It takes energy to move across time. But the universe is filled with energy, drenched with the radiant bounty of uncounted stars. The Creators knew how to tap that energy, and my memories of their actions taught me how to tap it also.
The walls of Osiris’s temple faded before my eyes, but did not disappear. The carvings melted away. The dancing, shimmering pictures slowly dissolved until the walls were blank and smooth, as if newly erected.
I rose to my feet. The wound in my chest was gone. That existed in another time, thousands of years away.
Through the open doorway I saw not the columned court of the main temple, but a lush garden where fruit trees bent their heavily laden branches to the grassy ground and flowers were opening their colorful petals to the first welcome rays of the morning sun.
The temple I was in was small, plain, virtually undecorated. A rough stone altar stood against one wall, with a single small statue atop it. It was the figure of a man with the head of a beast I could not recognize: a sharply curved beak, almost like a hawk’s, but the rest of the face had no birdlike qualities to it.
No matter. I saw that there was another doorway in the opposite wall, and that it led into a smaller, inner shrine. It was dark in there, but I stepped through the doorway without hesitation.
Through the dim shadows I saw her lying on the altar, dressed in a long gown of silver. Her eyes were closed, her hands lay by her sides. She was not breathing, but I knew she was not dead. Merely waiting.
I looked up at the low ceiling, barely above my head. It was made of wooden beams covered with planks and sealed with pitch. I reached up and, sure enough, the section of roof just over the altar was hinged. I pushed it open and let the morning sun shine down on Anya’s recumbent figure.
The silver of her robe gleamed like a thousand tiny stars. Color returned to her cheeks.
I stepped to the altar, leaned over her, and kissed her on the lips.
She felt warm and alive. Her arms twined around my neck and she sighed deeply and kissed me back. My eyes filled with tears and for many long minutes we said nothing at all, merely held each other so closely that neither time nor space could separate us.
“I knew you would find me,” Anya said at last, her voice low and warm and filled with love.
“They said you couldn’t be revived. They told me you were gone forever.”
“I was here. Waiting for you.”
Anya sat up slowly, and then I helped her to stand. Her eyes held the depths of the universes in them. She smiled at me, the same radiant smile I remembered from so many other existences.
But as I held her in my arms, rejoicing, the memory of our death together sent a chill shudder through me.
“What is it, my love?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“The Golden One murdered you…”
Her face grew grave. “He is mad with jealousy of you, Orion.”
“The other Creators have taken him. They’re trying to cure his madness.”
She looked at me with new respect. “And you helped to capture him, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. They couldn’t have done it without you, just as they couldn’t have revived me without you.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
She touched my cheek with her soft, wonderful fingertips. “It will take time to teach you, my brave Orion, but you already know much more than you realize.”
A new question rose in my mind. “Are you human now, or a… goddess?”
Anya laughed. “There are no gods or goddesses, Orion. You know that. We have much more knowledge than earlier human species. We have much more powerful capabilities.”
Much more powerful than I, I thought.
As if she could read my mind, Anya said, “Your own powers are growing, Orion. You have learned much since the Golden One first sent you to the Ice Age to hunt down Ahriman. You are becoming one of us.”
“Can you be killed?” I blurted.
She understood my fear. “Anyone can be killed, Orion. The entire continuum can be destroyed, and everything in it.”
“Then there’s no place for us to be at peace? No time when we can rest and live and love as ordinary human beings do?”
“No, my darling. Not even ordinary mortals have that luxury. The best we can hope for is to be together, to face the joys and dangers of each moment side by side, through all time, across all the universes.”
I took her in my arms once more and felt not merely content, but supernally happy. “That will be good enough. To be with you, no matter what, is all I desire.”
Epilogue
WITH Anya beside me, I walked out of the ancient temple into the warming sunshine of the new day. All around us, a lush green garden grew: flowering shrubs and bountiful fruit trees as far as the eye could see.
Slowly we walked toward the river, the mighty Nile, flowing steadily through all the eons.
“Where in time are we?” I asked.
“The pyramids have not been started yet. The land that will someday be called the Sahara is still a wide grassland teeming with game. Bands of hunting people roam across it freely.”
“And this garden? It looks like Eden.”
She smiled at me. “Hardly that. It is the home of the creature whose statue stood on the altar.”
I glanced back at the little stone temple. It was a simple building, blocks of stone piled atop one another, with a flat wooden slat roof.
“Someday the Egyptians will worship him as a powerful and dangerous god. They will call him Set.”
“He is one of the Creators?”
“No,” Anya said. “Not one of us. He is an enemy; one of those who seek to twist the continuum to their own purposes.”
“As the Golden One does,” I said.
She gave me a stern look. “The Golden One, power-mad as he is, at least works for the human race.”
“He created the human race, he claims.”
“He had help,” she replied, allowing a small smile to dimple her cheeks.
“But this other creature… the one with the lizard’s face?”
The smile vanished. “He comes from a distant world, Orion, and he seeks to eliminate us all from the continuum.”
“Then why are we here, in this time and place?”
“To find him and destroy him,” said Anya. “You and I together. Hunter and warrior, through all space-time.”
I looked into her glowing eyes and realized that this was my destiny. I am Orion the Hunter. And with this huntress, this warrior goddess, beside me, all the universes were my hunting grounds.
Author’s Afterward
THE distant past has always been just as exciting to me as the distant future, and seems an equally fascinating domain for science fiction.
The novel you have just read is science fiction, not an historical novel. Obviously this is so, for the novel deals with the gods and goddesses of the ancients, and attempts to portray them as advanced human beings from a far distant future who have the ability to travel through time at their whim.
Yet the historical parts of this novel are as accurate as careful research can make them — with some deliberate deviations from “known” history.
It is agreed among most students of ancient history that the siege of Troy celebrated in Homer’s Iliad and the fall of Jericho described in the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua both happened sometime around the middle of the twelfth century B.C. To the novelist, this presents the opportunity of placing the same character(s) at both events; both could have happened within the lifespan of a human being. Perhaps they happened within a few years, or even a few months, of each other.