Anya smiled contentedly. “We’ll eat raw fish and try the berries and fruits from the different bushes.”
Thus we began what became many weeks of watching the castle in the lake. Each morning it submerged, the entire titanic structure sinking slowly into the frothing water as if afraid of being seen by the rising sun. Each night it rose up again, dripping and dark like a brooding, malevolent giant.
We hunted and fished while the castle was submerged. We avoided the tyrannosaurs prowling through the woods and the more open flat land beyond. In all truth they did not seem to be particularly searching for us. Just the opposite. We were being ignored.
I began to teach Anya how to control our duckbill, which was rapidly growing out of its babyhood. She had named the little beast Juno, and when I asked her why, she laughed mysteriously.
“A joke, Orion, that only the Creators would appreciate.”
I knew that the Creators sometimes assumed the names of ancient gods. The Golden One referred to himself as Ormazd sometimes, at other times he had called himself Apollo, or Yawveh. Anya herself was worshiped as Athena by the Achaians and Trojans alike. Apparently there was a Juno among the Creators, and it amused Anya to name our heavy-footed round-backed duckbill after her.
After many days I began to realize that the castle was rising out of the water a bit later each night and lingering a few minutes longer into the dawn each morning. This puzzled me at first, but I was more interested in the comings and goings from the castle than its risings and submergings. In the dawn’s early light we could see more clearly what was happening, and why.
Each time the castle rose out of the water a long narrow ramp slid out from a gate set into its wall like a snake’s probing tongue and reached to the shore of the lake, almost a quarter of the way around its roughly circular circumference from the beach where Anya and I lay watching. Invariably, a dozen or so of the humanoid servants of Set, red-scaled and naked as they had been in the Neolithic, marched down that narrow ramp, across the sandy beach, and into the trees.
Tyrannosaurs waited for them there, gathered to this lake by forces unknown to us. In the dark of night or the glimmering gray of dawn, the humanoids selected a dozen or so of the monstrous brutes and headed off, away from the lake.
It did not take us long to realize that each reptilian humanoid controlled a single tyrannosaur. Each team of humanoids created a pack of tyrannosaurs and took them off on some mission. After many days a team would return with its pack. The humanoids would go back into the waiting castle; the tyrannosaurs would inevitably head for the swamplands that seemed to be their natural environment.
“They’re calling the tyrannosaurs here and then using them for some purpose,” Anya concluded one bright morning after the castle had sunk beneath the lake’s surface once again.
We were making our way back from the beach to our dugout, each of us carrying our spears, the duckbill—almost as tall as my hips now—sniffing and whistling beside us. I had a string of three fish thrown over one shoulder: our breakfast.
“There can only be one purpose for using the tyrannosaurs,” I said to Anya, recalling the slaughter at the duckbills’ nesting ground. “But it doesn’t make any sense.”
Anya had the same thought, the same question.
At least I had settled the question of why the castle’s emergence from the lake was taking place a few minutes later each day. It surfaced only when the red star was high in the sky. And it submerged when the red star sank toward the horizon.
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?”