Serpent's Kiss

by Alex Archer

  Goraksh didn’t know what was keeping the cargo ship afloat. Thinking like that made him nervous, though. If the ship suddenly went down, the sea bottom was nearly a half mile down. If he didn’t get out quickly enough, it would take him with it.

  Don’t think about that, he instructed himself. Get the job done.

  He surfaced and shone the floodlight up at Karam. “Send down the net.”

  Karam nodded and dropped the cargo net down. Other members of the crew used battery-operated saws to widen the hole in the hull.

  Goraksh grabbed a fistful of the rough hemp strands and pulled the net under with him. He selected a crate at random and wrapped the net over it. Then he yanked on the rope to signal Karam and the others to haul it out of the hold.

  An arm settled around Goraksh’s neck and shoulder. Fear ripped through him as he flailed in the water with his free hand to turn around. He aimed the floodlight behind him and instinctively centered it on the figure.

  The dead man’s mouth and eyes were open. Yellowed eyes and yellow, crooked teeth showed.

  That was all Goraksh noticed before he screamed in terror and tried to swim backward. The respirator dropped from his lips and his face slammed into a suspended crate hard enough to almost knock him out. He swallowed seawater as he tried to breathe, then remembered he was underwater.

  Fighting the panic that filled him, unable to get the dead man’s face out of his mind, Goraksh dropped the floodlight and used both hands to shove crates away from him so he could reach the surface. He pushed off on a floating crate and got enough lift to reach the edge of the hole that had been cut in the hold.

  Sick, barely able to breathe because of his fear of dead things and the seawater he’d swallowed, Goraksh hauled himself out of the hold. He couldn’t stand and ended up on all fours as he retched out the seawater.

  When his stomach finally settled, Goraksh felt drained and embarrassed. He forced himself to his feet and stood on shaky legs amid the mess he’d made.

  “Are you through shaming me?” his father roared from the other ship.

  Goraksh faced his father and intended to speak roughly, as a man would do. But his words were soft and without direction.

  “The crew went down with the ship,” he said.

  “Good. Then maybe they didn’t have time to call in this location,” his father said. “Maybe we’ll have more time to work.”

  Even after all the years he’d lived with the man, Goraksh couldn’t believe how callous he was. Rajiv had brought Goraksh along on the pirating expeditions after storms for eight of his twenty years. During the past four, Goraksh had been expected to take part in stealing whatever cargo they could salvage.

  Finding the illegal salvage was one thing, but getting away with it was quite another. The Indian navy and merchant marine, the British navy and the International Maritime Bureau, were all problems. Rajiv Shivaji considered those risks a part of doing business.

  Goraksh recognized them as an end to the life he wanted. His father was a pirate. Rajiv Shivaji carried on an old family enterprise. Goraksh never romanticized the nature of what his father did.

  But if Goraksh was ever caught doing his father’s business, he knew his dream future was forfeit. Still, he loved his father. After his mother had died, his father had raised him and had never taken another wife. It had only been the two of them.

  If Goraksh was ever to be asked if he feared or loved his father more, though, Goraksh didn’t know what his answer would be.

  KARAM USED a crowbar to open the crate Goraksh had selected from those in the flooded hold. Water, foam peanuts and boxes of iPods spilled out across the ship’s hull.

  “They’re ruined,” Rajiv snarled. “Go below and find something salvageable.”

  Goraksh put the respirator back in his mouth and dived back into the hold. He recovered his floodlight and tried not to look at the dead man floating amid the boxes. Then he found two more.

  He bagged more crates and sent them up. During the time he waited for the net to be sent back down, he scouted the hold. Two hatches, one at either end, normally allowed access to the upper decks. Both of them had jammed.

  If there was anything in the crew’s quarters, they wouldn’t be able to get to it without cutting through the floor or forcing the hatches. Goraksh hoped his father wouldn’t demand that. Doing either of those things might upset the equilibrium of the ship.

