Orion in the Dying Time

Chapter 1

Anya pulled off her glittering silvery robe and flung it to the grassy ground. Beneath it she wore a metallic suit of the kind I vaguely remembered from another time, long ages ago. It fit her skintight, from the tops of her silver boots to the high collar that circled her neck. She was a dazzling goddess with long dark hair that tumbled past her shoulders and fathomless gray eyes that held all of time in them.

I wore nothing but the leather kilt and vest from my previous existence in ancient Egypt. The wound that had killed me then had disappeared from my chest. Strapped to my right thigh, beneath the kilt, was the dagger that I had worn in that other time. A pair of rope sandals was my only other possession.

Anya said, “Come, Orion, we must hurry away from this place.”

I loved her as eternally and completely as any man has ever worshiped a woman. I had died many deaths for her sake, and she had defied her fellow Creators to be with me time and again, in every era to which they had sent me. Death could not part us. Nor time nor space.

I took her hand in mine and we headed off along a wide avenue between the heavily laden trees.

For what seemed like hours, Anya and I walked through the garden, away from the bank of the ageless Nile flowing patiently through this land that would one day be called Egypt. The sun rose high but the day remained deliciously cool, the air clean and crisp as a temperate springtime afternoon. Cottony clumps of cumulus clouds dotted the deeply blue sky. A refreshing breeze blew toward us from what would one day be the pitiless oven of the Sahara.

Despite her denying it, the garden did remind me of the legends I had heard of Eden. On both sides of us row upon row of trees marched as far as the eye could see, yet no two were the same. Fruits of all kinds hung heavy on their boughs: figs, olives, plums, pomegranates, even apples. High above them all swayed stately palms, heavy with coconuts. Shrubs were set out in carefully planned beds between the trees, each of them flowering so profusely that the entire park was ablaze with color.

Yet not another soul was in sight. Between the trees and shrubbery the grass was clipped to such a uniformly precise height that it almost seemed artificial. No insects buzzed. No birds flitted among the greenery.

“Where are we going?” I asked Anya.

“Away from here,” she replied, “as quickly as we can.”

I reached toward a bush that bore luscious-looking mangoes. Anya grabbed at my hand.

“No!”

“But I’m hungry.”

“It will be better to wait until we are clear of this park. Otherwise…” She glanced back over her shoulder.

“Otherwise an angel will appear with a flaming sword?” I teased.

Anya was totally serious. “Orion, this park is a botanical experimental station for the creature whose statue we saw in the temple.”

“The one called Set?”

She nodded. “We are not ready to meet him. We are completely unarmed, unprepared.”

“But what harm would it be to eat some of his fruit? We could still hurry along as we ate.”

Almost smiling, Anya said, “He is very sensitive about his plants. Somehow he knows when someone touches them.”

“And?”

“And he kills them.”

“He doesn’t drive them into the outer darkness, to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows?” I noticed that even though my tone was bantering, we were walking faster than before.

“No. He kills them. Finally and eternally.”

I had died many times, yet the Creators had always revived me to serve them again in another time, another place. Still I feared death, the agony of it, the separation and loss that it brought. And a new tendril of fear flickered along my nerves: Anya was afraid. One of the Creators, a veritable goddess who could move through eons of time as easily as I was walking along this garden path—she was obviously afraid of the reptilian entity whose statue had adorned the temple by the bank of the Nile.

I closed my eyes briefly to picture that statue more clearly. At first I had thought it was a representation of a man wearing a totem mask: the body was human, the face almost like a crocodile’s. But now as I scanned my memory of it I saw that this first impression had been overly simple.

The body was humanoid, true enough. It stood on two legs and had two arms. But the feet were claws with three toes ending in sharply hooked talons. The hands had two long scaly-looking fingers with an opposed thumb for the third digit, all of them clawed. The hips and shoulders connected in nonhuman ways.

And the face. It was the face of a reptile unlike anything I had seen before: a snout filled with serrated teeth for tearing flesh; eyes set forward in the skull for binocular vision; bony projections just above the eyes; a domed cranium that housed a brain large enough to be fully intelligent.

“Now you begin to realize what we are up against,” Anya said, reading my thoughts.

“The Golden One sent us here to hunt down this thing called Set and destroy him?” I asked. “Alone? Just the two of us? Without weapons?”

“Not the Golden One, Orion. The entire council of the Creators. The whole assemblage of them.”

The ones whom the ancient Greeks had called gods, who lived in their own Olympian world in the distant future of this time.

“The entire assemblage,” I repeated, “That means you agreed to the task.”

“To be with you,” Anya said. “They were going to send you alone, but I insisted that I come with you.”

“I am expendable,” I said.

“Not to me.” And I loved her all the more for it.

“You said this creature called Set—”

“He is not a creature of ours, Orion,” Anya swiftly corrected. “The Creators did not bring him into being, as we did the human race. He comes from another world and he seeks to destroy the Creators.”

“Destroy… even you?”

She smiled at me, and it was if another sun had risen. “Even me, my love.”

“You said he can cause final death, without hope of revival.”

Anya’s smile disappeared. “He and his kind have vast powers. If they can alter the continuum deeply enough to destroy the Creators, then our deaths will be final and irrevocable.”

Many times over the eons I had thought that the release of death would be preferable to the suffering toil of a life spent in pain and danger. But each time the thought of Anya, of this goddess whom I loved and who loved me, made me strive for life. Now we were together at last, but the threat of ultimate oblivion hung over us like a cloud blotting out the sun.

We walked on until the lines of trees abruptly ended. Standing in the shade of the last wide-branched chestnut, we looked out on a sea of grass. Wild uncut grass as far as the limestone cliffs that jutted into the bright summer sky, marking the edge of the Nile-cut valley. Windblown waves curled through the waving fronds of grass like green surges of surf rushing toward us.

Silhouetted against the distant cliffs I saw a few dark specks moving slowly. I pointed toward them and Anya followed my outstretched arm with her eyes.

“Humans,” she muttered. “A crew of slaves.”

“Slaves?”

“Yes. Look at what’s guarding them.”

Chapter 2

I focused my eyes intently on the distant figures. I have always been able to control consciously all the functions of my body, direct my will along the chain of neural synapses instantly to make any part of my body do exactly what I wished it to do.

Now I concentrated on the line of human beings trudging across the grassy landscape. They were being led by something not human.

At first it reminded me of a dinosaur, but I knew that the great reptilians had become extinct millions of years before this time. Or had they? If the Creators could twist time to their whim, and this alien called Set had comparable powers, why not a dinosaur here in the Neolithic era?

It walked on four slim legs and had a long whiplike tail twitching behind it. Its neck was long, too, so that its total length was nearly twenty feet, about the size of a full-grown African bull elephant. But it was much less bulky, slimmer, more graceful. I got the impression that it could run faster than a man.

Its scales were brightly colored in bands of red, blue, yellow, and brown. Horny projections of bone studded its back like rows of buttons. The head at the end of that elongated neck was small, with a short stubby snout and eyes set wide apart on either side of a rounded skull. Its eyes were slitted, unblinking.

It strode up at the front of the little column of humans, and every few moments turned its long neck back to look at the slaves it led.

And they were slaves, that was obvious. Fourteen men and women, wearing nothing but tattered loincloths, emaciated ribs showing clearly even at the distance from which we watched. They seemed exhausted, laboring for breath as they struggled to keep up to the pace set by their reptilian guard. One of the women carried a baby in a sling on her back. Two of the men looked like teenagers to me. There was only one gray head among them. I got the impression they rarely lived long enough to become gray.

Hiding behind the bole of the chestnut tree at the edge of the garden, we watched the pitiful little parade for several silent moments.

Then I asked, “Why slaves?”

Anya whispered, “To tend this garden, of course. And the other desires of Set and his minions.”

The woman with the baby stumbled and fell to her knees. The giant reptile instantly wheeled around and trotted up to her, looming over her. Even from this distance I could hear the faint wailing of the baby.

The woman struggled to her feet, or tried to. Not fast enough for the guard. Its slim tail whipped viciously across her back, striking the baby as well. She screamed and the baby shrieked with pain and terror.

Again the tail flicked back and struck at her. She fell facedown on the grass.

I strained forward, but Anya grasped ray arm and held me back.

“No,” she whispered urgently. “There’s nothing you can do.”

The huge lizard was standing over the prostrate mother, bending its neck to sniff at her unmoving form. The baby still wailed. The other men and women stood unmoving, mute as statues.

“Why don’t they fight?” I seethed.

Anya replied, “With their bare hands against that monster?”

“They could at least run away while its attention is diverted. Scatter—”

“They know better, Orion. They would be hunted down like animals and killed very slowly.”

The lizard was squatting on its two rear legs and tail now, nudging the woman’s body with one of its clawed forepaws. She did not move.

Then the beast pulled the infant out of the sling and lifted it high, swinging its head upward as it did so. I realized it was going to crunch the baby in its jaws.

Nothing could hold me back now. I bolted out from the protection of the trees and raced pell-mell toward the monster, bellowing loudly as I could while I ran. All my bodily senses went into hyperdrive, as they always do when I face danger. The world around me seemed to slow down, everything moved with an almost dreamlike languor.

I saw the lizard holding the squalling baby aloft, saw its head turning toward me on the end of that long snaky neck, saw its narrow slit eyes register on me, its head bobbing back and forth as if it were saying no. In reality it was merely trying to get a fix with both eyes on what was making the noise.

I saw the baby still clutched in the lizard’s claws, its tiny legs churning in the empty air, its blubbering face contorted and red with crying. And the mother, her naked back livid with the welts from the beast’s tail, was pushing herself up on one elbow in a futile effort to reach her baby.

The lizard dropped the baby and turned to face me, hissing. Its tongue darted out of its tiny mouth as its head bobbed left and right. The tail flicked as it dropped to all fours.

I had my dagger in my right hand. It seemed pitifully small against the talons on the monster’s paws, but it was the only weapon I possessed. As I closed the distance between us I saw the other humans standing behind the lizard. My brain registered that they were totally cowed, unmoving, not even trying to get away or distract the beast in any manner. I would get no help from them.

The lizard took a few trotting steps toward me, then reared up on its hind legs like an enraged bear. It towered over me, advancing on those monstrous clawed hind legs while its neck bent down between its wide-spread forelegs, hissing at me. Its teeth were small and flat, I saw. Not a flesh-eater. Just a killing machine.

Suddenly bright yellow frills snapped open on both sides of its neck, making its head appear twice as large; a trick for frightening enemies, but I knew it for what it was.

I ran straight at the big lizard and saw its long tail whipping toward my left. Like a slow-motion dream I watched its tip swinging toward me. I gauged its speed and jumped over it as it snapped harmlessly beneath my feet. My impetus carried me straight toward the lizard’s scaled underside and I sank my dagger blade into its belly with every ounce of my strength.

It screeched like a steam whistle and reached to grab me. I ducked under the clutching claws and plunged my dagger into its hide again.

In the heat of battle I had forgotten about its tail. It caught me this time, knocking me off my feet. I hit the ground with a thud that made me grunt with pain and surprise. The lizard reached for me again, but with my senses in hyperdrive I could see its every move easily and rolled away from those clutching claws.

The tail slashed at me again. I stepped inside its arc and carved a bloody slice down the lizard’s thigh. My blade caught bone and I worked it in deeper, hoping to disable its knee joint and cripple it. Instead I felt its claws circle around me, cutting into my midsection as it yanked me high into the air. The dagger was wrenched from my grasp, still stuck in its knee.

It carried me up above its head and I saw those narrow yellow reptilian eyes staring coldly at me, first one and then the other. Its teeth were not made for rending flesh but those jaws could crush my body quite easily, I knew. That was just what the beast was going to do. Its yellow collar frills relaxed slightly; the monster no longer felt threatened.

I strained to break free of the demon’s claws, but I was just as helpless as the baby had been moments before.

“Orion! Here!”

Anya’s voice made me glance down while I struggled in the lizard’s powerful grip. She had come up behind me and was pulling my knife out of the lizard’s knee. Before the beast understood what was happening, she threw the dagger as expertly as any assassin. It pierced the soft folds beneath the lizard’s jaw with a satisfying thunk.

With its free hand the dragon started to reach for the steel in its throat. But I was closer and faster. I grabbed the projecting hilt of the dagger and began working the blade across the lizard’s jawline, back toward the frills that had snapped fully erect once again. It shrieked and released me, but I clutched at its neck and swung up behind its head, pulling the dagger free and jamming it in beneath the base of the skull.

It collapsed as suddenly as a light being switched off. I had severed its spinal cord. The two of us came crashing down to the grassy ground. I felt myself bounce and then everything went blank.

Chapter 3

I opened my eyes and focused blearily on Anya’s beautiful face. She was kneeling over me, deep concern etched across her classic features. Then she smiled.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I ached in every part of my body. My chest and thighs were slashed from the lizard’s claws. But I consciously clamped down on the capillaries to stop the bleeding and closed off the pain centers in my brain. I made myself grin up at her.

“I’m alive.”

She helped me to my feet. I saw that only a few moments had passed. The big lizard was now nothing more than a huge mound of brightly colored scales stretched out across the grass.

The crew of slaves, however, was something else. The slaves were terrified. And instead of being grateful, they were angry.

“You have slain one of the guardians!” said a scrawny bearded man, his eyes wide with terror.

“The masters will blame us!” one of the women wailed.

“We will be punished!”

I felt something close to contempt for them. They had the mentality of true slaves. Instead of thanking me for helping them, they were fearful of their master’s wrath. Without a word I went to the dead beast and pulled my dagger from the back of its neck.

Anya said to them, “We could not stand idly and watch the monster kill the baby.”

The baby, I saw, was alive. The mother was sitting silently on the grass, holding the child to her emaciated breast, her huge brown eyes staring at me blankly. If she was grateful for what I had done, she was hiding it well. Two long red weals scarred her ribs and back. The baby also had a livid welt across its naked flesh.

But the scrawny man was tugging at his tangled gray beard and moaning, “The masters will descend upon us and kill us all with great pain. They will put us in the fire that never dies. All of us!”

“It would have been better to let the baby die,” said another man, equally gaunt, his hair and beard also filthy and matted. “Better that one dies than all of us are tortured to death. We can always make more babies.”

“If your masters do not find you, they cannot punish you,” I said. “If the two of us can kill one of these overgrown lizards, then all of us can work together to protect ourselves against them.”

“Impossible!”

“Where could we hide that they will not find us?”

“They have eyes that see in the night.”

“They can fly through the air and even cross the great river.”

“Their claws are sharp. And they have the eternal fire.”

As they spoke they clustered around Anya and me, as if seeking protection. And they constantly looked up into the sky and scanned the horizon, as if seeking the first sign of avenging dragons. Or worse.

Anya asked them in a gentle voice, “What will happen to you if the two of us go away and leave you alone?”

“The masters will see what has happened here and punish us,” said the beard tugger. He seemed to be their leader, perhaps merely by the fact that he was their eldest.

“How will they punish you?” I asked.

He shrugged his bony shoulders. “That is for them to decide.”

“They will flay the skin from our bodies,” said one of the teenagers, “and then cast us into the eternal fire.”

The others shuddered. Their eyes were wide and pleading.

“Suppose we stayed here with you until your masters find us,” I asked. “Will they punish you if we tell them that we killed the beast and you had nothing to do with it?”

They gaped at us as if we were stupid children. “Of course they will punish us! They will punish every one of us. That is the law.”

I turned to Anya. “Then we’ve got to get away.”

“And bring them with us,” she agreed.

I scanned the area where we stood. The Nile had cut a broad, deep valley through the limestone cliffs that rose like jagged walls on either side of the river. Atop the cliffs, according to Anya, was a wide grassy plain. If this region would truly become the Sahara one day, then it must stretch for hundreds of miles southward, thousands of miles to the west. A flat open savannah, with only an occasional hill or river-carved valley to break the plain’s flat monotony. Not good country to hide in, especially from creatures that can fly through the air and see in the dark. But better than being penned between the river and the cliffs.

I had no doubt that the slaves were telling the truth about their reptilian masters. The beast Anya and I had just slain was a dinosaur, that seemed certain. Why not winged pterosaurs, then, or other reptiles that can sense heat the way a pit viper does?

“Are there trees nearby?” Anya was asking them. “Not like the garden, but wild trees, a natural forest.”

“Oh,” said the scrawny elder. “You mean Paradise.”

Far to the south, he told us, there were forest and streams and game animals in endless abundance. But the area was forbidden to them. The masters would not let them return there.

“You lived there once?” I asked.

“Long, long ago,” he said wistfully. “When I was even younger than Chron here.” He pointed at the smaller of the two teenage boys.

“How far away is it?”

“Many suns.”

Pointing southward, I said, “Then we head for Paradise.”

They made no objection, but it was clear to see that they were terrified. The spirit had been beaten out of them almost totally. Yet even if they did not want to follow my lead, they had no real alternative. Their masters had frightened them so completely that it made no difference to them which way they went; they were certain that they would be caught and punished most horribly.

My first aim was to get away from the carcass of the lizard. It would take a while for whoever was in charge of the garden—Set, I supposed—to realize that one of his trained animals had been killed and a crew of slaves was loose on the landscape. We had perhaps a few hours, and by then it would be nightfall. If we could move quickly enough, we might have a chance to survive.

We climbed the cliff face. It was not as difficult as I had feared; the stone was broken and tiered into what seemed almost like stairways. They puffed and gasped and struggled their way up to the top with me leading them and Anya bringing up the rear.

At the summit I saw that Anya had been right. An endless rolling plain of grass stretched out to the horizon, green and lush and seemingly empty of animal life. A broad treeless savannah that extended all the way across the northern sweep of Africa to the very shore of the Atlantic. To the south, according to the gray-bearded slave, was the forest land he called Paradise.

Pointing with my left hand, I commanded, “Southward.”

I set as brisk a pace as I could, and the slaves half trotted behind me, gasping and groaning. They did not complain, perhaps because they did not have the breath to. But each time I glanced back over my shoulder to see if they were keeping up, they were glancing back over their shoulders in fear of the inevitable.

