by Jack Geurts
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Table of Contents
Title Page
JASPER FLINT AND THE DINOSAUR SADDLE
PART I | THE DINOSAUR SADDLE
CHAPTER ONE | The Blind Rider
CHAPTER TWO | A Hundred Million Years
CHAPTER THREE | Out Of The Past...
CHAPTER FOUR | ...Into The Present
CHAPTER FIVE | Arrival
PART II | THE FORGOTTEN SHORE
CHAPTER SIX | Across The Sea
CHAPTER SEVEN | The First City
CHAPTER EIGHT | The Heart Of The Temple
CHAPTER NINE | The Sands Of Time
PART III | BURIED IN THE EYE OF A DRAGON
CHAPTER TEN | To The East
CHAPTER ELEVEN | Journey Of The Second Marker
CHAPTER TWELVE | The Mausoleum
CHAPTER THIRTEEN | Quicksand And Quicksilver
PART IV | THE LOST CITY OF PYRAMIDS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN | Proof
CHAPTER FIFTEEN | Born In The Darkness
CHAPTER SIXTEEN | The Buried Secret
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN | A Test Of Courage
PART V | THE BRIDGE OF TIME
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN | Land Of The Pharaohs
CHAPTER NINETEEN | Goodbye
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
For James Cheers and Jonathan Ferrier, two childhood friends who planted the seed for this story.
JASPER FLINT AND THE DINOSAUR SADDLE
Jack Geurts
No creature has ever altered life on the planet in this way before, and yet other, comparable events have occurred...In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realise that they are causing another one.
-Elizabeth Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-Arthur C. Clarke
PART I
THE DINOSAUR SADDLE
CHAPTER ONE
The Blind Rider
When Jasper Flint came face-to-face with a living dinosaur, the first thing he noticed were its feathers.
Second were its teeth.
Third were its claws.
The tornado had stopped as quickly as it began. A swirling vortex of sand and dust that climbed high into the sky simply vanished in an instant. It had barely lasted thirty seconds, but that wasn’t the only thing strange about the whirlwind.
It was also entirely confined to a pit measuring five metres by six. A pit located somewhere out in the vast, desert hinterland of Australia. A pit that contained the fossil of a dinosaur one hundred million years old.
Until moments ago, the palaeontologists were huddled in and around the pit. Now, they were standing back at a distance, at a loss to comprehend what they were seeing. University students, mainly, and their teachers – a married couple, Jonathan and Zoe.
And there among them, a person who by all accounts did not belong on a dig site. He was too young for university. Barely old enough to drive, and even then, he had to have an adult with him. Jonathan and Zoe’s sixteen-year-old son Jasper accompanied them everywhere they went – on every dig, every research trip. It wasn’t that he hated going, but he didn’t exactly share his parents’ interest in fossils. Not until now, that is.
Along with everyone else, he stared wide-eyed at the pit, which was covered by a cloud of red dust. He had no idea what had happened or why, only that it was a hell of a lot more interesting than chipping away at old fossils.
Just then, there was movement from within the cloud, within the pit.
The tinkling of sand spilling down.
A dragging sound, and breathing. Loud breathing. Short, sharp breaths through a pair of nostrils irritated by the dust. Grains of sand crunching beneath large, heavy feet.
Slowly, from the red cloud, a snout emerged...
Then a long, reptilian head, familiar in size and shape, but not at all in its scales and feathers. Yellow eyes with black pupils that darted about. Birdlike eyes, learning its new environment. At the end of its snout, a jaw opened slowly to reveal rows of pointed teeth. Opened as if in a smile.
A few of the students stepped backwards in horror, but for the most part they remained rooted to the spot. Frozen. All experiencing what an art historian might coming face-to-face with a living, breathing Leonardo da Vinci. If da Vinci was armed with an M60 machine gun and had developed a taste for human flesh.
Five metres long, one-and-a-half metres tall at the hip and three metres when standing upright, the Australovenator was sometimes referred to as Australia’s velociraptor, only bigger. This had always puzzled Jasper, as in reality, velociraptors were much smaller, roughly the size of a large turkey. And like a turkey, they were covered in feathers and probably had a similar IQ. They certainly didn’t hunt in packs or set traps, and if Jasper saw one today, it would probably strike him more as a bird than a reptile.
The Australovenator, on the other hand, was an absolute killing machine. It weighed in at five hundred kilograms and was armed with seventy-two razor sharp teeth and three long, curved claws on each hand. Its arms were long enough to be useful and so – unlike the Tyrannosaurus – it used those, rather than its jaws, to kill. But like the T-Rex, it was a theropod – a carnivore that ran on two legs and ran fast, potentially up to thirty kilometres an hour. This loaned it another nickname, “the cheetah of the Cretaceous”, which always struck Jasper as more appropriate. Though it was a lightweight predator compared to the T-Rex, it was still the deadliest creature ever to have walked the Australian continent.
