“One of Set’s troops?”
“There are more,” Anya said, gesturing toward the other nests. “I think they deliberately smashed the eggs that weren’t broken when the tyrannosaurs attacked.”
“That means Set—or someone like him—is here, in this time and place.”
“Attacking the duckbills? Why?”
“More important,” I said, “whoever it is, he’s probably searching for us.”
Anya raised her eyes and scanned the horizon, as if she could see Set or his people heading toward us. I looked, too. The land was flat and depressingly green, nothing but the same tone of green as far as the eye could see. Not a flower, not a sign of color. Even the streams meandering through the area looked a sickly, weed-choked green. Mangroves lined the waterways and giant ferns clustered thickly, waving in the warm wind. Whole armies could be hidden in that monotonous flat bayou country and we could not have seen them.
It struck me all over again how helpless we were, how useless in the Creators’ struggle to overthrow Set and his kind. Two people alone in a world of dinosaurs. I shook my head as if to clear it of cobwebs but I could not shake this feeling of depression.
Anya showed no signs of dismay, however. “We’ve got to find their camp or headquarters,” she said. “We’ve got to find out what they are doing in this era, what their goals are.”
I heaved a big hungry sigh. “First,” I countered, “we’ve got to have dinner.”
Returning to the two unbroken eggs, I started to build a small fire, knowing now that there were eyes out there in the distance that could detect it and locate us. Yet we had to eat, and neither of us was ready to face raw eggs or uncooked meat. Using a duckbill’s pointed scapula, I scraped out a pit in the soft dirt so that the meager flames could not be seen above the crest of the hill by anyone watching from below. Yet I knew that even primitive heat detectors could probably spot our fire from its thermal signature against the cooler air of the late afternoon.
“Orion! Quickly!”
I turned from my blossoming fire, grabbing for the nearest bone to use as a weapon, and saw Anya staring tensely at our eggs. One of them was cracked. No, cracking. As we watched, it split apart and a miniature duckbilled dinosaur no more than two feet long crawled out of the shell on four stubby legs.
Anya dropped to her knees in front of it.
The baby dinosaur gave a weak piping whistle, like the toot a child might make on a tin flute.
“Look, it has an egg tooth,” Anya said.
“It’s probably hungry,” I thought aloud.
Anya dashed over to my tiny fire and pulled out a couple of twigs that still had some pulpy leaves on them.
Stripping the leaves off, she hand-fed them to the little duckbill, which munched on them without hesitation.
“She’s eating them!” Anya seemed overjoyed.
I was less thrilled. “How do you know it’s a female?”
She ignored my question. Eating the other egg was out of the question now, even though it never opened that evening and was still not open the following morning. Our dinner consisted of a single rat-sized reptile that I managed to run down before darkness fell, and a clutch of melons that I picked from a bush, the first recognizable fruit I had seen.
In the morning Anya made it clear that she had no intention of leaving our baby duckbill behind.
“We’ll have to feed it,” I complained.
“It eats plants,” she countered. “It’s not like a mammal that needs its mother’s milk.”
I was anxious to get away from this hilltop massacre site and leave it to the scavenging pterosaurs. Our best defense against whoever had directed the attack on the duckbills was to keep moving. Anya agreed, but our pace that morning was terribly slow because the little duckbill could not trot along with any real speed. It seemed to show no curiosity about the world around it, as a puppy would. It merely followed Anya the way ducklings fixate on the first moving object they see, believing it to be their mother.
Anya seemed quite content with motherhood. She picked soft pulpy leaves for her baby and even chewed some of them herself before feeding the little beast.
I had brought something quite different from the duckbill boneyard: a forearm bone that fit my hand nicely and had the proper size and heft to be an effective club. We had to make tools and weapons if we were to survive.
Why we had to survive, what our goal might be beyond mere physical survival, was a total blank to me. Oh, I knew we were supposed to be battling against Set and whatever plans he had for this period in time. But how the two of us, alone and practically defenseless, were supposed to overcome Set and his people—that was beyond my reckoning.
Despite my misgivings, Anya set us out on the tracks of the tyrannosaurs.
“The humanoids went with them,” she said, pointing at the smaller tracks set in between the giant prints of the tyrants.
“Some distance behind them,” I guessed.
“I suppose so. We must find those humanoids, Orion, and learn from them what Set is doing.”
“That won’t be easy.”
She smiled at me. “If it were easy, it would have already been done. You and I are not meant for easy tasks, Orion.”
I could not make myself smile back at her. “If they can truly control the tyrannosaurs, we haven’t a chance in hell.”
Anya’s smile wilted.
We quickly saw that the tyrannosaur tracks led back toward the swamps we had quit only a few days earlier. I felt miserably disheartened to be returning to that fetid, humid, steaming gloom. I wanted to run as far away from there as possible. For the first time in my lives I was feeling real fear, a terror that was dangerously close to panic.
Anya overlooked my brooding silence. “It makes sense that Set’s headquarters here would be very close to the place where we entered this spacetime. Maybe we can use his warping device in reverse and return to the Neolithic when we’re finished here.”
“Return to his fortress?”
She ignored my question. “Orion, do you realize that the tyrannosaurs left their usual habitat there in the lowlands, marched up to the duckbills’ nesting area to slaughter them, and then returned immediately back to the swamps? They must have been under Set’s control.”
I agreed that it did not seem likely that the giant carnivores would trek all the way to the nesting site and back without some form of outside stimulus.
We camped that evening by a large, placid lake, on a long curving beach of clean white sand so fine it almost felt like powder beneath our feet. The beach was some twenty to thirty yards wide, then gave way to a line of gnarled, twisted cypresses festooned with hanging moss and, behind them, tall coconut palms and feathery fringe-leafed ferns that rose like gigantic swaying fans.
The sand was far from smooth, though. It was crisscrossed with the prints of innumerable dinosaurs: blunt deep hooves of massive sauropods, birdlike claws of smaller reptiles, and the powerful talons of carnosaurs. They all came to this shore to drink—and, some of them, to kill.
As the sun dropped toward the horizon, turning sky and water both into lovely pastel pinks and blue greens, I saw a streak of brilliant red and orange drop out of the sky and plunge into the lake. In half a moment it popped to the surface with a fish flapping in its toothy jaws.
The thing looked more like a lizard than a bird, with its long, toothed snout and longer tail. But it was feathered, and its forelimbs were definitely wings. Instead of taking off again, though, it paddled to the water’s edge and waddled up onto the shore, then turned to face the setting sun and spread its wings wide, as if in worship.
“It can’t fly again until it dries its wings,” Anya surmised.