The Serpent's Secret

by Sayantani DasGupta

  “Yum! Yum! Snaky King is a big dum-dum!”

  “What did he say? Oh no, what did he say?”

  The boat went almost vertical and tumbled backward.

  “Yaaaa!” I wasn’t sure who was shouting, but the last thing I saw before we got pulled down into the center of the whirlpool were people—and a bird and two magical spheres—that I didn’t want to lose.

  It was a long way down—history-test long, humiliating-moment-in-the-locker-room long, Alice-falling-down-the-rabbit-hole long. And dark. And loud. And terrifying.

  When we landed—with a hard thunk, I might add—it wasn’t in the demon’s stomach, but in a relatively dry undersea cavern. The peacock barge, luckily, was equipped with airbags, and they seriously broke our fall. (Go magical crash-test systems!)

  We climbed out, leaving the gold and silver balls in the barge for safekeeping, and looked around. I could hear the water of the whirlpool still swirling above us. The scene was all too familiar. The demon baby was nowhere to be seen. But someone else was.

  “Hello, Sssissster,” said a set of seven nasty voices.

  I whipped around to see that last-place winner for brother of the year—Naga, the seven-headed snake.

  “Oh, booger-nosed snot fest, where did YOU come from?”

  “Daughter, your mouth.”

  “Yesss, indeed, your mou-sss,” hissed the cobra heads in unison. In a flash, Naga wrapped Ma, Baba, and even poor terrified Tuntuni in his coils. As a last flourish, he slapped his nasty tail over all their mouths. They were effectively bound and gagged.

  “Let them go!” Neel brandished his sword. Even in the dark cavern, it glinted with an inner light.

  “Now!” I aimed my arrow at the largest of his seven hooded heads. The snake lunged at me, flicking seven forked tongues.

  I saw Baba’s eyes widen at something behind me even before I heard the chilling voice. I whirled around, my arrow still raised. I should have known who was behind all this.

  “Children, children, why all the fuss?” The Serpent King slithered into the room—his top half human, but his bottom half in his terrible serpentine form. “Do you like my new undersea residence?” he oozed. “It’s a rental, and I’m still waiting on the interior decorator …”

  “You!” Neel ran at the Serpent King, his sword aimed at my birth father’s throat.

  “Impudent demon-ling!” The Serpent King held up his hand, sending Neel’s sword clattering to the floor with a bolt of green lightning. “Did you actually think you could destroy my glorious kingdom and get away with it?”

  “Stop!” I whirled back around and aimed my arrow at the largest of the cobra’s seven heads. “Let them all go—it’s me you want. Otherwise … I shoot Naga!”

  The Serpent King waved a callous hand, mocking Naga’s snakey lisp. “Oh, shoot him, what do I care? You’d think those ssssseven ssssstupid heads would make him sssssmarter. But he let you get away last time, didn’t he?”

  If it was possible for a magical seven-headed cobra to look hurt, he did. But it’s not like my snake-brother got all warm and fuzzy as a result. In fact, he squeezed his prey even harder. Ma and Baba sputtered, their faces red, and an alarming number of yellow feathers discharged from where Tuntuni must be—almost invisible in the folds of cobra muscle.

  “Stop!” I shrieked, turning to the Serpent King. “Please! He’ll kill them!”

  “So what?” snarled my biological father. “Did you show my poor snakes any mercy? Hmm? Did you?”

  “Let them go!” I sent an arrow flying at the Serpent King, but he stopped it mid-flight with a green bolt. As I aimed a second arrow, the Serpent King shot another bolt of green lightning, this time directly at my hands. My beautiful bow exploded in green flames. I dropped it, before falling to the ground myself. Where the green fire hit me, my arms felt like they were burning, only from the inside out. It was agony.

  Neel had picked up his sword again, and ran screaming at the Serpent King. “Aaaa!”

  “Oh, will you never learn?” He shot a bolt of green, this time a flaming sphere that imprisoned Neel within it. The prince screamed in pain—a sound that made my blood run cold. He writhed around within the glowing orb, his body twisting in unnatural contortions, as if he was being tortured.

