Orion in the Dying Time o-3

by Ben Bova

  Every tribe had young women who needed husbands and young men who wanted wives. Often the unmarried men formed raiding parties to steal women from neighboring tribes. This usually started blood feuds that could last for generations.

  Under Anya’s tutelage we created a veritable marriage bureau, bringing news of available mates from one tribe to another. Primitive though these men and women were in technology and social organization, they were no fools. They soon recognized that an arranged marriage, where both families willingly gave their consent, was preferable to raiding and stealing—and the constant threat of retaliation.

  Despite the fearsome stories some men like to tell about human savagery and lust, despite the cynical boasts of the Golden One about how he built ferocity into his creation of Homo sapiens, human beings have always chosen cooperation over competition when they had the choice. By giving the tribes the chance to extend ties of kinship we extended ties of loyalty.

  Even shy Reeva found herself a new mate: Kraal himself. Since her baby had been killed by the snakes Reeva had seemed to become even more withdrawn, quieter, brooding, almost morose. Then one bright morning Kraal told me that Reeva had agreed to be his wife. His gap-toothed grin was a joy to see.

  Yet I felt uneasy. I asked Anya about it, and she shrugged.

  “Reeva seeks protection,” she told me. “If she can’t have it from you, she’ll get it from the next most powerful male available.”

  “Protection?” I wondered. “Or power?”

  Anya looked at me thoughtfully. “Power? I hadn’t considered that.”

  It was a happy time for Anya and me. Despite the lurking threat of Set and his monsters we lived together joyfully in Paradise. Each day was fresh and new, each night was a pleasure of loving passion. We felt that we were accomplishing something important, helping these struggling tribes to defend themselves against true evil. Time became meaningless for us. We had our cause, we had our work, and we had each other. What more could we ask of Paradise?

  After seven months of constant travel through the forest of Paradise, we had built up a loose alliance of several dozen tribes under the nominal leadership of Kraal. Most of the people of those tribes went on living exactly as they had before we met them—except that they now had new tools, new foods, new mates, new ideas stirring them. Only a few young men or women from any single tribe actually traveled with us.

  Had we done enough?

  I knew that we had not. All through those long months we did not see a dreaded giant snake or dragon. Each time I looked up through the leafy trees I saw only the sky, empty except for clouds. No pterosaurs seeking us. Yet I felt deep within me that Set knew exactly where we were, day by day. Knew precisely what we were doing. With the absolute certainty of inbuilt instinct I realized that Set was preparing to smash us.

  How and when I did not know. It dawned on me that I had better find out.

  That night Kraal’s wandering band camped in a parklike glade beneath lofty pine trees. Their trunks rose straight and tall as the pillars of a cathedral. The ground beneath them was bare of grass but covered with a thick, soft, scented layer of pine needles. We spread our hides and robes and prepared for sleep.

  There were about forty of us who roamed the forest of Paradise under Kraal’s nominal leadership, offering metal tools and medicines, knowledge and marriageable young men and women in exchange for loyalty and the promise to resist the reptilian masters when next they raided.

  A massive gray boulder sat at one end of the glade, gray and imperturbable in the last golden rays of the setting sun. I glanced at Anya, then turned and asked Kraal to follow us up to its top.

  We scrabbled up from one rock to another until we stood atop the big boulder, looking down on the others as they huddled in small groups around their cooking fires.

  “If the dragons come again to steal slaves for Set,” I asked, “how will we be able to bring all the tribes together to fight against them?”

  Kraal made a sighing, grunting sound, his way of showing that he was thinking hard. Anya remained silent.

  “When we hunt deer or goats,” I mused, “we send men out into the brush to search for the game we seek. But what can we do when the dragons come hunting for us?”

  Kraal swiftly saw where I was leading. “We could pick men to go to the edge of Paradise and watch for the dragons’ approach!”

  Anya nodded encouragement to him.

