Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series Read online

“Ayuvah!” Tull shouted, stunned at the betrayal.

  “This money would feed my family for a year,” Ayuvah countered.

  Scandal cut the coin purse from his belt. “If the man of fire gives me a refrigeration cube, this will be worth it. I promise, you won’t regret this.”

  “Then I am coming with you,” Tull said, “to make sure you don’t steal anything.”

  Scandal glared at Tull; his face burned red with rage. “I am not a thief!” he shouted, “I am an honest businessman, making a business contact!”

  Tull felt embarrassed at making such an accusation, yet he could not fathom Scandal’s designs. “I know,” Tull said, “but I’ll come just in case you are tempted to become a thief.”

  Wisteria woke then, and sat wrapped in her furs. Her face was white and pasty, and when Tull offered her breakfast, she refused to eat.

  Tull told her of their plan to visit the cave, but she complained, “I feel ill. You go on ahead without me.” An hour later, Phylomon returned from his visit with Ironwood Woman, ate a few bites of corn cake, and went to sleep. Ayuvah, Tull, and Scandal crept from camp, followed by Tirilee.

  The journey to the cave was only two miles, yet in that space they passed three dead dragons, their legs and wings stiffened with rigor mortis, their flesh blasted by fire from the red drones, their mouths burned by the plasma of giants that had battled them in the sky.

  There were not enough buzzards in the valley to eat so much flesh, and on one carcass a black-and-white magpie feasted. It jumped into the sky at their approach, then dipped and soared, dipped and soared in unhurried retreat, its tail feathers floating out behind it.

  The four of them climbed a long low hill, and at last came to a rocky white bluff between two arms of the hill. Twisted scrub oaks grew along the cliff face. Ayuvah pointed to the oaks, brushed a strand of red hair from his eyes, and said, “The cave is there.”

  “Where?” Scandal asked, searching the base of the cliff.

  Ayuvah walked forward, looked at the stone, and announced loudly, “Falhalloran, it is I, Ayuvah, I have returned.”

  With a sound of rushing wind, the white stone crumbled into dust and dropped like a curtain.

  Scandal fell backward in surprise. “What in the name of hell!” he shouted, running back from the cave.

  Ayuvah said, “We are going to get ourselves killed,” and backed away.

  Tull had been too startled to run. He walked forward, looked into what seemed like a natural cave. The walls oozed with mud and limestone. Cave coral had formed on the floor, and travertine ran in ridges down the sides. The whole place was wet and dripping, and in the middle of the floor lay a porcupine skeleton.

  From these signs, it was hard to believe that Falhalloran would be anything but a gutted ruin. Tull imagined a city of wood and stone, with rotting floors and bent walls. In such a musty place as this, he suspected, that was all that could be left. Yet he spotted tracks on the floor where Phylomon and Ayuvah had entered the day before.

  “I will not go in,” Ayuvah said. His legs trembled. “I should not have brought you here. I broke a promise.”

  Tull walked forward, inspected the walls. Tirilee followed close behind; she crept up and actually took his hand. Tull looked at her in surprise, and the young Dryad shook, then sniffled in terror. “I want to see it, too!”

  Scandal hurried forward, following a close third. Tull took a few steps, and, as if by mutual consent, the others each took exactly one step to match his own. The tunnel stood before them, leading far back into the blackness. He felt a warm wind brush his face—like the liquid exhalations of a woman’s breath, blowing out from the tunnel.

  “I hear breathing,” Tirilee said softly. “Something is alive in there!”

  Tull felt it too, the hot breath of something infinitely large. The hair on Tull’s back stood on end, and Tirilee clutched his arm.

  “I am alive,” a voice whispered from the cave, ringing from stone to stone—a powerful commanding voice, neither male nor female. “Come into me.”

  Tull looked at Tirilee, and her lips were drawn back in terror. He asked, “Who are you?”

  “Falhalloran, the City of New Birth.” the voice whispered.

  “Listen,” Scandal whispered to Tull. “This is wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe we should leave.”

  Tull watched the fat man tremble. So he had wanted to loot the place, he realized. Scandal had come only because he had hoped to sneak past the man of fire.

  “We’ve come to see you, Falhalloran,” Tull shouted. “Can you show yourself?”