  “Neel!” I shrieked, running toward him. The heat of the sphere was scorching, and it shot out green flares. It burned me even at a distance, like the molten surface of some alien sun. “Neel, hang on! Hang on!”

  “You’ll join him soon enough, you pathetic waste of a daughter.” The Serpent King aimed his hands high.

  “No!” Everyone I loved was going to die. And it was all my fault. My legs couldn’t hold me up anymore, and I collapsed. I was screaming and crying so hard, my tears were tumbling from my face. I didn’t try to control them. I had much more important things to worry about. But where the tears hit my arms, something strange happened. They eased the burning feeling of the green bolt.

  My tears. In a flash, I remembered how Tuni had seemed dead, but how he’d come to life in my arms. I’d been crying then too. And why was it exactly I’d spent so many years training my own tears not to spill? Had I somehow known the power they contained?

  Unless the pearly waters of the fountain can flow free.

  Were my tears the salty pearls that needed to flow free too?

  And then I heard her voice, as clean and pure as a bell. The tears of the moon’s daughter are as powerful as the tides. I felt her strength within me, my moon-mother. I had always had it—the strength of the night, the strength of the tides, the strength to reflect the light of others. The strength to weep without weakness.

  “You’re not going to kill them.”

  I rose from the ground, my arms outstretched. I was my father’s child. I was my mother’s daughter. My face was still wet, and my heart beat in rhythm with the music of the oceans.

  “And you’re not going to kill me.”

  The jagged green light shot at me, but I met it with a searing white light of my own. Where they clashed, the green glowing softened, became liquid, and fell to the floor like rain.

  “No!” the Serpent King cried, his eyes burning orbs. “How is this possible?”

  “I guess there’s no getting around it. I am your daughter, at least biologically,” I said. “I can’t hide from who I am. But it doesn’t mean I can’t choose my own destiny.”

  He shot bolt after bolt of green fire, but I met them all with the shimmering, diamond light of my own. The intensity of its power grew each time I aimed my hands.

  When unleashed, there is no more powerful force than the will of nature.

  I was a part of nature, a moon-child, and I wanted desperately to live, to have my loved ones live. Not die in this horrible dark cavern, but walk together into the light.

  My body felt possessed, as if I was channeling all my moon-mother’s energy through me. My eyes were wet and felt like they were glowing white-hot. My hair shot out around me—shimmering as if with electricity. And the moonlight—not soft, but terrible, and beautiful too—shot like dancing fire from my upturned palms.

  There was a rumbling, and I knew that I was somehow shifting the tides in the sea above our heads. I heard a familiar groaning.

  “Where din-din go? Snaky King, you steal Bogli’s din-din?”

  The cavern started to shake, and streams of water poured down from cracks in the ceiling. Then I heard a drumbeat that could only be the rhythmic sound of demonic footsteps.

  The rakkhosh baby, Bogli. Somehow, the Serpent King had recruited him to get us to this cavern. And now Bogli was coming to collect his reward. The thought of facing both the Serpent King and the baby demon should have terrified me. But I wasn’t scared. I knew exactly who I was.

  I turned to the seven-headed cobra and said, with both sympathy and hard honesty, “You better run, Brother. All heck’s about to break loose, and our father’s not going to save you.”

  The seven forked tongues flickered for only
a moment as Naga considered my words. Then the seven heads nodded as the cobra unwound himself from his victims. Ma, Baba, and Tuni fell in a collapsed heap on the ground. All injured, but all breathing.

  “Thisss isssn’t the end, Sssissster.” Naga shot his muscular tongues in my direction, but I fended them off with a bolt of white light.

  “Oh, I’ll count on it,” I called as the cobra slithered down a passage and disappeared.

  “Good riddance to old rubbish,” the Serpent King snarled, aiming his claws at me. “Now to take out the rest of the trash!”

  I was tired, but exhilarated. I aimed my hands, willing the white light with all my might, but before I could, something happened. From the streams of water pouring out of the cracking ceiling, a woman in misty white appeared. She was translucent, as if she existed only as a reflection in the water.

  “Mother,” I breathed.

  “I have let this go on for long enough!” Her voice boomed through the cavern with an unearthly force. “I let my love for you blind me to your darkness, but no more!”