  “That would take many men,” I said. “And we would need fast runners to carry the news from one group to another.”

  Thus we created the idea of scouts and messengers, and began training men and women for such duties. We wanted youngsters who were fleet of foot, but not so foolhardy that they would try to attack a dragon by themselves—or so flighty that they would report dragons when they saw nothing more than clouds on the horizon.

  After a few weeks of training I myself took the first group of scouts northward, toward the edge of Paradise, where the forest merged with the broad treeless savannah that would eventually become the Sahara.

  Anya wanted to come with me but I convinced her that she was needed more at Kraal’s side, helping him to win more tribes over to our cause, teaching the women the arts of healing and baking.

  “I don’t want to leave Kraal entirely alone,” I said, “without either one of us close by him.”

  Anya’s eyes widened slightly. “You don’t trust him?”

  It was the first time that I realized so. “It’s not a matter of trust, exactly. What we’re doing is new to Kraal—new to all of them. One of us should be at his side at all times. Just in case.”

  “I’d rather be sticking a spear into a lizard’s ribs,” she said.

  I laughed. “There’ll be plenty of chances for that, my love. I have the feeling that Set knows exactly what we’re doing and he’s merely biding his time to strike us when and where he chooses.”

  Anya reached up to touch my cheek. “Be very careful, Orion. If you are killed by Set… it will be the end. Forever.”

  There had been times when I longed for eternal death, for the final release from the agony of living. But not now. Now with Anya here in Paradise with me.

  I kissed her, long and deep and hard. And then we parted.

  Young Chron had become something of an acolyte to me, at my elbow practically every moment of the day. Naturally he volunteered for this first scouting mission. I had to admit that he possessed exactly the qualities we needed in a scout: courage tempered by good sense, keen eyes, and young legs.

  There were five of us, and we spent more than a week moving northward through the forest. We headed for the bowl of rock where we had first camped, months earlier. From there, we knew, it was little more than a day’s trek to the edge of the grassland.

  “Will the god speak to us, Orion?” Chron asked as we tramped through the woods. I had spread our group out in tactical formation: two up ahead, spaced apart the distance that a shout would carry, then the two of us, and finally a one-man rear guard trailing behind us.

  “I don’t think so,” I replied absently. “We won’t stay long enough for that.”

  My attention was on the birds and insects that called and chirped and hummed all around us. As long as they made their usual noises we were probably safe. Silence meant danger in this forest.

  A pair of blackbirds seemed to be following us, flapping from tree to tree, cawing noisily from high above us. Looking past them, I saw that the sky was darkening. There would be rain soon.

  The clouds burst near sundown and we made a miserable, drenched camp without fire that night. The rain poured down so hard it seemed like solid sheets of water pelting us. We sat beneath a spreading oak, huddled together and hunched over like a quintet of pathetic apes while the rain sluiced over us and chilled us to the bone. We dined on crickets that we found in the grass, silent and inert in the cold. They crunched in my mouth and tasted oddly sweet.

  Finally the downpour stopped and the forest came alive once more with
the droning of insects and the drip, drip, dripping of rainwater from countless thousands of leaves. A fog rose up, gray and cold, wrapping its ghostly tendrils around us, making our soaked, chilled bodies even more wretched.

  My brave scouts were obviously frightened. “The mist,” Chron said, shuddering, “it’s like the breath of a ghost.” The others nodded and muttered, hunched over, wide-eyed, trembling.

  I smiled at them. Knowing that reptiles became torpid in the cold, I said, “This mist is a gift from the gods. No snakes or lizards can move through such a mist. The mist protects us.”

  The morning sun burned away the mist and we marched northward again. Until we came to the end of the lake where Kraal’s village had stood.

  The birds circling overhead should have been a warning to us. At first we thought they were pterosaurs, so we stayed in the protective shadows of the trees as we approached the village. The birds wheeled and circled in deathly silence.