I had hardly worked up a sweat despite the warm sun slanting down on us from near the western horizon. I associated the sun with the Golden One, the Creator who called himself Ormazd in one era and Apollo in another, the half-mad megalomaniac who had created me to hunt down his enemies across the span of the eons.

“You must let them rest,” Anya said, jogging easily beside me through the knee-high wild grass. “They are exhausted.”

I reluctantly agreed. Up ahead I saw a small hill. Once we reached its base I stopped. All of the slaves immediately sprawled on the ground, wheezing painfully, rivers of sweat cutting grimy streaks through the dirt that crusted their bodies.

I climbed to the hilltop, less than thirty feet high, and scanned the view. Not a tree in sight. Nothing but trackless savannah in every direction. In a way it was thrilling to be in a time and place where no human feet had yet beaten out paths and trails. The sky was turning a blazing vermilion now along the western horizon. Higher up, the blue vault was deepening into a soft violet. There was already a star shining up there, even though we were far from twilight.

A single star, brighter than any I remembered seeing in any era. It did not twinkle at all, but shone with a constant ruddy, almost brownish light, bright and big enough to make me think that I could see a true disk instead of a mere pinpoint of light. The planet Mars? No, it was brighter than Mars had ever been, even in the clear skies of Troy, thousands of years in this era’s future. And its color was darker than the bright ruby red of Mars, a brooding brownish red, almost like drying blood. Nor could it be Antares: that great red giant in the Scorpion’s heart twinkled like all other true stars.

A shriek of fear startled me out of my astronomical musings.

“Look!”

“He comes!”

“They are searching for us!”

I followed the outstretched emaciated arms of my newfound companions and saw a pair of winged creatures crisscrossing the darkening sky to the northeast of us. Pterosaurs, sure enough. Enormous leathery wings flapping lazily every few heartbeats, then a slow easy glide as their long pointed beaks aimed down toward the ground. They were searching for us, no doubt of it.

“Stay absolutely still,” I commanded. “Lie down on the ground and don’t move!”

Winged reptiles flying that high depended on their vision above all other senses. My crew of scrawny slaves were as brown as dirt. If they did not attract attention by moving, perhaps the pterosaurs would not recognize them. They hugged the ground, half-hidden even from my view by the long grass.

But I saw the long rays of the setting sun glittering off Anya’s metallic suit. For an instant I wanted to tell her to move into the shadow of the hill. But there was no time, and the motion would have caught the beady eyes of the searching pterosaurs. So I stretched myself out flat on the crest of the little hill and hoped desperately that the winged reptiles were not brainy enough to realize that a metallic glinting was something they should investigate further.

It seemed like hours as the giant fliers soared slowly across the sky, crisscrossing time and again in an obvious hunting pattern. They may have looked ugly and ungainly on the ground, with their long beaks and balancing bony crests extending rearward from their heads, but in the air they were nothing less than magnificent. They flew with hardly any effort at all, soaring along gracefully on the warm air currents rising from the grassy plain.

They passed us by at last and disappeared to the west. Once they were out of sight I got to my feet and started southward again. The slaves followed eagerly, without a grumble. Fear inspired them with new strength.

As the sun touched the green horizon I spotted a clump of trees in the distance. We hurried toward them and saw that a small stream had cut a shallow gorge through the grassland. Its muddy banks were overshadowed by the leafy trees.

“We can camp here for the night,” I said. “Under the trees, with plenty of water.”

“And what do we eat?” whined the elder.

I looked down at him, more in exasperation than anger. A true slave, waiting for someone to provide him with food rather than trying to get it for himself.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Noch,” he said, his eyes suddenly fearful.

Clasping his thin shoulder in my hand, I said, “Well, Noch, my name is Orion. I am a hunter. Tonight I will find you something to eat. Tomorrow you begin to learn for yourselves how to hunt.”

Cutting a small branch from one of the trees, I whittled as sharp a point as I could on one end while the young Chron watched me avidly.

“Do you want to learn how to hunt?” I asked him.

Even in the shadows of dusk I could see his eyes gleam. “Yes!”

“Then come with me.”

It could hardly be called hunting. The small game that lived by the stream had never encountered humans before. The animals were so tame that I could walk right up to them and spear one of them as it drank at the water’s edge. Its companions scampered away briefly, but soon returned. It took only a few minutes to bag a brace of raccoons and three rabbits.

Chron watched eagerly. Then I let him have the makeshift spear, and after a few clumsy misses, he nailed a ground squirrel, squealing and screeching its last breath.

“That was the enjoyable part,” I told him. “Now we must skin our kills and prepare them for cooking.”

I did all that work, since we had only the one knife and I had no intention of letting any of the others touch it. As I skinned and gutted our tiny catch, to the avid eyes of the whole little tribe, I worried about a fire. If there were reptiles out there that could sense heat the way a rattlesnake or a cobra does, even a small cooking fire would be like a blazing beacon to them.

But there seemed to be no such reptiles in the area. The pterosaurs had passed us by hours earlier, and I had seen no other reptilians in this open savannah, not even the tiniest of lizards. Nothing but small mammals—and we few humans.

I decided to risk a fire, just large enough for cooking our catch, to be extinguished as soon as the cooking was done.

Anya surprised me by showing she could light a fire with nothing more than a pair of sticks and some sweat.

The others gaped in astonishment as wisps of smoke and then a flicker of flame rose from Anya’s rubbing sticks.

Gray-bearded old Noch, kneeling next to her, said in an awed voice, “I remember my father making fire in the same way—before he was killed by the masters and I was taken away from Paradise.”

“The masters have the eternal fire,” said a woman’s voice from out of the flickering shadows.

But none of the others seemed concerned with that now, not with the delicious aroma of roasting meat making them salivate and their stomachs rumble.

After we had eaten and most of the tribe had drifted off into sleep I asked Anya, “Where did you learn to make fire?”

“From you,” she answered. Looking into my eyes, she added, “Don’t you remember?”

I could feel my brows knitting with concentration. “Cold—I remember the snow and ice, and a small team of men and women. We were wearing uniforms…”

Anya’s eyes seemed to glow in the night shadows. “You do remember! You can break through the programming and remember earlier existences.”

“I don’t remember much,” I said.

“But the Golden One wiped your memory clean after each existence. Or tried to. Orion, you are growing stronger. Your powers are growing.”

I was more concerned with our present problems. “How do the Creators expect us to deal with Set with nothing but our bare hands?”

“They don’t, Orion. Now that we have established ourselves in this era we can return to the Creators and bring back whatever we need: tools, weapons, machines, warriors… anything.”

“Warriors? Like me? Human beings manufactured by the Golden One or the other Creators and sent back in time to do their dirty work?”

With a tolerant sigh, Anya replied, “You can hardly expect them to come themselves and do the fighting. They are not warriors.”

“But you are here. Fighting. That monster would have killed me if you hadn’t been there.”

“I am an atavism,” she said, almost with pleasure in her voice. “A warrior. A woman foolish enough to fall in love with one of our own creatures.”

The fire had long been smothered in mud, and the only light sifting through the trees came from the cold white alabaster of the moon. It was enough for me to see how beautiful Anya was, enough to make me burn with love for her.

“Can we go to the Creators’ realm and then return here, to this exact place and time?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Even if we spend hours and hours?”

“Orion, in the realm of the Creators there is a splendid temple atop a crag of marble that is my favorite retreat. We could go there and spend hours, or days, or months, if you wish.”

“I do wish it!”

She kissed me gently, merely a brushing of lips. “Then we will go there.”

Anya put her hand in mine. Reflexively, I closed my eyes. But I felt nothing, and when I opened my eyes, we were still in the miserable little camp by the muddy bank of a Neolithic stream.

“What happened?”

Anya’s whole body was stiff with tension. “It didn’t work. Something—someone—is blocking access to the continuum.”

“Blocking access?” I heard my own voice as if a stranger’s: high-pitched with sudden fear.

“We’re trapped here, Orion!” said Anya, frightened herself. “Trapped!”

Chapter 4

Now I knew something of how the tribe of ex-slaves felt.

It was easy to feel brave and confident when I knew that all the paths of the continuum were open to me. Knew that I could travel through time as easily as stepping through a doorway. Certainly I could feel pity, even contempt, for these cowardly humans who bowed down to the terrifying reptilian masters. I could leave this time and place at will, as long as Anya was with me to lead the way.

But now we were trapped, the way was cut off, and I felt the deep lurking dread of forces and powers far beyond my own control looming over me as hatefully as final, implacable death.

We had no choice except to press on southward, hoping to reach the forests of Paradise before Set’s scouting pterosaurs located us. Each morning we rose and trekked toward the distant southern horizon. Each night we made camp in the best available protective foliage we could find. The men were learning to hunt the small game that abounded in this endless grassy veldt, the women gathered fruits and berries.

Each time we saw pterosaurs quartering the skies above us we went to ground and froze like mice faced with a hunting hawk. Then we resumed our march to the south. Toward Paradise. And the horizon remained just as flat, just as far away, as it had been the first day we had started.

Sometimes in the distance we saw herds of grazing animals, big beasts the size of bison or elk. Once we stumbled close enough to them to see a pride of saber-toothed cats stalking the herd’s fringes; the females sleek and deadly as they prowled through the long grass, bellies almost on the ground, the males massive with their scimitarlike incisors and shaggy manes. They ignored us, and we steered as far away from them as we could.

Anya troubled me. I had never seen her look frightened before, but frightened she was now. I knew she was trying each night to make contact with the other Creators, those godlike men and women from the distant future who had created the human race. They had created me to be their hunter, and I had served them with growing reluctance over the millennia. Gradually I was remembering other missions, other lives. Other deaths.

Once I had been with another tribe of Neolithic hunter/gatherers, far from this monotonous savannah, in the hilly country near Ararat. In another time I had led a desperate band of abandoned soldiers through the snows of the Ice Age in the aftermath of our slaughter of the Neanderthals.

Anya had always been there with me, often disguised as an ordinary human being of that time and place, always ready to protect me even in the face of the displeasure of the other Creators.

Now we trekked toward a Paradise that may be nothing more than a half-remembered legend, fleeing devilish monsters who had apparently taken total control of this aspect of the continuum. And Anya was as helpless as any of us.

Some nights we made love, coupling as the others did, on the ground in the dark, silently, furtively, not wanting the others to see or hear us, as though what we were doing was shameful. Our passions were brief, spiritless, far from satisfying.

It was several nights before I realized that the mother whom I had saved from the lizard’s punishment had taken to sleeping beside me. She and her baby remained several body lengths away the first night, but each evening she moved closer. Anya noticed, too, and spoke gently with her.

“Her name is Reeva,” Anya told me as we marched the following morning. “Her husband was beaten to death by the guard lizards for trying to steal extra food for her so she could nurse the baby.”

“But why—”

“You protected her. You saved her and her baby. She is very shy, but she is trying to work up the courage to tell you that she will be your number-two woman, if you will have her.”

I felt more confusion than surprise. “But I don’t want another woman!”

“Shhh,” Anya cautioned, even though we were not speaking in the language of these people. “You must not reject her openly. She wants a protector for her child and she is willing to offer her body in return for your protection.”

I cast a furtive glance at Reeva. She could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. As thin as a piece of string, caked with days’ worth of grime, her long hair matted and filthy. She carried the sleeping baby on one bony hip and walked along in uncomplaining silence with the rest of the tribe.

Anya, who bathed whenever we found enough water and privacy, seemed to be taking the situation lightly. She seemed almost amused.

“Can’t you make Reeva understand,” I virtually pleaded with her, “that I will do the best I can to protect all of us? I don’t need her… enticements.”

Anya grinned at me and said nothing.

Each night that baleful star looked down at us, like a glowing blot of dried blood, bright enough to cast shadows, brighter even than the full moon. Sunrise did not blot it out; it lingered in the morning sky until it dropped below the horizon. It could not be any planet that I knew of; it could not be an artificial satellite. It simply hung in its place among the other stars, unblinking, menacing, blood-chilling.

One night I asked Anya if she knew what it was.

She gazed at it for long moments, and its dark light made her lovely face seem grim and ashen. Then tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she answered in a whisper that carried untold misery. “I don’t know anything anymore!”

She tried to stifle her tears, but she could not. Sobbing, she pressed her face against my shoulder so that the others would not hear her crying. I held her tightly, feeling strange, uncomfortable. I had never seen a goddess cry before.

By my count, it was on the eleventh day when young Chron came dashing back toward me with an ear-to-ear grin on his face.

“Up on the hill! I can see trees! Lots of trees!”

The teenager had taken to scouting slightly ahead of the rest of us. For all our wearying march and the terror that drove us onward, the tribe was actually in better physical condition now than when I had first stumbled across them. They were eating regularly, and a protein-rich diet at that. Skinny little Chron looked better and certainly had more energy than he had shown only ten days earlier. The hollow places between his ribs were beginning to fill in.

I went up to the top of the hillock with him and, sure enough, the distant horizon was no longer a flat expanse of grass. It was an undulating skyline of trees, waving to us, beckoning.

“Paradise!” Noch had come up to stand beside me. His voice trembled with joy and anticipation.

We headed eagerly for the trees, and even though it took the rest of the day, we finally entered their cool shade and threw ourselves exhausted on the mossy ground.

All around us towered broad-spreading oaks and lofty pines, spruce and balsam firs, the lovely slim white boles of young birch punctuating this world of leafy green. Ferns and mosses covered the ground. I saw mushrooms clustered between the roots of a massive old oak tree, and flowers waving daintily in the soft breeze.

An enormous feeling of relief washed over us all, a sense of safety, of being in a place where the terrible fear that had hovered over us was at last dissipated and driven away. Birds were singing in the boughs high above us, as if welcoming us to Paradise.

I sat up and took a deep breath of clean, sweet air redolent of pine and wild roses and cinnamon. Even Anya looked happy. We could hear the splashing of a brook nearby, beyond the bushes and young saplings that stood between the sturdy boles of the grown trees.

A doe stepped daintily out of those bushes and regarded us for a moment with large, liquid brown eyes. Then it turned and dashed off.

“What did I tell you, Orion?” Noch beamed happily. “This is Paradise!”

The men used the rudimentary hunting skills I had taught them to trap and kill a wild pig that evening as it came down to the brook to drink. They showed more enthusiasm than skill, and the pig screeched and squealed and nearly got away before they finally hacked it to death with their makeshift spears. But we feasted long into the night and then went to sleep.

Anya curled into my arms and fell asleep almost immediately. As our fire died slowly into embers I gazed down on her face, smudged and stained with grease from our pork dinner. Her hair was tangled and stubborn ringlets fell over her forehead. Despite her best efforts she was no longer the smoothly groomed goddess from a far superior culture. I remembered vaguely another existence, with that other hunting tribe, where she had become one of them, a fierce priestess who reveled in the blood and excitement of the hunt.

It would not be so bad to stay in this time, I thought. Being cut off from the other Creators had its compensations. We were free of their schemes and machinations. Free of the responsibilities they had loaded upon me. Anya and I could live here in this Paradise quite happily like two normal human beings; no longer goddess and creature, but simply a man and a woman living out normal lives in a simple, primitive time.

To live a normal life, free of the Creators. I smiled to myself in the darkness, and for the first time since we had arrived in this time and place, I let myself fall completely and unguardedly into a deep delicious sleep.

But with sleep came a dream. No, not a dream: a message. A warning.

I saw the statue of Set from that little stone temple back along the bank of the Nile. As I watched, the statue shimmered and came to life. The blank granite eyes turned carnelian, blinked slowly, then focused upon me. The scaly head turned and lowered slightly. A wave of utterly dry heat seemed to bake the strength from my body; it was as if the door to a giant furnace had suddenly swung open. The acrid smell of sulfur burned my lungs. Set’s mouth opened in a hissing intake of breath, revealing several rows of sharply pointed teeth.

He was an overpowering presence. He loomed over me, standing on two legs that ended in clawed feet. His long tail flicked back and forth slowly as he regarded me the way a powerful predator might regard a particularly helpless and stupid victim.

“You are Orion.”

He did not speak the words; I heard them in my mind. The voice seethed with malevolence, with an evil so deep and complete that my knees went weak.

“I am Set, master of this world. You have been sent to destroy me. Abandon all hope, foolish man. That is manifestly impossible.”

I could not speak, could not even move. It had been the same when I had first been created by the Golden One. His presence had also paralyzed me. He had built such a reaction into my brain. Yet even so, I had learned to overcome it, somewhat. Now this monstrous apparition of evil held me in thrall even more completely than the Golden One ever had. I knew, with utter certainty, that Set could still my breath with a glance, could make my heart stop with a blink of his burning red eyes.

“Your Creators fear me, and justly so. I will destroy them and all their works utterly, beginning with you.”

I struggled to move, to say something back to him, but I could not control any part of my body.

“You think you have struck a blow against me by killing one of my creatures and stealing a miserable band of slaves from my garden.”

The terror that Set struck in me went beyond reason, beyond sanity. I realized that I was gazing upon the human race’s primal fear, the image that would one day be called Satan.

“You think that you are safe from my punishment now that you have reached your so-called Paradise,” Set went on, his words burning themselves into my mind.

He was incapable of laughter, but I felt acid-hot amusement in his tone as he said, “I will send you a punishment that will make those pitiful wretches beg for death and the eternal fire. Even in your Paradise I will send you a punishment that will seek you out in the darkest night and make you scream for mercy. Not this night. Perhaps not for many nights to come. But soon enough.”

I was already screaming with the effort of trying to break free of his mental grasp. But my screams were silent, I did not have the power to voice them. I could not even sweat, despite bending every gram of my strength to battle against his hold over me.

“Do not bother to fight against me, human. Enjoy what little shreds of life you have remaining to you. I will destroy you all, including the woman you love, the self-styled goddess. She will die the most painful death of all.”

And suddenly I was screaming, roaring my lungs out. Sitting up on the mossy ground beneath the trees of Paradise as the sun rose on a new day, bellowing with terror and horror and the self-hate that comes from weakness.

Chapter 5

The others clustered around me, eyes wide, questioning.

