The Hero King (26 page)

I nearly cried with relief.

Maybe the “nearly” could be struck from that.

    Right along the boundary, the ground was the same on both sides, the coarse mixture of sand and gravel. But it started to change quickly once we were free of the treadmill, less grit and more real dirt mixed in, and more grass growing out. My horses and I were too spent to travel far beyond the boundary, but edges make me nervous. They’re too easy to fall off of.

We lost more than half a day there, not fifty yards from the boundary. I didn’t even bother to fix myself a meal before I pitched my tent and crawled in to sleep. I got the horses taken care of, hooked together on a long picket line staked to the ground where they could graze to their hearts’ content without straying back into the moving zone of ground. There was water just within their reach as well, another trickling little creek, this one wandering crookedly from northeast to southwest—not a straight boundary creek like those that had bracketed the forest.

Judging from the sky, it was nearly noon before I woke and took a good look at the land around and ahead. I built a fire, then got water and several meal packs on to heat, then trudged to the top of a low ridge just north of us to have a good look at the next stretch.

We had stopped in a good place. Beyond that ridge, things started to get crazy again.

The ground sloped away quickly into a wide valley north of the ridge. The valley seemed to be filled with a tropical jungle. And the few creatures I could see in the air above the jungle looked suspiciously like pterodactyls. These weren’t dragons, but even more primitive flying reptiles.

I couldn’t see any way around the jungle either. It extended as far as I could see, east to west.

“Okay, I guess it’s time to do the Professor Challenger bit,” I mumbled. At least it looked warm in the jungle, wherever the heat to power it came from. I packed my coat and gloves. It was still chilly out in the open where I was, so I didn’t bother to shed the thermal long johns.

“If I was sure we could get all the way through that in one day, we’d just stay here and rest up the rest of today,” I said. I was doing a lot of my talking out loud, even when I wasn’t talking directly at the horses. “But there’s no way to know that, so I guess we should get started today. You boys have seen dragons, so I doubt that there’ll be much in there to really give you a fright.”

You have to understand. After dealing with dragons the size of the
Love Boat
, nothing out of the Age of Dinosaurs is going to give a regulation Hero or his steed much of a fright.
Tyrannosaurus rex?
The species only got to be about fifteen feet tall—a mere bagatelle, child’s play. And the really huge beasts of that age were all vegetarians, slow-moving, with peanut-sized brains. The only thing to fear from one of them would be if it tripped over its own feet and fell on you. If the advertising was correct.

It did occur to me that those prehistoric jungles might have contained threats that didn’t leave such impressive remains—venomous bugs or slugs maybe, creatures that didn’t leave huge piles of bones around. For that matter, a toxic fungus might prove to be more dangerous than all the carnivorous dinosaurs that ever lived.

“We can at Least get down to the edge of the jungle,” I said when I finally hoisted my saddle back on Electrum. “We’re still a few hours short on sleep from last night.”

The slope down to the jungle was longer than I thought, which meant that the jungle itself was also more massive than it had appeared from the ridge. We spent nearly three hours going down the slope, angling back and forth to keep from edging into a headlong rush, because the slope was also steeper than I had thought at first. There was a breeze coming out of the jungle, soft, light, but full of wet, earthy smells, bringing with it a strong hint of warmth that had no business existing just north of a plain where the temperatures had been flopping back and forth across the freezing mark at night. I saw huge ferns in the moderate distance, and a lot of lush trees that looked like they would be uncomfortable with nightly lows even thirty degrees above freezing.

There was a lot of movement inside the jungle, but at first I couldn’t tell if any of it was caused by the local fauna or if it was just the movement of the wind through the branches. I saw those flying reptiles from the ridge, but it wasn’t until we were well below the level of the jungle canopy that I saw anything else.