  Scandal’s eyes grew round and he moaned in fear. In the distance, far back in the cave, there was a scream like the sound of metal twisting.

  Suddenly the mud and limestone walls of the cave began to glow. Not the comforting glow of a fire, but a fierce glow that frightened Tull. With a rush of wind, a great stone pillar in front of them burst into a flame of light that gave no more warmth than the sun striking one’s face, and the pillar shrank into the form of a man whose features were molten glass, whose body was somehow fiercely bright.

  The man was tall, like Phylomon, with a stretched look and angular cheekbones. Yet, unlike Phylomon, he had hair—white filaments of flowing glass. He wore a simple tunic, open at the chest, that left his arms bare.

  Tull felt a wave of heat rush over him, a burning within his own breast, and looked down. His own body, and the bodies of those who were with him, also glowed. Yet they did not look like glass. Somehow, he suspected that he had been changed into something not quite flesh and bone.

  “I am the Aspect of Falhalloran,” the man said. As his mouth moved, Tull detected tiny structures, like intricate crossbeams and braces that made up the fine musculature of his mouth. He was obviously neither glass nor flesh—a structure of some other material. His voice penetrated Tull, seemed to inscribe itself in his mind. “What do you desire?”

  Scandal took one look at Falhalloran and promptly fainted.

  Tull pointed at Scandal lying in a heap on the floor. “We came to ask your help. To the north, in Bashevgo, and to the west, in Craal, the Slave Lords rule, and they keep forty million of the Pwi in captivity. For eight hundred years we have been at war with them, and they have won. In our own land, the sea serpents that have formed an eco-barrier for a thousand years have died. We want you to send your giants to save us from the carnosaurs that will swim across the ocean, and we want you to help free our people from captivity.”

  “I am Falhalloran, the City of New Birth,” the man of fire said. “I am not a weapon of war. Neither I nor the giants I created last night can move from Sanctum.”

  “Yet you are the most powerful creature on this planet!” Tull countered. “Surely you could give us weapons!”

  “I could teach you to make weapons to destroy your enemies, destroy this world,” the man of fire said, “but in time your enemies would wrest them from you. Your end would be more miserable than your life is now.”

  “Is there nothing you can do to help us?” Tull begged.

  The man of fire said, “I do not bestow weapons,” and his light began to fade until suddenly he became nothing more than a stone pillar once again.

  ***

  Chapter 7: Stirrings

  Tull looked to Tirilee in confusion, wondering what to do. He started to bend over Scandal, to pull him from the cave, but Tirilee stared at Tull as if lost in a dream, her pupils had gone unnaturally wide, her jaw slack. She clung to him with one hand. She was such a child, just a stick of a girl.

  As Tull reached down for Scandal, he suddenly felt something strange—a deep attraction for Tirilee. It was something in the way that she stood, the way she looked at him, the perfume of her scent. He longed suddenly to hold her.

  Tull looked up into her face, and knew that she felt it too. She was under a spell.

  She lurched forward a step, twisted an arm around his neck, and her arm felt as strong as metal bars. She drew him close, wrapped both arms behind
his head.

  A hot tremor pierced him, and he wanted her, wanted her more than he’d ever wanted Wisteria. Every muscle seemed to go taut.

  She parted her lips slowly, and they touched his own lips. Her breath was warm and moist, scented of earth and flowers.

  She pulled her whole body against him, as if to kiss him with every inch of her flesh, and he was painfully aware of the way that the hot nubs of her little breasts against his chest.

  All thought left his mind. As a child he had once gotten cut severely, and Chaa had drugged him with opium, then sewed the wound closed. He felt that way now, drugged, empty of thought, unable to waken.

  Yet a small corner of his mind called out, “Wisteria.” The words escaped his lips.

  Tirilee pushed him away and suddenly staggered back three steps, then turned and ran from the cave.

  He merely stood and tried to regain his senses.

  He knew he did not love her, did not care for her any more than he did a stranger. Yet the smell of her had been so tantalizing, like the scent of honeysuckle blown on the wind. He could not resist the temptation to inhale the air, to catch that beautiful scent.