“What is it, Orion?”

“Nothing,” I said. “A bad dream, nothing more.” But I was soaked with cold sweat, and had to consciously control my nerves to keep from trembling.

They asked me to relate the dream to them so they might interpret it. I told them I could not remember any of it and eventually they left me in peace.

But they were clearly unsettled. And Anya regarded me with probing eyes. She knew that it would take something much more than an ordinary nightmare to make me scream.

“Come on,” I said to them all. “We must move deeper into these woods, away from the grassland.” As far away from Set as possible, I meant, even though I did not say the words aloud.

Anya walked beside me. “Was it the Golden One?” she asked. “Or one of the other Creators?”

With a shake of my head I answered with one word: “Set.”

The color drained from her face.

For several days more we traveled through the forest, following the brook as it led to a wider stream that seemed to flow southward. The men all had spears now, and I was teaching them to fire-harden their points. I wanted to find a place where there was flint and quartz so we could begin making stone tools and weapons.

Birds flitted through the trees, bright flashes of color in the greenery. Insects buzzed a constant background hum. Squirrels and other furry little mammals scampered up tree trunks at our approach and then stopped, tails twitching, watching until we hiked past them. My sense of danger eased, my fear of Set’s lurking presence slowly diminished, as we moved deeper into this cool peaceful friendly forest.

It was peaceful and friendly by day. Night was a different matter. The world was different in the dark. Even with a sizable campfire to warm and light us the forest took on a menacing, ominous aspect in the darkness. Shadows flickered like living things. Hoots and moans floated through the misty gloom. Even the tree trunks themselves became black twisted forms reaching out to ensnare. Cold tendrils of fog hovered like ghosts just beyond the warmth of our fire, creeping closer as the flames weakened and died.

Our little band endured the dark frightening nights, sleeping fitfully, bothered by restless dreams and fears of things lurking in the shadows beyond our sight. We marched in the light of day when the forest was cheerful with the calls of birds and bright with mottled sunshine filtering through the tall trees. At night we huddled in fear of the unseeable.

At last we came to a line of high rugged cliffs where the stream—a fair-sized river now—had cut through solid stone. Following the narrow trail between the water’s edge and the cliff, we found a hollowed-out area, as if a huge semicircular chunk of stone had been scooped out of the cliff by a giant’s powerful hand.

I left Anya and the others by the river’s edge while I went in to explore this towering bowl of stone. Its curving walls rose high above me, layered in tiers of ocher, yellow, and the gray of granite. Pinnacles of rock rose like citadels on either side of the bowl, standing straight and high against the bright blue sky.

Through the screen of brush and young trees that covered the boulder-strewn floor of the little canyon I saw the dark eyes of caves up along the bowl’s curving wall. Water and woods near at hand, a good defensive location with a clear view of any approaching enemy.

“We will make this our camp,” I called back to the others, who were resting by the river’s edge.

“…this our camp,” came an echo rebounding from the bowl of rock.

They leaped to their feet, startled. Before I could go down to them they came rushing up to where I stood.

“We heard your voice twice,” said Noch, fearfully.

“It is an echo,” I said. “Listen.” Raising my voice, I called out my own name.

“Orion!” came the echo floating back to our ears.

“A god is in the rock!” Reeva said, her knees trembling.

“No, no,” I tried to assure them. “You try it. Shout out your name, Reeva.”

She clamped her lips tight. Staring down at her crusted toes, she shook her head in frightened refusal.

Anya called out. And then young Chron.

“It is a god,” said Noch. “Or maybe an evil demon.”

“It is neither,” I insisted. “Nothing but a natural echo. The sound bounces off the rock and returns to our ears.”

They could not accept a natural explanation, it was clear.

Finally I said, “Well, if it is a god, then it’s a friendly one who will help to protect us. No one will be able to move through this canyon without our hearing it.”

Reluctantly, they accepted my estimate of the situation. As we walked along the narrow trail that wound through the jutting boulders and trees toward the caves it was obvious that they were wary of this strange, spooky bowl of rock. Instead of being exasperated with their superstitious fears I felt almost glad that at last they were showing some spirit, some thinking of their own. They were doing as I told them, true enough, but they did not like it. They were no longer docile sheep following without question. They still followed, but at least they were asking questions.

Noch insisted on building a cairn at the base of the hollow to propitiate “the god who speaks.” I thought it was superstitious nonsense, but helped them pile up the little mound of stones nevertheless.

“You are testing us, Orion, aren’t you?” Noch said, puffing, as he lifted a stone to the top of the chest-high mound.

“Testing you?”

The other men were gathered around, watching, now that we had completed the primitive monument.

“You are a god yourself. Our god.”

I shook my head. “No. I am only a man.”

“No man could have slain the dragon that guarded us,” said Vorn, one of the older men. His dark beard showed streaks of silver, his head was balding.

“The dragon almost killed me. I needed Anya’s help, or it would have.”

“You are a full-grown man, yet you grow no beard,” Noch said, as if proving his point.

I shrugged. “My beard grows very slowly. That doesn’t make me a god, believe me.”

“You have brought us back to Paradise. Only a—”

“I am not a god,” I said firmly. “And you—all of you—brought yourselves back to Paradise. You walked here, just as I did. Nothing godly about that.”

“Still,” Noch insisted, “there are gods.”

I had no answer for that. I knew that there were men and women in the distant future who had godlike powers. And the corrupted egomania that accompanies such powers.

They were all staring at me, waiting for my reply. Finally I said, “There are many things that we don’t understand. But I am only a man, and the voice that comes from the rock is only noise.”

Noch glanced around at the others, a knowing smile on his lips. Eight ragged, dirty Neolithic men—including Chron and the other beardless teenager. They knew a god when they saw one, no matter what I said.

If they feared me as a god, or feared the echo that they called “the god who speaks,” after a few days their fears vanished in the glow of well-being. The caves were large and dry. Game was abundant and easy to catch. Life became very pleasant for them. The men hunted and fished in the stream. The women gathered fruits and tubers and nuts.

Anya even began to show them how to pick cereal grains, spread the grain on a flat rock, and pound it with stones, then toss the crushed mass into the air to let the breeze winnow away the chaff. By the end of the week the women were baking a rough sort of flat bread and I was showing the men how to make bows and arrows.

Chron and his fellow teenagers became quite adept at snaring fowl in nets made from vines. We used the birds’ feathers for our arrows after feasting on their flesh.

One night, as Anya and I lay together in a cave apart from the others, I praised her for her domestic skills. She laughed. “I learned them a few lifetimes ago, just before the flood at Ararat. Don’t you remember?”

A vague recollection flitted through my mind. A hunting tribe much like this one. A flood caused by a darkly dangerous enemy. I felt the agony of drowning in the lava-hot floodwaters.

“Ahriman,” I said, more to myself than Anya.

“You remember more and more!”

The cave was dark; we had no fire. Yet even with nothing but starlight I saw that Anya was suddenly filled with a new hope.

Propping herself up on one elbow, she asked urgently, “Orion, have you tried to make contact with the Creators?”

“No. If you can’t, then how can I?”

“Your powers have grown since you were first created,” she said, her words coming fast, excited. “Set is blocking me, but perhaps you can get through!”

“I don’t see how—”

“Try! I’ll work with you. Together we might be able to overcome whatever force he’s using to block me.”

I nodded and rolled onto my back. The stone floor of the cave was still warm from the day’s sunlight. Just like the rest of the tribe, we had constructed a bed of boughs and moss in a corner of the cave. I had covered it with the skin of a deer I had killed, the largest animal we had caught in this abundant forest. There were wolves out there, I knew; we had heard their howling in the night. But they had not come anywhere near our caves, high up the steep rock face and protected by fire.

“Will you try?” Anya pleaded.

“Yes. Of course.” But something within me was hesitant. I liked this place, this time, this life with Anya. I felt a real aversion to reestablishing contact with the Creators. They would force us to resume the tasks they wanted us to carry out, their endless schemes to control the continuum, their petty arguments among themselves that resulted in slaughters such as Troy and Jericho . Our pleasant existence in Paradise would end the moment we reached them.

Then I remembered the implacable evil of Set. I saw his devil’s face and burning eyes. I heard his seething words: I will destroy you all, including the woman you love, the self-styled goddess. She will die the most painful death of all.

I grasped Anya’s hand and closed my eyes. Side by side, we concentrated together and strained to touch the minds of the Creators.

I saw a glow, and for an instant thought we had broken through. But instead of the golden aura of the Creators’ distant spacetime, this radiance was sullen red like the dark flames of hell, like the unblinking baleful eye of the blood red star that hung above us each night.

The glow contracted, pulled itself together like an image in a telescope coming into focus. Set’s remorseless hateful face glowered at me.

“Soon, Orion. Very soon now. I know where you are. I will send you the punishment I promised. Your doom will be slow and painful, wretched ape.”

I bolted up to a sitting position.

“What is it?” Anya asked, startled, sitting up beside me. “What did you see?”

“Set. He knows where we are. I think we revealed ourselves to him by trying to make mental contact with the Creators. We’ve stepped into his trap.”

Chapter 6

A that night Anya and I discussed what we should do. Our options were pitifully few. We could stay where we were, even though Set knew our location now. We could try to escape deeper into the forest and hope that he could not find us. If we tried to contact the Creators, the mental energy we expended would signal Set like the bright beam of a laser cutting through the dark. If we could not contact the Creators, we were practically helpless against this reptilian demon and the enormous powers he possessed.

We came to no conclusion, no decision. Whichever direction we looked in, nothing but bleak disaster appeared. Finally, as the first rays of the new day began to brighten the sky, Anya stretched out on the deer hide and closed her eyes in troubled, exhausted sleep.

I sat at the cave’s entrance, my back against the stubborn stone, my eyes scanning the wooded, rock-strewn floor of the canyon. I could see out to the smooth-flowing river and a little beyond it. Any enemy approaching us could be easily spotted from up here. Any noise was amplified and echoed by the natural sounding board of the hollowed rock cliff.

The lurid brownish red star hung in the morning sky despite the sun’s radiance. Somehow it made my blood run cold; the star did not belong there. It was intrusion in the heavens, a signal that things were not as they should be.

I saw Noch and the others stirring. Noch was actually getting muscular. His arms and chest had thickened. He held his chin high. Even scrawny Reeva had filled out enough to begin looking somewhat attractive. The welts on her back were fading blue-black bruises now.

Scrambling down the steep rocky slope to the canyon floor, I caught up with Noch on his way to the stream. His head barely reached my shoulder’s height, and he had to squint up into the morning sunlight to speak to me. But the old servility had disappeared.

Side by side we went to the stream and urinated into its muddy bank. Equals in that, at least.

“Do we hunt again today?” Noch asked.

I replied, “What do you think? Should we go out?”

“There’s still a fair amount of meat from the goat we caught yesterday,” he said, tugging at his unkempt beard, “but on the way back home I saw the tracks of a big animal in the mud by the bank of the stream. Tracks like we’ve never seen before.”

He showed me. They were the prints of a bear, a large one, and I told him I thought it would be wise to keep away from such a beast. From the size of the prints, it was a cave bear that stood more than seven feet tall on its hind legs. The massive paws that made those prints could break a man’s back with a single swipe. I described what a bear looks like, how ferocious it could be, how dangerous it was to tangle with one.

To my surprise, my words only excited Noch. He became eager to track down the bear.

“We could kill it!” he said. “All of us men, working together. We could track it down and kill it.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why risk the danger?”

Noch pulled at his beard again, struggling to find the words he wanted. I thought I knew what was going through his mind: he wanted to kill the bear to prove to himself—and to the women—that he was a mighty hunter. The king of the forest.

But what he said was, “If this beast is as dangerous as you say, Orion, might it not come to our caves in the night and attack us? It could be more of a danger not to kill it than to hunt it down.”

I grinned at him as we stood by the stream’s muddy bank. He was thinking for himself, his slavish docility replaced now by the spirit of a hunter. Perhaps he could even become a leader of men.

Then a new thought struck me. Could this bear be a weapon sent against us by Set? A huge cave bear could kill half our little band or more if it struck suddenly in the night.

“You’re right,” I said. “Round up all the men and we’ll track the beast down.”

The eight males of the little band came with me, each of them carrying a couple of rough spears. I had a bow slung across my shoulders and a half-dozen arrows tied in a sheaf on my back. Several of the men had crude flint knives, nothing more than sickle-shaped chunks of flint sized to fit in the palm, one edge sharpened. Anya had wanted to come with us, but I begged her to stay with the women and not upset the precarious division of labor that we had so recently established.

“Very well,” she said, with an unhappy toss of her head. “I will stay here with the women while you have all the fun.”

“Keep a sharp lookout,” I warned. “This bear might be merely a diversion sent by Set to draw the men away from the caves.”

It was a long, punishingly hard day, and I was constantly on the alert. Perhaps there was more than a cave bear in these woods. Certainly there should be more than a solitary bear. Where there was one there should be others. Yet no matter how diligently we searched, that one set of tracks was all we could find.

The tracks followed the river’s course, and we trailed along its bank beneath the overhanging trees. Colorful birds chirped and called to us and insects danced before our eyes like frantic sunbeams in the heat of the afternoon.

Chron clambered up a tall slanting pine and called down, “The river makes a big bend to the right, and then grows very wide. It looks like… yaa!”

His sudden scream startled us. The youngster was frantically swatting at the air around his head with one hand and trying to climb down from his perch at the same time. Looking closer, I saw that he was enveloped in a cloud of angry, stinging bees.

I raced toward the tree. Chron slipped and lost his grip, plummeting toward the ground, crashing through the lower branches of the tree. I dived the last few feet and reached out for him, caught him briefly in my arms, and then we both hit the ground with an undignified thump. The air was knocked out of me and my arms felt as if they’d been pulled from their shoulder sockets.

The bees came right after him, an angry buzzing swarm.

“Into the river!” I commanded. All nine of us ran as if chased by demons and splashed without a shred of dignity into the cool water while the furious bees filled the air like a menacing cloud of pain. None of the men could swim, but they followed me as I ducked my head beneath the water’s surface and literally crawled farther away from the bank.

Nine spouting, spraying heads popped up from the water, hair dripping in our eyes, hands raised to ward off our tiny tormentors. We were far enough from the river-bank; the cloud of bees was several yards away, still buzzingly proclaiming their rights, but no longer pursuing us.

For several minutes we stood there with our feet in the mud and our faces barely showing above the water level. The bees grudgingly returned to their hive high up in the tree.

I picked the soggy stem of a water lily from my nose. “Still think I’m a god?” I asked Noch.

The men burst into laughter. Noch guffawed and pointed at Chron. His face was lumpy and fire red with stings. It was not truly a laughing matter, but we all roared hysterically. All but poor Chron.

We waded many yards downstream before dragging ourselves out of the river. Chron was in obvious pain. I made him sit on a log while I focused my eyes finely enough to see the tiny barbs embedded in his swollen face and shoulders and pulled them out with nothing more than my fingernails. He yelped and flinched at each one, but at last I had them all. Then I plastered his face with mud.

“How does it feel now?” I asked him.

“Better,” he said unhappily. “The mud feels cool.”

Noch and the others were still giggling. Chron’s face was caked so thickly with mud that only his eyes and mouth showed through.

The sun was low in the west. I doubted that we would have enough daylight remaining to find our bear, let alone try to kill it. But I was curious about Chron’s description of the river up ahead.

So we cut through the woods, away from the river-bank’s bend. It was tough going; the undergrowth was thick and tangled here. Nettles and thorns scratched at our bare skin. After about half an hour of forcing our way through the brush we saw the water again, but now it was so wide that it looked to me like a sizable lake.

And hunched down on the grassy edge of the water sat our bear, intently peering into the quietly lapping little waves. We froze, hardly even breathing, in the cover of thick blackberry bushes. The breeze was blowing in from the broad lake, carrying our scent away from the bear’s sensitive nostrils. It had no idea that we were close.

It was a huge beast, the size and reddish brown color of a Kodiak. If we stood Chron on Noch’s shoulders, the bear would still have been taller, rearing on its hind legs. I could feel the cold hand of reality clamping down on my eager hunters. I heard someone behind me swallowing hard.

I had been killed by such a bear once, in another millennium. The sudden memory of it made me shudder.

The bear, oblivious to us, got up on all fours and walked slowly, deliberately, out into the lake a half-dozen strides. It stood stock still, its eyes staring into the water. For long moments it did not move. Then it flicked one paw in the water and a big silvery fish came spiraling up, sunlight sparkling off its glittering scales and the droplets of water spraying around it, until it plopped down on the grass, tail thumping and gills gasping desperately.

“Do you still want the bear?” I whispered into Noch’s ear.

He was biting his lower lip, and his eyes looked fearful, but he bobbed his head up and down. We had come too far to turn back now with nothing to show for our efforts except the bee stings on Chron’s mud-caked face.

With hand signals I directed my band of hunters into a rough half circle and made them crouch in the thick bushes. Slowly, while the bear was still engrossed in his fishing, I slipped the bow from my shoulder and untied the crudely fledged arrows. Signaling the others to stay where they were, I crept on my belly slowly, cautiously forward, more like a slithering snake than a mighty hunter.

I knew the arrows would not be accurate enough to hit even a target as big as the cave bear unless I was almost on top of it. I crawled through the scratching burrs and thorns while the birds called overhead and a squirrel or chipmunk chittered scoldingly from its perch on a tree trunk’s rough bark.

The bear looked up and around once, and I flattened myself into the ground. Then it returned to its fishing. Another flick of its paw, and another fine trout came flashing out of the water in a great shining arc, to land almost touching the first one.

I rose slowly to one knee, braced myself, and pulled the bow to its utmost. The bear loomed so large, so close, that I knew I could not miss. I let the arrow fly. It thunked into the cave bear’s ribs with the solid sound of hardened wood striking meat.

The bear huffed, more annoyed than hurt, and turned around. I got to my feet and put another arrow to the bowstring. The bear growled at me and lurched to its hind legs, rearing almost twice my height. I aimed for its throat, but the arrow curved slightly and struck the bear’s shoulder. It must have hit bone, for it fell off like a bullet bouncing off armor plate.

