Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series

by David Farland

  It was odd that the mothers always laid eggs in the same hatcheries. They were not genetically programmed for the trait, but Phylomon’s father had explained that it was an offshoot of other programming—the mothers were programmed to hunt for food in a school. They were herd animals.

  So when it came time to lay, they hunted for egg space together. The fact that they always chose the same nesting grounds year after year was not due to chance. The serpents were nearly as smart as humans, and they remembered the best places to lay.

  They required only three things—a steep rocky shelf in shallow water, relatively weak wave action so the egg sacks would not be torn from the rocks during low tides, and cool weather.

  With the powerful tides on Anee, few places boasted the right attributes. Phylomon peered up at a cloud that faintly showed the colors of the rainbow. Why do temporaries so rarely notice how often clouds show the colors of the rainbow? he wondered.

  On their fourth day of watch, they found a serpent near shore—a three-hundred-foot mother who lay dead.

  Her tail had washed up on the shore, and her gray head and body floated on the water. The four deadly spikes on her tail were each as long as a man.

  She had not decayed, and Phylomon wondered at the cause of her death, at the cause of all the serpent’s deaths, so he walked out upon her, placing his feet carefully on her large scales, using her body as sort of a raft.

  She was twenty feet wide from her dorsal fins to her pectoral, and treading upon her body was like walking over an undulating road that smelled vaguely of fish oil.

  The rear fins showed no obvious wounds, no disease. But when he reached her gills, it looked as if she had been in a great fight. The heavy scales beside her gill flaps, each scale as large as a platter, had been gouged away. She looked as if she had been raked with great claws the entire length of her jaw. The one great red eye that Phylomon could see, floating just beneath the water, had a detached retina.

  Yet none of the wounds seemed serious enough to cause her death. Phylomon walked down upon her head and tried to see into her mouth, but the head was too heavy to bear his weight, and it began to sink, so he had to turn back.

  When he peered into to the gill flaps, he noticed something strange. When he’d put his weight on the head, the gill flaps had opened wider, and at the base of the gills he could see red holes with rings around them, like the pucker marks that circle a bullet hole.

  Phylomon had seldom examined the corpse of a large serpent and could not recall if the pucker marks belonged. Could they be some respiratory orifice, he wondered, to expel carbon dioxide? Or could they be an opening to fresh-air lungs?

  Certainly the serpents they’d kept in their barrel could not have breathed oxygen from that stale water, which meant they had to be taking it directly from the air. He walked back over the length of the body, uncertain as to why the beast had died.

  Over the next week, they found six serpents guarding an island only two miles out to sea. They made camp and watched the mothers. Phylomon drew a map of the island, and each time a serpent surfaced, they plotted the point on the map.

  Anee orbited Thor once every 176 days. They would reach perigee with Thor in 23 more days. As Anee reached perigee, the tides would become fiercer. On a normal day, tide levels varied by fifty feet. During severe tides, the water level might vary by a hundred feet. If the waters here were shallow enough, Phylomon believed that they would be able to walk to the island during low tide.

  They had been watching the serpents for only three days when Tull and Ayuvah went to hunt quail. They came back an hour later and Ayuvah shouted in Pwi. “Phylomon, come see the thing-I-am-so-bewildered-by. It is people-marvelous. But small-marvelous. Not human, not Pwi, not Hukm, not Dryad.”

  Phylomon looked at the young man skeptically. “Are you saying that you’ve found a fifth kind of people? Another species?”

  “Yes!” Tull said, “Come see!”

  Phylomon followed, leaving Scandal to watch the rocks, and soon they were nearly running. “Of course, it makes sense!” he said. “We are in an ecological introduction zone. The Creators have not introduced anything new to this planet since they made the Dryads, hundreds of years ago.”

  But when they reached the spot Tull had marked, all Phylomon saw was the corpse of a dead wolf.

  “Here she is!” Ayuvah shouted, and he lifted the corpse of the wolf. Beneath, huddling for warmth against the fur, was a tiny woman, about thirty inches tall. She watched the Pwi with terror in her eyes.

  “Step back,” Phylomon said. “We don’t want to frighten her.” He looked at the tiny woman for a long time. She had no facial hair or extraordinary body hair. The hair of her scalp was brown, and her eyes blue. She wore no clothing. Her skull was box-shaped, like the skull of Homo sapiens. The joints of her thumbs were tilted at an angle, the way human thumbs are tilted. She had no stump of tail, like those found upon Hukm or Mastodon Men. Her breasts were small, almost non-existent. All in all, she looked like a very small, starved girl, perhaps twelve years old.

  “She’s a Homo sapiens,” Phylomon said. “Human in every way, much like the Starfarers were before their genetic upgrades. She’s just so tiny. The Creators often make miniatures of a species when they are testing. It cuts down on the amount of space and feed they need for their animals. I remember the first imperial mastodons—they were only six feet at the shoulder.”

  “Can you speak?” he asked the tiny woman. She flinched away, tried to cover herself with the carcass of the wolf.

