4

Seven Years Ago

I lay in the lifeboat with my face turned up to the sky. What I saw there brought back memories of our childhood. The thing we had most looked forward to each year was the trip we took with our grandfather every summer. He drove us up to the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest to take us camping. It was from him that we first learned self-reliance, foraging, and the other skills of ingenuity that we’d later adapt to survive as Knights of the Blue Rose.

More than the camping, it was his stories which fascinated us. Grandfather had been a professor of mythology and folklore for decades before being driven out of academia during one of the cultural purges. His campfire stories were drawn from the myths of ancient civilizations and the folk tales of remote peoples, and he told them with the animating devotion of a man who had spent his life immersed in the pursuit of narratives. As we grew older, the storytelling became mixed with lectures about the meanings of the symbols in the myths and the histories of the people who had composed them.

The day in particular that I was remembering had been marked by our stumbling across a snake. For the rest of the day, grandfather would occasionally talk about some aspect of snakes in mythology. Their association with vital energy as shown by examples such as the snake in the Epic of Gilgamesh who ate the plant of immortality and shed its skin. Tiamat, both goddess of primordial creation and monstrous serpent of chaos to be defeated by Marduk. Apep, another serpent of chaos who lurked below the horizon in order to ambush the sun god, Ra, every night. The Egyptians said that eclipses were caused by Apep striking forth during the day, impatient to battle his nemesis. Jörmungandr who was so large as to circle the world and bite its own tail, linking it to a massive collection of symbols of snakes eating themselves in a loop which reflected another aspect of life in that the living sustain themselves by devouring more life. One of the signs of Ragnarök, the end of the current world cycle, was Jörmungandr releasing its tail from its jaws.

Late that night we got a special treat, one of grandfather’s original tales. He was struck by inspiration now and then and composed stories of his own as amalgams of all that he had learned. When the night grew deep and the fire had nearly burned itself out allowing the darkness to close in around us, he began to speak:

“A long time ago, before men kept records and measured the years, a huge and terrible serpent came to our Earth. It wound itself around the planet again and again so that its coils stretched across the sky and blocked the view of the stars at night and the face of the sun during the day. The monster hissed deafeningly causing the trees to wilt and potent venom dripped from its fangs poisoning the waters.

“Some of the people living on the Earth flung spears and shot arrows at the serpent, but they could not dislodge it from the sky. No matter how much they wounded it with their missiles, it would shed its skin and return to the peak of health. The dried husks fell to the ground and smashed apart the land killing any who could not escape. The people wept and lamented that their dead would not be able to rest in peace while the snake blocked the pathway to the otherworld at the top of the sky. Worse, those spirits who tried to reach the afterlife were snapped up in the serpent’s jaws.

“It was a dark, almost hopeless time. People prayed to their gods for help but they did not receive their intervention nor were they granted access to their mighty armaments. Instead they received encouragement to fight the snake no matter how futile it seemed. With that bit of courage sustaining them, people continued to hurl their tiny weapons against the serpent. Eventually, this determination spread to all corners of the planet until every person of every tribe raised their arms against the monster.

“It shed its skin over and over and at first the people thought that the serpent must be immortal, but they noticed that it was slowly shrinking. As one, humanity fired arrows, threw spears, and slung stones at the snake. It shrank and shrank and shrank until at last the monster could not hold itself up any longer and it fell from the sky. Its body broke apart as it fell and the pieces burned away in the atmosphere. A great cheer of victory echoed around the Earth; for the first time since the coming of the snake the stars could be seen in the night sky.”

It went something like that, but I don’t have the same talent for storytelling as he did. When he had finished, he leaned down to the dying embers of our campfire and gently blew on them. The coals glowed, tiny specks of warm light. It was something I must have seen any number of times as campfires died, but I was enthralled by the red sparkling sea at that moment. I could see it, the souls of the dead and the stars in the sky and the serpent burning away to nothing.

That’s the image I recalled as I lay in the lifeboat staring up at the grand expanse of sky. The dark clouds serving as the vanguard of a storm were rolling in toward the base of the space elevator and my little raft bobbed up and down on the increasingly turbulent sea. The elevator’s platform was like an immense oil rig with a gigantic cable stretching up into the sky, into orbit where the stars twinkled gently. Something was wrong with the towering cable though; what should have been taut was sagging and bending and at the fringe of the heavens far above I saw the structure wreathed in flames.

A burning serpent falling upon the Earth, the stars in the sky, and the souls of the dead.