  Even now he truly believed the ship had sunk lower in the water. He reached the opening they’d created more easily.

  Pounding echoed throughout the hold. Goraksh felt as though he were trapped in a gigantic drum. He netted a final crate, thinking his efforts were going to be as wasted as the other times. He surfaced.

  Karam leaned down into the hold. He cupped one hand around his mouth to be heard over the sound of the sea against the hull. “Your father wants to leave.”

  “All right,” Goraksh responded. He swam through the maze of boxes to the opening and wondered what had made his father change his mind. Not even the fact that they’d only pulled up ruined electronics in over a dozen attempts would have made Rajiv Shivaji give up on the hope of turning a profit.

  Something had happened.

  “IS ANYONE OUT THERE? Can anyone help us?”

  Goraksh stood beside his father in the ship’s wheelhouse and listened to the broadcast over the shortwave radio. His sodden clothing gave him a chill.

  “Hello? Hello? God, please let someone be out there. We need help. Our boat is sinking. Please. Please!”

  The voice belonged to a woman. She sounded young and frightened.

  Rajiv glanced at the radio operator. The man worked quickly with a slide rule, compass and map. He made a few tentative marks and watched his instruments again.

  “Why don’t you answer her?” Goraksh asked. For a moment he couldn’t help imagining his girlfriend at the other end of the radio connection. Then again, Tejashree feared the open ocean and wouldn’t accompany him sailing.

  “Because I don’t wish to answer her,” Rajiv said.

  Goraksh fell silent and knew better than to ask again.

  “Our boat is the Grimjoy,” the woman said.

  Although he tried, Goraksh couldn’t decide if her accent was American or Canadian. He knew there was a difference between the two, but he didn’t quite know how to tell. He would have known if she had a British inflection.

  “Grimjoy,” one of his father’s men said as if he were familiar with the vessel.

  “I know.” Rajiv nodded happily. “I know that boat.” He looked at the radio operator. “Can you locate it?”

  The man made a few final notations on the map. “I have it now.” He handed up a slip of paper with the coordinates listed.

  “How far away are we?” Rajiv demanded.

  “Ten or fifteen miles. They’re north of our position.”

  “Is the boat in the open sea?”

  The radio operator shook his head.

  Goraksh knew that within the country’s boundaries the authorities would arrest his father for what he was doing. Most of the men on the Black Swan had been in trouble with the law on some occasion.

  “Does anyone else know they’re out there?” Rajiv asked.

  “I’ve been monitoring this frequency. So far they’ve received no reply.”

  “Good.” Rajiv gave the paper with the coordinates to the helmsman. “Set a course to take us there immediately.”

  The man nodded and hurried away.

  Rajiv strode out of the wheelhouse and onto the deck. He bellowed orders to abandon the sinking cargo ship and put on sails.

  Goraksh watched his father, but he listened to the woman’s plaintive voice coming over the radio frequency.

  “Please. Someone has to be out there. We’re adrift. I don’t know how to work the boat.”

  In seconds the Black Swan got under way. She heeled hard to port, caught the wind and sliced through the rolling waves like a thoroughbred.

  When he
joined his father on the deck and saw the savage exuberance on his father’s face, the sick knot inside Goraksh’s stomach twisted more violently. He’d never seen his father kill anyone, but he was aware of the stories that were told in the rough bars and opium dens in the darkest corners of Kanyakumari that said Rajiv Shivaji was a murderer several times over.

  5

  “Dude, nagas were evil.”

  “Maybe in Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, but not in Three-Point-Five. In Three-Point-Five you could roll up a naga character and play one. You could be Lawful Good if you wanted to.”

  “Yeah, well Three-Point-Five ripped D&D’s canon all to hell. It was just a stupid marketing ploy to bring back players who wanted to play monster characters and got pissed because they couldn’t.”

  “Playing monster characters is cool.”

