Ancient Fire by Mark London Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

ratlike creatures
who scamper around the feet of the more advanced Saurian species
have grown here into all sorts of exotic creatures who roar, growl,
beat their chests, walk around on two legs, and use all kinds of
tools. Their records show that, like mammals everywhere, they also
engage in the high-risk “live birth” of their young, as opposed to
hatching from the vastly safer egg-and-nest method.
    Eli the Boy was one such mammal. His species
call themselves Homo sapiens , because they
all presume they can think. They do have
many languages. But they are always making trouble for each other
and lighting many fires.
    That said, I must add the most surprising
thing of all: This Eli the Boy, this young mammal, has become my
friend. As has Thea the Girl — born of Hypatia, the time scholar
from Alexandria — whom the boy and I would soon meet.
    They were helpful because they trusted me and
wound up defending me, despite our having just met. Like two
leaf-eaters assisting a stranger in a roomful of carnivores —
before knowing which I was.
    I realize such closeness breaks all the basic
rules about field-trip safety.
    One thing about Earth Orange: It never runs
out of ways to surprise you.
     
     
     

Chapter Seven
    Eli: The Lighthouse
    415 C.E.
     
    I’d become unstuck, unglued in time. Tangled
in it.
    Thanks to my dad’s experiments, and Mr.
Howe’s WOMPERs, I wasn’t going to move straight through from the
beginning of my life to the end of it, like everybody else. I was
going to be twirled around in time and history, like a smoothie in
a great big cosmic blender.
    Strange things happen when you zigzag through
time like that. First, you go into the Fifth Dimension, where it’s
much harder to tell the difference between time and space, or when
and where. Or even who and what — you’re not quite sure, when
you’re there, where you end and the rest
of everything else begins. In the Fifth Dimension, things kind of flow ….
    Time gets stretched out. And somehow, in some
part of your brain, when you land in a ship next to a talking
dinosaur, who turns out to be about your age in dinosaur years,
you’re not that surprised.
    And when the time-ship journey seems to be
taking a while, like a cross-country drive with your father, you
get to know the dinosaur boy. After all, you’re not going anywhere
else. Yet.
    His name is Clyne, and he was doing some kind
of science project for his school. Apparently, by landing in his
ship, I’d messed up all his careful calculations, and now his trip
was ruined, because he didn’t know where he was headed.
    As it turned out, he was headed for ancient
Alexandria, in the year 415. And so was I.
    Judging from the sun, we arrived around
noon.
    We first appeared hovering over a giant
lighthouse in the harbor. Now, arriving in a round, metallic ship
in full daylight isn’t exactly the way to slip in somewhere without
being noticed. On top of that, there was a beam of rainbow-colored
light pouring out of the tower, directly hitting Clyne’s ship.
    Making us even more obvious than we already
were.
    There was a big crowd of people around the
lighthouse already, but whatever they were there for, they stopped
doing it to stare at us.
    Clyne looked through the glass at the people
below. I was squinting because the rainbow beam was so bright.
    “Mammal dance! Tchkkk-tchkk-kk !” Clyne said excitedly. He’d already
taken off his lingo- spot in the ship, because after we’d been
talking awhile, he said human speech seemed pretty simple, and if
he learned it on his own, he could maybe fulfill some language
requirement at his school.
    I decided to keep my lingo-spot on. There was
little chance I was going to learn to speak Lizard anytime soon.
With or without the tongue-clicking.
    As for what Clyne described as a “dance” — he
was still figuring out which words go with which situations — to me
it just looked like people standing still with their jaws open.
    They were dressed in robes