THE VOICES OF THE SNAKES

By Karina Sumner-Smith

 

"Hello poison, hello grave-specter, hello nightmare," the little green grass snake called, his tiny voice high and all his sibilants hissed. He flicked his tongue and uncurled his sleepy coils. "Hello dung heap, hello monstrosity, hello ruin."

It was his morning ritual, and all his greetings were for her.

"Hello snake," she replied through swollen, blackened lips. The others laughed, thin sounds like leaking breath; they never failed to find her amusing.

"Up vomit, up stench," the green snake piped happily when she at last began to stir, his tongue light against her ear. "Up, up -- we're cold, we want to see the sun."

"The sun, the sun," murmured others from the vicinity of her neck. She recognized a few voices: the zigzag-patterned adder, the long black egg snake that liked to choke her while she slept, the rattler whose warnings seemed to shiver across her scalp. There were too many, though, to tell them all apart.

She didn't like the sun, hated the way the light burned across her disfigured skin, making her tingle and itch. Yet this was not what made her pause, feigning weariness and a desire to sleep, but routine; this day was to seem as any other.

At last the viper stirred, woken by his brethrens' twisting and whispering. Rising, he said slowly, softly, "Yes, beautiful. Let us see the sun."

He was the oldest, the largest and the cruelest, and from the very first day the mere sound of his voice had made her feel cold. Once he had tormented her, taunted her with words far crueler than the grass snake could ever utter; her ears and the line of her jaw, the curves of her shrunken breasts, still bore the scarred marks of his teeth and the memory of his venom.

She had endured decades of his abuse -- decades thinking that she deserved such treatment -- and then fought back in the bloody decades that followed. He was immune from her great weapon, but she'd found he had no escape from her temper, her teeth or her claws. They had a truce now, their enmity tempered by centuries together. Beautiful, he still called her, and she allowed him the entertainment of this tired mockery.

She rose from her tangle of animal skins and fabric, her joints creaking with the movement, and shuffled forward from the cool darkness of her cave on feet almost too bent to bear her weight. The viper curled himself around her neck, his coils a loose and heavy necklace patterned in brown.

Outside, she squinted in the morning light, the brightness sharp in her eyes. With small and careful steps, she made her way down the rocky path that led away from her shelter, out beyond the reaching shadows of the mountain's bulk.

"Here, beautiful," the viper murmured at last, and she sat before a low, flat rock, shifting her head and stretching her neck until the snakes approved of her position. They squirmed amongst themselves, jostling in their tight mass to each find a patch of sunlight, a bit of warm rock on which to bathe. Their scales were smooth against her face and bare shoulders, their arguments familiar, their occasional bites on her ears or throat common enough to be ignored.

She did not hate them, the snakes, her punishment and her guards. Not anymore. Too long spent here, she supposed, too many years and she too weary to care; her anger had seeped away, and her pain.

Sleepily, the little grass snake stretched his body out across her cheek, crooning in the heat. His scales were soft and dry, sliding over her skin like warmed silk. He closed his poison green eyes, and murmured, "Hello traitor, hello whore, hello desecrator."

When he was tired, she thought, resigned, he always returned to his old favorites. She stroked the short length of his body with the tip of a single brass claw.

The sun passed slowly across the heavens, and she watched the shadows shift and shorten before her. At last she closed her eyes, as if she too could find peace in the heat of the sun's yellow light. It would be easier, she thought, as she'd thought countless times before, to be like the snakes: to rest and sleep and dream in contented warmth; to have such simple things be enough to make her happy. Sometimes it seemed that she must have gazed upon her own heart, and now buried in her chest there was no blood, no beating flesh and warm life, but only a cold bit of chambered stone.

It was a sound that made her open a single eye: the slight scrape of leather against rock. For a moment she saw nothing, and then there, a movement -- a glimpse of human skin, a glint of light from polished metal. A man; a man's back, clothed in dirtied white. Softly, he crept nearer, careful movements in reverse.

"Hello hero," she whispered, the words little more than a shaped exhalation of breath. "You came." Upon her head the snakes shifted, lost in dreams, sluggish from the heat, and did not wake. It was only in the depths of her mind that her imagination conjured the grass snake's greeting: "Hello wing-foot, hello pretender, hello death."

Her hero paused but did not reply. Oh, he'd heard her; she knew that much for certain. It was not the first morning that she'd seen him, nor the first time that they'd spoken. A moment later he resumed his stealthy approach. Soon she could hear his ragged breathing, smell his dripping sweat. He was afraid, the arid scent of terror surrounded him, and yet he kept walking. One step. Another.

"A moment," she whispered, knowing that he could read the shape of her lips in reflection, if not hear the sound of her words. And yet he came closer.

"All I ask," she said, and now her words held an edge as hard as stone, "is for a moment."

He stopped, but did not reply. Fine, she thought, she'd leave him to his silence. Let him pretend that he was the hero she'd named him; that it was the shield that let him approach rather than her permission. Let him believe that it was his prowess that had kept him safe, this time as on his other visits, and skill that prevented his becoming anything but pile of dust and rubble, smashed at the bottom of the mountain like so many others.

She was so tired; this brief anger, too, soon bled away.

In the stillness, she moved with care. One by one she touched them, her snakes, with small movements of an outstretched arm that might be taken for the twitches of dreams. Golden scales and brown, green scales and black, white scales like clouds at dawn. The grass snake did not wake when she came to him, stroking his softly breathing side.

"Goodbye snake," she said.

Not stone, she thought, for she could feel the sudden beating of her heart: a rush of joy and heat and pain. The past was gone; if she had but one regret, it was for them, her beautiful, hateful snakes.

In silence she had spoken, and so carefully she had moved, but it had not been enough; and slowly, as he did everything but strike, the viper rose from his place in the sun. No, she thought, and felt exhausted.

The viper turned his wedge of a head towards the hero and his drawn sword, and yet he raised no cry. His voice, which had called out warnings for so many other would-be heroes, stayed silent; he did not tense or bare his fangs. He merely watched for a single long moment, then turned back to stare at her face. It was only then that she thought to wonder if he felt as tired as she.

With but a moment's hesitation, she touched his neck once with the back of a single finger, the first time she had touched him with anything but the points of outstretched claws. His body was warm.

Again she said, "Goodbye snake." The viper peered at her with his dark, metallic eyes. His tongue flicked out once, twice, and then he curled, twisting around so that his body rested across her shoulder. With gentleness she'd never seen, that she'd never imagined he possessed, he lay down, his head a soft pressure in the hollow of her throat.

"Beautiful," he whispered. "You are forgiven."

The End

 

Published in Issue #2 of Fantasy Magazine, February 2006.