Ganne


24 - The Kiss Of The Viper.


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"Snake Face!  Snake Face!  Snake Face!"

The chanting of his cousins pursued him through the dripping dark, as
Kristos ran away through the pouring rain.  No matter how far or fast he
ran, the chanting found him out, for even when he had run so far and so
fast that he outdistanced the hurtful voices, they would still haunt his
mind.

Kristos had been running all his life; but the demon that preyed upon his
soul easily kept pace with him.  The grinning, snake faced demon that had
so soured the joy of being in life, could never be outdistanced, because
it was not just a part of him....

It was him.

You could not run away from yourself.

That had not stopped Kristos trying.

He was running still.

His booted foot snagged in a root.  He plunged headlong to the forest
floor, ploughing his hateful face into the fragrant cushion of pine
needles.  The boy made no move to rise.  He lay there, letting his tears
of pain and frustration well from his pale blue eyes...

"Snake Eyes!  Snake Eyes!"

Kristos shrank from the cries echoing in his mind.  He buried his face
deeper into the bosom of mother earth.  The rich, piny scent of her being
filled up his senses.  His bitter tears soaked away into the forest floor.
She accepted his tears without reservation.  Gently, she drowned his
bitterness in her own sweet tears, falling from the cloudy sky.

The Great Earth Mother loved all her children without condition - even the
cursed half-breed Viper spawn.  In her rough embrace, Kristos had found
more acceptance even than in his own mother's arms.  The Greenwitch had
never let him down, or hurt him.  She had soaked him, frozen him, blown
him about in her strong winds, and burned him brown under a hot sun; but
these were just the physical discomforts she visited upon all her
children.  She had never hurt him in the deep places of his being, seeking
him out there in those vulnerable places and scoring his soul with claws
of loneliness and rejection.

Sometimes in his darkest moments, Kristos wished he had been born a girl.
Then, they would have strangled him at birth.  Gripped by these feelings,
he would run away into the forest.  Feeling completely at home among the
pines, seeing all the life around him, the trees sighing and singing, the
small animals scurrying busily in the undergrowth, the birds filling the
air with sweet sounds, he was never able to sustain that grim mood.  Soon
his heart would lift; and he would run, shouting his joy under the sighing
pines, while he cavorted and capered a wild dance of delight, giving full
rein to his joy of being strong in life; but always, he had to turn
reluctant steps towards the wagons of his clan, and brave the isolation of
life among his own people.

It was especially bad just now.  The band was on its twice yearly dash
across the Ballan Tah, braving the Vardenai soldiery, and for those Ganne
sensitive, the Curse.  His mother was one such.  Even now she lay in the
bed of the family wagon, in a deep coma, tended by his two older sisters.
While in this near death state, she could not protect him from the callous
cruelty of his cousins.  So the crossing of the Ballan Tah was a
particular torment for Kristos.  This twice yearly torture had been his
lot for all of the life which Kristos could remember.  He had never gotten
used to the pain.

Slowly, he pushed himself up from the soaked ground, and rolled onto his
back.  He squeezed his eyes shut, enjoying the caress of the Earth
Mother's tears upon his snake face.  The cleansing balm ran over his
forehead, eyelids, and down his cheeks.  Gently, the Greenwitch washed his
face clean of the mud, allowing the diamond scale patterning of his Viper
inheritance to shine forth.  It glowed a pale yellow in the gloom.

When he opened his eyes, she was there.

Kristos felt no surprise.  He had not heard the girl's approach; but some
part of him had known that she had come.  She stood wrapped in a cloak,
the hood pulled up.  In the extra shadowed darkness under that cowl, a
ghostly face floated.  Kristos could distinctly see the girl's features
suffused in the palest of golden radiances.  The ethereal light seemed to
illuminate her face from within, emphasising the diamond scale pattern of
her skin.

Kristos's heart began to thump in his chest.  His mouth was suddenly dry.
He was acutely aware of the world holding its breath, of this single
moment in time being a turning point in his life.  After this meeting in
the pine forest, the entire world would be different.  How, Kristos did
not know in that instant, nor what any of it meant; but he understood that
it was to be so.

