The First Riders Read online

  THE FIRST RIDERS

  David Ferguson

  © David Ferguson, 2013

  Prologue

  A hot sun baked the rocks of the desert, the blinding glare fading the colours to neutrality. The radiant heat burned the exposed portions of Dr Chester Jones, palaeontologist, and steamed the unexposed parts. The glare was achingly bright, the heat tremendous. Chester Jones removed his bush hat, wiped his brow with the back of his hand and replaced the hat on his balding head. Fossil hunting was hot work in a place like this. Senegal was on the edge of the Sahara - a very hot place - and here in this shallow valley it was even hotter. After he had studied what he thought he could see, he would break into the ice-box for another beer. Chester glanced briefly towards his friend and colleague, Dr Eddie Mizell, who was working fifty yards away, and observed that he was equally hot. Jean Wilson and Roger Schmidt, their students, were out of sight. The tents of their camp and the two vehicles shimmered in the distance. He returned his gaze to the area of ground just in front of him.

  This area of desert, sixty-five million years before, had been a swamp. Over the intervening years the mud had slowly fossilised to a soft shale, trapping any animal that had fallen in. The area marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the Paleocene, that cataclysmic time when the dinosaurs and many other animals had disappeared. The swamp had its secrets and right now Chester thought one was about to be revealed.

  Just in front of him lay a small piece of rock. It looked like a fossilised bone, and an interesting one at that. He picked it up and inspected it. It looked like a finger-bone from a small dinosaur. He called out to Eddie.

  Eddie Mizell looked up from his inspection of the rocks.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I've found something! It might be a dinosaur!’

  They studied the fossil together. It was about eight centimetres long and one centimetre thick.

  ‘Dinosaur finger-bone?’ Eddie asked tentatively. ‘One of the smaller species. An ornithopod, maybe?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Where did you find it?’

  Chester pointed to where he had marked the place with his hammer. They dropped to their knees and carefully studied the ground.

  ‘There’s more here,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Yes. We need Jean and Roger.’

  He picked up the radio and called them.

  The four scientists carefully searched the area for the rest of the day, stopping only to take an occasional beer out of the cold box. By the time the sun was setting they had partially uncovered what seemed to be the almost complete skeleton of a small dinosaur. They did not know what it was.

  It was not until evening, after the meal had been cleared away, that they took the first steps towards identification. It was much cooler now that the sun had set. The desert was inky black beyond the yellow light of their gas lamps. Chester took the first fossil - the tentative finger-bone - out of the collecting bag, unwrapped it, and placed it on the inspection table. They gazed at it in interest.

  ‘We need a book,’ Eddie said briefly. ‘This one is not obvious at all.’

  Jean picked up the fossil and studied it carefully.

  ‘What's this?’ she asked. ‘This kind of ridge thing.’

  Eddie looked up from his reading.

  ‘What ridge thing?’

  ‘Look, just here.’

  She showed him a ridge about seven millimetres wide and three millimetres high which ran all the way round the exposed part of the bone. It seemed to be perfectly circular.

  Chester took the fossil from her with curiosity. He rubbed the ridge with his thumb. Its touch was strange.

  ‘Well I don't know,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I'll try scraping it and see what happens.’

  He worked at the ridge with his tool, watched fascinatedly by the others. Very slowly the underlying material began to appear. It was metallic, and it was yellow.

  ‘It's gold,’ Jean said, astonished.

  ‘It can't be. This is a fossil sixty-five million years old.’

  ‘Well there's no point in arguing,’ Eddie said. ‘Let's clean it some more, then we'll know.’

  After an hour of careful scraping there was no doubt. They had uncovered a circular gold ring. It was decorated with a design of hexagons like a honeycomb.

  ‘I can't believe this,’ Chester said despairingly. ‘This is a fossil, surely?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Eddie said briskly. ‘We all know a fossil when we see one.’

