Tyrannosaurus rex. No doubt of it. Tremendous size, dwarfing Set’s fighting carnosaurs that we had seen in Paradise. Withered vestigial forelegs hanging uselessly on its chest. It reared up to its full height, taller than all but the biggest trees, and seemed to peer in the direction that the duckbills had gone. Then it stepped out into the muddy stream on two powerful hind legs, its heavy tail held straight out as if to balance the enormous weight of that fearsome head.
I could feel the terrified tension in Anya’s body, pressing against mine. I myself was as rigid as a frightened mouse confronted by a lion. The tyrannosaur loomed over us, its scales striped jungle green and dark gray. Its feet bore claws bigger and sharper than reapers’ scythes.
Slowly, stealthily, it moved upstream in the tracks of the duckbills. Just when I was about to breathe again, a second tyrannosaur pushed through the foliage as silently and carefully as the first. And then a third.
Anya nudged me with an elbow and, turning my head slightly, I saw two more of the enormous brutes emerging from the tangled trees on the other side of us.
They were hunting in a team. Stalking the duckbills with the care and coordination of a pack of wolves.
They passed us by. If they saw us or sensed us in any way, they gave no indication of it. I had always pictured the tyrannosaurus as a brainless ravening killing machine, snapping at any piece of meat it came across, regardless of its size, regardless of whether the tyrant was hungry or not.
Obviously that was not the case. These brutes possessed some intelligence, enough to work cooperatively in tracking down the duckbills.
“Let’s follow them,” Anya said eagerly after the last of them had disappeared into the reeds and giant swaying ferns that closed off our view of the waterway.
I must have looked at her as if she were crazy.
“We can stay a good distance away,” she added, her lips curving slightly at the expression on my face.
“I have the impression,” I replied slowly, “that they can run a good deal faster than we can. And I don’t see a tree for us to climb that’s tall enough to get away from them.”
“But they’re after the duckbills, not us. They wouldn’t even recognize us as meat.”
I shook my head. Brave I may be, but not foolhardy. Anya was as eager as a huntress on the trail of her prey, avid to follow the tyrannosaurs as closely as possible. I feared those monstrous brutes, feared that they would swiftly make us the hunted instead of the hunters.
“We have no weapons, nothing to defend ourselves with,” I said. Then I added, “Besides, I’m still weak from…”
Her face went from smug superiority to regretful apology in the flash of instant. “I forgot! Oh, Orion, I’m such a fool… forgive me… I should have remembered….”
I stopped her babbling with a kiss. She smiled and, still looking shamefaced, told me to wait for her while she found something for us to eat. Then she scampered down the tree trunk and headed off across the mossy muddy swampland.
I lay on my back as the sun filtered down through the leaves. A tiny gray furred thing raced across a branch slightly above me, ran down the tree’s trunk to the branch where I lay, and stared at me for half a moment, beady eyes black and shining, long hairless tail twitching nervously. It made no sound at all.
I said to it, “Greetings, fellow mammal. For all I know, you are the grandfather to us all.”
It dashed back up the trunk and disappeared in the leafy branches above me.
Clasping my hands behind my head, I waited for Anya to return. She had escaped the core-tap pit by reverting to her true form of pure energy, absorbing the heat that had been roasting our flesh, using Set’s own warping device to fling us into this time and place. And reconstructing herself back into human form, unscratched and even newly clothed in the bargain.
An ancient aphorism came unbidden to my mind: Rank hath its privileges. A goddess, a highly advanced creature evolved from human stock but so far beyond humanity that she had no need of a physical body—that kind of creature could happily go thrashing through a Cretaceous landscape after a pack of tyrannosaurs. Death meant nothing to her.