Orion and King Arthur

Epilogue: Paradise

We lay side by side on our bellies in the high grass. We had been tracking the boar all morning. The sun burned hot above, but beneath the shade of the broad-leafed trees the air was cool with the breeze blowing in from the nearby sea.

Anya didn’t look much like a goddess. She wore an animal pelt, arms and legs bare, her lovely face smudged with dirt, her flowing onyx hair wildly tangled.

She smiled at me, and her beauty shone through all the stains and smears of this existence. We were in Paradise, the broad, beautiful, game-filled forest that stretched across the northern rim of Africa. The basin that would one day be known as the Mediterranean Sea was filling from the enormous waterfall spilling in from the Atlantic Ocean where the Pillars of Hercules stood. Every day the sea grew, bringing fresh rains to nourish the broad, green forest.

North of the filling basin the land that would become Europe was almost completely covered by a two-mile-thick ice sheet that stretched all the way to the North Pole. An Ice Age gripped much of the world, and the human race—scattered across Africa for the most part, in tiny bands of nomadic hunters—had yet to invent agriculture or build villages.

Paradise. A hunting ground teeming with game and freedom. Anya and I were happy here. Who wouldn’t be? There were no chiefs here among the meager human tribes, no kings or vassals, no cities to confine us, no wars to bring slaughter and misery.

What would one day become the island of Britain was still attached to the mainland of Europe, buried beneath the glaciers that would not melt for another thousand centuries.

Silently, Anya tapped me on the shoulder. I could not see the boar through the high grass, but I heard it snuffling. We were upwind of the beast, yet it still sounded wary, dangerous.

Inching along slowly on our bellies, we followed the boar’s grumbles. I moved slightly ahead of Anya. Like her, I was gripping a wooden spear in one hand, its tip hardened by fire.

With the tip of the spear I slowly, carefully parted the tufts of grass obscuring my vision. There was the boar, rooting in the ground with its curved tusks, unaware of our presence and its impending death. It was a big animal, enough meat to feed our little band of hunters for many days. If we could kill it. If it didn’t kill us first.

Anya tapped my shoulder again and made a circling motion with her free hand. I nodded, and she slithered off to my right as silently as a snake. I smiled at my huntress. In later ages she would be worshipped as Athena, warrior and giver of wisdom. In this era she was a Neolithic hunter, happy and free.

I worried that she might move too far in her ploy to attack the boar from two sides. If the breeze changed even a little the beast would sniff us out and bolt away. Or charge at her with those powerful, sharp tusks.

And that is just what happened. Almost.

The boar’s head suddenly snapped up. It grunted, much like an old man suddenly disturbed in his slumber. My senses went into overdrive. I saw the boar’s muscles tense beneath its shaggy coat. If it charged at Anya while she was still inching along the ground, prone, it could rip her apart before she could use her spear to defend herself.

I leaped to my feet and bellowed at the animal. It froze for an instant, then turned toward me, its narrow little eyes blinking. For a moment I thought it would scamper away, and our whole morning’s stalk would be wasted. Instead it bunched its muscles, lowered its head, and charged straight at me.

I gripped my spear in both hands, ready to impale the beast when it got close enough. But then Anya burst out of the foliage to my right and nailed the animal through its ribs with her spear. The boar growled and twisted, yanking the spear from Anya’s hands. Slathering, spouting blood, it turned on her.

I raced forward and rammed my spear through its hindquarters, nailing it to the ground. It screeched horribly as it thrashed about, trying to work itself loose. I held on to my spear, keeping the beast pinned.

Anya jumped lightly to the boar’s side, yanked her spear out, then jammed it in again at the base of the animal’s skull. It collapsed and went silent.

“Well done,” I said, puffing.

She laughed. “Well done yourself, Orion.”

By the time we finished quartering the carcass we were both grimy and splattered with the boar’s blood and entrails. I grinned at her. Anya didn’t look like a goddess now—unless perhaps she was Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

As we toted the meat through the forest, back to the clearing where our band had made its little camp, Anya said happily, “We’ll feast tonight.”

“And tomorrow,” I said. “Several tomorrows.”

Her cheerful smile faded. “How many tomorrows do we have, Orion?”

I knew what she meant. “As many as we desire, dear one.”

But she shook her head sadly. “Aten is scheming to destroy you, darling. You know that.”

“Let him scheme. We can stay here in Paradise as long as we want to.”

“I wish that were true.”

“Why not?” I demanded.

She caught me with those infinite gray eyes of her. “Aten must be plotting with others of the Creators to eliminate you, erase you from the continuum as if you never existed.”

“He can try,” I growled.

“He is trying! I can sense it.”

“We’re safe enough here.”

“For how long? A week? A year?”

Shaking my head, I admitted, “I still don’t understand how you can travel through time and yet still be bound by it.”

“The point is, Orion,” she said, very seriously, “that the longer we stay here in Paradise the longer Aten has to plan your destruction.”

“Maybe I should destroy him, then.”

Her eyes widened. “Destroy a Creator?”

“He’d destroy me if he could. Why shouldn’t I fight back?”

“But … destroy a Creator?” The idea seemed to shock her.

I stopped and let the bloody chunk of the boar slide from my shoulders to the ground. “We’ve got to do something. You’re right about that.”

“What do you have in mind?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Not yet.” I felt a weight far heavier than the boar settling on my shoulders. “But I’ve got to do something, don’t I?”

“We have to do something, my darling. You and I, together.”

I lifted the bloody meat off her shoulder and took her in my arms and kissed her. Two Neolithic hunters, covered with grime and gore, who loved each other through all the eons and light-years of the continuum. We would face Aten and the other Creators together, for all eternity if need be.