The Serpent's Secret

by Sayantani DasGupta

  “Wait a minute!” We were flying straight toward the stone ceiling, chaos and destruction all around us. Oh, I had a bad feeling about this. “Aren’t we right under the …”

  “When I say so, you both take a big breath!” Neel commanded. “One … two …”

  But he didn’t even have a chance to count to three, because the tree trunk charged a huge hole in the ceiling of the underground cavern, and lake water poured into the room, drowning the snakes. And, oh yeah, us.

  We were underwater. I panicked in the swirling tempest and tried to kick away from Neel with my legs, toward what I guessed was the surface of the lake. But Neel held on to me. I fought him, panicking. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even see which way was up. My lungs were going to explode.

  Air.

  Oh, I needed air.

  I shook my head. The pressure on my lungs was too much. I was going to drown. I didn’t want to die like this. I had to get air … had … to … get …

  With a burst, the tree branch Neel was hanging on to cleared the surface of the water. I gasped big breaths into my lungs.

  I breathed.

  I breathed.

  I breathed.

  The air tasted so sweet. I would never take the simple act of breathing for granted again.

  The tree deposited us on the shore, its branch acting like an enormous hand. As soon as we tumbled off, the branches kept shooting upward and outward. The banyan’s roots stretched and grew until the entire surface of the lake was gone. And with it, the underworld kingdom was buried without a doorway to the upper realm. Where the lake had been, with its magic door, was now a majestic banyan tree.

  Neel and I lay side by side near the tree’s roots, panting.

  “We’re alive!” Neel’s eyes glowed in a way that made me feel a little dizzy.

  “You don’t need to sound so surprised.” I groaned, trying to sit up. My entire body ached like I’d been through some giant car wash. Except without a car. I felt all vomit-y again.

  “Dark energy!” Neel stretched his arms, cracked his neck, and then began wringing out his shirt. “Dang, that’s some powerful stuff in Chhaya Devi’s shadows.”

  “Dark what?” My breath was still jagged and hurt my raw throat. My hair was plastered to me, but I couldn’t find the strength to brush it from my eyes.

  I couldn’t help but resent Neel, who looked almost chipper now. There was something really annoying about a boy who never seemed tired, even after fighting a passel of poisonous snakes, then getting half drowned.

  “Dark energy. It’s the energy that helps the universe keep expanding. You might call it a part of the universal life force.”

  That sounded vaguely familiar.

  “My Baba always tells me we’re all connected by energy—trees, wind, animals, people, everything.” I tried to get my ragged breathing under control. “He says that life energy is a kind of river flowing through the universe.”

  “And that our souls are just a bit of that river water held inside the clay pitcher of our bodies?” Neel smiled at my surprise. “Yeah, I know that story too. They say that when our bodies give out, that’s just the pitcher breaking, pouring what’s inside back into the original stream of universal souls.”

  “So no one’s soul is ever really gone,” I finished, repeating the words that Baba had said to me so often.

  “Yup.” Neel nodded. “It’s the same idea that governs Chhaya Devi’s shadows. When unleashed, there’s nothing more powerful than the desire of nature to reunite with the universal soul.”

  I was about to ask Neel to explain some more, when I noticed the still, yellow body a couple of feet away.

  “Tuntuni!”

  The little bird wasn’t moving at all. His wings were dark with water, and his head and beak were at a funny angle. Panic sent energy shooting through my cramped muscles. I half crawled, half scrambled over to where his tiny form lay on the ground.

  I shook him, calling his name. The poor thing just flopped in my hands. I tried looking for a pulse (did birds have pulses?) but couldn’t find one. My own heart fluttered alarmingly in panic. Where was a phone to dial 911 when I needed it! I started to do CPR, pumping his little yellow chest with two fingers. Problem was, the only CPR I’d ever learned was from a hospital TV show.

  “He might be gone, Kiran,” Neel murmured. He touched the bird’s feathery head. “Returned to the universal stream of souls.”

