Orion in the Dying Time (8 page)

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 10

"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 gallumphing 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.