Orion in the Dying Time Part 4

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 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 G.o.d?" 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 gra.s.sy 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 gra.s.s, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y pile of fur shuddering and moaning in the reddened slippery bushes. I gave it the coup de grace coup de grace with my dagger and the cave bear finally collapsed and went still. 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 b.u.t.ted 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 a.s.sured 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 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 G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 lakesh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d 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 into the garden, and not by angels but by devils. 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d. 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 sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.ds 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 sh.o.r.e 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?"