Blade Kin Read Free Page B

dinosaurs, but they had never gone alone together.
    It would be dangerous without a large hunting party, without the war horns and weaponry and guards. Yet the journey would be thrilling.
    If they sailed south for a few days, spring would be there. She imagined the lush forests of fern. The orchids would be in bloom—flame orange, freshly minted gold.
    The pteranodons would be nesting in the cliffs along the beach.
    Sometimes, when people honeymooned here, young men would come and play tricks on them, stealing their clothes and whatnot. She wondered if Tull was afraid of such teasing, or if something even more troubling gnawed at him.
    “Yes,” she agreed finally, “that sounds good.”
    So they sailed south and east to Hotland, stopping at each main river for the night, making love in Pwi hunting lodges along the way.
    The weather turned much warmer than she’d expected, for thermal winds blew out of Hotland’s great central desert.
    After four nights, they had gone farther south than either of them had ever traveled before, and if the Pwi from town like Fish Haven or South Bay had built hunting lodges, Tull and Fava did not find them.
    The weather became warmer at each successive stop, and after five days Fava felt they had gone far enough. They reached a fertile land where orchids bloomed and the air smelled rich, sweet.
    Gray-and-green striped stegosaurs roamed the fields in a loose herd, and among them Fava felt safe from larger predators. It seemed a good place to play.
    But Tull still seemed driven. The next morning, he insisted that they go farther, and as they sailed that day his face became taut, and he stared ahead as if compelled by some force that she did not understand.
    If Tull had been a full-blooded Pwi, Fava would have thought kwea drove him, some memory of being happy and fulfilled here in the south.
    Yet he was sailing into the unknown, and now Fava wondered if it were some evil kwea that compelled him, perhaps a mad need to prove his courage or perhaps he was fleeing some ugly memory from Smilodon Bay.
    He must free himself, she thought. Perhaps that is what he struggles for.
    On the ninth day, they skirted a great school of plesiosaurs fishing near the surface at the mouth of a wide river of blue-gray water.
    They sailed upstream. If it had seemed spring farther north, then here it seemed summer, for the fern trees had grown tall and thick in their foliage.
    Hadrosaurs with their honey-yellow stripes and bright crests of plum, lemon, and robin’s egg, loped along the marshy banks and dug for plants with their wide bills in the shallows, muddying the water.
    The sun was just dying out on the sea when they swung around a bend and came to the ruins of an ancient city made of huge granite blocks, stained crimson by the setting sun.
    The city climbed up the side of a mountain in neat steps, and atop the mountain was a circle of standing statues, images of Neanderthals raising round shields and ancient kutows, double-headed war axes.
    Most of the statues were damaged—broken axes, missing arms. Fronds of giant ferns and flowering vines obscured much of the stonework.
    For a long time, Tull and Fava sat in the evening silence, listening to the whistling songs of frogs, the croaking of pteranodons as they hunted insects above the river.
    “What is this place?” Tull asked.
    “I don’t know.” Fava studied the buildings. “I have never heard rumor of it.” The stones used to raise the walls were huge and rounded, so that many men would have had to carry them. The roofs of the buildings had been made of logs, and had rotted away. Obviously, no one had lived here for decades.
    The buildings were constructed in simple designs. Some door posts had bas-relief representations of Pwi in ancient garb fighting dinosaurs or weaving baskets from palm fronds. The craftsmanship lacked the detail that humans would make with their small hands, yet it was flawless—the kind of work done by Pwi who enjoyed the kwea