Jasper Flint and the Dinosaur Saddle

by Jack Geurts

  She was testing him now. Jasper thought about it. “Eridu?”

  Io nodded, apparently satisfied. “Eridu.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The First City

  On the road from Baghdad to Umm Qasr, as it passed by Nasiriya, there was a dirt trail that wound off into the desert. If followed, this trail would lead you in the direction of Lake Hammar, and just short of that lake, you would find the ruins of the world’s first city.

  Eridu.

  At the time of the city’s construction, it was situated on the marshy banks of the Persian Gulf, right near where the Euphrates River fed into it. But due to the build-up of silt on the shoreline over the millennia, it was now located almost 125 miles inland, surrounded by an ocean of sand stretching all the way to the horizon.

  Ironically, it was this desolate landscape that was known as the ‘cradle of civilisation’.

  The invisible Flight Pod slowed as it approached the site, again without any kind of action on Io’s part. Jasper had taken to thinking the vessel just moved of its own accord. As it eased to a mid-air hover, he leaned forward and gazed down at the ruins in awe.

  “Wow...” he breathed.

  The city below him was so long abandoned it had simply become part of the landscape, swallowed up by the encroaching desert tide. Man-made mudbrick and natural silt had fused together over time to create an archaeological maze. Indeed, to someone who didn’t know what they were looking for, it might seem as if the remains of buildings and temples were simply natural ridges jutting up from the earth.

  But Jasper knew the truth. This was the birthplace of the first writing, the first literature, the first wheel, the first school, the first map of the world. All of Western civilisation began here and rippled outwards through the centuries – all the way to the present moment, where Jasper found himself floating above the world, staring down at it. The sheer history of this place boggled his mind.

  Io saw this. She smiled at his boyish wonder.

  “Would you like to see something?” she said.

  He frowned. This wasn’t something?

  The Flight Pod manoeuvred around to the other side of the ruins so they were facing back the way they came. South-east.

  “What are you...?” he began, but didn’t get a chance to finish, because at that moment, Io held her gloved hand out toward the ruins and it began to glow blue.

  Jasper had a flashback to Janus’ hand glowing red as he stroked the dinosaur, but there was no time to dwell on this connection. In the very next instant, the outside world began to change, began to shift. The desert began to move as if in some kind of time-lapse video sequence. As if it was being fast-forwarded through time. Or rewound...

  Jasper saw the sand dunes shifting, changing place. Undulating like waves across an ocean – like the earth itself was alive. The sun rose and fell on different parts of the horizon every millisecond, interrupted only by the passing of the moon. The two celestial orbs moved so fast that they just became blurry arcs of orange and white, moving steadily around the world as it turned. Night, then day, then night again. A million dawns and dusks. A hundred years in a heartbeat.

  Jasper watched, wide-eyed, as the land reformed below him, moulded like wet clay by some unseen cosmic hand.

  By Io’s hand...

  He watched the water come flooding in from the horizon and realised the clock hands of the world had been set in reverse. He was indeed moving backwards through time.

  The waters of the Persian Gulf reclaimed their former territory, coming in to meet the mouth of the Euphrates River, which flowed freely once again from the north-west. Together, they spread out to form freshwater marshes long since dried. Thickets of reeds sprang up like islands, forming a semi-solid landmass dissected by canals.

  And there, where only moments ago stood mounds of rubble and debris, a city started to rebuild itself...

  The city of Eridu.

  Around a small inlet, a harbour took shape. Reed boats shot in and out at high speed, sailing away through the marshes and returning again in an instant – exploring a world that was yet unknown. The inlet stabbed into the heart of Eridu, coming in from the Gulf to meet...

  The ziggurat.

  Reforming from what it would become, the ziggurat rose again to its previous height and glory. A great raised platform accessed by ramps and stairs, it extended a small way down the southern side of the inlet, forming a crude L-shape. On top of this platform were three temples – one on the main base, one raised up higher on an additional platform, and one set low. The tallest temple faced straight down the length of the inlet and out to sea, while the lowest could scarcely be called a temple at all. It seemed more likely to be some kind of priests’ quarters.