  “I won’t let him die! He saved our lives!” I wailed, but then I noticed Tuni’s chest was moving—although very slightly—on its own. I didn’t know what else to do except to cradle him in my lap, stroking his feathery head. His breathing was uneven, now rapid, now stopped entirely. He made a strange choking sound, and then the movement in his chest slowed down even further.

  “Kiran,” Neel said, but I ignored him, rocking and cooing to the bird in my arms.

  Within a few seconds, I realized that Tuntuni’s breathing had stopped altogether.

  No, no, no.

  “Kiran,” Neel said again. This time he put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “He can’t die!” I cried. “He can’t!”

  Everything crashed in on me. Being away from home. Inviting Neel’s mom into the kingdom. Fighting that awful snake in the dark. Coming face-to-face with my über-awful birth brothers and father. The ticking clock on my real parents’ lives. My chest burned until I thought I would explode. And then it happened.

  I started to cry. Not just cry, but sob, complete with pathetic bleating noises. My eyes stung, my throat caught. And that doorway in my chest that I’d kept tightly shut for so long burst open, releasing everything that I’d stuffed inside. Salty tears poured down my face, mingling with the lake water on the bird’s body.

  But Neel didn’t laugh or point or even say useless platitudes about how the bird had lived a full life. How everything would be okay. He just sat there in my presence, letting me be sad. He just was.

  And then the most remarkable thing happened. The stone-still bird took a shuddering breath. He stirred, and grew warm in my arms. I watched, stunned, as Tuntuni opened his eyes.

  “What should you buy a bird?” he chirped weakly.

  “He’s alive!”

  “Looks like it.” Neel looked at me with a curious expression. “He’s alive.”

  Tuni coughed and sputtered, shaking his soaked wings dry. “Something cheep!”

  I laughed in relief. If Tuni was telling bad jokes, he was going to be okay. I hugged the bird to me until he started to protest, and I put him down.

  “Let’s get out of here, numskulls!” Tuni croaked weakly. “Before those snakes figure out how to come back!”

  “We can’t.” I looked around wildly. “I don’t know where the horses are!”

  “You still have the python jewel, right?” Neel asked.

  It took me a couple moments because my fingers were still numb. Neel helped me struggle out of his sopping jacket, and finally we pulled out the python jewel from the pocket. The light from the magic stone illuminated the dark forest.

  I heard the flapping of large wings. Like some kind of a beacon, the jewel had called the horses from wherever they’d been hiding. Snowy and Midnight trod their way through the banyan tree roots, neighing and tossing their manes.

  “You couldn’t just have told me to take out the jewel sooner?” I said as Snowy snarfled my ear with a wet nose. “There’s fresh clothes in the saddlebags!”

  “I’m sorry; I was a bit preoccupied watching you heal Tuntuni.”

  “I didn’t heal him!” Where did Neel get that idea? “He just got better on his own.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.” I scuttled off, shaking with wet and cold, to go change behind a distant tree.

  After I was in dry clothes, I felt almost myself again. I pulled out Ma’s map. In the light of the python jewel, we had no trouble reading it. The decoding trick was actually easy. You just had to shine the jewel at the paper, then put your eye
up to the back of it, so you were viewing the map through the prisms of the python jewel’s surface. Just like that, the blank sheet was covered with the recognizable symbols on a map.

  “Look, some kind of body of water—a sea—separates us from the Maya Mountains.”

  I stared at the paper. The writing on it was actually moving. Where, just a second ago, had been the lake entrance to the underworld kingdom was now the drawing of a huge tree. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, there were also two little human figures and a bird next to two creatures that looked like winged horses.

  Neel was unfazed. “You are here,” he said, pointing at the shorter of the two human figures. “And the sea we have to cross is”—he dragged his finger not a long distance on the map—“here.”

  “And then over the sea to the Maya Mountains, easy!” I slung my quiver on my back.

  “As long as the mountains don’t move again before we can get there,” Tuntuni mumbled. “Or if we don’t get eaten by sea monsters. Or catch our deaths of pneumonia …”

  “Your secret’s out, Tuni.” I picked up the bird and put him on my shoulder. “You’re not as much of a grump as you pretend to be.”

