The beast gleamed, flanks heaving in the firelight. Its tiny dead eyes glared from sixteen feet above them. In his heart, Aubry felt that this was the most beautiful creature that he had ever seen. Dead for sixty million years. Revived through the NipTech nanobots, genetically engineered by machines functioning on the molecular level.
The Tyrannosaurus rex’s stubby nostrils quivered as it sniffed the air. Did some subcellular memory within it quest about, wondering where the swamps and fat-flanked brontosaurs had gone? Was there brain enough behind the sloping brow, within the pebbled flesh to ask what pygmies these were who approached it, twelve weak, tiny, spear-carrying humans…?
Did it feel anything at all? Toward them, or toward the fire that burned behind them? Toward the first of twelve brave lads in that line? This boy had no name, had nothing but hope, and a belief that within him lived a spark of greatness. Even in the face of the greatest predator that ever walked the Earth, his stride was calm.
Nerves and veins seething with the potent brew, Aubry was both terrified and exalted.
But there was a line of fire that each of them had to cross, a line separating the spirit from the flesh.
By striding past the women who used their bodies, the old women who used their laughter, the old men who mocked and beat them …
From love. For what but love could motivate the grandmothers and grandfathers of Iron Mountain to dissuade the children from their terrible destiny? What but love?
Ringing the top of the amphitheater, a hundred men, armed with spears, chanted their excitement. Any young warrior who stepped into this arena would find no retreat, no escape. Here, it was conquer or die.
Aubry’s heart opened to these people, to this magnificent beast, to the world within the Iron Mountain, and most of all, to himself. His emotional skin peeled away to reveal a man he had never known before.
A man who wanted to live and love and laugh.
But first had to kill.
The rex’s jaws flashed down. The teeth snapped shut just a foot away from the first boy. The youth reared back, and the beast squalled as the chain brought it up short. Its great tail thrashed as it spun, seeking a moment of freedom, an inch of slack, any slight opportunity to destroy these fleas.
Behind them, the coals touched the wood chips. The chips smoldered and burst into flames. The logs beyond them began to burn. The initiates weren’t endangered yet—but the threat was real, and nearer every second.
The magnificent beast sniffed the air, and its dead eyes came to life as it sniffed the smoke. Fire it understood.
The King could lie down and die. Or it could kill them all. And die. There were no other options for such a beast. There was fear. There was heat. There was flesh.
The attack began.
And Aubry, in that state outside of his mind, remembered teeth and claws, and the fire creeping up behind them. The rex’s lashing tail almost caught him twice, strobing in the haze. Aubry sprang, higher than he ever had before, over the tail to land lightly on spring-steel quadriceps. He felt no pain, no fatigue.
The spears dug, and the rex was bloodied in a dozen places, but unslowed. Two of the young warriors were down, unmoving … no, one of them groaned and cried.
Atop the arena, the spearmen stared down pitilessly.
A spear rolled from the hand of the dead man. Aubry snatched it up, and looked at the left side of the terrible, wonderful beast. As he stared at it, it seemed to expand, filled his field of vision until the only thing that existed in his world was its dark, cold eye. Its head shifted, Aubry’s hand and eyes in synch, until he felt a part of it.
He knew this tyrant king. His ancestors had known it, cluttering things that were the size of squirrels when beasts the size of houses ruled the Earth. Back that far, before anything with the awareness of life had lived, he and this thing had known each other. Sixty million years before man it had lived, but within Aubry was the germ of cells older than man. Something that understood. That had always fled from creatures such as the King. That hid in shadow, and upon occasion ate the eggs of such beasts.
The spirit of a million generations of living things witnessed this moment. That place within him was tired of waiting, impatient now to come face to face with fears older than thought. It guided Aubry’s arm, so that the cast began in his legs, which pulled their strength from the earth. The cast twisted at the hips, and whipped the shoulder forward. He loosed the spear.
It flew true, and buried itself in the beast’s eye.
The rex reared up, howling anguish and rage and perhaps, at last, fear.
This thing from the deepest depths of their nightmares feared men! And all of the young warriors heard it in the rex’s cry. Fear. And Aubry’s heart sang: There lives within you a force equal to the most terrible creature ever to walk the Earth!