  The entire complex was not exactly the pyramidal shape Jasper had in mind when he thought of a ziggurat, but then he reminded himself that this was the first one – no doubt changes were made before the architectural style was perfected in Uruk, Ur, Nippur, and later, Babylon.

  All around the central complex were houses – a low, flat sprawl of mudbrick dwellings, hundreds upon hundreds of them. They were clustered around the ziggurat and on either side of the inlet. Being made of mudbrick, in time, the houses would begin to crumble. When this happened, they were simply torn down and new houses were rebuilt on the ruins. In this way, the whole city was raised up over the surrounding landscape in a broad mound, known as a ‘tell’.

  At the peak of this tell, the great temple complex towered over all, propped up on the ruins of its own previous forms, dwarfing the houses and boats. Dominating the landscape in humanity’s first attempt to reach the heavens.

  The alluvial river plain stretched out beyond the city and along the marshy coast. Dark, rich soils – cultivated lands that were ploughed, went green with crops and then turned to soil again with the harvest. All of this happened in a second, and every second. The food was made, consumed, the city built – all before Jasper’s very eyes.

  Beyond that was the desert, the same hostile wasteland Jasper saw only moments ago in the present day – unchanged in all these thousands of years. Where the marshes rolled out to the south-east, and the river came in from the north, the desert sprawled forever into the west and south.

  It was impossible not to notice the three different ecosystems converging on this one place. The desert, the fertile river plain, and the marshes. Home to the herders, the farmers and the fishermen. Three ways of life coming together to build this city, to give birth to civilisation.

  Finally, Io’s glove stopped glowing and the world paused.

  The sun held still in the sky, the ships froze on the water below. It was a photograph of a moment in time – a still image of the city at its apex. An ancient metropolis at the dawn of civilisation.

  But Io wasn’t done yet.

  The Flight Pod started moving again, dipping down low toward the city. As they got closer, soaring just above the rooftops, Jasper gained an even deeper appreciation for the scope of it all. The one- and two-storey buildings became real, three-dimensional. They took on lifelike colours and shades of light. He could see the rough, mottled texture of the mudbrick up close. He could almost smell the damp, packed earth, the exposed riverbanks at low tide, drying in the sun. He could almost hear the warm, desert breeze teasing the fronds of palm trees. They grew tall amidst the houses, in courtyards and streets, their lush green foliage in stark contrast to the earthy hues of everything around them.

  And the people...

  The ancient Sumerians. Brown-skinned and black-haired. Mothers and children walking in the streets, the women dressed in ankle-length shawls, but leaving their right shoulder and arm uncovered. Their hair was braided and wrapped around their heads. They wore bracelets, necklaces, pendants and armbands. The jewellery of poorer women was made out of strung beads, while the rich had theirs moulded from gold or silver, inlaid with precious stones and obsidian – the black, volcanic glass glinted in the sun.

  The men wore jewell
ery, too – some of them even more adorned than the women. They were fewer in number and Jasper guessed many of them were out working in the fields. Those within the city led donkeys to market loaded with wares – rugs and clothes and other textiles, harvested crops from their farm. Many of them went about shirtless in the heat, with only knee-length skirts tied at the waist to clothe them. Unlike the women, they kept their hair short or shaved it off completely, and those with beards were few and far between.

  The clock hands of the world had not been paused at all, Jasper quickly realised, but rather slowed from their super-fast rewind to a normal pace. He almost couldn’t believe it – living, breathing people from over five thousand years ago.

  He saw a woman seated beneath a palm tree in a courtyard. She wore an elaborate headdress of gold, leaf-shaped ornaments and was plucking the strings of a lyre with delicate fingers. Children and grandparents had gathered before her to listen. None among them seemed to notice the two people floating past in their invisible spacecraft.

