The Serpent and the Crown Read online

  The cave opened up into a large cavern. Jankaro noticed a pile of bones ahead of him and stopped to take a closer look. By the look of the skull, he suspected it was a tapir. Beyond it there was another pile of bones, and the skull looked like it belonged to a jaguar. There were many piles of bones in the cavern, but he thought better of inspecting all of them and continued looking for a way out.

  There were several tunnels leading out of the cavern, all about the same size as the one from which he had come. Before choosing a tunnel, he dropped a bone at the entrance to the tunnel that led back out. He picked a tunnel at random and dropped a bone at its entrance. He wanted to be able to retrace his steps if need be. He followed the first tunnel for a while, sometimes crawling on his hands and knees to get through. The tunnel forked, he chose a direction and marked his path again. After a short while he arrived at another large chamber containing piles of bones. He wondered what fate had befallen the animals to whom the bones belonged. A wave of fear came over him but he pushed it from his mind.

  The second cavern also offered several paths of departure, so he chose one at random, marked his trail, and carried on. As he walked through the tunnel he reached out, pulled spiderwebs away from the walls and pushed them to the side. At one point his hand felt moisture. He examined it with the torch but, as he suspected, it was not water. It was a sticky substance that he quickly wiped away on his pants. He didn’t want to know what it was. He wasn’t feeling like his normal curious self. He desperately wanted to get home.

  He came to a small rounded chamber with substantial airspace above, but it seemed to be a dead end. Far up the wall of the chamber, he saw what looked like another cave. He thought he might be able to climb up to it and find a way out.

  The muddied wall was hard packed and solid, not loose and crumbly like the hole he had fallen into. This time it occurred to him to use his knife as a tool for climbing and he reached up as high as he could and sank the blade of his knife into the earthen wall, all the way down to the handle. It hung fast and he was able to pull himself up and dig his feet into the side of the wall. He lowered his feet back down to the ground and tucked his dwindling torch into the back of his belt, angling the flame away from his body. When he reached up again to find the handle of the knife and begin his climb, he sensed that something had entered the chamber behind him.

  Jorobai had raised his son alone since his wife’s death when Jankaro was almost two years of age. It was his passion for the jungle that Jankaro inherited. Whenever work on the farm was slow, he would take his son out into the forest to explore and learn. He taught him all the names and uses of the plants he knew. He taught him what to eat and what was poisonous when they ventured out gathering and fishing. If times were tough and the harvest was scarce, their survival was not at stake because they could always rely on the jungle to provide their basic needs.

  He forbade his son to stay out at night, as there were many dangers: poisonous snakes, toads, insects and plants, and the much more threatening hunger of the pumas and jaguars. It troubled him deeply to think of his son stranded in the middle of the jungle alone.

  He felt a dark foreboding twist his stomach into knots as the last remaining light from the sun faded away. He cursed himself for not disciplining his son. I should have started him working a year ago, he thought to himself. He finished his evening meal and stopped short of pouring himself a cup of masato. Night brought darkness, and it was much later than any other evening for Jankaro to return home. At that point he knew he must venture off into the night to search for him.

  He found his brother at his hut eating a grilled fish. “Rongo, I fear for Jankaro, he has not come home. Will you help me find him?”

  “Out there alone in the forest at night, I fear for him too,” said Rongo.

  The two brothers hurried off into the night, in search of Jorobai’s only son, lost in the dark depths of the jungle.

  When Jankaro turned around to see what was behind him, he wished he had heeded the words of his father and not ventured so far into the jungle. Or perhaps he should have pulled out his blowgun and tried to sink a poison dart into the eyeball of the Ashtari.

