Orion

CHAPTER 22

My eyes opened and showed me a blue sky bright with sunshine and puffy white clouds. The memory of Karakorum, of Ogotai and the Mongols, faded from my mind like a distant, echoing song. All I could think of was Agla, the sound of her voice, the touch of her vibrantly warm skin, her beautiful face. “Ormazd,” I thought, “do you understand what suffering is? Do you know how cruel you are?”

Yet, even as I said those words to myself, I had the feeling that I would meet her again. Aretha, Agla, whatever her true name was — she was bound to me, and I to her, through all of time. No matter how many centuries separated us, we would find each other. I knew it with all my soul.

I realized that I was lying on my back. Sitting up, I surveyed my new location. It was a broad open meadow of cool grass that sloped gently down toward a distant river. Trees grew at the water’s edge, the first trees I had seen in a long while. The grass itself was long and wild and matted; no blade had ever cut it, from the looks of it. Wild flowers dotted the land with color. Rocks and boulders jutted here and there; no one had ever cleared them away. The trees by the river swayed in a warm wind; they rose up from a tangle of low foliage that hugged the river’s bank. There was no sign of civilization, no sign of human beings ever having been here.

A rabbit’s brown, lop-eared head popped up from the grass. It eyed me, nose twitching, as I sat there, then hopped up closer, well within arm’s reach. It had no fear of me at all. After a few moments of inspection, it bounded away and disappeared into the long grass once again.

I looked down at myself. My garments were a simple kilt made of hide and a leather vest. A braided belt around my waist held a small knife. I drew it from the belt and saw that it was made of a smooth stone handle and a blade of chipped flint, tied to the handle rather clumsily with what looked like dried pieces of vine.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to puzzle out where and when I might be. Obviously I had been sent backward through time again. Ahriman had told me I was moving back toward The War, from the twentieth century to the thirteenth to the…

I looked down at the crude knife in my hand once more. I was in the Stone Age, apparently. This time Ormazd had flung me backward not mere centuries; I had traveled back ten thousand years or more.

From the tortured hell of a blazing nuclear fury to the barbaric splendor of the capital of the Mongol empire, and now to this. A calm, grassy meadow on a sweet, sunlit morning. An Eden where humans were so rare that animals did not fear them. Civilization had not yet begun. Not even the first villages had been started. The pyramids of Egypt were a hundred centuries or more in the future. Glacial ice sheets still covered much ofEurope, retreating grudgingly as the Ice Age gave way to a warmer climate.

Here it was springtime. Flowers bloomed everywhere. Insects buzzed and scurried through the grass. Birds swooped and sang overhead. I must be far south of the ice, I reasoned, or in a region where the glaciers had never penetrated.

I got to my feet. It was a beautiful part of the world, serene and untouched by human hands. Yet I knew that if Ormazd had sent me here, it was because there were humans in this time and place. And Ahriman. He would be here, too. Somehow, this spot was a nexus in the space-time continuum, a pivotal location where Ahriman planned to change the course of events. My task was to stop him, at all costs, and kill him if I could.

At all costs. I could feel my face harden into a grimace of anger and frustration. What did death mean to one such as Ahriman? Or to me? Pain, the shock of separation, the grief of loss. But all that was temporary. A moment, a blink of an eye later, and centuries or millennia had melted away and we still lived, still existed, only to begin the cycle anew: hunter and hunted, prey and predator — kill or be killed. Must it go on forever, endlessly? Was there no peace in all of space-time? Was there no place for me to rest and live like a normal man?

You are Orion, a voice within my mind spoke to me. Orion the Hunter. Your task is to find Ahriman and kill him. Through all the eons of time, if need be, you must seek out the Dark One and destroy him before he succeeds in destroying all humankind. For this purpose you were created. Ask nothing more.

I knew it was Ormazd’s command, and I had no choice but to obey it. I knew that asking for something more, for rest or love or simply oblivion and an end to all existence, was futile; Ormazd would never grant me any of it. I knew that I would do his bidding because I had no real choice. But I did not have to like it. Nothing that Ormazd could do to me could make me serve him happily, willingly. I did what I did out of necessity, out of a sense of duty to my fellow human beings. But not out of love, or even respect, for the God of Light.

I walked to the river. It was pleasant, at first, strolling easily under the warm morning sun. My feet were bare, and I had to smile to myself to think that now I did not even have the sandals that I had worn in the time of the Mongols — the sandals that had caught Ogotai’s notice. But my smile vanished as I remembered Ogotai, his pain, and how I had murdered the man who had befriended a stranger from a distant time.

The going was more difficult along the river’s bank; the brush grew thick and tangled here. Thorns scratched at my bare arms and legs as I forced my way through. At last I stood at the water’s edge, with the big trees swaying and sighing above me in the gentle breeze.

The river was slow and sluggish, meandering gently through the grassy plain. I knelt down and drank from its clear water. Off to my right I saw a row of stones rippling the water’s surface; they had been lined up roughly to form a path across the river. This was the first sign that human beings had been here: a ford.

I made my way across the river and began climbing the gentle slope that led up and away toward a line of low hills. As I reached the crest of the ridge line, I saw that the land became more rugged, serrated into row after row of hills, each line rising slightly higher than the one before it. And off in the distance, floating like a disembodied ghost in the bluish haze, rose a strange double-peaked mountain. One of its cones was covered with snow at the top, but the snow was streaked with dark gray, and a thin wavering line of whitish smoke snaked upward and dissipated in the clean blue sky.

A slumbering volcano. Something about the mountain’s double-peaked shape stirred a faint memory within me, but I couldn’t pin down exactly what it was.

With a shake of my head, I turned to go back down the hill. The river-watered meadow looked better to me than these ridges.

That’s when I saw them, coming over the ridge line about fifty yards to my right. Silhouetted against the bright springtime sky, a string of thirty-some people walked single file, heading in my direction.

I blinked. For a moment I thought they might be Mongols and that I had not traveled through time at all. But they were afoot, not mounted. And they were slender, fair of skin, their hair reddish and wild and long. Their clothes were hides, like mine. They were caked with dirt and I could smell their sweat and grime on the breeze. A few mangy, bone-thin dogs accompanied them. They bared their fangs and snarled at me, but they stayed near their masters.

The red-bearded man leading them carried a pole with the skull of a horned animal fixed to its top. He raised the pole and halted so abruptly that the children, back toward the end of the line, bumped into their elders and jostled them. I almost laughed — until I saw that all of the men, and several of the younger women, carried long, slim spears tipped with blackened, fire-hardened points. Even the pole carrying the groups totem was actually a spear.

For several moments the red-haired people did nothing but gape at me, their expressions ranging from puzzlement to curiosity to fear. Hands fingered stone knives. Several of them shifted their long, knobby-shafted spears to their throwing hands. I saw that all the women were armed, at least with knives, and even the bigger children carried sticks or clubs. The dogs continued to growl menacingly.

A Stone Age hunting clan, out of the dawn of human history. Shaggy-haired, unkempt, gaunt with the tautness of constant hunger, and as wary of a stranger as a bird is wary of a snake. Yet they were human, fully; just as human as I. Perhaps even more so.

The red-bearded leader’s upraised arm still hung poised in the air as he looked me over very carefully. A young woman stepped up beside him. My heart leaped inside my chest. She was redheaded, just like the rest of them, and matted with filth. But even from this distance I could see that was Agla/Aretha.

She showed no sign of recognizing me, though. I saw her lips move as she spoke to the leader, but her tones were too low for me to hear her words.

The leader silenced the dogs with a gesture, then turned and gestured to two of the younger men, further down the line. They glanced at each other in the classic Why me? expression, but they started walking slowly, reluctantly, along the grassy slope toward me, hefting their long spears as they approached. The rest of the clan gathered around their leader in a ragged semicircle, ready to charge at me or run away, back over the crest of the ridge, depending on what happened next.

The pair approaching me were teen-agers, the Stone Age equivalent of cannon fodder. They were beardless, but their coppery hair was shoulder-long and matted. I could almost see the vermin living in it. Every muscle and tendon in their arms and torsos was rigid with tension. Their knuckles were white as they gripped their spears and held them pointed at me. They were too skinny, hollow-cheeked, and young to look truly fierce, but they certainly lacked nothing in grim determination.

I raised both my hands, palms outward, in what I hoped they would understand as a sign of peace. At least they could see that I held no weapons. They halted a good ten yards from me close enough to drive a spear clean through me, if I were slow enough to allow that to happen.

“Who are you?” asked the one on the left, in a quavering, cracking adolescent’s voice.

I wasn’t surprised that I understood their language. Ormazd had programmed it into me, no doubt, during my brief transition from one time era to another. If I could converse with the Mongols, or the twentieth-century Americans, for that matter, why not with these primitives whose language has not been spoken for millennia?

“I am a traveler, from afar,” I replied.

“What are you doing here?” asked the other one. His voice was a bit deeper, but equally shaky. He raised his spear as he spoke, ready to throw it at me.

I kept my hands outstretched from my body. I knew that I could snap both their spears and their bones anytime I chose to. But I doubted that I could handle the whole clan if they decided to rush me all at once.

“I come from far away,” I said, loud enough for their leader to hear me. “I have traveled a long, long time.” No lie, I told myself. “I am a stranger in your land and seek your help and protection.”

“Traveled?” asked the second one. “Alone? You travel alone?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head vehemently. “You lie! No one can travel alone. The beasts would kill you, or the spirits of the dead. No man walks by himself, without a clan.”

“I speak the truth,” I said. “I have traveled a great distance, alone.”

“You belong to another clan. They are hiding nearby, waiting to ambush us.”

So there was warfare here. Killing. I felt a great sadness wash over me. Even in this young Eden human beings murdered one another. But I looked past the two frightened, suspicious youths at the young woman standing by the leader’s side. Her eyes met mine. They were as gray and deep as those eyes I knew so well. But there was no spark of recognition in them, no hint of understanding. She was a woman of her time, a Stone Age huntress, as savage and uncouth as the rest of them.

“I am alone,” I repeated. “I have no clan. That is why I want to join you. I am weary of being alone. I seek your friendship.”

They glanced back over their shoulders at their leader, then turned back to me.

“You cannot be of the Goat Clan,” said the deeper-voiced one. “Who is your mother? Who is your father? They are not of the Goat Clan. You are not of the Goat Clan.”

It was all very simple in their minds. Either you were born into the clan or you were an outsider, a threat, a danger. Perhaps you could marry into the clan, but more likely a male took his bride to his own clan. Women could be traded back and forth, but not men, I was willing to bet. And the horned skull on the leader’s pole had been a goat. I smiled to myself. It was a good totem. The goat is a hardy animal, willing to eat almost anything and as tough as the flint these people used for tools and weapons.

“It is true that I am not of your clan. I have no clan. I would like to stay with you. It is not good for a man to be alone.”

They wavered, uncertain, and looked back at the leader again. He was scratching his red beard, frowning in concentration. He had never encountered a problem like this before.

“I can help you,” I coaxed. “I am a good hunter. My name is Orion. It means Hunter.”

Their jaws fell. All of them. Not merely the two youths, but the leader and the rest of the clan gaped at me. Even the dogs seemed to become more alert.

“Yes,” I said. “Orion means Hunter. What are your names? What do they mean?”

Both the lads started yelling and brandishing their spears at me. Their pupils were dilated with rage and fear as sweat broke out on their bodies and the veins in their necks began to throb furiously.

Beyond them, the whole clan surged and roared. Without a visible signal from the leader they hefted their weapons and swarmed down the slope toward me, dogs and all. The two teen-agers were jabbing their spears at me, working up the courage to make a real attack.

I made a very quick, very human decision. I turned and ran. I had no desire to frighten them further or to risk being swarmed under and hacked to bloody pieces by their primitive weapons. So I ran, as fast as I could.

They threw spears at me, but I easily avoided them. There was no organized pattern to their fusillade; over my shoulder I could see the individual shafts wobbling across the sky so slowly that I could have turned and caught them if I had wanted to. Instead, I simply dodged as I ran.

They chased after me, but their speed and endurance were nowhere near mine. Not even the dogs could keep up with me. Besides, they were merely trying to chase me away; you always run better when your goal is to save your own skin. In less than a minute I was beyond the range of their spears. Their leader sent a relay of four men after me, but their endurance was pitifully short. I jogged down toward the river, crashed through the underbrush, and dove into the cold water with a huge, belly-whopping splash.

I swam to the other side and crawled up into the foliage along the bank. My erstwhile pursuers stopped on their side of the river, pointing in my general direction, yelling and shouting angrily, but never so much as dipping a toe into the turgidly flowing water. The dogs yapped, but stayed close to the men.

After a while they turned away and headed back toward the rest of the clan. I crawled out of the brush and stretched myself on the grass to let the afternoon sun dry me.

CHAPTER 23

By nightfall I had reasoned out what had upset them so badly. Names. Primitive tribes are naturally wary of strangers, and in a landscape as thinly populated with humans as this one, strangers must be extremely scarce. Primitives are also very superstitious about names. Even in the time of the Mongols no one willingly spoke the name of Timujin, Genghis Khan.

To these Stone Age hunters, a person’s name carried his soul and strength with it. To give your name to a stranger is to expose yourself needlessly and to invite witchcraft and danger, like voluntarily giving your fingernail clippings or strands of hair to a voodoo priestess.

Thinking back on the afternoon’s encounter, I could see that I had shocked them when I voluntarily told them not only my name but also its true meaning. And when I asked them for their names, they attacked me. Obviously they thought me a demon or a warlock. I had terrified them and made them triply afraid of me.

As the sun set behind the row of rocky hills across the river and the sky flamed into achingly beautiful reds and purples, I picked out a mossy spot next to a tree for my night’s sleep. I usually need only an hour or two of rest, but I felt physically weary and even more spent mentally.

Then the distant roar of a hunting lion echoed through the darkening evening. Reluctantly I got up from the soft moss and climbed the tree. A pair of squirrels chittered at me angrily, then scampered back into their hole. I found a sturdy notch and settled into it. The bark was rough and hard, but I fell asleep almost immediately, thinking of Agla.

But it was Ormazd who came to me in my sleep.

It was not a dream; it was a purposeful communication. I saw him shining against the darkness of night, his golden hair glowing with light and his face smiling, yet somehow neither happy nor pleased.

“You have found the tribe.” It was neither a question nor an acknowledgment of success — merely a statement of fact. His robes were golden, glowing. He was seated, but on what I could not see.

“Yes, I found them,” I reported. “But I frightened them and they chased me away.”

“You will gain their trust. You must.”

“Yes,” I said. “But why? What is so important about a gaggle of primitives?”

Ormazd looked as splendid as a Greek god, radiant against the darkness. But as I studied his face more closely, I saw that he was a troubled god, weary of struggle and pointless questions from mere mortals.

“The Dark One seeks to destroy this… gaggle of primitives, as you call them. You must counter him.”

I wanted to say no; I wanted to tell him that I would refuse to do his bidding unless he gave me the woman I loved, unharmed and safe from the wrenching separations of this endless quest through time. The thought was in my mind, the demand on my lips.

But, instead, I heard myself asking meekly, “What does Ahriman stand to gain from killing a small clan of Stone Age hunters? How would that affect human history?”

Ormazd eyed me disdainfully. “What matter is that to you? Your appointed task is to kill Ahriman. You have failed in that task twice, although you have managed to thwart his schemes. Now he is stalking this clan of primitives; therefore, you will use the clan as bait to stalk him. What could be simpler?”

“But why me?” I pleaded. “Why have I been taken from my own time to hunt down Ahriman? I haven’t the strength to kill him — you must know that! Why can’t you deal with him yourself? Why must I die when I don’t even understand…”

“You do not understand!” Ormazd’s voice was suddenly thunder, and the brightness radiating from him became too painful to look at directly. “You are the chosen instrument for the salvation of the human race. Ask no pointless questions, and do as you must.”

