by Jon Jacks
God of the 4th Sun
Jon Jacks
Other New Adult and Children’s books by Jon Jacks
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent
Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak
Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife
Elm of False Dreams
Coming Soon
A Guide for Young Wytches
Text copyright© 2015 Jon Jacks
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‘Although mute throughout its life, the song of a swan about to die is the most beautiful of all calls amongst the birds. The serpent is also mute yet, shedding its skin to create life anew, lives eternally: and so the Snake Song heralds the end of all life.’
Annals of the Jaguar, Text.III
Chapter 1
The Iron Men were laying their long swords of iron across the plains, drawing nearer every day towards Tesetra’s city.
Not that it should bother her anymore, she thought.
She had been finally exiled.
While she had been sent out into the wilderness to die, her sisters had been accorded the honour of taking part in the procession to placate the Jaguar god.
‘Tears of the Moon’; that’s what her new name meant. Even worse than her old name, Setrast: ‘Snake Song.’
The changes to the tattoos running down her arm still stung from the recent changes. She ignored the pain however, concentrating instead on keeping low amongst the rocks, hoping to avoid the gaze of the Iron Men populating the plain far below her.
She had heard they had magical instruments, including the Long Eyes which allowed them to see clearly over great distances. They also had strange bows that, although never tightly strung, fired invisible arrows.
On the river, docked to unload ever more supplies, was an Iron Pyramid. Despite its great size, it was smaller by far, and appeared only partially built, compared to her city’s own great, stone pyramid. But the pyramids of the Iron Men could move on the water, carrying men and the strange beasts called horses. She had heard from their own defeated warriors that these Iron Pyramids also emitted balls of the Sun.
Had the Sun and the Moon deserted her people, as more and more people were saying?
The metal these new men called Iron seemed to be a gift from the Moon herself, shining as if with her own silver sheen. It remained impregnable to their own golden metals. The Iron Men, coated completely in the armour of this wondrous metal, were unbeatable.
Many of her city’s best warriors already lay dead.
Only the Jaguar god could save them now.
Perhaps, at last, he would be placated by the blood of her sisters.
*
As Tesetra watched the industrious work of the Iron Men far below her, she heard a scuffling of rocks off to her side.
She ducked, fearing that she was about to be discovered by one of the Iron Men’s scouts, men who rode upon the iron horses.
But it was instead an old man who ran past her, his hair white, his skin almost like leather. Taking up a hiding position behind a boulder on the edge of the mountainside, he began to observe the toiling Iron Men below, studying them every bit as intently as Tesetra had observed them.
Tesetra didn’t recognise the man. He wasn’t from her own city.
Could there be another people who also felt threatened by the steady yet relentless encroachment of the Iron Men?
She wondered if she should approach him, thought better of it: just because these people feared the Iron Men didn’t mean they weren’t also a threat to her own people.
The old man watched the Iron Men for the rest of the day, seemingly impervious to the blasting rays of the sun. Fortunately, Tesetra had chosen her own position more wisely: she had the shade of a withered shrub to keep her relatively cool.
Even so, she felt parched, in need of at least water if not also something to eat. In the same way that he seemed to shrug off the effects of the sun, however, the old man seemed to either fail to notice or didn’t require anything to assuage his hunger.
The Iron Pyramid was creating more of the thick, black clouds the Iron Men always surrounded themselves with. The plumes rose like writhing black serpents from the rigidly straight trees surmounting its top.
On the long swords being laid out across the ground, an Iron Serpent wound its way, creating its own dark storm clouds. Reaching the end of the swords, it hissed impatiently, waiting for the Iron Men to lay down more of their iron, adding daily to the swords’ ever growing length.
Were there real men inside all that armour of iron? According to the warriors who had survived the ferocious battles, the men themselves were of iron. The iron was their skin, not a battle costume.
As the sun at last began to set, the glow of the fires that blazed everywhere amongst the encampment of the Iron Men, fires fed by their black rocks, glowed themselves like hot, miniature suns. The harsh clangs of iron against iron continued too, the Iron Men continuing to work by the light of their fires, their boxes of solidified water containing flames.
The old man at last appeared to be tiring from his long watch.
Placing in his satchel the tablets of clay he’d been using to make notes, he turned and slinked quietly away from the cover of the boulder. As he loped past Tesetra, she could see his face, see him closer up, and she realised he looked exhausted. In fact, he suddenly seemed much older than she had first taken him to be.
Once again, Tesetra was tempted to approach him, or at least follow him. But only a few steps back from the edge of the mountain, he stopped once more.