The girl watched him with eyes as blue as his own.

Of course, Kristos could not see the colour in the darkness; but like the
change in the world, this too he knew.  As their eyes locked, a smile made
love to her lips.  That beautiful smile went right up into her eyes.

Snake eyes?

She reached down a hand.  Kristos reached up, and interlaced his fingers
with hers.  A pale golden fire flickered between their interwoven fingers.
It was as if their two hands had existed solely for this moment, and to
complete this simple act of conjoining.

She drew Kristos to his feet.  His heart was hammering.  It was difficult
to breath.  He could not...  Would not...  Look away from that face.

The girl lifted her other hand, stroked the finger tips along the scaling
on his cheek.  The touch of her fingers was like fire and ice, and the
caress of the wind, and the warmth of the sun.

There was an unvoiced question in the simple caress.  The answer was
equally unspoken, as certainty, and a sense of profound wonder grew in the
void between them.  Together, they groped towards a joy of mutual
comprehension.

For them both, the world with all its harshness and pain, had receded into
a vast and unfathomable distance.  Only the two of them existed in the
universe.  Only that gentle caress mattered.

Her lips parted slightly as she moved forward to press her mouth to his.
The kiss was tentative, clumsy, yet completely and utterly right.  While
Kristos's mind struggled to frame coherent thoughts, his body responded
with a deep instinctive knowledge of its own.  He returned the kiss with a
matching tentative clumsiness.

Nearby among the trees, Guara watched, tortured by guilt for the harsh but
necessary thing she had not done in the past...  And the cruelly hard
thing she must now do to rectify that error.  With an unsteady hand, the
Matriarch drew her Bayonne.  She held the symbol of her power and
responsibility up before her eyes.

The Vipers stood close, their fingers entwined.  A golden nimbus of light
cocooned them.  As they kissed, a shimmering arc of rainbow colours
embraced them as the raindrops fell through that shining radiance.

Painful as it was, the thing had to be done.  It could be put off no
longer...  Not now that this had happened.  It was all her fault.  She had
loosed this monstrous catastrophe upon her own kind by her own selfish
desire for power.  It was all her fault.

Her arm trembled with the effort of holding the bayonne.

But it had to be done.

It had to be done, or the world would fall into darkness and agony as it
had once before.  She had read and read the books of the Ancients, the
ones they did not keep in the library.  It had to be done or the terror
and madness of the Viper tyranny would come back to ravage the world anew.

She started forward.  She would slay them both.  That would be the kindest
thing.  Yes, they would die together.

That would be the kindest thing for all.

With tears streaming down her face, Guara moved forward to carry out the
stern edict of the law she had so disgracefully delayed these last twenty
years.

For the sake of the generations to come, all the children of the sons and
daughters of Terra, yet unborn...

Even though it would give her no peace...

But what did that matter?...

With the Viper slain, Karrellanne and Beruth would lose no time in moving
against her.  She could not withstand them working in tandem.  She would
be dead before the dawn.

Guara would have liked a chance to atone for her crimes, for all the
despicable things she had done to hold at bay the calamity that odious
creature at Starnford had promised to visit upon the people of the Ganne
lands if she refused to cooperate in his mad scheme.  She had regretted
them all, every single Ganne she had sent to her death - even her
bitterest enemies.

Then, as now, what choice had there been?

None!

It had to be done.

Guara moved with resolution towards the couple.

The Vipers continued to cling and kiss.  The golden halo shimmered about
their entwined forms, lighting up the soaring trunks.  Rainbow colours
flickered as the tears of the mother fell.  Together, the Vipers walked in
another world, another dimension, through landscapes beyond Guara's
imagining.  They were oblivious to all.

A neck slash would be best, quick, and , she hoped fervently, painless.
Guara lifted the Bayonne on high.  The cold raindrops pattered on the
upraised knife.  They coalesced into rivulets, which flowed in silver
streams down the three foot of edged steel.  Sluicing in a cold wash over
the hand-guard, the water seeped between Guara's clenched fingers.