  The constant chatter had finally gotten on Annja’s last nerve as she scanned the ocean shallows for more artifacts like the naga. She’d been listening to the arguments cycle viciously between Jason and one of Professor Rai’s students for two hours. At first the discussions had been amusing. Now they were exhausting.

  “Hey!” Annja turned around quickly and brought both of the younger men up short. They splashed to awkward stops in the water. “Gamer geeks—enough with the chatter.”

  Jason and the other young man just looked at her owlishly. They even blinked at about the same time.

  “The naga statue we found isn’t a playing piece from some long-lost D&D game,” Annja said. “We’re supposed to be out here looking for more artifacts.”

  She and Lochata had agreed to keep the students busy until the rescue helicopter arrived. They’d salvaged enough water and energy drinks to get them through the next few hours.

  “You think that naga was like part of a chess set?” the other young man asked.

  Irritated, Annja pinned him with her gaze. “What’s your name?”

  “Me?” The young man pointed at himself and looked surprised.

  “Yes. You.”

  He shrugged. “My name is Sansar.”

  “Fine. Listen up. No, I do not think that naga statue was part of a chess set. Or any kind of game.”

  “It would be kind of big, I suppose.”

  “Sansar,” Annja said, struggling to maintain her composure.

  The young man looked at her.

  “What I think is that the naga statue came from somewhere out there.” Annja waved at the shallows that lapped at the foot of the cliff. The flooding had almost totally receded.

  “Like, it was just laying out here somewhere?”

  “Or was buried under the sand.” Sand, shells and other debris from the sea lay strewed across the dig site and into the jungle. “The tsunami moved a lot of sea floor. Maybe it shifted some things around,” Annja said.

  “You think there’s more out here?”

  “I think there could be more out here,” Annja corrected. She couldn’t believe how lackadaisical the two were about potentially finding more artifacts.

  “So we could be out here tromping around in the water for no reason,” Jason said.

  “Personally, I think it beats sitting around the dig site in muddy clothes waiting for help to arrive,” Annja said.

  Jason frowned. “If my PSP hadn’t gotten washed away, I’d rather be sitting in the shade playing a game.”

  Okay, Annja thought with a sigh, forensic anthropology in a nice, quiet lab is soooo going to be your thing.

  “When’s the rescue helicopter going to be here?” Sansar asked.

  “I don’t know,” Annja answered. She felt a headache coming on, but she didn’t know if it was caused by hunger, the hot sun, spending the night in a tree or listening to the never-ending argument.

  “Man, I hope somebody finds more food,” Sansar said. “Do you think a Pringles can could survive getting submerged? I mean, if it hasn’t been opened. Those things are watertight before you peel them open.”

  Annja turned to face the two. “I’ve got an idea.”

  They waited.

  “Why don’t you two walk in that direction?” Annja pointed in the opposite direction.

  Jason looked that way, then he looked back at Annja. “Why do we have to walk that way? Why can’t we walk with you?”

  “Because we can cover more ground if we separate.” Annja hoped she sounded reasonable instead of frustrated and resentful of the company she was keeping.

  “Yeah,” Jason said, “I can see that. But why do you have to have this end? Why can’t we have it?”

  Annja stared at Jason. “We’ve been through a tsunami. We’re trapped out here without supplies. And you want to argue over which end of the Indian Ocean we’re going to search for artifacts that could be harder to find than a needle in a haystack?”

  Jason’s self-preservation suddenly kicked in. He held his hands up before him. “Hey, you know what? This end is just fine with me.” He looked over his shoulder and faked smiling happily.

  “What if she’s telling us to go that way because she believes she’s going to find something this way?” Sansar said suspiciously. “How do you know she doesn’t just want all the glory for herself?”

  “Dude,” Jason whispered, “you should really keep your mouth shut about now. She could kick your butt.”