  He turned all the way around to behold the flickering tongue and mesmerizing eyes of a giant snake. Its head occupied nearly the entire space of the cave that he had crawled through. Before he had a chance to reach for his knife, or his blowgun, the serpent opened her mouth and exhaled a plume of foul breath that filled the chamber. When it entered his nostrils, he was stunned and weakened. His arms collapsed to his sides and his knees wobbled. He hunched forward, head sagging toward his chest and his mouth hung open, as he stood in a stupor. His whole body relaxed as he was transfixed by the power of the serpent, gazing up into her eyes. He watched as she opened her mouth wide from above and slowly lowered her head to consume him.

  “No” he whimpered, the words scarcely making a sound. “No, please no, don’t, don’t.” He was dizzy and wanted to lie down and find the earth with his hands. The life force within him wanted to cry out, wanted to scream, to grab the knife and flail wildly as the top of his head entered her mouth. She slid her mouth down over his head and shoulders as he stood helpless. With what little sensation he had left, he felt his head touch the soft, slimy entrance to her throat. She seemed to savor the process as the scaly edges of her mouth caressed the edges of this tender morsel. Jankaro’s torch hissed as it extinguished upon her tongue. He could faintly hear the slurping sound as his knees, ankles and feet disappeared into her mouth.

  “FATHER!” His cries echoed in the walls of his mind. “JOROBAI HELP ME!” His spirit pleaded over and over again as he felt his body compressed by the snake’s throat. She maneuvered him down further and further into the depths of her body.

  Resurrection

  Jorobai and Rongo raced out of the village and searched all of the main pathways around the perimeter, calling out for Jankaro as they went.

  “Last night he told me he saw an Ashtari,” Jorobai said to his brother.

  “That couldn’t be,” Rongo responded. “I remember grandfather told me about them. They were enormous beasts with a blue streak arching up and over their head and down their back. If you hunted them, they hunted you back. In all my explorations, I’ve never seen a trace of them.” Rongo possessed finely tuned tracking skills; he could find anything or anyone. But the darkness presented a serious challenge when trying to find someone quickly.

  “No one speaks of the Ashtari anymore,” Rongo continued. “Grandfather took me to a clearing by the Irumi River where the last of them was killed by his grandfather and brothers 100 years ago. No one has seen one since. In all the villages I have visited I have never heard anyone offer up such a tale as Jankaro’s. All this time we assumed they had died out.”

  “Where else could we look? I fear my son may have been correct in what he saw, and I dismissed him. Take me to that clearing and let’s see if we can pick up his trail from there.”

  Jorobai and Rongo raced back to the village once more to see if Jankaro had returned, but found no trace of him. They roused some of their tribesmen to patrol the night around the village, then returned to their huts, packed weapons and supplies, and ran together into the night.

  Down into the snake’s belly Jankaro descended. Agonizing pressure built in his lungs and finally he was left with no other choice but to open his mouth and gasp for air. There was just a bit of air, and what followed was the foul slime of the serpent’s insides. It flowed into his mouth, filling his lungs. His body shook as his lungs convulsed and tried to rid themselves of the slime, but eventually they collapsed and his breathing stopped.

  His heart accelerated to a furious pace, then it, too, collapsed and stopped. Air stopped flowing, his blood stopped circulating. Jankaro’s pain faded away.

  He remained awake but could not feel his body. He knew he was in the death process, and felt he was leaving the world, never to s
ee his father, his home, or the jungle ever again. He had sometimes thought about death, what it would be like to die. Was there anything on the other side? In death, would he get the chance to meet the mother he never really knew? But he wanted to go on living. In that moment he wanted more than anything to be free from the belly of the snake, to be free from the cave, to return home to his father. He would gladly choose serving his village as a humble farmer over death. There was only one chance. He would plead for mercy.

  “I beg you for mercy,” he called out to her with his inner voice. “Let me live. Let me go. Spit me out. Spit me out now and let me live. I want to live. Please snake, don´t eat me. Let me go.” He begged for mercy with passion and sincerity, and sensed that she heard him, but she did not seem interested in granting his request as she seemed to be taking such pleasure in devouring him. “Please snake, I will do anything. I will do anything you want. Let me go!”

