Part 13 (1/2)

She pointed. ”There.”

It was not Orion. Not the familiar constellation of the Hunter that I had known. Rigel did not yet exist. Brilliant red Betelgeuse was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the three stars of the belt and the sword hanging from it, I saw only a faint, misty glow.

My blood ran cold. Not even Orion existed in this lonely place and time. We had no business being here, so far from everything that we had known. We were aliens here, outcasts, abandoned by the G.o.ds, hunted by forces that we could not even begin to fight against, doomed to be extinguished forever.

An intense brooding misery filled my soul. I felt completely helpless, useless. I knew that it was merely a matter of time until Set tracked us down and made an end of us.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake this depression. I had never felt such anguish before, such despair. I tried to hide it from Anya, but I saw from the anxious glances she gave me that she knew full well how empty and lifeless I felt.

And then we came across the duckbills' nesting ground.

It was the broad, fairly flat top of a gently sloped hill. There were so many duckbill tracks marching up the hillside that their heavy hooves had worn an actual trail into the bare dusty ground.

”The creatures must come up here every year,” Anya said as we climbed the trail toward the top of the hill.

I did not reply. I could not work up the enthusiastic curiosity that was apparently driving Anya. I was still locked in gloom.

We should have been warned by the noisy whistling and hissing of dozens of pterosaurs flapping their leathery wings up above the summit of the hill, swooping in for landings. As Anya and I climbed up the easy slope of the hill we heard their long bony bills clacking as if they were fighting among themselves.

A faint half memory tugged at me. The way the pterosaurs were behaving reminded me of something, but I could not recall what it was. It became clear to me the instant we reached the crest of the hill.

It was a boneyard.

Up on the bare ground of the hilltop there were hundreds of nests where the duckbills had been laying their eggs for uncounted generations.

But the tyrannosaurs had been there.

A gust of breeze brought the stench of rotting flesh to our nostrils. The pterosaurs flapped and hissed at us, tiny claws on the front edges of their wings quite conspicuous. I realized that they were behaving like vultures, picking the bones of the dead. I swatted at the nearest of the winged lizards with the spear I carried and they all flapped off, hissing angrily, hovering above us on their wide leathery wings as if waiting for us to leave so they could resume their feast.

I thought Anya would break into tears. Nothing but bones and sc.r.a.ps of rotting flesh, the rib cages of the ma.s.sive animals standing like the bleached timbers of wrecked s.h.i.+ps, taller than my head. Leg bones my own body length. Ma.s.sive flat skulls, thick with bone.

”Look!” Anya cried. ”Eggs!”

The nests were shallow pits pawed into the ground where oblong eggs the length of my arm lay in circular patterns. Most of them had been smashed in.

”Well,” I said, pointing to a pair of unbroken eggs that lay side by side on the bare ground, ”here's dinner, at least.”

”You couldn't!” Anya seemed shocked.

I cast an eye at the pterosaurs still flapping and gliding above us.

”It's either our dinner or theirs.”

She still looked distressed.

”These eggs will never hatch now,” I told her. ”And even if they did, the baby duckbills would be easy prey to anything that comes along without their mothers to protect them.”

Reluctantly Anya agreed. I went down the hill to gather brushwood for a fire while she stayed at the nests to protect our dinner against the pterosaurs.

It struck me, as I picked dead branches from the ground and pulled twigs from bushes, that the tyrannosaurs had been unusually efficient in their a.s.sault on the duckbills. As far as I could see they had killed every one of the herbivores. That did not seem natural to me. Predators usually kill what they can eat and allow the rest of their prey to go their way. Were the tyrannosaurs nothing but killing machines after all? Or were they being directed directed by someone-such as Set or his like? by someone-such as Set or his like?

Had they followed the migrating herd we had seen so that they could find the duckbills' nesting ground and kill all all the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs. the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs.

When I returned to the hilltop with an armload of firewood, Anya showed me the answer to my question.

”Look here,” she said, pointing to the edge of one of the nests.

I dropped the tinder near the nest where our prospective dinner waited and went to where she stood.

Footprints. Three-clawed toes, but much too small to be a tyrannosaur's. Human-sized. Or humanoid, rather.

”One of Set's troops?”

”There are more,” Anya said, gesturing toward the other nests. ”I think they deliberately smashed the eggs that weren't broken when the tyrannosaurs attacked.”

”That means Set-or someone like him-is here, in this time and place.”

”Attacking the duckbills? Why?”

”More important,” I said, ”whoever it is, he's probably searching for us.”

Anya raised her eyes and scanned the horizon, as if she could see Set or his people heading toward us. I looked, too. The land was flat and depressingly green, nothing but the same tone of green as far as the eye could see. Not a flower, not a sign of color. Even the streams meandering through the area looked a sickly, weed-choked green. Mangroves lined the waterways and giant ferns cl.u.s.tered thickly, waving in the warm wind. Whole armies could be hidden in that monotonous flat bayou country and we could not have seen them.

It struck me all over again how helpless we were, how useless in the Creators' struggle to overthrow Set and his kind. Two people alone in a world of dinosaurs. I shook my head as if to clear it of cobwebs but I could not shake this feeling of depression.

Anya showed no signs of dismay, however. ”We've got to find their camp or headquarters,” she said. ”We've got to find out what they are doing in this era, what their goals are.”

I heaved a big hungry sigh. ”First,” I countered, ”we've got to have dinner.”

Returning to the two unbroken eggs, I started to build a small fire, knowing now that there were eyes out there in the distance that could detect it and locate us. Yet we had to eat, and neither of us was ready to face raw eggs or uncooked meat. Using a duckbill's pointed scapula, I sc.r.a.ped out a pit in the soft dirt so that the meager flames could not be seen above the crest of the hill by anyone watching from below. Yet I knew that even primitive heat detectors could probably spot our fire from its thermal signature against the cooler air of the late afternoon.

”Orion! Quickly!”

I turned from my blossoming fire, grabbing for the nearest bone to use as a weapon, and saw Anya staring tensely at our eggs. One of them was cracked. No, cracking. As we watched, it split apart and a miniature duckbilled dinosaur no more than two feet long crawled out of the sh.e.l.l on four stubby legs.

Anya dropped to her knees in front of it.

The baby dinosaur gave a weak piping whistle, like the toot a child might make on a tin flute.

”Look, it has an egg tooth,” Anya said.

”It's probably hungry,” I thought aloud.

Anya dashed over to my tiny fire and pulled out a couple of twigs that still had some pulpy leaves on them.

Stripping the leaves off, she hand-fed them to the little duckbill, which munched on them without hesitation.

”She's eating them!” Anya seemed overjoyed.

I was less thrilled. ”How do you know it's a female?”