  “Can they see us?” said Jasper.

  Io shook her head. “No. Only we see out.”

  They kept going, too fast for Jasper to appreciate everything around him. He wanted to slow down and study every detail, every inch of this city. But when he looked over at Io, he saw her not even taking it in. She wasn’t marvelling at this impossible world the same way he was.

  Instead, she had her gloved palm facing the ground and was studying the tablet computer affixed to the back of her hand. There was a kind of radar displayed on it, reading the ground beneath them – her glove acting as the scanning device.

  “What are you doing?” Jasper said.

  “I am looking for the first Marker.”

  “You think it’s underground?”

  “Most likely, yes. At this point in time, it was left behind about four or five thousand years ago. I can’t see it displayed prominently anywhere, so it must have either been buried or housed in one of these temples.”

  “Where?”

  “Obviously, I do not know where,” she said, eyes alternating between the radar and the city as they zoomed over it. “That is precisely what I am looking for now.”

  Jasper sensed her growing irritation, like he was a kid repeatedly asking, “Are we there yet?” on a long car trip. So he went back to staring out at the ancient, resurrected city in awestruck silence.

  As they came to the swampy shoreline of the Gulf, the Flight Pod banked left and swung around to make another pass of the city, heading back along the inlet towards the harbour. On either side of the canal, the banks rose up in gentle clay slopes to the waterfront dwellings, and were dotted with small fishing boats that had been pulled ashore.

  Up ahead, the ziggurat loomed above the harbour. The larger fishing boats and trade vessels were beached on the shore or otherwise floating nearby, moored on anchored ropes, waiting to be docked. Under the direction of merchants and fishermen, slaves were unloading the goods from far-off lands, as well as the fish caught earlier in the day. All of it was taken up the great, wide staircase to the temples.

  In the case of one merchant vessel, the goods were slaves themselves. They were led by the captain in single file, each fixed with a wooden collar and lashed to the man in front and behind with a length of rope. The first in line was tugged forward by a leash held by the captain as if he were walking a dog, and the human chain shuffled forward, all of them half-naked and terrified, their hands bound tightly and their ankles loosely, so they could shuffle but not run.

  The Pod flew right over the bustling harbour and up over the ziggurat. Suddenly, Io’s radar started beeping...

  Jasper looked over, saw her eyes widen.

  “There...” she said, and pointed down. Jasper looked earthward at the great temple complex, then at Io’s radar. It showed the outline of the platforms, the buildings. And there at the centre of the highest temple was a red dot.

  The first Marker.

  “It is buried right below the main temple,” she said.

  The spaceship descended in a slow spiral and came to a hovering stop just above the roof of the temple. The legs of the plane extended and touched down gently. As they did, the Archaeopteryx lifted its drowsy head from beneath its tail and opened its mouth wide in a yawn. Dia blinked several times as it took in the new environment, like a child waking after a long car trip to find itself in a new place. For a moment, Jasper thought it looked almost cute.

  Then it noticed him.

  Immediately, its eyes narrowed to slits. Dia rose up out of the hat, lifting its red-feathered wings and trying to make itself look bigger, more intimidating. The message was clear: Jasper’s hat had now been re-purposed as a nest, and it belonged to Dia. But the effect was more comical than scary, and Jasper simply shooed it away. The creature squawked as it hopped out of the hat and scurried off after its master, who had already unbuckled herself and was descending the lowered ramp.

  The Pod remained invisible as Jasper followed them out onto the roof of the temple, setting the cowboy hat back atop his head. He was standing on what must have been the tallest building in the world at this point in time, and from that vantage point, he drank in the view. The shoreline he was looking at now had been forgotten in the present day, just like the shoreline of the inland sea in Australia where the dig site was located.

  Jasper wanted to see what the platform below the temple looked like. But as he went to take a step forward, Io quickly put a hand out to stop him.

