe that launderer’s son. The chemist. What is his name? Guangdi. Wan Shu has no fire in him. He is struck dumb by the mere sight of that big footed girl whom he pines for. Bah!”
“You worry needlessly and prematurely,” said Daifu Fan with a sigh. “I have not even broached the subject of apprenticeship with him.”
“And you should not!” said Sang, rapping his little hand on the table. “Mind you, it all comes from him honoring his mother but not his father. Impious! Shameful!”
“Be patient with him,” said Daifu Fan. “I trust he will come around.”
Sang grunted.
“And meanwhile, his father languishes needlessly in hell.”
“No father worth his office would not do the same for his son,” said Daifu Fan. “And the universe tends to correct disorder in due time.”
“Hah!” Sang scoffed. “We have differing views of the universe.”
There was a creak and the banging of a door from the front of the shop.
Sang and Daifu Fan exchanged sharp looks.
“Excuse me,” Daifu Fan said, rising. “I must have left the door unlocked.”
“You never leave the door unlocked,” Sang whispered warily, jumping down from his chair. “And it is past midnight.”
“It’s probably Old Man Yong come calling with some nighttime ailment. Stay out of sight,” Daifu Fan whispered. He went inside, through his modest bedroom and storage, to the curtain that led to the shop proper, and drew it aside.
It was not the launderer, Old Man Yong.
Two strangers perused the wares on the shelves.
They were Chinese, but they were neither miners, nor any members of the Golden Trowel Tong who loitered about the Tong Shan Eatery that he’d ever seen about.
They were traditionally dressed in old-style shenyi robes, strange to see in this part of America, where drunken Anglos cut the queues from men’s heads with oversized knives, and some were made to hop in place before the smoking barrel of a Colt revolver as entertainment.
One was unshaven, his long black hair unbound. He wore a striking red surcoat covered with trigrams. A black silk satchel hung from his neck, in which his hand continually rested. There was a large burlap sack on his shoulder. A wood handled snakeskin whip hung coiled at his side. Talismans to Gui-Li-Da-Wang, the Ghost King, marked him as a member of the Yin Shan priesthood.
The other man had a head of long, shock white hair. He was surpassingly tall, in a blue robe and a black and silver braided hair vest, the latter somewhat disquieting, as Daifu Fan could swear the braids resembled shorn queues.
Daifu Fan could not see this one’s face, as it was turned towards the inspection of a carved wooden dragon set with jade eyes in the shop window. The man carried a three foot garden hoe with a polished steel head more like a staff of office than a working tool.
“Forgive me,” Daifu Fan said. “I was taking tea and moonlight in the back.”
“It is no trouble,” said the white haired man, without turning around.
“Actually, the shop is closed,” said Daifu Fan, resting his palms on the counter. “I seem to have carelessly forgotten to lock the door. And…turn out the lamp,” he added, though he knew for certain he had not.
The man in the red surcoat eyed him quietly.
“Of course, if your need is urgent,” said Daifu Fan, “I will oblige. However, if it is not, I humbly ask that you please return tomorrow during business hours.”
“There may be no tomorrow,” said the white haired man, moving his hand idly along the shelves, as though making a show of looking for something he knew he would not find there. “Our need is very urgent indeed, you see. And we have traveled very far. I count my blessings that we happened upon you out here in this wasteland.”
“How can I help?” Daifu Fan said warily, slipping his hand under the counter and producing a folding fan, with which he began to rapidly stir a breeze across his face. It was stuffy in the close confines of the cluttered shop. The heat of the Arizona day lingered still.
“Gin seng,” said the man, turning now to face him. He had a long wispy mustache and the skin of his face was surpassingly red, as though he were intoxicated.
Was it him?
It had been so many years ago. Daifu Fan had been a young man, and had only glimpsed Liang Ziweng then, as he fled with Sang.
Daifu Fan tensed internally, eyes flitting to the staring man in the surcoat and back to the man with the white hair.
Outwardly pleasant and bright, he said;
“Yes of course. I have numerous excellent examples.”
“These are puny,” said the man with the white hair, not even sparing the stock a glance. “Not what I’m looking for at all. The one I’m looking for is quite exceptional.”
“Exceptional specimens are difficult to obtain,” said Daifu Fan. “Gin seng does not thrive in this climate.”
The man with the white hair gestured to his subordinate.
The man in the red surcoat took the burlap sack off his shoulder and uncovered a large jade pot. He set it down heavily on the counter. It was covered with binding seals.
Daifu Fan swallowed.
It was him.
“It has been many years, Fan Shung Song,” said the man with the white hair.
The man in the red surcoat drew a handful of yellow papers from his bag then. With a flick of his wrist, there was a flash of fire and smoke, and a blazing yellow and orange phoenix burst to life and flew, talons bared at Daifu Fan.
But Daifu Fan was ready. He spread wide his fan with its counteractive calligraphy, and reflected the phoenix screaming back at the man in the red surcoat. The Yin Shan sorcerer barely threw up his hands in a warding gesture. The phoenix burst apart in a brilliant blaze of scintillating fire and the man in the red surcoat was blown back into a shelf of herbs which smashed and fell over on him.