The first animals I saw on the ground weren’t any of the giant dinosaurs that make such lovely movie monsters. The first dinosaurs I saw were about three feet tall, skinny and long-legged—maybe the Cretaceous version of the road runner. Beep, beep. They
were
running, and they looked as if they might be catching flying insects and eating them on the run. I stopped and watched them for a few minutes—from about a hundred yards away and up on the slope. Maybe they were full-grown, and maybe they were young, with Mama hanging by just out of sight. They ran around like kittens at play. But their long, narrow, tooth-filled snouts looked like they could take a decent hunk out of meat a lot bigger than a dragonfly.

“I hope they sleep soundly,” I said when I started Electrum down the slope again. I toyed with the idea of setting up camp for the night outside the jungle, waiting until morning until I actually entered. If it hadn’t been for the cruising pterodactyls (or whatever they were), I probably would have done just that, parked right at the base of the slope. But the flying reptiles seemed to be doing their hunting out on the verge of the jungle, where they could get some speed into their dives … and see anything out in the open.

Since I didn’t know which was the frying pan and which was the fire, I decided to get under cover of the jungle, where I could at least escape long-distance observation.

It wasn’t just
warm
when we reached the bottom of the valley and moved under the cover of the jungle, it was downright
hot
, maybe fifty degrees warmer at dusk inside the forest then it had been at noon on the ridge just south of the valley.

Dusk seemed to flick past in a matter of seconds inside the jungle. Sunset meant
real
darkness under a thick canopy. It was an exotic jungle, and only looked somewhat like a modern tropical rain forest. The soil seemed ridiculously poor and thin to be supporting so much, but I guess that’s the way those rain forests in Africa and South America are too, everything actively tied up in the ecosystem, depending on very tight recycling to keep it all going. There was a lot of rock in this forest, some of it barely covered by a few inches of soil, some of it sticking up in large knobs and low ridges. To support themselves, the trees had to depend on extensive systems of roots, many of them almost entirely aboveground, and various kind of natural buttresses. Thick vines coiled around trunks and led from one tree to the next, locking vast sections of the jungle together in a massive web. There was relatively little ground cover or underbrush. The trees and vines hoarded most of the available resources.

About twenty minutes after we entered the jungle, I spotted a nook protected on three side by a hefty elbow-shaped rock and decided that it would make a dandy campsite, even if there was only one way out. That meant there was only one way in too, and I was more worried about large animals than I was about trolls or any other thinking enemies. I set aside part of the thornwood Geezer had been carrying to build a night-long fire, and used the rest to put up a half-assed barricade across the open side of the nook. Those thorns wouldn’t even inconvenience many of the saurians I had read about, but maybe it would slow up the little ones that I had actually seen. And maybe the fire would keep all of them back … if it didn’t attract them by its novelty. Dinosaurs weren’t covered in any of the survival manuals or camping guides Dad had made me study while I was growing up. Maybe dinosaurs wouldn’t know that animals are supposed to be frightened of fire.

Somehow, I just
knew
that I was going to have to do battle with at least one of the monsters of the Dinosaur Age before I got through the jungle. I was a certified Hero, on a Mission. There had to be a battle to justify the set.

I did sleep that night. I was still so exhausted from the treadmill plain that nothing could have kept me from getting some sleep. But my danger sense kept waking me. I heard crashing noises in the night, clear enough to assure me that there were some of the big dinosaurs around even though I hadn’t seen any before sunset. I slept sitting up, with my back against the rock outcropping, both of my elf swords on my lap, my hands on the hilts. During one drowsy period, halfway between sleep and waking, I found myself wondering which variety of dinosaur I would have to face. The two likely candidates that came to mind (there weren’t all that many that I knew by name) were
Triceratops
and
Tyrannosaurus rex
, both late Cretaceous types.
T. rex
would make for a more exciting spectator sport with its quick movements and huge mouth.
Triceratops
would be more difficult to dispatch, from the Hero’s point of view. Those three big horns on its head and the big armored flap stretching back to cover the neck would be a bitch to get past. I knew that there were many other kinds of dangerous or dangerous-looking dinosaurs, but if the dangers were as personalized as the falling Wrigley Field seemed to indicate, I felt relatively sure that it would be one of the two I could call by name. I
thought
that
Triceratops
was supposed to be a vegetarian, but it was sure equipped to fight. Hell, rhinoceroses are vegetarians, but they’re sure not house pets. If I lost to any of these dinosaurs, it wouldn’t matter much to me if I was on the supper menu or not.

