Orion in the Dying Time (12 page)

CHAPTER 15

The next morning we started our trek out of the swamplands and up toward the cooler, cleaner hills. Subconsciously I expected to find a more familiar world, a landscape of flowering plants and grass, of dogs and rabbits and wild boars. I knew there would be no other humans, but my mind was seeking familiar life-forms nonetheless.

Instead we found ourselves in a world of dinosaurs and very little else. Giant winged pterosaurs glided effortlessly through the cloudy skies. Tiny four-legged dinosaurs scurried through the brush. Their larger cousins loomed here and there like small mountains, gently cropping the ferns and soft-leafed bushes that abounded everywhere. There were no flowers anywhere in that Cretaceous landscape, at least none that I could recognize. Some of the barrel-shaped bushes bore clumps of colored leaves beneath the feathery fronds at their tops. Otherwise the plants we saw looked nasty, repulsive, armed with spikes and suckers, soft and pulpy and altogether alien.

Not even the trees were familiar to me, except for occasional stands of tall straight cypresses and the mangroves that clustered by the edge of every pond and stream, their gnarled tangled roots gripping the soggy earth like hundreds of sturdy wooden fingers. And palm trees, some of them huge, their trunks bare and scaly, their feathery leaves catching the moist warm breezes high above us. There was neither grass nor grains to be seen, only wavering fronds of reeds and ugly cattails that sometimes covered ponds and watercourses so thickly they looked like solid ground. Until we stepped into it and squelched through to water up to the knees or deeper.

We climbed trees for the nights, although as far as I could tell the dinosaurs slept the dark hours away just as we did. Still, unarmed against the ferocious likes of tyrannosaurs, we had no alternatives except running and hiding.

We saw no more of the tyrannosaurs during our first few days' march, although their deep three-toed footprints were plentiful. Anya insisted that we follow their tracks, which moved right along with the even deeper hoofprints of the duckbilled dinosaurs. There were places where the tyrants' claws had stepped precisely into the duckbills' prints.

There were other meat-eaters about, however. Swift two-legged predators taller than I who ran with their tails straight out and their forearms clutching avidly at smaller dinosaurs, who bleated and whistled like a steamboat in distress when the carnosaurs' claws and teeth ripped into their flesh.

Anya and I went to ground whenever a meat-eater was in sight. Armed with nothing but our senses and our wits, we flattened ourselves on the mossy ground and lay un-moving the instant we saw one of the hunters. None of them bothered with us. Whether that was because they did not see us or because they did not recognize us as meat, I could not say. Nor did I want to find out, particularly.

Once we saw a half-dozen triceratops drinking warily at a stream's edge, each of them bigger than a quartet of rhino, with three long spikes projecting from their heads and a heavy shield of bone at the base of the skull. Their flanks were spotted with rosettes of color: shades of red and yellow and brown. They looked awkward and ungainly and extremely nervous. Sure enough, a pair of two-legged carnosaurs splashed into the stream from the other side; not tyrannosaurs, but big and toothy and mean looking.

The triceratops looked across the stream and then pulled themselves together in a rough shoulder-to-shoulder formation, heads lowered and those long spikes pointing at the meat-eaters like a line of pikes or a gigantic hedgehog. The carnosaurs huffed and snorted, jinked up and down on their hind legs, looked the situation over. Then they turned and dashed away.

I almost felt disappointed. Not that I especially wanted to watch the violence and gore of a dinosaur battle. I simply felt that no matter who won the fight, there would most likely be plenty of meat for us to scavenge. We had been eating little else but the small dinosaurs and furry shrewlike mammals we could catch with our crude nets and clubs. A thick slab of meat would have been welcome.

The second night of our trek I awoke in pitch blackness to a sense of danger. Anya and I were half sitting in the crotch of a tree, as high above the ground as we could find branches to support us.

We were not alone. I felt the menacing presence of someone—something—else. I could see nothing in the utter darkness. The night was quiet except for the background drone of insects. There were no wolves howling in this Cretaceous time, no lions roaring. Only the forefathers of field mice and tree squirrels were awake and active in the darkness, and they made as little sound as possible.

The clouds parted overhead. The moon was down, but the ruddy star that I had first seen in the Neolithic glowered down at me. In its blood red light I caught the glint of a pair of evil eyes watching me, unblinking.

Without consciously willing it, my body went into hyperdrive. Just in time, as the huge snake struck at me, jaws extended, poisonous fangs ready to sink into my flesh.

