Tamer- King of Dinosaurs 5

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “Yes,” Tannin sighed as she crossed her arms over her long hair. “That is a good way to think of it. My legs feel so much better now. I think I can try walking.” After she spoke, she stood up from her seat on the stone and carefully stepped amongst the rocks. Her thin legs looked a bit wobbly, but they soon stopped shaking and she was walking around with the grace of a ballet dancer.

  “You look steady,” Gee said with a nod, and the other woman nodded.

  “I’m going to sleep,” I said. “The stegosaurs will split the watch, so you all don’t need to worry. Well, if something big happens to come, then we’ll have to be worried, but they will let us know.” Gee still didn’t know about Grumpy, and I still wanted to keep him hidden for as long as I possibly could.

  “Goodnight, Victor,” Gee said, and both she and Tannin smiled at me as I climbed into the shelter.

  I heard the two women whisper to each other as I took off my socks and arranged the palm frond bedding under my bare back, but I couldn’t decipher their words. Even though I had gotten a decent sleep last night, I hadn’t slept at all the night before, and my eyelids were heavy. As soon as I closed my eyes, I felt warmth on my chest, and I startled awake when my vision turned red.

  It took me a second or two to realize that the light in my eyes was the dawn sun reflecting off the river water and bouncing into my side of the lean-to. I let out a careful exhale and then looked down to my feet where the branches that divided Tannin and my beds were. I could see her orange hair through the gaps in the pine needles, and I breathed a sigh of relief, then I wiggled out of my bed, raised my hands over my head and stretched my back.

  Gee was sleeping on her back where I had asked her, and I realized I still wasn’t used to seeing her naked all the time. The slab of rock that served as her bed looked a lighter shade of gray than the surrounding rock, and the waves of heat coming up from her body looked like a mirage.

  I guessed the sun had risen only an hour ago, so I went to work starting the campfire back up. Bruce woke up when I got the fire going, and he laid his head on my shoulder for a few moments so I could pet him. Then he leapt into the air to hunt for breakfast, and I moved over to the large stalk of bamboo that I had used to make the first water container. I didn’t want to hack into it with my axe and risk waking up the women, so I used one of the larger stone knives I had taken from the camp on the other side of the river to carve four more containers for water slowly. As I finished, Bruce landed with two large fish impaled on his beak, and I went to work cleaning them before I set them on the cooking stone.

  The women woke up when they smelled breakfast, and they each stretched and yawned before they got up and moved over to sit next to the fire. I asked Gee to boil all the water in the containers, and then I packed up the rest of our shelter and stored it on Ad-Rock’s back with the rest of our gear. The fish was done cooking just as I finished packing everything up, and the three of us ate our meal as we listened to the sound of the river dancing between the boulders.

  “I’m hoping we reach the ocean by the end of the day today or tomorrow,” I said after we had finished eating. “I’m also hoping we don’t run into anyone, or anything else that wants to kill us, but we should expect new trouble in every valley. You both ready to go?”

  “Yes,” Gee said as she winked at me, and Tannin gave two nods before she pushed off the rock.

  “You can ride up on one of the stegos with me, or you can ride on your own,” I said as I gestured to the armored dinosaurs.

  “I would prefer to be near you,” Tannin said, “but can I have some of those green leafy plants? I can use them to make clothes to cover my body.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said as followed her finger to the stacks of palm fronds I had on Ad-Rock’s back. “Take as much as you need. Actually, I’ll climb up there and throw the piles down to you.” I realized that she would probably have a hard time climbing up onto the stego’s back, so I would need to get it all for her.

  “Thank you, Victor,” Tannin said.

  As soon as we had a big stack of palm fronds moved over to Mike D’s back, I pulled Tannin up next to me, and I got the caravan moving again. Even though I had lost a few hours yesterday by waking up late and ending the day early, today was shaping up to be much better, and I figured we’d be able to cover a lot of distance.

  Gee walked her usual path in and out of the river bank. Every so often, she would submerge herself in water to quench her burning skin, and then stand up with a carefree laugh as she spun her hair back over her shoulders.

  Tannin sat cross legged between Mike D’s plates and worked on turning the palm fronds into cordage. I thought about offering to help, but I needed to focus on the surrounding terrain, and she stared at her work with an intense look of concentration on her face.

  The river continued to wind through various valleys, in between sheer cliffs, and amongst forests of trees. A few times we heard the roars of angry carnivores, but other than a pack of gray feathered raptors that were smaller than the balaur bondocs, we didn’t encounter anything that posed a threat to us. We stopped a few times so that Gee could boil water for Tannin and I to drink, and once to relieve ourselves, but we didn’t take a break for lunch, and soon the sun looked like it was beginning its descent toward the west.

  I hadn’t seen a single redwood tree since the valley where the first nook I’d used for a campsite was, but we soon came to a valley filled with trees that looked a lot like Douglas firs. They were tall pine trees, and I commanded the caravan of stegos to halt.

  “What’s wrong?” Gee asked.

  “We either have to start thinking about where we are going to camp for the night, or we need to push to the coast. I need to climb a tree and get our bearings.”