  “Oh, yes, I am!” squawked the bird. But he puffed out his feathers in pleasure.

  Neel rolled his eyes at the both of us as he tugged on Midnight’s reigns. “Come on, boy, let’s go!”

  We were on our way to the Ruby Red Sea, when something else Neel said in the Serpent King’s throne room came back to me. We rode side by side, but I still had to shout a little to make myself heard over the wind.

  “Hey, Neel, what was that other thing you said about my … I mean, the Serpent King? You said he was my dark matter? Is that the same thing as dark energy?”

  “Nah, dark matter’s a whole other mysterious force.” Neel clicked his tongue at Midnight, who kept straining at the bit, trying to gallop faster. “In your dimension, dark matter’s the invisible presence that surrounds galaxies. Your scientists can’t see it, except sometimes like a halo around star systems.”

  “And that relates to the Serpent King how?”

  “Dark matter has this incredible gravitational pull,” Neel explained. “It wants to incorporate everything into itself. Think about how badly the Serpent King wanted to draw everything into himself. Your brother-snakes. You.”

  “There is no light without the darkness,” Tuntuni chirped from my shoulder. “No darkness without the light.”

  It was the same thing the merchant of shadows had said to Neel. She’d also said that Neel had to face his shadow self but not get pulled into the darkness. I guessed the same was true for me. My biological parents had been invisible my whole life—but hovering around me like a dark halo even as Ma and Baba filled my life with light. And now that dark pull had brought me back to this place, threatening to extinguish my parents’ light forever.

  I couldn’t ask anything else because we had already gotten to the edge of the sea. As we landed and dismounted the horses, I noticed there was a long line of colorful barges on the shore of the lapping water, carved and painted to look like peacocks. Neel pulled the barge closest to us in more securely onto the land.

  “Can’t the horses just fly us over?”

  Neel shook his head, pointing to a sign that read:

  PFDBMHNFZ

  Then in smaller letters under it:

  Pakkhiraj, Flying Demons, Bird Man, and Helicocroc No-Fly Zone

  “Another no-fly zone, huh?” I remembered the Mandhara Mountain.

  Neel nodded. “Any land mass that tends to move is a no-fly zone. There’ve been cases of flying horses getting trapped in the space between here and there if they’re flying when the land under them decides to shift around.”

  “And I guess I don’t really want to know what a Helicocroc is, huh?”

  Tuntuni shuddered. “Just be glad, Princess, they can’t fly here.”

  Neel heaved the golden and silver spheres out of Midnight’s saddlebags and into the barge, while I packed what food and supplies we had left into my backpack. As we worked, I picked up the conversation from before.

  “I don’t get it, Neel. Is the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers some kind of version of outer space? Back in the stables, I think I saw something really weird in your mother’s mouth …”

  “Like planets and moons and stuff?” His smile was twisted and didn’t really reach his eyes. “Like I said before, it’s all really complicated to explain. That’s why we call people from your dimension 2-Ds. Most people from there can’t imagine that there are a lot of realities that exist at the same time. That one thing can have multiple forms. That the difference between inner space and outer space might just be an illusion.”

  I remembered a Shady Sadie the Science Lady show about how our reality might just be one of many, and that these parallel dimensions might be like a bunch of vibrating strings in a row—each dimension clueless about the existence of the others. But even though I’d heard about it before, it was still really hard to imagine. Just trying to think about it hurt my brain.

  But then something else struck me. “So if we don’t get to my parents in time”—I gulped—“they really will get swallowed into a black hole?”

  “You could say that. Every time a spell collapses, it gives birth to a new rakkhosh from a well of dark energy. The amount of time that takes varies—usually rakkhosh are born the night of a new moon. And when they’re born …” Neel trailed off. “Well, let’s just say, they’re hungry.”

  “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  Before I got into the peacock barge, I hugged Snowy’s muzzle.

