Part 15 (1/2)
In the back of my mind a voice questioned my newfound courage. Was I being manipulated by Anya? Or was I merely reacting the way I had been created to react?
The Golden One had often boasted to me that he had built these instincts for violence and revenge into me and my kind. Certainly the human race has suffered over the millennia for having such drives. We were made for murder, and the fine facade of civilization that we have learned to erect is merely a lacquered veneer covering the violence that simmers behind the mask.
What of it? I challenged the voice in my mind. Despite it all the human race has survived, has endured all that the G.o.ds of the continuum have forced upon us. Now I must face the devil incarnate, and those human instincts will be my only protection. Once more I must use the skills of the hunter: cunning, strength, stealth, and above all, patience.
”We've got to get inside,” Anya said, still staring wide-eyed at the castle of darkness.
I agreed with a nod. ”First, though, we've got to find out what Set is trying to do here, and why.”
Which meant that we must hide and observe: see without being seen. Anya recognized the sense of that, although she was impatient with such a strategy. She wanted to plunge boldly into that fortress, just the two of us. She knew that was a hopeless fantasy and agreed that we must bide our time. Yet her agreement was reluctant.
I took the baby duckbill from her arms and led us back into the trees, keeping wide of the tyrannosaurs sleeping there in well-separated locations. The little dinosaur seemed heavier than it had been earlier. Either I was tired or it was gaining weight very rapidly.
We pushed our way through the thick underbrush as quietly as possible. The duckbill remained asleep-as did the tyrannosaurs lurking nearby.
”This baby of yours is going to be a problem,” I whispered to Anya, following behind me as I pushed leafy branches and ferns aside with my free hand.
”Not at all,” she whispered back. ”If you show me how to control her, she can be a scout for us. What is more natural in this world than a baby dinosaur poking around in the brush?”
I had to admit that she was at least partially right. I wondered, though, if the duckbills were ever seen alone. They seemed to be herd animals, like so many other herbivores that found safety in numbers.
We stopped at a spot where a heavy palm tree had toppled over and fallen onto a boulder as tall as my shoulders. Thick bushes grew behind the fallen bole and heavy tussocks of reeds in front of it. With our spears Anya and I scratched a shallow dugout into the sand, just long enough for us to stretch out flat on the ground. With the heavy log above us, the boulder to one side, and the bushes screening our rear, it was almost cozy. We could peer through the reeds and tufts of ferns to see the beach and the lake beyond it.
”No fire as long as we're camped here,” I said.
Anya smiled contentedly. ”We'll eat raw fish and try the berries and fruits from the different bushes.”
Thus we began what became many weeks of watching the castle in the lake. Each morning it submerged, the entire t.i.tanic structure sinking slowly into the frothing water as if afraid of being seen by the rising sun. Each night it rose up again, dripping and dark like a brooding, malevolent giant.
We hunted and fished while the castle was submerged. We avoided the tyrannosaurs prowling through the woods and the more open flat land beyond. In all truth they did not seem to be particularly searching for us. Just the opposite. We were being ignored.
I began to teach Anya how to control our duckbill, which was rapidly growing out of its babyhood. She had named the little beast Juno, and when I asked her why, she laughed mysteriously.
”A joke, Orion, that only the Creators would appreciate.”
I knew that the Creators sometimes a.s.sumed the names of ancient G.o.ds. The Golden One referred to himself as Ormazd sometimes, at other times he had called himself Apollo, or Yawveh. Anya herself was wors.h.i.+ped as Athena by the Achaians and Trojans alike. Apparently there was a Juno among the Creators, and it amused Anya to name our heavy-footed round-backed duckbill after her.
After many days I began to realize that the castle was rising out of the water a bit later each night and lingering a few minutes longer into the dawn each morning. This puzzled me at first, but I was more interested in the comings and goings from the castle than its risings and submergings. In the dawn's early light we could see more clearly what was happening, and why.
Each time the castle rose out of the water a long narrow ramp slid out from a gate set into its wall like a snake's probing tongue and reached to the sh.o.r.e of the lake, almost a quarter of the way around its roughly circular circ.u.mference from the beach where Anya and I lay watching. Invariably, a dozen or so of the humanoid servants of Set, red-scaled and naked as they had been in the Neolithic, marched down that narrow ramp, across the sandy beach, and into the trees.
Tyrannosaurs waited for them there, gathered to this lake by forces unknown to us. In the dark of night or the glimmering gray of dawn, the humanoids selected a dozen or so of the monstrous brutes and headed off, away from the lake.