  “Can’t you ask Bruce?” Gee asked as she gestured up at the pteranodon hovering in the air a few hundred feet above us.

  “He doesn’t understand the concept of distance,” I said with a shrug. “I could ask him if we can make it to the ocean before the sun sets, and he’ll say yes, but that’s only because he can fly there. He understands close, or far away, but not really in between.”

  “If I had my wings, I could--” Tannin started to say, but I waved my hands, and her mouth froze open.

  “It’s fine, I can climb. Don’t worry.” I smiled at her as I moved to get off Mike D’s back, and the beautiful elf-woman returned the smile. She had weaved the palm fronds through cordage and crafted a hula-looking skirt for herself, and she was in the process of weaving together more strands into a basket shape that I imagined would cover her breasts. The bruises on her face were still purple, but the ones on her thin legs were turning a yellow color, and I figured they would be gone tomorrow.

  The pine tree wasn’t as tall as a redwood, but it was still crazy tall. Fortunately, the bark was thick and made plenty of hand holds that I could use for the first twenty or so feet until I hit the first branch. Then the process was pretty much like climbing ladders while I tried to avoid getting pine needles in my eyes.

  When I reached as high as I felt I could safely get, I moved away from the trunk and crawled along one of the branches until I was close to the edge of the pine needles.

  And there was the ocean.

  It looked maybe eight miles away, but it was hard to tell the distance while I was up in the tree. It was much closer than it had been the other day when on top of the redwood though, and the wonderful blue blanket spread in every direction. Joy surged up my stomach and I figured that we could probably make it there before dusk. I let out a thankful sigh of relief and was about to crawl back, but then I stopped myself when I noticed something moving at the mouth of the river.

  Make that somethings.

  The river cut clean through the various canyons and valleys close to me, but I lost it in bends midway to the ocean. Where I thought the river would have come out, was instead a long expanse of open grass and patches of still looking water.

  It was a marsh, or a swamp, or a bog, or wh
atever it was called when the water from a river hit another body of water and didn’t form a lake or a pond. On Earth, these spots would be teaming with wildlife and smell all sorts of nasty. I couldn’t smell the marsh from this distance, but it was definitely teaming with wildlife.

  And that wildlife looked like spinosaurs.

  There were four of them moving through the marsh, and while they looked smaller than my pinky nail at this distance, I recognized their weird bent-forward stance and the giant fin on their backs. I didn’t want to face one of these guys, let alone four, but I knew we would probably have to if we followed the river close to the ocean.

  And I especially didn’t want to face them at night.

  “What do you see?” Gee shouted up at me.

  “Remember those roars you heard when you first came here?”

  “Yes,” she called back.

  “I think we are about eight, maybe ten miles from the ocean, but I see four of those dinosaurs patrolling around where the river ends. I’m going to wait a few minutes and see if they keep moving.”

  “Okay,” she called up, and I turned my attention back to the ocean.

  The spinos moved around the grassland marsh with slow movements, and I realized that they were probably swimming. The sight was even more disturbing, since it meant that there were probably all sorts of other hungry creatures in the slow moving water, and I became more convinced that we shouldn’t try to make it to the ocean today.

  But then the spinos all turned toward something to the north and then began to swim in that direction. As I watched, they seemed to increase their speed, and then they moved past a slope of a hill and I couldn’t see them anymore.

  Were they gone for good? Were they hunting something that was going to keep them occupied for the rest of the day? Would they eat it and then just relax on the beach with full bellies and ignore a trio of stegos moving past their hunting grounds?

  If I waited now, would they just be back tomorrow?

  I climbed back down the tree branches, but I didn’t feel comfortable scaling down the hand holds on the bark, so I had MCA move below me so I could drop onto his back. Gee and Tannin stared at me with obvious interest, and I let out a long breath as I tried to figure out what to do.

  “The river seems to end in a marsh,” I said.

  “What is that?” Gee asked.

  “A wide expanse of water,” Tannin said.

  “Like a lake?” the fire-woman asked.

  “Yeah, but it’s not deep, maybe five feet or less for most of the area. Grasses and trees often grow inside, and there are normally lots of birds, fish, and other wildlife in it. I saw four of the very large predators moving through the water, and they all seemed to be moving up north, so it might be safe now, but they might come back. If there isn’t an issue, we might make it there at dusk, maybe a bit earlier.”

  “How far is your fort from there?” Gee asked.

  “I’m not sure because I don’t know how far away we are,” I said as I finally made up my mind. “We are going to continue on. We’ll go for another hour or two, and then I’ll try to find a tree to check. If the spinos are back, then we’ll camp, but if they aren’t, we’ll press onward to the beach. If we can make it to the fort, we’ll be pretty safe, since it is in a cave.”

  “I thought you said you were in a clearing of a forest?” Gee asked.

  “That’s our main fort,” I answered as I ordered the stegos to start moving downriver. “It’s about an hour or two from the cave one that is near the beach.”

  The words made me realize that I was going to have a bit of a problem getting Gee through the jungle which concealed the gorge where Quwaru’s cave was.

  “Gee, how many minutes can you keep your body from heating? We will have to pass through a jungle.”

