I feared that I would lose her. Or worse yet, that she would grow tired of my human limitations and leave me forever.
Chapter 15
For three days we remained in the steaming swamp while I recuperated and regained my strength. I felt certain that Anya and I were the only human beings on the whole earth in this time—although she was actually more than merely human.
The swamp was miserably hot and damp. The ground squelched when we walked; every step we took was a struggle through thick ferns and enormous broad leaves bigger than any elephant’s ear that clung wetly to our bodies when we tried to push through them. Vines looped everywhere, choking whole trees, spreading across the spongy ground to trip us.
And it stank. The stench of decay was all around us; the swamp smelled of death. The constant heat was oppressive, the drenching humidity sapped my strength.
I felt trapped, imprisoned, in a glistening world of sodden green. The jungle pressed in on us like a living entity, squeezing the breath from our lungs, hiding the world from our view. We could not see more than a few yards ahead in any direction unless we waded out into the oozing mud of midstream, and even then the jungle greenery closed off our view so quickly that a herd of brontosaurs could have been passing by without our seeing them.
There was little to eat. The plants were all strange to us; hardly any of them seemed to bear anything that looked edible. The only fish I could see in the dark water were tiny flitting glints of silver, too small and fast for us to catch. We subsisted on frogs and wriggling furry insect grubs, nauseating but nourishing enough. Barely.
It rained every evening, huge torrents of downpour from the gray towering clouds that built up during the sopping heat of the afternoons. My skin felt wet all the time, as if it were crawling, puckering, in the unremitting humidity. After three days and nights of being soaked and steamed, even Anya began to look bedraggled and unhappy.
The sky was gray almost all the time. The one night it cleared enough to see the stars, I wished it had not. Peering through the tangled foliage while Anya slept, I tried to find the familiar patterns of recognizable constellations. All that I saw was that dismal red star hanging high in the dark sky, as if spying down on us.
I searched for Orion, my namesake among the stars, and could not find the constellation. Then I saw the Big Bear, and my heart sank. It was different, changed from the Dipper I had known in other eras. Its big square “bowl” was slim and sharp-angled, more like a gravy pitcher than a ladle. Its curving handle was sharply bent.
We were so many millions of years removed from any period I had known that even the eternal stars had changed. I stared at the mutated Dipper, desolate, downcast, filled with a dreadful melancholy such as I had never known before.
Other than an occasional shrewlike gray furry creature that seemed to live high in the trees, we did not even see another mammal. Reptiles, though, were everywhere.
One morning Anya was filling a gourd at the edge of the muddy stream when suddenly a gigantic crocodile erupted from the water where it had been lurking, its massive green scaly body hidden perfectly among the reeds and cattails with nothing but its horn-topped eyes and nostrils showing above the surface. Anya had to run as fast as she could and clamber up the nearest tree to escape the crocodile’s rush; despite its spraddling short legs, it nearly caught her.
There were turtles in the swamp and long-tailed lizards the size of pigs and plenty of snakes gliding through the water and slithering up the trees.
This world of the Cretaceous, however, was truly ruled by dinosaurs. Not all of them were giants. The second day Anya, using a thick broken branch for a club, tried to kill a two-legged dinosaur that was only as big as an overgrown chicken. It scampered away from her, whistling like a teakettle. Accustomed to dodging its larger cousins, it easily escaped Anya’s attempts to catch it.
From our tree perch I saw one afternoon a waddling reptile plated with bony armor like an armadillo, although it was almost the size of a pony. It dragged a short tail armed with evil-looking spikes.
Insects buzzed and crawled around us all the time but, oddly, none seemed to bother us. I thought this strange at first, until I realized that there were so few mammals in this landscape that hardly any insects had developed an interest in sucking warm blood.
The third night I told Anya that I felt strong enough to travel.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s time we left this soggy hellhole.”
“And go where?” she asked.
I shrugged. The evening cloudburst had just ended. We sat huddled on a high branch beneath a rude makeshift shelter of giant leaves that I had put together. It had not been much help; the torrents of rain had wormed through the leaves and wet us anyway. The last remnants of the rain dripped from a thousand leaves and turned our green world into a glittering, dewy symphony of pattering little splashes. Anya’s once-sparkling robe was sodden and gray. My leather vest and kilt clung to me like clammy, smelly rags.
“Anywhere would be better than this,” I replied.
She agreed with a nod.
“And probably as far away from this location as we can get,” I added.
“You’re worried about Set?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I suppose I should be. I can’t help thinking, though, that he won’t bother with us. We’re trapped here, why spend the effort to seek us out and kill us? We’re going to die here, my love, in this forsaken miserable time, and no one will save us.”
In the shadows of dusk her lovely face seemed somber, her voice low with dejection. I had been content to live a normal human lifetime with Anya in the Neolithic, but the cool forest of Paradise was very different from this rotting fetid jungle. Even though the people there had turned traitor against us, there were human beings in Paradise. Here we were totally alone, with no human companionship except each other.
“We’re not dead yet,” I said. “And I don’t intend to give Set any help in killing us.”
“Why would he bother?”
“Because this is a crucial nexus for him,” I told her. “He knows where his spacetime warp was set, he knows we’re here. As soon as he has the device operating again he’ll come looking for us, to make certain that we don’t upset whatever it is he’s planning for this point in the continuum.”
Anya saw the logic of it, but still she seemed reluctant to take action.
“We’ll be better off out of this damned swamp,” I added, “This is no place to be. Let’s start out tomorrow morning, first light. We’ll head upland, to where it’s cooler and dryer.”
In the deepening shadows I saw her eyes sparkle with sudden delight. “We can follow the path that the duckbills took. They were heading toward higher ground, I’m certain.”
“With the tyrannosaurs after them,” I muttered.
“Yes,” Anya said, some of her old enthusiasm back in her voice. “I’m curious to see if they caught up with the duckbills.”
“There are times,” I said, “when you seem absolutely bloodthirsty.”
“Violence is part of human makeup, Orion. I am still human enough to feel the excitement of the hunt. Aren’t you?”
“Only when I’m the hunter, not the hunted.”
“You are my hunter,” she said.
“And I’ve found what I was searching for.” I pulled her to me.
“Being the prey isn’t all that terrible,” Anya whispered in my ear. “Sometimes.”
Chapter 16
The next morning we started our trek out of the swamplands and up toward the cooler, cleaner hills. Subconsciously I expected to find a more familiar world, a landscape of flowering plants and grass, of dogs and rabbits and wild boars. I knew there would be no other humans, but my mind was seeking familiar life-forms nonetheless.