By nightfall he’d been able to drag only one serpent from the water—a fourteen-footer that thrashed with its tail spikes so hard that no one dared go near. It ripped the fur from the lure, gulped it down, then used its tiny front claws to drag itself back to the water.
That night, Phylomon and Born-in-Snow came into camp. “You are fishing too deeply,” Phylomon said. “We watched the Thralls upstream. They fish in the shallows. They put a spotter up in a tree to watch for the small ones, then the spotter tells the lure man where to put his bait. We found you a good spot downstream.”
“How many did these Thralls catch today?” Scandal asked.
“They caught only one that they could keep,” Phylomon admitted. “We may have come a little too late for the harvest.”
“And how many do you say we should try to haul home? A hundred?”
“I’d hoped for that many,” Phylomon agreed.
Tull looked around. Everyone seemed drained and despondent. Ayuvah said, “Chaa told us to come. He must have had a reason.”
“But how well did he see this future?” Wisteria asked. “Maybe he didn’t know that our mammoth would die, that we’d have to push the damned wagon over the Dragon Spines?”
“Damn it.” Scandal argued, “We did what he asked, and we’re here. If Chaa says we can catch some serpents, we’re going to find them. Maybe … a fresh hatch of three-footers is on its way upstream this very moment.” Yet his enthusiasm sounded false, words spoken in desperation, meant only to soothe their fears.
“Perhaps,” Phylomon admitted. “Or perhaps we will find only big ones.”
“You know,” Scandal said, “this could be harder than it sounded.”
“What would you have us do?” Phylomon asked, and then he pinned his gaze on Tull, putting him in charge.
Tull furrowed his brow and considered.
“The boy doesn’t know any better than the rest of us!” Scandal growled.
“Yet the Spirit Walker gave him this task,” Phylomon answered. “Let him choose.”
Tull thought. “Tomorrow, we go for shallow water. If I can see the serpents, I can catch a few.”
The next morning, they moved camp two miles downstream and found a pile of boulders in some shallows. Someone had fished these waters before, for near the boulders was a circle of rocks that formed a ring big enough to hold several serpents. With fresh river water flowing through the rocks, the circle acted as a holding pond.
The pond had not been used for years, and the heavy flows of winter water had all but destroyed the north and south walls. Tull and Ayuvah hauled rocks from shore and built the walls back up. Then Tull stood on the boulders—good tall rocks that even the larger serpents could not climb. Ayuvah and Wisteria acted as spotters. Within an hour, they were rewarded for their labor—Wisteria spotted a five-footer eeling along the bank toward the boulders, and Tull put the pole down in front of it and began jigging.
The serpent seemed almost stupid. Instead of going for the jig, it stopped and settled on the bottom. For five minutes it worked on changing color to blend in with the background.
Tull eased to the edge of his boulder, jabbing the pole closer and closer to the serpent’s mouth, and the serpent watched with great red eyes. It leisurely extended its gills, breathing deeply.
When it was ready, it flared its gill flaps, pulled its gills in, and used its front fins to push up from the bottom and grab the bait. Tull waited until the serpent’s jaws locked on the bait, then flipped the creature into the air.
The serpent flapped its tail from side to side, and two spikes raked Tull’s chest. He gasped, nearly dropping his pole, but managed to toss the serpent into the holding pond. The serpent ripped at the bait even in the pond, and when the fur tore from the jig, the serpent broke free and everyone rushed forward to see it.
The serpent banged the sides of the pond, scraping its armored fins across the rocks. It bashed its head into the rocks again and again, and when it tired, it leapt up and stuck its head over the wall and tried to eel back into the river. Tull grabbed his pole to push the serpent back in, and Ayuvah rushed back to shore for more rocks to build up the walls of the holding pond.
Scandal was so pleased he shouted, “One thousand goddamned miles through the Rough, and we’ve caught ourselves a serpent! Tonight, we celebrate!”
He climbed down from the rocks, built a fire, and began cooking. Tull and Wisteria danced around camp, and Ayuvah smiled dumbly. After half an hour, Tull stifled his desire to celebrate and went back to work.