  “We were hunting rabbits right over there,” Ayuvah said, “And we saw something move here in the brush. I thought it was a rabbit, and then I thought it was only the wind blowing the hair of this wolf, and then I saw this people.”

  Phylomon reached down and touched the tiny woman. She moaned in fright, drew back, and closed her eyes. Her skin was cold to the touch; her lips were blistered from wind and sun. “It’s good that you found her,” Phylomon said. “She would have died in this cold.”

  “She could not live like this through the winter!” Ayuvah said. “It is too cold!”

  “She doesn’t know that,” Phylomon said. “When the Dryads were first formed, the Creators simply turned them loose in the woods. They were like this tiny woman—wild, frightened, starving. They did not know how to make clothing. They huddled in clusters for warmth, and in the spring we’d find them frozen in the mountains. It was only because the Pwi could not resist them that they survived. The men took care of the Dryads, and the Dryads took care of the trees. That is how the Creators wanted it.”

  “Then who will take care of this little woman?” Ayuvah asked. “She could be dangerous, like a Dryad.”

  “I’ll take care of her,” Tull said, picking her up as if she were a child and placing his jacket around her, hugging her to his chest to warm. She did not fight or try to escape, but lay curled in a fetal position, lips spread slightly apart, with eyes half open.

  “We should all care for her,” Phylomon said. “But first, let us find the others.”

  “Others?” Tull asked.

  “The Creators know that it takes several hundred members of any species to produce a breeding population. We should look for the rest of them and just hope they had the sense to stay together.”

  They searched for other survivors all afternoon and found many bodies. Bones of the tiny humans were scattered everywhere, and from the small tooth marks Phylomon decided that the tiny humans had fallen prey to bobcats.

  “Bobcats,” Tull asked. “You must be joking!”

  “Not at all. Many men are killed by sabertooth tigers, yet a bobcat is as large to these people as a sabertooth is to one of us!”

  When it appeared that they would find no other survivors, Ayuvah came to them. “Phylomon, that gray bird is circling over there!” he pointed up into the sky, and off to the east, a mile away, the eye of the Creator circled.

  They followed it, and in late afternoon found caves—a series of
badger holes dug into the side of a hill beneath a slab of igneous rock. All along this cliff, tiny humans huddled for shelter, warming themselves by mutual body heat, covering themselves with mud and dried leaves.

  Phylomon searched for a food source for the small folk, but there was nothing for the people to eat except acorns that he could see, and their tiny teeth could not penetrate those. There was no wild fruit, not much in the way of wild grain, no gardens. Nothing but one another.

  And by the number of partially eaten bodies lying about, it became obvious that the tiny people had resorted to cannibalism. From a small grove of oaks, a gray bird watched, its large yellow eyes the color of wheat straw.

  Ayuvah ran back to the wagon to get some food for the tiny creatures while Tull and Phylomon began taking inventory of their needs.

  The colony had water nearby—a stagnant pool where several bodies floated. Of the sixty tiny humans, Phylomon guessed that the oldest was no more than fourteen.

  A full third of the women appeared to be pregnant, yet there were no children, no young under the age of twelve. Phylomon hesitated to voice the opinion that they might be abandoning or even eating the children, and he hoped that infanticide was not one of their crimes. Perhaps they had only recently become pregnant, he wondered, for they had obviously been placed her only this summer.

  In the space of a few hours, Phylomon watched several fights where men bashed each other with stones, and found that the tiny people communicated only with grunts and gestures.

  Six older boys roamed about at will, taking what they wanted, and the tiny people scurried away from them. Aside from this gang of hoodlums, he could see no indication that they had formed any type of social bonds.

  Phylomon made a small fire in the shelter of a rock, hoping it would not frighten the tiny people, and to his surprise, they all came running immediately and held their hands out to warm themselves.

  “They’ve seen fire before,” Tull said.

  “I suspect the Creators showed them fire,” Phylomon said. “I think they were kept in some kind of holding pens until recently. Not only do they not have children, but you will notice that the women do not have stretch marks on their bellies. I think none of them have given birth.”

  “What are we going to do about them?” Tull asked. “There are so many? We can’t possibly feed them from our stores.”

  “We can teach them to make weapons and clothing, to build fire. We can teach them to hunt for rabbits and quail.” Phylomon answered. “But I don’t see the point. Even with spears and arrows, they could not protect themselves from a dire wolf.”

  A fight broke out near the fire. The gang of six pulled a young woman down and began trying to rape her.

  Tull grabbed two of the perpetrators, smashed them together, and threw them a dozen feet. The other four looked at him, mouths agape, and ran to hide in the bushes.

  “Try that again,” Tull said, “and you die!”

  Phylomon laughed.

  “I don’t see anything funny,” Tull said.

  “You’ll make a fine protector,” Phylomon said. “Blade Kin to the little people.”

  “I’m not Blade Kin.”

  “Of course not,” Phylomon said. “To them, you’ll be more like a god. Isn’t it strange how they destroy themselves? In the space of a few months, I dare say they’ve learned all about cannibalism, murder, rape, robbery. They’ve mastered all the universal attributes of a human society.”

  “If they understood how to feed themselves,” Tull said, “if they knew how they will need one another to survive, they would not do this.”

