King Keone, part 2 I slept in fits and starts on cool hard ground. The sound of distant singing woke me for moments at a time, the torches searing my eyes before reality poured like cold water into my skull. Throbbing, aching pain in every joint and fiber accounted for

King Keone, part 1 I opened my eyes to a purple sky mottled by puffy orange clouds. The rain had stopped, the storm broken and routed. Throbbing body-wide pain suggested I wasn’t dead; my right temple bayed like a hound. I touched its sticky mass and cringed at the

War on the Windward Fields, part 2 The ground quaked once again and it wasn’t the High Speaker’s doing. We were clear of Keone’s koali’i, but his front-line forces now converged on our little band. Ground shifted beneath our feet; just as before, it took a

War on the Windward Fields, part 1 We marched, the five of us, through burned cane stalks amidst a blanket of ashes soft as snow. Sunlight beat down on the blackened ground, throwing off a terrific glare that forced me to shield my eyes. Between the Sun and the smoldering

Hale Waimanalo, part 2 Finding Staves was easy, as a white man wearing bright red grabbed the public’s attention. “Haole komo ‘ula kahiko” was enough to elicit a pointing response from anyone in Waimanalo. My sometime commander sat on a broad stone by the sea, on the bluff’s

Hale Waimanalo, part 1 All of Waimanalo turned out to greet us under a deep purple sky. Over a hundred Kane crowded shoulder to shoulder on either side of the road, jostling one another for a glimpse of the High Speaker as she approached the first huts. Two lines of

Flight to Waimanalo The dogs caught up ten minutes later, nearly a mile on near the ridge’s crest where the forest broke into a grassy clearing.  A ruin sat in its center: an old two-story structure long since swallowed by ivy and moss, just a skeleton of a building

The Battle of Mahoe Kahu, part 2 The gash down Mahoe Kahu’s center was clear only when we drew close.  It was thin given the mountain’s size, maybe thirty yards from one razor-sheared wall to the other.  They were cut, not blasted or chiseled: smooth vertical faces showing

The Battle of Mahoe Kahu part 1 Clouds massed overhead, promising rain as Ienith’s army mustered to march. Hard winds whipped down from the mountains to bring a chill that cut deep the moment the Sun hid among clouds. Only humidity kept the day mild. I watched the last