Now the beast was truly enraged. Bellowing loud enough to shake the ground, it dropped to all fours and charged at me. I turned and ran, hoping that my hunters were brave enough to stand their ground and attack the beast from each side as it hurtled past.

They were. The bear came crashing into the bushes after me and eight frightened, exultant, screaming men rammed their spears into its flanks. The animal roared again and turned around to face its new tormentors.

It was not pretty. Spears snapped in showers of splinters. Blood spurted. Men and bear roared in pain and anger. We hacked at the poor beast until it was nothing more than a bloody pile of fur shuddering and moaning in the reddened slippery bushes. I gave it the coup de grace with my dagger and the cave bear finally collapsed and went still.

For several moments we all simply slumped to the ground, trembling with exhaustion and the aftermath of adrenaline overdose. We, too, were covered with blood, but it seemed to be only the blood of our victim. We had suffered just one injury; the man called Pirk had a broken forearm. I pulled it straight for him while he shrieked with pain, then tied a splint cut from saplings and bound the arm into a sling improvised from vines.

“Anya can make healing poultices,” I told Pirk. “Your arm will be all right in time.”

He nodded, his face drained white from the pain, his lips a thin bloodless line.

The others fell to skinning the bear. Noch wanted its skull and pelt to bring back to the women, to show that we had been successful.

“No beast will dare to threaten us once we mount this ferocious skull before our caves,” he said.

Twilight was falling when I sensed that we were not alone. The men were half-finished with their skinning. Chron and I had gathered wood and started a fire. Deep in the shadows around us other presences had gathered, I realized. Not animals. Men.

I got to my feet and moved slightly away from the fire to peer into the shadows flickering among the thick foliage. Without conscious thought I reached down and drew my dagger from its sheath on my thigh.

Chron was watching me. “What is it, Orion?”

I silenced him with a finger to my lips. The other seven men looked up at me, then uneasily out toward the shadows.

A man stepped out from the foliage and regarded us solemnly, our firelight making his bearded face seem ruddy, his eyes aglow. He wore a rough tunic of hide and carried a long spear in one hand, which he butted on the ground. In height he was no taller than Noch or any of the others, although he seemed more solid in build and much more assured of himself. Broad in the shoulders. Older too: his long hair and beard were grizzled gray. His eyes took in every detail of our makeshift camp at a glance.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Who are you?” he countered. “And why have you killed our bear?”

“Your bear?”

He raised his free hand and swept it around in a half circle. “All this land around the lake is our territory. Our fathers have hunted here, and so have their fathers and their fathers before them.”

A dozen more men stepped out of the shadows, each of them armed with spears. Several dogs were with them, silent, ears laid back, wolflike green eyes staring at us menacingly.

“We are newcomers here,” I said. “We did not know any other men hunted in this area.”

“Why did you kill our bear? It was doing you no harm.”

“We tracked it from our home, far up the river. We feared it might attack us in the night, as we slept.”

The man made a heavy sigh, almost a snort. This was as new a situation for him, I realized, as it was for us. What to do? Fight or flee? Or something else?

“My name is Orion,” I told him.

“I am called Kraal.”

“Our home is up the river a day’s walk, in the vale of the god who speaks.”

His brow wrinkled at that.

Before he had time to ask a question I went on, “We have come to this place only recently, a few days ago. We are fleeing the slave masters from the garden.”

“Fleeing from the dragons?” Kraal blurted.

“And the seekers who fly in the air,” Noch added.

“Orion killed one of the dragons,” said Chron, proudly. “And set us free of the masters.”

Kraal’s whole body seemed to relax. The others behind him stirred, too. Even the dogs seemed to ease their tension.

“Many times I have seen men taken by the slave masters to serve their dragons. Never have I heard of any man escaping from them. Or killing a dragon! You must tell us of this.”

They all stepped closer to our fire, lay down their spears, and sat among us to hear our story.

Chapter 7

I spoke hardly a word. Noch, Chron, and even broken-armed Pirk related a wondrous tale of how I had single-handedly slain the dragon guarding them and brought them to freedom in Paradise. As the night wore on we shared the dried scraps of meat and nuts that each man had carried with him and the stories continued.

We talked as we ate, sharing stories of bravery and danger. The dogs that accompanied Kraal’s band went off by themselves for a good part of the night, but eventually they returned to the fire and the men still gathered around it, still talking.

Kraal told of how his own daughter and her husband had been abducted by dragons who had raided their village by the lakeshore many years earlier in search of slaves.

“They left me for dead,” he said, pulling up his tunic to show a long brutal scar carved across his ribs. In the firelight it looked livid and still painful. “My wife they did kill.”

One by one the men told their tales, and I learned that Set’s “dragons” periodically raided into these forests of Paradise and carried off men and women to work as slaves in the garden by the Nile. And undoubtedly elsewhere, as well.

My first notion about Set’s garden had been almost totally wrong. It was not the Garden of Eden. It was this thick forest that was truly the Paradise of humankind, where men were free to roam the woods and hunt the teeming animals in it. But the people were being driven out of the forest by Set’s devilish reptilian monsters, away from the free life of Neolithic hunters and into the forced labor of farming—and god knew what else.

The legends of Eden that men would repeat to one another over the generations to come would get the facts scrambled: humans were driven out of Paradise into the garden, and not by angels but by devils.

Obviously the reptilian masters allowed their slaves to breed in captivity. Reeva’s baby had been born in slavery. I learned that night that Chron and most of the other men of my band had also been born while their parents toiled in the garden, Noch, I knew, had been taken out of Paradise in early childhood. So had the remaining others.

“We hunt the beasts of field and forest,” said Kraal, his voice sleepy as the moon’s cold light filtered through the trees, “and the dragons hunt us.”

“We must fight the dragons,” I said.

Kraal shook his head wearily. “No, Orion, that is impossible. They are too big, too swift. Their claws slice flesh from the bone. Their jaws crush the life from a man.”

“They can be killed,” I insisted.

“Not by the likes of us. There are some things that men cannot do. We must accept things as they are, not dream idle dreams of what cannot be.”

“But Orion killed a dragon,” Chron reminded him.

“Maybe so,” Kraal replied with the air of a man who had heard tall tales before. “It’s time for sleeping now. No more talk of dragons. It’s enough we’ll have to fight each other when the sun comes up.”

He said it matter-of-factly, with neither regret nor anticipation in his tone.

“Fight each other?” I echoed.

Kraal was settling himself down comfortably between the roots of a tree. “Yes. It’s a shame. I really enjoyed listening to your stories. And I’d like to see this place of your talking god. But tomorrow we fight.”

I glanced around at the other men: their dozen, our nine, including me.

“Why must we fight?”

As if explaining to a backward child, Kraal said patiently, “This is our territory, Orion. You killed our bear. If we let you go away without fighting you, others will come here and kill our animals. Then where would we be?”

I stood over him as he turned on his unscarred side and mumbled, “Get some sleep, Orion. Tomorrow we fight.”

Chron came up beside me and stood on tiptoes to whisper in my ear, “Tomorrow they’ll see what a fighter you are. With you leading us, we’ll kill them all and take this land for ourselves.”

Smiling in the moonlit shadows, he trotted off to a level spot next to a boulder and lay down to sleep.

One by one they all dropped to sleep until I stood alone among their snoring bodies. At least they did not fear treachery. None of them thought that someone might slit the throats of sleeping men.

I walked down to the shore of the lake and listened to the lapping of the water. An owl hooted from the trees, the sacred symbol of Athena. Anya was the inspiration for the legends of Athena, I knew, just as the Golden One, mad as he is, inspired the legends of Apollo.

And me? The so-called gods who created me in their distant future called me Orion and set me the task of hunting down their enemies through the vast reaches of time. In ancient Egypt I would be called Osiris, he who dies and is reborn. In the barren snowfields of the Ice Age my name would be Prometheus, for I would show the earliest freezing, starving band of humans how to make fire, how to survive even in the desolation of mile-thick glaciers that covered half the world.

Who am I now, in this time and place? I looked up at the stars scattered across the velvety-dark sky and once again saw that baleful dark red eye staring down at me, brighter than the moon, bright enough to cast my shadow across the ground. A star that had never been in any sky I had seen before. A star that somehow seemed linked with Set and his dragons and his enslavement of these Neolithic people.

For a moment I was tempted to try once more to make contact with the Creators. But the fear of alerting Set again made me hesitate. I stood on the shore of the broad lake, listening to the night breeze making the trees sigh, and wished with all my might that the Creators would attempt to contact us.

But nothing happened. The owl hooted again; it sounded like bitter laughter.

I stayed by the lake side rather than returning to the makeshift camp where the men sprawled asleep. Kraal insisted that we had to fight, and I felt certain he did not mean any bloodless ritual. With the dawn we would battle each other with wooden spears and flint knives.

Unless I could think of something better.

I spent the long hours of the sinister menacing night thinking. A cold gray fog rose from the lake, slowly wrapping the trees in its embrace until I could not make out their tops nor see the stars. The moon made the fog glow all silver and the world became a chill dank featureless bowl of cold gray moonlight, broken only by an occasional owl’s hoot or the distant eerie howl of a wolf. Kraal’s dogs bayed back at the wolves, proclaiming their own territory.

The fog was lifting and the sky beginning to turn a soft delicate pink when I sensed a man walking slowly through the mist-shrouded trees toward me at the water’s edge. It was Kraal. He came up beside me without the slightest bit of fear or hesitation and looked out across the lake. The fog was thinning, dissolving like the fears of darkness dispelled by the growing light of day.

He pointed toward the growing brightness on the horizon where the Sun would soon come up. “The Light-Stealer comes closer.”

I followed his outstretched arm and saw the dull reddish star glowing sullenly in the brightening sky.

“And the Punisher is almost too faint to see,” Kraal added.

“The Punisher?”

“Can’t you see it? Just beside the Light-Stealer, very faint…”

For the first time I realized that there was a second point of light close to the red star that Kraal called the Light-Stealer. A dim pinpoint barely on the edge of visibility.

“What do those names mean?” I asked.

He gave me a surprised look. “You don’t know about the Light-Stealer and his Punisher?”

“I come from far away,” I said. “Much farther than Noch and his band.”

Kraal’s expression turned thoughtful. He explained the legend of the Light-Stealer. The gods—which include the Sun-god, mightiest of them all—had no care for human beings. They saw humans struggling to exist, weaker than the wolves and bears, cold and hungry always, and turned their backs to us. The Light-Stealer, a lesser god, took pity on humankind and decided to give us the gift of fire.

My breath caught in my throat. The Prometheus legend. It was I who gave the earliest humans the gift of fire, deep in the eternal cold and snow of the Ice Age. Kraal told the story strangely, but his tale caught the cruel indifference of the so-called gods almost perfectly.

The Light-Stealer knew that the only way to bring fire to the human race was to steal it from the Sun. So every year the dull red star robs the Sun of some of its light. Instead of remaining in the night sky, as all the other stars do, it gradually encroaches on the daytime domain of the Sun, getting closer and closer each day. Finally it reaches the Sun and steals some of its fire. Then it runs away to return to the night, where it gives light to men in the dark hours, light that is brighter than the moon’s.

The legend of Prometheus thrown against the background of the stars. What Kraal was telling me could make sense only if the Sun were accompanied by another star, a dim brownish red dwarf that orbited far out in the deeper distances of the solar system. Yet the Sun was a single star, accompanied by a retinue of planets, not by a companion star. Through all of my journeys across the spacetime continuum the Sun had always been a solitary star.

Until now.

“And what of the Punisher?” I heard myself ask.

“The Sun and the other gods become angry when the Stealer robs fire from the Sun,” Kraal went on. “The Punisher tears at the Light-Giver, rips into its guts again and again, all year long, forever.”

The companion star has a planet of its own orbiting around it, I translated mentally. From the Earth they can see it bobbing back and forth, disappearing behind the star and reappearing on its other side. A Punisher ripping into the Light-Stealer’s innards, like the vulture that eats out Prometheus’ liver once the gods have chained him to the rock.

“That is how fire was given to us, Orion,” said Kraal. “It happened a long time ago, long before my grandfather’s grandfather hunted around this lake. The stars show us what happened, to remind us of our debt to the gods.”

“But from what you say,” I replied, “the gods are not friendly to us.”

“All the more reason to respect and fear them, Orion.” With that he walked away from me, back toward the camp, with the air of a man who had made an unarguable point.

By now the Sun was fully risen over the lake’s farther shore and the men were up, stretching and muttering, relieving themselves against a couple of trees. They shared the food they had remaining, Kraal’s men and my own, and washed it down with water from the lake, which Chron and one-armed Pirk brought up to our makeshift camp in animal bladders.

“Now for our fight,” said Kraal, picking his long spear up from the ground. His men arrayed themselves behind him, each of them gripping spears, while my band came together behind me. The dogs lay sleepily on their bellies, tongues lolling. But their eyes took in every move.

“You are twelve, we are only nine,” I said.

He shrugged. “You should have brought more men.”

“We don’t have any more.”

Kraal made a gesture with his free hand that said, That’s your problem, not mine.

“Instead of all of us fighting,” I suggested, “why not an individual combat: one against one.”

Kraal’s brow furrowed. “What good would that do?”

“If your side wins, my men will go back to their home and never come here again.”

“And if my side loses?”

“We can both hunt in this area, in peace. There’s plenty of game for us both.”

“No, Orion. It will be better to kill you all and be finished with it. Then we can take your women, too. And any other tribes who come by here will know that this is our territory, and they must not hunt here.”

“How will they know that?”

He seemed genuinely surprised by such a stupid question. “Why, we will mount your heads on poles, of course.”

“Suppose,” I countered, “we kill all of you? What then?”

“Nine of you? Two of them lads and one of the men with a bad arm?” Kraal laughed.

“One of us has killed a dragon,” I said, making my voice hard.

“So you claim.”

“He did! He did!” my men shouted.

I silenced them with a wave of my hand, not wanting a fight to break out over my claims of prowess. An idea was forming itself in my brain. I asked Chron to bring me my bow and arrows.

“Do you know what this is?” I held them up before Kraal.

“Certainly. Not much good against a spear, though. The bow is a weapon of ambush, not face-to-face fighting.”

Handing the bow and arrows to him, I said, “Before we start the fighting, why don’t you shoot me with this.”

Kraal looked surprised, then suspicious. “What do you mean?”

Walking toward a stately old elm, I explained, “Fire an arrow at me. I’ll stand here.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t believe I killed a dragon. Well, there are no dragons about this morning for me to show you how I did it, so I’ll have to give you a different kind of proof. Shoot me!”

Puzzled, wary, Kraal nocked an arrow and pulled the bowstring back. My men edged away from me; Kraal’s seemed to lean in closer, eager to see the show. I noticed that Kraal pulled the string only back to his chest instead of his cheek.

I willed my body to go into hyperdrive, and saw the world around me slow down. The pupils of Kraal’s eyes contracted slightly as he aimed. A bird flapped languidly from one bough to another, its red-feathered wings beating the air with dreamlike strokes.

Standing ten paces before me, Kraal let the arrow fly. I saw it wobbling toward me; it was a crude piece of work. I easily reached out with one hand and knocked it aside.

The men gasped.

“Now,” I said, “watch this.”

Striding up to one of Kraal’s men, I instructed him to hold his spear in both hands, level with the ground. He looked at his leader first, and when Kraal nodded, he reluctantly did as I asked. Swinging my arm overhand and yelling ferociously, I snapped the rough spear in two with the edge of my hand.

Before they could say or do anything, I spun around and grabbed Kraal around the waist. Lifting him high over my head, I held him there, squirming and bellowing, with one hand.

“Do you still want to fight us, Kraal?” I asked, laughing. “Do you want us to take your women?”

“Put me down!” he was shouting. “This isn’t the proper way to fight!”

I set him down gently on his feet and looked into his eyes. He was angry. And fearful.

“Kraal, if we fight, I will be forced to kill you and your men.”

He said nothing. His chest was heaving, sweat trickling down his cheeks and into his grizzled beard.

“I have a better idea,” I went on. “Would you allow my men to join your tribe? Under your leadership?”

Noch yelped, “But you are our leader, Orion!”

“I am a stranger here, and my true home is far away. Kraal is a fine leader and a good hunter.”

“But…”

They both had plenty of objections. But at least they were talking, not fighting. Kraal’s face went from fear-driven anger to a more thoughtful expression. His eyes narrowed, became crafty. He was thinking hard about this new opportunity. I invited him to come and see the place where the god speaks, and as we walked back toward the echo canyon we continued to talk about merging the two bands.

The idea that had entered my mind was far greater than these two ragged gangs of Stone Age hunters. I reasoned that there were far more humans in these forests of Paradise than reptiles. If I could weld the tribes together into a coherent force, we would outnumber Set and his dragons. I knew that Set had a far superior technology at his command than my Neolithics did, but with numbers—and time—we might be able to begin fighting him on a more equal basis.

The first step was to see if I could merge Noch’s band of ex-slaves with Kraal’s tribe. It would not be easy, I knew. But the first step never is.

Chapter 8

Kraal was impressed with the echo—the god who speaks. But he tried to hide it.

“The god only repeats what you say.”

“Most of the time,” I replied, a new idea forming in my mind. “But sometimes the god speaks its own words to us.”

He grunted, trying to keep up an air of skepticism.

He was also impressed with Anya, who greeted him courteously, seriously, as befits a man of importance. Kraal had never seen a metallic fabric such as Anya wore: it was practically impervious to wear, of course, and literally repelled dirt with a surface electrical charge. She seemed to glow like a goddess.

He had never seen a woman so beautiful, either, and his bearded face plainly showed the confusion of awe, longing, and outright lust that percolated through him. He was an experienced leader who seemed to grasp the advantages of merging Noch’s band into his own. But it had never been done before, and Kraal was not the type to agree easily to any innovation.

We feasted that night together on the rocky canyon floor, our whole band plus Kraal’s dozen men clustered around a roaring fire while we roasted rabbits, possums, raccoons, and smaller rodents on sticks. The women provided bread, something Kraal and his men had never seen before, as well as mounds of nuts, carrots, berries, and an overpowering root that would one day be called horseradish.

