When I told Anya, she looked at me questioningly. “Are you sure?”
“The star is so bright that it will be visible in midday,” I replied. “Then the castle will emerge in daylight. I’m certain of it.”
“So Set is not trying to hide from anyone,” she mused.
“Who is there for him to hide from? Us?”
“Then why does the castle sink back into the water? Why not have it out in the open all the time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But there’s a bigger question for us to answer Why does it rise only when that bloody star is in sight?”
Anya’s mouth dropped open. She stopped where she stood, in the heavy foliage near our nest. Turning, she peered out between the leaves toward the western horizon.
The red star was almost touching the flat line of the lake, tracing a shimmering narrow red line across the water, aimed like a stiletto blade toward us.
For two more nights we watched and saw that the castle rose up from the water only once the red star was riding high in the sky, near zenith. It stayed above the water well into daylight now, and only sank back again once the star began to dip close to the horizon.
“You’re right,” Anya said. “It seeks that star.”
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“Set must come from the world that circles that star,” Anya realized. “That must be his home.”
Our other big question, what the humanoid-tyrannosaur teams were doing, could only be answered by following one of the packs and watching them. I could not decide whether we should both go together to observe a tyrannosaur pack, or if I should go alone and leave Anya at the lake to continue watching the castle.
She was all for coming with me, and in the end I agreed that it would be best if she did. I feared leaving her alone, for there was no way for us to communicate with one another once we were separated. If either of us needed help, the other would never know it.
So, one bright hot morning, we took our spears in our hands and headed out after a team of nine humanoids who walked a discreet distance behind nine huge grotesque tyrannosaurs. We let them get over the horizon before leaving the shelter of the woods. I did not want them to see us following them. There was no fear of them eluding us; even a myopic infant could follow the monstrous tracks of the tyrants in the soft claylike ground.
Across the Cretaceous landscape we trekked for three days. It rained half the time, gray cold rain from a grayer sky covered by clouds so low I thought I could put a hand up and touch them. The ground turned to mud; the world shrank to the distance we could see through the driving rain. The wind sliced through us.
Little Juno seemed totally unperturbed by the foul weather. She munched on shrubs battered nearly flat by the rain and wind, then trotted on after us, a dark brown mound of rapidly growing dinosaur with a permanent silly grin built into its heavy-boned duck’s bill and a thickening flattish tail dragging behind it.
Our progress slowed almost to a crawl through the rainstorm, and stopped altogether when it became too dark to move further. We made a miserable soaked camp on a little rocky hummock that projected a few feet above the sea of mud. Once the sun came out again, the land literally steamed with moisture boiled up out of the drenched ground. We saw that the tyrannosaurs had continued to slough along through the mud almost as fast as they had gone before. They apparently stopped to sleep each night, as we did—shivering cold and wet, without fire, hungry.
The tyrannosaurs should have been hungry, too, I thought. It must take a constant input of food to keep twenty tons of dinosaur moving as fast as they were going. But we saw no signs that they had slackened their pace, no bones or scavenging pterosaurs in the air to mark the site of a kill.
“How long can they go without eating?” Anya asked as the hot sun baked away the moisture from the rain. The earth was steaming in chill mist rising up from the ground. I was glad of it; the fog hid us from any eyes that might be watching.
“They’re reptiles,” I mused aloud. “They don’t need to keep their bodies at a constant internal temperature the way we do. They can probably go a good deal longer without food than a mammal the same size.”
“Obviously,” said Anya. She looked tired. And hungry—
We caught a couple of dog-sized dinosaurs. They were basking in the morning sun, sluggish until the heat could sink into them. They seemed completely unafraid of humans, never having seen any before. They would never see any again.
Even though we tried to light a small fire, the shrubs and scrubby growth was so wet from the previous day’s rain that we finally ate the meat raw. It took a lot of chewing, but at least there was plenty of water to wash it down with from the ponds and puddles that laced through the area.
We used Juno as a taster, as far as vegetable matter was concerned. If the duckbill nibbled at a plant and then spat it out, we stayed away from it. If she chomped on it happily, we tried it ourselves. As far as we knew, we created the first salads on Earth—out of pulpy, soft-leafed plants that would be wiped out and become as extinct as the dinosaurs that fed on them when the Cretaceous ended.
The ground we traveled was rising, becoming browner, drier than the marshy flatlands we had traversed. Still the deep tracks of the tyrannosaurs led us on, but now we began to see the tracks and hoofprints of other dinosaurs pounded into the hard bare ground by countless numbers of animals.
“This must be a migration trail,” Anya said, mounting excitement in her voice.
I had my eyes on the hills rising before us. “We don’t want to go too fast here. We might blunder into a pack of meat-eaters.”
At my insistence we kept well to one side of the broad worn trail that marked the dinosaurs’ migration route. Still we saw the clawed tracks of carnosaurs, most of them considerably smaller than tyrants, although there were plenty of tyrannosaur tracks as well.
Apparently the duckbills and other herbivores trekked this way each year as the seasons slowly changed. I had detected no noticeable change in the weather, although the rainstorm we had suffered through had lasted longer than anything previous to it, and the mornings did seem slightly chillier than before.
It was the pterosaurs again that showed us where to look. Vast clouds of them were wheeling high in the sky, circling somewhere beyond the ridge line of the hills we were approaching. With reckless anticipation Anya began loping toward the ridge, impatient to see what was happening there. I ran after her and left little Juno galumphing behind.
We heard bleating, whistling, hooting shrieks and knew that they could not be coming from the winged lizards hovering so high above. These were the sounds of terror and death.
Anya reached the crest of the ridge and stopped, aghast. I pulled up beside her and looked down at the long narrow valley below us.
It was a battle.
Chapter 20
Thousands of herbivores were under attack by hundreds of tyrannosaurs. The battle stretched over miles of dry bare rocky ground, already red and slick with blood.
A running battle in the long narrow valley below us, with the duckbills and triceratops and smaller four-footed herbivores desperately trying to get through the rocky neck of the gorge and into the more open territory beyond while the tyrannosaurs ravaged through them like destroying monsters, crunching backbones in those terrible teeth, tearing bodies apart with their slashing scimitar claws.
It was like a naval battle in the days of sail, with powerful deadly dreadnoughts ripping through the line of clumsy galleons. Like fierce speedy brigades of mounted warriors slicing apart a fat caravan.