I saw the snake coiled around our tree branch, saw its mouth gaping wide and the fangs already dripping venom, saw its head rear back and then lunge forward at me. All as if in slow motion. Those lidless slitted eyes glared hatefully at me.

My right hand darted out and caught the snake in midstrike. It was so big that my fingers could barely reach around half its width to clutch it. The momentum of its long muscular body nearly knocked me off the branch into a long fall to the shadows far below. But I gripped the branch with my legs and free hand as my back slammed against the tree trunk with a force that made me grunt.

Pressing my thumb against the snake's lower jaw, I held its head at arm's length away from me. It writhed and coiled and tried to shake loose. Anya awoke, took in the situation immediately, and reached for her club.

I struggled to one knee, fearful of being knocked off the branch by the snake's bucking and writhing.

"Lie down flat!" I commanded Anya.

As she did I let my hand slide partway down the snake's body and swung it as mightily as I could against the tree trunk. Its head hit the wood with a loud, satisfying thunk. Again I bashed it against the tree, and again. It stopped writhing, stopped moving at all. The head hung limp in my grasp. I threw the serpent away, heard it crash among the lower branches and finally hit the ground.

Anya raised her head. "From Set?" she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

I made a shrug that she could not see in the shadows.

"Who knows? There are plenty of snakes here, they probably prey on the little nocturnal mammals that live in these trees. We may simply have picked the wrong tree."

Anya moved close to me. I could feel her shuddering. From that night onward we always slept in shifts.

And I realized why all human beings have acquired three instinctive fears: fear of the dark, fear of heights, and fear of snakes.

CHAPTER 16

Gradually, as we walked the rising land, Anya and I began to fashion a few primitive tools. I could not find flint anywhere, but I did pick up a stone that fit nicely into the palm of my hand and worked each night scraping one side of it against other stones to make a reasonably sharp edge. Anya looked for fairly straight branches among the windfalls from the trees we passed and used our nightly fire to harden their ends into effective spear points.

I worried about making a fire each night. We needed it to cook what little food we could find, of course. In another age I would have wanted it to help ward off predators while we slept. But here in this world of dinosaurs and snakes, this world ruled by reptiles instead of mammals, I wondered if a fire might not attract heat-seeking predators instead of frightening them away.

Besides, there was still Set to consider. Certainly no one except Anya and I would light a fire each night in this Cretaceous landscape. It would stand out like a beacon to anyone with the technology to scan wide areas of the globe.

Yet we needed a nightly fire, not merely for cooking or safety but for the psychological comfort that it provided. Night after night we huddled close together and stared into the warm dancing flames, knowing that it would be more than sixty million years before any other humans would create a campfire.

The skies were clearer in the uplands, away from the deep swamp. But the stars were still unfamiliar to me. Night after night I searched for Orion, in vain.

I began to show Anya my prowess as a hunter. Using the spears she made, I started to bag bird-sized dinosaurs and, occasionally, even bigger game such as four-legged grazers the size of sheep.

One night I asked Anya a question that had been nagging at me ever since we had come to this time of dinosaurs. "When you changed your form . . . metamorphosed into a sphere of energy"—the idea of that being her true self still bothered me—"where did you go? What did you do?"

The firelight cast flickering shadows across her face, almost the way she had shimmered and glittered when she had left my arms as we fell down the well of Set's core tap.

"I tried to return to the other Creators," she said, her voice low, almost sad. "But the way was blocked. I tried to move us both to a different time and place, anywhere in the continuum except where we were. But Set's device was preset for this spacetime and it had too much energy driving it for me to break through and direct us elsewhere."

"You're conscious and aware of what you're doing when you—change form?"

"Yes."

"Could you do it now?"

"No," she admitted somberly. Gesturing toward our little campfire and the scraps of dinosaur bones on the ground, she said, "There isn't enough energy available. We barely have energy input to keep our human forms going."

Her voice smiled when she said that, but there was an underlying sadness to it. Perhaps even fear.

"Then you're trapped in this human form," I said.

"I chose this human form, Orion. So that I could be with you."

She meant it as a sign of love. But it made me feel awful to know that because of me she was just as trapped and vulnerable as I was.

Within a week we were up in the hilly country where the air was at least drier, if not much cooler, than it had been in the swamps below.

Night after night I found myself searching the skies, seeking my namesake constellation and trying to avoid the feeling that the baleful red star was watching me like the eye of some angry god—or devil.