Jasper often liked to imagine it probably still would be the apex predator, had it survived. Today, he found himself regretting that wish. Instead, he wondered how on earth this was possible. How could this creature have come back to life?
The dinosaur moved slowly forth from the cloud of dust, revealing first the three black bone sickles on either hand, then the tall, muscular legs ending in three-toed claws, each spread wide from the other. Behind its eyes, a mane of spiny feathers grew flat to the skin, spreading back to cover the whole of its body and tail, its limbs. This streamlined coat was thicker in places than others, thinnest on the arms and legs, while the scales beneath were coloured orange and red in patches that melted together. The colour of dust and sand and rock to distinguish itself against the greenery of its former landscape, and now to blend into its present one. Burnt hues upon which were patterned black stripes and spots, giving it the look of a tiger. A reptilian tiger, grown to need only its back legs for movement, its front legs for killing.
And on its back...
A saddle.
A sturdy, leather saddle.
A sturdy, leather saddle fastened around the base of the dinosaur’s neck.
Two belts, starting above the arm on either side, crossed at the chest to link back to the saddle below. Another, wider belt looped beneath the ribcage, all three securing the saddle in a way that seemed comfortable to the creature. The stirrups hung loose on either side.
It kept its head low, just beneath the level of its hips. At the back, the tail was elevated, stiff and lightly feathered, acting as counterweight to the head. For some reason, Jasper was reminded of a wedge-tailed eagle standing on the ground – the body horizontal for the most part, legs perpendicular to the spine, but in place of a beak was a sharp-toothed snout.
In its entirety, the body sloped downward from tip of tail to snout. All the muscles and ligaments in between were coiled tightly, poised to strike. A low, guttural rumbling sounded from the back of the throat. Its claws clicked together. Once again, Jasper got the impression that it was smiling. Savouring the meal to come.
Just as it looked ready to pounce, it stopped, and a figure materialised beside it from the dust. A tall, wraith-like figure wearing a black robe and running a hand along the spiny down of the creature’s flank. A hood over his head, but under that, his face was pale. Not just pale, but translucent. Jasper thought he could even make out the blood vessels beneath the skin and the teeth within his closed mouth. From what he could tell, the figure had no eyes or nose, only a thin slit where his lips ought to be.
His sandalled feet were wrapped in the same black cloth that the rest of his body was. One of his hands was similarly wrapped, but the other was gloved in a synthetic material, and bound to the wrist was what appeared to be some kind of heavy-duty tablet computer. The glove glowed red as he stroked the dinosaur – the feathers lighting up likewise where he touched it.
Jasper took note of this. The gloved hand running along the dinosaur’s side, a trail of glowing red feathers in its wake. The feathers quickly faded back to normal when the hand moved on, but the creature was suddenly calm, obedient to its rider. He noted how the rider didn’t take his hand off the dinosaur, but maintained contact, as if to remove the hand would remove the bond. Remove what kept the creature from eating him.
Another thing Jasper noted was that the figure didn’t have an inch of his translucent skin exposed to the sun – like to do so would cause him harm.
Jasper, his parents and the others gathered behind them weren’t sure who to be more afraid of – the figure or the dinosaur – but still, they didn’t move. It was like they couldn’t believe their own eyes, or that they knew whoever was first to break away would draw the theropod’s attention, and that person would be the first to die.
They could only watch as the grotesque rider took hold of the saddle and the dinosaur stooped its neck down to meet him. The rider put his foot in the stirrup and hauled himself up like a man would a horse, swinging his leg over and all the while keeping his gloved hand on the dinosaur.
The rider sat there astride his saurian mount like something out of the distant and mythical past – a sightless spectre arrived to bring about the end of all things. Both rider and mount seemed to be linked somehow by the glowing red light of the glove. The rider kept his hand on the dinosaur’s spine and suddenly it stepped forward, as if commanded to by some unheard voice.
Several within the group exclaimed with fright and some fell over in their haste to move back. Jonathan got before his son to shield him.
The creature took another step forward, then another.
Then, suddenly, it bolted.
Inside of a second, the theropod had closed the gap between it and its prey and was upon the group, taking the first of them in its terrible claws and ripping open his soft belly to darken the sand with his blood and viscera.
Finally, the people snapped out of their horrified trance and ran screaming in every direction, scattering like beetles.
Jonathan herded Zoe and Jasper into a marquee with all the plastic walls rolled down. One of the students, Troy, came in behind them, unfurling the rolled-up door and zipping the edges shut as if that would save them.
Jonathan spun around wildly, looking for something, anything, that could help them. But all the tent contained was a table set up for analysing fossils, a few spare shovels and picks in the corner, and a diesel generator hooked up to a series of multi-adapters, extension leads running out beneath the plastic wall.
He tried to put it all together, to think, while outside continued the desperate screams and the heavy, thudding footsteps. The clattering of tent poles and the billowing whoosh of plastic folds as the other marquees were trampled. The ripping of flesh from bone, the snapping of jaws, the bellowing, blood-chilling roar of a dinosaur stretching its legs after a hundred million years underground.