  The silence was broken by Roger: ‘When all possibilities fail then all we have left is the impossible.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sherlock Holmes. What I mean is - we are looking at a fossil finger with a gold ring on it. There is only one explanation - this is the fossil of an intelligent dinosaur, one capable of making artifacts.’

  There was a short silence, which was broken by Jean.

  ‘This is awesome,’ she said. ‘Are you sure about this?’ Couldn’t it be modern?’

  Eddie gave her a hard stare. ‘How?’ He picked up the fossil and held it in front of her nose. ‘This is rock. That makes it a fossil. And as it was embedded in Cretaceous shale that makes it a Cretaceous fossil. We have here a sixty-five million year old gold ring, Jean.’

  ‘OK, Eddie, calm down,’ Chester said. ‘We have to be sceptical. The rest of the world will be, you can be assured.’

  ‘That’s true enough. Anyway, we’ve got the rest of the skeleton to dig out. We ought to be able to do that in the time left.’

  ‘Sure. No problem. That shale’s pretty soft. We’ll have it packed away within the week.’ Chester suddenly grinned. ‘And then we stun the world.’

  Eddie grinned back. ‘That’s my boy. We’re about to become famous. However, right now we ought to be getting to bed. The skeleton can wait until tomorrow.’

  Roger said, ‘If it's got a large cranium, we really are in business.’

  ‘You're not kidding. Look, let’s forget it and get some shut-eye.’

  Over the next few days they systematically uncovered the skeleton. On the third day they located the skull.

  Very carefully they chipped away the rock and the extent of the cranium became slowly obvious. It was huge. It also had a circular hole in the right temple. The scientists looked at it in amazement.

  Chester tried to stay calm. ‘This creature has been murdered,’ he said. ‘Unless I’m going mad, this hole has been created by a spear or an arrow or even a bullet. This is incredible. The sooner we get this skeleton to a museum, the better. We have here the find of the century, fellows. An unknown species of dinosaur with a huge cranium and a gold ring on a finger and a hole in its head. This, my friends, is the big one.’

  On the last evening, Jean asked the question they had all been thinking.

  ‘We seem to have an idea as to what it looked like. It was quite small - less than 1.5 metres high - it seemed to have stood erect, it had binocular vision and large eye-sockets, but what did it do? And to what sort of civilisation did it belong? And if there was a civilisation then how come everybody’s missed it until now?’

  Chester answered, speaking slowly. ‘We can only answer one of those questions, Jean. We’ve missed the civilisation until now because it probably only lasted a few thousand years. After all , we’ve only been civilised for four thousand years at the most, and what’s four thousand years in sixty-five million? It’s a tiny slice of strata, and even if you did find it you would still have to find the fossils within it - not easy, as we know.’

  The others nodded in agreement.

  ‘We’ve been incredibly lucky,’ Jean said quietly. ‘We’re privileged.’

  The dinosaur bones were carefully removed from the si
te, carefully packed in boxes, and loaded onto their vehicles. They drove along the dusty tracks to the main road and the airport at Dakar. Eventually the fossils were transported home to their museum, where specialists carefully cleaned the precious rocks.

  It was a year after the initial find that the report appeared. Scientists around the world read first with disbelief and then with wonder. The illustration of a reconstruction of the intelligent animal was the centrepiece. It showed an erect biped with a long, lean body, powerful arms with long claw-like fingers, and a huge head. The eyes were enormous and forward-looking. Its height was indicated at 1.4 metres.

  Jean made dinner for her boy-friend the evening the report was published. While they were drinking coffee, she opened the report at the illustration and showed it to him.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘This is it?’

  ‘Yep. He may have been feathered, like Dromaeosaur, but we weren’t bold enough to take that possibility on. Essentially, though, this is he. Meet Sapienteles, the dinosaur with a brain the size of a planet. He could make gold alloy and fashion it into an intricately patterned ring - all of sixty-five million years ago. Think of that.’

