CHAPTER 44

Anya instructed me to close my eyes, and not open them again until I felt the wind against my skin. For a moment I stood there, unmoving, my gaze fixed on her lovely, somber face.

This would be the last time I'd see her, I knew. There would be no return from this journey.

I wanted to take her in my arms, to kiss her and tell her for one last time that I loved her more than life itself. But she was a goddess, not a human woman. I could love her as Agla the witch, or Ava the huntress. I could love Aretha, whom I barely knew, or Adena, as she led her troops in battle. But this silver-clad goddess was beyond me, and I knew it. Ormazd had been right: a bacterium cannot become a bird; a goddess cannot fall in love with a monkey.

I closed my eyes.

"Keep them closed until you feel the wind against you," her sweet voice told me.

I nodded to show her I understood. Then I felt the softest touch against my cheek. Her fingertips, perhaps. Or perhaps the faintest brush of her lips. I burned for her, but found myself paralyzed. I could not unclench my fists, could not move a step. My eyes would not open even if I willed them to.

"Good-bye, my love," she whispered. But I was unable to answer.

For the briefest instant I remained locked in frozen darkness, deprived of all sensory inputs. I could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

My hearing returned first. A soft, sighing sound came to me, the whisper of something I had not heard for so long that I thought I had forgotten it: a gentle breeze rustling the leafy limbs of trees.

I felt that breeze on my face, warm, kind, loving. Opening my eyes, I saw that I stood in the midst of a forest of gigantic trees—sequoias, from the looks of them. Their immense boles were wider than a house, and they stretched up toward the blue, cloud-flecked sky like the pillars of a giant's cathedral.

Except for the sighing of the breeze, the forest seemed silent to me. But as I stood there lost in wonder beneath the shade of those gigantic leafy boughs, I began to recognize the sounds of life in the background: bird calls echoing through the forest, the gurgling of a fast-rushing stream off in the distance, the scampering of a small furry creature through the sparse underbrush between the enormous tree trunks.

What a world this was! How Dal and Ava and their clan would have loved it here. Even Subotai and the High Khan, crusty old warriors though they were, would have happily settled themselves here. Everything a man could desire was here—except other people.

I wandered through the forest for hours, picking berries from a bush, drinking from that noisy brook, reveling in the peace and joy of a world untainted by war and killing.

Slowly I began to wonder if Anya had not sent me here to get rid of me as gently as she could. It was a good world, an easy place to live in except for the absence of companions. Was this her way of exiling me, removing me from her presence? A pleasant Coventry? A warm and lovely Siberia? I would live out my solitary existence here in comfort, and when I finally died, I would no longer trouble her. Like putting a pet to sleep when you no longer need or want it.

I shook my head. No, she would not lie to me. She sent me here so that I might understand the whole scheme of things. She placed me here for a reason, not merely to get me out of her way, I told myself. I insisted to myself. I had to believe that. There was nothing else for me to cling to.

The sun was setting behind hills that I could barely make out, far off in the distance, through the stout columns of the trees. The shadows lengthened into dusk, but the air was still warm and fragrant with flowers. I wore a sleeveless shirt and knee-length pants made of hides. My feet were shod with thonged sandals of leather. Yet, even as twilight deepened into night, I did not feel cold. The ground was mossy and soft; I stretched out on it and fell asleep almost at once.

In my dreams I saw this early Earth as a god might see it, as Anya and Ormazd undoubtedly saw it, a beautiful blue sphere set against the cold darkness of unfathomable space, decked with bands and swirls of clouds that gleamed purest white. I recognized the rough outlines of Europe and Africa, the Americas and Asia, set against the glittering deep blue of the oceans. The Atlantic seemed narrower than it should be, and Australia was not yet an island, but this was Earth, clearly enough.

The Arctic was clear of ice, its waters as blue and inviting as those girdling the Equator. Antarctica was dazzling white, though. Nowhere did I see cities, or roads, or the gray domes and sooty plumes of human habitation.

It was an Earth empty of human life, devoid of intelligence—almost.

I awoke feeling physically refreshed, yet puzzled to the point of worry. There had to be people here; if not the human creations of Ormazd, then Ahriman's people. That was why Anya had sent me here: to find them and see them for what they truly were.

I got to my feet, washed in the cold stream and ate a breakfast of berries and eggs. I could not bring myself to kill any of the animals that chattered and called through the echoing forest. I had no tools, no weapons, and no inclination to start making them.

Instead, I began walking along the stream's bank, up the gently rising ground, surrounded by the skyscraper trees that threw dappled patterns of sunlight and shadow across the mossy ground. The stream gurgled and splashed across rocks. On the far side I saw a doe and her two fawns watching me, ears twitching and eyes so big and liquid brown.

"Good morning," I called to them. They did not run away. They merely watched me until, satisfied that I was no threat, they returned to browsing on the shrubbery that grew by the stream's edge.

As I walked further upstream, more deer came into view, stepping carefully on their slim legs, gazing at me with their innocent eyes. There must be predators somewhere nearby, I thought. Yet I had not heard a cat's roar nor the growling and baying of canines during the night.

Although the ground was rising as I walked upstream, the going was quite easy. Undergrowth was sparse, and the ground was covered with green, springy mosses and needles from the trees. More and more groups of deer and smaller animals clustered by the water's edge, where the shrubbery grew more thickly. It almost seemed to me like a park, a deliberately designed game preserve. Built by whom? I wondered. For whom?

By mid-morning I found the answer to those questions.

Birds were chattering and rustling up in the limbs of the giant trees. I looked up and saw them gathering, flocking, birds of every kind and color: brilliant red cardinals, bluebirds, brown sparrows, red-shouldered blackbirds, glossy crows, robins, wrens, birds of yellow and green and white. Hundreds of them, thousands, sitting and jabbering on the branches, swooping back and forth. Not a predator among them. No hawks or falcons, no ravens or eagles.

