Free Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova

warily searching for more snakes as we gathered up the bodies of the slain. Broken-armed Pirk was among them. And three of Kraal's men. And gray-bearded Noch; his return to Paradise had been brief and bitter.
    All that day we scoured the canyon floor for bodies. To my surprised relief we found only two others. About noontime Kraal and three of his men came to me.
    He shook his head at the bodies of the slain. "I told you, Orion," he said sadly, choking back tears of frustrated hate. "There is nothing we can do against the masters. They hunt us for their sport. They make slaves of our people. All we can do is bow down and accept."
    Anya heard him. She had been kneeling among the dead bodies, not of the humans but of the snakes, dissecting one of them to search for its poison glands.
    Angrily she sprang to her feet and flung the flayed body of the twenty-foot snake at Kraal. Its weight staggered him.
    "All we can do is bow down?" Anya raged at him. "Timid man, we can kill our enemies. As they would kill us!"
    Kraal goggled at her. No woman had ever spoken so harshly to him before. I doubt that any man had.
    Seething like the enraged goddess she was, Anya advanced on Kraal, flint knife in hand. He backed away from her.
    "The god called you Kraal the Leader," Anya taunted. "But this morning you look more like Kraal the Coward! Is that the name you want?"
    "No . . . of course not . . ."
    "Then stop crying like a woman and start acting like a leader. Gather all the bands of people together and, together, we will fight the masters and kill them all!"
    Kraal's knees actually buckled. "All the tribes . . . ?"
    Several of the other men had gathered around us by now. One of them said, "We must ask the god who speaks about this."
    "Yes," I agreed swiftly. "Tonight. The god only speaks after the sun goes down."
    Anya's lips twitched in a barely suppressed grin. We both knew what the god would say.

CHAPTER 8

    Thus we began uniting the tribes of Paradise.
    Once Kraal got over the shock of the snakes' attack and heard Anya's god-voice telling him that it was his destiny to resist the masters in all their forms and might, he actually began to develop into Kraal the Leader. And our people began to learn how to defend themselves.
    Months passed, marked by the rhythmically changing face of the moon. We left the place of the god-who-speaks and moved even deeper into the forest that seemed to stretch all the way across Africa from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. It extended southward, according to the tales we heard, evolving gradually into the tropical rain forest that covered much of the rest of the continent.
    Each time we met another tribe we tried to convince them that they should work with us to resist the masters. Most tribal leaders resisted, instead, the idea of doing anything new, anything that would incur the terrible wrath of the fearsome dragons who raided their homes from time to time.
    We showed them the skulls of the snakes we had slain. We told stories about my fight against the dragon. Anya developed into a real priestess, falling into trances whenever it was necessary to speak with the voice of a god. She also showed the women how to gather grains and bake bread, how to make medicines from the juices of leaves and roots. I showed the men how to make better tools and weapons.
    I found, stored in my memory, the knowledge of cold-working soft metals such as copper and gold. Gold, as always, was extremely rare, although we found one tribe where the chief's women hung nuggets of gold from their earlobes for adornment. I showed them how to beat the soft shining metal into crescents and circles, the best I could do with the primitive stone hammers available. Yet it pleased the women very much. I became an admired man, which helped us to convince the chief to join our movement.
    In several scattered places we found lumps of copper lying on the ground, partially buried in grass and dirt. These I cold-worked into slim blades and arrowheads,