  As he filled his lungs, waves of desire for Tirilee rushed over him again, and he stood alone and helpless in their wake, as if standing in the sand before the rushing waves of the ocean, knowing that they would knock him about and carry him away.

  “God, if you exist,” he mouthed, unwilling to speak in the stillness of the cave, “I love my wife. Do not let Tirilee’s Time of Devotion come now.”

  Yet his prayer felt empty. Dryads had been destroying the lives of the Pwi for generations. As truly as he had heard the voice of Falhalloran, Tull knew Tirilee would take him.

  He stooped to pick up Scandal, and in the mud he found a ball made of brass, a simple thing with the edges of continents etched on it. Tull picked it up, looked about.

  He’d asked the aspect for weapons. Was this a gift from Falhalloran?

  He tucked it into his food pouch, and then pulled Scandal to the mouth of the cave, out into the sunlight.

  Ayuvah stood waiting outside, pale with fear. He was shaking, stamping from foot to foot nervously. He glanced helplessly off into the brush, toward where Tirilee had run, then helped pull Scandal into the open, examining him as if to discover why he’d been struck down.

  “What happened? Why did the Dryad run?” Ayuvah asked.

  “She was afraid,” Tull said, unwilling to tell the whole truth.

  Scandal began to rouse. He shook his head, looked up at them in surprise, peered back at the cave, and asked, “Was it a dream?”

  Tull looked toward the cave. Silently, somehow the curtain of stone had drawn back in place. No one would ever imagine the wonders hid behind it. He said bitterly, “It was no dream.”

  They walked back to camp in defeat. Ayuvah returned the thirty silver eagles to Scandal and would not keep even part of it. At camp, they found Phylomon awake, fixing lunch.

  The Hukm milled about aimlessly or bartered in their marketplace over fruit or hides or cloth. They stood waggling their stubby tails, occasionally grunting for emphasis as they finger talked. For all their size, they were unnervingly quiet. Short Tail and Born-in-Snow quietly hooked a woolly mammoth to the wagon, guiding it back between the wooden tugs with grunts and hand movements. Short Tail was dusky red and had shaved his head of all hair but two lines that ran from his eyebrows back to the nape of his neck. Born-in-Snow was darker in color, but his winter white was coming in rapidly, so much so that his back and rump had gone nearly all white.

  Phylomon grinned at them knowingly. “I hope you enjoyed your little jaunt to Falhalloran.” he said. “I hope you got what you went for.”

  “I saw no city,” Scandal said in disgust.

  “True, but you saw its Aspect, its personification,” Phylomon said. “I helped bury the city years ago. It was in the winter, and Captain Chu had been beheaded by the Aenthari—the first tribe of Neanderthals to be captured by Slave Lords, the first to become Thralls. Many Slave Lords in those days were mere technicians, and they wanted to break away from Anee. We were afraid that if they knew that Falhalloran had been only damaged—not destroyed—by the red drones, they would have tried to turn it into a vessel of war. They would have attacked the red drones, or at the least tried to break away from the planet, and Falhalloran would have been annihilated. So we buried it. For a thousand years, I told no one that the city even existed. Now, it doesn’t matter. Falhalloran is a city of peace, a city of creation. No one living can turn it into a weapon of war.”

  “You know,” Scandal said, “there was a rock wall that turned to dust and fell to the ground, and in an instant, while our backs were turned, it rose back up!”

  “The wall is made of millions of tiny machines the size of specks of dust,” Phylomon said. “Each machine has legs like a spider. They hold themselves together to form a wall. If you’d looked closely when the wall rose, you’d have seen motes crawl into place.”

  “We asked the man of fire for help,” Tull said. “We asked him for weapons. Yet I found only this.” He pulled the brass ball from his pocket.

  Phylomon looked at Tull for a long moment, gauging him. “Falhalloran did not leave you empty-handed. I asked him to give you what he thought best. It is a weather globe. Here …” Phylomon knelt and pulled a piece of straw from the ground. At the top of the globe was an indentation. He stuck the straw into the indentation and pushed. The ball suddenly jumped into the air and expanded until it was four feet in diameter. It hung like a moon, blue and white, with streaks of pink. Tull somehow grasped that this was a map of his world. He could see the terminus dividing night from day, and he saw the vivid blue oceans of Anee and white clouds billowing over the land.

