by Jack Geurts
Jasper lifted his body off Io, and Dia hopped out onto the ground, shaking the sand from his feathers. The G-Rex was gone – its body anyway. The bones still remained. An entire skeleton laid out over the amphitheatre, its skull facing him and seeming almost like it was smiling.
But not only was the dinosaur gone – so, too, was the ring of fire. The amphitheatre was once again open to the rest of the city, to the ruined pyramid towering overhead. Jasper knew this could only mean one thing – the test had been successfully completed. But at what cost?
He was turned away from Io, surveying the world around him, so he didn’t notice as her eyes flickered open...
“Jasper...” she said, her voice feeble.
He instantly turned back to her, not believing his eyes. “How...?”
But before he could ask the question, something caught his eye and he looked down...
His hand was glowing green.
Not his gloved hand. His bare hand. The hand that was resting on Io’s chest was glowing against the darkness of the plaza.
Neither of them spoke for a moment, both too shocked to believe it, then an overjoyed Dia leapt up onto Io’s chest and nuzzled into her neck. Jasper was about to swat him away, but relaxed when he saw Io laugh instead of scream. He helped her up into a sitting position and Dia dropped down into her lap. She smiled, stroking the bird as it nestled against her belly, then lifted a hand and ran it over her chest, feeling the mended breastplate beneath her scales.
Io looked up and met Jasper’s eye. His bare hand had stopped glowing now, but before she could say anything, she noticed something over his shoulder.
Jasper turned to see a crowd of people beginning to emerge from their huts with flaming torches. They were gathering at the edge of the amphitheatre, seeing that the monsters were gone and sensing no threat in the trio that remained. They watched the strangers with wide-eyed amazement and seemed reluctant to come any closer without invitation.
“Are you alright?” Jasper said. Io nodded and he helped her to her feet, steadying her as she got her balance. They turned to face the Norte Chico, looking around at the ancient city – the stone huts and the pyramids and the green fields beyond.
“You did it,” Io said, smiling proudly at him.
“We did it. Together.”
She nodded graciously, then turned to the G-Rex skeleton. “What happened?”
“After I dismounted, there was another sandstorm and that’s all that’s left.”
“You mean you did not kill it?”
Jasper was a little taken aback. “No. Why would I?”
“So, as I suspected, the test was not to defeat or kill the dinosaur, but to ride it as my people once did.”
“I don’t suppose your ancestors counted on me having to ride it into battle.”
“I suppose not,” she said, noticing the Window that Janus had stolen from her brother now strapped to Jasper’s wrist. With some hesitation, she added, “Is he gone?”
Jasper nodded.
“For good this time?”
“For good.” He paused, gauging her reaction. “Are you angry?”
She frowned, puzzled. “Why would I be angry?”
Jasper wasn’t sure how to word it. “You’ve been after Janus a lot longer than I have.”
Io could see he was struggling with his emotions, not meeting her eye.
“I am just glad he is gone,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “How do you feel?”
Jasper looked up at her, surprised by the question. The same disappointment washed over him again, the same numbness. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”
Seeking to change the subject, he turned his attention to the Flight Pod. “You reckon it’ll still fly?”
Io shrugged, and pointed her gloved hand at the spaceship. Slowly, it began to rise, hovering in the air. A few awed gasps could be heard from the crowd as Io moved the strange-looking craft with her mind – lifting it up higher and then turning her hand around so the palm was facing up. As she did this, the Flight Pod rotated 180 degrees on its axis so it was up the right way. She then brought it back down to rest on its telescopic legs, the lowered ramp touching to the sand.
“What now?” Jasper said. “The Marker didn’t tell us where to go next.”
“Maybe this is it.”
“What is?”
“This,” she said, gesturing to the crowd gathered there. “It would appear the map brought us here for two reasons. The first was to test your courage against the dinosaur and prove your worth.”
“And the second?”
“Perhaps it also meant to show us a certain way of life. A peaceful people who live in harmony with nature, instead of destroying it. Instead of destroying each other. Look at how you were supposed to ride the dinosaur, instead of kill it.”
Jasper thought about this. “But...what about people in the present day? How do we help them?”
Io didn’t have an answer for him.
“You said the map was going to save humankind,” Jasper said, growing heated.
“No, I said the map was supposed to provide a way for you to save yourselves. There was never any definite answer.”
“Then, what? We’re supposed to live like this? Leave our cities behind to go and build pyramids in the desert?”
“I did not design this map, Jasper. I know as much about it as you do. All I am saying is that it seems to be showing you how you ought to live.”
“That’s all well and good, but how do we get people to do that? They know what they should be doing, but they either can’t do it or they don’t want to.”
Io paused. “I do not know what to tell you, Jasper. I am sorry that you are disappointed, but...maybe there is no magic solution. Maybe this is all we get.”
Jasper wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but there didn’t seem to be any substitute, any more clues to follow. They had come to the end of the road.
Letting out a sigh, he did the only thing he could think of doing – he went over to the fossilised bones of the G-Rex and began removing the saddle. With a heavy heart, he undid all the buckles and pulled the straps free so he could get it clear of the spine. It seemed that all of this had been for nothing – or if it had been for something, he couldn’t figure out what it was yet.