Placing his satchel by his side, he lay down alongside it, as if preparing for sleep. He placed his hands across his chest; then closed his eyes.
Tesetra wondered if this gave her an opportunity to slip away. Or if the man – who could hardly really be asleep after such a brief span of time – would hear and catch her.
She stayed where she was, waiting until she could be sure he was asleep.
But as she watched him, looking for signs that he was falling asleep, his already heavily leathered skin began to rapidly dry, as if his time in the unforgiving sun, his lack of water, was beginning to reap its unfortunate rewards. As it dried, it buckled, lifting clear on ever larger parts of his body.
And yet, now, there was a strange shuffling movement within that dried skin, like a man wearily moving beneath sheets.
Towards the head, the skin broke, tore. The tear became larger as the movement within became more frenetic.
What had been the white hair began to peel back, as if it were the skin of a piece of fruit.
A new head appeared through the hole, the glistening head of a young boy. A boy of about six, with hair shinning like sun-refle
cting corn.
Tesetra had to forcibly hold herself back from gasping in a mix of horror and awe.
The Snake People really existed.
They weren’t just a ridiculous, ancient myth after all.
*
Chapter 2
Wriggling now like a snake sheds its own skin, more and more of the boy appeared.
The skin of the old man’s head and face grotesquely stretched as the boy’s wider body wormed its way through.
Where the feet had been, however, the skin was now as wrinkled and flattened as a long-fallen leaf.
The boy’s skin shone, like a newborn babe’s.
The old man’s skin was dried and useless. An unwanted husk.
As the boy finally slipped out of the last remnants of his older self, he kicked the old skin clear of his feet.
He briefly looked about him, puzzlement on his face.
He glanced down at the dried husk of the old man as if unaware what it could possibly be. The satchel similarly appeared to mean nothing to him.
He was completely naked, yet this didn’t seem to bother him. Even so, he grasped – if unhurriedly – the loincloth the older man had been wearing only moments before. Then, holding tightly onto his cloth, he set off at a brisk and easy run towards and down the far side of the mountain.
Tesetra waited only a moment before she scrambled excitedly towards the husk of the old man the Snake boy had left behind. She didn’t want to touch it: it looked disgusting, a white sheen of diagonally-adjoined sections of skin. She could still make out the old man’s face, a hand, a foot.
When she eventually plucked up the courage to touch it, she was surprised by how cold and dry it felt.
It was like a dried leaf, nothing more: brittle, fragile.
Carefully, Tesetra began to quickly fold the crumpled, flat skin into a small, tighter package. This she even more carefully placed into the satchel the boy had left behind, realising she would need all this as proof of the existence of the Snake People.
She set off, eager to return to the city she had been exiled from only weeks before on her sixteenth birthday.
Although any one spotting her tattoo would undoubtedly stone her to drive her away, she had to tell someone there that the Snake People really existed – and they and her own people seemed to have a common enemy in the Iron Men.
*
Tesetra could hear the wailing trumpets and beating drums of the ceremony long before she at last sighted the top of the pyramid rising up from out of the jungle.
Painted with every colour imaginable, today it was brighter and more splendid that ever. Large, colourful banners and flowery vines had been draped everywhere along the processional concourse that wound its way up to the very peak.
The long procession was already winding its languid, serpentine way around the pyramid’s sides. Those heading the procession had just turned around the corner, coming out of the dark, shadowed side of the pyramid that backed onto the jungle. They were emerging into the light flooding both the pyramid’s front and the side Tesetra was rapidly approaching.
Somewhere amongst that procession were her two sisters, chosen to appease the Jaguar god and request his help in ridding their land of the Iron Men. It was an honour that had also been bequeathed on their parents only months earlier.
An honour denied Tesetra, for she was deemed unworthy.
And yet – if the Snake People really existed, did that mean that the Serpent god also existed?
If the Jaguar god continued to refuse to help them, if he had abandoned her people, then shouldn’t they instead be seeking the aid of his legendary enemy, the Serpent god?
Reaching the base of the pyramid, Tesetra began to climb up its steep sides, using the carvings of the gods and her people’s history as foot- and handholds.
If anyone saw her, this alone would be another reason to stone her. Yet this was the quickest, if perhaps more tiring, way of catching up with the procession before it reached the pyramid’s plateaued peak.
Every now and again, she crossed over sections of the wide and corkscrewing causeway that had already been passed over by the procession, a thick layer of strewn, brightly coloured petals signifying their passing, their weeping, their tears of joy. At last, she arrived on the level where the procession had only recently passed, those at the rear in sight and now just a short run ahead.