Earlier, I had spoken at length to Anya about my idea, and she had actually laughed with the delight of it.

“Are you sure you can do it?” I had asked.

“Yes. Of course. Never fear.”

It was wonderful to see her smile, to see the delight and hope lighting her gray eyes.

After our eating was finished the women went back to the caves and the men sat around the dying embers of our big fire, belching and telling tales.

Finally I asked Kraal, “Have you thought about merging our two groups?”

He shook his head, as if disappointed. “It can’t be done, Orion.”

“Why not?”

All the other men stopped their talk and watched us. Kraal answered unhappily, “You have your tribe and I have my tribe. We have no people in common: no brothers or brides or even cousins. There are no bonds between the two tribes, Orion.”

“We could create such bonds,” I suggested. “Several of our women have no husbands. I’m sure many of your men have no wives.”

I saw nods among his men. But Kraal shook his head once more. “It’s never been done, Orion. It’s not possible.”

I pulled myself to my feet. “Let’s see what the god has to say.”

He looked up at me. “The god will repeat whatever you say.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Raising my hands above my head, I called into the night, “O god who speaks, tell us what we should do!”

My voice echoed off the bowl of rock, “…tell us what we should do!”

For several heartbeats there was nothing to hear except the chirping of crickets in the grass. Then a low guttural whisper floated through the darkness: “I am the god who speaks. Ask and you shall receive wisdom.”

All the men, mine included, jumped as if a live electrical wire had touched their bare flesh. Kraal’s eyes went so wide that even in the dying firelight I could see white all around the pupils. None of them recognized Anya’s voice; none of them could even tell that the rasping whisper they heard came from a woman.

I turned to Kraal. “Ask the god.”

His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Most of the other men had gotten to their feet, staring toward the looming shadow of the hollowed rock. I felt some shame, tricking them this way. I realized that an unscrupulous person could easily make the “god” say whatever he or she wanted it to say. One day oracles and seers would use such tricks to sway their believers. I would have much to answer for.

But at this particular instant in time I needed Kraal to accept the idea of merging our two tribes.

To my surprise, it was Noch who spoke up. His voice quavering slightly with nervousness, he shouted toward the rock wall, “O god who speaks, would it be a good thing for our tribe to merge with Kraal’s tribe?”

“…merge with Kraal’s tribe?”

Again silence. Not even the wind stirred. The crickets had gone quiet.

Then the whispered answer “Are two men stronger than one? Are twenty men stronger than ten? It is wise to make yourselves stronger.”

“Then we should merge our two bands together?” Noch wanted a definite answer, not godly metaphors.

“Yesss.” A long drawn-out single syllable.

Kraal found his voice. “Under whose leadership?”

“…whose leadership?”

“The leader of the larger of your two tribes should be the leader of the whole. Kraal the Hunter shall be known from this night onward as Kraal the Leader.”

The man’s chest visibly swelled. He broke into a broad, gap-toothed grin and turned toward the other men, nodding approval at the wisdom the god displayed.

“But what about Orion?” Noch insisted.

“…Orion?” the echo repeated.

“Orion will remain among you for only a little while,” came the answer. “He has other tasks to undertake, other deeds to accomplish.”

My satisfaction at having conned Kraal and the others melted away. Anya was speaking the truth. We could not remain here much longer. We had other tasks ahead of us.

I watched Kraal and Noch embrace each other, watched the relieved looks on all the men’s faces when they realized they would not have to fight each other. How the women would take to embracing strange men, I did not know. Nor did I particularly care. Not at that moment. I had forced these people on the first step of resistance against Set and the reptilian masters. But it was only the first step, and the immensity of the task that lay before me weighed on my shoulders like the burdens of all the world.

I made my way back to the cave I shared with Anya, achingly weary. As the moon set, that blood red star rose above the treetops, glaring balefully down at me, depressing me even further.

Anya was eager with excitement as I crawled into the cave and dropped down onto our pallet of boughs and hides.

“It worked, didn’t it! I saw them embracing one another.”

“You did a fine job,” I told her. “You have real worshipers now—although I’m not certain how they would react if they knew they were obeying a goddess instead of a god.”

Kneeling beside me, Anya said smugly, “I’ve had worshipers before. Phidias sculpted a marvelous statue of me for all of Athens to worship.”

I nodded wearily and closed my eyes. I felt drained, demoralized, and all I wanted was to sleep. Anya and I would never be free to live as normal human beings. There would always be the Creators to pull my strings, never leaving us alone. Always a new task, a new enemy, a new time and place. But never a time and place for happiness. Not for me. Not for us.

She sensed my soul’s exhaustion. Stroking my brow with her cool, smooth fingers, Anya soothed, “Sleep, my darling. Rest and sleep.”

I slept. But only for the span of a few heartbeats. For I saw Set’s satanic face, his red eyes burning, his sharp teeth gleaming in a devil’s version of a smile.

“I told you I would send you a punishment, Orion. The hour has come.”

I sat bolt upright, startling Anya.

“What is it?”

There was no need to answer. A terrified shriek split the night. From one of the caves.

I grabbed at the spear lying near the cave’s entrance and dashed out onto the narrow ledge of rock that formed a natural stairway down to the canyon floor. Others were spilling out of their caves, screaming, jumping to the rocks below. Kraal’s men among them, running and shrieking in absolute terror, stumbling down the rough stone steps, leaping to certain injury or death in their panic to escape…

Escape from what?

“Stay behind me,” I muttered to Anya as I started climbing up the steep stairway of rock.

Reeva came screaming toward me, nearly knocking me over the edge in her wild-eyed terror. She was empty-handed. Her baby was still in the cave up above.

I clambered up the uneven stones, sensing Anya right behind me, also armed with a spear. The dreadful gloomy light of the strange star bathed the rock face with the color of dried blood, making everything look ghastly.

The cave Reeva shared with several other women looked empty, abandoned. Below us I could still hear shrieks and screams, not merely fright now, but cries of pain, of agony. Men and women running, thrashing wildly, as if trying to beat off some invisible attacker.

It was darker than hell inside the cave, but my eyes adjusted to the minuscule light level almost instantly. I saw Reeva’s baby—disappearing into the distended jaws of a huge snake.

Before I could even think I flung myself at the serpent and slashed at its head with my dagger. It coiled around my arm, but I had it at its most vulnerable, with a half-swallowed meal between its teeth. I hacked at the snake, just behind its skull. It was as thick as my leg at the thigh, and so long that its body twined almost the full circumference of the cave and still could wrap half a dozen coils around my flailing arm.

Anya rammed her spear into its writhing body again and again while I sawed through its spinal cord and finally cut off its head. Dropping my dagger I pried at its jaws and worked the baby free of its fangs. The baby was quite dead, already cold, its skin blue gray in the dim starlight.

“It’s poisonous,” I said to Anya. “Look at those fangs.”

“There are others,” she said.

They were still screaming outside. I rose to my feet, burning hot fury seething within me. Set’s punishment, I knew. Snakes. Huge venomous snakes that come slithering silently in the darkness of night to do their work of killing. Death and terror, those were the hallmarks of our adversary.

I strode to the lip of the cave. “Up here!” I bellowed, and the rock amplified my voice into the thunder of a god. “Come up here where we can see them! Get away from the floor of the canyon.”

Some obeyed. Only a few. Already I could see dead bodies stretched out on the grass, twisted among the boulders and brush that formed natural hiding places for the snakes. Up here on the rocks, at least we would be able to see them. What we could see, we could fight.

Most of the people had fled terrified into the night, their only thought to get away from the sudden silent death that struck in the shadows. A woman lay down among the stones on the floor of the canyon, broken by her panicked leap away from the caves. I could see a long writhing ghastly white snake gliding toward her, jaws spread wide, fangs glittering. She screamed and tried to scrabble away from the snake. Anya threw her spear at it and missed. The snake sank its deadly fangs into her flesh and the woman’s screams rose to a hideous crescendo, then died away in a gurgling, strangling agony.

The others were stumbling, staggering up toward me, clambering up the steep stone steps to the narrow ledge where Anya and I stood. And the snakes came slithering after them, long thick bodies of deathly gray white, yellow eyes glittering, forked tongues flicking, their fangs filled with venom, their bodies gliding silently over the rocks in pursuit of their prey.

I gathered our little band on the ledge, men armed with spears and knives on the perimeter, women inside the cave. All except Anya, who stood at my shoulder, a fresh jabbing spear in one hand, a flint hand knife in the other, panting with excitement and exertion, eyes aflame with battle lust.

The snakes attacked us. Wriggling up the stone steps, they dodged this way and that to avoid our spears, coiled up just beyond our reach, struck at us with lightning speed. We too dodged, hopping back and forth, trying to keep our bare legs from their fangs.

We fought back. We jabbed at them with our wooden spears, we turned the shafts into clubs and hammered at them. One snake began coiling around the spear Anya held, slithering up its length to get at her, driven by an intelligent sense of purpose that no serpent’s brain could originate.

I shouted a warning as Anya calmly ripped the snake open with her flint knife. It reared back. I grabbed it around its bleeding throat and Anya hacked its head off. We threw the bloody remains off the ledge, down to the canyon floor below.

The fight seemed to go on for hours. Two of our men were struck and died shrieking, their limbs twisting in horrifying pain. Another was jostled off the ledge and fell screaming to the ground below. He was badly injured, and in minutes several snakes gathered around him. We heard his wailing screeches, and then he went silent forever.

Abruptly, there were no more snakes. No more live ones, at any rate. Nearly a dozen lifeless bodies twitching in their own blood at our feet. I blinked at the shambles of our battlefield. The sun had risen; its bright golden rays were shining through the trees.

Below us lay eight dead bodies, their limbs twisted, their faces horribly constricted. We went down, still warily searching for more snakes as we gathered up the bodies of the slain. Broken-armed Pirk was among them. And three of Kraal’s men. And gray-bearded Noch; his return to Paradise had been brief and bitter.

All that day we scoured the canyon floor for bodies. To my surprised relief we found only two others. About noontime Kraal and three of his men came to me.

He shook his head at the bodies of the slain. “I told you, Orion,” he said sadly, choking back tears of frustrated hate. “There is nothing we can do against the masters. They hunt us for their sport. They make slaves of our people. All we can do is bow down and accept.”

Anya heard him. She had been kneeling among the dead bodies, not of the humans but of the snakes, dissecting one of them to search for its poison glands.

Angrily she sprang to her feet and flung the flayed body of the twenty-foot snake at Kraal. Its weight staggered him.

“All we can do is bow down?” Anya raged at him. “Timid man, we can kill our enemies. As they would kill us!”

Kraal goggled at her. No woman had ever spoken so harshly to him before. I doubt that any man had.

Seething like the enraged goddess she was, Anya advanced on Kraal, flint knife in hand. He backed away from her.

“The god called you Kraal the Leader,” Anya taunted. “But this morning you look more like Kraal the Coward! Is that the name you want?”

“No… of course not…”

“Then stop crying like a woman and start acting like a leader. Gather all the bands of people together and, together, we will fight the masters and kill them all!”

Kraal’s knees actually buckled. “All the tribes…?”

Several of the other men had gathered around us by now. One of them said, “We must ask the god who speaks about this.”

“Yes,” I agreed swiftly. “Tonight. The god only speaks after the sun goes down.”

Anya’s lips twitched in a barely suppressed grin. We both knew what the god would say.

Chapter 9

Thus we began uniting the tribes of Paradise.

Once Kraal got over the shock of the snakes’ attack and heard Anya’s god-voice telling him that it was his destiny to resist the masters in all their forms and might, he actually began to develop into Kraal the Leader. And our people began to learn how to defend themselves.

Months passed, marked by the rhythmically changing face of the moon. We left the place of the god-who-speaks and moved even deeper into the forest that seemed to stretch all the way across Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. It extended southward, according to the tales we heard, evolving gradually into the tropical rain forest that covered much of the rest of the continent.

Each time we met another tribe we tried to convince them that they should work with us to resist the masters. Most tribal leaders resisted, instead, the idea of doing anything new, anything that would incur the terrible wrath of the fearsome dragons who raided their homes from time to time.

We showed them the skulls of the snakes we had slain. We told stories about my fight against the dragon. Anya developed into a real priestess, falling into trances whenever it was necessary to speak with the voice of a god. She also showed the women how to gather grains and bake bread, how to make medicines from the juices of leaves and roots. I showed the men how to make better tools and weapons.

I found, stored in my memory, the knowledge of cold-working soft metals such as copper and gold. Gold, as always, was extremely rare, although we found one tribe where the chief’s women hung nuggets of gold from their earlobes for adornment. I showed them how to beat the soft shining metal into crescents and circles, the best I could do with the primitive stone hammers available. Yet it pleased the women very much. I became an admired man, which helped us to convince the chief to join our movement.

In several scattered places we found lumps of copper lying on the ground, partially buried in grass and dirt. These I cold-worked into slim blades and arrowheads, sharp but brittle. I taught the hunters how to anneal their copper implements by heating them and then quenching them in cold water. That made them less brittle without sacrificing their sharpness.

As the months wore on we developed stone molds for shaping arrowheads and axes, knives and spear points, awls and scrapers. When I recognized layers of rock bearing copper ore, I taught them how to build a forge of stones and make the fire hotter with a bellows made from a goat’s bladder. Then we could smelt the metal out of the rock and go on to make more and better tools. And weapons. Instead of Orion the Hunter I was filling the role of Hephaestus, blacksmith of the gods. But it was during those months that human tools and weapons gleamed for the first time with metal edges.

While most of the tribal elders we met were just as stubborn as Kraal had been, many of the younger men eagerly took up our challenge to resist the devilish masters. We won their loyalty with appeals to their courage, with new metal-edged weapons, and with the oldest commodity of all—women.

Every tribe had young women who needed husbands and young men who wanted wives. Often the unmarried men formed raiding parties to steal women from neighboring tribes. This usually started blood feuds that could last for generations.

Under Anya’s tutelage we created a veritable marriage bureau, bringing news of available mates from one tribe to another. Primitive though these men and women were in technology and social organization, they were no fools. They soon recognized that an arranged marriage, where both families willingly gave their consent, was preferable to raiding and stealing—and the constant threat of retaliation.

Despite the fearsome stories some men like to tell about human savagery and lust, despite the cynical boasts of the Golden One about how he built ferocity into his creation of Homo sapiens, human beings have always chosen cooperation over competition when they had the choice. By giving the tribes the chance to extend ties of kinship we extended ties of loyalty.

Even shy Reeva found herself a new mate: Kraal himself. Since her baby had been killed by the snakes Reeva had seemed to become even more withdrawn, quieter, brooding, almost morose. Then one bright morning Kraal told me that Reeva had agreed to be his wife. His gap-toothed grin was a joy to see.

Yet I felt uneasy. I asked Anya about it, and she shrugged.

“Reeva seeks protection,” she told me. “If she can’t have it from you, she’ll get it from the next most powerful male available.”

“Protection?” I wondered. “Or power?”

Anya looked at me thoughtfully. “Power? I hadn’t considered that.”

It was a happy time for Anya and me. Despite the lurking threat of Set and his monsters we lived together joyfully in Paradise. Each day was fresh and new, each night was a pleasure of loving passion. We felt that we were accomplishing something important, helping these struggling tribes to defend themselves against true evil. Time became meaningless for us. We had our cause, we had our work, and we had each other. What more could we ask of Paradise?

After seven months of constant travel through the forest of Paradise, we had built up a loose alliance of several dozen tribes under the nominal leadership of Kraal. Most of the people of those tribes went on living exactly as they had before we met them—except that they now had new tools, new foods, new mates, new ideas stirring them. Only a few young men or women from any single tribe actually traveled with us.

Had we done enough?

I knew that we had not. All through those long months we did not see a dreaded giant snake or dragon. Each time I looked up through the leafy trees I saw only the sky, empty except for clouds. No pterosaurs seeking us. Yet I felt deep within me that Set knew exactly where we were, day by day. Knew precisely what we were doing. With the absolute certainty of inbuilt instinct I realized that Set was preparing to smash us.

How and when I did not know. It dawned on me that I had better find out.

That night Kraal’s wandering band camped in a parklike glade beneath lofty pine trees. Their trunks rose straight and tall as the pillars of a cathedral. The ground beneath them was bare of grass but covered with a thick, soft, scented layer of pine needles. We spread our hides and robes and prepared for sleep.

There were about forty of us who roamed the forest of Paradise under Kraal’s nominal leadership, offering metal tools and medicines, knowledge and marriageable young men and women in exchange for loyalty and the promise to resist the reptilian masters when next they raided.

A massive gray boulder sat at one end of the glade, gray and imperturbable in the last golden rays of the setting sun. I glanced at Anya, then turned and asked Kraal to follow us up to its top.

We scrabbled up from one rock to another until we stood atop the big boulder, looking down on the others as they huddled in small groups around their cooking fires.

“If the dragons come again to steal slaves for Set,” I asked, “how will we be able to bring all the tribes together to fight against them?”

Kraal made a sighing, grunting sound, his way of showing that he was thinking hard. Anya remained silent.

“When we hunt deer or goats,” I mused, “we send men out into the brush to search for the game we seek. But what can we do when the dragons come hunting for us?”

Kraal swiftly saw where I was leading. “We could pick men to go to the edge of Paradise and watch for the dragons’ approach!”

Anya nodded encouragement to him.

“That would take many men,” I said. “And we would need fast runners to carry the news from one group to another.”

Thus we created the idea of scouts and messengers, and began training men and women for such duties. We wanted youngsters who were fleet of foot, but not so foolhardy that they would try to attack a dragon by themselves—or so flighty that they would report dragons when they saw nothing more than clouds on the horizon.

After a few weeks of training I myself took the first group of scouts northward, toward the edge of Paradise, where the forest merged with the broad treeless savannah that would eventually become the Sahara.

Anya wanted to come with me but I convinced her that she was needed more at Kraal’s side, helping him to win more tribes over to our cause, teaching the women the arts of healing and baking.

