Siberius (44 page)

The big female unleashed a baritone roar that vibrated Talia’s eardrums. Over and over again, it roared in short bursts, calling out to its mate. There was no response. She did this for several minutes before giving up. After glancing up at Talia, a gesture that was more an acknowledgement of her presence than a threat, she turned and trotted out of the forest.

Talia tried to forget how cold and hungry she was. She hadn’t had any food since eating the reindeer stew in the gulag, and that was almost 24 hours ago. She shook her head, refocused her mind on the current situation. Watching the ground for a while, Talia wondered if the entire siberius pride had indeed vacated to their lair. Every scientific bone in her body told her that yes, they were on the cusp of hibernation and that she was witnessing the onset of a long winter’s nap. But she couldn’t be sure, because, one, no other known cat hibernates and therefore there was no correlation to be made with siberius, and two, they had tricked every person they had come into contact with over the past two days. Talia wouldn’t underestimate them again.

Looking over at the elephant bone structure only yards away, her excitement to climb down and study it equaled her fear of the Smilodons. But she bided her time, using her developed sense of sight and skills as an accomplished tree-hide observer to watch for sudden movements that might betray a hiding cat’s presence.

There was none. Not for an hour.

The sun split in half at the horizon line, and Talia grew confident that the pride had indeed returned to the den. As quiet as she could, she descended the tree. Reaching the snowy ground, she stopped, held her breath and looked around. The forest was dim, the sunlight waning, but she could still see details well enough.

There was nothing there.

Turning toward the bone structure, Talia navigated around the gully, her eyes and ears open to the possibility of a surprise attack.

In no time, she was standing before the 12 foot tall structure. From the tree, it was fascinating. On the ground, it was even more impressive, in implication if not physical presence.

It wasn’t as grand as the Egyptian pyramids, or Stonehenge or the Neolithic statues of Easter Island. But it was just as important. Perhaps even
more
important. She circled it, ran her hands across the pitted surface of massive mammoth femurs, skulls and pelvises. Reaching a narrow doorway, she peered inside. It was empty except for leafless birch saplings and assorted scrub. A chill overcame her as she entered the ruin.

It was a fort, there was no other explanation for it. Though there was no physical way to tell how old it was, she was confident that it had to be at least 10,000 years old. There was good reason for that confidence, too. Up in the tree, the round structure and projecting palisade of tusks, horns and antlers struck her as familiar, although she didn’t know why. But then, it all hit her at once, and she knew that what she had been looking at was in fact, something that she had seen before.

The cave drawings.

Not the Scythians ones, but the older ones. The ones drawn by the Cro-Magnons.

A circle with lines projecting away from it,
she thought.
Inside the circle, human figures. Outside, clusters of Smilodons.
When she found them, Talia had assumed the drawings were representations of the sun and that the stick figures within were gods or spirits. She also felt that the drawings were relevant to Leonid’s theories. Now, here in the glow of twilight, she knew what they meant.

             
The circles weren’t suns, they were forts.

The lines projecting out from them were not beams of sunlight either. They were showing the palisade surrounding the forts. And the figures within the drawings were not spirits, they were people. People taking refuge from attack. People trying to pass through a hostile land.

              Inside the cave, the drawings had stretched along the wall to a great white circle. She had told Nick that the “suns” represented a sort of path. At the time, she could not have known just how right she was. Leonid’s theories on human migration were radical, that much she knew. Though she was painfully aware that most scoffed at his ideas, the evidence now was overwhelming.

“
Leonid,” she whispered. Now, more than at any other time, she felt his spirit right alongside her. “It’s a fort.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “You were right about everything. There’s no other way to explain it.” Pressing first her hand, then her ear up against the cold bone, she closed her eyes, listened. “Do you hear them?” Her words were soft, respectful. “They’re talking to us. Man didn’t just migrate away from Asia voluntarily. He
evacuated
Asia. Forced out by
them
.”

Images of the Cro-Magnon cave drawings flashed in her mind. A long row of forts stretched across the cave wall-
Siberia-
to the great white circle-
North America.
It was a road to safety, a highway to the land bridge that was Beringia to a new land that did not have prides of marauding, territory-protecting monster cats. Cats that had no intention of sharing their territory, their
hunting
grounds, with another species. A highway complete with forts to rest weary travelers. Forts built at least 7,000 years before the pyramids of Egypt. Long before man had been considered capable of such elaborate construction. All because of the presence of a predator that was, when one got right down to it, even more ferocious and territorial than man himself.

             
In a daze and enjoying it, Talia wandered around the inside perimeter, imagined herself a prehistoric woman fighting her way across Siberia with a tribe bent on securing a new life. Spears, stone hatchets, torches. Charging Smilodons. It wasn’t difficult to paint a picture, considering what she had been through the past week.

             
They won
, Talia thought.
They got rid of us. They drove us out and claimed Siberia for themselves.
The irony of that fact struck her all at once and she began to giggle. Unbeknownst to siberius, the last ice age was winding down just as they were claiming victory over the people of the region. The earth was warming up again, the ice was receding, and along with it, the cold climate species were migrating further north or disappearing altogether. The mammoths, the wooly rhinos, the musk ox, and siberius itself either adapted or perished.
You won. But what did you win? A territory that you could no longer live in?
As cold as Siberia could be, it was now much warmer than it was 10,000 years ago. The greatest of all ice age predators had to follow the retreating icecap to survive, withdrawing from the majority of their hard-faught territory. They went north, abandoning the southerly regions of Siberia and leaving it to be repopulated by their vanquished enemy: man.

