Serpent Catch: Book Two of the Serpent Catch Series

by David Farland

  Tull looked at Wayan, and was thankful that Fava was here to watch over him. What did he know about raising a child?

  “Would you like something to eat?” Fava asked Tull.

  Tull nodded, but did not speak. He felt clumsy in her presence. Her long red hair was tied in back, and she wore a short dress. On her right thigh was a bracelet decorated with feathers from a blue-jay. He realized that it was too cold for Fava to wear such a dress, but the bracelet signified that she was unmarried, and Fava was throwing her maidenhood in his face. She went to the pot on the oven, pulled out some rolls.

  Her legs were long and tan, well muscled. Her breasts were full and large. Her face showed her strength.

  With Wisteria, love had been mere entertainment. With Tirilee, it had been all passion and fire, with the promise of slavery in the end.

  But what would it be with Fava? Tull wondered. He decided, It would be all giving.

  She was strong, so much like him that he imagined them growing together, entwining like ivy around a pole. He had seen people grow together like that—their lives and notions, desires and fears, all becoming so entangled that the couple began even to look the same.

  That is the way it would be with Fava, until in the end they would not even be two people in mind or body, but one.

  And along the way there would be some fiery passion, and some nights of long, slow lovemaking just for fun, and days and years of giving to one another.

  Fava brought the rolls and some venison and set the plate on the ground before him. Tull looked down at it for a moment, and realized he was not hungry.

  “Is it not good?” Fava asked, an edge of hysteria in her voice, as if the thought of displeasing him would hurt her.

  Tull looked up at her, and he had the feeling, that in his personal journey of the worm, he was about to turn a corner and discover a love deeper than he had ever known.

  He unfolded his legs, picked up Wayan, and took Fava by the hand, pulled her outside.

  In the dirt by the front door, he drew a large figure eight, and then, holding Wayan, he stepped in the circle.

  He knew that formally, it was not right—that he should have brought his most valued possessions, the things that carried great kwea for him. Yet Wayan was the only thing he valued at the moment.

  He held his palms out and up, in a beggar’s gesture, and said. “I seek shelter from loneliness. I bring all that you see within this circle. I bring my heart.”

  Fava jumped back up on the porch with her mouth agape. “No! You can’t do this to me!” For a moment he thought she was saying no, but she put her hand over her mouth and tears welled from her eyes. “Today can’t be my wedding day! I must get ready. I need my friends to witness. I need time to figure out what I will bring into the circle—I need my favorite cup, and the sculpture of the bear! And my combs!”

  All of them were objects of great kwea, the things she would have to bring into her circle. She glanced at the door to the hogan and then back at Tull, and then toward Pwi Town where her friends lived, and Tull could tell that she could not decide which way to run first. She would want a traditional wedding, though he did not much care to have everyone watch them.

  “Fava,” Tull said, nodding his head toward town, “Get your friends and have them help you get ready. I’ve waited my whole life for love. I can wait a little while longer.”

  ***

  About Serpent Catch

  This was initially going to be a meditation on human physiology, to some degree. I was fascinated at the time by how the human mind works, how love leads to bondage, how powerful fear twists perceptions.

  So I wondered about the hypothalamus and its relationship to emotions and learning. How would a greatly enlarged area of the brain affect the thoughts and perceptions of the Neanderthals?

  This wasn’t just some minor curiosity. As a young teenager, I learned that I had a rare condition, one caused by an enlarged area of the brain in my auditory center, which gave me a borderline “audio-eidetic memory.” In other words, I could remember most of what I heard, a trait that is far rarer than having a photographic memory.

  So the idea of “alternate physiologies” carried a special appeal for me, and I kept probing the implications that this might have had for Neanderthals.

  Just as importantly, I wondered about the hidden evils that lie beneath the surface of society.

  Certainly, everyone has something that they would like to change about their own society, and I learned to feel a special dislike for the town that I grew up in.

  I mentioned earlier that I was the victim of child abuse at the hands of my father—physical, mental, and even some minor sexual abuse. But what strikes me as an adult is just how prevalent, and how tolerated, child abuse was in the town where I lived.

  This came home to me when I was sixteen. We had a family across the street, from us, one where the father was a disabled veteran with a lot of shrapnel in his head. He suffered terrible pain, and so he drank constantly. Often at night he could be heard yelling at his children from midnight to five in the morning (a boy of six, and one of eight), and beating them.

  In the neighborhood where I lived, child abuse was rampant, I’m afraid, and all of our neighbors turned a blind eye to the abuse in this house, but eventually someone turned Mr. Worden in, and the state became involved in the family’s affairs. In those days, the Children’s Welfare department was pretty much a toothless tiger. They helped ease the abuse, but didn’t stop it completely.

  One day when I came home from high school and found a couple of police cars at the neighbor’s house. I asked my mother what was going on, and she said, “Mr. Worden is being arrested. He’s had his boys chained to their beds for a month.”

  I was caught by surprise. I hadn’t heard any yelling coming from their house in weeks, but hadn’t realized that it was “too” quiet.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me what was going on,” I asked angrily.