The rex threw itself at them, the spear waggling from its bloodied, ruptured eye socket like a flagpole. The tail smashed at another young warrior and he howled, nerve breaking, trying to flee up the wall of the amphitheater. The spearmen on the wall pushed and poked him back down, hooting. He fell sprawling into the flames and screamed, racing up blindly, his hair burning—directly into the range of the blood-maddened, half-blinded rex.
Its head, as large as the cab of a truck, lunged down and snapped, the teeth clacking shut. Half the boy’s body protruded from its jaws. The legs twitched spastically, intestines sliding down the front of his loincloth like Christmas treats exploding from a ruptured piñata.
But one of the other boys lunged in while the head was low, and thrust with his spear. And then another.
Blood flowed from a terrible gash above the single, unblinking eye. The beast scraped at its eye with those ridiculous forepaws, trying to clear its sight. But the gash was deep, and although it blinked and wiped, it could no longer see.
There were nine young warriors remaining, nine against this thing resurrected from their darkest fantasies. Behind them, the flames crackled, nearer now. The rex stopped, shook its head until the dangling human legs fell free. It stood tall, head cocked slightly to the side, smelling the air, feeling its wounds, and perhaps in some saurian manner singing its own death song.
It lunged at them and the chain broke, snapped with a sound like a dying dream. The hairless apes evaded but did not flee, harrying it, screaming and tormenting, but scoring again and again with their spears. The rex stood with its back to the fire, tail thrashing, face and jaws crimsoned. Its pitifully small paws wiped at its cuts, and failed to do anything but widen them. The stench of burning flesh filled the air. Blood flowed from wounds in chest and flank. Its chest labored.
There was a moment of quiet, a moment when something in that arena shifted, quieted in respect for what was about to occur.
Another spear was launched, catching the rex in its exposed throat. It pawed at the spear, splintering the shaft. It charged again, so fast that one young warrior hadn’t time to get out of the way and was trampled.
But the spears flashed now and, every time they did, left another thread of crimson. The rex was laboring now. Had its tiny mind been capable of irony, it might have asked why it had been born again, after cold eons, to die so. Still, when it walked, the Earth thundered; and if its walk was hobbled by shorn tendons, it was still the walk of a king.
An old, and tired, and wounded king, but a monarch nonetheless.
The rex’s mouth opened to the artificial sky above it, and it screamed. In that scream was all of the rage and pain of a lost race, a vanished time. Then another spear struck it in the throat. A third spear, cast by Aubry’s arm, thrown with all of the strength of his body, and powered, this time, by love.
And the rex regarded him. Aubry swore that it looked directly at him, blood flowing from its mouth, looking into him. Something passed between them, some moment, some aliveness.
It took a step toward him, and Aubry didn’t move. The fire was close behind him. He could, in some distant manner, feel its heat. And the beast, dying now, blood bubbling from its gouged flanks, seemed almost intelligent. Almost inquisitive, as if wondering who had done such a thing to it. To Aubry’s mind it was no longer a monster but merely an animal that, like all living things, must at last confront its own death.
And they knew each other.
One of the young warriors dashed in, and slashed the right leg once, twice again, until the giant bunched tendons were laid bare by a flap of skin the size of a flag. The rex twisted on the axis of the ruined leg as it buckled. It fell into the fire.
It struggled to climb out, but was prodded back at spear-point, unable to walk.
It lay on its side now, thrashing for a few moments, then quiet, then thrashing once again. The great chest heaved, striving to pump blood to legs that would no longer work. Tiny clawed hands scrabbled for purchase it couldn’t find.
Aubry ran forward and buried his spear in the rex’s eye. He drove it in, ground it in, pushed with maniac strength until it broke the wall of bone and pierced the brain.
He remembered fire.
He remembered floating in the air, as its head jerked reflexively.
He remembered striking the ground, his arm slapping hard, his body relaxed, taking, breaking the fall.
He remembered standing, looking at the King upon its pyre, flanks still shuddering.
He remembered the survivors, heaving, bloodied, exhausted, filing out the door as the flames rose up to consume the amphitheater’s floor.
He remembered his last thought:
The King is dead.
Long live …