I had to shield my eyes with my upraised hands, but I pressed on. “I have a right to know who I am and why I am being made to do this.”

Ormazd’s blazing eyes felt hotter than the nuclear fires that had killed me ten thousand years in the future.

“You doubt me?” he rumbled. It was not a question, it was a threat.

“I accept you. But that is different from understanding. I had a life of my own once, didn’t I? If I must die…”

“You will die and be reborn as often as is necessary.”

“No!”

“Yes. You must die to be reborn. There is no other way to step through time, not for you and your kind. For mortals there is no way to move across time except through death.”

“But the woman, Agla… Aretha — what other?”

For many moments Ormazd was silent, his lips drawn into a tight line. Then he spoke again, more softly. “She is in danger from the Dark One. Ahriman seeks to destroy her, and me, and all of the continuum. If you wish to save her, you must kill Ahriman.”

“Is it true that you, your race—” I hesitated, then plunged on — “that you annihilated Ahriman’s race, all of his kind, except for him?”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“He is the Prince of Lies.”

That was no answer, I realized. But it was all the answer I was going to get.

“When was The War?” I asked. “What happened?”

“That is something that you must discover for yourself,” Ormazd replied, his image beginning to waver and fade before my eyes. Then he added, “And for me.”

I Was stunned. “Wait! Do you mean that you yourself don’t know what happened? You don’t know what took place in The War? What your race did to his?”

But he was only a pinpoint of light now, dwindling into the all-engulfing blackness. I heard his voice calling, from far away:

“Why do you believe that my race is not the same as yours, Orion? Are we not father and son?”

With a shock I realized that I was staring at the dark night sky. Twinkling stars gazed back at me from the depth of space as I clung to the tree’s rough bark and searched the bowl of heaven for understanding, for meaning. I sought out the constellation of Orion, but it was nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER 24

For days on end I trailed the Goat Clan as it marched across the Neolithic landscape. I had to get them to accept me, but they were totally xenophobic; either you were born a member of the clan or married a member of the clan — or you were an outsider, to be shunned and feared.

But Ormazd’s command was clear. I must save this clan from Ahriman’s plan, whatever it might be; I must use this clan to trap the Dark One.

And the woman — the gray-eyed one whose beauty could not be hidden even by layers of grime and ignorance — I knew she was the one I had known as Agla, and even before then, as Aretha. But she gave no hint of recognizing me. Was she reborn each time I was, but without any memories at all of her previous lives? Why would Ormazd do that?

I thought I knew the answer. She was my local barometer, as native to this time and place as any other member of her clan. If I could get her to accept me, the rest of the clan would.

And I wanted her to accept me. I wanted her to love me, as she had loved me ten thousand years ago, as I have loved her through all time.

But they were a superstitious, fearful troop of savages whose prime instinct was to flee from the unknown — and kill strangers.

I watched them from afar. They spent much of their days hunting, the younger women beating the bushes for rabbits, squirrels, and anything else they could find, while the men roamed farther afield, looking for bigger game and generally finding none. The older women stayed by their campfire, tending the children and gathering edible plants and berries.

By dusk they were all gathered around their fire, the women cooking their meager meals, the men chipping new tools from stores of flint they carried in leather bags or hardening their spear points in the flames. They were a self-contained, self-sufficient group, living off the land, staying just above the starvation-level as long as they did not produce too many children.

Twentieth-century ecologists despaired of “modern” man’s so-called throwaway culture and pointed to primitive tribes who, they claimed, lived in harmony with nature. Here I was watching the origins of the throwaway culture. These Neolithic hunters walked to a campsite, cut down brush and stripped trees of their smaller limbs to build a fire, killed whatever game they could find and tossed their bones away when they were finished gnawing on them. They left discarded flakes of flint, tools and weapons that were no longer useful, wherever they dropped them.

The smoke from their fires did not damage the purity of the Neolithic air. Their scattered refuse piles did not contaminate the soil. Their pitiful little camps did not harm the water table, nor did their hunting endanger any animal species. But the attitudes of these simple nomadic hunters would become the ingrained attitudes of all the generations of humans that followed them. What was acceptable for a few scattered bands of primitive hunters became a major environmental problem when those hunters’ descendants began to number in the billions.

But, despite myself, I had to smile as I watched them, day after day, and thought of the absurd assumptions that twentieth-century ecological moralists made about primitive peoples.

This was not accomplishing my mission, however. After several days of observing them, mostly from hiding, but now and then blatantly enough so that they could see me and know I was trailing them, I hit upon a scheme that would get them to accept me — I hoped.

I had boasted to them of my skill as a hunter. It had been mostly empty words; the only hunting I had ever done had been at Ogotai’s side in the great Mongol killing drive. But I knew that my reflexes and senses were far enough beyond theirs to give me a great advantage over them in anything that required physical exertion and skill. After watching them stalking game and building their primitive snares, and usually failing to catch anything, I knew that I could improve on their methods.

So I began taking game from the countryside and leaving it at their smoldering campfire while they slept. Innocents that they were, they posted no guards as they slept out in the open. The fire protected them from dangerous night-stalking beasts, and other human tribes must have been too far away to pose a threat to them. It was easy for me to leave a brace of fowl or a rabbit or two that I had flushed out of the brush and killed by throwing small rocks at them.

It took me several tries, but eventually I fashioned a crude bow and learned how to make arrows that would fly halfway accurately. I brought down a young doe with my new weapon, although I had to finish the job with my knife. I left the catch at their campfire just before dawn.

I watched them each morning, from a distance and always from concealment behind rocks or bushes. They were startled at first, wondering how the dead game appeared in their midst. They discussed it for hours at a time, some members of the clan apparently believing that others had done the deed. But no one admitted to it, and after a few mornings of finding the gifts by their campfire, they began to realize that it was the work of an outsider.

That made them fearful, even though they ate the offered gifts just as though they had caught it themselves. But they started to post sentries through the night. At first they were drowsing youths, and I managed to slip past them easily enough. Then a few of the adult men stood guard, but it was a rare night when they stayed alert enough to prevent me from leaving a gift near the smoldering campfire.

Gradually I began to let them see me, but always at a distance. I would hold a fowl in my upraised hand or carry a young buck across my shoulders. They would huddle together and stare at me in awe. In the dark of night I would sneak in close enough to their crackling fire to listen to their talk, and before morning streaked the sky, I would leave the prize that they had seen me with the previous day.

Soon enough they turned me into a legend. Orion was eleven feet tall. His eyes darted flame. He could leap across rivers and stop spears in midair merely by glancing at them with his fierce countenance. He was a mighty hunter who could bring down a mastadon single-handedly.

Their talk of mastadons intrigued me. Apparently the clans came together, later in the year, and hunted down truly big game together. The elders — who may have been all of thirty-five years, or even forty — told tales of grand hunts where they chased entire herds of mighty tusked behemoths over the edge of a cliff and then feasted on their carcasses to bursting.

I listened also to the names they called themselves, and I learned that the red-bearded leader was Dal and the teen-ager with the cracking voice was Kralo. The woman I had loved in other times was known as Ava — and she was Dal’s woman, I soon realized. That hurt. For days I wandered away from the clan, feeling alone and betrayed by a woman who had none of the memories I had, whose only sight of me had been that first day when I had surprised and terrified the entire clan. What did you expect? I raged at myself. These savages don’t have the time or the resources to allow women to go unmated. Did you think she would wait for your arrival? She didn’t even know you existed until a few weeks ago. Even now she thinks you are a demon or a god, not a man who loves her and wants to possess her.

Still I moped and sulked, filled with self-pity and a smoldering anger at Ormazd, who could put me into this situation without a thought about my feelings.

After three days away from them spent nursing my aching heart, I realized that I was not doing myself or them any good. I decided to return to the task that had been set before me. In truth, there was nothing else that I could do. I was a pawn in Ormazd’s game, and the emotions of a pawn are not important to the chess master.

I sneaked back to their camp that night and listened to them asking themselves why the mighty Orion had abandoned them. What had they done to offend the great hunter? It took all my self-control to keep from laughing. How quickly the miraculous becomes common-place! The gifts of food that had frightened them, at first, they now considered quite normal. It was the absence of the formerly wonderful gifts that troubled them.

I decided to give them a real gift. First I thought back to the marches they made each day, the distances between one night’s camp and the next. They were obviously moving through this springtime with a definite objective in mind. I calculated where they would camp two days hence and made for that spot. To my pleasure, I saw that the area I arrived at had obviously been used as a campsite before: beside a shallow, swiftly gurgling brook there was a patch of earth already blackened by the fires of countless earlier camps and a mound of weathered bones where they had tossed their garbage.

I spent that night and all the next day really hunting. With my rickety bow and with a sling I had devised for throwing rocks, I amassed a huge pile of slain meat for the clan: rabbits, birds, deer, even a succulent young boar. I left the food at the intended campsite, spending almost as much time defending the cache against wild dogs and other scavengers as I did in hunting down more game.

The dogs were my biggest difficulty. These were not the half-tamed companions of the humans; they were more like wolves than pets. They were ferocious and intelligent. They hunted in packs, and they would have dragged me down and killed me if I had not been fast enough and smart enough to outwit them. I hated to do it, but I had to kill several of them before they finally gave up on my horde and left the area.

I guarded the cache of meat through that long night and most of the following day. Finally, as the late afternoon shadows lengthened toward sunset, I saw the vanguard of the clan approaching from over the grassy horizon two of the teen-agers whom Dal often sent out ahead of the rest. I splashed across the rushing brook and hid in the foliage on its other side.

The boys saw the pile of game first and began leaping into the air and yelling madly. The rest of the clan hurried toward them, gaped, and then ran for the campsite. They were ecstatic. Never had they seen so much food in one place before. They gathered around the cache, swishing their hands through the air to shoo off the flies, and simply stared in awe at the pile of meat.

From my hiding place in the bushes I heard their leader, Dal, say gravely, “Only Orion could have done this.”

“Can it be all for us?” Ava asked.

“We are his people,” replied Dal. “This has been our clan’s camp since before even old Makar can remember. It is Orion’s gift to us. He has returned to his people. He is no longer angry at us.”

I let them build their fire and settle down to feasting as the evening slowly pulled its violet blanket over the cloudless sky. I slipped away, went upwind along the bank of the stream, and where it eddied into a wide pool, I saw a fine solitary stag dipping his antlered head to drink.

Unlimbering my bow, I slowly walked toward the stag. It saw me, but it was so unused to humans that it allowed me to get within deadly range of it. I felled it with a single shot through the neck, then slit its throat swiftly and cleanly with my stone knife. I felt a twinge of conscience, the memory of a later century when human hunters stalked such beautiful animals for sport, not for food. With a determined shake of my head, I lifted the carcass onto my shoulders and headed back toward the clan’s camp. It was heavy, and I walked slowly, carefully, through the gathering dusk.

Just as the first star showed itself in the dark sky, I stepped into the flickering light of the clan’s camp with the stag across my shoulders. They were still eating, stuffing themselves as only people accustomed to long hunger can do, their fingers and faces greasy with meat, the campfire blazing hot and shining in their eyes.

I stepped into their midst and dropped the stag with a heavy thunk at Dal’s feet.

No one spoke a syllable. For several moments the only sound was the hissing of spitted meat burning on the fire.

“It is me,” I said at last. “Orion. I bring you another gift.”

They were victims of their own propaganda. They had puffed up their stories about me so far out of proportion that now they seemed terrified of my presence. None of them moved. Their faces were rigid with fear and surprise. They probably expected me to strike them with lightning, or something equally drastic, I suppose.

Ava recovered her wits before any of the others. Rising slowly to her feet, she extended both her arms toward me.

“We thank you, O mighty Orion. What can we do to show our gratitude?”

She was filthy, her face and hands stained with the bloody, charred meat she had been eating. But in the firelight I saw the calm gray eyes that I had known and loved in other eras, and it took all my self-control not to clasp her in my arms.

I took a slow, calming breath and tried to speak in the somber manner they would expect of a demigod.

“I grow weary of solitude,” I said. “I wish to be among you for a while.”

That sent a murmur through them. Dal got to his feet and stood slightly behind Ava.

“I will teach the ways of hunting that I use. I will show you how to catch more game than you ever thought possible.”

They remained unmoving, Dal and Ava standing, facing me, the rest of them still sitting in a semicircle around the crackling, hissing fire. I could see the conflict warring in their grimy faces. They were scared half out of their wits by me. Yet, to be able to hunt down animals like that! It was a tempting offer. Which would it be, their fear or their bellies?

Ava stepped closer to me and studied my face in the dancing firelight. I suppose I was none too clean myself, shaggy and unkempt.

“Are you a man or a spirit?” she asked boldly.

She was as beautiful as I remembered her. Tall and slender, almost my own height, taller than most of the men of the clan. Yet her strong, lithe body was completely female; the skins she wore could not hide that. Her bare arms and legs were dirty, scratched here and there. A scab covered one knee. Her matted filthy hair was reddish, like the others, instead of the darker tones I remembered. But she was the same woman — beautiful, intelligent, courageous — the woman I loved.

I made myself smile. “A man,” I answered. “I am only a man.”

Dal moved from behind Ava to examine me more closely. There were no weapons in his hands, but he was clearly being protective of her.

“You look like a man,” he said. “Yet…”

“I am a man.”

“But you do things that no man can do.”

“I will teach you how to do them.”

Ava asked, “What clan were you born to, if you are a man?”

“My clan lives far from here. I have traveled for a long, long time.”

“Can everyone in your clan hunt the way you do?”

“Some can,” I said. “Some hunt better than I.”

For the first time, a smile curled her lips. “They must be very fat, then.”

I laughed. “Some of them are.”

“Why are you alone?” Dal asked, still suspicious. “Why have you come to us?”

“My clan is far away, and I have been separated from it for a long time. I was sent here to help you, to show you how to hunt and to protect you from your enemies. I have been alone for more days than any of you can count, and I am weary of loneliness. You are the clan that I have sought. You are the people I wish to be with.”

As I spoke the words, I realized the truth that lay in them. I had been alone all my life, except for those few brief months with Agla, so far in the future of this time.

“It is not good for a man to be alone,” said Ava, with surprising warmth and understanding in her voice. “Even the mightiest hunter needs a clan and a family.”

Like all humans facing a difficult decision, they finally settled on a compromise. Dal spoke earnestly with the two elders of the clan, then with all the adults, male and female. They agreed to let me join them and show them my tricks of hunting. But they insisted that I had to sleep by myself, away from their campfire. Many of them were not convinced that I was not some form of a supernatural being, and they wanted to take as few chances with me as possible.

I accepted their decision. I had to. No one brought up the question of what to do about me after I had shown them all my techniques of hunting. These people did not think much about their future; they lived in the present, like all animals, and only dimly perceived that tomorrow might be different from yesterday.

I was content with their decision, for the time being. It fulfilled Ormazd’s command. And it brought me closer to Ava.

CHAPTER 25

Dal and Ava stayed close to me at all times as the clan continued its migration across the green, flowering land.

Dal was a good leader, who took his responsibilities seriously. Nearly as tall as I, although much slimmer, he was well-muscled and had keen, alert eyes. He watched me carefully every minute of the day. Dal had no fear that I might be a spirit who posed a supernatural threat to the clan. His worries were very practical and matter-of-fact. He feared that I might be a spy from another clan, an infiltrator who would somehow lead the clan into an ambush.

At first I didn’t realize this. But after a few days of his suspicious, wary watch over me, I began to piece it together. At night, when the elders told their tales around the campfire, I heard enough singing over blood and battle to realize that even in this demi-Eden, where human clans were so thinly spread that contact between them was rare, war and killing were still common enough, and still glorified.