  My mother said, “Because you would have called the police on them!”

  I felt baffled. “You mean that you wouldn’t have?”

  She tried to explain, “I know that their parents are terrible, but they still love their children. If we called the police, the kids would be taken away.”

  Well, the kids got moved to foster care that day, and I felt relieved and hoped that it would begin the process of recovery.

  I felt ashamed, and wondered why I personally hadn’t done more. I recognized that to some degree I was simply “asleep” to some of the things that went on around me—like child abuse.

  I’d grown up with it in my own family. I’d learned to be careful as a toddler, to hide from my father when I could, and to take a blow. Everywhere I looked, abuse was prevalent. When I was eight, we’d had a family next door where the alcoholic parents left the children to fend for themselves, teaching their filthy infants to beg and steal just to be fed. I often saw the kids fishing for carp, or scavenging roadkill (“them dead coons is good eatin’!”). When they moved, they were replaced by another family that was even worse. We had teachers who would complain about all of the violence in our school, but would then turn a blind eye on the playground to the rampant bullying that went on.

  What intrigued me about this incident was simply this: We had at least a dozen other neighbors living within screaming distance of our neighbor’s children. Some lived much closer than we did, and so they knew better than I what was going on. Yet every single one of them ignored the problem. They let those boys stay chained in their rooms.

  So the question became, how does an entire society become blind to its own evil?

  Some societies are more brutal and corrupt than others, of course.

  My grandfather worked in organized crime for most of his life, and he wanted me to follow in his footsteps, but I looked at his sad little existence and wanted no part of it.

  A couple of years before writing this novel, I worked in a prison, which was rife with gangs, and became fascinated
by how gang life worked.

  In particular, I began studying cultures, wondering why so many corrupt and ineffective societies still convince themselves that they are somehow good or useful.

  Even our churches often hide a dark side.

  I had a critic who once delivered a paper on this novel, where he talked about Tull’s search for a new father—and the critic was right on the money.

  But Tull doesn’t just reject his father and mother—he rejects the society that he was born into, his family, his town, his continent.

  Tull becomes unmoored, and must begin creating his own society.

  In writing this, I wanted Tull to go to the city of Denai and be shocked by how evil it was. The place was already a legend in his mind, so I had to try to figure out how to beat the legend. I tried to imagine what the most evil city in the world would be like, and realized that perhaps the best model would be Las Vegas. So I tried to give Denai the glamour of Las Vegas, along with the slave markets of old New Orleans, and the Gestapo of Hitler’s Germany.

  Really, I think that the novel perhaps should have dwelt on that longer, but Tull’s sojourn in Denai was meant to be a slap in the face, an awakening to the vastness of a problem that troubles every civilization on earth to some degree.

  The question for me became: How do we recognize the hidden evils in our own society, and then root them out?

  How do we awaken ourselves?

  ***

  Glossary

  Anee—A mineral-poor moon 11,000 miles in diameter that circles a gas giant named Thor near a type I star 1950 lightyears from Earth. In the year 2681, the Alliance of Nations began terraforming Anee in order to create a terrestrial zoo—a place where genetic paleontologists could store specimens of animals recreated from the Jurassic, Miocene, and Pliocene Eras. Each of three continents stores representatives from one of the Eras.

  Creators—A race of highly intelligent beings, part machine and part biological organism, designed by genetic paleontologists to maintain the ecosystems of Anee. The Creators are living DNA synthesizers. To control animal populations, they frequently design and give birth to predators and parasites. The Creators are strictly programmed to perform their specific jobs. After the death of the Creator named Forester 1, the Creators designed Dryads to protect the forests.

  Dire Wolves—Canis Dirus—A heavy-bodied dark gray wolf common during the Pleistocene, short on cunning but long on tenacity and viciousness.

  Dragons—Warm-blooded flying carnivores that were created by the Starfarers to be an eco-barrier. Each continent has several varieties of dragon in various sizes—from the giant great-horned dragons to the tiny hawk dragon. Each dragon is born with a genetically transmitted memory that encourages it to destroy species that it recognizes as foreign to the environment.

  Dryads—A being made by the Creators to maintain forests in Pliocene areas after the Creator Forester 1 was killed in an earthquake. Dryads are humanoid females with long life spans and strange abilities. The abilities, size, and coloration of the Dryad depends upon the type of forest it was created to maintain.

  Eco-barriers—Certain animals have the ability to migrate across oceans. For example, many types of semi-aquatic carnivorous dinosaur could easily make such journeys, and the introduction of such animals into an area populated by Pleistocene sabertooths could be disastrous, since the sabertooths could not compete with the larger predators. The paleontologists who terraformed Anee recognized the danger such transoceanic migrations could cause. Therefore, they erected a series of “eco-barriers” to prevent migrations. These barriers consist of artificially engineered predators: primarily, the deep-ocean “sea serpent” to patrol the waterways; and various species of “dragon” to patrol the sky. Both the sea serpent and the dragon are ruthless predators without equal in nature.