As he pulled the saddle off his mount, Jasper heard a man speaking in a language he could not understand. A language that hadn’t been spoken in millennia.
He turned to see the man stepping forward, pointing at something. He was tall and strong-looking, probably a leader in the community. Jasper looked around, trying to see what it was he was gesturing to. Io shrugged – she didn’t know either. The man spoke again, stabbing the air with his finger and seeming to indicate the dinosaur’s head.
Jasper turned once again...and then he saw it.
The back of the G-Rex’s skull was glowing blue.
His eyes went wide and he set the saddle down. Together with Io, Jasper rushed to the fossil’s head and studied what appeared to be a carving of some kind, the lines of which were glowing blue. At first, he thought it might be a crack in the bone or maybe a deep gash from the pterosaur’s talons. But this wasn’t a natural injury like that – this was man-made.
Or Precursor-made, he thought.
A single, wavy line came up from the base of the skull, then branched out into many separate lines, with even more lines coming off of those. These continued outward in a kind of V-shape and then came to a stop, so their endings made a rough dome. Jasper thought it looked like a tree, or some kind of root system.
He stared at the glowing lines that had been carved with an artist’s hand, as beautifully rendered as something could be in bone. Then it came to him.
“Egypt,” he said, so quiet Io almost didn’t hear him. “It’s the river delta in Egypt.”
Jasper nodded a thank you to the man who had pointed it out. Then he turned back to Io, both of them with great, big smiles on their faces. This wasn’t the
end of the road after all – there was still hope.
“What are we waiting for?” she said. And without wasting a second, they waved goodbye to the crowd and climbed back into the Flight Pod, Jasper carrying the saddle and Dia waddling after them.
The people of Caral could only watch as the alien vessel rose up into the air, drawing in its ramp and legs. A number of them stepped back in fright and ducked as it shot off over their heads, heading east toward the mountains. They turned and watched it go, watched as it picked up speed and then vanished entirely from sight.
When they had recovered from the shock of this, their attention returned to the great dinosaur skeleton sprawled out in the middle of their plaza – to the half-collapsed pyramid rising over it.
For the rest of their lives, they would wonder about what had happened here. They would gather around fires and tell stories to their children of men who had done battle on the backs of giants. Who had fought atop a pyramid, and brought another one to ruin. Who had ridden through fire, and flown away in a giant orb that vanished forever into another realm.
PART V
THE BRIDGE OF TIME
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Land Of The Pharaohs
The pyramids of Ancient Egypt were so astounding to Jasper that he sometimes forgot they were ruins. But clustered there on the edge of the desert, only a stone’s throw from the urban sprawl of Cairo, that’s exactly what they were. The exposed blocks of stone that people often think of when thinking of the pyramids were actually the structural core of the building.
Back when they were built, this core was coated in a layer of white limestone that made the sides of the pyramid smooth – as if it was all one single block that had been chiselled into shape. At night, the pyramids would catch the cold light of the moon and glow eerily in the dark – in the sun, these monuments would be blinding white, acting as a beacon to far-off travellers wandering in from the desert and serving as a symbol of the pharaoh’s magnificence.
Right now, that’s exactly what Jasper was looking at.
Io had set the clock hands of the world in reverse and they watched as the city of Cairo slowly retreated and the pyramids regained their former glory. There were three of them, standing in a row and ordered in terms of age and size. The smallest and most recent of the three was Menkaure’s Pyramid. The middle pyramid was built by Menkaure’s father, Khafre, and seemed to be the tallest, but that was only because it was built on higher ground than the oldest and largest pyramid of all.
Khufu’s Pyramid. Otherwise known as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Rising up to 146 metres, it had been the tallest structure on earth for almost four thousand years, until the spire of the Lincoln Cathedral in England was raised in 1311 CE. In the era Jasper and Io were visiting, it glistened in white with its two younger, smaller siblings. Each of them were topped with a gold capstone that glowed even brighter in the sun than the white sheen of their flanks. Out of the pyramids Jasper seen in Eridu, China, Peru and now Egypt, these were easily the closest replicas of the Precursor Markers that had inspired them.
Despite being impressive, the pyramids Jasper had seen outside modern-day Cairo – the ones that tourists took photos of and archaeologists studied – were shadows of their former selves.
Scattered around the base of these giants were funerary complexes made up of rectangular mastabas where nobles were buried, smaller pyramids for the pharaoh’s wives, and mortuary temples connected to a canal in the valley down below by means of long, roofed causeways. All of it was cased in polished, white limestone, stark against the orange sands of the desert.
Down by the canal, other mortuary temples sat facing the water. Not far back from a small inlet where reed fishing boats were moored, the Great Sphinx lay flat against the sand, its head raised and front paws extended outward.
Io stopped the Time Reversion in the middle of the third millennium BCE and was moving slowly over the necropolis, scanning for the red dot that would signify the fourth Marker. They had made several passes of the pyramid complex already with no success, so now she brought them in low towards the waterline, and it was here that Jasper got a good look at the Sphinx.