  No more than a handful of Kraal’s people had decided to accompany him on his god-inspired journeying. The others had remained where they were, in their huts of boughs and mud by the southern shore of the lake.

  The dragons had paid them a visit.

  Our noses told us something was wrong long before we reached the remains of the village. The putrid stench of decay was so strong that we were gagging and almost retching by the time we pushed aside the last thorny bushes and stepped out onto the sandy clearing where the village had been built.

  The ground was black with ashes. Every hut had been burned to the ground. Tall stakes had been driven into the ground at the water’s edge and a dozen men and women had been impaled on them; their rotting remains were what we had smelled. A kind of gibbet had also been built from sturdy logs. Two bodies hung from it by their heels, the flesh ripped so completely from their bones that we could not tell if they had been men or women.

  One of my scouts had come from this village. He stared, goggle-eyed, unable to speak, until at last his legs gave way and he collapsed in a blubbering, sobbing heap onto the burned sand.

  The others, including Chron, were stunned at first. But gradually, as we slowly walked through the charred remains of huts and human bones, Chron’s face went red with rage, even though the others remained pale with shock.

  I pointed to immense tracks of three-clawed feet in the ashes and sand. Dragons.

  Chron shook his spear in the air. “Let’s find them and kill them!”

  One of the others looked at him as if he were insane. “We could never kill such as these!”

  Glaring at him, Chron said, “Then let’s throw ourselves into the lake and be finished with life! Either we avenge these murders or we’re not worth the air we breathe!”

  I stilled him with a hand on his shoulder. “We will kill the dragons,” I said calmly, softly. “But we won’t go crashing through the forest following their trail. That is exactly what they want us to do.”

  As if in confirmation of my suspicion, a pterosaur came gliding into view high above the placid lake. It soared for several moments, wings outstretched, then folded its leathery wings and dove into the lake with barely a splash. An instant later it came up with a fish wriggling in its long beak.

  “It’s fishing, not searching for us,” said Chron.

  I lifted an eyebrow. “Even a scout needs to eat.”

  The pterosaur spread its great wings again and took off, flapping hard and running on the water’s surface with its webbed feet, then wobbled into the air and headed away from us, to the north.

  “Come on,” I said. “The dragons were here two or three days ago. If we’re clever enough, maybe we can trap them while they’re waiting to trap us.”

  Chapter 10

  The dragons had left a clearly visible trail through the forest, trampling down bushes and even young trees as hey headed back toward the savannah to the north. I saw that their immense three-clawed footprints headed only in the northerly direction. They had come down to the village more stealthily, along the riverbank or perhaps wading in the stream itself.

  Yes, they were making it easy for us to follow them. I knew that they were waiting up ahead somewhere, waiting to spring their trap on us.

  I made my tiny band of scouts stay well away from their trail. We moved through the deep forest as silently as wraiths, slipping through the dense foliage and thickly clustered trees, barely leaving a footprint.

  We struck for the high ground, the rocky hills that paralleled the river’s course. We clambered up the bare rocks, and once at the top we could easily see the broad trail that the dragons had pounded out down among the trees.

  Keeping down below the skyline on the far slope of the ridge, we soon found ourselves above the bowl of rock where we had made our camp months earlier.

  And the dragons were there, an even dozen of them, eating.

  The five of us flattened ourselves on the rim of the rock bowl and looked down at the giant lizards that had wiped out Kraal’s village.

  These monsters were considerably different from the beast I had slain so many months earlier. They were slightly bigger, bulkier, more than twenty feet from snout to tail. They walked on their two hind legs only, so that their fearsome heads could rise as much as fifteen feet above the ground. The forelegs were short and relatively slim, used for grasping. Their necks were short and thick, supporting massive heads that seemed to be almost entirely made of teeth the size and shape—and sharpness—of steak knives. Their tails were also shorter and much thicker than I had seen before.

  Their colors varied from light dun brown to a mottled green, almost like camouflage. Then, as I watched them I realized that their coloration was camouflage; it changed like the coloring of a chameleon as the giant beasts moved slowly from one place on the canyon floor to another.

