Her eyes were fierce. She had led her men head-on to the splitting pathway. She was at the forefront of the battle. Dahia al-Kahina was perplexed that the army could come back. Even though every inch of the earth was a scorching patch beneath their feets, they lunged forward towards her men. She could hear the cry of battle. The languishing noise of men getting slain, the thickness of blood, the scarcity of space between the warring factions were all too familiar. Dahia al-Kahina and all of Berber had seen this before. They all knew to fight back. If the Arabians took the city, hope would be a fizzling spring that was all but taken. They would never let that happen.
Dahia al-Kahina, Queen of Berber, had ordered that the earth was scorched and that nothing was left to breath. She had made her men know that she would rather have the land destroyed than let the Arabians have it. It worked or so she thought. Hassan ibn al-Nu’man and his men of the Umayyad Dynasty receded as soon as the heat began to reach them. Everything beneath the soil gave way and the earth was too hot for feets.
By even time, the fine lines from the Arabians began to form once more. They took the city gate and made it all the way to the citadel. When Dahia saw Hassan, she knew that they had been betrayed. There were a hundred left of her men. She pierced the Arab leader with a strong stare and poured the contents of the cup into her mouth. “I’ll give you a chance to conduct the rites,” Hassan said to Dahia’s finest men. But Khalil knew that Dahia’s death was the end of the Umayyad invasion. Hassan would not leave Tabarka alive.
This was a winning piece at the African Female Legend Writing Contest 2019.