But the rest of the day did not go as well. They saw many serpents moving upstream, but for each that moved upstream, two were moving down, and none were as small as the one they had caught. They celebrated that night anyway, and the next day they went back to work, but came up empty. Phylomon and Born-in-Snow spent the day scouting the area, and they came back with a report.
Phylomon said, “We scouted ahead for ten miles. The Summerhazy Hills cross our path, and the road is not well tended—steep and rugged in places. We won’t get the wagon through.”
“Is there a promising road elsewhere?” Scandal asked.
“We found trails, but they are not for human feet.”
“Deer?”
“Mastodon Men,” Phylomon said. “The hills are thick with oak and buck brush. It’s good country for wild boar and moose.”
Scandal said, “Find me a good path to Denai.”
“We’ll try in the morning. It will take two days, three at the least.” Before dawn he crept away from camp, leaving Tull to work.
But Phylomon did not return after two days, nor after three. And Tull did not catch another serpent.
Scandal and Ayuvah hunted each day and learned that the serpent catchers had fished the area out.
To feed their only serpent, the men resorted to jigging for a larger serpent. When Scandal and Ayuvah managed to pull it from the water, Tull hacked its head open with his broadsword and fed chunks to their youngster. It cracked the bones in its teeth and thrashed the shallow water of its holding pond in a feeding frenzy.
On the fourth day, two things gave them cause for alarm—first, a group of nearly two thousand Blade Kin warriors came down the road from Denai, guns in hand. They asked the party if they had seen any Hukm, checked Scandal’s forged traveling papers. They were not impressed by the High Lord of Retribution’s signature, and they searched the wagon twice over. Fortunately, Scandal had hidden his stolen gold and guns off in the brush, though the Blade Kin seemed curious, they left after nearly an hour. Also on that day, the number of large serpents that they spotted in the river dropped to thirty-two. The numbers of fish had diminished, and the serpents headed back down to the open ocean.
That afternoon, seven wagons passed them as the other fishermen vacated the river.
Tull wore a grim, determined face, but his heart was not so determined. He plodded along the riverbank all afternoon, desperate to spot some young serpents. Chaa had foreseen that the quest could succeed, that Tull would catch the serpents. But what if Chaa had seen him catch only one serpent? One would not be enough. Tull had missed something. He looked at his hands, great robust hands, more like the paws of a bear than human hands. They never served him. Always a failure, and a failure now, as well.
That night, five ragged Thralls passed the group in a wagon pulled by a mastodon, and they stopped nearby. Their campfire gleamed upriver, shining through the barren trees, reflecting off the water. One Thrall played a panpipe, and the fishermen sang together, happy to be going home.
Phylomon and Born-in-Snow returned to camp that night. “We found a better road,” Phylomon said, “but it goes from one small town to another. It is rocky and narrow in places and doesn’t follow near the river at all. We won’t be able to get fresh water for the serpents for the first three days. That concerns me. It will take six or seven days just to reach Denai.”
“Then, by God, if we had any serpents they would just have to breathe air, wouldn’t t
hey?” Scandal said.
“What do you mean?” Phylomon said. “How many serpents have you captured?”
“Just the one,” Wisteria said.
Phylomon looked hard at Tull, “What will you do?”
Tull swallowed and gazed at the Thrall camp up the river. He had tried so hard, and it all came to nothing. “I do not think we will catch any more small serpents,” he told the group.
Scandal followed Tull’s gaze upriver. “Ayaah, I see what you are thinking: Those Thralls have serpents we can take.”
“They’d be no match for four men with guns,” Phylomon admitted. One Thrall raised his voice in song.
“No,” Tull said. “Let me reason with them.”
Tull went to the brush, unwrapped the weapons they had robbed from the dead men at Gold River pass. He gathered five guns into his arms, took a bag of ammunition, stuck them into a sack.
“What are you doing?” Scandal shouted.
“I’m going to barter with them,” Tull said.
