Orion in the Dying Time (4 page)

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 god 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 6

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 scraps 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 lakeshore 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 god 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 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 anticipation 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 god. 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 shore 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 gods 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 shore 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?"

"Can't you see it? Just beside the Light-Stealer, very faint . . ."

For the first time I realized that there was a second point of light close to the red star that Kraal called the Light-Stealer. A dim pinpoint barely on the edge of visibility.

"What do those names mean?" I asked.

He gave me a surprised look. "You don't know about the Light-Stealer and his Punisher?"

"I come from far away," I said. "Much farther than Noch and his band."

Kraal's expression turned thoughtful. He explained the legend of the Light-Stealer. The gods—which include the Sun-god, mightiest of them all—had no care for human beings. They saw humans struggling to exist, weaker than the wolves and bears, cold and hungry always, and turned their backs to us. The Light-Stealer, a lesser god, took pity on humankind and decided to give us the gift of fire.

My breath caught in my throat. The Prometheus legend. It was I who gave the earliest humans the gift of fire, deep in the eternal cold and snow of the Ice Age. Kraal told the story strangely, but his tale caught the cruel indifference of the so-called gods almost perfectly.

The Light-Stealer knew that the only way to bring fire to the human race was to steal it from the Sun. So every year the dull red star robs the Sun of some of its light. Instead of remaining in the night sky, as all the other stars do, it gradually encroaches on the daytime domain of the Sun, getting closer and closer each day. Finally it reaches the Sun and steals some of its fire. Then it runs away to return to the night, where it gives light to men in the dark hours, light that is brighter than the moon's.

The legend of Prometheus thrown against the background of the stars. What Kraal was telling me could make sense only if the Sun were accompanied by another star, a dim brownish red dwarf that orbited far out in the deeper distances of the solar system. Yet the Sun was a single star, accompanied by a retinue of planets, not by a companion star. Through all of my journeys across the spacetime continuum the Sun had always been a solitary star.

Until now.

"And what of the Punisher?" I heard myself ask.

"The Sun and the other gods become angry when the Stealer robs fire from the Sun," Kraal went on. "The Punisher tears at the Light-Giver, rips into its guts again and again, all year long, forever."

The companion star has a planet of its own orbiting around it, I translated mentally. From the Earth they can see it bobbing back and forth, disappearing behind the star and reappearing on its other side. A Punisher ripping into the Light-Stealer's innards, like the vulture that eats out Prometheus' liver once the gods have chained him to the rock.

"That is how fire was given to us, Orion," said Kraal. "It happened a long time ago, long before my grandfather's grandfather hunted around this lake. The stars show us what happened, to remind us of our debt to the gods."

"But from what you say," I replied, "the gods are not friendly to us."

"All the more reason to respect and fear them, Orion." With that he walked away from me, back toward the camp, with the air of a man who had made an unarguable point.

By now the Sun was fully risen over the lake's farther shore and the men were up, stretching and muttering, relieving themselves against a couple of trees. They shared the food they had remaining, Kraal's men and my own, and washed it down with water from the lake, which Chron and one-armed Pirk brought up to our makeshift camp in animal bladders.

"Now for our fight," said Kraal, picking his long spear up from the ground. His men arrayed themselves behind him, each of them gripping spears, while my band came together behind me. The dogs lay sleepily on their bellies, tongues lolling. But their eyes took in every move.

"You are twelve, we are only nine," I said.

He shrugged. "You should have brought more men."

"We don't have any more."

Kraal made a gesture with his free hand that said, That's your problem, not mine.

"Instead of all of us fighting," I suggested, "why not an individual combat: one against one."

Kraal's brow furrowed. "What good would that do?"

"If your side wins, my men will go back to their home and never come here again."

"And if my side loses?"

"We can both hunt in this area, in peace. There's plenty of game for us both."

"No, Orion. It will be better to kill you all and be finished with it. Then we can take your women, too. And any other tribes who come by here will know that this is our territory, and they must not hunt here."

"How will they know that?"

He seemed genuinely surprised by such a stupid question. "Why, we will mount your heads on poles, of course."

"Suppose," I countered, "we kill all of you? What then?"

"Nine of you? Two of them lads and one of the men with a bad arm?" Kraal laughed.

"One of us has killed a dragon," I said, making my voice hard.

"So you claim."

"He did! He did!" my men shouted.

I silenced them with a wave of my hand, not wanting a fight to break out over my claims of prowess. An idea was forming itself in my brain. I asked Chron to bring me my bow and arrows.

"Do you know what this is?" I held them up before Kraal.

"Certainly. Not much good against a spear, though. The bow is a weapon of ambush, not face-to-face fighting."

Handing the bow and arrows to him, I said, "Before we start the fighting, why don't you shoot me with this."

Kraal looked surprised, then suspicious. "What do you mean?"

Walking toward a stately old elm, I explained, "Fire an arrow at me. I'll stand here."

"I don't understand."

"You don't believe I killed a dragon. Well, there are no dragons about this morning for me to show you how I did it, so I'll have to give you a different kind of proof. Shoot me!"

Puzzled, wary, Kraal nocked an arrow and pulled the bowstring back. My men edged away from me; Kraal's seemed to lean in closer, eager to see the show. I noticed that Kraal pulled the string only back to his chest instead of his cheek.

I willed my body to go into hyperdrive, and saw the world around me slow down. The pupils of Kraal's eyes contracted slightly as he aimed. A bird flapped languidly from one bough to another, its red-feathered wings beating the air with dreamlike strokes.

Standing ten paces before me, Kraal let the arrow fly. I saw it wobbling toward me; it was a crude piece of work. I easily reached out with one hand and knocked it aside.

The men gasped.

"Now," I said, "watch this."

Striding up to one of Kraal's men, I instructed him to hold his spear in both hands, level with the ground. He looked at his leader first, and when Kraal nodded, he reluctantly did as I asked. Swinging my arm overhand and yelling ferociously, I snapped the rough spear in two with the edge of my hand.

Before they could say or do anything, I spun around and grabbed Kraal around the waist. Lifting him high over my head, I held him there, squirming and bellowing, with one hand.