Apparently they met other clans on these migration routes, and when they did they generally battled over control of the hunting grounds. Although to me it seemed that the territory was teeming with game, to these nomadic hunters, territorial rights were vital to their survival. It took many square miles of ground to provide enough game to feed even the smallest of clans, because they depended on hunting for most of their nourishment. And the hunting was never good enough to support them very well.

From what I heard from Dal and the others, several clans that were related by marriages generally lived in the same area during the summer. We were heading for the summer camping grounds now, up in the hills that lay close to the big double-peaked volcano that dominated the landscape. The clans would spend the summer together, close enough to each other for regular visits, courting, marriages, and exchange of stories and information. In the autumn they would break up and go their separate ways toward their winter campsites, far to the south.

Ava had her suspicions about me, also. But her fears all centered on the supernatural. She was the clan’s shaman, a combination of herbal physician, priestess, psychologist, and advisor to Dal, the clan’s leader. It almost amused me to realize how early in human history the roles of priest, doctor, and power-behind-the-throne had come together.

She walked beside me nearly every day, but her interest in me seemed purely professional. She wanted to make certain that if I did turn out to be a demon, she would know about it and be able to do something about it before I could hurt the clan. She questioned me endlessly about where I came from and what my clan was like. I didn’t mind; I was happy to be with her, even though I knew that each night, when I had to move far from the campfire, she bedded down with Dal.

I had expected that the clan’s shaman, or witchdoctor, would have been an old woman, a crone who had either outlived her mate or never attracted one. It surprised me, at first, that someone as young as Ava would fill the role while she was mated to Dal. Then I realized that there were no old women in the clan. No woman over thirty or so, as far as I could see. The two elders, both men, could hardly have been much more than forty; their shaggy beards were just starting to turn gray. But there were no gray-haired women in the Goat Clan. And of the eight children, only three were girls, one of them an infant still being carried on her mother’s back. I asked Ava what happened to women as they grew older. “They die,” she said calmly. “Their spirits leave their bodies.”

“How do they die?” I asked.

She shrugged her slim shoulders. “Many times they die in childbirth, or soon afterward. Some become too sick or weak to keep up with the clan as we march.”

“And you leave them?”

Her gray eyes flashed at me. “Of course not! We let out their blood so that their spirits can remain with us. We would not let the spirit of one of our people roam the world all alone.”

“I see,” I said, and let the subject drop. No need asking her about selective female infanticide. I could see that it was being practiced simply by counting the children.

Women were a liability in this rugged hunting life. They were necessary for procreation, of course, but too many women meant too many babies, too many mouths to feed. So female children were weeded out at birth. Conversely, once a woman was no longer capable of bearing children, her usefulness to the clan was finished and they apparently got rid of her. Not that the men lived much longer: disease and accidents took their toll, and if they were not enough, there was always war. Long before human beings learned to tame the wild ponies that they hunted for food, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse kept human numbers in balance with the rigors of the Neolithic landscape.

Without consciously deciding to do so, I was changing that balance. It took me many weeks to realize that it was so. But as I taught the clan how to make bows and arrows, how to dig pits and camouflage them so that animals would fall into them, I began to realize that I was altering — ever so slightly — the ecological balance of this era. For it was not preordained that humans should live in small, scattered hunting groups and survive on the ragged edge of starvation. Only their lack of knowledge, their lack of proper tools, kept these hunters weak and vulnerable. Given more knowledge, better tools, they would become the masters of this world.

And eventually build nuclear bombs and vast cities choking in their own filth, I knew. Yet, as I woke up each morning in this dawn of human history and watched these people get ready to work another day with little more than their bare hands, I realized that my choice was the only one I could make. They were part of me, I knew, as human as I was. For me to refuse to help them would be the same as for me to refuse to breathe. No matter what the consequences, I had to choose life over death, knowledge over ignorance, humankind over all the other forms of life in the world.

And then I would see Ava walking gracefully among her people, sipping water from a gourd, tending to a crying infant, and I realized that all my fine thoughts were merely excuses. I did what I did to help this clan because she was here, and I could not face the idea that one day, when she grew too slow to stay up with them, her clansmen would open her veins and let her spirit leave her body.

My own knowledge of Neolithic technology was shadowy, at best, but I remembered seeing pictures of spear-throwers, long, grooved handles that effectively extended the length of the throwing arm and allowed one to fling a spear twice the distance that he could unaided. I experimented for the better part of a week and finally taught myself how to make one and use it.

Dal’s suspicions of me almost vanished when I showed him how to throw a spear farther than any man had before. The bow and arrow he had regarded with misgivings, mainly because I was far from expert at feathering the arrows and they were consequently far from accurate. But the spear-thrower fit into his experience and expectations beautifully. The first day he used it he brought down a gazelle that fed the whole clan for two nights. I was instantly besieged with requests for more of them. I made three, under the watchful eyes of the men and boys. Then they started making them, and within a week they were building better ones than I could.

Each night I gazed up at the stars longingly, searching their eternal patterns for some sign of where on Earth I might be. Most of the constellations looked familiar. I recognized Boцtes, Andromeda, Perseus and the Little Dipper. Clearly, I was in the Northern Hemisphere. The Big Dipper looked strange, lopsided, its stars rearranged. If instinct had not done so already, that would have convinced me that I had moved many millennia through time.

The double-peaked volcano that loomed ahead of us seemed strangely familiar, but I could not place it. When I asked Dal what its name was, he gave me a strange stare. Either this clan did not name mountains or the name was too sacred to be spoken casually.

The landscape was rising now, and we climbed grassy slopes that grew steeper with each passing day. After almost a week of that, the land flattened out into a broad plateau covered by a dark and gloomy forest. Huge boles of pine and spruce alternated with groves of birch trees and mighty oaks. Beneath the trees the undergrowth was sparse, but it grew thick and tangled wherever the green canopy overhead thinned enough to let sunlight filter through to the ground. Dal kept us on a trail that meandered through the shadows of the trees — bare ground, softened by fallen pine needles. Easy hiking.

The forest was rich with game. Every morning the men and older boys went out to hunt boar, deer, and whatever else they could find. Often a few of the women went with them. The other women and younger boys stayed at the campsite, some of them trapping smaller game. I became expert at the sling and could usually kill a couple of rabbits or squirrels in an hour or so. The clan ate well in the forest. I wondered why they ever left it.

I asked Ava, one afternoon when she had stayed in camp instead of going off with the hunters.

“We go to the valley, to our camping place for the summer,” she told me. “There we will meet other clans. There will be marriages and feasting.”

I sat with my back against the bole of a huge oak, while she knelt on the thin grass, sorting out the roots and herbs she had spent all morning collecting.

“Why don’t the clans meet here in the forest?” I asked. “There’s more game here than anywhere else I’ve seen.”

She gave me the kind of patient smile that a teacher might offer a struggling student. “The valley is better. There is plenty of game there. And other kinds of food as well. Here in the forest…” She looked around the gloomy shadows cast by the trees, highlighted here and there by shafts of ghostly sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead. “Here there are dark spirits, dangerous and foul.”

I knew of a dark spirit that was very real. I wondered if Ahriman was lurking in these dreary woods.

“And enemies who can ambush us,” Dal’s strong voice broke into our conversation. “The forest is an easy place for enemies to trap us.”

He strode up to us, strong and confident and smiling through his coppery red beard. Over one shoulder he had slung a young boar, its hind legs tied together by a thong.

Ava jumped to her feet, so obviously happy to see him that I felt instantly jealous and resentful. “Why are you back so soon?”

Letting his catch drop to the ground, Dal pointed and said, “We found a new watering place, further up the hill. All the animals go there to drink. It wasn’t there last year; something has dammed the stream to make a big pool. At sundown we can take enough game to carry us through the rest of the way to the valley!”

By sundown the whole clan was staked out by the watering spot, a large, still pool fed by a tiny stream that trickled through the woods from far above, where the snows still lay on the mountainside. Only the two elders, the babies, and the four oldest women had been left behind. Dal brought everyone else and carefully supervised our placement around the pool and on either side of the trail that led to it.

He was confident enough of himself to direct even me to a hiding place. I accepted his orders with a smile; Dal no longer feared me, and I felt good about that. I had been accepted.

We waited, hunkered down into the ground, covered with leaves and foliage, hoping that the wind would not change and give away our hiding positions to the animals that would come to the pool for their evening drink.

The afternoon light faded. Birds chattered and swooped through the trees. A procession of ants marched two inches in front of my eyes as I lay on the ground, itching and sweating despite the coolness of the forest shadows. Three spears lay beside me. A leafy oak branch lay over me. On either side of me I could see other clan members, similarly hiding and camouflaged. We were all to wait until Dal made the first move.

We waited. The shadows grew darker. The calls of the birds slackened and stilled. But no animals came to the pool. I began to wonder if something had gone wrong.

Then I heard a snuffling noise from behind me. I dared not turn around to look. I stayed absolutely still, barely breathing. I could hear my heart thumping in my ears. My palms were sweaty. I was as excited as any of these Neolithic hunters, perhaps even more excited than they.

Singly, in pairs, animals came warily down the trail to drink at the pool. Deer, boar, a strange kind of goat, others that I could not identify. They came warily, knowing full well that hunting dogs and wolves lurked in the woods. But they were not aware of the predators who lay hidden in their midst.

With a paralyzing scream Dal leaped to his feet and threw a spear at the biggest of the deer, hitting the doe just behind the forelegs. It fell, splashing, at the pool’s edge. We all leaped up, roaring with pent-up passion, and began killing.

Ava was the wildest one of all, absolutely fearless and as fierce as any demon out of hell. She nailed a fawn with her first spear, then jumped out onto the trail to block the animals’ easiest escape route. A tusked boar charged at her, head down, eyes burning with hate. Ava spitted it on her other spear, but the beast’s furious charge wrested the weapon from her grasp. I came up beside her and pinned the animal’s hindquarters to the ground with my remaining spear. Without an instant’s hesitation, Ava straddled the boar’s squirming back and slit its throat from ear to ear.

Blood spurted over us both as she leaped to her feet, arms upraised, brandishing her bloody stone knife in the air and screeching like a wild beast herself.

I stood there, suddenly transfixed by this vision of primitive ardor, the death-lust unmasked, unbridled, soaked with the blood of the prey. The killing was still going on all around us, filling the air with screams and the stench of blood. Ava flung her arms around my neck, laughing and sobbing all at once.

“Blood-mates!” she shouted. “We killed it together. We have shared a death.”

I wanted to share love with her, not death. But, to her, the passions seemed much the same.

We carried and dragged the slaughtered beasts back to the campsite, where the elder men and women oohed and ahhed appropriately. All of us were smeared with blood, stinking with the lust of killing and the disemboweled entrails of our prey. None of us had been seriously hurt; one of the teen-agers had been gashed on the calf, but it did not look serious.

I was still trembling by the time we got back to the camp. I had hunted before, alone. I had hunted with Dal and others of the clan. But this evening’s work was something different, something wild and passionate that stirred the savage killer-instinct within us all. We killed far more than we could eat; most of the game would rot before we could get to it. But like sharks in their feeding frenzy, we killed everything we could, sparing only those beasts that were fast enough or lucky enough to escape our spears.

Dal eyed me suspiciously as we made our way back to camp. But he was not worried that I was a spy from another clan or a spirit who would steal his soul. He was simply a jealous human male. He had seen Ava embrace me, and it did not please him at all.

The two elder males insisted that the clan perform a blood ritual to thank the gods for such a miraculous catch. They even wanted me to take part in it, as a representative of the gods. Dal adamantly refused.

“Orion has told us that he is a man, not a spirit,” he insisted.

“But we never had such good hunting before he came to us,” countered the eldest. “Whatever he says, out of modesty or the wisdom of the gods, he has still brought us incredible good fortune.”

I stayed out of the argument, knowing that it was better to allow them to make up their own minds while I kept silent — out of modesty or wisdom.

But Ava spoke up. “Orion helped me to kill the boar. We are blood-mates. He should take part in the celebration.”

Which, of course, set Dal’s mind even more firmly against me. The clan was a rough sort of democracy. Dal was not an absolute ruler. But like most democracies, a strong-willed minority can usually prevail over the wishes of the majority. Dal was firmly set against allowing me to participate in their tribal ritual. His purpose was reinforced by jealousy and suspicion. The others had only fairness and good will to support them. Dal won.

So I sat alone in the darkness, far from the blazing campfire, as the clan danced wildly and split the night with their strange whoops and cries. All around me the tree trunks loomed black and unyielding. They made me think of Ahriman, brooding dark and evil, as he plotted our extinction.

For hours I watched them dancing, listened to their howls and screams as I told myself that I was glad that I was not one of them, glad to be more civilized than these savages, glad to be separate and apart from them. I told myself that, over and again.

The eerie cries at last dwindled to silence and the glow of the fire sank to a sullen glower of red among the black pillars of the trees. I finally lay back on the pine needles and closed my eyes to sleep.

Glad not to be one of them. The thought swirled around and around in my mind until I almost became physically sick. I was not one of them. I was alone, totally alone, thousands of years away from the nearest friend, my memory so blocked that I did not even know if I had a friend anywhere in the whole long continuum of time and space.

It was then that Ava came to me. Even in the darkness I could smell the blood and entrails that smeared her naked body.

“You could not come to the ritual,” she whispered, her voice still breathless with excitement, “so I have brought the ritual to you.”

Part of me was disgusted with her and her primitive blood-lust. Part of me knew that Dal would never forgive me for making love with his woman. Part of me was repelled at the thought of taking her in my arms and wallowing in her stench and passion. But with a suddenness that overwhelmed every thought in my mind, I became as wild and fierce as she was, and at least for a little while I was alone no longer.

CHAPTER 26

The next morning we resumed our trek northward, each of us staggering under a heavy load of dead game. We traveled under clouds of flies, and the smell of meat decaying in the warmth of the day was enough to make me sick. But no one else seemed to mind it; they all seemed happy with their burdens.

Ava walked up at the head of our little column, beside Dal. If he knew what we had done the night before, Dal gave no sign of it.

Nor did Ava. When I awakened that morning, she had already left me and returned to her usual sleeping place, I supposed, beside Dal. She gave me no sign that our relationship had changed. I began to think that what happened under the maddened passion of the clan’s blood ritual was a sort of privileged event, not to be considered by the same rules as everyday life, not to be remembered or regretted once the sun arose again.

Two days later we emerged from the brooding forest and started across a broad, sunlit upland where the grass was green and sweet and dotted with flowers. Wild grains sprouted here and there, and lines of trees showed us where streams flowed. The people seemed to grow happier and lighter of heart with every step now. They knew this territory intimately, and they remarked on each and every jut of rock, bend of a stream, stand of grain that we passed.

Ava dropped back to walk with me one hot afternoon. I had taken to remaining toward the rear of the procession. For some unfathomable inner reason I had the uncanny feeling that we were being followed, watched. But, whenever I looked back, I could see no one, nothing, as far as the horizon. Yet the feeling remained, prickling the back of my neck.

“Soon we’ll be at our valley,” Ava told me, smiling.

“ Ourvalley?” I asked.

She nodded, looking as pleased as a traveler who was at last making her way home.

“The valley is a good place. Others will come there to share it with us. Plenty of water and grain and good hunting. Everyone is happy in our valley.”

When we finally reached it, nearly a week later, I saw that it was truly a lovely, sheltered Eden.

We stood by the bank of a gently meandering stream that afternoon, looking down across the valley. The stream dropped down in a series of terraced stone steps to the floor of the valley, then made its way along its length and disappeared into the cliffs at the other end. I saw that those cliffs actually formed the base of the big, double-peaked mountain that smoked quietly, far up at the top where snow still lay glittering white under the late springtime sun.

I could see why the clan was so happy to be here. The valley was sunny and green. From its U-shaped cross section I could tell that it had been scooped out by a glacier, probably from the looming mountain, which had now melted away. It was a very snug niche, quite defensible against invaders. The only easy access to the valley was down the stone terracing of the waterfall, the way we were entering. The trail was slippery, but not terribly difficult to get down. On the other sides the valley walls rose fairly steeply to heights of at least several hundred feet.

