Yet we needed a nightly fire, not merely for cooking or safety but for the psychological comfort that it provided. Night after night we huddled close together and stared into the warm dancing flames, knowing that it would be more than sixty million years before any other humans would create a campfire.
The skies were clearer in the uplands, away from the deep swamp. But the stars were still unfamiliar to me. Night after night I searched for Orion, in vain.
I began to show Anya my prowess as a hunter. Using the spears she made, I started to bag bird-sized dinosaurs and, occasionally, even bigger game such as four-legged grazers the size of sheep.
One night I asked Anya a question that had been nagging at me ever since we had come to this time of dinosaurs. “When you changed your form… metamorphosed into a sphere of energy”—the idea of that being her true self still bothered me—“where did you go? What did you do?”
The firelight cast flickering shadows across her face, almost the way she had shimmered and glittered when she had left my arms as we fell down the well of Set’s core tap.
“I tried to return to the other Creators,” she said, her voice low, almost sad. “But the way was blocked. I tried to move us both to a different time and place, anywhere in the continuum except where we were. But Set’s device was preset for this spacetime and it had too much energy driving it for me to break through and direct us elsewhere.”
“You’re conscious and aware of what you’re doing when you—change form?”
“Yes.”
“Could you do it now?”
“No,” she admitted somberly. Gesturing toward our little campfire and the scraps of dinosaur bones on the ground, she said, “There isn’t enough energy available. We barely have energy input to keep our human forms going.”
Her voice smiled when she said that, but there was an underlying sadness to it. Perhaps even fear.
“Then you’re trapped in this human form,” I said.
“I chose this human form, Orion. So that I could be with you.”
She meant it as a sign of love. But it made me feel awful to know that because of me she was just as trapped and vulnerable as I was.
Within a week we were up in the hilly country where the air was at least drier, if not much cooler, than it had been in the swamps below.
Night after night I found myself searching the skies, seeking my namesake constellation and trying to avoid the feeling that the baleful red star was watching me like the eye of some angry god—or devil.
Anya always woke near midnight to take the watch and’ let me sleep. One night she asked, “What do you expect to see in the stars, my love?”
I felt almost embarrassed. “I was looking for myself.”
She pointed. “There.”
It was not Orion. Not the familiar constellation of the Hunter that I had known. Rigel did not yet exist. Brilliant red Betelgeuse was nowhere to be seen. Instead of the three stars of the belt and the sword hanging from it, I saw only a faint, misty glow.
My blood ran cold. Not even Orion existed in this lonely place and time. We had no business being here, so far from everything that we had known. We were aliens here, outcasts, abandoned by the gods, hunted by forces that we could not even begin to fight against, doomed to be extinguished forever.
An intense brooding misery filled my soul. I felt completely helpless, useless. I knew that it was merely a matter of time until Set tracked us down and made an end of us.
No matter how hard I tried, I could not shake this depression. I had never felt such anguish before, such despair. I tried to hide it from Anya, but I saw from the anxious glances she gave me that she knew full well how empty and lifeless I felt.
And then we came across the duckbills’ nesting ground.
It was the broad, fairly flat top of a gently sloped hill. There were so many duckbill tracks marching up the hillside that their heavy hooves had worn an actual trail into the bare dusty ground.
“The creatures must come up here every year,” Anya said as we climbed the trail toward the top of the hill.
I did not reply. I could not work up the enthusiastic curiosity that was apparently driving Anya. I was still locked in gloom.
We should have been warned by the noisy whistling and hissing of dozens of pterosaurs flapping their leathery wings up above the summit of the hill, swooping in for landings. As Anya and I climbed up the easy slope of the hill we heard their long bony bills clacking as if they were fighting among themselves.
A faint half memory tugged at me. The way the pterosaurs were behaving reminded me of something, but I could not recall what it was. It became clear to me the instant we reached the crest of the hill.
It was a boneyard.
Up on the bare ground of the hilltop there were hundreds of nests where the duckbills had been laying their eggs for uncounted generations.
But the tyrannosaurs had been there.
A gust of breeze brought the stench of rotting flesh to our nostrils. The pterosaurs flapped and hissed at us, tiny claws on the front edges of their wings quite conspicuous. I realized that they were behaving like vultures, picking the bones of the dead. I swatted at the nearest of the winged lizards with the spear I carried and they all flapped off, hissing angrily, hovering above us on their wide leathery wings as if waiting for us to leave so they could resume their feast.
I thought Anya would break into tears. Nothing but bones and scraps of rotting flesh, the rib cages of the massive animals standing like the bleached timbers of wrecked ships, taller than my head. Leg bones my own body length. Massive flat skulls, thick with bone.
“Look!” Anya cried. “Eggs!”
The nests were shallow pits pawed into the ground where oblong eggs the length of my arm lay in circular patterns. Most of them had been smashed in.
“Well,” I said, pointing to a pair of unbroken eggs that lay side by side on the bare ground, “here’s dinner, at least.”
“You couldn’t!” Anya seemed shocked.
I cast an eye at the pterosaurs still flapping and gliding above us.
“It’s either our dinner or theirs.”
She still looked distressed.
“These eggs will never hatch now,” I told her. “And even if they did, the baby duckbills would be easy prey to anything that comes along without their mothers to protect them.”
Reluctantly Anya agreed. I went down the hill to gather brushwood for a fire while she stayed at the nests to protect our dinner against the pterosaurs.
It struck me, as I picked dead branches from the ground and pulled twigs from bushes, that the tyrannosaurs had been unusually efficient in their assault on the duckbills. As far as I could see they had killed every one of the herbivores. That did not seem natural to me. Predators usually kill what they can eat and allow the rest of their prey to go their way. Were the tyrannosaurs nothing but killing machines after all? Or were they being directed by someone—such as Set or his like?
Had they followed the migrating herd we had seen so that they could find the duckbills’ nesting ground and kill all the dinosaurs nesting there? Obviously the hilltop was being used by more than the forty-some duckbills we had seen in the swamp. There were more than a hundred nests up there. But they had all been slaughtered by the tyrannosaurs.
When I returned to the hilltop with an armload of firewood, Anya showed me the answer to my question.
“Look here,” she said, pointing to the edge of one of the nests.
I dropped the tinder near the nest where our prospective dinner waited and went to where she stood.
Footprints. Three-clawed toes, but much too small to be a tyrannosaur’s. Human-sized. Or humanoid, rather.