He went to the Thrall camp, followed by Born-in-Snow and the others. They walked up to the fire, and the Thralls backed away, staring at Tull, at the Hukm, at Phylomon’s blue skin. One Thrall went to the wagon, drew a club.
“I want your serpents,” Tull said. The Thralls looked at him as if he were mad.
“Our Lord would beat us!” an old Thrall said, licking his lips with fear. “He would beat us like dogs if we were to give away our catch!” His voice was almost a whimper, for he stared at the Hukm and knew that he could not protect his serpents.
Tull emptied the bag of rifles onto the ground.
The old Thrall peered at the guns. “Where did you get those?”
“We killed the Blade Kin up in Gold River Pass.”
The old Thrall eyed the rifles. “You will be punished for it. You will die the death! Surely you are not such a fool as to think you can escape?”
“Take the guns and leave,” Tull said. “This is my payment for your serpents. Head over the hills now, while the snow is still melted. Or how much longer do you want to be a Thrall?”
One younger man, a Neanderthal with blond hair and a face reddened and wrinkled from the sun, walked to the pile and picked up a gun. He broke the barrel open, saw that it was loaded, snapped the barrel closed.
“I tell you how long he will be a Thrall,” the man said, “until the day he dies.” He stuck the barrel in the old man’s face and pulled the trigger.
The bullet penetrated the old man’s skull. For a moment he looked at everyone with rheumy eyes, as if he’d suddenly forgotten their names, while smoke issued from the ragged hole under his throat, then his legs buckled and he pitched forward.
The other Thralls looked at the body, and Tull was surprised at their expressions, for they mourned him. “At least he died quickly,” one young man said, “which is more than we may get.” The three rushed forward, grabbed guns, and began unloading food from their wagon hurriedly.
“We thank you for the guns,” the wind-burned Thrall said over his shoulder, “but I fear the Blade Kin may have heard our shot, so we must leave run.” Within a minute, they rushed off into the darkness, heading for the trees.
Tull stood in shock. “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” he said. “I wanted to give them their freedom.”
Phylomon said sadly, “There is more than one path to freedom.” He grabbed the dead Thrall, dragged the old man to the river outside the circle of firelight, and tossed him in.
“Quickly,” he said, “let’s take their serpents and get out of here.”
“We should take their wagon,” Scandal said.
Phylomon looked at the wagon. “The axles aren’t strong enough for our rough trail. It will never make it over the mountain roads.”
Scandal doused the fire, and in the darkness they pushed the wagon a quarter mile back down the road to their camp. In the cold moonlight, Tull stood atop the wagon with his jigging pole and enticed the serpents to bite, then dumped them in his own barrel. They took eighty-four serpents, one by one, from the Thralls’ wagon. Then Scandal bashed in its sides with Tull’s broadsword and drained the water. When it had emptied, they pushed it off the road, well up into the brush.
They ate a small breakfast, though it was only after midnight, then waited for daybreak.
The others slept, but Tull could not. He knew he should be happy to have the serpents, but he kept seeing the face of the old man, seeing over and over in minute detail how the bullet had exploded his skull, making his head sag in like an empty sack. Tull had not wanted anything like this to happen—had believed he was offering the Thralls freedom. Would the Thralls who escaped really ever leave Craal?
Tull doubted it. They would become Okanjara and spend the remainder of their days camped upon Craal’s borders, playing their little games, sniping at the Blade Kin while they sniped back.
In the end, though they called themselves Okanjara—the free ones—they would never really be free. They would only change their chains for another kind of bondage. The old man had known that what Tull offered was only a different kind of slavery.
In the wagon above him, Tull could hear the serpents talking with deep voices, a long low moaning noise. Phylomon had once said the serpents were as smart as humans, that they spoke at great distances underwater. Tull tried to make out the words to their language.
As Tull lay thinking beneath the wagon, he heard a spoon scraping a metal bowl. Probably Scandal eating leftovers, he thought, but then realized Scandal was snoring. He looked up from under the wagon, and saw Tirilee, the silver of her hair and face turned unearthly orange by the firelight. She crouched and ate, never looking toward the wagon. Then she poked at the coals of the fire with a stick and put a few small logs on it.