Anya always woke near midnight to take the watch and let me sleep. One night she asked, "What do you expect to see in the stars, my love?"

I felt almost embarrassed. "I was looking for myself."

She pointed. "There."

It was not Orion. Not the familiar constellation of the Hunter that I had known. Rigel did not yet exist. Brilliant red Betelgeuse was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the three stars of the belt and the sword hanging from it, I saw only a faint, misty glow.

My blood ran cold. Not even Orion existed in this lonely place and time. We had no business being here, so far from everything that we had known. We were aliens here, outcasts, abandoned by the gods, hunted by forces that we could not even begin to fight against, doomed to be extinguished forever.

An intense brooding misery filled my soul. I felt completely helpless, useless. I knew that it was merely a matter of time until Set tracked us down and made an end of us.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake this depression. I had never felt such anguish before, such despair. I tried to hide it from Anya, but I saw from the anxious glances she gave me that she knew full well how empty and lifeless I felt.

And then we came across the duckbills' nesting ground.

It was the broad, fairly flat top of a gently sloped hill. There were so many duckbill tracks marching up the hillside that their heavy hooves had worn an actual trail into the bare dusty ground.

"The creatures must come up here every year," Anya said as we climbed the trail toward the top of the hill.

I did not reply. I could not work up the enthusiastic curiosity that was apparently driving Anya. I was still locked in gloom.

We should have been warned by the noisy whistling and hissing of dozens of pterosaurs flapping their leathery wings up above the summit of the hill, swooping in for landings. As Anya and I climbed up the easy slope of the hill we heard their long bony bills clacking as if they were fighting among themselves.

A faint half memory tugged at me. The way the pterosaurs were behaving reminded me of something, but I could not recall what it was. It became clear to me the instant we reached the crest of the hill.

It was a boneyard.

Up on the bare ground of the hilltop there were hundreds of nests where the duckbills had been laying their eggs for uncounted generations.

But the tyrannosaurs had been there.

A gust of breeze brought the stench of rotting flesh to our nostrils. The pterosaurs flapped and hissed at us, tiny claws on the front edges of their wings quite conspicuous. I realized that they were behaving like vultures, picking the bones of the dead. I swatted at the nearest of the winged lizards with the spear I carried and they all flapped off, hissing angrily, hovering above us on their wide leathery wings as if waiting for us to leave so they could resume their feast.

I thought Anya would break into tears. Nothing but bones and scraps of rotting flesh, the rib cages of the massive animals standing like the bleached timbers of wrecked ships, taller than my head. Leg bones my own body length. Massive flat skulls, thick with bone.

"Look!" Anya cried. "Eggs!"

The nests were shallow pits pawed into the ground where oblong eggs the length of my arm lay in circular patterns. Most of them had been smashed in.

"Well," I said, pointing to a pair of unbroken eggs that lay side by side on the bare ground, "here's dinner, at least."

"You couldn't!" Anya seemed shocked.

I cast an eye at the pterosaurs still flapping and gliding above us.

"It's either our dinner or theirs."

She still looked distressed.

"These eggs will never hatch now," I told her. "And even if they did, the baby duckbills would be easy prey to anything that comes along without their mothers to protect them."

Reluctantly Anya agreed. I went down the hill to gather brushwood for a fire while she stayed at the nests to protect our dinner against the pterosaurs.

It struck me, as I picked dead branches from the ground and pulled twigs from bushes, that the tyrannosaurs had been unusually efficient in their assault on the duckbills. As far as I could see they had killed every one of the herbivores. That did not seem natural to me. Predators usually kill what they can eat and allow the rest of their prey to go their way. Were the tyrannosaurs nothing but killing machines after all? Or were they being directed by someone—such as Set or his like?

Had they followed the migrating herd we had seen so that they could find the duckbills' nesting ground and kill all the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs.

When I returned to the hilltop with an armload of firewood, Anya showed me the answer to my question.

"Look here," she said, pointing to the edge of one of the nests.

I dropped the tinder near the nest where our prospective dinner waited and went to where she stood.

Footprints. Three-clawed toes, but much too small to be a tyrannosaur's. Human-sized. Or humanoid, rather.

"One of Set's troops?"

"There are more," Anya said, gesturing toward the other nests. "I think they deliberately smashed the eggs that weren't broken when the tyrannosaurs attacked."

"That means Set—or someone like him—is here, in this time and place."

"Attacking the duckbills? Why?"

"More important," I said, "whoever it is, he's probably searching for us."