Our clan was the first to arrive that year. Dal’s people raced down the wet stone terraces, laughing and happy, to the valley floor. Before the day ended they had felled some trees and chased some game. By nightfall they had erected a few primitive huts with mud walls and tree branches and hides for roofs. The huts were dug into the ground, more underground than above it, but to Dal’s people they seemed like palaces.

One note of sadness touched us that night. The boy who had been injured in the hunt sank into a fevered coma. I had thought at first that the gash on his leg would heal soon enough, but it had become infected despite all that Ava could do in the way of poultices and bandages made from leaves. By the time we had reached the valley, the poor youngster could barely walk; his leg was swollen and inflamed. That night he was delirious, burning with fever. Finally he grew quiet and still. His mother sat at his side all night long. At dawn her keening cry told us all that her son was dead.

The clan buried him that afternoon, with Ava leading a ritual that included lining his shallow grave with all the possessions that the lad had accumulated in fourteen summers: a few stone tools, a handful of smooth pebbles, the winter furs that he had still carried with him. Each member of the clan dropped a flower into the grave while his mother stood quietly and watched. Her weathered cheeks were dry; she had finished her crying. Ava told me later that the boy’s father had been killed two years earlier, and the woman — whose name was Mara — had no other living children. She was too old to expect to find a new husband. She would probably not survive the next winter.

I wondered how they would get rid of her, but didn’t have the courage to ask.

The following morning I walked the length of the valley, following the stream that ran through it. The land must have been tilted by an earthquake, because the stream ran in what seemed to me to be a backwards direction: from the end of the valley where we had entered, it splashed down the stone terraces and ran toward the base of the double-peaked mountain. I would have thought that water would flow from the mountain’s snowcap outward, in the opposite direction.

As I walked slowly back toward the collection of mud huts that the clan had built, I saw Ava off among the flowering bushes by the base of the steeply rising valley wall. I angled off my original path and went toward her. I could see that she was gathering herbs and roots for her store of medicines. Little good that they did for Mara’s son, Ava’s cures were all that these people had to counter disease and injury.

“Hello,” I called to her.

She looked up from the foliage she was studying. “What’s the matter?” she called back.

Striding through the knee-high brush, I answered, “Nothing’s wrong. I was walking down by the stream and I saw you here.”

Ava’s smile was more puzzled than welcoming. Apparently the idea of taking a leisurely stroll and stopping off to chat with a friend was not commonplace among these folk.

“You’re gathering herbs for medicines,” I said.

“Yes.” Her smile faded. “I wasn’t able to save Mara’s son. The devil within him was too powerful for me. I must find stronger medicine.”

Twenty thousand years later, I knew, medical researchers would still be hunting along the same trail.

“You did everything that was possible to do,” I said gently.

She eyed me. “You did nothing to help.”

“Me?”

“You are a man of great powers, Orion. Why didn’t you try to help the boy?”

I was shocked. “I… my skills are in hunting, not medicine.”

Those deep gray eyes of hers seemed to see straight through to my soul. “You have great knowledge; you know things that none of us know. I had thought that your knowledge included healing.”

“It doesn’t.” I felt awkward, apologetic. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t have that knowledge.”

She pushed a strand of coppery hair from her face, still looking unconvinced.

“I told you before,” I said, “I’m only a man.”

Ava shook her head. “I don’t believe that. You are different from any man I have ever seen.”

“How am I different?” I spread my arms, as if to show her that I was built the same as anyone else.

“It is not your body,” she said. “I have tested your body; I have taken your seed. You are strong, but your body is not different from Dal’s or other men.”

My blood ran suddenly cold. So our night of lovemaking had not been wild passion on her part, but a carefully considered experiment. Within my mind I heard a self-mocking laugh: She merely wanted to see what you were made of.

“Your difference,” Ava was saying, “is in your spirit, your soul. You know so much more than we do!”

“I know some things, true enough,” I said, trying to ignore the laughter ringing within me. “But there is much that I do not know.”

“Teach me!” she blurted. “Teach me all the things you know!”

That took me by surprise. Suddenly she was eager for knowledge, avid.

“There are so many things I must learn, so many things I don’t know. Teach me. Share your knowledge with me,” she pleaded.

“I can teach you some things, Ava,” I replied. “But much of what I know would make no sense to you. It wouldn’t be useful to you or to the clan.”

“But you will teach me?”

“If you wish.”

“I do!” Her eyes were wide with excitement.

“But why do you want to learn?” I asked.

She stared at me, momentarily speechless. “Why? To know, to understand — that is the important thing. The more I know, the more I can help the clan. If I had known enough about healing, I could have saved Mara’s son.”

It was my turn to fall silent. Beneath her unwashed skin and rude clothes, Ava was as fully human as Marie Curie, and as inquisitive. More than that, she realized that knowledge was the key to power, that understanding the world around her would help her to learn how to manipulate that world to her own ends. But she misinterpreted my silence. Haltingly, she said, “There is nothing I can give you in return for your knowledge…”

So the idea of trading sex for power had not occurred to her. I almost smiled at the realization that the world’s oldest profession had not yet been invented.

“There are things you know that I don’t,” I replied. “We will exchange knowledge for knowledge. Fair enough?”

“Yes!” She was almost breathless with enthusiasm.

“All right,” I said. “To begin with, tell me what the names of these flowers are and what healing properties they have.”

We spent the afternoon walking through the shrubbery and trading information. I told her that there were substances called metals which could make better tools than the stones and flints the clan used. She explained her wildflower apothecary to me. Gradually I began to lead the conversation toward a discussion of the other clans who came to the valley and the tribes who were their enemies.

“Do all the clans have hair the color of yours?” I asked.

“No, not at all. Some have dark hair, such as your own.”

“And the color of their skin? Are they all the same as ours?”

She nodded. “In the summer sun the skin gets darker, but in the winter it lightens again.”

“Have you ever seen a man whose skin is the color of the ashes that remain when a fire burns out? A man who is almost as tall as I am, but much wider, with enormously strong arms and eyes that burn red?”

She backed away from me. “No,” she said fearfully. “And I hope I never do.”

“Have you ever heard of such a man?” I pressed. “Sometimes he is called Ahriman. Sometimes he is called the Dark One.”

Ava was clearly afraid of the very idea. “He sounds like a demon.”

“He is a man. An evil man.”

She looked at me with a new suspicion in her eyes. “A man. Just as you say you are a man.”

I let the matter drop. She did not press it. Instead, we began talking about the valley and how much the clan enjoyed spending their summers here. I casually mentioned that they could spend the whole year here, if they prepared for the winter properly. She was instantly curious, and I began to describe how to make warm winter clothing from hides and fur pelts.

She knew about that. But: “What would we eat during the time of snows? All the game animals move to the warmer places. We follow them.”

“Instead of killing them,” I explained, “you could trap some of them and keep them in fenced-off areas. Let them breed young for you, and you will have meat all year round, without moving away from this spot.”

Ava laughed. She knew a crack-brained theory when she heard one. “And what will the animals eat during the winter? The grass dies.”

“Cut the grass and grain that the animals eat during the summer, when it is high, and store it in huts during the winter to feed to the animals.” Her laughter stopped. She didn’t accept the idea; it was too new and fantastic to be swallowed at one sitting. But she accepted the possibility of thinking about it. And that was more important.

We had walked to the face of the cliffs that formed the base of the double-peaked volcano. I decided it was my turn to ask a question. “Does the mountain have a name?”

“Yes,” Ava replied, squinting up into the bright sky to scan its rugged, snow-covered peaks.

“Is the name too sacred to be spoken?”

She turned her gaze back toward me, a new respect in her eyes because I understood the concept of sanctity.

“The smoking mountain can make the ground tremble when its spirit grows angry. The elders tell us that many, many years ago, before they themselves were born, the mountain spilled fire upon the people who lived in this valley and drove them away.”

“But they came back.”

“Not until long years had passed. They feared the mountain, and they taught that fear to their children and their children’s children.”

I glanced up at the snowcapped peaks. For them first time since I had originally seen them, no smoke came from the volcano.

“It seems to be resting now.”

Ava grinned. “Yes, sometimes it rests. But it can still breathe fire when its spirit grows angry.”

“Would it make the mountain’s spirit angry tell me its name?” I asked.

Her beautiful face pulled itself into a slight frown. “Why do you want to know?”

Smiling, I replied, “Like you, I am curious. I seek answers to questions.”

She understood that, the drive to learn, to know. Ava took a step closer to me and whispered the name of the mountain:

“Ararat.”

CHAPTER 27

Dal was not happy with us when Ava and I returned from our long walk. And he grew increasingly unhappy over the next few days as the two of us spent more and more time together.

At night I took Ava away from the lights of the clan’s fires — each family had its own small cooking fire in front of its hut now, instead of one single campfire. Off in the darkness I showed her the stars and began to teach her how the constellations formed a vast celestial clock and calendar.

She grasped the concept quickly, and even noted, after a few nights, that at least one of the stars seemed to have moved slightly out of place.

“That’s Mars,” I told her. “It is not a star like all the others you see. It is a world, something like our own world here, but incredibly far away.”

“It is red, like blood,” Ava murmured in the darkness.

“Yes,” I agreed. “Its soil is red sand. Even its sky is pink with reddish dust, almost the color of your hair.”

“The people there must be angry and warlike,” she said, “to have made their whole world the color of blood.”

My heart sank at the thought that I was helping to invent astrology. But I consoled myself with the notion that such ideas did not occur only once, in a single time and place. Concepts as obvious as astrology would be invented time and again, no matter how ludicrously wrong they may be.

That night we stayed up until dawn, watching the stars wheel across heaven in their majestic cosmic clockwork. And when Venus arose, the Morning Star shining as brilliantly beautiful as anything human eyes could ever see, I heard Ava’s sigh of pleasure in the predawn darkness.

I wanted to take her in my arms and kiss her. But she must have sensed what was in my mind, and she moved slightly away from me.

“I am Dal’s woman,” she whispered. “I wish it was not true, but it is.”

I wanted to tell her that I loved her, but with a shock I realized there was no word for such a concept in their language. Romance was yet to be invented. She was Dal’s woman, and women did not change mates in this early era.

We walked back to the huts and the embers of the cook fires. Dal sat on the ground in front of his hut, looking miserable, angry, worried and sleepy, all at the same time. He scrambled to his feet when he saw us, and Ava smiled at him and took his arm. They ducked through the low entrance to their hut without either of them saying a word to me.

I stood there alone for a few moments more, then turned and went off to my own dugout, which Dal had insisted the clan build for me — a good hundred yards away from the nearest hut of a clan family.

When I stepped down to the entrance and ducked through it into the shadowy interior of the single room, I immediately sensed that someone else was already inside. Dawn was just beginning to tint the eastern sky, and there were no windows in the hut — nothing but the open doorway to let in light or air. But I knew that I was not alone in the inky shadows of the dugout. I could feel a presence, dark and menacing. I could hear a slow, deep, labored breathing.

“Ahriman,” I whispered.

Something moved slightly in the darkest corner of the room. My hand went to the stone knife at my waist. A silly, useless gesture, I knew, but my hand moved of its own accord.

“You expected me to be here, didn’t you?” His harsh, tortured voice sent a chill along my spine.

Stepping to one side of the doorway, so that I would not be silhouetted against the growing light outside, I replied, “You’ve been trailing us for many weeks.”

“Yes.”

I could barely make out his form, bulking darkly in the shadows. “You plan to bring harm to these people?” I probed.

He moved slightly. “What harm can I do? I am only one man, against your entire race…”

“Don’t call yourself a man,” I snapped.

He gave out a wheezing, gasping sound that almost sounded like laughter. “Orion, you fool! Don’t call yourself a man.”

“I am a human being,” I said, “not one of your kind.”

“You are not one of my kind, true enough,” Ahriman said, each word labored and grim. “I am the only one of my kind left. Your cohorts killed all the others.”

“And you seek vengeance.”

“I seek justice.”

“Even if it means destroying the continuum of space-time.”

“That is the only way to obtain the justice I seek. To tear down the pillars that support the world. To bring it all to an end. To destroy the one who fashions himself as the Golden God.”

“Ormazd.”

“Yes, Ormazd. The master slaughterer. Your master, Orion. Your creator.”

“You can’t touch him; he’s too powerful for you, so you take out your spite on these poor ignorant savages.” I could feel hatred boiling inside me.

He countered, “You call yourselves humans. You think you own this planet.”

“We do! This is our world.”

“Temporarily,” Ahriman’s voice rumbled darkly. “Only temporarily. He built you to conquer this planet, but I will see to it that you are destroyed — utterly and forever.”

“No,” I said. “I have already stopped you twice. I will stop you here, as well.”

He paused, as if gathering his forces before speaking again. “Twice, you say? We have met twice before?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s true,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “You are moving back toward The War.”

I kept silent.

“The Golden One is very clever. He is moving you backward through the continuum. You have not seen The War yet. You don’t know what took place then.”

“I know that my task is to hunt you down and kill you, finally, for all time.”

I sensed a ponderous shaking of his head. “For all time. I wonder if you realize what that means. None of us, not even Ormazd, can grasp all of time in his hands.”

“That is my task,” I said.

He made that ghastly chuckling sound again. “Then why don’t you do your duty, here and now? Kill me.”

I hesitated.

“You are afraid.”

“No,” I answered honestly. Fear never touched me. I was calculating how to get to him. I knew that he was far stronger than I. With nothing but the pitiful stone knife in my hand, how could I hope to attack him?

“I grow weary of waiting,” Ahriman said.

The shadows exploded. His vast bulk suddenly leaped at me and I was smashed against the mud wall of the dugout, Ahriman’s powerful fingers at my throat. We crashed through the flimsy wall and the makeshift root of leafy branches fell in on us as we struggled in the dust. I slashed wildly at him with the knife, to no avail.

I saw his face inches from mine, a wide leering grin pulling his lips apart, his teeth gleaming wickedly, a brutal snarl growling up from his throat, his eyes blazing with triumphant fury. The strength was seeping out of my muscles. My arms grew weak, my attempts to fend him off feeble. Darkness started to cloud my vision, and I knew that I was about to die.

Something thudded into the ground close to me. Then I felt a muffled shock, as if a hard object had hit Ahriman’s body, atop me. His fingers around my throat slackened and I heard him growl. His weight rolled off my body. My vision cleared slightly as I drew in a deep, welcome breath of cool air and I saw him standing above me, a spear dangling from his side, blood oozing from the wound, snarling defiance.

Another spear hurtled through the morning air and he caught it with one hand. Turning, I saw that Dal had thrown it. The other men of the clan were running up toward where he was standing, more spears in their hands. Their faces showed more surprise than fear; as long as their leader was willing to stand up to this strange intruder, they would too — at a distance.

Ahriman flipped the spear around in his hand and pulled his arm back to throw it at Dal. I kicked at his legs and toppled him. The men gave a blood-curdling screech and charged at us.

I scrambled to get on top of the Dark One, but he cuffed me to my knees with a tremendous backhand blow, yanked the spear out of his bleeding side and threw it at the attacking clansmen. Even so haphazardly thrown, it had the force to go right through one of the men, chest to back, lift him off his feet and throw him cruelly to the ground.

That stopped the men of the clan dead in their tracks. All except Dal, who rushed in barehanded except for his puny knife and leaped at Ahriman. The Dark One knocked him away, lumbered to his feet, and staggered off toward the cliffs.

For several moments no one moved. I pulled myself painfully up onto my hands and knees. Dal sat up slowly, shaking his woozy head. A bruise was welling up along his jaw, where Ahriman had hit him.