  “Exactly,” Phylomon answered. “But what will you do if they continue to behave like this even after you have taught them better.”

  “I don’t know,” Tull said.

  “I think,” Phylomon answered, “you will dig a hole and place them in prison. You might torture them until they behave. Or you could incapacitate them in some way—remove their limbs. In the end, you might have to execute one or two.”

  Tull considered the idea, wondered if he were capable of executing one of the tiny thugs. He had just bashed two of them together hard enough that they were still lying on the ground, moaning.

  Phylomon said. “I have always believed that true morality can only arise when we recognize our mutual dependence upon one another. It can only arise when we see ourselves as part of a community. In a way, all immorality can be attributed to a kind of stupidity, an inability to recognize our own interdependence.…”

  “What you say may be true,” Tull said. “Out here in the Rough, you don’t feel safe unless you’ve got fifty people to watch your back. But you go to Denai, and there’s too many people. They don’t need each other anymore.”

  “You’re right,” Phylomon agreed. “In the cities, we don’t need protection from the elements as much as we need protection from one another. We lose our bonds, like the slavers in Smilodon Bay. Your slavers in town sell one another, and what will they get for it? In another twenty years, there will be enough Blade Kin to overrun the Rough in a single summer. They are better armed than we are. They could do it now, if one of the Lords thought the enterprise worthy of his expense.”

  Tull sat and thought. “Then, according to you, when you kill slavers, you are killing them because they are stupid. It seems a high price to pay for stupidity.”

  Phylomon laughed. “If you look at the slavers in your own town, you can see that their short-sightedness and brutality will destroy them anyway. I only hasten their demise. I know it sounds cold. Brutal. But it is just.”

  Tull pondered a moment. “You assume that people never change, that execution is always warranted, even years after the crime. I think that Wisteria’s father was a changed man. I know you disagree, but he was a good man.”

  “He may have been good in ways; he may even have repented,” Phylomon admitted. “I’ve never met a criminal yet who didn’t have some redeeming features. But I came to the conclusion long ago, that if man takes or jeopardizes a human life out of greed or lust, neither I nor anyone else has the right to forgive him. To free him and thus make a wager that he has changed only puts others in jeopardy.

  “You say Wisteria’s father had changed. Yet he joked about his deed. But I tell you honestly: people who enjoy their crimes don’t change. Given time and the proper circumstances, he would have sold another one of his townsmen off. He may have had many fine qualities, but he deserved his grave.

  “Many will say that I’m a cold man, that I’m inhuman. And perhaps I have lost my humanity. But you need me. Every town needs someone like me.”

  Beside the fire, three of the little women grabbed a young girl whose breasts were just beginning to bud, and they bit her. It took Tull a moment to realize that they were hungry, that they were trying to eat. Tull pulled them apart and tossed the women aside. He picked up the tiny girl, and her eyes were wild with terror. He tried to comfort her, but she only squirmed and tried to escape until he let her go.

  “You’d think the Creators would realize their mistake, that they would know these people could never survive without guidance.”

  “The Creators might not understand that principle,” Phylomon said. “They are not biological life forms. Their minds are crystal, and their bodies exist only to feed information to their brains. They are interested only in maintaining viable populations of creatures. I am not sure that they can conceive of the idea that a society is greater than its members. I know that they don’t understand the idea that some societies can doom themselves, that they can take directions that ensure the failure both of the society as a whole and of the members within it.

  “We never programmed that kind of information into the Creators. There are so many species, and with some of them, we did not know what types of guidance the animals would need to survive. Instead, we let instinct take its course. With some animals, that worked. You can hatch a stegosaur, and it will do just fine. But you’ve seen the little duckbill hunters? They
must work in packs of forty or sixty to kill their prey—it is a feat requiring great cooperation. And the Creators had to reestablish their populations forty or fifty times, experimenting each time, until they reached the point where the experiment worked.”

  “The Creators did a good job,” Tull said. “The duck-eaters are the most successful carnosaur in Hotland.”

  “But only because the society became greater than its members,” Phylomon said. “Not all societies do. Back on earth, our ancestors once studied groups of wild monkeys. In one population, the matriarchs took control of the tribe, and the monkeys lived in harmony. But in another tribe, separated by miles of ocean, the young males resorted to rape and theft and murder, until the population was decimated. Not all societies thrive.”

  He looked down at the tiny humans. “We made the Creators,” he said. “Yet we have always remained a mystery to them. We have millions of humans upon this world. You would not think that the Creators would want to add to our numbers. I suspect that they are experimenting now, that they created this tiny colony specifically so they could learn about us.

  “See how the eye of the Creator never stops observing?” Phylomon motioned up toward the oak tree. The gray bird sat, unblinking. “The bird has no digestive system, no need to feed. It was born with stored fat, and when its energy runs out, the bird will return to the Creators, and they will unravel the information stowed in its brain and learn that we are here, learn what we are saying now, learn what the tiny humans have done over the past few weeks. I wonder what the Creators hope to find out?”

  ***

  Chapter 37: The Gray Bird