Anya raised her eyes and scanned the horizon, as if she could see Set or his people heading toward us. I looked, too. The land was flat and depressingly green, nothing but the same tone of green as far as the eye could see. Not a flower, not a sign of color. Even the streams meandering through the area looked a sickly, weed-choked green. Mangroves lined the waterways and giant ferns clustered thickly, waving in the warm wind. Whole armies could be hidden in that monotonous flat bayou country and we could not have seen them.

It struck me all over again how helpless we were, how useless in the Creators' struggle to overthrow Set and his kind. Two people alone in a world of dinosaurs. I shook my head as if to clear it of cobwebs but I could not shake this feeling of depression.

Anya showed no signs of dismay, however. "We've got to find their camp or headquarters," she said. "We've got to find out what they are doing in this era, what their goals are."

I heaved a big hungry sigh. "First," I countered, "we've got to have dinner."

Returning to the two unbroken eggs, I started to build a small fire, knowing now that there were eyes out there in the distance that could detect it and locate us. Yet we had to eat, and neither of us was ready to face raw eggs or uncooked meat. Using a duckbill's pointed scapula, I scraped out a pit in the soft dirt so that the meager flames could not be seen above the crest of the hill by anyone watching from below. Yet I knew that even primitive heat detectors could probably spot our fire from its thermal signature against the cooler air of the late afternoon.

"Orion! Quickly!"

I turned from my blossoming fire, grabbing for the nearest bone to use as a weapon, and saw Anya staring tensely at our eggs. One of them was cracked. No, cracking. As we watched, it split apart and a miniature duckbilled dinosaur no more than two feet long crawled out of the shell on four stubby legs.

Anya dropped to her knees in front of it.

The baby dinosaur gave a weak piping whistle, like the toot a child might make on a tin flute.

"Look, it has an egg tooth," Anya said.

"It's probably hungry," I thought aloud.

Anya dashed over to my tiny fire and pulled out a couple of twigs that still had some pulpy leaves on them.

Stripping the leaves off, she hand-fed them to the little duckbill, which munched on them without hesitation.

"She's eating them!" Anya seemed overjoyed.

I was less thrilled. "How do you know it's a female?"

She ignored my question. Eating the other egg was out of the question now, even though it never opened that evening and was still not open the following morning. Our dinner consisted of a single rat-sized reptile that I managed to run down before darkness fell, and a clutch of melons that I picked from a bush, the first recognizable fruit I had seen.

In the morning Anya made it clear that she had no intention of leaving our baby duckbill behind.

"We'll have to feed it," I complained.

"It eats plants," she countered. "It's not like a mammal that needs its mother's milk."

I was anxious to get away from this hilltop massacre site and leave it to the scavenging pterosaurs. Our best defense against whoever had directed the attack on the duckbills was to keep moving. Anya agreed, but our pace that morning was terribly slow because the little duckbill could not trot along with any real speed. It seemed to show no curiosity about the world around it, as a puppy would. It merely followed Anya the way ducklings fixate on the first moving object they see, believing it to be their mother.

Anya seemed quite content with motherhood. She picked soft pulpy leaves for her baby and even chewed some of them herself before feeding the little beast.

I had brought something quite different from the duckbill boneyard: a forearm bone that fit my hand nicely and had the proper size and heft to be an effective club. We had to make tools and weapons if we were to survive.

Why we had to survive, what our goal might be beyond mere physical survival, was a total blank to me. Oh, I knew we were supposed to be battling against Set and whatever plans he had for this period in time. But how the two of us, alone and practically defenseless, were supposed to overcome Set and his people—that was beyond my reckoning.

Despite my misgivings, Anya set us out on the tracks of the tyrannosaurs.

"The humanoids went with them," she said, pointing at the smaller tracks set in between the giant prints of the tyrants.

"Some distance behind them," I guessed.

"I suppose so. We must find those humanoids, Orion, and learn from them what Set is doing."

"That won't be easy."

She smiled at me. "If it were easy, it would have already been done. You and I are not meant for easy tasks, Orion."

I could not make myself smile back at her. "If they can truly control the tyrannosaurs, we haven't a chance in hell."

Anya's smile wilted.

We quickly saw that the tyrannosaur tracks led back toward the swamps we had quit only a few days earlier. I felt miserably disheartened to be returning to that fetid, humid, steaming gloom. I wanted to run as far away from there as possible. For the first time in my lives I was feeling real fear, a terror that was dangerously close to panic.