“I don’t want to leave Kraal entirely alone,” I said, “without either one of us close by him.”

Anya’s eyes widened slightly. “You don’t trust him?”

It was the first time that I realized so. “It’s not a matter of trust, exactly. What we’re doing is new to Kraal—new to all of them. One of us should be at his side at all times. Just in case.”

“I’d rather be sticking a spear into a lizard’s ribs,” she said.

I laughed. “There’ll be plenty of chances for that, my love. I have the feeling that Set knows exactly what we’re doing and he’s merely biding his time to strike us when and where he chooses.”

Anya reached up to touch my cheek. “Be very careful, Orion. If you are killed by Set… it will be the end. Forever.”

There had been times when I longed for eternal death, for the final release from the agony of living. But not now. Now with Anya here in Paradise with me.

I kissed her, long and deep and hard. And then we parted.

Young Chron had become something of an acolyte to me, at my elbow practically every moment of the day. Naturally he volunteered for this first scouting mission. I had to admit that he possessed exactly the qualities we needed in a scout: courage tempered by good sense, keen eyes, and young legs.

There were five of us, and we spent more than a week moving northward through the forest. We headed for the bowl of rock where we had first camped, months earlier. From there, we knew, it was little more than a day’s trek to the edge of the grassland.

“Will the god speak to us, Orion?” Chron asked as we tramped through the woods. I had spread our group out in tactical formation: two up ahead, spaced apart the distance that a shout would carry, then the two of us, and finally a one-man rear guard trailing behind us.

“I don’t think so,” I replied absently. “We won’t stay long enough for that.”

My attention was on the birds and insects that called and chirped and hummed all around us. As long as they made their usual noises we were probably safe. Silence meant danger in this forest.

A pair of blackbirds seemed to be following us, flapping from tree to tree, cawing noisily from high above us. Looking past them, I saw that the sky was darkening. There would be rain soon.

The clouds burst near sundown and we made a miserable, drenched camp without fire that night. The rain poured down so hard it seemed like solid sheets of water pelting us. We sat beneath a spreading oak, huddled together and hunched over like a quintet of pathetic apes while the rain sluiced over us and chilled us to the bone. We dined on crickets that we found in the grass, silent and inert in the cold. They crunched in my mouth and tasted oddly sweet.

Finally the downpour stopped and the forest came alive once more with the droning of insects and the drip, drip, dripping of rainwater from countless thousands of leaves. A fog rose up, gray and cold, wrapping its ghostly tendrils around us, making our soaked, chilled bodies even more wretched.

My brave scouts were obviously frightened. “The mist,” Chron said, shuddering, “it’s like the breath of a ghost.” The others nodded and muttered, hunched over, wide-eyed, trembling.

I smiled at them. Knowing that reptiles became torpid in the cold, I said, “This mist is a gift from the gods. No snakes or lizards can move through such a mist. The mist protects us.”

The morning sun burned away the mist and we marched northward again. Until we came to the end of the lake where Kraal’s village had stood.

The birds circling overhead should have been a warning to us. At first we thought they were pterosaurs, so we stayed in the protective shadows of the trees as we approached the village. The birds wheeled and circled in deathly silence.

No more than a handful of Kraal’s people had decided to accompany him on his god-inspired journeying. The others had remained where they were, in their huts of boughs and mud by the southern shore of the lake.

The dragons had paid them a visit.

Our noses told us something was wrong long before we reached the remains of the village. The putrid stench of decay was so strong that we were gagging and almost retching by the time we pushed aside the last thorny bushes and stepped out onto the sandy clearing where the village had been built.

The ground was black with ashes. Every hut had been burned to the ground. Tall stakes had been driven into the ground at the water’s edge and a dozen men and women had been impaled on them; their rotting remains were what we had smelled. A kind of gibbet had also been built from sturdy logs. Two bodies hung from it by their heels, the flesh ripped so completely from their bones that we could not tell if they had been men or women.

One of my scouts had come from this village. He stared, goggle-eyed, unable to speak, until at last his legs gave way and he collapsed in a blubbering, sobbing heap onto the burned sand.

The others, including Chron, were stunned at first. But gradually, as we slowly walked through the charred remains of huts and human bones, Chron’s face went red with rage, even though the others remained pale with shock.

I pointed to immense tracks of three-clawed feet in the ashes and sand. Dragons.

Chron shook his spear in the air. “Let’s find them and kill them!”

One of the others looked at him as if he were insane. “We could never kill such as these!”

Glaring at him, Chron said, “Then let’s throw ourselves into the lake and be finished with life! Either we avenge these murders or we’re not worth the air we breathe!”

I stilled him with a hand on his shoulder. “We will kill the dragons,” I said calmly, softly. “But we won’t go crashing through the forest following their trail. That is exactly what they want us to do.”

As if in confirmation of my suspicion, a pterosaur came gliding into view high above the placid lake. It soared for several moments, wings outstretched, then folded its leathery wings and dove into the lake with barely a splash. An instant later it came up with a fish wriggling in its long beak.

“It’s fishing, not searching for us,” said Chron.

I lifted an eyebrow. “Even a scout needs to eat.”

The pterosaur spread its great wings again and took off, flapping hard and running on the water’s surface with its webbed feet, then wobbled into the air and headed away from us, to the north.

“Come on,” I said. “The dragons were here two or three days ago. If we’re clever enough, maybe we can trap them while they’re waiting to trap us.”

Chapter 10

The dragons had left a clearly visible trail through the forest, trampling down bushes and even young trees as hey headed back toward the savannah to the north. I saw that their immense three-clawed footprints headed only in the northerly direction. They had come down to the village more stealthily, along the riverbank or perhaps wading in the stream itself.

Yes, they were making it easy for us to follow them. I knew that they were waiting up ahead somewhere, waiting to spring their trap on us.

I made my tiny band of scouts stay well away from their trail. We moved through the deep forest as silently as wraiths, slipping through the dense foliage and thickly clustered trees, barely leaving a footprint.

We struck for the high ground, the rocky hills that paralleled the river’s course. We clambered up the bare rocks, and once at the top we could easily see the broad trail that the dragons had pounded out down among the trees.

Keeping down below the skyline on the far slope of the ridge, we soon found ourselves above the bowl of rock where we had made our camp months earlier.

And the dragons were there, an even dozen of them, eating.

The five of us flattened ourselves on the rim of the rock bowl and looked down at the giant lizards that had wiped out Kraal’s village.

These monsters were considerably different from the beast I had slain so many months earlier. They were slightly bigger, bulkier, more than twenty feet from snout to tail. They walked on their two hind legs only, so that their fearsome heads could rise as much as fifteen feet above the ground. The forelegs were short and relatively slim, used for grasping. Their necks were short and thick, supporting massive heads that seemed to be almost entirely made of teeth the size and shape—and sharpness—of steak knives. Their tails were also shorter and much thicker than I had seen before.

Their colors varied from light dun brown to a mottled green, almost like camouflage. Then, as I watched them I realized that their coloration was camouflage; it changed like the coloring of a chameleon as the giant beasts moved slowly from one place on the canyon floor to another.

I recognized the stench wafting toward us; it was from the food they were eating. It took several moments for Chron and the others to understand. I felt his body go rigid beside me. I clamped my hand over his mouth, tightly. The others stirred but did not speak.

The dragons were eating dead human bodies. They must have carried the corpses with them from the village. As we watched in horrified silence I saw that they used the vicious claws on their forelegs to hold their prey and tore off huge chunks of meat with those serrated butcher’s knives they had for teeth.

Despite their bulk I thought that they could run quite fast, faster than a human. Those short, thick tails might be useful for clubbing a victim at close quarters, and with those grasping talons and ripping teeth they were fearsomely armed.

At my signal we slithered backward down below the ridge line and crawled, then walked in utter silence for nearly half an hour before any of us said a word. Our copper-edged spears and knives seemed pitifully puny compared to the dragons’ teeth and claws.

Even Chron seemed cowed. “How can the five of us kill those monsters?”

“Even if we had all the men from all the tribes, we wouldn’t dare to attack them,” said one of the others.

“They are fearsome beasts, true enough,” I said. “But we have a weapon that they don’t.”

“Spears won’t stop them.”

“Their claws are bigger than our knives.”

“The weapon we have is not held in our hands,” I said. “It’s up here.” I tapped at my temple.

Coming down off the hillside, we made a wide circle northward and crossed the river at a shallow point where it frothed and babbled noisily white among broken rocks and flat-topped boulders. I kept a wary eye on the sky, but saw no pterosaurs.

Once under the trees on the far bank, I squatted on the sandy ground and drew a map with my finger. “Here is the bowl of the god who speaks, where the dragons are waiting for us, expecting us to walk into their trap. Here is the river. And here we are.”

I explained what I wanted them to do. They were doubtful at first, but after a couple of repetitions they saw that my plan could work. If everything went off just the way I wanted it to.

We had another weapon that the dragons did not: fire. The dragons had used the cooking fires of the huts to help destroy the village by the lake. Now I intended to use fire and the element of surprise to destroy them.

We worked all night gathering dry brush for tinder. The floor of the canyon was strewn with bushes and clumps of trees that would burn nicely once ignited. The dragons would either be asleep or torpid, I reasoned, during the cool of the night. Reptiles become sluggish when the thermometer goes down. The time to strike would be just before dawn, the lowest temperature of the night.

My one fear was that they might have some sort of sentries. Perhaps heat-sensitive snakes such as the ones who had attacked us in our caves. My hope was that Set was arrogant enough to think that a band of five little humans would camp for the night and resume their journey only after the sun came up.

We made dozens of trips across the slippery wet rocks, carrying armloads of brush and dead branches from windfalls. The moon rose, a slim crescent that barely shed light, and close enough almost to touch its edge, that glowering red star rose with it. Swiftly, silently, we began to carry our cache of tinder toward the canyon.

I saw the looming dark shadow of a dragon at the canyon’s mouth. It was sitting on its hind legs and thick tail, not moving. But I saw the ruddy light of the strange star glint off its eyes. It was awake.

A guard. A sentry. Devilish Set was not so arrogant after all.

I stopped the men behind me with an outstretched arm. They dropped their bundles and gasped at the monster looming in the night. It slowly swung its massive head in our direction. We backed away, hugging the wall of rock and its protective shadows.

The giant lizard did not come after us. To me it seemed half-asleep, languid.

“We can’t get past it!” Chron whispered urgently.

“We’ll have to kill it,” I said. “And quietly, so that it doesn’t rouse the others.”

“How can—”

I silenced him with a finger raised to my lips. Then I commanded, “Wait here. Absolutely silent. Don’t speak, don’t move. But if you hear that monster roar, then run for your lives and don’t look back for me.”

I could sense the questions he wanted to ask, but there was no time for explanations or discussion. Without another word, I reached up for handholds on the steep cliff face and began climbing straight up.

The rock was crumbly, and more than once I thought I would plunge back to the bottom and break my neck. But after many sweaty minutes I found a ledge that ran roughly parallel to the ground. It was narrow, barely enough for me to edge along, one bare foot after the other. Flattened along the cliff, the rock still warm from the day’s sunlight, I made my way slowly, stealthily, to a spot just above the dragon.

The soft hoot of an owl floated through the darkness. Crickets played their eternal scratchy melody while frogs from the riverbank peeped higher notes. Nothing in the forest realized that death was about to strike.

I nearly lost my footing and tumbled off as I turned myself around and pressed my back against the bare rock. Silently I drew my dagger from its sheath on my thigh. I would have one chance and one chance only to kill this monster. If I missed, I would be its next meal.

Taking only enough time to draw in a deep breath and gauge the distance to the dragon’s back, I stepped off the ledge and into the empty air.

I dropped onto the monster’s back with a thud that almost knocked the wind out of me. Before the dragon realized what had happened I rammed my dagger’s blade into the base of his skull. I felt bone, or thick cartilage.

With every ounce of strength in me I pushed the blade in deeper.

I felt the beast die. One instant it was tense, vital, its monstrous head turning, jaws agape. The next it was collapsing like a pricked balloon, as inert as a stone. It fell face-first into the dirt, landing with a jarring crash that sounded to me like the result of an elephant falling off a cliff.

I lay clinging to the dragon’s dead hide. For a few heartbeats the noises of the night ceased. Then the crickets and frogs took up their harmony again. Something canine bayed at the rising moon. And none of the other dragons seemed to stir.

I made my way back to the waiting men. Even in the darkness I could see their wide grins. Without wasting a moment, we began piling up our brushwood across the mouth of the canyon.

The sky was beginning to turn gray as we finished the last piece of it. The barrier we had erected looked pitifully thin. Still, it was the best we could do.

Chron and I crawled the length of the brushwood barrier. Through the tangle dry branches I could see the dragons sitting as stolid as huge statues near the cliff wall, tall enough for their snouts to reach the lowest of the caves in the rock face. Their eyes seemed to be open, but they were not moving at all, except for the slow rhythmic pulsing of their flanks as they breathed the deep, regular breath of sleep.

It took several moments for Chron to start a fire from a pair of dry sticks. But at last a tendril of smoke rose from his busy hands and then a flicker of flame broke out. I touched a stick to the flame as Chron plunged his burning brand into the brush. Then we scrambled to our feet and raced back along the length of the barrier, starting new fires every few yards.

The others had their own fire going nicely by the time we reached them. The whole barrier was in flames, the dry brush crackling nicely, bright tongues of hot fire leaping into the air.

Still the dragons did not stir. I feared that our fire would go out before it could ignite the bushes and trees of the canyon, so I got up and grabbed a burning branch. With this improvised torch I lit several clumps of bush and started a small batch of trees alight. Then the grass caught. Smoke and flames rose high and the wind carried them both deeper into the canyon.

The dragons began to stir. First one of them awoke and seemed to shake itself. It rose on its hind legs, tail held straight out above the ground, head tilting high, nose in the air. A second dragon came to life and hissed loudly enough for us to hear it over the crackle of the flames. Then all the others seemed to awaken at once, shaking and bobbing up and down on their two legs, hissing wildly.

I had thought that they would be sluggish, torpid, in the cool of early dawn. I was wrong. They were quickly alert, pacing nervously along the hollow bowl of the rock wall as the flames rose before them and the wind carried the fire toward them.

For several minutes they merely milled around, hissing, snarling, their hides turning livid red with fear and anger. They were too big to climb the curving wall of rock and escape the way a man would have. They were trapped against the rocky bowl, the trees and grass and bushes in front of them turning into a sea of flame and thickly billowing smoke. I could feel the heat curling the hair on my arms, singeing my face.

We backed away. The dragons, as if in mental contact with one another, all seemed to make the same decision at the same instant. They charged into the crackling flames.

In a ragged column of twos the dragons plunged into the holocaust we had made for them. Hissing and whistling like giant steam engines, they waded into the sea of fire, tossing their immense heads to keep them above the flames and smoke. Those in front crashed through the fiery brush and stands of trees, flattening them out for those behind. One of them went down, screaming terribly. Then another. But the others came rushing forward, trampling over the roasting carcasses of their brethren.

Six of them died in the flames, deliberately giving their lives so that the others could get through. I watched stunned, astounded at this display of intelligence and sacrifice. Reptiles, dinosaurs, could not have that level of intelligence. Their brains were too small; their heads were mostly bone.

Something intelligent was directing them. I had no time to puzzle out the mystery, though, because the five remaining monsters were breaking through our fiery barrier.

And bearing down on us.

I could see steaming swaths of raw meat where they had been burned on their legs and flanks. And they could see the five of us, huddled against the cliff face with our copper-tipped spears in our hands.

“Run!” someone screamed.

“No,” I yelled. “Face them…”

But it was too late. They broke and ran from the fearsome hissing monsters. All but young Chron. He stayed at my side as three of the giant beasts bore down on us and the remaining pair chased after my fleeing men.

I cursed myself for not having thought to prepare an avenue of retreat. Now we were trapped with the enraged monsters pinning Chron and me against the cliff wall.

The dragons were terribly burned, screeching furiously. We planted our backs against the rock wall and gripped our spears with both hands.

The world slowed down as my body went into hyperdrive. I saw the first of the dragons looming before me, jaws wide, arms reaching for me. Those taloned claws could have ripped a rhinoceros apart.

I ducked beneath its outstretched arms and jammed my spear into its belly, tearing the lizard open from breastbone to crotch. It screamed like all the devils of hell and tottered a few steps sideways, then went down. Turning, I saw Chron with his spear butted against the rock, desperately trying to stave off the dragon that was clawing at him.

Pulling my bloody spear from the beast’s gut, I clambered over its whitening body and rammed the metal spear point into the dragon’s thigh. It stumbled, turned toward me. Again I rammed my spear into the undefended belly of the beast while Chron stabbed higher, nearer the heart.

Before the dragon could fall, the third of the monsters was on me. My spear was jammed inside the second beast. As I tried to work it loose, to the screams and shrieks of the dying monster, its partner slashed at me with a three-taloned hand. I saw it coming in slow motion and started to duck beneath the blow, but my foot slipped in the thick stream of blood covering the ground and I fell sideways.

I felt the dragon’s sharp claws slice through the flesh of my left arm and side. Before the pain could reach my conscious mind I clamped down on the blood vessels and shut off the nerve signals that would carry their message of agony to my brain.

Looking up, I saw Chron ramming his spear into the dragon’s throat. It reared up with a screaming roar, tearing the spear out of the teenager’s hands. I got to one knee and reached with my good arm for the spear still embedded in the second dragon’s hide.

Chron was flattened against the face of the rock, his eyes wide with terror, ducking and dodging as the wounded dragon slashed at him with pain-driven fury. It ignored the spear hanging from its throat in its fury to kill its tormentor. Its claws scored screeching gouges in the solid rock. It bent over to snap at Chron with its frightening teeth, and even I felt its breath, hot and stinking of half-digested flesh.

I reached the spear and worked it free of the dying carcass as Chron desperately twisted away from the dragon’s furious slashing and snapping. The lad was faster than the lizard, but not by much. It was merely a question of who would tire first, the defenseless human or the wounded, burned reptile.