The other men stood as if transfixed, staring now at the two of us, now at the body of their slain comrade. Ahriman had disappeared into the shadows of the cliffs, where the dawning light had not yet reached.

“Who was that?” Dal asked, at last. He ran two fingers over the lump on his jaw and winced.

“An enemy,” I said.

The other men came up to us, all of them chattering at once. Ava pushed her way through them and knelt at Dal’s side. She inspected him in the brightening sunlight and concluded that no bones were broken. Then she turned to me.

“I’m all right,” I said, getting to my feet. My throat burned, though, and my voice was hoarse.

The others were staring at me.

“Your throat bears the marks of the enemy,” Ava said, examining me. “I can see the print of each of his fingers.” She put her hands to my throat. “His hands are enormous!”

“Who is he?” Dal wanted to know.

“The enemy of all men,” I replied. “The enemy of every human being. He is the Dark One, an enemy whose only desire is to kill us all.”

They had all seen Ahriman, but I described him as closely as I could. I did not want them to begin thinking of the Dark One as a spirit or a demon who was beyond human resistance. I praised them for driving him away, for wounding him and saving me from his choking hands.

“We can follow his spoor and track him to his lair,” Ava said, pointing to the bloodstains Ahriman had left on the grass.

The men showed a distinct aversion to the idea. Even Dal, so fearless a few moments earlier, backed away.

“No,” I said. “He will have gone deep into the caves by now. We wouldn’t be able to find him. He might even have set traps for us. Better to stay here in the sunlight. He won’t come back.” Not for a while, at least, I added silently.

The rest of the men gathered around their fallen comrade and lifted him tenderly from the ground to carry him back to his hut. I could hear Ahriman’s size and ferocity growing as they talked among themselves, and their own courage and strength increasing to keep pace.

Dal lingered near me, Ava at his side.

“You saved my life,” I said to him. “I thank you.”

He shook his head, troubled. “You are one of us. I did what had to be done.”

“It was more than any of the others did.”

“I am their leader.”

I remembered an aphorism: From those to whom much is given, much is expected. Dal was a true leader, and a good one. But still he looked troubled.

“Ahriman is no more of a spirit or a demon than I am,” I said. “He is a man, like me.”

“He took a spear in his side and pulled it loose as if it was nothing more than a burr annoying him.”

“He has great strength,” I admitted.

Reflexively Dal touched the bluish bruise on his jaw. “That is true. He drove that spear through Radon even while he was on his back.”

“But he ran away.” I didn’t want Dal to fear Ahriman more than was necessary.

His troubled eyes locked on mine. “You did not tell me that you were being pursued by an enemy.”

“I didn’t know he was here,” I half-lied. “I thought I had left him far away from here.”

Sensing the beginning of an argument, Ava stepped between us. “Come and eat with us. The sun has already climbed over the hills. It will be a beautiful day.”

But now Dal eyed me with new suspicion, even though I felt a bond of respect and admiration for the man who had attacked the Dark One with reckless courage, and thereby saved my life.

CHAPTER 28

The next few weeks were peaceful enough. Three more clans filtered into the valley, a total of a hundred and six additional people. Roughly two-thirds of them were adults, the remainder children ranging from nursing babies to gawky pre-adolescents. In this Neolithic society where life was so short, teen-agers became adults as soon as they reached sexual maturity. Twelve-year-olds bore children. Forty-year-olds were often too feeble and toothless to hunt or eat and were tenderly slain by their clansfolk.

“We stay here in the valley,” Ava told me, “until the grain turns to gold. Then we harvest it and carry it with us for the winter.” Frowning, she added, “Unless the snows come before the grain ripens.”

And in a flash of understanding I knew why Ahriman was here and what he planned to do.

This was another of the crucial nexus points in human history. These clans, these ragged, dirty, wandering hunters, were going to make the transition from hunting to farming. They were going to create the Neolithic Revolution, the step that turned humankind from nomadic savages to civilized city-builders. Ahriman was going to try to strangle that development, prevent it from happening.

If he could keep these primitive hunters from taking that step, he could eventually wipe out all of the scattered human tribes who wandered across this Neolithic landscape. I had no doubt of that. He could annihilate the human race, clan by clan, tribe by tribe, until the Earth was scoured clean of the last human being. Then he would be triumphant.

But if humankind made the transition to agriculture, if humans began the vast population explosion that led to the civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria, the Indus Valley and China, then not even Ahriman with all his powers could hope to wipe out the entire race. Humankind would be on the path toward mastery of this planet, no longer a few scattered half-starving tribes of nomadic hunters, but settled prosperous farmers with a steeply growing population.

Would agriculture be invented here, in this valley where Dal’s clan and his allies spent the summer? I could not believe that if Ahriman prevented that invention here, it would not occur elsewhere, in some other clan, at some other favored spot. But then I realized that, with his mastery of time, Ahriman could visit each and every spot where the invention was about to take place and stamp out the idea each and every time it arose. With a growing weariness hanging like a heavy weight around my soul, I realized that Ormazd would send me to each of those times and places, to do never-ending battle against the Dark One.

Contemplating that was more than I could bear. Almost. I consoled myself with the thought that since Ahriman was here, this must be the place where the idea of agriculture truly originated. If I stopped him here, there would be no need to fight him elsewhere — in this era. Obviously we had met at least once more in an earlier time. Perhaps during The War that he referred to.

Dal’s new suspicion of me quickly spread to the rest of the clan, and the other clans that joined us in the valley stayed well clear of me. I was regarded as something between a god and a human, feared and respected. They all knew that I could teach them wonderful things, but although they came to learn how to make bows and arrows and spear-throwers, and even how to pen game animals against the cliffs and begin herding them instead of simply killing them immediately, they still kept me away from their day-to-day social lives.

All except Ava. She spent long hours with me, learning whatever I could teach her about the stars, about spinning and weaving the wool from goats and sheep, about simple rules of cleanliness and infection.

But each evening she would return to Dal’s hut and cook his supper. She invited me to join them often enough, but Dal made it clear that he was uncomfortable with me and more than a little jealous of the time Ava spent with me. I usually ate alone, outside my rebuilt hut, cooking the meat and vegetables the clanspeople gave me in exchange for my lessons on tool-making and animal husbandry. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so tragic, to think of these primitives learning from me. Actually, all I did was expose them to ideas that had not occurred to them. Once the basic idea got into their minds, they went off and did things much better than I ever could have. They taught themselves to make accurate arrows, to build corrals, to spin wool. I merely planted the seeds; they cultivated them and reaped the harvest.

Life in the valley was pleasant and easy. The days lengthened into golden summer, but without oppressive heat and humidity. The grain grew tall and ripened, filling the valley with golden fronds that swayed in the gentle summer breezes. The color of Ormazd, I thought, and realized that it was good. The nights were cool and often tossed by sighing winds. I spent hours showing Ava the phases of the Moon, the paths of the planets, the rise and fall of the constellations. I pointed out the Summer Triangle of stars high in the night sky: Deneb, Altair, and Vega. She learned quickly, and the questions she asked showed that she was eager to learn more.

Dal accompanied us during those nights. At first it was because he did not trust me alone with Ava, and I could hardly blame him for that. But despite himself he began to grow interested in the lore of the sky.

“Do you mean you can tell when the seasons will change before the change really begins?” He was skeptical.

“Yes,” I replied. “The stars can tell you when to plant seed and when to harvest the grain.”

He frowned in the moonlight. “Plant seed? What do you mean?”

That brought us to long nights of talk about how plants grow. I think I might have been the first human being to explain the similarity between the birds and bees, plant growth and human sexuality. But I did it in reverse of the way twentieth-century parents gave the explanation to their children: I used human sexuality — which Dal and Ava understood perfectly well — to explain how plants grew from seeds.

Like children, they found the idea difficult to accept. “Do you mean that if we put some tiny seeds into the ground, a whole field of grain would grow there?”

When I said yes, Dal merely shook his head in disbelief. But Ava looked thoughtful, her gray eyes focused on the future.

Except for that one blood-crazed night of the hunting ritual, Ava and I had hardly touched each other. Not that I did not want her. But she was Dal’s woman, and her interest in me was the kind for which a word would not be invented for another hundred centuries: Platonic. Ava sought knowledge from me, not love or even companionship.

One afternoon, while Dal was leading a hunting party out toward the far end of the valley, where they could trap animals against the cliffs easily, I saw Ava staring soberly at the ripening fields of grain. She had filled out a bit, as had everyone. Now that we no longer had to trek each day, and as game was plentiful, we had all gained weight.

But Ava’s face was knotted into such a serious frown that I decided to ask her what the trouble was.

“Ava, what bothers you?”

She seemed startled. “What? Oh — it’s you.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“Wrong? No… not really.” She turned her gaze back to the grain, swaying gently in the summer breeze beneath the golden sun.

“You don’t believe what I told you a few nights ago,” I guessed, “that you can plant the seeds of the grain and grow crops from them.”

With a wan smile, she said, “No, Orion. I do believe you. What you say makes sense to me. I was just thinking that…” she hesitated, and I could see from the concentrated expression on her face that she was struggling to put her ideas in order.

I waited in silence. Her face was beautiful, and I longed to take her in my arms. But she had no desire for me, and I knew it.

“Suppose,” she began again, slowly, haltingly, “Suppose we really could do it… grow grain the way you said. Suppose we stayed here in this valley — all the time, winter and summer. We could grow the grain; we could pen up the animals against the cliffs. We wouldn’t have to go out each day and hunt. We could stay here and live much more easily.”

I nodded. The transition from hunting and gathering to a settled agricultural life had begun, at least in the mind of one Neolithic woman.

“But suppose the grain didn’t grow?” she asked me.

“It grows every year, doesn’t it? It’s always here when you return to this valley.”

She agreed, but reluctantly. “It begins to grow when we are away. If we stayed here all the time, would the grain still grow the way it does now?”

“Yes,” I said. “You will even find ways to make it grow better.”

“But doesn’t the grain’s spirit need to be alone? Won’t the grain die if we stay here always?”

“No,” I assured her. “The spirit of the grain will grow stronger if you help that spirit by tending the grain, by killing the weeds that choke it, by spreading the seed to new parts of the valley, where the grain does not yet grow.”

She wanted to believe me, I could see. But the old superstitions, the ingrained ways of thought, the stubborn fear that change — any change — would bring down the anger of the gods, all were struggling within her against the bright promise of this new idea.

“I’m going to take a walk,” I said, with a sudden inspiration. “Will you come with me?”

She agreed and I started out across the waist-high field of golden grain, toward the cliffs that the glacier had scooped out on the far side of the valley.

We talked as we made our way to the base of the cliffs, Ava going over the whole idea of agriculture and herding, again and again, trying to find out where the weak points were, where there might be a hidden flaw in the scheme, a trap that could bring ruin to the clan.

I could have told her that once the clan stopped its roaming and gave up hunting, it would lead to settled farming villages, to an hierarchical society of peasants and kings, to class divisions between rich and poor. I could have told her that the occasional tribal clashes she was familiar with would escalate into wars between villages, then between cities, and ultimately wars in which all the world was bathed in blood. I could have told her about teeming cities and pollution and the threats of overpopulation, nuclear holocaust, environmental collapse.

But I said nothing. Here in the bright morning of human civilization, I remained silent and let Ava examine the new idea for herself.

We reached the base of the cliffs. I squinted up toward their top, outlined against the bright summer sky.

“I think I’ll climb up to the top. Want to come with me?”

“Up there?” She laughed. “No one can climb up those cliffs, Orion. You are teasing me.”

“No, I’m not. I think we can make it to the top.”

“It’s too steep. Dal tried it once and had to give up. No one can climb these cliffs.”

I shrugged. “Let’s try it together. Maybe the two of us can get to the top, whereas one man alone would fail.”

She gave me a curious stare. “Why? Why do you want to climb where no one has climbed before?”

“That’s just it,” I said. “Because no one has done it before. I want to be the first. I want to see how the world looks when I’m standing in a place where no one has ever stood before.”

“That sounds crazy.”

“Haven’t you ever done something simply because you wanted to do it? Haven’t you ever had the desire to do something that no one has ever done before?”

“No,” she said. But not very convincingly. She looked up the face of the cliffs and her gray eyes were filled with wondering. “We always do things the way they have always been done. That’s the best way, just as our fathers and their fathers did, it.”

“But somewhere, sometime, one of them must have done a thing for the first time. There has to be a first time for everything.”

She looked sharply at me. I was challenging the safely ordered routines of her world, and she was not altogether happy about it.

But her expression softened and she asked, “Do you really think we could reach the top?”

“Yes, if we work together.”

She turned back to look at the cliffs again. They were steep, all right, but even an amateur climber could handle them, I knew. With utter certainty within me, I was sure that Ormazd had programmed me with much more than an amateur’s strength and skill.

Ava tore her gaze away from the looming cliffs and turned to look back at the golden fields of grain we had crossed. The afternoon breeze sent a swaying wave through them. She grinned at me.

“Yes!” she said eagerly. “I want to see what’s at the top of the cliffs, too!”

We used vines for ropes, and our bare, travel-hardened feet had to do without climber’s boots. But the cliffs were nowhere near as forbidding as they had seemed at first glance. It was a two-hour struggle, but we reached the top at last, panting, sweaty, weary.

The view was worth it.

Ava stood puffing, grinning broadly, and wide-eyed, as we looked far to the east and west and saw valley after valley, river after river, all running southward through golden fields. Above us loomed Ararat, towering high into the cloudless, brilliant sky, its snowy cap glistening in the sun, a thin stream of smoke climbing from the higher of its two peaks. And beyond, farther to the north, the land dazzled with ice, glittering like a vast diamond that hurt the eyes if you stared at it too long. That vast glacier still covered most of Europe, I knew, although it was retreating northward as the Ice Age surrendered to a more humane climate.

“There’s so much to see!” Ava shouted. “Look at how small our valley seems from here!”

“It’s a big world,” I agreed.

She gazed down into the valley again and slowly her face lost its exultant happiness. She began to frown again.

“What’s wrong, Ava?”

Turning toward me, she said, “If we lived away from the others, if we found a valley for ourselves where no other clan lived… just you and I together…”

I felt my jaw go slack. “What are you saying?”

There were no words in her language for what she was feeling.

“Orion,” she said, her voice low, trembling, “I want to be with you; I want to be your woman.”

I reached out to her and she fled into my arms. I held her tightly and felt her strong, lithe body press against mine. For an eternity we stood there, locked in each other’s arms, warmed by the summer sun and our own passionate blood.

“But it cannot be,” she whispered so softly that I could barely hear her.

“Yes, of course it can be. This world is so large, so empty. We can find a valley of our own and make our home in it…”

She looked up at me and I kissed her. I didn’t know if kissing had been invented yet by these people, but she took to it naturally enough.

But when our lips parted there were tears in her eyes.

“I can’t stay with you, Orion. I am Dal’s woman. I can’t leave him.”

“You can if you want to…”

“No. He would be shamed. He would have to organize the men of the clan to hunt us down. He would have to kill you and bring me back with him.”

“He’d never find us,” I said. “And even if he did, he’d never be able to kill me.”

“Then you would have to kill him,” Ava replied. “Because of me.”

“No, we can go so far away…”

But she shook her head as she gently disengaged herself from my arms. “Dal needs me. He is the leader of the clan, but how could he lead them if his woman deserts him? He is not as confident as you think; at night, when we are alone together, he tells me all his fears and doubts. He fears you, Orion. But he is brave enough to overcome that fear because he sees that you can be helpful to the clan. He places his responsibility to the clan above his fear of you. I must place my responsibility to the clan above my desire for you.”

“And me?” I asked, feeling anger welling up inside me. “What about me?”

She looked deep into my eyes. “You are strong, Orion, with a strength that no ordinary man has. You were sent among us to help us, I know that. Taking me from Dal, from the clan, would not be a help. It would destroy Dal. It could destroy the clan. That is not why you have come among us.”