  “We are here,” Phylomon said, pointing to a speck of fire on one edge of the continent. “As you can see, we have blue skies above. Out in Hotland the sun is rising.” He pointed to a great swirl of clouds, “and thunderstorms are rolling in.”

  Phylomon reached up into the air, into the heart of the globe, and the illusion disappeared. He held in his hand the brass ball.

  “Tull, this is yours,” he said.

  “I … might break it,” Tull said, not wanting to touch the thing. “My hands are too clumsy.”

  “Take it,” Phylomon said, “This is your future. Technology is your future.” He gave the ball to Tull.

  Wisteria sat on a log, still pasty-faced. She finally got up, stumbled a few feet and vomited.

  Tull took a pitcher and filled a cup with water so that Wisteria could rinse her mouth.

  Ayuvah asked her, “Are you still sick? It has been nearly two weeks.”

  “I’m not sick,” she admitted timidly. She looked up at Tull to see his reaction. “I think I’m pregnant.”

  ***

  Chapter 8: A Babe in the Rough

  After a lifetime of feeling as insignificant as a dried leaf blowing through town, Wisteria suddenly became visible. Phylomon himself took her off her feet and physically set her on the back of the wagon while Ayuvah patted her back and Tull stood grinning from ear to ear, too happy to be of use to anyone.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I mean, I feel great.”

  “Babies are rare enough out here in the Rough,” Phylomon said, “There’s no use taking chances with them before they are born. Besides, it’s hard for a human woman to carry a Pwi child full-term.”

  “He’s right,” Scandal said. “From now on, no more pushing wagons or hauling wood for you—you’re our lord, and we’re your slaves. You tell us to jump, and every man here will bust a testicle at your whim.”

  So by sundown they left Sanctum, and Short Tail kept his mammoth moving well after dark. Phylomon was pleased with the progress. Though the woolly mammoths weren’t as large as the woodland mastodons, they were better suited for cold-weather travel, and they were spirited. “Cantankerous,” Scandal called them, and they were that too. Short Tail’s mammoth would often
jerk the wagon, for he hated butterflies, and he was constantly lunging after cabbage moths, sucking them into his trunk and spitting them out with enough gusto to break their tiny bodies.

  Still, it was nice to ride in the wagon, and Tull sat with Wisteria all day long, just holding her. Scandal razzed them. “All the panting and rutting you two have been up to has paid off! I’ll be surprised if you don’t drop triplets! Why, you’ll have a veritable litter of woolly-backed little Neanderthals running around your feet in no time.”

  Ayuvah just sat out in the sun in the back of the wagon and smiled at them, then looked back at the mountains toward Smilodon Bay, as if mourning the distance between himself and his own wife. Only Tirilee did not seem intoxicated by the joy everyone felt at news of the impending birth. She sulked along beside the wagon, trailing it just a bit.

  Scandal spent part of the afternoon hunting with Phylomon, and after battle practice, for dinner Scandal celebrated news of the pregnancy by making a clay oven and baking three grouse and glazing them with a paste of his special plum sauce. For dessert he baked his famous walnut and sweet potato pie. Wisteria could imagine no heaven where time could be passed more enjoyably than feasting upon such delicacies. After the food had settled while Wisteria lay on the grass enjoying the scent of the fire. Tull pulled her to him and kissed her.

  “Let’s go to the thicket by the pond and make love,” he said.

  She felt surprised. He had not tried to make love to her for days—not since Short Tail had slugged him. Indeed, his ribs were bandaged and he often held them and breathed shallowly while he and Ayuvah practiced. “Not now,” she said. “Let’s just enjoy the fire.”

  Tull raised himself to one elbow and slid his hand into her hair at the base of her skull, then he clenched his fingers and pulled her toward him. He smiled down at her from above and kissed her roughly, then nipped her lower lip. She just stared at him in surprise. He was warm and sweaty, and his Neanderthal teeth were large and clean.

  “Come, let’s go to the pond. In another two weeks, we will be in Craal. Like the dragons above us, I want to soar to the heights and burst into flame once before I die.” Tull let go of her hair, stroked her face, and his hand continued running down her, over the curve of her breasts and thighs.