Pip: The Ship’s Lantern — where the campfire stories get dark before they get warm, and the warmth is never guaranteed.

Mara: Marshall Bennett, Doctor of Pulp, is behind everything we’re covering today — exile and survival on the road out of Zabhela, a shaman reading omens in the savannah, and a knight who won’t take sole credit for a skeleton fight.

Pip: Let’s start with the exile.

Exile And Survival

Mara: The question this post puts on the table is a hard one: what does a man become when hunger is his only teacher and the road is his only home?

Pip: The narrator doesn’t flinch from the answer. Here’s the man himself speaking: “On the roads out of Zabhela, near the water crossings, we waited. If they resisted, we killed them. If they didn’t, we took from them anyway.”

Mara: And he names what they were — du’iisa-i hiddii-ni. Dead gazelles. The post doesn’t let that be metaphor; it’s a self-assessment. “A gazelle runs until the crocodile takes it. That was us.”

Pip: The whole confession runs on that logic. They stole for wives, for children — and then, with a small grin, “sometimes a little more.” Coins, jewels, things cached in caves near Napata. The post holds both truths at once: necessity and appetite.

Mara: What makes the piece work is the ending. He drops from a palm, kills the driver, and his brothers close in from the rear. Then: “The guard rose from the ridge. They had been waiting.” His brothers are gone. He is not killed — just brought here. That “not killed” lands like a door closing.

Pip: Survival as the consolation prize nobody asked for.

Mara: The post earns that reading. “Dead Gazelles, Caravans from Zabhela” is a tight first-person confession that treats banditry as biography without excusing it — and leaves the narrator alive in a situation he hasn’t explained yet.

Pip: From one man waiting out his fate to a shaman waiting on an omen — the savannah has its own accounting system.

Shamans And Lost Chiefs

Mara: “Bombaata the Kushite” frames a different kind of waiting: a shaman tending a shrine, watching the sky, holding the community together while leadership is simply absent.

Pip: The omen arrives as three buzzards circling a mesa. Bombaata reads them straight: “Dead dead birds omen — there will be a new chief.” He doesn’t know there are three people under those birds, not two.

Mara: So when Gonzo and Heidi appear out of the savannah looking for refuge, Bombaata gives them the chief’s hut. The post is brief, but the logic is clean: the omen said new chief, the strangers arrived, the shrine is tended. Duty fills the vacuum.

Pip: From omens to outright heroics — where the bones get piled and the credit gets shared.

Mythic Encounters And Heroics

Mara: “Sir Fons, the Skeleton, and the strength of Asgard” tells its story in verse — a knight named Sir Fons spots a skeleton at Najima wielding a glowing blue sword and invoking Yog, and charges.

Pip: He doesn’t charge alone. An ally from Asgard joins him, they scatter the bones, and when the rescued maiden thanks Sir Fons, he refuses the solo credit: “It was not I alone, but you and I — we together shone a bright and martial light.”

Mara: The poem’s form matches its ethic — short, shared lines, no hero hogging the stanza.

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Pip: Dead gazelles, circling buzzards, scattered bones — this corner of the Lantern runs on omens and aftermath.

Mara: And on people who name what they are honestly, whether that’s a bandit, a shaman, or a knight who splits the credit. More from the Lantern next time.