As I stood among the trees, my head tilted back in amazement, they all became still and quiet. As if expecting something. And then, one by one, they began gliding down from their lofty perches, wings outspread and hardly flapping at all, gliding down toward the ground, and swooping right past me.

I followed their flight with my eyes and saw, off in the distance, where they were heading.

Several men stood in a small clearing among the massive trees, reaching into pouches they wore slung over their shoulders and tossing handfuls of their contents onto the ground.

Human beings! I was staggered. Anya had said there were no humans here, and yet there were three—no, four of them, feeding a forest full of birds!

I approached them slowly, staying in the shadows of the trees, partly to get out of the way of the stream of birds swooping down toward the feeding area, partly because for some instinctive reason I did not want to startle them by revealing myself too soon.

As I came nearer, I saw who they were, and my heart sank. Ahriman's people. The ones that Adena's troopers called the brutes. They did not seem terribly brutal, sprinkling birdseed on the ground around them, letting birds perch on their broad shoulders, laughing as they fed the multihued flocks.

I studied them from the cover of a giant tree trunk. They were Ahriman's people, not my own kind. Broad faces with high cheekbones and thin, almost lipless mouths. Wide, thick, well-muscled torsos. Heavy arms and legs.

Suddenly my insides seemed to go hollow. I realized who they were, what they were. Neanderthals.

I sank to my knees and leaned my head against the smooth bark of the mammoth tree. Neanderthals. The other race of intelligent primates who had lived on Earth during the Ice Ages.

Squeezing my eyes shut to concentrate, I tried to recall what little I knew of twentieth-century anthropology. The Neanderthals were regarded as quite human, and just as intelligent as my own kind of human being. The scientists had named them Homo sapiens neanderthalensis as opposed to our own Homo sapiens sapiens.

The Neanderthals had evolved out of the four-million-year-long line of primate apes, replacing the earlier hominids such as Homo erectus. And then, quite abruptly, the Sapients appeared—my own line of human beings, the ones whom Ormazd claimed to have created—and the Neanderthals became extinct. No anthropologist could explain why they disappeared; it happened very abruptly, as evolutionary time goes. Before the Age of Ice, Neanderthals were the highest and most widespread primates on Earth. When the glaciers melted, they were gone, and the high-domed, slim-bodied Sapients were the only intelligent species on the planet.

I knew what had happened. As I knelt there in that primeval forest, the knowledge made me sick.

It can't be, I told myself. There must be more to it than you think. Anya would not have sent you here merely to show you the horror of genocide. Not even Ormazd could be that callous.

I did not want to believe what I knew to be true. I gathered my strength and pulled myself to my feet. There must be something else, something still hidden from me, something that I had yet to learn.

I have always been able to control my body, down to the most peripheral nerve cell. I have never lacked courage—most probably because I never had the imagination to see, ahead of time, what pain and danger I was facing. Action has always been easier for me than reflection.

Yet the most difficult action I ever had to take was to step out from behind the concealment of that tree and show myself to the four young Neanderthal men who were in the clearing, feeding the flocks of birds.

I took a deep breath, calmed my racing heart, and began walking toward them. They were youngsters, probably no more than teen-agers, their hair dark and full, their faces smooth and unlined. They were laughing and whistling to one another as they tossed birdseed around the mossy ground. One of them was holding out both his hands and half a dozen birds perched on them, pecking at the seeds in his palms.

The birds noticed me before the lads did. With a great swirling, fluttering, flashing of colors they flew off in all directions as I approached. Not a peep out of them; no sound except the beating of frightened wings.

The four young Neanderthals, suddenly alone except for a few drifting feathers, turned to gape at me.

I held up both my hands, palms outward, as I approached.

"I am Orion," I said. "I come in peace."

They glanced at one another, more puzzled than frightened. They made no move to stop me from coming nearer, nor did they seem in any way inclined to run from me. They whistled back and forth among themselves, low, musical sounds not unlike the calls of birds—or the whistling language of dolphins.

I stopped and let my hands fall to my sides. "Do you live nearby?" I asked. "Will you take me to your village?" I knew that they could not understand my words, any more than I could interpret their whistles. But I had to establish at least the beginnings of communication.

The four of them looked me up and down, then walked around me as if I were a clothing display. In utter silence. Yet I had the feeling that they were conversing with one another, without the need for sounds.

They were more than a full head shorter than I, all four of them, although already their barrel chests and powerful arms were much bigger than my own. I felt puny beside them. The tallest one, who almost came up to my chin, grinned at me. There was no hint of fear or distrust in his deep brown eyes. Merely curiosity.

He stared at me in silence for several moments, and I could almost hear the questions in his mind: Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?"

Like an English tourist, I spoke slowly and loudly in my effort to make him understand. "My name is Orion. Orion." I touched my chest with a forefinger and repeated, "Orion."

"Ho-rye-un," the youngster said, in the same painful whisper that I had heard so often from Ahriman.

"Where is your village?" I asked. "Where do you live?"

No response.

I tried a different tack. "Do you know Ahriman? Where is Ahriman?"

The lad's eyes flicked to his comrades and I could feel some form of mental communication vibrating from one to another. Ahriman echoed in my mind. Ahriman.

After a moment or so, the teen-ager stared into my eyes and frowned in concentration. I concentrated, too, trying to receive whatever mental message he was trying to send. I got nothing but the vaguest impression of the forest around us, trees and not much else.

With a very human shrug, the lad whistled a few notes to his companions, then gestured for me to come along with him. The five of us started along a well-worn trail that began in that clearing and headed deeper into the woods.