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 bloody pile of fur shuddering and moaning in the reddened slippery bushes. I gave it the coup de grace 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 butted 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 assured 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?” 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 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 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 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.”