  Eridani—An alien race that went to war with humans in the year 2902. Using small faster-than-light drone warships, the Eridani successfully stopped all extraplanetary travel between human settlements within a matter of four years.

  Hukm—Homo-gigantis. A race of large apelike humanoids with long brownish-red or white fur. The Hukm, one of several races of giant hominids once native to Earth, were originally restricted to a small region of Northeast Asia, and the species thrived only for a few thousand years. Fossil evidence indicates that the race probably died out about 396,000 BC. Extinction appeared to occur due to climactic changes between glacial periods, and may have come about as a result of inter-species warfare accompanied by starvation. When reintroduced into the wild on Anee, the Hukm showed themselves to be highly social vegetarians who quickly domesticated the woolly mammoths.

  Kwea—Emotional resonance. Often passionate feelings aroused by memories. Neanderthals have specific words that can refer to hundreds of different kinds of kwea, based upon the types and degrees of emotionality, but these are ignored in translation for simplicity’s sake.

  For a Neanderthal, every object, every experience, every memory carries an emotional weight, a value of kwea. While some things, like the tale of Adjonai, are so universally known that nearly all Neanderthals feel a similar type of fear of him, in most cases the weight of kwea is based upon personal experience.

  For example, a common knife may be considered sacred or of great value to one individual because of his associated kwea, while for another the same object would seem plain and unimportant.

  Mastodon—On Anee, any of eleven species of pachyderm that inhabit woodlands and grasslands in every climatic region.

  Mastodon Men—Homo rex. A race of carnivorous humanoids of low intelligence, averaging some 8.5 feet in height and weighing 500-800 pounds. Mastodon Man originally inhabited mountainous areas in Asia from 250,000-75,000 BC. On Earth, the Mastodon Man apparently did not compete well with smaller humanoids, but on the fecund world of Anee they quickly gained a strong foothold.

  Neanderthal—Homo neanderthalensis (see also Pwi, Okanjara, and Thrall). The Neanderthals are a distinct species, similar to modern humans in size and build, but differing from humans in their DNA by .285%. Neanderthals tend to be larger and stronger than humans, and have slightly shorter arms and a muscular build. The Neanderthal spine has less curvature, so Neanderthals stand straighter than humans do, and their large toe is curved inward, allowing them to run faster. The Neanderthal’s chest cavity is larger than that of a human, and their arms rotate at a greater angle. Their skulls are thicker, hips slightly wider.

  Neanderthals have sandy yellow to red hair and green, blue, or yellow-brown eyes. They have heavy supraorbital ridges that give their eyes a deep-set appearance. Their teeth and palate tend to protrude more than that of a human, yet they completely lack a chin.

  The hands of a Neanderthal differ in structure from that of a human. The hands of a Neanderthal are larger and stronger than those of a human, with large robust knuckles. The human thumb is tilted at a forty-five degree angle to the fingers so that tip of the thumb can touch the tip of each individual finger; however, a Neanderthal’s thumb is not tilted at an angle to the fingers, and the Neanderthal is therefore far less dexterous than a human.

  Differences in the Neanderthal palate, larynx, and sinus cavities do not allow them to vocalize most long vowels or semivowels used by humans. Instead, the Neanderthals shorten long vowels and tend to speak through their noses.

  The cerebral cortex of the Neanderthal brain is slightly larger than that of a modern human, and they are fully the intellectual equals of humans. However, the Neanderthal hypothalamus, the area of the brain responsible for processing emotions, is three times as large as that of a human. For this reason, Neanderthals tend to lead a very complex emotional life. Because of the way that the Neanderthal brain processes information, memories frequently carry very strong, emotionally-charged ties.

  Because Neanderthals feel their emotions more powerfully than humans do, they feel a consuming need to express these emotions. Neanderthal dialects vary by region, but their languages have some similarities.
Any noun or verb can be modified by various suffixes to express the Neanderthal’s feelings about an object or action. The order of the suffixes always goes:

  noun or verb + emotional indicator + person + emotional degree indicator.

  For example instead of saying “the sky is gray,” the Neanderthal might express his feelings about the subject: szerzhoaFava ah femma. This sentence literally reads “Sky-love-I-generously is gray,” and would be translated “The gray sky which I love completely.” The first word in the sentence, szerzhoaFava, is translated below:

  Emotional

  Noun Base + Indicator + Person + Degree Indicator

  szer (sky) zho (love) a (I) Fava (completely)

  The degree indicator is often a noun itself. For example, the word Fava means “pear tree.” On Anee, several varieties of wild pear bear fruit in late autumn. Neanderthal legends often embellish this, telling of heroes starving in the wilderness who are saved by pear trees that magically blossom and ripen in mid-winter when the tree “sees” the hero coming. Because of this reputation for generosity, Fava then becomes synonymous with generous. When used as an emotional indicator, Fava means “given with all the heart.”

  Okanjara—The Free Ones. (Literally, “I am free!”) Any Neanderthal who has escaped slavery after a long period of time is an Okanjara.

  Phylomon—The last living human who was not born on Anee. The last of the Starfarers. A man who, because he still benefits from the technology of the Starfarers, has survived for over one thousand years.