It did not take us long to realize that each reptilian humanoid controlled a single tyrannosaur. Each team of humanoids created a pack of tyrannosaurs and took them off on some mission. After many days a team would return with its pack. The humanoids would go back into the waiting castle; the tyrannosaurs would inevitably head for the swamplands that seemed to be their natural environment.
”They're calling the tyrannosaurs here and then using them for some purpose,” Anya concluded one bright morning after the castle had sunk beneath the lake's surface once again.
We were making our way back from the beach to our dugout, each of us carrying our spears, the duckbill-almost as tall as my hips now-sniffing and whistling beside us. I had a string of three fish thrown over one shoulder: our breakfast.
”There can only be one purpose for using the tyrannosaurs,” I said to Anya, recalling the slaughter at the duckbills' nesting ground. ”But it doesn't make any sense.”
Anya had the same thought, the same question.
At least I had settled the question of why the castle's emergence from the lake was taking place a few minutes later each day. It surfaced only when the red star was high in the sky. And it submerged when the red star sank toward the horizon.
When I told Anya, she looked at me questioningly. ”Are you sure?”
”The star is so bright that it will be visible in midday,” I replied. ”Then the castle will emerge in daylight. I'm certain of it.”
”So Set is not trying to hide from anyone,” she mused.
”Who is there for him to hide from? Us?”
”Then why does the castle sink back into the water? Why not have it out in the open all the time?”
”I don't know,” I said. ”But there's a bigger question for us to answer Why does it rise only when that b.l.o.o.d.y star is in sight?”
Anya's mouth dropped open. She stopped where she stood, in the heavy foliage near our nest. Turning, she peered out between the leaves toward the western horizon.
The red star was almost touching the flat line of the lake, tracing a s.h.i.+mmering narrow red line across the water, aimed like a stiletto blade toward us.
For two more nights we watched and saw that the castle rose up from the water only once the red star was riding high in the sky, near zenith. It stayed above the water well into daylight now, and only sank back again once the star began to dip close to the horizon.
”You're right,” Anya said. ”It seeks that star.”
”Why?” I wanted to know.
”Set must come from the world that circles that star,” Anya realized. ”That must be his home.”
Our other big question, what the humanoid-tyrannosaur teams were doing, could only be answered by following one of the packs and watching them. I could not decide whether we should both go together to observe a tyrannosaur pack, or if I should go alone and leave Anya at the lake to continue watching the castle.
She was all for coming with me, and in the end I agreed that it would be best if she did. I feared leaving her alone, for there was no way for us to communicate with one another once we were separated. If either of us needed help, the other would never know it.
So, one bright hot morning, we took our spears in our hands and headed out after a team of nine humanoids who walked a discreet distance behind nine huge grotesque tyrannosaurs. We let them get over the horizon before leaving the shelter of the woods. I did not want them to see us following them. There was no fear of them eluding us; even a myopic infant could follow the monstrous tracks of the tyrants in the soft claylike ground.
Across the Cretaceous landscape we trekked for three days. It rained half the time, gray cold rain from a grayer sky covered by clouds so low I thought I could put a hand up and touch them. The ground turned to mud; the world shrank to the distance we could see through the driving rain. The wind sliced through us.
Little Juno seemed totally unperturbed by the foul weather. She munched on shrubs battered nearly flat by the rain and wind, then trotted on after us, a dark brown mound of rapidly growing dinosaur with a permanent silly grin built into its heavy-boned duck's bill and a thickening flattish tail dragging behind it.
Our progress slowed almost to a crawl through the rainstorm, and stopped altogether when it became too dark to move further. We made a miserable soaked camp on a little rocky hummock that projected a few feet above the sea of mud. Once the sun came out again, the land literally steamed with moisture boiled up out of the drenched ground. We saw that the tyrannosaurs had continued to slough along through the mud almost as fast as they had gone before. They apparently stopped to sleep each night, as we did-s.h.i.+vering cold and wet, without fire, hungry.
The tyrannosaurs should have been hungry, too, I thought. It must take a constant input of food to keep twenty tons of dinosaur moving as fast as they were going. But we saw no signs that they had slackened their pace, no bones or scavenging pterosaurs in the air to mark the site of a kill.
”How long can they go without eating?” Anya asked as the hot sun baked away the moisture from the rain. The earth was steaming in chill mist rising up from the ground. I was glad of it; the fog hid us from any eyes that might be watching.
”They're reptiles,” I mused aloud. ”They don't need to keep their bodies at a constant internal temperature the way we do. They can probably go a good deal longer without food than a mammal the same size.”