Orion in the Dying Time (3 page)

CHAPTER 4

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 5

All 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 riverbank; 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 riverbank'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."