Tull could not smell her. The aphrodisiac scent she sometimes emanated seemed to be gone. Tull looked at Tirilee, and she was Tirileezhoai—Tirilee who held the love he feared. The Dryad finished her dinner, then reached into a small basket in a tree beside the fire, pulling bread and wine from it.
Tull was surprised—leaving food in the open like that would only attract bears. Scandal should have known better.
But then he remembered that Phylomon had sat there at dinner, not Scandal. Just as Phylomon had fed her at the start of the trip, he fed her now at the end.
Another week, and they would be in Denai. If all went well, two weeks after that they might sail home. Tirilee bundled the food in the folds of her dress and crept back into the woods.
In another week, Tull thought, I will be rid of her forever.
***
Chapter 18: Summerhazy Hills
The journey through the gentle, rolling Summerhazy Hills was treacherous. The great barrel, though only partly filled with water, weighed several tons, and the mammoth often trumpeted in rage at being made to pull such a grievous weight.
When going uphill, Born-in-Snow sometimes had to push the wagon from behind, while the men worked with axes and picks to clear brush from road ahead. This left only Wisteria to guide the mammoth, and Phylomon taught her to ride its great neck and guide it as the Hukm do, urging it forward and steering it with kicks to its small ears and neck, stopping it by pulling its hair.
The area was thick with white cabbage moths, and time after time Wisteria found her mammoth, angered by his load, striking out at the helpless moths, sucking them up his trunk, then spitting them out. Controlling the stupid beast was hard work that left her calves and the insides of her legs aching. At the end of the day she stank of sweat and muddy mammoth hide.
They toiled all day without rest, moving as quickly as they could over steep roads, then made a waterless camp at sundown on a forest floor thick with rotten limbs and scraggly bushes. It was a poor place to camp. They’d passed a nice little stream not two hours before, yet the men chose to drive on.
Wisteria could feel the urgency in the air. Everything was rushed. During the day, riding the mammoth over the hills, she’d had time to think. I
n three weeks they would be back in Smilodon Bay with their serpents. In three weeks, Garamon would learn that she had not sabotaged the quest. Five of Garamon’s brothers were dead, and she had not given him his vengeance. She remembered how he had taken her in the back of his dry goods shop. The threats of death, the punches to the belly. He was a slaver. He’d kill her for failing him. She knew it. Yet they were rushing forward, rushing toward home.
Wisteria sniffed herself and recoiled from the smell. The weather had turned warm ten days ago, and it was as hot as summer. In the heat of the day, her sweat mingled with the mud and hair on the mammoth. It was such a foul-smelling creature, she was not sure she’d ever be able to wash the odor off, and she thought of the shallow stream she’d passed, and how nice it would have been to wash.
She made a bed of leaves, covered it with a bearskin, then threw herself down. She caught a whiff of her armpits and frowned. Tull came to lay beside her, and Wisteria was surprised that he could stand her smell.
They lay for a long time, watching the stars. The only moon in the sky was Freya—a blue mote so distant it was not much larger than a star. The red drones passed like comets. Wisteria realized Tull was sweating, as with a fever.
“Why are you so tense?” she asked.
“While we were clearing the trail today, we talked about what we must do. Scandal will have to go to Denai to buy a boat for the journey home, and then he will sail it upriver at night to meet Phylomon so he can load the serpents. Phylomon cannot go into the city, for he is an outlaw, and I do not want Ayuvah to go into the city, for he is too afraid of the Crawlies. Phylomon says it will be dangerous, for the Crawlies are suspicious of all foreigners, so I will have to go in disguise as a Thrall.”
“You can convince them. You’ve seen enough Thralls.”
Tull grunted. “I have seen Thralls, but Phylomon told me the laws they live under. Thralls cannot carry knives. Thralls cannot touch a human unless commanded to do so. I cannot look a human in the eye. This seems easy. Yet Phylomon warns that we will pass the slave markets, and I must not interfere with anything that I see.
Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series Page 11