Jonathan grabbed a shovel from the corner as if to fend off the half-ton dinosaur, but then he saw Zoe sobbing quietly and holding Jasper to her. The boy’s eyes were wide, his heart racing. Jonathan saw all this, the fear in them and in himself. He saw the shovel in his hand and quickly realised it was no use.
The hope drained out of his eyes and Jasper saw it happen, saw their fate written on the marquee wall as outside, the blood of some poor soul was splattered against the thin, white plastic. Zoe jumped with fright and pulled Jasper even closer, both of them squeezing their eyes shut and hoping the wait would be brief, the end quick...
CHAPTER TWO
A Hundred Million Years
One day earlier...
The students worked down in the pit while Jasper sat perched above them, watching.
He watched the small tools chipping dirt from rock, rock from bone. The brushes sweeping away what remained. He watched as the distant past was exposed before him like an accidental time capsule, unknown for millions of years and seen now for the first time by human eyes.
One of the students, a tall brunette named Lucy, was shaking a sieve back and forth. The loose dirt fell through and left behind fossilised fragments of bone from an earlier age. Such fragments were like gold to these students, and the way Lucy went about it with a sieve, Jasper was reminded of a prospector panning for gold in the mid-1800s. But she wasn’t mining gold – she was mining history.
The camp was far from any town or city, way out in the red desert grassland – the same ochre used to paint the bones of nomads long before the coming of sailed ships. The same bald hills where they had hunted. There were no trees here, not even gums. Tall, thin grass grew in clusters and danced in the wind.
Parked beyond the edge of the site was an excavator and a bulldozer, both of which were used in removing the bulk of the dirt from atop the fossil. Nearby were a row of portable toilets and three dusty four-wheel-drives that had ferried the diggers from their coastal home.
Closer in to the pit, there was a scattering of pitched tents where they sheltered from the cold desert night and the insects that night brought. Marquees had been erected around the pit itself, used to cover the tools and equipment, the dining tables and chairs. The fridge, the freezer, the toaster, the kettle. All hooked up to an old diesel generator.
A little village set up around this ancient fossil.
Jonathan paced along the edge of the pit like a foreman in a shipyard, long dark patches running down the back of his shirt and beneath his arms. It was the same with everyone. The sun bearing down without mercy, like some cruel god had placed a giant floating lens in the sky and they below were ants, burning.
Half the students were Jonathan’s, half belonged to his wife. Zoe was down in the pit among them and he stayed up above, observing from a distance. In another hour or so, they would switch places – he would go down to direct the eager young minds, and his wife would come up to observe. There could be only one leader at a time, so they divided that time equally between themselves.
Zoe’s skin burned easily in the sun, so she wore a brim hat large enough to shade three people and long sleeves made of light, breathable fabric. She was just as excited as any of her students, as passionate as when she was a student herself. And though her patience was often tested by the long hours of painstaking work with little or no result, that flame refused to burn out.
“There is always more to find,” she liked to tell her son, and those words had since been burned into his brain.
The boy watched, but said nothing. He was sixteen years old by his parents’ count and he figured they ought to know. Back on the day of his birth, they named him Jasper and didn’t seem to know why, other than they liked the sound of it.
Searching through history for famous namesakes, trying to uncover some hidden meaning, he found a few people of note, a few places. But most important
ly, he learned that jasper was a gemstone prized in the ancient world among the Persians and the Greeks. In that regard, he felt it was appropriate. It was also one of the birthstones of March – and he was born in September – so in that regard, it was not.
He’d always harboured a greater love for history than paleontology, which was its own kind of history, but of a much earlier time he cared less for. His passion lay in the achievements of humankind, from the moment they began walking upright to the present day. Not that dinosaurs didn’t hold a special place in his heart, they did. It was just a smaller part.
Jasper hadn’t reapplied his sunscreen in the last couple of hours, so his forearms had started to burn. He was wearing a similar shirt to his dad – a loose, button-down shirt that was rolled up to the elbows – but that wasn’t the only resemblance between them. Jonathan had on his head an Akubra hat like a cowboy might wear, and hardy steel-capped boots to match. Jasper had the same, looking much like a younger, smaller version of his father. A cowboy in training, as it were. Beneath his hat was a mop of brown hair that tended to grow out instead of down, and sharp hazel eyes that were always working. Not just passively watching, but analysing. Taking everything in.
The university students were, for him, a kind of makeshift family – constantly there, but every now and then, one would leave and a new person would arrive to join the tribe. In this way, his siblings were close, but unfamiliar, and they always stayed the same age. That’s not to say they were always in the field, or that Jasper didn’t have friends of his own – he did. In the small, seaside town where Jasper was raised, he went to school and spent his summers in the sand and the salt water. But a lot of the time, he wasn’t there. He was off with his parents on digs, being home-schooled – or rather, field-schooled. If he was at home, he would have been at school, so to him the term never made much sense, though his parents continued to use it.
