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 e few weeks rather than to range wide 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 gun-slinger, 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.

So, is there more of Nengwe and Falana? Yes, He Lives in You is a story taking these characters to another world. While strictly speaking it is not part of Huntress, in its time-line it fits in between All You Have to Do is Roar and Full Circle.

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 pride lands.

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 again alongside his son, and grandson. Yet it wasn't some "alternative universe" story, it was a continuation of The Lion King that created a plausible Mufasa survival scenario through the timely off-screen intervention of us: humans; humans that had a purpose unrelated to the story told by The Lion King. That purpose, the attempted re-introduction of captive bred African wild dogs into the wild, accounts for a lot, in particular why the dogs in this story having English, specifically North London, accents. Re-introduction of dogs is a difficult task in reality due in no small part to the highly complex nature of wild dog society and behaviour, much of which, including hunting techniques, is learned in the wild from one generation to the next and so is almost totally lacking in captive bred dogs. This helps to account for why the dogs have somehow risen to the top in this story.

So, why is this version of the pridelands so empty? Where have all the lions gone? This is something I do touch on in the story, and in an earlier version explain in greater detail. Why did I get rid of all that? In part it was because it was a distraction and dilution of the main story. Partly it was because it was potentially very harrowing and difficult to accept for Lion King fans. The cold facts are that in 1994, the very year The Lion King was released, an outbreak of canine distemper virus of exceptional virulence swept through the lions of the Serengeti, killing one third of the population of about 3000 lions. Much like the Black Death in humans centuries before, in some places it wiped out entire prides, while leaving others almost unscathed. In my stories the dogs were immune, having been inoculated while in captivity. The dogs are not the carriers, jackals and hyenas were, just as they probably were in our real world in 1994. The lion the human shoots; puts out of his misery if you will; is in the final phase of this terrible disease. He is also The Lion King's Mufasa. The vet who shot him is the one who saved him in the gorge, and if it's any consolation, he went back to his car and threw up in the earlier version. It would not have been easy for fans to deal with that. It's really tough and hard to accept. Hard even to accept that a disease, one of dogs, could play any part in The Lion King world, but in my version it does, as do other illnesses and animal weaknesses as well as their strengths.

Many Lion King fan-fiction stories start with a weasel worded disclaimer, followed swiftly by a paragraph that describe the appearance of a character. I don't do either. Indeed I never describe any of my characters in any depth. If you have an idea of what Nengwe looks like then you have formed it for yourself in your imagination, and that's exactly what I want you to do. I don't describe Falana either, but I do give little hints about her, in particular about the way she moves, that and that she has "loin achingly beautiful emerald eyes." I tell you how Nengwe is proud of his mane, and, at least at first, spends a lot of time cleaning and grooming it. In contrast I spend a lot of time getting the story going. Indeed no says anything at all in the opening and first chapter. I confess that's a mistake I probably wouldn't make now. I'd get the story going a lot faster.

I have a very well developed sense of point of view, even for conventional fiction, and well beyond anything seen in fan-fiction. I use it to hopefully produce all sorts of emotional effects in my readers. Point of view is a lot more than just simple first person, third person stuff. It's more like the camera angles and shots of film and TV. For most of this story I adopted a very close over the shoulder third person point of view alongside Nengwe or occasionally Shaha. The reader sees and hears everything he does, and its close enough to allow the reader to hear his thoughts. I think of this as the "riding with" shot often used in coverage of motorsport. You see the race from that driver's perspective and even may hear his team radio. I use this mainly to invite the reader to identify with Nengwe and to get them deeply involved in the story. It gives a "you are there" feeling. I hope you are almost able to smell Nengwe at times; something that in reality would be impossible and frankly far from pleasant. When I adopt any other point of view, for example Falana's, it's not so close, not being able to hear their thoughts. The point of view rules I set myself initially didn't allow me to follow the dogs, or even Mtundu. We see them through the eyes of the lions. When I finally came to write the final part I realised that I needed to change that to allow the reader to see more of the dogs, in particular their planning in the run up to the final showdown. This gives at one point the same timeframe from three different viewpoints: Nengwe's, Shaha's and the dogs. I also play some specific point of view tricks with Shaha and Yali.

I have worked hard for a long time to make my reported speech distinctive and natural. I want the reader to know who is talking without constantly telling them with "said so-and-so". This allows my dialogue to flow and hopefully to be easy to read. For the record, "said Nengwalamwe" or "said Nengwe" occurs only twice, and never on its own. Two character conversations are simple enough, but three and more way does get tricky. It's about each character having distinct speech patterns and vocabulary, as well as accent. It's all about creating believable characters rather than stamping them out with a cookie cutter.

I write in the traditional English style, which is character led. The story comes out of who the characters are, rather than the characters coming from the plot. That sometimes means that the characters didn't always do what I wanted them to; they took me on some interesting side journeys at times. I also use foreshadowing and other literary devices fairly extensively. The story starts "in medias res", i.e. jumping into the middle of part of the story; using good ol' flashback to resolve it later. The weather and location often both reflect and drive Nengwe's moods; this is an example of so-called pathetic fallacy. I also sprinkle a fair amount of imagery and allegory, particularly within the story itself. So the cave on the rock is important to Nengwe, and its opening and the subsequent hunt are about much more than clearing rubble and hunting.

