In the morning Anya made it clear that she had no intention of leaving our baby duckbill behind.
“We’ll have to feed it,” I complained.
“It eats plants,” she countered. “It’s not like a mammal that needs its mother’s milk.”
I was anxious to get away from this hilltop massacre site and leave it to the scavenging pterosaurs. Our best defense against whoever had directed the attack on the duckbills was to keep moving. Anya agreed, but our pace that morning was terribly slow because the little duckbill could not trot along with any real speed. It seemed to show no curiosity about the world around it, as a puppy would. It merely followed Anya the way ducklings fixate on the first moving object they see, believing it to be their mother.
Anya seemed quite content with motherhood. She picked soft pulpy leaves for her baby and even chewed some of them herself before feeding the little beast.
I had brought something quite different from the duckbill boneyard: a forearm bone that fit my hand nicely and had the proper size and heft to be an effective club. We had to make tools and weapons if we were to survive.
Why we had to survive, what our goal might be beyond mere physical survival, was a total blank to me. Oh, I knew we were supposed to be battling against Set and whatever plans he had for this period in time. But how the two of us, alone and practically defenseless, were supposed to overcome Set and his people—that was beyond my reckoning.
Despite my misgivings, Anya set us out on the tracks of the tyrannosaurs.
“The humanoids went with them,” she said, pointing at the smaller tracks set in between the giant prints of the tyrants.
“Some distance behind them,” I guessed.
“I suppose so. We must find those humanoids, Orion, and learn from them what Set is doing.”
“That won’t be easy.”
She smiled at me. “If it were easy, it would have already been done. You and I are not meant for easy tasks, Orion.”
I could not make myself smile back at her. “If they can truly control the tyrannosaurs, we haven’t a chance in hell.”
Anya’s smile wilted.
We quickly saw that the tyrannosaur tracks led back toward the swamps we had quit only a few days earlier. I felt miserably disheartened to be returning to that fetid, humid, steaming gloom. I wanted to run as far away from there as possible. For the first time in my lives I was feeling real fear, a terror that was dangerously close to panic.
Anya overlooked my brooding silence. “It makes sense that Set’s headquarters here would be very close to the place where we entered this spacetime. Maybe we can use his warping device in reverse and return to the Neolithic when we’re finished here.”
“Return to his fortress?”
She ignored my question. “Orion, do you realize that the tyrannosaurs left their usual habitat there in the lowlands, marched up to the duckbills’ nesting area to slaughter them, and then returned immediately back to the swamps? They must have been under Set’s control.”
I agreed that it did not seem likely that the giant carnivores would trek all the way to the nesting site and back without some form of outside stimulus.
We camped that evening by a large, placid lake, on a long curving beach of clean white sand so fine it almost felt like powder beneath our feet. The beach was some twenty to thirty yards wide, then gave way to a line of gnarled, twisted cypresses festooned with hanging moss and, behind them, tall coconut palms and feathery fringe-leafed ferns that rose like gigantic swaying fans.
The sand was far from smooth, though. It was crisscrossed with the prints of innumerable dinosaurs: blunt deep hooves of massive sauropods, birdlike claws of smaller reptiles, and the powerful talons of carnosaurs. They all came to this shore to drink—and, some of them, to kill.
As the sun dropped toward the horizon, turning sky and water both into lovely pastel pinks and blue greens, I saw a streak of brilliant red and orange drop out of the sky and plunge into the lake. In half a moment it popped to the surface with a fish flapping in its toothy jaws.