  “You are my wife,” the Serpent King snarled. “You are bound to my darkness. You don’t have strength to kill me!”

  But this was the moon’s most fierce face. Her light glowed a thousand times brighter than mine. It was glorious and terrifying at the same time. Confronted with such power, the Serpent King went from scoffing to disbelieving to actually a little worried.

  Even still, he raised his hands, sneering at her. “You don’t have the guts!”

  As he launched the crackling lightning from his hands, the moon shot a white-hot beam at the Serpent King. He glowed an incandescent green, but then began to writhe and decay, his energy going from green to brown to gray to black.

  As his power dissipated, so did the swirling orb holding Neel. Neel was free—panting, eyes closed, on the ground. But free.

  When I turned back around, the Serpent King was a pile of char. She had done it. The moon maiden had freed me, and herself.

  I could barely look at her; her aspect was so awesome and powerful. I ducked my head in a grateful bow.

  “He is gone for now, but not forever,” she said, her voice shimmery like the ocean.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I whispered.

  For a moment, she touched my head with a silvery hand. I felt the cool liquid of her touch fill me with energy, power, and love. She slipped something strong and yet pliable in my hands—my bow, magically intact.

  “You are the daughter of the moon. But you are also the daughter of those good people who raised you. And yes, you are the daughter of the dark Serpent King too.” Her voice rang like a bell in the echoing cavern. “Everything is connected to everything, Kiranmala.”

  I nodded. My eyes were too full of tears to do anything else. It was only when I admitted to myself all of who I was that I was able to find my deepest power.

  Then my moon-mother withdrew, becoming faint and distant again.

  Her last words to me were ones of warning. “And now, you must run, my daughter, for the demons are coming.”

  The ceiling was collapsing, and the underground cavern was filling with seawater. The thumping footsteps of the baby demon were fast upon us, and everyone was half unconscious from the attack of my serpent relatives. Just another average day in the alternate dimension.

  “Neel, get up!” I didn’t have time to be super sympathetic right now. He was a demon prince and a fast healer, and I needed his help with the others. I hauled him up by the armpits and yelled into his half-focused face. “Come on, daycare demon’s on his way, and we’ve got to get out of here!”

  I was thinking about slapping him across the face, but he got it together about the third time I shook him. The water in the cavern was already waist-high.

  “Let’s get the others in the boat.”

  Neel and I half dragged, half carried Ma, Baba, and Tuntuni into the peacock barge. The golden and silver spheres rolled around as if glad to see us. My parents were holding up okay, but the small bird had really gotten the worst of it. He sputtered and coughed, his face and body badly bruised.

  Ma wrapped the bird in the frayed end of her sari, but her troubled eyes were on me. “Are you all right, my golden one?”

  I couldn’t say anything. Fat tears fell out of my eyes. Now that I’d turned on the faucet, I couldn’t seem to shut it off.

  Ma and Baba were horrified at the sight of me crying. “Are you hurt? Oh, what can we do? Is it your bowels?” They looked as if they thought I was going to die.

  “No, it’s not that,” I sniffled. “It’s just that you didn’t ask to get involved in this. All you did was take care of me. You tried to tell me—but I never believed your stories. Can you ever forgive me?”

  Their faces cleared.

  “Shona, none of this is your fault.” Ma wiped my tears with her fingers. “We are your parents; it’s our job to take care of you. We will always love you, no matter what.”

  “We humans may not be powerful or magical,” Baba added, holding me close. “But the stories we pass on to our children can be.”

  “I hate to break up this touching moment,” Neel interrupted, “but we’ve got to find a way out of here before the cavern is totally flooded.”

  As if on cue, we heard a familiar voice bellow.

  “Where you go, din-din? Here, little din-din, come to Bogli belly!”

  We all started rowing like crazy.

  As we hauled the boat as fast as we could down a stony passage, I noticed my parents were looking a lot more sprightly. My tears seemed to have cleared up the bruises on their faces and hands. And even the few tears that hit Tuntuni, in my mother’s lap, had done him a lot of good. The little bird ruffled his feathers, and then flew over to help Baba row.