  “Ten minutes or so,” she said with a shrug as she kicked some river water. “It is painful though. I can’t do it for much longer than that. Cooling myself with water is much more enjoyable.”

  “That should be enough,” I said, and then we were quiet again as we trekked through the valleys at the side of the river.

  The next valley reminded me a bit of the hills on the west side of my own valley. They were covered with long green grass, and juniper trees dotted the landscape. A pack of parasaurs drank at the stream, and they let out a toot of greeting when they saw the stegos approach. The herd looked hesitantly at Gee when she walked toward them, but they didn’t shy away from her when she walked beside them.

  “I have four of those back at my camp,” I said. “One of them just laid an egg, so I’m thinking we might have a baby soon.”

  “They seem like wonderful creatures,” Tannin said as she stopped her weaving to look over at them.

  “What was your world like?” I asked.

  “It looked somewhat like this,” she said as she gestured around us, “but more sky between the rivers and valleys.”

  “More sky?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Hmmm.” She bit her lip, and her blue eyes looked up toward the clouds. “See the air? The clouds? Do you feel the breeze?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That was between the land. Sometimes more land was straight across, sometimes it was above or below. I used my wings to fly there.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “Ahh, look in the river,” she said as she pointed to where Gee was hopping between stones. “Imagine that each of those boulders or stones were places with valleys, forests, grass, and rivers, but the water is just sky. That is what my world is like.”

  “Oh!” I laughed. “Floating islands?”

  “Yes!” Tannin laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t heard her laugh yet, and the sound was beautiful.

  “It sounds great,” I said. “How long have you been on this world?”

  “I believe three months,” she said. “It is hard to keep track of the time, though.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “When I was first here, I flew around for a few days. I found a small group of men and women fishing on the river. I was cautious at first, but they were nice to me. I stayed with them, and although we were all scared, we were together.”

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything. I knew what the next part of her story was going to be, but I didn’t want her smile to fade.

  “I am glad you killed those four monsters,” she whispered.

  “I want to help people,” I said. “This world is dangerous because of the dinosaurs, but some of the survivors here are even more dangerous. Those four men who killed your friends are a small fraction of the assholes that are on this planet. The beings kidnapping us and putting us here seem to be picking the strongest of each species. Some of them didn’t become powerful because they had good manners.” My eyes drifted to Gee when I finished talking. The fire-woman and I were getting along now, but I could have easily seen her leading a band of survivors that just took what they wanted from everyone else. Gee wasn’t evil by any stretch of the word, but she believed that the strongest should be in charge.

  “This is done,” Tannin said as she held out her palm frond weave bikini top. “Can you tie it behind me? It will wrap around my neck.”

  “Uhh, yeah,” I said as she turned and placed the garment over her chest. I was a bit surprised that she wanted me to get this close to her, but then I realized that she couldn’t really ask anyone else for help. Gee’s fingers would have burned the material, and the ties of the bra wrapped up and over Tannin’s neck in a way which would make it hard to put on backwards and then twist around so that it was covering her breasts correctly.

  “There,” I said after I tied the knot over her back.

  “Thank you,” she said as she turned around to face me and pulled her long orange hair back behind her shoulders.

  I nodded at her and then turned my attention back to where the stegos were heading. This was the largest valley we had been in so far, and I almost wondered if I could
just head south west and eventually hit the beach. The plains in the direction stretched out farther than I could see, and I saw the high necks of what looked like brontos about a mile away.

  “I still can’t believe it,” I said as I shook my head.

  “Believe what?” Tannin asked softly.

  “That I’m on a planet filled with dinosaurs,” I answered with a shrug.

  “You seem very familiar with these creatures,” the elf-woman said. “Are they on your homeworld?”

  “They used to be,” I said. “A few million years ago, but then our planet got hit with a comet and they all died. We know about them because of the leftover bones that are stuck in the earth.”

  “We have never had such creatures on our world,” Tannin said, “but we do have birds. Some of these dinosaurs look a bit like them.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what they evolved to look like, eventually.”

  “How is it that this world has the same animals that used to exist on yours?” Tannin asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I answered. “I’ve thought about it a bunch, though.”

  “Do any of the others in your tribe have a history of these creatures on their worlds?” Tannin asked.

  “No,” I said, but that wasn’t exactly the truth, since I’d never had that conversation with Emerald, and I didn’t know about Quwaru’s people.

  “It is strange then, yes?” she asked as she pulled her tangerine colored hair behind one of her elf-ears. “Why can you control them? Why were they once on your world?”

  “Yeah, I dunno,” I sighed. “My species has always had a bond with animals, but I didn’t think it was much of an ability until I got to this place.”

  “Hmmm,” Tannin hummed, and then she glanced down at Mike D’s back where we rode. “However it works, I am glad it does, and that you found me. Thank you again, Victor.”

  “You’ll like living in our camp,” I said, “We don’t have much, but we’ll share what we do have, and we are working to make things better for everybody.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” she said as she wrapped her arms around her chest. “I never thought… well… I am looking forward to meeting everyone. If they are as nice as you, then I will cry tears of joy.”