Reaching the doorway again, a frigid breeze hit her face and Talia snapped out of the trance. Looking around, she felt very vulnerable.

Had she lost all sense of where she was?

Her ears perked up. She listened for the telltale crunch of footsteps in frozen snow. There weren’t any. Though she believed the cats had retired to their den, she couldn’t be certain. The desire to see the ruin was overwhelming, and she let it guide her actions.

She felt very foolish.

The fort offered no real protection any more. She had no weapons. No way to defend herself. How could she be so careless? She peeked outside. The surrounding forest grew ever darker as the orange sun sunk into the earth. The breeze was cold but light; it whistled a pixie song through the evergreens. The desire to run, to climb a tree, coursed through her body. She exited the fort and, without knowing why, made a bee-line for the nearest tree. Her heart raced. The cats were in their den. They had to be.

              Halfway to the trunk of a dead conifer, she heard a noise, jerked herself to a stop and turned around. Scanning the forest, she saw nothing, no glowing eyes, no impossible fangs. Just the familiar portrait of the taiga in winter.
Foolish child
, she thought.
Your not
-

             
The thumping footsteps came in a quick run toward her. Talia froze up with fear. In that instant, she knew she had been mistaken. They had not gone into hibernation. They had tricked her again. They had waited until she was in a clearing, away from a quick escape up a tree. They were smarter than she was, and she was about to pay for the disparity with her life.             

She closed her eyes and thought about Nick, and hoped she would die a quick death. The thumping footsteps got closer, and were soon upon her.

And then they passed her.

Talia dared to open an eye. She expected the big female or perhaps even the alpha male to be crouched in the snow before her.

There was nothing there.

She opened her other eye. The forest was empty.

Was she imagining things?

She turned her head to the left, but there was no sign of siberius. Looking right, the heavy thump of footsteps greeted her ears again, and this time, she didn’t hesitate. Talia made a run for the dead conifer tree and without stopping scaled its height until she could go no further.

Gasping for breath, she stood on the thickest branch and hugged the trunk with all the strength she could muster. Gazing down, she did a quick study of the surrounding forest.

Nothing.

She was losing her mind, she thought. Was she hearing ghosts now? Or were her nerves just working overtime?

The answer came as the heavy body of a bull elk crunched through the snow toward her tree. Foraging nearby was another, younger male. Talia sighed, cursing herself. The Smilodons
were
asleep. The elk wouldn’t be there if they weren’t. With her racing heart slowing to a normal beat, she loosened her grip on the tree and laughed a nervous laugh. At that moment, she couldn’t help but feel alive. Gloriously, drunkenly alive.

If there was one thing that could taint her euphoria, though, it was the thought of the outcome of Nick’s confrontation with the alpha male. Hours later, there was still no sign of either of them. She could conjure any number of scenarios, and not all of them positive, but in the end, it would do no good. The only thing she could do now was make it through the night without freezing to death.

In the morning, she would set out to look for him.

46

              Nick opened his eyes to a forlorn-looking nurse standing over him. With her right hand, she waved a vial of smelling salts under his nose. He gagged and turned his head, but the smell coated his throat and he hacked and spit.

             
“Dobry utra, Amyerikanyets,”
said a stern Russian voice. It took Nick a minute to register that he was indeed awake. When his mind cleared, though, he saw that he was no longer outside, but in fact, under the blankets of a hospital bed. He tried to sit up, but found himself strapped down.

             
“I know you speak Russian,” said the voice, and then a man with an angular face came to his bedside. The nurse left, replaced by two Soviet soldiers with rifles. The angular-faced man sat on a bed next to him and removed his hat. Dressed in a long black wool coat, his face looked like it was chiseled from stone, and Nick thought for sure it would break if he ever tried to smile.

             
“Where am I?” said Nick in Russian. Nothing made sense. Was he dreaming?

             
“You’re in a hospital in Novosibirsk,” the man said. “We’ve taken rather exceptional care of you, all things considered.”

             
It didn’t take long for Nick to know what that meant, and the fact that he was strapped to the bed indicated that he wasn’t just a patient. As his memory came back, he recalled the train, the explosion and somersaulting through the snow. The image of a white lion with great fangs came to him, along with two words that at first didn’t make sense.

Smilodon
siberius.

He repeated it over and over again in his mind until it came back to him. The saber tooth. What had happened to it? Did it die in the train wreck? There was something else, too, something he couldn’t remember.

“My name is Mishka,” said the man. “I have been assigned to you for this, shall we say, operation.”

Nick was oblivious. Mishka? Never heard of him. “Do I know you?” he asked. His head began to throb. That, or he was waking to fuller cognizance.

“No,” said Mishka. “But I know you, Mr. Somerset.”

Nick cringed.
He knows my name.

“
Right now, you are very popular. When we found you, we thought you to be a gift from the heavens, although the Soviet Union doesn’t officially recognize such things.”

Gibberish. Nothing made any sense. And the fact that something was bothering him, something Nick couldn’t quite place, made it all the more-