  The narrow passages made everything echo. Now the baby demon’s voice seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  “Come to Bogli, little din-din.”

  And then we heard the most disturbing sound. Like someone was slurping a thick milk shake through a tiny straw.

  “What is that?” I began to ask, when I realized what I was hearing. Oh gods, we were moving backward. That imbecilic demon brat was sucking the cavern water dry—and in the process pulling us toward him!

  “Row! Row!” I yelled, and my parents obeyed. Neel, bizarrely, did not.

  “What are you doing?” He’d pulled out his sword and was standing at the back of the boat, like some kind of advertisement for a one-leg-lifted-in-the-air pirate.

  “I’m tired of this snot-nosed rakkhosh baby calling the shots,” he yelled. We were getting sucked back so fast now, Neel’s hair was swirling around his head.

  “I think I’m retiring as a demonic pacifist.” Neel’s teeth flashed. “I’m going to kick some rakkhosh baby butt!”

  We were back in the main cavern again and could see Bogli at one end. The demon was crouched low to the ground, sucking the water like some kind of deranged elephant. His beady red eyes glowed at the sight of us.

  “Come to belly! Come to belly!” he squealed.

  “I’ll come to your belly, all right,” Neel shouted, jumping off the boat into the ankle-deep water. “I’ll come to your belly to cut it in half!”

  With a ferocious yell, Neel charged the demon.

  “We’ll be fine, don’t worry,” I called to my parents as I jumped out right behind him, my weapon raised. The magic bow vibrated in my hands as I volleyed arrow after arrow in the demon’s direction. My moon-mother must have done something to my quiver as well, because, no matter how many arrows I shot, it kept refilling on its own.

  My arrow tips glowed with white-hot moonlight, and where they hit the rakkhosh, they burned. The confused creature batted at the stinging missiles.

  “Ow! Mean girl has mean pointies! Why you so mean?”

  Neel was on him now, slashing at his ankles with his sword. Bereft of the Serpent King’s magical backup, the baby rakkhosh seemed to cower.

  “Ow! You mean too! Why hurt Bogli?�
�

  “Bogli needs to back off!” Neel shouted. “Stop chasing us, got it?” He was right up in the baby demon’s face, pointing his sword at Bogli’s eyeball.

  The rakkhosh sat down with a plunk on the wet cavern floor.

  “Mama! Mama!” Bogli wailed. “Boy yell at Bogli!”

  “Mama?” I moaned.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Baba yelled from behind me. “We don’t want to meet his mother!”

  Unfortunately, we already had. Because, in a puff of acrid-smelling smoke, who should be standing there but …

  “Ma?” Neel yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

  I stared. “Are you trying to tell me that Bogli is your …”

  “Adopted daughter? Yes, as a matter of fact, she is just that.” The Demon Queen picked her front teeth with a sharpened nail. “Say hello to your little sister, darling.”

  Sister? I choked back a snort.

  “Bogli’s a girl?” The odd revelation seemed to take the anger right out of Neel’s sails.

  “Do you have a problem with that?” The Queen crossed her taloned hands over her chest, her nostrils spewing flames. “Have I raised some kind of demonic sexist? A purveyor of rakkhosh patriarchy?”

  Huh. Maybe I liked Neel’s mother more than I realized.

  Behind the Queen, Bogli stuck her giant thumb in her even more giant mouth. “Big Bwother!” she bellowed.

  Neel shook his head. “Enough stupid tricks.” He pointed his sword at his mother’s throat. “You tell us how to turn Lal and Mati back. You tell us now!”

  “They’re still trapped?” The Demon Queen belly-laughed hard and long, only stopping when she burped. “Vah! Some big demon prince you turned out to be—you haven’t even figured that out yet?”

  “Tell us, Ma!”

  The rakkhoshi rolled her eyes, “Oh, come on, Moon Moon Sen, you haven’t the faintest idea?”

  “Well.” I looked apologetically at Neel. “I did have one thought …”

  “Let’s have it, then!” the demoness urged.

  Neel pulled me aside. “Are you seriously having this conversation? Did you forget she tried to eat my brother and Mati?”