Orion in the Dying Time Page 12

  The swamp was miserably hot and damp. The ground squelched when we walked; every step we took was a struggle through thick ferns and enormous broad leaves bigger than any elephant's ear that clung wetly to our bodies when we tried to push through them. Vines looped everywhere, choking whole trees, spreading across the spongy ground to trip us.

  And it stank. The stench of decay was all around us; the swamp smelled of death. The constant heat was oppressive, the drenching humidity sapped my strength.

  I felt trapped, imprisoned, in a glistening world of sodden green. The jungle pressed in on us like a living entity, squeezing the breath from our lungs, hiding the world from our view. We could not see more than a few yards ahead in any direction unless we waded out into the oozing mud of midstream, and even then the jungle greenery closed off our view so quickly that a herd of brontosaurs could have been passing by without our seeing them.

  There was little to eat. The plants were all strange to us; hardly any of them seemed to bear anything that looked edible. The only fish I could see in the dark water were tiny flitting glints of silver, too small and fast for us to catch. We subsisted on frogs and wriggling furry insect grubs, nauseating but nourishing enough. Barely.

  It rained every evening, huge torrents of downpour from the gray towering clouds that built up during the sopping heat of the afternoons. My skin felt wet all the time, as if it were crawling, puckering, in the unremitting humidity. After three days and nights of being soaked and steamed, even Anya began to look bedraggled and unhappy.

  The sky was gray almost all the time. The one night it cleared enough to see the stars, I wished it had not. Peering through the tangled foliage while Anya slept, I tried to find the familiar patterns of recognizable constellations. All that I saw was that dismal red star hanging high in the dark sky, as if spying down on us.

  I searched for Orion, my namesake among the stars, and could not find the constellation. Then I saw the Big Bear, and my heart sank. It was different, changed from the Dipper I had known in other eras. Its big square "bowl" was slim and sharp-angled, more like a gravy pitcher than a ladle. Its curving handle was sharply bent.

  We were so many millions of years removed from any period I had known that even the eternal stars had changed. I stared at the mutated Dipper, desolate, downcast, filled with a dreadful melancholy such as I had never known before.

  Other than an occasional shrewlike gray furry creature that seemed to live high in the trees, we did not even see another mammal. Reptiles, though, were everywhere.

  One morning Anya was filling a gourd at the edge of the muddy stream when suddenly a gigantic crocodile erupted from the water where it had been lurking, its massive green scaly body hidden perfectly among the reeds and cattails with nothing but its horn-topped eyes and nostrils showing above the surface. Anya had to run as fast as she could and clamber up the nearest tree to escape the crocodile's rush; despite its spraddling short legs, it nearly caught her.

  There were turtles in the swamp and long-tailed lizards the size of pigs and plenty of snakes gliding through the water and slithering up the trees.

  This world of the Cretaceous, however, was truly ruled by dinosaurs. Not all of them were giants. The second day Anya, using a thick broken branch for a club, tried to kill a two-legged dinosaur that was only as big as an overgrown chicken. It scampered away from her, whistling like a teakettle. Accustomed to dodging its larger cousins, it easily escaped Anya's attempts to catch it.

  From our tree perch I saw one afternoon a waddling reptile plated with bony armor like an armadillo, although it was almost the size of a pony. It dragged a short tail armed with evil-looking spikes.

  Insects buzzed and crawled around us all the time but, oddly, none seemed to bother us. I thought this strange at first, until I realized that there were so few mammals in this landscape that hardly any insects had developed an interest in sucking warm blood.

  The third night I told Anya that I felt strong enough to travel.

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. It's time we left this soggy hellhole."

  "And go where?" she asked.

  I shrugged. The evening cloudburst had just ended. We sat huddled on a high branch beneath a rude makeshift shelter of giant leaves that I had put together. It had not been much help; the torrents of rain had wormed through the leaves and wet us anyway. The last remnants of the rain dripped from a thousand leaves and turned our green world into a glittering, dewy symphony of pattering little splashes. Anya's once-sparkling robe was sodden and gray. My leather vest and kilt clung to me like clammy, smelly rags.

  "Anywhere would be better than this," I replied.

  She agreed with a nod.

  "And probably as far away from this location as we can get," I added.

  "You're worried about Set?"

  "Aren't you?"

  "I suppose I should be. I can't help thinking, though, that he won't bother with us. We're trapped here, why spend the effort to seek us out and kill us? We're going to die here, my love, in this forsaken miserable time, and no one will save us."

  In the shadows of dusk her lovely face seemed somber, her voice low with dejection. I had been content to live a normal human lifetime with Anya in the Neolithic, but the cool forest of Paradise was very different from this rotting fetid jungle. Even though the people there had turned traitor against us, there were human beings in Paradise. Here we were totally alone, with no human companionship except each other.

  "We're not dead yet," I said. "And I don't intend to give Set any help in killing us."

  "Why would he bother?"

  "Because this is a crucial nexus for him," I told her. "He knows where his spacetime warp was set, he knows we're here. As soon as he has the device operating again he'll come looking for us, to make certain that we don't upset whatever it is he's planning for this point in the continuum."

  Anya saw the logic of it, but still she seemed reluctant to take action.

  "We'll be better off out of this damned swamp," I added. "This is no place to be. Let's start out tomorrow morning, first light. We'll head upland, to where it's cooler and dryer."

  In the deepening shadows I saw her eyes sparkle with sudden delight. "We can follow the path that the duckbills took. They were heading toward higher ground, I'm certain."

  "With the tyrannosaurs after them," I muttered.

  "Yes," Anya said, some of her old enthusiasm back in her voice. "I'm curious to see if they caught up with the duckbills."

  "There are times," I said, "when you seem absolutely bloodthirsty."

  "Violence is part of human makeup, Orion. I am still human enough to feel the excitement of the hunt. Aren't you?"

  "Only when I'm the hunter, not the hunted."

  "You are my hunter," she said.

  "And I've found what I was searching for." I pulled her to me.

  "Being the prey isn't all that terrible," Anya whispered in my ear. "Sometimes."

  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 w
as 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.