I could have replied. I could have simply picked her up and carried her off. But she would have run back to her clan the instant I relaxed my hold on her. And she would have hated me.

So I turned away from her and glanced at the sun, low on the western horizon.

“It’s time to start back,” I mumbled. “Let’s go.”

CHAPTER 29

The grain grew taller than my shoulders, and the people of all the clans grew more excited and impatient to harvest it with each passing day.

I stayed aloof from them. I had taught them all I could. Now I waited, just as they did. But not for the time of harvesting. I waited for Ahriman. He would return; he was planning his attack on these people, on me, on the whole future existence of the human race. I waited with growing impatience.

I combed the valley, poked into the caves among the rocky cliffs, seeking the Dark One. All I found were snakes and bats, clammy, cold dampness and dripping water. And one cave bear that would have crushed my skull with a swipe of its mighty paw if I had not been fast enough to duck out of its way and scramble out of its cave before it could get to me.

I knew he was there, somewhere, biding his time, picking his point of attack. All I could do was to wait. Ormazd did not appear to me again to give me more information or even the slight comfort of showing me that he still existed and still cared that I existed. I was alone, placed here like a time bomb on a buried mine, waiting to be triggered into action.

Ava kept her distance from me. And the less I saw of her, the more I did of Dal. He came by my hut almost daily now. At first I thought he was trying to work up the nerve to pick a fight with me. But gradually, as he tried to strike up a conversation in his halting, pained way, I realized that he was trying to work up the nerve for something else, something that was far more difficult for him than merely fighting.

“The grain will be ready to cut soon,” he said, late one afternoon. I was sitting on the ground in front of my hut, fitting a new flint blade to the stone hilt of my knife. One of the clan’s elders was an artist when it came to making sharp flint tools; that was why he was allowed to remain with the clan even though he was too old and slow to hunt.

Dal squatted down on his haunches beside me, forcing a smile. “If it doesn’t rain in the next two days, then we can cut the grain.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Yes.”

I looked up at him. “What’s troubling you, Dal?”

“Troubling me? Nothing!” He said it so sharply that it was clear he was deeply bothered.

“Is it something that I’ve done?” I asked him.

“You? No, of course not!”

“Then what is it?”

He traced a finger along the dirt, like an embarrassed schoolboy.

“Is it about Ava?” I asked.

His glance flicked up at me, then down to the ground again. I tensed.

“It concerns her,” Dal said, “and the things you’ve been telling her. She thinks we should stay here in this valley… all the time.”

I said nothing.

“She claims that you said we could pen the animals against the cliffs and stay here even when the snows come,” he gushed out rapidly, as if afraid of stopping, “and next spring we can plant seed from the grain all across the valley and make more grain than anyone has ever seen before.”

He looked at me almost accusingly. “I told you these things, too,” I replied. “I told you both.”

Dal shook his head. “But she really believes them!”

“And you don’t.”

“I don’t know what to believe!” He was honestly confused. “We live well here, that’s true. We could move into caves when the snow comes. As long as we have fire we can stay in the caves and keep them warm and dry.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“But our fathers never did this. Why should we stop living the way our fathers have always lived?”

“Your fathers have not always lived this way,” I told him. “Long ages ago your ancestors lived far from here, in a land where it was always warm and they could pick fruit from the trees and live a life of ease and happiness all year long.”

His eyes showed that he did not want to believe me. But he asked, “Why did they leave such a paradise, then?”

“They were driven out,” I replied, “by a change in the climate. The trees withered. The land changed. They had to move elsewhere. They began to roam the land, as you do, following the herds of game.”

“But each year the herds get smaller,” Dal said, his mind focusing on the present and dismissing old legends that he only half believed. “Each year we must travel farther and our kills are harder to make.”

I gestured toward the fields. “But the grain grows high. And there are enough game animals here to feed all the gathered clans, if you keep them penned up and let them breed. They will provide you with all the meat and milk and wool you need, if you learn how to take care of them.”

He was truly perplexed. It was a gigantic hurdle for him.

“The grain is good,” he admitted slowly. “We make food from it — and a drink that makes you feel as if you’re flying.”

Bread and beer, the two staples of farming. I wondered which offered the bigger lure in Dal’s mind and swiftly decided that beer would be more important to him than bread.

“Then why not stay here, where the grain grows so well? You can store it in the caves after you’ve cut it. If you grow enough grain, you can even feed some of it to the animals you keep.”

With a deepening scowl, Dal wondered aloud, “But what would the spirits of our fathers do if we stopped following the game trails? How would they feel if we turned our backs on their ways?”

I shrugged. “They will probably rejoice that you have found a better way to live.”

“The elders say that the grain won’t grow if we stay here all year long.”

“Why wouldn’t it grow?”

“Its spirit would wither if we watched the fields all the time.”

I wondered if the elders were groping toward the idea of environmental pollution. But I said, “The grain grows just as the sun shines and the rain falls. It is all completely natural, and it will happen whether you are here to watch it or not.”

“Hunting is good,” Dal muttered. “Hunting is our way of life.”

And I’m going to destroy that way of life and turn you into farmers. In my heart, I could see that Dal’s every instinct was urging him away from the strange new ideas I had planted in his mind. For untold thousands of generations humankind had been hunters. Their minds and bodies were shaped for hunting; their societies were built around it. Now I was telling them that they could live fatter, easier lives by giving up their hunting ways and turning to farming and herding. It was true; farming would be the first step toward total domination of the planet by humankind. But they would have to turn their backs on the “natural” lives they now led; they would have to abandon the freedom they had, the rough democracy in which each clan member was as good as any other.

For an instant I wondered if I was doing them any good. But then I realized that it was not a choice between lifestyles; the choice these people had was between farming and eventual extinction. They would have to pay a bitter price for survival, but it was either pay that price or die.

Is this part of Ormazd’s plan? I wondered. Does Ormazd have a plan? Or is he merely determined to keep himself safe from the Dark One, no matter what it costs? As I sat there studying Dal’s face, so deeply etched with doubt and concentration, I was tempted to tell him to forget the whole thing and keep on living as he had always lived. But then I thought of the boy who had died of a simple infection. I thought of how lean and ragged these people were when they were following the game trails and living off what they could catch each day. I remembered that their elders were at an age that would be considered still youthful in later centuries. I realized that the clan’s hunting life kept them just barely alive; they lived constantly on the edge of extinction. Ahriman would not have to push hard to wipe out the human race.

“Hunting has been your way of life, it is true,” I said to Dal, “and a good way of life for you and the clan. But it is not the only way. It is not the best way.”

He looked unconvinced and very troubled. Dal was an honest, forthright man. He did not know what to believe, and he was too honest to make up his mind before he was convinced, one way or the other.

“Ava wants to stay,” he muttered, “but the elders say we must not.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Talk to the clan. Talk to all the people who have come to the valley. Tell them what I have told you. If you like, I will speak to them myself and tell them how the grain grows. The spirits of your fathers will not be angry with you; they will be pleased that you have found a better way to live.”

He smiled slowly. “Do you really believe they will be pleased?”

“Yes. I’m sure they will be.”

Dal rose to his feet and stretched his cramped legs. Nodding his head, he told me, “I will talk to the clans. I will tell them what you have told me.”

He felt relieved. He didn’t have to make the decision. He would put it to a vote. That lifted the burden from his shoulders. Or so he thought.

Even in this simple Neolithic society, with fewer than a hundred adults to deal with, it took three nights before Dal could assemble all the people to listen to him. I was fascinated to watch a primitive bureaucracy at work. Each clan had to discuss the idea of such a meeting within itself, with the elders going into painstaking detail on how such clan conferences had been arranged in the past, where their clan sat in relation to other clans, who was responsible for building the fire, who would speak and in what order. For these supposedly unsophisticated folk, the occasion of a clan gathering was an event, an entertainment, as well as a serious time of decision-making. They savored the arrangements and the protocol, fussing over the details for the sheer enjoyment and excitement of having something to fuss over.

At last the clans gathered around a big central bonfire that had been built closer to the Goat Clan’s huts than any other clan’s. The elders of each clan spent the first few hours of the night retelling their most important stories, each old man establishing his clan’s history and stature by sing-songing legends that each person sitting around the fire knew by heart, word for word. But they all sat through each tale of monsters and heroes, gods and maidens, bravery and cunning and seemed to enjoy themselves thoroughly, or at least as much as a twentieth-century family would enjoy spending an evening watching television.

Finally it was Dal’s turn to put his proposition to the assembled multitude. It was fully dark now, the night well advanced. Overhead, despite the glowing fire, I could make out the stars that presaged autumn: my namesake Orion was climbing above the saw-toothed horizon, looking down at me. He seemed different from the way I knew him from other eras, still easily recognizable, but vaguely lopsided. And there were four bright stars in the Belt, instead of just three.

Dal was no orator, but he spoke in a plain, clear way about the idea of staying in the valley through the winter. He hemmed and hawed a little, but he got across the basic idea that the clans could pen the animals against the cliffs and slaughter them at their leisure instead of tracking them down, that they could live off the grain which grew in the valley and could even grow more grain than sprang up naturally.

Everyone listened patiently without interrupting, although I could see many of the elders shaking their heads, their gray beards waving from side to side in perfect stubborn unison.

Finally, Dal said, “And if you want Orion’s words about it, he will be glad to tell you. This is all his idea, to begin with.”

A man Dal’s age, from the Wolf Clan, jumped to his feet. “We are not meant to stay in one place! This valley is prepared for us each year by our spirit-fathers. How can they prepare the grain if we stay here watching all year long? The spirits will go away and the grain will die!”

Dal turned uneasily toward me. I had been sitting to one side of the Goat Clan’s area, placed off at the end so that I was almost by myself, in a space between clans. I got to my feet and took a single step closer to the fire so that they could all see me well. I wanted them to see for themselves that although I was a stranger, I was a man and not one of the forty-armed monsters the elders had sung about earlier.

“I am Orion,” I said, “a newcomer to this part of the world. I love to hunt as much as any man here. But I know that there is a better way to live, a way that will bring all of us much pleasure, much comfort — a way that will keep us well fed all year long. Babies will be fat and healthy even in the winter’s worst cold and snow. We will all be able to…”

That was as far as I got. An explosion of bloodcurdling screams shattered the night, and flames seemed to burst all around us.

Everyone jumped every which way. A spear thudded into the ground near my feet. Screaming and yelling erupted from everywhere as men and women toppled, spears driven through their bodies. The bonfire hissed as blood spattered onto it. The clanspeople ran for their huts, terrified.

But not Dal. “They’re burning the grain!” he roared. “Get your weapons!”

Through the flickering flames I saw naked men painted in hideous colors dashing toward the huts. Some held torches, others spears.

“Demons!” Ava screamed. And they did look unhuman, the way they were painted, with the firelight glinting off their glistening bodies.

Dal had already yanked a spear from the body of a fallen clansman and was running toward one of the enemy warriors. Ava dashed in behind him, scooped up a fallen spear, and advanced to his side. Another spear whizzed past my head. A trio of the strange warriors dashed into one of the huts. Screams of pain and terror wailed from it.

All this happened in seconds. I rushed for my own hut, knocked down two warriors who tried to stop me, and grabbed my bow and a handful of arrows. I could hear more shouting and sobbing outside, and Dal’s voice clear and commanding over the din of confusion and battle.

As I ducked back into the night air outside my hut, a painted warrior sprang at me, his spear leveled at my chest. I sidestepped and floored him with a lethal chop to his neck. Over his body I stepped, out into the flame-filled screaming furor of the battle, my reflexes accelerating into overdrive, every sense alert and sharpened to its finest pitch. I felt a wild exhilaration: the waiting was over, the battle had been joined.

I notched an arrow and sent it through a warrior’s skull. Dal and Ava were off to my right, using their spears to fend off four spear-wielding warriors. I knocked off one of them just as Dal ripped another’s belly open. Ava dropped to one knee as a warrior charged her and spitted him from below. The screaming man fell atop her, but she wriggled out immediately, took his spear and rejoined the fight. By that time I had put an arrow through the neck of the fourth warrior.

In the light of the blazing grain I could see many of the clanspeople on the ground. But there were more of us on our feet, fighting. The invading warriors were falling back now, throwing their torches at us to slow our pursuit.

Sheer maddened anger drove me forward. I raced at them, bellowing mindlessly as I fired my remaining arrows into them and then took a spear from a fallen warrior and charged them with all the fury that had been pent up inside me, waiting for this release. I knocked down the first one to stand before me with a sidelong swipe of my spear against his skull, using the weapon like a quarterstaff. Another loomed to my side, and I drove the spear point into his guts. He screamed as I yanked it free and slashed it across the face of the next one.

It seemed longer, but within mere seconds my spear was bloodied along its whole length, slippery in my grasp, as I slaughtered anyone who came within reach. The remaining warriors bolted, wide-eyed with newfound fear, and I raced after them, killing, killing, killing again as I caught up with them, one by one. Behind me I could hear the shouts of Dal and the others growing fainter.

I followed the retreating warriors toward the distant cave-dotted cliffs. One of them stumbled and fell in front of me; I drove my spear through him and felt it bite into the dirt. He shrieked with his last breath. Tugging hard, I yanked it free again and resumed my chase after the others.

The invaders were scattering in all directions, their weapons thrown away as they ran for their lives to escape my bloody rage. I slowed and turned. Far behind me, Dal and the others had turned their attention to the fires that the invaders had started in the grain fields. I saw Ava, smeared with blood of her enemies, standing triumphantly and waving both arms over her head, urging me to come back.

But I pressed onward, toward those caves, where I knew Ahriman lurked. It was the Dark One who had organized this raid, no one else. He was there, and I moved relentlessly to find him, my hands already soaked in the blood of his cohorts. Like an automaton running wild, I stalked the Dark One, longing with every ounce of my being to add his blood to that which was already darkening my spear.

It was black by the base of the cliffs; not even the glow from the burning field cast much light there. But in that hushed gloom, where even the insects and beasts of the night lay silenced and frightened by the rush of fighting men, I heard breathing and the soft tread of bare feet on stony ground.

There were three of them, off to my left, waiting to attack me — and another two, further to my right, ready to circle behind me and close the trap.

I moved forward, as if unaware of their presence. But the instant they leaped toward me, I whirled around and swung my spear at their legs like a scythe, cutting the three of them down. As they fell in a jumbled heap, I hefted the bloody spear in my right hand and threw it at the nearer of the two who were circling behind me. The solid thunk of it hitting his chest was louder than the desperate little gasp he gave out as he died. I killed the three on the ground quickly, with my bare hands, while the only remaining warrior fled for his life.

I took all three of their spears and headed toward the nearest cave. I had no way of telling if Ahriman was there; all I knew was that I was certain he would be.

The cave was pitch dark inside, not a single glowing ember lit its yawning blackness. But I plunged into it anyway, hot with reckless fury.

It was the cave bear’s warning growl that saved my life. If the beast had been as intent on killing as I was, it would have waited until I had blundered into its grasp and then crushed me with its mighty paws. But it was only an animal defending its lair; it had none of the malicious hatred that human beings carry within them. It growled before it slashed out at me. I lunged forward at the sound with all three of the spears bundled together in my grip. I was lucky. I hit the bear’s heart or lungs. One of the spears snapped in my hands, but the other two penetrated and the animal died with a hideous shriek of agony.

Suddenly the blood lust cooled within me. I was dripping with sweat, covered with blood from head to toe, trembling with physical exertion and emotional exhaustion. Killing other humans had meant nothing to me, but killing the bear had snapped me out of my battle fury. There, in the utter darkness of the beast’s cave, I doubled over, hands on knees, panting and almost weeping with shame and regret.

For several minutes I remained there. Gradually my strength returned, and with it my resolve. Ahriman was here, I knew it. I could feel it. The bear might have been one of his defenses, to be used against me as he had used the rats in a man-made cave to kill the woman I loved.