Getting shakily to my feet, I rammed the spear into the dragon’s flank with all of my remaining strength, felt the copper point scrape against a rib and then penetrate upward, into the lungs.

The dragon shrieked like a thousand demons and swung its thick, blunt tail at me. I couldn’t get completely out of the way, and it knocked me sprawling.

The next thing I knew Chron was kneeling over me, tears in his eyes.

“You’re alive!” he gasped.

“Almost,” I croaked back at him. My back felt numb, there were deep slashes in my left arm and side.

With Chron’s help I got to my feet once more. He was unwounded except for a few scrapes and bruises. The three huge dragons lay around us, enormous mounds of deathly gray scaly flesh. Even flat on the ground, their carcasses were taller than my height.

“We killed all three of them.” Chron’s voice was awed, astonished.

“The others,” I said. My throat felt raw, my voice rasped.

Chron picked up our spears and we staggered off in the direction our three comrades had fled. We did not have to go far. Their bloody bodies, sliced to shreds, lay sprawled only a few minutes’ walk away.

Chron leaned on the spears, breathing heavily, trying to control his emotions. The dead men were a gruesome sight. Already ants and flies were crawling over their bone-deep wounds.

Then the youngster looked up, his eyes narrowing. “Where are the dragons? Do you think—”

“They’ve run away,” I told him.

“They could come back.”

I shook my woozy head. “I don’t think so. Look at their tracks. Look at the distance between the prints. They were running. They stopped long enough to slaughter our friends, then headed northward again. They won’t be back. Not today, at least.”

We started back toward the south. Chron caught our dinner that evening, and with food and a night’s rest I felt considerably better.

“Your wounds are healing,” he told me in the morning’s light. “Even the bruise on your back is smaller than it was last night.”

“I heal quickly,” I said. Thanks to the Creator who made me.

By the time we returned to the village deep in the forest of Paradise where we had left Anya and Kraal and the others, my strength was almost back to normal. The slashes in my arm were little more than fading scars.

I was eager to see Anya again. And Chron was bubbling with the anticipation of telling the villagers all our news.

“We killed ten dragons, Orion. Ten of them! Wait until they hear about that!”

I gave him a grin, but I wondered how Kraal and his people would take the news of their village being massacred.

Before I could tell him, though, Kraal had his own heavy news to tell me.

“Your woman is gone,” he said. “The dragons took her.”

Chapter 11

“Anya gone?” I was staggered. “The dragons took her?”

The village was nothing but mud huts beneath spreading oaks and elms. We stood on the bare ground of the central meeting area, the warm sunlight of midday shining through the trees. All the villagers were grouped around Chron and me, staring at us with troubled, frightened eyes.

“We killed dragons!” Chron blurted. “Ten of them!”

I looked straight into Kraal’s shaggy-browed shifting eyes. He avoided my gaze, uneasily shuffling from one foot to the other like a guilty little boy. Reeva stood behind him, strangely decked with necklaces of animals’ teeth.

There was no sign of a battle in this village. No sign even of a struggle. None of the men were wounded. As far as I could tell, all the people who had been there when I had left were still there.

“Tell me what happened,” I said to Kraal.

His face twisted into a miserably unhappy grimace.

“It was her or us,” Reeva snapped. “If we did not give her to them, they would kill us all.”

“Tell me what happened,” I repeated, anger simmering in my blood.

“The dragons came,” Kraal said, almost mumbling in his shame and regret. “And their masters. They said they wanted you and the woman. If we gave the two of you to them, they would leave us alone.”

“And you did what they asked?”

“Anya did not fight against it,” Reeva said, her tone almost angry. “She saw the wisdom of it.”

“And you let them take her without a fight?”

“They were dragons, Orion,” Kraal whined. “Big ones. Six of them. And masters riding them.”

Reeva pushed past him to confront me. “I am the priestess now. Anya’s power has passed to me.”

I wanted to grab her by her scrawny throat and crush her. This was the reward for all that Anya had taught her. My suspicions about little Reeva had been right. She had not been seeking protection; she had sought power.

Looking past her to Kraal, I said, “And you think the dragons will leave you alone now?”

He nodded dumbly.

“Of course they will,” Reeva said triumphantly. “Because we will provide them slaves. We will not be harmed. The masters will reward us!”

My anger collapsed into a sense of total defeat. All that Anya and I had taught these people would be used against other humans. Instead of building up an alliance against Set, they had caved in at the first sign of danger and agreed to collaborate with the devils.

“Where did they take Anya?”

“To the north,” Kraal answered.

The bitterness I felt was like acid burning inside me. “Then I’ll head north. You won’t see me again.”

“I’ll go with you,” Chron said.

Reeva’s dark eyes flashed. “You will go north, Orion. That is certain.”

From behind the row of mud huts strode two reptilian masters. The crowd parted silently to let them advance toward me.

They looked like smaller replicas of Set. Almost human in form. Almost. Clawed feet. Three-fingered taloned hands. Their naked bodies were covered with light red scales that glittered in the mottled sunlight filtering through the tall trees. Slim tails that almost reached the ground, twitching constantly. Reptile faces with narrow slashes for mouths and red eyes with vertical black slits for pupils. No discernable ears and only a pair of breathing holes below the eyes instead of noses.

I whipped the dagger from its sheath on my thigh and Chron leveled his spear at the two reptiles.

“No,” I said to the youngster. “Stay out of this.”

Then I saw two dozen spear points leveled at me. Most of the men in the village were staring at me grimly, their weapons in their hands.

“Please, Orion,” said Kraal in a strangled, agonized voice. “If you fight, they will destroy us all.”

The treachery was complete. I realized that Reeva had convinced Kraal to go along with the enemy. He was the tribe’s leader, but she was now its priestess and she could twist Kraal to her whims.

Then I heard the crunching sound of heavy footsteps through foliage. From beyond the miserable little huts reared the heads of two dragons, meat-eaters, fighters.

The pair of masters stepped past Kraal and Reeva to confront me. They were my own height, which put them a full head above the tallest villager. Their scaly reptilian faces showed no emotion whatever, yet their glittering serpent’s eyes stirred deep hatred within me.

Silently the one on my right extended a three-fingered hand. Reluctantly I handed him my dagger. I had won it on the plain of Ilios, before the beetling walls of Troy, a gift from Odysseus himself for battle prowess. It was useless to me now, in this time and place. Still, parting with it was painful.

The master made a hissing noise, almost a sigh, and handed my dagger to Kraal. He took it, shamefaced.

The other master turned toward the approaching dragons and raised one hand. They stopped short of the huts, their breath whooshing in and out like spurts of flame in a furnace. The monsters would have wrecked several huts if they had tried to come all the way to this meeting ground in the center of the village. Their masters were keeping their word: no harm would come to the village as long as Kraal’s people cooperated.

“You can’t let them take him!” Chron shouted at the villagers. There were tears in his eyes and his voice cracked with frustrated rage.

I made myself smile at him. “There’s nothing you can do, Chron. Accept the unavoidable.” Then I swung my gaze to Kraal and Reeva. “I’ll be back.”

Kraal looked down at his bare crusted feet but Reeva glared defiantly at me.

“I’ll be back,” I repeated.

The masters walked me past the huts. With soft whistles they got the big dragons to crouch down and we climbed up on their backs, me behind the one who had taken my dagger. If he—or she, I had no way of telling—was worried that I would grab him around the throat and strangle him, he gave no sign of it.

The dragons lumbered off past the village. I turned for one last look at it, over my shoulder. The villagers were still clustered in the central meeting ground, standing stock still, as if frozen. Chron raised his spear above his head in defiance. It was a pretty gesture, the only thing he could do.

The entire village had been cowed, all except that one teenage boy. I wondered how long he could survive if Reeva decided he was dangerous to her.

Then the trees blotted out the village and I saw it no more. The dragons jounced along at a good pace, jogging on their two legs between the trees, flattening the foliage on the ground. There was no saddle, no reins. I clung to the dragon’s hide with both arms and legs, clutching hard to hang on. We rode behind their massive heads, so there was no worry about being knocked off by tree branches. If the dragon could get through, we could easily enough.

The humanoid masters were clad only in their scaly skins, without even a belt or pouch in which to hold things. They seemed to have no tools at all, no weapons except their formidable claws and teeth. And the fearsome dragons we were riding, of course.

I began to wonder if they had language, then wondered even more deeply how a race could be intelligent without language. Clearly Set had communicated with me telepathically. Did these silent replicas of him use telepathy instead of speech?

I tried speaking to them, to no avail. No matter what I said, it made absolutely no impression on the reptilian sitting four inches in front of me. As far as I could tell he was stone deaf.

Yet they controlled the dragons without any trouble at all. It had to be some form of telepathy, I concluded. I remembered the Neanderthals, who also communicated with a form of telepathy, although they could make the sounds of speech if they had to.

We pounded through the forest without stop. Night fell but we barely slowed our pace. If the dragons had a need for sleep, they did not show it, and for all I knew, the masters riding them might have been sound asleep; I had no way of telling. Did they know that I can go without sleep for weeks at a time, if necessary? Or did they conclude that I could sleep without falling off the back of this galumphing latter-day dinosaur?

I decided to find out.

I let myself slide off the dragon’s back. Hitting the ground on the balls of my feet, I jumped out of the way of the beast pounding along behind me and dashed into the thick brush.

The dragons immediately stopped and reared up. I could hear their snuffling panting in the darkness of the night, like giant steam engines puffing. It was cloudy, threatening rain, so dark that I could not see them at all.

No sound came from the masters riding atop the giant beasts. But I heard the dragons crunching through the underbrush, sniffing like immense bloodhounds. I edged deeper into the bushes, scuttling like a beetle while trying to keep quiet. The forest had gone silent: not an insect chirped.

In the hushed darkness a picture formed itself in my mind. The village I had just left was being trampled by dozens of dragons. Men and women were being torn apart, crushed in the pitiless jaws of the beasts. I saw Chron ripped from throat to groin by a dragon’s monstrous claws.

Someone was sending me a powerful message. Whether it was the masters whom I was trying to escape or Set himself in contact with me despite the distance separating us, the message was perfectly clear: either I surrender myself or Chron and all the villagers will be painfully, mercilessly slaughtered.

I rose to my feet. It was still utterly dark. Not even a breeze stirred the air. Within a few minutes, though, I heard the hissing breath and ponderous footfalls of one of the dragons. I stepped out into a slightly clearer space between the trees and saw the burning-red glittering eyes of a master staring down at me from his perch on the dragon’s back.

“I fell asleep and slipped off,” I lied.

It did not matter. The master watched, wordlessly, as his dragon crouched down enough for me to clamber up onto its back once again. And then we resumed our journey toward the north.

It began to rain at dawn and I hung on to the beast’s back, angry, wet, frustrated, and—beneath it all—terrified of what Set was doing to Anya. We had failed, the two of us. Our few moments in Paradise had cost us our lives.

Then a new thought struck me. The masters had actually made a deal with Kraal’s tribe. Despicable though it was on Kraal’s part, it seemed to me to be a small sign of weakness on the part of Set. The masters had no need of collaborators before I had met Kraal. Our idea of welding all the human tribes into an alliance to resist the masters must have forced Set to make this new accommodation.

The masters were vulnerable. At least to a small degree. After all, we had killed some of their most fearsome dragons with the most primitive of weapons. We had been rousing the human tribes to fight back.

But a voice in my head kept asking, What is he doing to Anya?

Probably everything we had accomplished had been wiped away by Set’s masterful use of terror. The old hostage maneuver: do as I say or I will kill those you love. Kraal had given in to it, with Reeva’s urging. Set would never have stooped to bargaining with humans, even if the bargain was nothing more than threatening hostages, if he had not felt that we were starting to cause damage to him.

But what was he doing to Anya?

Set’s hostage ploy has worked to perfection, my inner voice admitted. He has Anya in his grasp, and soon enough he will have you. And all you’ve accomplished with Kraal is to teach him how to round up fresh slaves for the diabolical masters.

And what is Set doing to Anya?

It was in this turmoil of conflicting fears and regrets that I rode on the back of the galloping dragon all that long, miserable, rainy day. Wet, cold, and dispirited, I lay my head on the beast’s hide and tried to sleep. If the rain bothered the reptilians, they gave no indication of it. The water spattered off the scales of their hides; the chill dankness of the air seemed to have no effect on them at all.

I closed my eyes and willed my body to hang on to the dragon’s wet, slippery back. I wanted to sleep, to be as rested as possible for the coming confrontation with Set. I also hoped, desperately, that in sleep the Creators might contact me as they had so often in other lives, other times.

My last waking thought was of Anya. Was she still alive? Was she suffering the tortures that Set told me he would inflict upon her?

I made myself sleep. Without dreams, without messages. Any other time I would have been happy for a few hours of restful oblivion. But when I awoke, I felt disappointed, abandoned, hopeless.

Blinking the sleep away, I saw that it was nearly nightfall again. We had broken clear of the forest and were riding now across the broad sea of grass toward the garden by the Nile. The moon was just rising above the flat horizon and with it that blood red star shone down on me, the same color as the baleful eyes of Set.

Chapter 12

The sun was high in a sky so blue it almost hurt my eyes to look at it. We were riding through the garden by the Nile now, the two dragons pacing less urgently down a long wide avenue of trees. The ground beneath us was grassless bare pebbles, raked smooth by unseen hands.

No slaves were in sight. No other dragons or masters. The garden seemed totally empty except for us.

Then up ahead I saw a structure, a building, or rather a high smooth curved wall. In the shadowless glare of the high sun it seemed the color of eggshell, almost white, and as smooth as the shell of an egg. It slanted inward, sloping a discernable few degrees toward the top. No battlements, no crenellations, no windows. Only a smoothly curving, sloping wall of featureless material that was neither stone nor wood.

Our dragons slowed their pace even further as we approached the wall, then began to trot around its base. It was more than three stories high, I judged, and so wide in extent that it must have covered more ground than Troy and Jericho combined.

We rode around the wall’s vast curving base for several minutes before I saw a section slide open to reveal a high, wide door. The dragons trotted through it.

Now the beasts slowed to a walk as we went down a long, broad tunnel. Their clawed feet crunched on bare pebbles. Their heads almost grazed the ceiling, which was made of the same smooth plastic material as the outer wall. Finally we stepped out into sunshine again.

We were in a huge circular courtyard, busy with reptilians of all descriptions and scampering, sweating half-naked human slaves. The inner wall towered above me, slanting inward, utterly smooth and impossible to climb.

There was a corral of sorts built on the far side of the courtyard, where the four-footed herbivorous dragons that served as slave guards were penned in. Some of them were eating, their long necks bent down to troughs piled high with greens. Others stood placidly, tails swinging slowly, eyes calmly surveying the courtyard, heads bobbing up and down. At their full height they reached more than halfway up the enclosing circular wall.

Exactly opposite the corral were sturdier pens where several of the fiercer meat-eating dragons paced nervously, hissing and snapping, their enormous teeth flashing like sabers in the sunlight.

A terrace jutted out from one section of the curving wall, more than fifteen feet above the ground. Dozens of pterosaurs squatted there as if sleeping, their big leathery wings folded, their long beaks hanging down, eyes closed. I saw no droppings on the beams that supported the terrace or the ground below. Either the flying lizards were well trained or the slaves cleaned up after them.

I counted eight of the humanoid masters in that wide courtyard, striding across the yard or sitting on benches or bent over some piece of work. None of them conversed with another. They remained far separated, aloof, as if they had no use for their own kind.

Human slaves scurried to fill the feeding troughs, toting big wicker baskets bulging with leafy vegetation. A quartet of slaves trudged out of a low doorway, leaning heavily into rope harnesses as they dragged a wooden pallet piled high with raw red meat for the carnosaurs. Others dashed here and there on tasks that were not apparent to me, but obviously important to someone from the way they were scampering. Two slaves ran up to us, standing with heads bowed as the masters slid off our mounts and beckoned me to do the same.

It was like a scene from a medieval castle or an oriental bazaar: the dragons in brilliant splashes of colors; the masters’ scaly hides in pale coral red, almost pink; the looming walls; the outlandish pterosaurs; the scurrying slaves. Yet there were two things about it that seemed uncannily strange to me. There were no fires anywhere, no smoke, no cooking, no one warming themselves beside crackling flames. And there was virtually no noise.

All this was going on in almost total silence. Not a voice could be heard. Only the occasional hiss of a dragon or buzz of an insect broke the quiet. The slaves’ unshod feet were inaudible on the dusty bare ground of the courtyard. The masters themselves made no sound, and their human slaves apparently dared not speak.

I slid to the ground and stared at the two slaves standing mutely before us. One was a young woman, bare to the waist like her male companion. Without a word they motioned to the dragons, which followed them to the pens on the opposite side of the courtyard from the herbivores’ corral.

One of my captors touched my shoulder with a cold clawed hand and pointed in the direction of a narrow doorway set into the wall’s curving face. I would have sworn the wall had been perfectly smooth a moment earlier.

With one master ahead of me and the second behind, I entered the cool shadows of a corridor that seemed to curve along the wall’s inner circumference. We came to a ramp that led down and began a long, silent, spiraling descent. It was dark inside, especially after the brightness of the afternoon sun. The downward-ramped corridor had no lights at all; I could barely make out the back of the reptilian walking a few feet in front of me, his tail swinging slightly from side to side.

Finally we stopped at what seemed to be a blank wall. A portion of it slid aside. My escorts gestured me through.

I stepped into a dimly lit chamber and the door slid shut behind me. I knew I was not alone, however. I could sense the presence of another living entity.

Even though my eyes can adjust to very low light levels almost immediately, the chamber remained shrouded in gloomy shadows. Almost complete inky blackness. Then a beam of dark red light, like the angry glower of the blood star in the night, bathed the part of the chamber in front of me.

Set reclined on a low, wide backless couch. A throne of blackest ebony, raised three feet above the floor on which I stood. On either side of him stood several statues, some of wood, some of stone, one of them seemed to be carved from ivory. No two were the same size; they had been apparently carved by many different hands. Some were outright crude. The ivory statue was truly a beautiful masterwork.