My horses didn’t like the smells or the noises in the jungle. They were restless all night, sometimes waking me even when my danger sense wasn’t active.

I got up as soon as there was any hint of light in the jungle and fixed breakfast. The horses settled down a little then. I don’t know if they were lulled by the resumption of familiar routine or if they just knew that breakfast meant that we would soon be moving away from this place where they were so nervous.

There’s no real drama to riding through a forest like that—if all you have is the forest. With no underbrush and with all the tall trees reaching to get to the sunlight before they start to put out branches, you don’t even have to worry much about bumping your head on anything. It’s as safe and comfortable as riding down the center aisle of a cathedral. Sure, it’s spooky with the light dimmed and tinted green, with the thick smells, but the jungle itself is just a collection of trees. It’s the animals that provide the danger, and the sound effects. Dawn brought a lot of noise, especially from the canopy, from animals or birds I couldn’t see or hope to identify by call … and by the occasional splattering of waste being dropped from high branches.

Compass out, I started us off toward the north again. There were individual trees that had to be detoured around, but it was nothing like the forest of thorn trees where I had no choice but to follow a narrow, twisting path. Here, there was more path than forest.

About midmorning, I saw my first large dinosaur, one of the really huge ones, in the shallow water at the edge of an even larger pond. The water wasn’t in my way, and the dinosaur, a brontosaur or something similar to my nonexpert eyes, showed no inclination to climb out of the water to investigate me. In size, even the brontosaur was nothing compared to the dragons I had faced close-up and personal.

The main event in the jungle didn’t start until after noon.

In this corner, Gil Tyner, Hero and King. In the other corner, a whole damn
family
of
Triceratops
. The two little ones were each the size of Electrum. Mama was about three times as big and must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that morning. Or maybe
Triceratops
dinosaurs were habitually in a bad mood, like rhino.

“Hey, lady, let’s make a deal,” I called out. “You don’t bother me and I won’t bother you.”

She lowered her head so those three giant spikes were aimed directly at me and charged about three steps. Electrum and Geezer went into reverse just as quickly. When Mama T stopped, so did my horses. The big
Triceratops
pawed the ground. The two small ones did the same. I started looking for the emergency exit. At the moment, those dinosaurs looked a lot less vulnerable than any of the full-grown dragons I had seen, though some of them could have eaten Mama T in one gulp.

I tugged on Electrum’s reins to shift him toward the right. We started moving slowly, all of our eyes on the armored nasties. And they were watching us just as closely. One of the small ones did a mock charge, coming a little closer to us than Mama had. Then the other small one had to show its bravery.

Well, there comes a time for bravery, when you have to swallow all the fear and insanity and “do what a man has to do.” But as far as I was concerned, that wasn’t it. As soon as we had a little room, I put my heels to Electrum and we exercised the better part of valor. We ran like hell.

Maybe I was finally learning how to be a smart Hero.

* * *

It was getting dark inside the jungle when we reached the edge. Beyond, the ground started upward, gently at first, then more steeply to another ridge, perhaps twice as high as the one we had descended on the southern side of the jungle. I spotted a cozy-looking ledge about a third of the way up and decided that we would spent the night there. Twilight was almost wasted before we got up to the ledge and started to settle in for the night. I still had a little wood left after reclaiming most of what I had used for the picket fence in the jungle, and the air was still fairly comfortable up on the ledge, thanks to a warm upflow of air from the valley. I fixed supper and got ready for a good night’s sleep. There didn’t seem to be any need for the tent, so I just wrapped up in my blankets and stared into the sky. I felt pretty good after escaping another of the traps in my path. Put the white feathers on me and teach me to crow. I didn’t give a damn. I knew there would be sufficient Hero work ahead. There was no need to take chances that didn’t have to be taken.