  “Ahhhhhhhhh!” he could hear the delight as she hissed back and her voice reverberated all around and through him, “You will do anything I want?”

  “I give you my word I will do anything! Please give me back my life!”

  “Are you sure you want to make that commitment to me? Wouldn’t you rather just die? Follow the light. Your loved ones will greet you on the other side, and my hunger will be sated for a while.”

  “Please, I will do anything. Name it and I will do it! Let me live!”

  “Ahhhhhhh, well then, young man, I may have a task for you.” With this, Jankaro sensed the snake slithering quickly forward, with him still inside her belly.

  After a few hours of running through the forest, Jorobai and Rongo reached the clearing. Jorobai felt nauseous as he listened to Rongo read the tracks and describe his son´s encounter with the Ashtari. “Look here!” Rongo shouted. “He fell down into this pit!”

  “Jankaro! Jankaro! Are you down there?” Jorobai cried out, hearing nothing but an echo. He cut a long vine, lashed it around a tree and lowered himself into the pit while Rongo waited.

  “I’m at the bottom,” Jorobai hollered up. Rongo grabbed the vine and dropped down after him.

  They looked around and read the tracks and markings on the walls of the cave. “Looks like this pit saved him from the Ashtari,” said Rongo, fingering the depressions in the cave where the Ashtari had dragged its claws.

  “Jankaro!” Jorobai called out into the darkness, and again heard nothing but his own voice echoing back. They followed his trail through the cave until they came upon the dead end and found his knife embedded in the wall. It was a sharp blade made of metal, passed down to Jorobai from his father. It had been a gift from a man from a distant tribe. Jorobai pulled it out of the dirt wall as Rongo searched the chamber for clues.

  “This is it. The trail is cold. He starts to climb up here, he steps back down, he turns around, and that’s it. He disappears. I’ve never seen anything like this. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours ago. The handle of his knife is still moist with sweat.”

  Jorobai studied the knife and stared into the blade. He felt a gaping void in his chest pushing up into his throat as he dropped to one knee and touched the cold ground.

  Jorobai and Rongo retraced their steps through the cave, climbed up the vine and made their way back to the village. As they walked through the night, Jorobai stared into the knife, asking it where his son had gone. He felt an overwhelming despair, but he promised himself that he would not give up hope for his son until he knew for certain what had happened to him.

  They returned to the village just before dawn. No one had seen or heard from Jankaro. “Now we will track his every step in the light,” said Rongo. “We must leave no stone unturned. We will start from your hut.” So they went to Jorobai’s hut and noted that along with the knife, he took some food, his torch, his blowgun and his poison darts. They set out once again from the village, tracking every step Jankaro had taken.

  They came to the river and saw the raft on the other side so they built their own raft and crossed over. On the opposite bank, Rongo observed that Jankaro had picked up his pace and stopped marking his trail clearly after a while. They found the exact spot where he turned around, and tracked him all the way back to the river again. “He must have been in a hurry. The raft must be about half a mile back that way, but I can see across the river that he built himself another one,” said Rongo, pointing. They followed the river back to their own raft, crossed, and returned to Jankaro’s second raft. From there they tracked him back to the clearing where he encountered the Ashtari. They descended into the cave and retraced his steps again, but arrived at the same conclusion: Jankaro had simply vanished into thin air.

  Jankaro lost all sense of time as he rode in the snake’s belly in a state of paralysis. He scarcely felt a thing as she regurgitated his body and slid him feet first out of her mouth and onto the earth below. His body was limp and collapsed to the earth like a sack of yucca. He laid in the fetal position while she stuck out her forked tongue and licked the slime away from his mouth, nose, eyes, and ears. Jankaro felt his spirit reenter his body. He felt tremendous pain all over, and an intense pressure building inside his chest. He coughed and heaved over and over again in agony as the slime erupted out of his lungs and vomited up from his stomach. It came spraying out of his mouth and nose and onto the earth below. He gasped for air and felt it fill his lungs, then continued to cough and vomit as his lungs and stomach purged the slime. He felt his heart at first lurching, then pounding in his chest. His veins ached as his blood began to circulate.