They were all of the same subject: the hellish creature who was called Set.

His red slitted eyes radiated implacable hatred. His horned face, crimson-scaled body, long twitching tail were the devil incarnate. Thousands of generations of human beings would fear his image. His was the face of nightmares, of terror beyond reason, of an eternal enmity that knew no bounds, no restraints, no mercy.

I felt that burning hatred in my soul. My knees went weak with the seething dread and horror of standing face-to-face with the remorseless enemy of humankind.

“You are Orion.” The words formed themselves in my mind.

Aloud I replied, “You are Set.”

“Pitiful monkey. Are you the best your Creators could send against me?”

“Where is Anya?” I asked.

Set’s mouth opened slightly. In a human face it might have been a cruel smile. Rows of pointed teeth, like a shark’s, glittered in the sullen red light.

“The weakness of the mammal is that it is attached to other mammals. At first literally, physically. Then emotionally, all its life.”

“Where is Anya?” I repeated.

He raised a clawed hand and part of the wall to his right became a window, a display screen. I saw dozens of humans packed into a dank airless chamber. Some were sitting, some were grubbing colorless globs of food from a bin with their bare hands and stuffing it into their mouths. A man and a woman were coupling off in a corner, ignoring the others and ignored by them.

“Monkeys,” Set said in my mind.

I searched the scene but could not see Anya. Then I realized that this was the first example of real technology that I had seen from Set or any of the reptiles.

He raised one talon and I began to hear the hum and chatter of human speech, shouting, conversing, even laughing. A baby cried. An old man’s cracked voice complained bitterly about someone who had called him a fool. A trio of women sat huddled together on the grimy floor, heads bent toward one another, whispering urgently among themselves.

“Chattering stupid monkeys,” Set repeated. “Always talking. Always gibbering. What do they find to talk about?”

The human voices sounded warm and reassuring to me.

Set’s words in my mind became sardonic. “Humans that see each other every hour of every day still make their mouth noises at each other constantly. This will be a better world when the last of them are eliminated.”

“Eliminated?”

“Ah, that roused your simian curiosity, did it not?”

“You expect to wipe out the entire human race?”

“I will erase you, all of you, from the face of this world.” Even though he projected the thought mentally, I seemed to hear a sibilant hissing in his words.

My mind was racing. He couldn’t wipe out the entire human race. I knew that the Creators existed in the far future, which meant that humanity survived.

Then I heard Set’s equivalent of laughter, an eerie blood-chilling high-pitched shrill, like the scrape of a claw against a chalkboard.

“The Creators will not exist once I have finished my task. I will bend the continuum to my will, Orion, and your pitiful band of self-styled gods will disappear like smoke from a candle that has been snuffed out.”

The display on the wall went dark.

“Anya…”

“You wish to see the woman. Come with me.” He got to his feet, looming over me like a fearsome dark shadow of death. “You will see her. And share her fate.”

We went through another hidden door and into a corridor so dimly lit I could barely see his powerful form in front of me. He and his kind must be able to see far into the infrared, I reasoned. Does that mean they cannot see the higher-energy parts of the spectrum, the blues and violets? I mentally filed that conjecture for future consideration.

The corridor became a spiraling ramp that led down, down, deeper into the earth. The walls glowed a feeble dull red, barely enough for me to guide my steps. Still we descended. Set was nearly a foot taller than I, so tall that the scales of his head nearly scraped the tunnel’s ceiling. He was powerfully built, yet his body did not bulge with muscle; it had a fluid grace to it, like the silent deadly litheness of a boa constrictor.

His skull was ridged, I saw, with two bony crests that ran down the back of his neck and merged with his spine. From the front those ridges looked like small horns just above his slitted snake’s eyes. From the rear I saw that his spine was knobby with vestigial spikes, projections that may have been plates of bony armor in eons past. There was a small knob at the end of his tail, also, that might once have been a defensive club.

The tunnel was getting narrower, steeper. And hotter. I was perspiring. The floor was uncomfortably warm against my bare feet.

“How far down are we going?” I asked, my voice echoing off the smooth walls.

His voice answered in my mind, “Your Creators draw their energy from their sun, the golden light of the bigger star. I draw mine from the depths of the planet, from the ocean of molten iron that surges halfway between this world’s outer crust and its absolute center.”

“The earth’s liquid core,” I muttered.

“A sea of energy,” Set continued, “heated by radioactivity and gravity, seething with electrical currents and magnetic fields, so hot that iron and all other metals are molten and flow like water.”

He was describing hell. He drew his energy from hell.

Down and still further down we walked. I began to wonder why Set had not constructed an elevator. We walked on in silence, in the eerie dull red light, for what seemed like hours. It was like walking through an oven.

He’s holding Anya down here, I told myself. What can he have down at this depth? Why so deep underground? Is he afraid of being seen? Does he have other enemies, in addition to the Creators? Perhaps some of his own kind are at odds with him?

My thoughts circled endlessly, but always came back to the same fearful question: What is he doing to Anya?

Gradually I became aware of a presence in my mind, another intelligence, probing so gently I could hardly feel it. At first I thought it might have been Anya. But this presence was alien, hostile. Then I realized why we were spending so much time walking toward Anya’s prison. Set was probing my mind, interrogating me so subtly that I had not even realized it, searching my memories for—for what?

He sensed my awareness of his probe.

“You are just as stubborn as the woman. I shall have to use more forceful methods on you, just as I have had to do with her.”

Hot fury driven by fear raged through me. I wanted to leap on his back and snap his neck. But I knew that he could overpower me. I could feel his evil amusement at my thoughts.

“She is in great pain, Orion. Her agony will become even greater before I allow her to die.”

Chapter 13

The steep spiraling tunnel ended finally at another I blank door. Set did nothing that I could see, but the door slid open to reveal what seemed, at first glance, to be an elaborate laboratory.

Anya was nowhere in sight. The chamber we stepped into hummed with electrical power. Row upon row of buzzing throbbing consoles stood along two of the four walls of the cramped little room. Behind us was a long table cluttered with strange objects and a backless chair, almost like an ornate bench, for a tailed two-legged creature to sit upon. The fourth wall was absolutely blank.

Set clicked the talons of his right hand and that featureless wall slid up, revealing a much larger room, also packed with arcane equipment.

And Anya.

She was imprisoned in a glass cylinder standing atop a raised platform. Totally naked, she stood motionless, eyes closed, hands fiat at her sides. Blue flickers of electricity played up and down every inch of her body.

“She appears quite serene,” said Set’s hissing voice in my mind.

She seemed to be in frozen stasis. Or dead. On the four corners of the raised platform, outside the glass cylinder holding Anya, stood four rudely carved statues of Set. The largest was as high as my chest and made of wood.

“Look here,” he commanded.

I turned and followed his outstretched claw to see a row of display screens against the wall.

“They show her brain-wave patterns.”

Jagged spikes, red with agony, jittering up and down in rhythm to the sparks of electricity crawling over her body.

With a wave of Set’s hand the blue flickers intensified, became brighter, raced across Anya’s skin. Her naked body seemed to cringe, shudder. Her eyelids squeezed shut tighter. Tears crawled out from behind them. From the corner of my eye I saw the spikes of the display screens turn sharper, steeper, racing across the screens like tongues of flame burning themselves into my brain.

This monster was torturing Anya. Torturing her as heartlessly and efficiently as a swarm of army ants stripping the flesh from any living thing that stood in its path.

“Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop it!”

“Open your mind to me, Orion. Let me see what I want to see.”

“And then?”

“And then I will allow you both to die.”

I stared into his glittering reptilian eyes. There was no triumph there, no joy, not even sadistic pleasure. Nothing but pure hate. Hatred for the human race, hatred for the Creators, for Anya, for me. Set was remorselessly doing what he had to do to reach his goal.

I, too, burned with hatred. But, powerless, I let my shoulders slump and my head droop.

“Stop her pain and you can do what you want with me,” I said.

“I will ease her pain,” Set replied. “It will not stop until I have learned what I must know from you. Then you can both die.”

The blue flickers crawling across Anya’s skin turned paler, moved more slowly. The display screens showed her pain lessened.

And Set’s powerful, merciless mind drove into mine like a spike of red-hot iron, ruthlessly seeking the knowledge he wanted. I felt frozen, totally immobile, unable to twitch a finger as he ransacked my brain for its memory storage.

I saw, I heard, I felt things from my pasts. The insane Golden One sneering at me, telling me that he will destroy all the other Creators and be worshiped by the human race as its one true god. The barbaric splendor of Karakorum and Ogotai, the Mongols’ high khan, my friend, the man I assassinated. The piercing wet cold of Cornwall on that darkest day of the Dark Age, when Arthur’s knights slaughtered each other by the score.

Set was rampaging through my mind, touching on memories, thoughts, lifetimes that had been erased from my consciousness, seeking, seeking, greedily ripping across the eons I have lived to find what he sought.

Yet while he tore through my defenseless mind he exposed his own to me. The link between us, agonizing as it was, went in both directions. I could not see much of his thoughts, nor could I create an active probe to seek out his memory bank as he was doing to me. But Set could not ravage my mind without exposing at least some of his thoughts to me.

I was in the laboratory where the Golden One created me. I was on a becalmed sea beneath a brazen sky of hammered copper, dying of thirst. I was on a world that circled the star Sirius. I died with Anya in my arms as a great starship exploded.

At last I was standing in this alien fiendish torture chamber with Anya suffering within her glass prison and Set’s hateful red eyes glowering at me.

“Pah! This is pointless. You know less about it than I do.” For the first time his words, burning in my mind, seemed edged with frustration and anger.

My body came alive again. I felt it tingle as Set’s control over me relaxed.

He turned his reptilian gaze toward Anya once more. “She knows. I will have to tear it out of her.”

“No!” I bellowed as he raised his hand toward the instruments on the wall.

He turned to the wall of instruments once again, ignoring me for just a fraction of a second. Enough.

I grabbed the nearest of the four carved wooden statues and smashed him across his ridged back with it. Down he went, smashing into the dials and display screens lining the wall. Raising the carving over my head, I swung it with all my might at the tube of glass enclosing Anya. It shattered into a spray of fragments and the electrical flames that slithered over her naked flesh winked out.

I reached for her wrist and pulled her down off that pedestal of pain.

“Wh—what…?” Her eyes opened, bloodshot from pain.

“This way!” I snapped, pulling her along with me.

Set was on one knee, pulling himself to his feet. “Stop!” his voice roared in my head. And something within me wanted to obey him.

But something even stronger drove me on, overriding his mental command. I yanked Anya through the doorway and into the small outer chamber, then out into the corridor as Set barked out commands telepathically.

The corridor did not truly end where we had stopped.

That much I had seen in Set’s mind. A section of its wall slid away smoothly and Anya and I plunged into this new branch of the long spiraling tunnel.

Heading down.

“Orion—he captured you, too?”

“Reeva and Kraal made a deal with him: his price was both of us.”

We were pounding along the dim tunnel as it sloped sharply downward, our bare feet slapping against the smooth flooring. It felt hot. The feeble light emanating from the narrow walls cast no shadows.

“Are you all right?” I asked, her wrist still firmly in my grasp.

She gasped as we ran, “The pain… it was in my mind.”

“You’re all right?”

“Physically… but… I remember… Orion, he’s a heartless fiend.”

“I’ll kill him.”

“Where are we heading? Why are we descending?”

“Energy,” I said. “His energy source is below, down deep in the earth.”

What I had seen in Set’s mind had been a confused tangle of impressions. He could manipulate spacetime as the Creators did, and the source of the titanic energies he needed for that was deeply buried beneath us.

“We can’t get away,” Anya said as we raced breathlessly down the tunnel, “by going down.”

“We can’t get away by heading up. Set’s cohorts are there. Dozens of dragons up at the surface, and I don’t know how many so-called masters he has with him.”

“They’ll be coming after us.”

I nodded grimly.

Set had been seeking in my mind a knowledge that the Creators apparently had and he did not. Something about a nexus in the spacetime continuum, a crisis that had occurred millions of years earlier that he was trying to change, undo, reverse.

Suddenly I saw his face in my mind, seething fury. “You cannot escape my wrath, pathetic ape. Excruciating pain and utter despair are all that you can look forward to.”

Anya saw him, too. Her eyes widened momentarily. Then she snapped, “He’s afraid, Orion. You’ve made him fear us.”

“FEAR ME!” Set’s voice boomed in our minds.

I said nothing and we plunged onward, down the spiraling dim tunnel, heading away from the sun and freedom. I knew that dozens of Set’s humanoid underlings were racing down the tunnel after us, cutting off any hope of returning to the surface and the world of warmth and light.

Not that it was cold in the tunnel as we sped down its steeply sloped spiral. The floor was now blistering hot, the walls glowed red. It was if we were heading for the entrance to hell.

I realized that I still grasped the statue of Set in my left hand, my fingers wrapped tightly around its neck. It was the only thing even close to a weapon that we possessed and I hung on to it, despite its hefty weight. It had served me well once and I was certain I would be wielding it again before long.

The tunnel finally widened into a broad circular chamber filled with more instruments and equipment of Set’s alien technology. This womb of rock was lit more brightly than the tunnel, though its ceiling was low, claustrophobic. In its center was a circular railing. We went to it and peered down a long featureless tube so deep that its end was lost from sight. Pulses of heat surged up through it, and I thought I could hear a rumbling low throbbing sound, like the slow pulsing of a gigantic heart at the core of an incalculably immense beast.

“A core tap,” Anya said, peering down that endless shaft.

“Core tap?”

“The energy source for Set’s attempt to warp the continuum. It must extend down to the molten core of the earth itself.”

I knew she was correct but the realization still made me blink with astonishment. Set was tapping the seething energies of the earth’s molten core. For the purpose of altering spacetime. But why? To what end? That I did not know.

This chamber was the end of the corridor. There was no exit except the way we had just come, and I sensed that dozens, scores of Set’s humanoid reptilians were racing down the corridor toward us.

Anya was totally absorbed in scanning the banks of instruments and display panels lining the chamber’s circular wall. We had only a few minutes before every reptilian master in Set’s domain came clawing at us, but she concentrated entirely on the hardware surrounding us. She was focused so completely on the machinery that the pain of Set’s torture was forgotten, her nudity ignored.

Not by me. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, slim and tall and lithe as a warrior goddess should be, lustrous black hair tumbling past her bare shoulders, luminous gray eyes intently studying the alien technology before her.

“The spacetime warp is building up at the bottom of the shaft, on the edge of the core. The energies down there are enough to distort the continuum completely, if focused properly.”

From the way she muttered the words it seemed that she was speaking more to herself than to me.

Then she turned. “Orion, we’ve got to destroy these instruments. Smash them! Quickly.”

“With pleasure,” I said, raising the wooden statue.

You are only increasing the agonies that I will inflict upon you, Set warned inside my head.

“Ignore him,” said Anya.

I swung the statue at the nearest bank of instruments. It crashed through the light plastic casing easily. Sparks showered, cold blue and white. A thin hiss of smoke seeped out of its battered face.

Methodically I went from one console to the next, smashing, breaking, destroying. I pictured Set’s face in place of the lifeless instruments. I enjoyed crushing it in.

I was only a quarter of the way around the wide circle when Anya warned, “They’re coming!”

I dashed to the circular chamber’s only entrance and heard the clatter of dozens of clawed feet scraping down the sloping ramp toward us.

“Hold them off for as long as you can,” Anya commanded.

I had only a brief instant to glance at her. She attacked the next set of consoles with her bare hands, ripping off the lightweight paneling and tearing at their innards, her fingers bloodied, the flash of electrical sparks throwing blue-white glare across the utterly determined features of her beautiful face.

Then the reptilians were on me. The doorway was not as narrow as I would have liked. More than one of the humanoid masters could confront me, sometimes as many as three at once. I used the statue of their lord and ruler as a weapon, striking at them with all the accumulated fury and hatred that had been building in me for these many months.

I killed them. By the pairs, by the threesomes, by the dozens and scores. I stood in that doorway and smashed and swung and clubbed with a might and bloodlust that I had never known before. The wooden statue became an instrument of death, crushing bones, smashing skulls, spurting the blood of these inhuman enemies until the doorway was clogged with their scaly bodies, the floor slick with gore.

They had no weapons except those that nature had given them. They slashed with their wicked claws, ripping my flesh again and again. My own blood flowed with theirs, but it did not matter to me. I was a killing machine, as mindless as a flame or an avalanche.

Then Anya was beside me, a long sharp strip of metal torn from the consoles in her hand, wielding it like a sword of vengeance. She shrieked a primal battle cry, I roared with rage born of desperation, the reptiles hissed and clawed at us both.

Slowly, inexorably, we were driven back from the doorway, back into the big circular chamber. They tried to get around us, surround us, swarm us under. We stood back-to-back, swinging, cutting, smashing at them with all the fury that human blood and sinew could generate.

Not enough. For every reptilian that fell another took its place. Two more. Ten more.

Without a word passing between us, Anya and I cut a swath through the monsters and made it to the railing around the core shaft. We used it to protect our backs as we fought on, all hope gone, just fought for the sake of killing as many of them as we could before they inevitably wore us down.

One of the humanoids clambered over the railing behind us, across the wide gap of the core shaft, and tried to leap across it to land on our backs. He could not span the width of the shaft and fell screeching wildly into its yawning abyss.

I had long since clamped down on the nerve impulses signaling pain and fatigue to my brain, but my arm felt heavier with each stroke, slower. A reptilian’s claws raked my chest, another tore at my face. It was the end.

Almost.

In the midst of the blood and battle I finally realized that they were not trying to kill us. They were dying by the dozens to obey Set’s implacable command. He wanted us alive. Quick death was not his plan for us.

I would not let him get his vicious hands on Anya again. With the last painful gasp of my ebbing strength I grasped Anya around the waist and pushed the two of us over the top of the railing and into the yawning, gaping mouth of the red-hot pit that ended in the surging molten fury of the earth’s seething core.

Down and down we plummeted. Down toward the molten, surging heart of the earth.

And death.