What is in a name? It's long been a convention to use Swahili, or less commonly, Zulu words as names in The Lion King based fan-fiction. I've read it advised, and assumed to be the norm in many places. I have never gone with that, it's not how I generally create names. I like names to be names. Nyala is a Zulu word… probably. It's a type of forest dwelling larger antelope. They're fairly unusual, but they do appear in some zoos. I happen to rather like them. I shortened it to Yali. It turns out that a Yali is either a Turkish waterside mansion, or more appropriately, a Hindu mythical creature, mostly lion, or at least cat-like.

Shaha though is a Swahili word that means "storyteller". She is a shaha. I chose it as I wanted it to be given to her by Rafiki, who uses Swahili in The Lion King. I named her sister and brother, Zenani and Thembekile after Nelson Mandala's first children as I had recently read his inspiring autobiography: Long Walk to Freedom. I used the familiar versions he used: Zeni and Thembi. But of course Nelson Mandela is not a Zulu, he is Xhosa. The two are closely related linguistically and geographically. In Zulu Thembi appears to be used as a girls' name, in Xhosa culture it's for boys. I don't know why. Neither have anything to do with Swahili, which is in a different language group.

Falana is a name I made up. It sounded right to me, suitably (north) African and sensual, having overtones of Nala. It turns out to indeed be an actual name. Mtundu came from Dave, as did father's name, Utawala. I had forgotten this, but apparently Mtundu in Swahili means clever, but in a street-smart, slick way. Utawala means governance or administration. Mtundu shortens to Mutt, which Dave and I used often in discussions, and still do to this day, but which I only used once or twice in the story. He uses many various less than flattering terms to refer to Nengwe, including Fuzzbutt, as due to an obvious physical characteristic of baboons, Nengwe calls him Baldarse. Nengwe's parents' and brother's names: Melakwe, Nengwala and Talashi are also meaningless. I made them up on the fly while writing. As is usual in many cultures I use appropriate short, familiar, nickname version of most of the names. This is something I've done right from the start of my Lion King fan-fiction writing, though few other fan-fiction writers do.

I enjoyed coming up with Kudlavu. It is reminiscent of the Zulu word for elephant: Ndlovu and yet has its own character. Llasani is a character I particularly enjoyed naming. She needed a feminine name, in leonine terms that is, but where does that double L come from? I confess that was a dig I took at the Swahili naming convention. Llasani is not a Swahili name, and it doesn't mean anything, yet it means a lot to me. Zulu is a "click" language and it has three distinct click sounds, rendered in our roman letters as lh, lq and if I remember rightly, lz. Xhosa has even more; indeed xh in the word "Xhosa" is a click. Ll is none of these sounds however. So what is it? It's simple, at the time I was working for a company based in south Wales. Ll is a sound that as far as I am aware is almost unique to Welsh. Llasani comes from the south Wales valleys, the Rhondda probably, and is the kind that, were she human, would get trashed every Friday night in Swansea. Meeting her could be as big a mistake for you as it was for Nengwalamwe, and possibly for pretty much the same reason.

So Nengwalamwe, where did his name come from? It's not Swahili. It's not Zulu or Xhosa, though nengwe is a word in both. What does it mean? The Lion King's Lebo M translates it as "tiger", elsewhere its "leopard". Most commonly and in most learned sources it translates as any generic "big cat", hence could be used for either tiger or leopard. It's the root of ngonyama, one of the many Zulu words for lion, others including mbube (which is the form to use when addressing a lion: not exactly common in real life, but would be the right word to use in many places in this story such as in, "Lion, let me introduce you to my mother."), ihbubeshi and isilo, which both carry a lot of respect and cultural weight. So Nengwe is a "big cat", and that's what he is for me, a big house cat rather than one of the big cats. His short name is simple and "friendly", but he needed a longer, more complicated name; a right mouthful in fact. I wanted it to be awkward to say, both for us and the other characters, so I added some African-esque nonsense syllables to get Nengwalamwe, of which, like his mane, he's inordinately proud. For good measure I often let him give his full name as "Nengwalamwe, son of Nengwala". I use his transition from that through Nengwalamwe to plain Nengwe to mark his personal changes.

Finally I must mention the dogs. Their names are of course English. Most of them were once captive; probably in Britain. There's more however. You may have noticed they are not just any English names, they are English monarchs' names: kings and queens. Even the short lived Jane: Lady Jane Grey, hence the colouration of her dog counterpart. There's even a Mary, queen of spots, and the reclusive queen, who else could she be other than Victoria?

Yet with all this, my characters are not lions. No anthropomorphic characters are what they appear to be. These "animals" are all humans with animal skins on. I like to make those skins thick and as convincing as I can but under that skin they are as human as you or I. I try to make them concerned about the things that they should be as the animals they appear to be. I know that in the past some readers have not been able to get their head around the differences in their world to how they assume (often wrongly I have to add) our own is. I regard it as a point of honour to give my characters their own animality, analogous to our humanity, but different. Not worse: different. They don't share our morality or live in our social structure and they face very different problems and solve them using methods alien to us. My characters don't have anything that is recognisable as religion or spirituality, not even the "great kings of the past" stuff from The Lion King; they have more than enough just dealing with the harsh realities of life to worry about all that. There is, of course, something of that simmering under The Huntress at Sunset, indeed its key to the drive of the story but it's not in the foreground. I don't expect, nor indeed want, everyone to be able to cope with these ideas, rather radical as they are in the Lion King context.

The Huntress at Sunset is what we brits call a "marmite story": you either love it or you hate it. If you've read this far, and aren't simply reading the last few pages to see how it ends, you probably love it. Thank you for reading and letting me take you on Nengwalamwe's journey.

Chris Boyce, February 2012.