Some obeyed. Only a few. Already I could see dead bodies stretched out on the grass, twisted among the boulders and brush that formed natural hiding places for the snakes. Up here on the rocks, at least we would be able to see them. What we could see, we could fight.
Most of the people had fled terrified into the night, their only thought to get away from the sudden silent death that struck in the shadows. A woman lay down among the stones on the floor of the canyon, broken by her panicked leap away from the caves. I could see a long writhing ghastly white snake gliding toward her, jaws spread wide, fangs glittering. She screamed and tried to scrabble away from the snake. Anya threw her spear at it and missed. The snake sank its deadly fangs into her flesh and the woman’s screams rose to a hideous crescendo, then died away in a gurgling, strangling agony.
The others were stumbling, staggering up toward me, clambering up the steep stone steps to the narrow ledge where Anya and I stood. And the snakes came slithering after them, long thick bodies of deathly gray white, yellow eyes glittering, forked tongues flicking, their fangs filled with venom, their bodies gliding silently over the rocks in pursuit of their prey.
I gathered our little band on the ledge, men armed with spears and knives on the perimeter, women inside the cave. All except Anya, who stood at my shoulder, a fresh jabbing spear in one hand, a flint hand knife in the other, panting with excitement and exertion, eyes aflame with battle lust.
The snakes attacked us. Wriggling up the stone steps, they dodged this way and that to avoid our spears, coiled up just beyond our reach, struck at us with lightning speed. We too dodged, hopping back and forth, trying to keep our bare legs from their fangs.
We fought back. We jabbed at them with our wooden spears, we turned the shafts into clubs and hammered at them. One snake began coiling around the spear Anya held, slithering up its length to get at her, driven by an intelligent sense of purpose that no serpent’s brain could originate.
I shouted a warning as Anya calmly ripped the snake open with her flint knife. It reared back. I grabbed it around its bleeding throat and Anya hacked its head off. We threw the bloody remains off the ledge, down to the canyon floor below.
The fight seemed to go on for hours. Two of our men were struck and died shrieking, their limbs twisting in horrifying pain. Another was jostled off the ledge and fell screaming to the ground below. He was badly injured, and in minutes several snakes gathered around him. We heard his wailing screeches, and then he went silent forever.
Abruptly, there were no more snakes. No more live ones, at any rate. Nearly a dozen lifeless bodies twitching in their own blood at our feet. I blinked at the shambles of our battlefield. The sun had risen; its bright golden rays were shining through the trees.
Below us lay eight dead bodies, their limbs twisted, their faces horribly constricted. We went down, still warily searching for more snakes as we gathered up the bodies of the slain. Broken-armed Pirk was among them. And three of Kraal’s men. And gray-bearded Noch; his return to Paradise had been brief and bitter.
All that day we scoured the canyon floor for bodies. To my surprised relief we found only two others. About noontime Kraal and three of his men came to me.
He shook his head at the bodies of the slain. “I told you, Orion,” he said sadly, choking back tears of frustrated hate. “There is nothing we can do against the masters. They hunt us for their sport. They make slaves of our people. All we can do is bow down and accept.”
Anya heard him. She had been kneeling among the dead bodies, not of the humans but of the snakes, dissecting one of them to search for its poison glands.
Angrily she sprang to her feet and flung the flayed body of the twenty-foot snake at Kraal. Its weight staggered him.
“All we can do is bow down?” Anya raged at him. “Timid man, we can kill our enemies. As they would kill us!”
Kraal goggled at her. No woman had ever spoken so harshly to him before. I doubt that any man had.
Seething like the enraged goddess she was, Anya advanced on Kraal, flint knife in hand. He backed away from her.
“The god called you Kraal the Leader,” Anya taunted. “But this morning you look more like Kraal the Coward! Is that the name you want?”
“No… of course not…”
“Then stop crying like a woman and start acting like a leader. Gather all the bands of people together and, together, we will fight the masters and kill them all!”
Kraal’s knees actually buckled. “All the tribes…?”
Several of the other men had gathered around us by now. One of them said, “We must ask the god who speaks about this.”
“Yes,” I agreed swiftly. “Tonight. The god only speaks after the sun goes down.”
Anya’s lips twitched in a barely suppressed grin. We both knew what the god would say.
Chapter 9
Thus we began uniting the tribes of Paradise.
Once Kraal got over the shock of the snakes’ attack and heard Anya’s god-voice telling him that it was his destiny to resist the masters in all their forms and might, he actually began to develop into Kraal the Leader. And our people began to learn how to defend themselves.
Months passed, marked by the rhythmically changing face of the moon. We left the place of the god-who-speaks and moved even deeper into the forest that seemed to stretch all the way across Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. It extended southward, according to the tales we heard, evolving gradually into the tropical rain forest that covered much of the rest of the continent.
Each time we met another tribe we tried to convince them that they should work with us to resist the masters. Most tribal leaders resisted, instead, the idea of doing anything new, anything that would incur the terrible wrath of the fearsome dragons who raided their homes from time to time.
We showed them the skulls of the snakes we had slain. We told stories about my fight against the dragon. Anya developed into a real priestess, falling into trances whenever it was necessary to speak with the voice of a god. She also showed the women how to gather grains and bake bread, how to make medicines from the juices of leaves and roots. I showed the men how to make better tools and weapons.
I found, stored in my memory, the knowledge of cold-working soft metals such as copper and gold. Gold, as always, was extremely rare, although we found one tribe where the chief’s women hung nuggets of gold from their earlobes for adornment. I showed them how to beat the soft shining metal into crescents and circles, the best I could do with the primitive stone hammers available. Yet it pleased the women very much. I became an admired man, which helped us to convince the chief to join our movement.
In several scattered places we found lumps of copper lying on the ground, partially buried in grass and dirt. These I cold-worked into slim blades and arrowheads, sharp but brittle. I taught the hunters how to anneal their copper implements by heating them and then quenching them in cold water. That made them less brittle without sacrificing their sharpness.
As the months wore on we developed stone molds for shaping arrowheads and axes, knives and spear points, awls and scrapers. When I recognized layers of rock bearing copper ore, I taught them how to build a forge of stones and make the fire hotter with a bellows made from a goat’s bladder. Then we could smelt the metal out of the rock and go on to make more and better tools. And weapons. Instead of Orion the Hunter I was filling the role of Hephaestus, blacksmith of the gods. But it was during those months that human tools and weapons gleamed for the first time with metal edges.