  I recognized the stench wafting toward us; it was from the food they were eating. It took several moments for Chron and the others to understand. I felt his body go rigid beside me. I clamped my hand over his mouth, tightly. The others stirred but did not speak.

  The dragons were eating dead human bodies. They must have carried the corpses with them from the village. As we watched in horrified silence I saw that they used the vicious claws on their forelegs to hold their prey and tore off huge chunks of meat with those serrated butcher’s knives they had for teeth.

  Despite their bulk I thought that they could run quite fast, faster than a human. Those short, thick tails might be useful for clubbing a victim at close quarters, and with those grasping talons and ripping teeth they were fearsomely armed.

  At my signal we slithered backward down below the ridge line and crawled, then walked in utter silence for nearly half an hour before any of us said a word. Our copper-edged spears and knives seemed pitifully puny compared to the dragons’ teeth and claws.

  Even Chron seemed cowed. “How can the five of us kill those monsters?”

  “Even if we had all the men from all the tribes, we wouldn’t dare to attack them,” said one of the others.

  “They are fearsome beasts, true enough,” I said. “But we have a weapon that they don’t.”

  “Spears won’t stop them.”

  “Their claws are bigger than our knives.”

  “The weapon we have is not held in our hands,” I said. “It’s up here.” I tapped at my temple.

  Coming down off the hillside, we made a wide circle northward and crossed the river at a shallow point where it frothed and babbled noisily white among broken rocks and flat-topped boulders. I kept a wary eye on the sky, but saw no pterosaurs.

  Once under the trees on the far bank, I squatted on the sandy ground and drew a map with my finger. “Here is the bowl of the god who speaks, where the dragons are waiting for us, expecting us to walk into their trap. Here is the river. And here we are.”

  I explained what I wanted them to do. They were doubtful at first, but after a couple of repetitions they saw that my plan could work. If everything went off just the way I wanted it to.
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br />   We had another weapon that the dragons did not: fire. The dragons had used the cooking fires of the huts to help destroy the village by the lake. Now I intended to use fire and the element of surprise to destroy them.

  We worked all night gathering dry brush for tinder. The floor of the canyon was strewn with bushes and clumps of trees that would burn nicely once ignited. The dragons would either be asleep or torpid, I reasoned, during the cool of the night. Reptiles become sluggish when the thermometer goes down. The time to strike would be just before dawn, the lowest temperature of the night.

  My one fear was that they might have some sort of sentries. Perhaps heat-sensitive snakes such as the ones who had attacked us in our caves. My hope was that Set was arrogant enough to think that a band of five little humans would camp for the night and resume their journey only after the sun came up.

  We made dozens of trips across the slippery wet rocks, carrying armloads of brush and dead branches from windfalls. The moon rose, a slim crescent that barely shed light, and close enough almost to touch its edge, that glowering red star rose with it. Swiftly, silently, we began to carry our cache of tinder toward the canyon.

  I saw the looming dark shadow of a dragon at the canyon’s mouth. It was sitting on its hind legs and thick tail, not moving. But I saw the ruddy light of the strange star glint off its eyes. It was awake.

  A guard. A sentry. Devilish Set was not so arrogant after all.

  I stopped the men behind me with an outstretched arm. They dropped their bundles and gasped at the monster looming in the night. It slowly swung its massive head in our direction. We backed away, hugging the wall of rock and its protective shadows.

  The giant lizard did not come after us. To me it seemed half-asleep, languid.

  “We can’t get past it!” Chron whispered urgently.

  “We’ll have to kill it,” I said. “And quietly, so that it doesn’t rouse the others.”

  “How can—”

  I silenced him with a finger raised to my lips. Then I commanded, “Wait here. Absolutely silent. Don’t speak, don’t move. But if you hear that monster roar, then run for your lives and don’t look back for me.”