Tesetra ran, even though she was exhausted, her feet feeling as heavy as lead, her heart beating wildly.
She didn’t want her sisters’ deaths to be in vain – just two more sacrifices to a god who hadn’t benevolently looked down on them in years.
*
Chapter 3
Tesetra’s father had insisted that his sacrifice to the Jaguar god would ensure he would be invited into the Thirteenth Heaven.
Tesetra’s mother, however, had expressed her private doubts to her.
There had already been so many sacrifices, she had whispered fearfully to Tesetra when they had gone to the river together to complete some washing. And yet the Jaguar god still refused to help them.
They had sacrificed to a number of gods, and none of them had responded to their pleas for a means to remove the Iron Men from their lands. The Jaguar god was just one more god in a list of superior beings who had seemed to have abandoned them to their fate.
Tesetra had been surprised to hear her mother talking like this.
She had always believed that her parents accepted the rule and rulings of the gods; no matter how confusing or unfair the gods’ decisions seemed to the people, there was always a reason behind them.
Her mother had seen the shock – yes, even the horror – in Tesetra’s face when she had admitted her doubts. It was dangerous to refute the right of the gods to impose their rule upon us.
‘The gods can be as foolish and misguided as anyone,’ he mother had explained. ‘So why must we assume that our priests know what they desire? Aren’t they even more imperfect than the gods? Aren’t they simply placing their own words in the mouths of the gods to impose their own rule upon us?’
‘You mustn’t think this way, mother!’
It would be dangerous for both of them if they were overheard talking in this way. Worse, however, was the fact that her mother and father’s deaths were inevitable; how much worse it would be to think that their deaths would be for no reason other than to placate the foolish wishes of a hierarchy of arrogant priests!
Her mother had taken Tesetra’s hands in hers, holding them tightly.
‘Do not trust authority!’ she had said. ‘The fact that they all agree with each other shows not that they must be right, but only how misguided, blinkered and corrupt they are! That they will never be open to other viewpoints that might threaten their authority!’
Then, after carefully checking that they were still on their own, Tesetra’s mother told her the story of The All-Knowing King.
*
Chapter 4
The All-Knowing King
There was once a king so wise that his admiring courtiers had granted him the title of the All-Knowing King.
This king was far from being perfect, of course. Physically, he was not what many people would expect of their king.
Far from being strong, he was weak.
Far from being skilled at warfare, he was a little clumsy.
Far from possessing a towering, commanding presence that awed a room into silence, he was small in stature, and just a touch too thin to be in any way impressive.
Nevertheless, it was said, the king was extremely sharp of mind.
He could best any man when it came to coming up with solutions to a problem. No matter how long it took him to resolve it, he would continue to ponder the matter in hand, arriving at the answer before anyone else could speak.
He had the wit that made those around him laugh uproarishly. While no one was capable of catching him out, or making fun of him.
He could make a decision within an important meetin
g that, despite being apparently unusual, would undoubtedly prove to be right. It was always universally agreed that any situation would have ended up far worse if any direction but the king’s had been taken.
The All-Knowing King was highly regarded and respected throughout the vast lands he had inherited from his father. Indeed, when some of the outlying lands of his kingdom were unfortunately taken over by other rulers, the people there sought to overcome their dismay by pretending to be relieved that they would no longer benefit from his wise rule.
So all-persuasive was the king’s persona on his court that the women there soon began to realise that their idea of the ideal man had been wholly and foolishly wrong: how could they be seen to be fawning over the strong men they used to adore when, quite clearly, such men were foolish rather than wise?
But how would they spot the wise men of court? Why, they would have a nature similar to the king’s, of course!
The man who tripped over a small step, over some minor obstacle, wasn’t the fool they would once have taken him to be. He was quite obviously a wise man who was otherwise distracted by his thoughts on matters of great importance!
The man who failed to show any degree of prowess in the tournaments wasn’t weak, as they would once have assumed; he was actually strong of mind. He saw, as we should all see, that making such ridiculous endeavours to win should be frowned upon!
With their eyes at last opened to the realities of life, the courtiers now shunned and even made fun of the crassness of the men and women who at one time would have been the most celebrated amongst them. Unless, of course, those very same men and women at last felt free to also demonstrate their own high levels of intelligence; they could trip-up now and again without feeling in any way embarrassed by it, or gracefully lose at those silly games they had once granted such undue importance.
Naturally, any visiting dignitaries were surprised by what they saw as the incredible ineptness of the king’s court. But that, of course, was purely because they themselves still held to outmoded ideas of what passed for wise kingship.