  ‘So what happened? Why isn’t he still around ruling us?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Brian. All the dinosaurs were wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous Period, sixty-five million years ago, probably by a meteorite impact. You know that.’

  ‘OK, but some traces should have remained - buildings or roads or something.’

  ‘I don't think so. It happened so long ago. Think of the buildings on Crete. They're less than four thousand years old, and yet they all but disappeared. The civilisation we're talking about is at least sixty-five million years old, and probably only lasted a few thousands of years - a sliver of time on the geological scale. It would be completely obliterated.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘It's the same with the animals themselves. If they evolved right at the end of the Cretaceous then they may have been around for a few tens of thousands of years - like us. We would need to have discovered that slice of time to have found them, and we didn't until now.’

  ‘Right. We’ll drink to that.’ Brian gazed thoughtfully at the illustration. ‘I take it this pale khaki skin colour he’s been given is a guess. You only have the bones to go on.’

  ‘Oh, sure. It seemed a reasonable colour to pick. He lived in a fairly dry savannah, a bit like East Africa, I should think. They were probably hunters, so we gave him a camouflage colour suitable for the terrain. But he could have been shocking pink and sky blue for all we know.’

  ‘M’yes. But the character you found was not a hunter, he wore a gold ring. He could have been a bank clerk or a tax collector or a PR executive.’

  Jean laughed. ‘I suppose so, but to me he was a hunter-gatherer who somehow came in possession of a gold ring. He hunted hadrosaurs, which were the wildebeest or buffalo of the region, and fended off tyrannosaurs and dyonichycus.’

  ‘Tyrannosaurus I know, but what was the other?’

  ‘Dyonichycus, a velocoraptor, a small - though not much smaller than our sapienteles - highly vicious carnivore with a scimitar-like hind claw. Not something you would want to meet on a dark night.’

  ‘Oh, those. No indeed. But I expect he lived in a town - there would have been towns, wouldn’t there?’

  ‘There must have been for the ring to have been made. It’s bizarre. Up until now we have assumed that prehistoric times were empty of civilisation, but it seems that at the end of the Cretaceous at least there was something of the sort. We don’t know whether it was advanced like ours, or like - say - the Romans. We don’t know whether it covered the whole world or whether it was just confined to what is now West Africa. Mind you, if they had gold rings then they probably had ships. The continents were much closer then, and smaller because of the warm climate and the higher sea levels. Getting from one to another would have been much easier for them than it was for Columbus.’

  ‘It was warm?’

  ‘Mostly. It was cooler towards the poles, of course, but even somewhere like Norway was warmer than it is now. The terrain would have been reasonably familiar. In West Africa and the Americas there weren’t too many trees, just ferns and giant horsetails, but further north there were firs and pines just like now. Flowering plants were scarce but there were insects and birds, much as now. It was the dinosaurs that were the main difference. Only the birds remain of the dinosaurs - and look how obvious they are in our world compared to - say - mammals. Imagine what it would be like with dinosaurs around.’

  Brian grinned. ‘Yes, I know, you’ve mentioned it before.’

  ‘But this is different,’ she cried. ‘Now we know there was an intelligent dinosaur who created a civilisation that predates ours by sixty-five million years. He may have had abilities that we don’t possess. Look at birds. They’re the nearest we have to dinosaurs. They have clocks and compasses in their heads so they can navigate around the world. Maybe dinosaurs could do the same. Maybe they were great travellers - who knows? If the asteroid hadn’t come, what could this dinosaur have achieved?’

  Jean lapsed into silence. Sixty-five million years ago an intelligent dinosaur wearing a gold ring had died in a swamp. She tried to imagine the scene - the steaming swamp, the great ferns, the slight creature falling in, perhaps. Long ago there had been a civilisation of dinosaurs. They could make gold rings. Presumably they had houses and towns and jobs and governments. What were they now? A few bits of rock, that's all. She picked up the drawing and studied it. She liked the creature she saw, its high forehead, its huge wide-spaced eyes, its strong arms and long fingered hands. It looked like a friend, someone you could rely on. She felt incredibly sad.