I wrestled one of the spears from the bear’s still warm body, stepped over the carcass, and started to grope my way into the ever deeper darkness of the dank cave. Eyesight was useless in this black pit, but all my other senses were fully alert, stretched as far as they could reach.

But just as I could see nothing, I heard nothing. Not a sound, except my own ragged breathing and the almost inaudible padding of my bare feet on the cave floor. My left hand slid along the rough stone wall; my right held the spear. I advanced cautiously, probing the darkness like a blind man, seeking the enemy that I knew lurked somewhere up ahead of me.

The sudden glare of blinding light paralyzed me, and then a tremendous blow to my head thrust me into darkness once more.

CHAPTER 30

I felt the chill of death, and when I opened my eyes, I saw that we were in a cave of ice. Cold, glittering, translucent ice surrounded us. The floor and walls were smooth, polished, blue-white. The ceiling, high above, was craggy with frozen stalactites. I could see my breath puffing from my open mouth. I shivered involuntarily.

We were far underground, beneath the rocky surface of Ararat. A natural hiding place for the Dark One. Ahriman sat, incongruously, behind a heavy, broad slab of wood, like a thick slice taken from a full-grown tree. The top of the slab was burnished down to a gloss so fine that I could see the reflection of his dark, brooding face and powerful neck and shoulders in it.

I was sitting up, my back propped against an outcropping of stone. My head thundered from the blow I had received, but with a conscious effort I eased the tension in my neck muscles and directed the capillary blood flow to reduce the swelling. The pain began to slacken.

Behind Ahriman’s menacing bulk I could see a dully gleaming canister. It seemed to be made of wood also, but a dense, black wood that almost looked like metal. Its top half was hinged open. It looked to me more like a coffin than anything else.

Ahriman sat silently behind the wood slab of a desk, staring into its gleaming surface as if he could see things in it that I could not. I shifted slightly, testing my reflexes. I was not bound; my arms and legs were free and seemed to respond to my commands with no difficulty.

He looked up at me, his eyes glaring. The Dark One wore a skintight suit of metallic fiber, sealed at the throat with a gleaming stone whose colors changed and shifted even as I watched. The metallic suit glittered in the cave’s soft lighting. I looked up, but could see no lamps, only a glow that seemed to be coming from the ice itself.

“Bioluminescence,” Ahriman said. His voice was a grating, painful whisper.

I nodded, more to test my aching head than to agree with him. The pain was receding quickly.

“Your people put out the fires quickly enough,” he said. “The grain is rich with moisture. I should have waited a week, it would have been drier then.”

“Where did you get those warriors?” I asked.

A grim smile flickered across his almost lipless face. “That was easy. There are plenty of tribes of your people who are eager for the chance to murder and loot. They think of it as glory. They go back to their miserable hovels with a clutch of heads they’ve cut off and tell their wives and children what powerful men they are.”

“You tempt them to do so.”

“They don’t need much temptation. Killing is a part of their way of life; it’s built into them.”

“You’re going to fail here, you know,” I told him. “We will meet again.”

“Yes, you told me. You have met me twice before.”

“Which means you will fail here. You will not succeed in preventing these people from developing agriculture…”

He raised a single massive hand to stop me in mid-sentence.

“How certain you are,” Ahriman whispered harshly. “How absolutely sure that you will triumph, that you are right, that the Golden One represents truth and victory.”

“Ormazd is…”

“Ormazd is not even his true name, any more than mine is Ahriman. They are merely fabrications, lies, inventions, simplifications that are necessary because your mind was never made to grasp the entire truth in all its endless facets.”

Anger began to warm me from within. “I know enough of the truth to understand what you intend.”

“The destruction of your kind is what I intend,” Ahriman said, “even if it takes all of time to accomplish it. Even if it means tearing apart the continuum and destroying the whole universe of space-time. I have nothing to lose. Do you understand that, Orion? I have nothing to lose. ”

His red eyes were burning at me. I felt the power of his anger, his hatred, and something more — something that I could not identify, something that felt like sorrow, eternal and everlasting.

But I spat back, “You’ll never win! No matter what you do, it’s you who’ll be destroyed.”

“Really?”

“You will fail here, just as you failed in other times. You can’t stop the human race.”

He leaned his powerful arms on the tree-slab desk and hunched forward, looming before me like a dark thundercloud.

“You pitiful fool, you don’t understand the nature of time even yet, do you?”

Before I could reply, he went on, “Just because we have met before, in other centuries, in other places, does not mean that you will defeat me here. Time is not a railroad track that’s laid down in place, one section at a time, and fixed solidly, unmovably. Time is like a river, or better yet, an ocean. It moves, it shifts; it washes away a bit of the land here and throws up a new island there. It is not immutable. If I succeed here, the eras in which you and I have already met will dissolve back into primeval chaos, as if they never happened.”

I stared at him for long, silent moments. Then I said, “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”

He shook his head slowly, ponderously. “I can win here, Orion. I will. And all of the space-time will be disrupted. The continuum will crumble, and those times and places where we met will cease to exist.”

“It can’t be true!”

“But it is. And you know it is. I will destroy all of you, you who call yourselves Homo sapiens sapiens. All of you who are Ormazd’s creations. You and he will dissolve into nothingness together, and my people will triumph at last.”

“Never,” I said, but so softly that I barely heard it myself.

Ahriman ignored me, gloating, “Your little band of savages will not make the transition from hunting to agriculture. Nor will any other of your tribes. Your people will remain a small, weak, starving collection of scattered hunting tribes — with the instinct for war built into you.”

He stressed that last phrase, savored it, hissed it at me as if it were a justification for everything he had done, every life he had taken, every evil he had committed.

“It will be easy enough to get your bloodthirsty tribes to slaughter each other, given enough time,” Ahriman went on. “All that I need do is lead them into collision courses, bring two tribes together unexpectedly. Your own savage instincts will do the rest for me.”

“The clans don’t always fight when they meet,” I argued. “They’re working together in the valley…”

“Only because they know each other. And only because food is plentiful in the valley. But they are such wasteful, wanton fools. Already they have thinned out the game herds and driven some beasts into extinction. Food will become scarcer for them, I promise you.”

“If they don’t turn to agriculture,” I muttered.

“They won’t. And when one of your wandering bands of hunters bumps into a strange group, they will annihilate each other.”

I shook my head stubbornly, refusing to believe him. “There are too many human tribes for you to destroy them all. They’re spread out all across the world…”

“Not so,” Ahriman said. “The glaciers cover a good part of the northern hemisphere. And even if they did not, what difference does it make to me? I have all the time in the world to kill off your wandering tribes of savages. Think of it! Centuries, millennia, eons! A long, delicious feast of killing.”

His pain-red eyes glowed with the thought. I sat still, silently calculating my chances for leaping across the desk and crushing his throat before he could stop me.

“And in the end,” Ahriman went on, his face as close to happiness as it could ever be, “when your primitive blood-drinkers have finally slaughtered each other, the wrenching of the continuum will be so severe that the Earth, the sun, the stars and galaxies themselves will all collapse in on themselves. A temporal black hole. The end of everything, at last.”

I jumped for his throat. But from the expectant leer on his dark face I realized that he had made the same calculation that I had, and placed himself just far enough from me to give himself time to block my lunge. I saw his powerful hands clench into fists and launch themselves straight at my face. Pain exploded in my brain. I blacked out again.

I awoke to the sound of trickling water. I lay on hard stone, in utter darkness. It took a long time before the throbbing in my head stopped, even though I exerted every effort to control my nervous system and shut off the pain.

When I tried to sit up, I bumped my head against solid rock. I probed upward with both hands and found that I was tucked into a narrow cleft of stone. I felt a blank rock wall on my right; on my left, an edge that dropped off into nothingness.

Ahriman was gone, I knew. Off to accomplish his task of either driving the clans out of the valley or killing them altogether. I had to get free and prevent him from winning.

Vision was useless; there was no light at all. The trickling water noise came from below me. Carefully, I turned myself over onto my stomach and groped down along the ledge as far as my arm would reach. No bottom. I poked around for a loose pebble, found one, and dropped it over the edge. Straining my ears and concentrating all my attention did no good. I waited for what seemed like hours, but heard no splash. I found a larger piece of rock and tried it again. The seconds moved slowly, slowly — and then I heard a faint plonk. There was water down there, far below.

I began inching forward, not knowing if I was moving in the right direction. The rock seemed to slope slightly upward, but that did not necessarily mean it was heading toward the surface, I knew. But there was nothing else I could think of. So I crawled, blind as a mole, inching along without knowing where I was heading. No sounds reached me except my own breathing and the scrabbling noises of my body scuffing along the rock ledge, and the far-off murmur of running water.

Slowly I began to realize that the rock was getting warmer. It reminded me of the underground cell that Ahriman had trapped me in the first time we had met. But this was a natural cave, not a bubble of captured energy. The heat was coming from a natural source. Magma from the volcano, I reasoned. Perhaps I was moving deeper underground, rather than toward daylight.

I stopped, panting in the dank, heavy air, and tried to think it out. That got me nowhere; I simply did not have enough information. Then I tried to put myself in Ahriman’s place. What was he going to do? Destroy the Goat Clan, came the answer.

How? I asked myself. The attack on the clans had failed. They would be on guard now. Instead of driving them out of the valley, the attack probably made them realize how precious the grain fields were. They might well have decided by now to stay in the valley year-round, to protect the grain against marauders.

But Ahriman is no fool, I told myself. He would have foreseen that.

Then the true purpose of the attack must have been to entice the clans into staying in the valley. But that did not make sense — unless Ahriman planned to destroy the clans and the valley itself, together!

How? Earthquake? Could the Dark One control tectonic forces? I didn’t know. But the answer came to me soon enough, as I lay there in my lightless prison of rock. I heard a loud, slapping, sloshing noise from far below me. A wave was surging through the underground river that flowed down there in the darkness.

“A flood,” I said aloud, my voice strangely hoarse and muffled against the close confines of rock. My thoughts raced. Underground heat to melt the underground ice. The stream that runs through the valley will burst out of the mountainside in an uncontrollable flood. The clans will never have a chance of getting out. The valley will be drowned, together with everyone in it.

Even as I lay there, it was beginning to happen. The water was lapping noisily below me, getting closer, rising to where I lay trapped in this prison of stone. I would be the first one to drown. Ahriman had planned well.

Going through death and being reborn does not make you eager to face death again. Ormazd was in control of my destiny, I knew, but the more I learned about the Golden One and his powers, the more I became aware of his limitations. If he had the power, he would have dealt with Ahriman directly, without need of me or any intermediary. He had power enough to pull me through death and project me into another time and place — at least twice. But what assurance did I have that he could do it again, or would do it again, or even that he knew where I was and what I was facing? I felt totally alone, facing the choice of waiting for the water to rise up and drown me or plunging down into it and trying to find a way back out to daylight. Time was vital. If I survived at all, it was crucial that I get to Dal and Ava in time to warn them of the flood.

I made up my mind, took a deep breath, and rolled over the edge of the rock and dropped like one of my tossed stones down toward the water. There was plenty of time for me to be frightened; the fall was a long one. I oriented my body feet downward, the best way to take such a dive. I found myself wondering how deep the water was; I might break my neck before I drowned.

The water felt like cement when I finally hit it, and then I was plummeting deep, deep down in icy black water, every nerve shocked numb, no sensory input except a painful bubbling in my ears.

I bobbed to the surface at last, took a deep, happy breath, and half swam, half rode the current wherever it was leading me. I had the feeling it was in the direction opposite to the one in which I had been crawling.

After what seemed like hours, I banged my flailing arms against solid rock. The river swirled and surged against a blank wall, but I could feel from the undertow that it dipped into a deeper tunnel and kept flowing on. There was no airspace in that tunnel, I realized, but I had no choice except to follow it. I filled my lungs and then dove under, letting the current carry me along.

The oxygen in my lungs was soon exhausted; yet the river still flowed in its natural tunnel. I began to squeeze oxygen from the spare cells of my body, consciously shutting down whole muscle systems and organs that I didn’t need, taking their stored oxygen to feed to my heart and brain and limbs. I began to die, bit by bit, like the lights of a city winking out in a power failure, one section after another. Desperate, I slowed down my heartbeat and brought myself into a virtual catatonic trance, passively flowing along the underground river, starving for oxygen, not knowing if I would ever see the light of day again.

It seemed like months went by, but finally the darkness around me began to brighten and I floated to the surface of the river.

Air! Real, breathable air. It tasted wonderful as my body returned to life and I gulped in huge lungfuls of the most precious substance on Earth.

The river was emptying itself into a huge cave, turning it into a vast underground cistern. I dragged myself up onto dry, rocky ground, every part of my body jangling from lack of blood circulation. Sunlight filtered from an opening in the vast cave, far overhead. I was much too weak even to try to reach it.

CHAPTER 31

For hours there was nothing I could do but lie there on the rock-strewn dirt and try to recover my strength. But every moment of that time, the water behind me rose higher, splashing and gurgling as it filled this natural underground cistern. Soon enough it began lapping at my feet as I lay stretched prone on the damp ground.

I forced myself to stand and began scrabbling up the sloping wall of the huge cave, toward the opening where the sun’s light streamed in. The bare earth was loose and pebbly, difficult to climb. With each step forward I was in danger of sliding all the way back. But I struggled upward and finally pushed myself through the narrow fissure of rock and out into the daylight.

Looking back, I saw that the underground river was filling up the cave. When it reached the rock ceiling, the water would have nowhere to go but outward, exploding through the rock that held it back, gushing down into the valley below with the force of a tidal wave that would sweep everything before it.

I staggered down the steep slope of the valley wall, my legs weak and rubbery from exertion. Through blurring eyes I could see the valley spread out below me in the late afternoon sun, beautiful, peaceful, vulnerable. I had to get down to Ava and Dal and warn the people.

Tottering with exhaustion, I made my way toward the grain fields. People were at work there, cutting down the long golden stalks with their flint knives. I made my way to them.

“Look!” came a shout from one of the men. “It’s Orion!”

“He’s come back from the dead!”

They dropped their work and gathered around me, keeping a respectful distance.

I raised my hand in greeting, but before I could utter a word to them, exhaustion and hunger took their inexorable toll. I blacked out.

Ava’s taut, lovely face was staring at me when I opened my eyes again.

“You are alive,” she said gravely.

“Yes,” I croaked. “And starving.”

Looking around, I saw that I was in my own hut, lying on the matted grass that we used for a pallet. I could see a crowd of clanspeople pressing at the doorway, peering in. Food of every description was piled high in the middle of the room — gifts from the people, I supposed.

Ava turned from me momentarily. Within seconds one of the other women had pushed her way into the hut, bearing a gourd of steaming broth. I sipped at it, burning my tongue. But it felt good and strengthening as it slid down my innards.

“Where’s Dal?” I asked, my voice more normal. “We’ve got to get the people out…”

“Eat first,” Ava crooned. “Get your strength back.”

I put the gourd to my lips and gulped down all of the broth. She tried to get me to lie back again, but I gently pushed her hands away.

“I’ve got to see Dal.”

“Were you in the land of the dead?” asked the woman who had brought the gourd.

I shook my head, but her eyes were round with awe. “What was it like? Did you see my son there? His name is Mikka, and he was four summers old when he died of a fever.”

Ava shooed her away, then came back to me.

“You were in the land of the dead, weren’t you?” she asked softly.

I saw that the people cramming my doorway believed that, no matter what I said. Ava did too, with that mistaken simplicity of logic that says: Dead people are buried underground; Orion has been underground; therefore, Orion has been in the land of the dead.

“Dal,” I whispered urgently. “I must talk to Dal. We’ve got to leave this valley. Quickly!”

“Leave? Why…?”