  He lay there, curled up in a ball in the darkness for hours, coughing and spitting while the great serpent hovered and watched. Gradually he recovered his ability to make a few small movements of his fingers and toes. Then he was able to move his arms and legs and head slightly. His body was left incredibly weak after being dead for so long. He suffered every moment.

  It seemed like days passed in the darkness, so he figured he must be in a cave again. His tongue cracked with thirst and his stomach growled for something to eat as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Gradually some energy returned to what little muscles he had left and he was able to get up on his hands and knees for a moment, only to immediately collapse. Suffering through the hours in the darkness, he taught himself to crawl.

  After a few days of intermittently crawling in the darkness, she beckoned him to climb up onto her back. He was barely able to muster the strength and collapsed down onto her; not straddling her, but draped over her sideways and face down on his belly. He reached for his knife at his side only to realize it was lodged in the wall of the other cave. He realized that even if he had found it, he lacked the strength to deliver a killing blow.

  The snake carried him out of the cave and dropped him onto the ground in the open air of the night. By the light of the moon he saw that he was on top of a hill. He collapsed onto the ground and began to fall asleep, receiving a long awaited hint of pleasure from the crisp, warm night air.

  “Time to wake up, child,” the serpent hissed. “The sun is coming soon.” Jankaro opened his eyes and could feel the light shifting. He pressed himself up into a sitting position for a moment, but grew weak and had to lie back down. His sense of wonder returned as he watched the sunrise illuminate the landscape. He saw rolling hills and mountains in the distance. He saw scattered trees and broad fields of grass. He saw deer roaming the hills and eating the plants, and heard the songs of baby birds as they welcomed the new day.

  His eyes burned as dawn turned into day. He had to shut them for a little while, open them gradually, then rest them again. He could feel the heat of the sun upon his back and it gave him energy, but he knew better than to turn around and look, for it would be too much for his eyes. Around midday the sun began to hit his eyes and he had to keep them closed most of the time. He could occasionally squint and open them. After the sun set over the opposite hillside, he watched the colors
begin to shift from day to night. “Turn around,” the serpent beckoned. Jankaro rolled over and looked down on a big city. He had never seen one before, but had heard a few stories about them. It was part of a vast empire far greater than his humble origins. There was a towering castle in the back, and in front of it were many buildings of various types. Beyond the city the waters of the sea stretched to the horizon on three sides. A wall extended across the front of the city from sea edge to sea edge, and outside the wall, in front of the city, there were agricultural fields, filled with people completing the day’s harvest.

  “If you want to live,” the snake leaned in close and whispered, “go down there, get the crown and bring it to me here. You said you would do anything for me so that is what you must do. Do not delay. If you stray from your task, I will find you, eat you and give you air to breathe so you can feel the pain of your flesh disintegrating while I digest you.”

  With that, the serpent turned and slithered back into the cave. Jankaro watched. It took some time for her entire body to disappear into the darkness. He tried to stand, but didn’t have the strength. His body cried with hunger and his spirit ached for home as he lay back down to sleep.

  He awoke at dawn to the sound of birds singing. He coughed and belched for a few minutes as acrid slime dribbled from his mouth onto the ground. Beneath him the ground was wet from the slime that had slid off of his body during the night. In spite of this, he noticed that his body was still covered in it. He tried to wipe it away from his skin but it just stuck there. He tried to stand but found that he was still unable. He sat hunched over, and watched as people emerged from the gates of the city to work in the fields. Occasionally a rider on a four-legged animal would emerge and follow the road between two hillsides and disappear off into the distance. While he rested and waited for his strength to return, he thought about the crown, and wondered how he could find it.