  PART 1

  The Hunters

  Chapter 1

  Eln-Tika listened to the night. Nearby the wind gently stirred the skin coverings of the group's tents. A little beyond, the blenjis occasionally snorted in their sleep. Beyond them the giant plants of the savannah rustled quietly. Once a nightbird hooted.

  Eln-Tika was happy; there was no danger. She pulled her quilted cloak more tightly over her shoulders to keep out the cool of the night. She chewed slowly on a piece of dried flathead meat, slices of which she kept in her pouch. It had been sun-dried with a sauce of herbs and berries and was delicious. Most of the octet carried them because they were easy to carry and lasted a long time. As she slowly chewed she made a conscious scan for sounds, but she heard nothing untoward. Relaxed and happy, she continued her study of the stars. It was partly cloudy, and the Snake had disappeared for the moment. But the Zigzag was still in view, its five stars blazing down from the night. Eln-Tika liked the stars. The group was in the middle of a marvellous discussion as to what they were, and she had decided views on the matter, but really it was perhaps best to accept them without question, for the question could never be answered.

  She continued to stare with her huge deep brown eyes. Sometimes if you stared at the night long enough you saw a thin bright line streak across the sky, which disappeared almost as soon as you realised it was there. She gazed intently, but tonight there were none.

  Round her neck hung the wooden whistle on its leather thong which was used to wake the rest of the group at times of danger. By her side lay the short, powerful bow which was the group's main weapon. She knew she would have no use for either this night. Her ability to detect danger was her great asset, the reason why she was held in such regard by the others. She remembered the time when the speed-dragon had attacked them. She had known it was there long before they saw it, and they had had time to make themselves ready. She remembered clearly the great enemy crashing slowly to the ground, killed by the poisoned arrows of the octet. They had all been totally exhausted at the end of the long fight.

  The sun was rising. The night sounds faded in the increasing light and birds began to sing. The faint glow in the eastern sky brought the giant ferns into silhouette and the l
ow outlines of the tents into view. Movement inside them indicated that her companions were stirring. Wath-Moll stuck his head out of the gap and blinked at her.

  ‘Good morning,’ Eln-Tika said coolly.

  ‘Yes,’ the newcomer answered absently. ‘It was a quiet night, wasn’t it?’

  ‘There's no danger,’ Eln-Tika agreed.

  His head disappeared into the tent to re-emerge shortly afterwards. He climbed out dressed in his riding clothes - leather tunic, trousers and moccasins. He was slightly shorter and slightly stockier than average with a face that combined good humour and authority.

  ‘It's berry picking, then,’ Wath-Moll said. He yawned, stretched his arms, and gazed round the camp.

  The tents were small, merely sleeping shelters from the weather. Each consisted of a frame of branches held together with an ingenious system of slots and pegs over which the skin of a flathead grazer had been thrown and then pegged to the ground. They weighed very little and could be packed into a single long saddle-bag. There were eight tents - one for each member of the octet. They were arranged into a circle, the tents pointing towards the central cooking and meeting area.

  The others emerged one by one into the ever-brightening sun and each asked the same question: is there danger? And each time Eln-Tika answered in the same way: there's no danger.

  The beginning of the day was the best time. All around there was sound: birds singing, little animals scampering through the ferns and the trees. Later it would become hotter and quieter, when, with luck, the octet would have done its work for the day. In the evening, when it was cool again, they would eat whatever they had gathered or hunted during the day.

  The octet made preparations for berry picking. Wath-Moll, as leader, chose who would go and who would stay. Staying meant preparing the meat from yesterday's kill, which was a congenial task, but not, in Eln-Tika’s opinion, as congenial as berry picking. Not everyone agreed with her on this though, and the division was made without difficulty. The five who were leaving the camp strapped their bows and scabbards of arrows on their backs, and made towards the blenjis, now wide awake and waiting to be ridden.