The Matriarch took three quick steps.  She made ready to strike in the
name of the law, and the children yet unborn...  That they might live free
under the sky...  That they should not languish under the serfdom of the
Golden Tyranny of the Viper Kind.

In that instant, the pair stiffened.  Angela broke the kiss, and turned a
look of reproach upon the resolute old woman.  The betrayal in that glance
seared Guara's soul; but it was not enough to stay her hand.

It had to be done.

Guara gathered her resolve.  She tensed for the blow.  Angela's head
suddenly jerked up to the right.  Her face seemed to grow dark and
bloated.  The eyes bulged from their sockets.  The mouth hung open.  A
swollen sausage of tongue lolled out.  Saliva drooled from the corners of
the slack mouth.  Angela began to sway back and forth, emitting strangled
gurgling noises.

Guara reeled back from the sight of Malincha's last moments, conjoured
from her own bitter, pain wracked imaginings by the alien mind of the
Viper.  A thin, whimpering cry of horror broke from Guara's lips.

The boy watched the suffering woman with detached interest.  He was no
longer entirely Kristos.  Neither was he yet completely Viper; but that
would come; that would come now.  The inevitability of it warmed his alien
heart.

The Viper Kind would come again.

Guara, after her first reactions of shock and horror, got a grip on
herself.  Only the most powerful ascended to the Chair.  Guara had ruled
for nearly forty years.  Even with Angela to protect her back, such a feat
of survival took rare courage and skill in the Ganne lands.  It was only
this strength of mind that kept her sane in that terrible moment.

Even so, that strength of will was not enough.

It was all over for Guara.  Here was her grief and pain made manifest.
Here was the only enemy she could not overcome.  Here was the breaking of
her iron will.

With a scream of anguish, she rammed the blade of the Bayonne into a tree
trunk.  Taking the hilt in both hands, she levered sideways.  The blade
broke with a ringing metallic crack.

It sounded to Guara louder than the crack of doom.

Relieved then of all duty and obligation, she turned and fled into the
dripping dark.

The Viper dropped the ghastly pose.  There might have been regret in the
eyes as they watched the woman stumble away among the trees.  For a long
time after Guara had been swallowed by the darkness, the Viper and the boy
stood, hand in hand, gazing upon each other.  Communication, silent and
deep, ran between them in that intense regard, like lines of glowing
golden force.

The young man shook his head - an emphatic "NO!"

Disagreement sparked in the dank air between them.  The rain pattered down
in the angry silence.  At last, the Viper's face softened.  The expression
became touched by a trace of humanity.  The scaling pattern receded; and
the golden radiance dimmed until it was the merest flicker along Angela's
jaw, and around the eyes.

She stooped and picked up the hilt of the broken bayonne.  She looked from
it to the remains of the blade stuck in the tree.  Angela was troubled by
this thing the Viper had done.  This daughter of Terra mattered to Angela.
Why, the Viper did not know; But Angela understood.  It had to do with a
distant memory of gentle hands holding her safe and warm.

It was more Angela now and less the Viper who dropped the handle and
glided away, following the path taken by the former Queen whose will she
had just broken.  Moving with certainty through the dark under the trees,
Angela came upon the old woman.  Guara was crouched among gnarled roots at
the base of a forest giant.  Her face was buried in her hands.  She was
weeping with a weary, desolate determination.

Angela knelt, and took down the hands from the old face.  She peered into
the pain ravaged features, aware of a keen distress at this thing the
Viper had done; but Angela's distress was powerless to hold the Viper from
embracing its destiny.  Even so, Angela put her arms about the rocking
shoulders and hugged her mother in an embrace that almost achieved
affection.  They remained like that for a long time, huddling together in
the soaking downpour among the roots of the forest giant.

Each took something different from the contact.

After a time, the rain eased to a light spotting.  At last, Angela rose,
drawing up Guara with her.  She took Guara's hand in a firm grip, and led
the old woman away, unerring through the dripping dark, towards the
Traveler Hall.


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