Concept art for Taharqa, future ruler of the Kushite empire, as he might have looked when he was a young prince in the year 700 BC.
Last night I cooked up an outline for short story in which Taharqa and his half-brother Shabaka travel to what is now Italy to rescue their sister from barbarous Latin raiders. Inspired by their boyhood hobby of collecting turtle shells along the Nile, Shabaka has devised a cunning tactical maneuver which he believes will protect their forces against the Latin onslaught, but Taharqa rejects it as too passive and cowardly. Once Taharqa lands himself into the clutches of a Latin chieftain with imperial ambitions, he might have to reconsider his brother's ideas...
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