  “I’ll miss you, Tushar Kona,” I murmured, using his real name.

  And then, as clearly as if the horse were speaking to me, I heard his voice in my mind.

  Don’t get killed, Princess. I really like you.

  “Okay, I’ll try not to get killed,” I whispered, tickling Snowy’s ears.

  “Are you talking to your horse?” Tuntuni made a cuckoo gesture with his wing, drawing circles at the side of his head. “Isn’t that a little wacka wacka?”

  “Look who’s talkin’,” muttered Neel.

  And with that, we pushed offshore in our peacock barge, waving good-bye to our loyal horses.

  The full, red moon hung high in the sky, beaming down on us with an eerie light. The tides were on our side, propelling the little boat forward on the water. We didn’t have to row, but Neel steered us straight with the wooden rudder. To balance out the long barge, I sat at the far front end, with the golden and silver spheres in the middle. Tuntuni plunked himself in my lap and fell asleep.

  As we floated along, something strange began to happen. Just like I could hear Snowy’s thoughts in my mind, I felt a buzzing all around me, as if something—the sky, the sea, the very air—were speaking to me.

  No, it’s the moon.

  “Did you say something, Neel?”

  “Hmm?” he called from the back of the boat.

  Look at the water to see my reflection, Daughter.

  The dark red moon was enormous in the mirrorlike surface of the sea.

  “Mother?” I whispered, barely believing it.

  I have been a poor mother to you, my little piece of the moon …

  The voice sounded so sad. Did she know what we’d just been through?

  “The underworld kingdom,” I started. “We buried the lake …”

  He will rise again, I fear, the moon replied. Until then, Daughter, you have freed me of my obligation. And this month on the night of no moon, when I come down to Earth in my human form, I can visit you.

  My birth mother could come down to Earth on the night of the new moon! It couldn’t be a coincidence that was the same amount of time I had to find my parents before they became baby-demon food.

  The sea wind whipped my hair and the salt water stung my cheeks. I looked back at Neel, who was staring ahead, steering the boat into the dark water. My eyes fell on the surface of th
e sea, and I started. Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing?

  The moon shone even more brightly than before, making the surface of the water shimmer as if made of bobbing red rubies. Tentatively, I ran my fingers in the sea. Then I scooped my hand back into the boat.

  Clunk, clink, thunk.

  I didn’t leave your father’s kingdom entirely empty-handed, Daughter. These are your birthright.

  I scooped my hand along the sea again.

  “What was that?” Neel called.

  I didn’t know what to say. At my feet glimmered dozens of bloodred rubies I’d just plucked from the water’s surface. Wordlessly, I held up one of the stones. The night was dark, but in the glow of the python jewel, the ruby shimmered.

  “Where did you get that?”

  I pointed at the sea. With a grin, Neel started scooping in fistfuls of rubies himself.

  At the sound of all the clunking, Tuni woke up.

  “Cross ruby seas full of love beneath the dark red moon,” he recited.

  I slid the smooth jewels through my fingers. “Thank you,” I whispered, “Mother.”

  You’re welcome, Daughter. I’m afraid you’ll need them in the terrible place you’re going.

  “We’re not going straight to Maya Pahar?” I felt a pit of dread growing in my stomach.

  Check the map, the moon said before disappearing behind a gray cloud.

  In the back of the boat, Neel whooped as he scooped up more and more rubies.

  “Watch it,” I called. The boat sunk pretty close to the surface of the water. “We’re heavy enough as it is.”

  I took Ma’s map from my pocket, and peered at it in the python jewel’s light.

  “Oh no … the thing’s shape-shifting again.”

  “Look, we’re approaching shore!” Neel pointed to a vague gray line on the horizon.

  “Neel,” I warned, “according to the map, that’s not the Maya Mountains anymore.”

  The lines on the paper finally stopped moving. The little bird peeked over my shoulder. “Okay, now the Maya Mountains are on the other side of …” Tuni stopped. He made a choking noise, and discharged several yellow tail feathers.