The man with the white hair shook his head.
“My apprentice, Red Sheng. He still has much to learn. You have come a long way from a thieving clerk in Cho Kyung-soo’s store, Fan Shung Song.”
“So I have, and yet you are still the same greedy old demon, Liang Ziweng,” said Daifu Fan.
“Where is Sang?” Liang Ziweng demanded, his face reddening further.
Daifu Fan said nothing, but readied himself, fan quivering defensively.
Liang Ziweng leapt atop the counter and swept his garden hoe down.
Daifu Fan bent backwards, narrowly avoiding the weapon. It cleared a shelf of jars, raining down glass and preserves.
Daifu Fan gripped the hoe as it completed its destructive pass and used it to pull himself up onto the counter with Liang Ziweng. He was determined not to take the fight out into the garden. He had to give Sang time to run.
“You have no hope in defeating me,” Liang Ziweng chuckled. “Look at you! You’re an old man now.”
“How long before your age catches up with you, Liang Ziweng?” said Daifu Fan, sneering. “I can smell your rot, and something else; the devils at your back.”
“Bastard!” Liang Ziweng muttered.
He broke Daifu Fan’s grip on his weapon and lashed out. The old man was still surprisingly strong, and checked several blows with his fan before Liang Ziweng swept at his legs, forcing him to cartwheel down.
Red Sheng was just rising from beneath the fallen shelf when Daifu Fan came down hard atop him, flattening him again in the broken wreckage.
Daifu Fan whirled and flipped open his fan as Liang Ziweng thrust out his hands in a sorcerous gesture. Daifu Fan readied his talismanic fan again, but instead of some crackling black blast of yin energy, a number of white slivers sprang from Liang Ziweng’s sleeve.
These tore through the fan like buckshot. The old man blinked down at the shredded paper, then saw the spots of blood spreading across his shirt. Eight, all told.
“Penetrating Meridian Bone Needles,” Liang Ziweng announced with a smug smile.
Daifu Fan fell face first to the floor, stiff as a broomstick, unable to move.
Liang Ziweng hopped off the counter and came to stand over the old man. He flipped him on his back with the end of his hoe.
“You’ll be dead soon,” said Liang Ziweng. “Where is Sang?”
Daifu Fan’s eyes flitted around in a panic, but then focused stoically ahead, unyielding.
Liang Ziweng frowned as Red Sheng picked himself from the remains of the shelf.
He and Liang Ziweng tore through the shop, clearing every shelf, pulling out every drawer. Like a ransacking whirlwind they passed into the storeroom, bringing chaos, finding nothing, leaving behind disorder, until they were outside in the little back garden.
Liang Ziweng kicked over a row of raised beds, spilling germinating plants and medicinal herbs in frustration.
There was a clatter then. Something smashed, not by their hand.
Liang Ziweng stood stricken for a moment, seeing the remains of a teapot in fragments on the ground. Then he spied the small shadow clambering up the back fence.
“There!”
Red Sheng rushed forward, eager to redeem himself. He drew out his whip and lashed. The end snaked out with a crack that split the night air and caught the diminutive fugitive by his ankle, dragging him down into the crescent pond with a splash.
In another instant Red Sheng was upon him, fitting his struggling captive with a wrought iron chain interlaced with links of green jade.
Liang Ziweng came over, his eyes alight, esurient in the moonlight.
“I’ve found you at last, my old friend.”
“Oh Heavens,” said Sang, tiredly. “Please. Not again….”
Preorders for the Kindle edition are live. Print drops on release day.
Late on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported ex-AARO administrator Sean Kirkpatrick learned in his time in office that UFOs had been the subject of a Pentagon disinformation campaign for decades, with military offices doctoring photos and seeding fake flying saucer stories to cover up secret research programs and encounters with foreign craft. The Journal also reported that Kirkpatrick concluded that many of the men in the Air Force who claimed knowledge of secret reverse engineering UFO programs were in fact the subject of a “hazing” effort from high-ranking officers who, for decades, had new intelligence agents view doctored UFO photos and sign and NDA after being convinced they were going to study UFOs. Most never learned the program was a joke. (The discovery reportedly shocked Biden-era Director of National Intelligence Avrill Haines, who had a hard time believing it.) AARO does not understand why the deception occurred, speculating it might have been a loyalty test. The paper also reported that the so-called Malmstrom Air Force Base incident, when a “UFO” allegedly shut off nuclear weapons, was actually a Pentagon-sanctioned test using an exotic electromagnetic pulse generator. In short: AARO found everything skeptics always assumed to be true was in fact true, and the UFO phenomenon is mostly smoke and mirrors. In fact, it is worse than skeptics thought, since the self-deluding Pentagon officials ended up doing actual damage by creating a false belief that undermined the ability of the government to understand real, non-alien threats thanks to a self-inflicted wound.
By the way, full disclosure: I spoke with Joel Schectmen, one of the authors of the article, a few months ago when he was working on this story and provided some background information into the UFO cabal orbiting the Pentagon.
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