Built in the time of Khafre, the Great Sphinx was a monolithic statue, carved out of a single piece of rock. It had the body of a lion and the head of a man, and the face was thought to be modelled on Khafre himself. Situated between his pyramid and the canal, it acted like a guard dog for all eternity.
In the present day, its nose and tube-shaped goatee were missing. There were stories that the nose was pried off by an angry Muslim gentleman in 1378 CE, who found locals making offerings to the Sphinx in return for a good harvest. The gentleman apparently found this to be an affront to his own god and was hanged for his vandalism. Another tale went that the nose was shot off by Napoleon’s troops during target practice as the 18th century drew to a close.
But as Jasper saw it now, the nose was intact – so, too, was the pharaonic goatee that hung beneath its chin. The beard was painted in blue and gold stripes, as was the headdress, while the face and body were coloured a dark red. Details on the face, such as white-painted eyes lined with blue, made it look distinctly more human than its present-day ruin.
“There!” Io said, and Jasper was jolted from his reverie to see a glowing red dot in the outline of the Sphinx on her Window.
“Under the Sphinx?” he said.
“It appears so, yes.”
Io brought the Flight Pod to a hover just before the statue, its giant eyes staring at them – like it could see them even though they were invisible, even though it was a lifeless statue. Io raised her glove and concentrated a Time Reversion to the Sphinx itself, leaving the rest of the pyramid complex untouched.
Scaffolds were erected in reverse around the statue and the paint was stripped away in stages. First, the red of the body and face vanished, then the blue and gold of the headdress and goatee, until finally, it stood there as white and polished as the pyramids it lay before.
In due course, the white limestone disappeared also. They kept moving backwards through time, watching as huge stone blocks were removed from the Sphinx’s chest until Io slowed the Reversion to an almost-normal speed.
“There,” she said, pointing to a hole that the workers were in the process of sealing off (or clearing away, since they were moving in reverse). It was the entrance to a chamber within the Sphinx. Jasper’s eyes lit up.
Io wound the clock back a little more so it was night, then brought time back to normal. Under cover of darkness, they landed on the left paw of the Sphinx and climbed down the mound of stone blocks that had been heaped against it – the blocks that would shortly be used to wall off the hidden entrance forever. Dia insisted on coming so harm would not befall his master a second time, and Io didn’t have the heart to refuse him. He descended the stone blocks in awkward, flapping bounds alongside them.
Two spearmen had been posted at the end of either paw, but they were facing outwards, like the guards at Eridu had been. Also like those guards, they reasonably assumed that no threat would come from above, and so neither of them noticed as two small figures and a third even smaller figure clambered down the stone blocks and disappeared inside the Sphinx’s chest.
Io’s glove was dim enough that no one outside would notice, but bright enough that they could move forward safely. The tunnel burrowed downwards at an angle, not unlike the one at Caral, and they began picking their way down the rocky slope.
They walked for the better part of an hour, neither of them saying much to the other – both were too busy wondering what they might find at the bottom of this tunnel. As Jasper followed Io’s silhouette amidst the bluish-green light of their gloves, he found himself wondering if this was the kind of environment Janus had been born into.
A world of total darkness. A world without warmth. He found it hard to imagine how a person raised in such a place wouldn’t turn out the way Janus did. Born in the dark, raised in the dark, taught t
o be afraid of the sun. Forced to hear and smell your way. Forced to feel your way along damp, rocky walls until you could rely enough on your other senses. Taught to hate the people who had forced you underground. Told stories of an ancient homeland far away where your people once thrived and could thrive again. Wanting nothing more than to lead them there, out of the cold and the dark. Dreaming only of a better life for your people.
All of this did little to soothe Jasper’s guilt.
He tried to put it from his mind as they pressed on, advancing further into the earth, the air growing colder. Io didn’t seem to notice the drop in temperature, but pretty soon, Jasper was shivering – even in the fleece-lined jacket that he wore. His breath fogged up in the air before him, and he was beginning to think that the tunnel would never end – that it would just keep going until they came to the centre of the earth.
On the way over, Jasper and Io had talked about what happened in Caral. First of all, they discussed the people who had seen them and what impact that might have on future events. Though earlier, she had been adamant that they not be seen in the past, she conceded this time that it was unavoidable – that the chips would fall where they may. It was more important that Janus had been taken out of the equation so they could go about following the map without interference. Jasper had only nodded at this and turned away.
They had also wondered if the glowing image of Egypt’s delta would have appeared on the back of the G-Rex’s skull had they killed it instead. Maybe it had been there all along and could be seen by either killing the dinosaur or riding it. The latter seemed to have been the goal of the test, as once Jasper had successfully ridden the beast and dismounted again, the G-Rex returned to its fossilised form. They agreed that the test had been designed that way, given her people’s respect for the creatures – but it was also possible that had they simply killed the dinosaur, the image would still have been carved into the back of its skull.
Maybe once it was dead, the G-Rex would have been swallowed up by the time-shifting whirlwind and its bones laid bare. Maybe it would have been a matter of waiting for the flesh to decay or removing it themselves – neither of which would have occurred to them. In the end, they came to the conclusion that it was a choice the subject of the test had to make, and both of them felt they had made the right one.
