I felt completely alone, of course. Yet I did not mind the solitude. It was a relief, a welcome respite from the turmoil I had been through and the dangers I knew lay ahead of me. I did not try to contact the Creators, remembering that such mental signals served as beacons that allowed Set to pinpoint my location. I wanted to remain hidden from him as much as I could. For the time being.
He knew I was here. Day after day I saw long-winged pterosaurs gliding high in the bright blue skies. As long as I remained in the forest I was safe from their prying eyes, I reasoned. They could not see me through the leafy canopy of the trees.
I wondered where the Creators were, if they knew what I was up to. Or were they scattering across the galaxy in this spacetime, still fleeing Set after Anya’s capitulation to him?
I thought of Anya, of how she had betrayed me at one point in time yet swore she loved me at another. Was she watching over me now or running for her life? I had no way of knowing and in truth I did not care. All that would be settled later, after I had dealt with Set. If I survived, if I succeeded in killing him once and for all, then I could confront Anya and the other Creators. Until then I was on my own, and that’s the way I wanted it.
Try as I might, I could not understand how the Creators could be running for their lives in one era and yet living peacefully in their mausoleum of a city in the distant future. Nor how Set’s home world could be utterly destroyed and yet he alive and burning for revenge against me here in the Neolithic.
“How could you understand?” I once again heard the mocking voice of the Golden One in my memory. “I never built such understanding into you. Don’t even try, Orion. You were created to be my hunter, my warrior, not a spacetime philosopher.”
Limited. Maimed from the instant of my conception. Yet I ached for understanding. I recalled the Golden One telling me that the spacetime continuum is filled with currents and tides that shift constantly and can even be manipulated by conscious effort.
I gazed down the stream I had been following for many weeks. It was a fair-sized river now, flowing smoothly and silently toward some distant rendezvous with the Nile. To me, time was like a river, with the past upstream and the future downstream. A river that flowed in one direction, so that cause always came before effect.
Yet I knew from what the Creators had told me that time was actually more like an ocean connecting all points of the spacetime continuum. You could sail across that wide ocean in any direction, subject to its own inherent tides and currents. Cause did not necessarily precede effect always, although to a time-bound creature such as myself who senses time linearly, it always seems that way.
Each night I scanned the heavens. Sheol was still in the sky, but it looked sickly, dull. Except one night when it flared so brightly it cast bold shadows on the ground. It still shone bright enough to be seen at high noon the following day. Then it faded again.
The Sun’s companion star was still exploding, blowing off whole layers of plasma, peeling itself like an onion until there would be nothing remaining except a central core of gases too cool to produce the fusion reactions that make a star shine. The Creators were still directing its destruction from the safety of the far future.
The land around me began to look familiar. I had walked this ground before. For much of a morning I followed the riverbank, recognizing a sturdy old beech tree that slanted out over the placid stream. I spotted a boulder half overgrown with tall fronds of grass and berry bushes. The charred remains of a campfire blackened the ground in front of it. Anya and I had camped here.
Stretching to my fullest height, I felt the breeze, inhaled the scent of flowers and pine trees. The soft blue sky was marred by a thin gray cloud wafting on the wind. I smelled the faint, distant charred odor of fire. Kraal’s village was no more than a couple of days from here, I realized.
I turned my steps away from the river, aiming for the village of Kraal and Reeva, the two who had betrayed me.
My usual procedure was to hunt down some game along toward sunset, when the animals came to the river to drink. Although the river was far behind me by the time the day’s shadows were lengthening, I found a pond, a natural water hole, and hunkered down in a clump of bushes next to a tough old hickory to wait for my dinner to appear. The wind was in my face, so not even the most sensitive doe could scent me. I remained quite still, an immobile part of the landscape, and waited.
Hundreds of birds were singing and calling in the branches above me in the final moments of the day as the first animals cautiously approached the water hole. Several squirrels appeared, their tails twitching nervously. Then they were joined by other little furry things, woodchucks or something of that kind.
Eventually deer came for their evening drink, stepping delicately, stopping to sniff the air and search the purpling shadows with their big liquid eyes. I tightened my grip on my spear but remained hidden and unmoving, not so much out of compassion for them as because they were on the opposite side of the pond and too fleet afoot for me to reach them.
I heard a grunting sound behind me, almost a growl. Turning only my head, I saw the bushes shaking. Then a heavy-sided brown boar waddled toward me, tusks the size of carving knives. He took no notice of me whatsoever except to grunt and grumble as he passed by and shambled to the water’s edge.
He was not afraid of humans. Probably he had never seen one before. He would never see another.
The boar bent his head and began noisily slurping at the water. In one fluid motion I rose to my feet and raised my spear high above my head. Using both hands, I rammed its fire-hardened point into the boar’s back just behind his shoulder blade. I felt it penetrate his tough hide and slide wetly through lung and heart.
The boar collapsed without a sound. The deer on the far side of the pond, startled by my sudden movement, leaped away a few yards but then soon returned to the water’s edge.
I congratulated myself on an easy kill as I started the grisly business of skinning the boar and slicing off the best meat with my stone tools.
I congratulated myself too soon.
The first sign of danger was when the deer suddenly looked up, then bounded off into the woods. I took no notice of it. I was kneeling over my kill, too busy hacking away at the boar’s carcass in anticipation of a pork dinner.
Then I heard a coughing growl behind me that could only come from the deep chest of a lion. Turning slowly, I saw a shaggy-maned saber-toothed cat staring at me with glowing golden eyes, saliva drooling from one corner of a mouth armed with twin curving gleaming daggers.
He wanted my kill. Like a latter-day mafioso he had let me do the work, and now he intended to help himself to the profits.
I glanced into the shadowy bushes, trying to determine if this male was alone or if there were females lying in wait to spring at me. He seemed alone. Looking more sharply at him, I saw that his ribs poked through his tawny pelt. He took a limping step toward me.
He was either sick or hurt or too old to hunt for himself. This lion had been reduced to scavenging kills made by others, bluffing them away.
Sick though he may be, however, he still had the claws and teeth that could kill. My senses went into hyperdrive as I realized that my spear rested on the ground slightly more than an arm’s reach away.
If I got up and walked away, chances were the saber-tooth would take the boar’s carcass and leave me alone. But if he decided to attack me, turning my back to him was a foolish thing to do. Perhaps it would invite his attack.
The beast took another step toward me and growled again. The limp was noticeable; his left rear leg was hurt.
I had no intention of letting this rogue take my meal away from me. If he could bluff, so could I. Slowly, as we faced each other with unblinking eyes, I reached for my spear. As my outstretched fingers touched the smoothed wood, the saber-tooth decided that he would have to do more than growl.