“There is going to be a flood. We’ll all be drowned if we stay here. Find Dal and bring him here. Now!”

She turned and told one of the men to bring Dal. Looking back at me, Ava said, “Dal was wounded in the fighting three nights ago.”

“Badly?”

“His leg was slashed by a spear, just above the knee.”

Infection, I thought.

“It’s not a very bad wound, but I’ve made him stay on his pallet to rest. I’ve kept the wound covered with leaves and poultice.”

I got to my feet and headed for the doorway. The people melted away from me, almost in a panic. I had been in the land of the dead and then returned. There was fear in their eyes, and a desperate curiosity to know what lay beyond death. Grimly I strode through their midst toward Dal’s hut, thinking to myself that their primitive superstition was truer than they knew: I have been through the land of the dead, more than once.

In the slanting late-afternoon light I could see that the stream cutting through the valley was already broader, noisier, and moving faster than it ever had before. And its direction had reversed. It was flowing from the base of the cliffs out toward the waterfall at the other end of the valley, where the two flows met to form a growing, frothing pool.

Off in the distance I heard a low rumble and felt the ground shudder. All the clanspeople looked toward Ararat’s smoking crest.

“Orion walks and the mountain speaks to him,” I heard a woman say.

The others mumbled agreement.

I said nothing. For the moment, their awe-stricken respect for me was useful; I was going to give them commands that they had to obey swiftly.

Two of the clan’s teen-aged boys were helping Dal to his feet when I stepped into his hut, Ava trailing a step or two behind me. His leg did not seem swollen, beneath the leaves that she had plastered over his wound. Perhaps he would survive, after all.

“Let him sit,” I told them, and they lowered Dal back onto his pallet.

He looked me over in the gloomy shadows inside the hut. “We thought you were dead. But we could not find your body.”

“I am still alive,” I said. “But we will all be killed if we don’t get out of this valley right away.”

Dal winced as if I had slapped his face. “What? Leave the valley? But I thought…”

“There is going to be a flood,” I said. “Soon. Very soon. Perhaps only a few hours from now. It will drown this whole valley and everything in it.”

“But the stream has never…”

“Dal,” I snapped, “have I ever lied to you? There will be a flood. I know! If we stay here, we will all be killed. We must leave. Now! ”

He looked up at Ava.

“There’s no time for argument,” I said. “We must tell all the people, all the clans, and move out now, this hour.”

“Up the steps of the waterfall,” Ava said.

I realized that would be impossible. The first stage of the flood was creating an ever-deepening pool at the base of the waterfall. We could not get out of the valley the way we had come in.

“No,” I said. “We must go up the cliffs along the side of the valley.”

Dal looked shocked. “No one can climb those cliffs!”

“I will show you how to do it,” I said.

“But it can’t be done. We’re only ordinary people; we can’t fly!”

“We can climb,” Ava said firmly. “Orion and I climbed the cliffs one day, more than a month ago.”

He stared at her, began to object, then shook his head. It was more new information than he could take in, I thought. But when he looked down at his leg, stiff and tender from the spear wound, I realized that Dal was worried about his own survival.

A roar of thunder shook the ground. But it did not come from the heavens. The sky to the north flared an angry red, and I could hear fearful moans from the people outside the hut. The volcano was smoldering, preparing to erupt. Ahriman was flexing his muscles.

“There is no time to lose,” I said. “We must leave now.”

With a nod, Dal said, “Go ahead. Ava, you direct the clan. Call the elders in here; I’ll tell them that you will be in charge until they can pick another leader.”

“But you’re coming too!” she said.

He pointed to his wounded leg. “How can I? I couldn’t even climb those cliffs when both my legs were whole.”

I was terribly tempted to agree with him. It would be difficult enough to get more than a hundred men, women and children, none of whom had ever climbed before, to make it safely up the face of the cliffs. A man with a bad leg could slow us down to the point where the flood waters would overtake us before we reached safety. And if Dal stayed behind, I would have Ava to myself once we had put the flood behind us.

My eyes locked on his. He was clearly afraid; he believed me and knew that if he stayed behind he would die. Yet he was willing to sacrifice his life for the safety of his clan. Bravery or stubbornness or just plain stupidity — whatever was driving him, I simply could not leave him there to die.

So I bent down and hauled him to his feet. Moving to the side of his bad leg, I grasped him firmly around the waist.

“Put your arms across my shoulders,” I commanded, “and lean your weight on me.”

“You can’t…”

“Don’t argue with me!” I snapped. “There isn’t enough time.”

Ava beamed at me as we hobbled out of the hut. Dal began shouting orders to the people. Teen-agers were sent scampering off to warn the other clans. Women collected whatever food they could from their huts. Men gathered their tools and weapons.

“The grain!” Ava realized. “What’s going to happen to the grain?”

“It will be swept away by the flood,” I said.

“No!” she said. And she ran off toward the field, gesturing two of the teen-aged girls to come with her.

Ararat grumbled again, making the earth tremble. Hot steam was boiling up from the volcano’s cone now, and I knew that worse would soon follow. The gentle stream that meandered through the valley was rushing and roaring now, already overflowing its banks here and there and edging into the grain field as it burbled the length of the valley and splashed into the lake that was growing at the base of the waterfall. The waterfall itself was angrier, more powerful, pouring an ever-stronger torrent down the stone terraces and into the widening lake. Mist rose from the lake and caught the slanting rays of the dying sun in a diabolically enticing rainbow.

“This way,” I shouted as the people began to gather around Dal and me; they were frightened, confused, casting terrified glances at the angry stream and the angrier volcano.

“Do as Orion commands!” Dal told them. “Only he can save us. Do not anger the spirits of the dead by failing to obey him.”

That calmed them a little. Tell us what to do; give us a direction, lead us — anywhere, just as long as you seem to know what you’re doing. That’s all it takes to stop a frightened crowd from turning into a panic-stricken, self-destructive mob.

We headed toward the cliffs, away from the flooding stream. I hauled Dal along, his weight dragging against me as he hobbled along on his good leg. Over my shoulder I saw the people of the other clans streaming after us, following blindly. But I could not find Ava’s face in the growing crowd.

We made it to the base of the cliffs at last, and I sat Dal down on a rock. Picking two of the wiriest teen-aged boys, I lashed us together with ropes made from vines and took the lead in scrambling up the cliff face. The boys were young enough so that they did not know what was impossible, unlike their elders. They followed me with barely a false step.

We made it to the top, where the setting sun was still above the horizon. Looking below, I could see that most of the valley was in shadow now. And the stream was spreading its growing fingers in all directions, rapidly flooding the grain fields and edging toward the huts the clans had built. The waterfall at the far end of the valley was lost in mist now, and I could hear its thundering roar even from this distance.

Working quickly, we tied the ropes to trees and dropped them down to the people waiting below. I ordered the boys to remain where they were, then rappelled down the cliff and started the others climbing upward.

Dal watched with unabashed admiration as the people hauled themselves up the steep rocky wall, pulling hand-over-hand along the ropes.

“Have you seen Ava?” I asked.

“No…”

“Here we are!” she called.

I looked up to see her and the two girls carrying big leather sacks on their backs, grinning wearily as they neared us.

“We’ve got as much of the cut grain as we could carry,” she said happily. “All the seeds that you told us about, Orion. And roots and berries, everything we could find. We’re bringing it with us. We’ll plant the seed next spring.”

I could feel myself smiling broadly. Glancing up at the smoldering volcano, I thought that Ahriman had lost. The idea of agriculture had found good soil here, and it had taken root. And the legends that would be handed down from generation to generation for hundreds of centuries before writing was invented would garble the story of Ararat: it was a woman, not Noah, and she saved the species of grain and fruits that would feed the human race, not of animals who could escape the flood under their own power. Mythology was usually based on a kernel of fact, but what distortions the male-dominated tribes would make of this story!

All through the deepening twilight the clans people worked as they had never worked before. The volcano’s rumblings grew stronger, angrier, and it began to spout black smoke streaked with red flame. The sky turned black, and flashes of lightning strobed the darkness, frightening the people even more. By ones and twos and threes they climbed, scrabbled, groped, inched their way up the ropes we had set out along the cliff face, and hauled themselves up to the safety of the top. The sturdiest of the teen-agers and young men helped the older and less agile. Babies rode on men’s backs. I made the journey up and back down again several times, helping everyone I could.

Dal sat on the rock at the base of the cliff, keeping the people organized down there, calming their fears and holding their panic at bay.

Ararat was growling at us now, and its sullen red glow lit the evening hours for us. I could see boulders the size of a house flying up out of its crater, and burning tongues of lava spilling over the lip of the volcano’s cone. The ground trembled with each roar of the mountain, but there was no true earthquake — not yet.

Slightly more than half the people had made it to the top of the cliff when the flood burst upon the valley. The rock wall where the stream had been gushing forth exploded in a mammoth shower of water and steam, hurling boulders halfway down the valley. The cistern where I had been earlier that day had not only reached its overflow point, but the heat from the tectonic forces that Ahriman had unleashed had turned the cistern into a mammoth tea kettle. The water had finally come to a boil and the expanding steam blew open the side of the mountain like a kiloton charge of explosives.

A wall of white water blasted down the valley, roaring like all the demons of hell let loose at once. Steam hissed into the dark sky and a hot rain began to fall on us.

I was halfway down the cliff, returning to help another pair of people up to safety, when it happened. I could see it all clearly, despite the darkness, and I saw the people still down at the base of the cliff standing frozen in terror as that all-consuming wave hurtled toward us.

“Move, move, move!” I bellowed, letting go of the rope and jumping the rest of the way down the cliff, landing with a shock on the balls of my feet and rolling over twice to absorb the impact.

The people jerked to frantic life, dozens of men and women suddenly scratching up the cliff to save their lives. Others clambered down from the top, risking their lives without a moment’s thought to help their friends and relatives.

Dal got to his feet and leaned heavily on a spear. He was staring at the angry flood of frothing hot water as it surged toward us, swallowing everything in its path.

The volcano erupted truly now, and the ground shook hard enough to knock people loose from the ropes as they climbed up the cliff. They fell; bones broke. Screams of agony and terror pierced the darkness over the roar of the flood and the volcano.

I helped those I could, racing among the fallen to set them on their feet and start them up toward the top again. Teen-aged boys scrambled down to help others.

Then I saw Dal standing there watching us, his face set in a stubborn mask of self-control. He neither frowned nor cried for help. He leaned on his gnarled spear shaft, his injured leg held out stiffly, as he watched his people climbing to safety. Behind him, the raging hot waters of the flood roared and thundered closer, closer.

CHAPTER 32

With a yell, I grabbed one of the dangling vine ropes and ran for Dal. He raised one arm to protest, but I grabbed him and looped the rope under his shoulders before he could stop me.

“Hold on to the spear,” I shouted over the roar of the approaching flood. “Use the strength of your arms to make up for your bad leg.”

“I can’t make it!” he shouted back. “Save yourself, Orion!”

“We’ll both make it. Come on!”

I half-carried, half-tugged him to the base of the cliff and gave him an upward shove. Whoever was on the other end of the rope, up at the top, understood what I was trying to do and began hauling in the rope. Dal used his spear like a crutch as I scrabbled up the cliff beside him. The rain was making the rock slippery, and I nearly fell more than once.

We were barely a quarter of the way up the cliff face when the flood smashed against the base of the rocks, splashing boiling hot foam against me and sending Dal spinning on the end of the rope. He lost his spear and screamed with sudden pain. I automatically clamped down on my own pain receptors as the boiling water seared my legs. Grabbing Dal, I pushed and grunted and shoved the two of us higher. The water clawed at us, trying to drag us down into its steaming clutches.

I got one hand on the rope and gripped Dal around the shoulders with my other arm. Slowly, slowly, we inched up the cliff as the water rose behind us, seeking us, pulling at us, cooking the flesh of our legs as we desperately climbed toward safety.

Suddenly I heard Ava’s voice shouting commands, and we were lifted by what could only be the strength of many hands. Miraculously, it seemed, that strength hauled us roughly up the cliff, out of the water’s boiling grip, and landed us wet, burned, exhausted at the top of the cliff.

I lay there like a fish hauled out of the sea, squinting up through the hot rain at a ring of faces peering down.

“Are you all right?” Ava asked over and over. “Are you all right?”

It was Dal that she was talking to. I sat up, wincing, as I allowed the pain receptors in my legs to resume their normal function. Both legs were scalded, but the damage did not seem too serious. Ava was kneeling beside Dal, already smearing some kind of ointment over his reddened legs.

He turned to me. “You saved me, Orion.”

“As you once saved me.”

“I owe you my life,” he said.

With a shake of my head, I said, “No, you owe your life to your people. Lead them well, Dal. Find another valley and make it your own.”

Ava turned to me. “We will. We will live as you told us to live, Orion. We will start a new life.”

I should have felt happy, but there was nothing inside me except the pain of realizing that Ava would go with Dal, that she had to, and that I would be left alone once again.

I turned to peer through the darkness at the flood surging below us. It frothed and lapped at me, as if angry that I had escaped and trying to reach higher to get at me.

“You’d better take the clans to higher ground,” I said, “until the flood goes down.”

“Up the mountain,” Dal agreed.

“But it’s shaking, burning,” Ava said.

“That won’t hurt us,” said Dal, sure of himself once again. “When the flood is over, we will find a new valley to live in.”

“Good,” I said. The rain was slackening, but I could still hear the flood waters boiling below us. “You’d better get going now, without delay.”

“But what about you?” Ava asked.

“I’ll stay here. You don’t need me any longer.”

“But…”

“Go,” I commanded.

Reluctantly, they left. They made a litter for Dal and said a brief little prayer for those who had been killed, and then the band moved off, many of them limping, toward higher ground.

I sat there, willing my scalded legs to heal, waiting for the inevitable. I looked out across the valley in the deepening darkness, lit now only by the surly glow of the volcano’s fiery grumbling. The flood waters hissed and growled below me. I could feel the steam wafting up from their surface. The whole valley had been turned into a boiling cauldron. Ahriman had done his work well — but not well enough.

“You think you’ve won.” It was his labored, rasping voice in the darkness.

Turning toward him, I said, “I know I’ve won.”

His ponderous bulk seemed to congeal out of the shadows to loom over me as I sat on the ground, my legs poking straight out awkwardly.

“Nothing will grow in that valley for a long, long time,” he said. “Your superstitious little band of hunters will be so afraid of returning to it that…”

“They won’t have to return,” I interrupted. “They’ve brought the seeds of their grains with them.”

His red eyes flashed. “What?”

“And they have the seed of a new idea in their heads,” I went on. “You’ve lost, Ahriman. Those hunters will survive. They’ll turn into farmers and flourish.”

He did not bother to argue or to deny the truth of what I had told him. He did not rant or shout with rage. He stood there in silence for a long time, thinking, calculating, planning.

“It’s checkmate. Dark One,” I said. “There’s no way you can stop them now. You’ve done your worst, and they’ve stood up to it.”

“Because of you,” he rumbled.

“I helped them, yes.”

“For the last time, Orion.” He strode swiftly to me and picked me right up off the ground, his powerful hands squeezing my ribs like a pair of steel vises. He held me up in the air, my legs dangling uselessly.

“For the last time!” Ahriman shouted, and he threw me over the edge of the cliff, down into the boiling water below.

But in that last instant I grabbed him around his bull neck and held on with all my strength. For half an instant we hung there on the edge of the cliff, the two of us teetering there in the darkness, and then we toppled together downward into the raging water.

The boiling water was a shock of agony as we plunged into its depths. We’ve beaten you again, I exulted silently as the water hissed and bubbled all around me. And maybe this time is the final encounter; maybe this time I’ve finished you once and for all.

The water surged over me, dragging me down into its hot depths, boiling me, flaying the flesh from my bones. I gave way to pain and death, my last hope being that this would truly be the end of it all.