  “Okay,” Annja said as evenly as she could, which she knew wasn’t very even at all, “you guys take this end. I’ll take that one.” She pulled the straps on her backpack and headed the other way.

  “You just really made her mad,” Jason told his companion.

  “Me? You’re the one that started the argument over the D&D rules.”

  Annja tried to block them from her hearing, but she was doomed to failure because sound carried more clearly and farther over water than it did over land. There were times when she preferred working alone on a dig. This was one of them.

  Doing a field study with Professor Rai was a treat. The woman had traveled extensively around the Indian subcontinent and been part of every major dig the Archaeological Survey of India had done in the past twenty years. Annja knew she could learn a lot. She also knew that the professor had played up Annja’s involvement to the local papers to get more press due to the Chasing History’s Monsters connection.

  The Shakti-sacrificial-victims dig hadn’t been set up to ferret out any new information. It was fieldwork designed to season the professor’s class and to provide more substantiation to the book Lochata was writing on Shakti.

  The gold naga statue was a totally unexpected find. Annja just hoped there would be more. She didn’t see how there couldn’t be.

  Jason and Sansar kept up their argument, though at a lower volume. They obviously weren’t paying attention to what might be in the shallows.

  Annja sighed unhappily. She was wet, hungry, tired and pushed to the breaking point of her patience. She wondered how the two students could be so completely useless. She wanted to find another artifact to show them what could happen if they actually applied themselves to the task at hand.

  “Hey!” Jason yelled with sudden enthusiasm. “Look what I found!”

  “SO HOW OLD IS IT?” Jason wanted to know.

  Standing in the shallows where the artifact had been found, Annja upended the fired clay pot and studied the bottom. “49 B.C.,” she said

  “Wow,” Sansar said. “That thing’s over 2050 years old.”

  Jason slapped him on the back of the head. “She’s goofing you. How would a potter know that he made a pot forty-nine years before Christ was born?”

  “Oh.” Sansar rubbed his head. “I knew that. I was just so excited over finding it that I wasn’t thinking.”

  “You didn’t find it. I did,” Jason said.

  “We were walking together. That means we both found it.”

  “I seem to recall bending down to pick it up from the water,” Jason replied.

  “Both of you can shut up,” Annja suggested.

  They looked at her, clearly offended but s
ilent nonetheless.

  “I think you have found something,” Annja said a short time later. “It even ties in with the dig Professor Rai has initiated.” She pointed to the figure of a six-armed woman riding a tiger.

  “Shakti, right?” Jason asked.

  “Right.”

  “I thought I recognized her.”

  “This lays out some of her story.” Annja slowly turned the pot to display the collection of images around the base.

  The images were sculpted to lead one into the other. The image next to the one of Shakti on the tiger showed her at court with several ladies-in-waiting fanning her. Still another showed her in battle with Shiva, her lover. The final image showed her sacrificing herself on a funeral pyre to Shiva.

  “Makes you wonder how long the Shakti cult was here,” Jason said.

  “It does,” Annja admitted. “But it also makes you wonder how wide the belief in her was spread.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did this come from the dig site? Or was it brought in from the sea?”

  “You think someone threw it away?”

  “No.” Annja struggled for patience. “I think the naga and the pot could have been part of a ship’s cargo.”

  “Cool,” Sansar said. “You mean you think there’s a sunken treasure ship loaded with gold out there?”

  “No,” Annja said. “I don’t.”

  BUT THE OTHER MEMBERS of the dig site were quickly convinced by Sansar and Jason that the ocean shallows were burgeoning with gold just waiting to be scooped up. They’d taken a break to go get bottles of water and quickly spread the news of their find. When they’d returned, most of the dig site members had returned with them.

  The students split into groups and prowled the water like children on an Easter-egg hunt. Jason and Sansar had stopped arguing long enough to locate a fishing net that had washed up. They weighted the bottom with stones and were dragging the ocean bed.

  Annja reluctantly admitted to herself that the two were definitely inventive.