  “Do not go near the edge,” she said. “We cannot let anyone see us.”

  Jasper paused, studying the rim of the rooftop. “For a second, I thought you were worried I might fall off.”

  “Well...that, too.”

  She said it a little awkwardly and Jasper wasn’t sure if she could tell he was joking, but he laughed anyway. “Now what?”

  “Now,” she said, “we wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For cover of darkness.”

  And so they waited.

  They waited until the sun had dropped low in the sky and turned a deep orange. It hung there above the horizon, casting a warm glow over the land, the sea, the city.

  They sat against the invisible legs of the Flight Pod, watching as the sailors and the last of the fishermen returned. The silhouettes of their boats passed through the narrow strip of light that glinted off the ripples and the surging waves, guided home by the towering ziggurat.

  Jasper and Io could hear the lapping of water against the hulls of boats and the earthen banks far below. They could hear the multitude of voices speaking in a dead tongue – a language they could not understand and that had not been spoken in over three thousand years. Arguing, haggling, laughing, singing.

  They could feel the throbbing warmth of the rooftop beneath them, the sun’s heat trapped within the stone. Jasper flattened his palms against the coarse masonry and ran them over it, still not believing this was real.

  Earlier, a great fire had been lit before the temple, and the smell of smoke and then incense filled the air. The voices began to sing in their extinct language – dozens of priests in unison. Jasper tried to imagine them gathered on the platform below, taking part in some kind of ritual.

  He wanted so badly to peer over the edge, to bear witness to this ancient custom, but he knew he wasn’t allowed. The music of lutes and lyres, of reed pipes and drums – all rose up to join the voices. The singing and the playing grew louder and faster until a lamb squealed, then everything went silent. Soon, the aroma of cooked meat rose up to mingle with the smoke and the incense.

  “Dia likes your hat,” Io said.

  The Archaeopteryx was nestled against her leg, purring like a cat as she gently stroked its feathers. It had its eyes closed in bliss and once more seemed totally harmless. Jasper wondered what it was about him that angered the creature so. Most likely, it was just that Dia was very protective of its master. Or maybe it just wanted his hat.

  “What do you call it?” Io sa
id.

  Jasper was surprised by the question. He took the cowboy hat off his head and studied it. “What do you mean? It’s a hat.”

  “Yes, but what do you call it?”

  “It doesn’t have a name, it’s just a cowboy hat.”

  “A cow-boy hat?” she said, sounding out the foreign word.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “That is a strange name for a hat.”

  Jasper laughed. “That’s just what it’s called.”

  “Are you a cowboy?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you wear it?”

  Jasper wasn’t quite sure how to answer that. “Well...I am a boy.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Are you also a cow?”

  “No.”

  “Then I am afraid I do not understand.”

  Jasper thought about how best to explain it. “A cowboy’s like a guy who rides a horse and works with cattle. So he’s a cow-boy.”

  “And do you ride a horse and work with cattle?”

  Jasper hesitated. “Well...no.”

  “Yet you still wear the hat?”

  She was smiling, joking with him now. But Jasper’s smile had faded. He looked down at the hat in his hands. “My dad gave it to me – he had one just like it.”

  Io went quiet. She felt bad for bringing it up. Jasper offered a weak smile to let her know it was okay, then placed the hat back atop his head.

  They sat there without speaking for a while, just watching the sunset. Now that the first Marker had been found and there was nothing to be done until nightfall, Io finally seemed to be recognising the beauty of this place. She could simply stop and stare, and marvel at this planet that was not her own – as alien to her as it was to Jasper.

  “Tell me about this place,” she said.

  Jasper looked over, but her gaze was fixed on the horizon. The sunlight made her scales shimmer, her feathers glow. She turned her yellow eyes to look at him and he realised he was staring, turned away. He tried to mask his embarrassment by saying, “Well, um...according to the ancient Sumerians, this was the city of the first kings.”