The Serpent Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  THE SERPENT

  DAVID DRAKE

  The Serpent

  David Drake

  Jon of Dun Add has created a civilization where before there had only been isolated pockets of humanity in a shattered cosmos.

  Young knight Pal is one of the most respected members of Lord Jon’s Hall of Champions. But Pal’s greatest talent lies not on the field of battle, though he’s no slouch there. He is also a Maker, one who can repair the tools the Ancients had left—sometimes. Moreover, he has learned to use his warrior dog’s ability to predict motion better than any human could, an ability that has saved his skin and won the day more than once.

  Now, Pal will need all his talent—as a fighter, as a Maker, and as a Champion—to deal with the monsters the Waste throws at him—and to deal with his fellow humans. For there are those who would destroy Dun Add and Lord Jon’s vision of a humanity united in peace from within . . .

  BAEN BOOKS by DAVID DRAKE

  Time of Heroes Series

  The Spark • The Storm • The Serpent

  The RCN Series

  With the Lightnings • Lt. Leary, Commanding • The Far Side of the Stars • The Way to Glory • Some Golden Harbor • When the Tide Rises • In the Stormy Red Sky • What Distant Deeps • The Road of Danger • The Sea Without a Shore • Death’s Bright Day • Though Hell Should Bar the Way • To Clear Away the Shadows

  Hammer’s Slammers

  The Tank Lords • Caught in the Crossfire • The Sharp End • The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Vols 1–3

  Independent Novels and Collections

  All the Way to the Gallows • Cross the Stars • Foreign Legions, edited by David Drake • Grimmer Than Hell • Loose Cannon • Night & Demons • Northworld Trilogy • Patriots • The Reaches Trilogy • Redliners • Seas of Venus • Starliner • Dinosaurs and a Dirigible

  The Citizen Series with John Lambshead

  Into the Hinterlands • Into the Maelstrom

  The General Series

  Hope Reborn with S.M. Stirling (omnibus) • Hope Rearmed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus) • Hope Renewed with S.M. Stirling (omnibus) • Hope Reformed with S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint (omnibus) • The Heretic with Tony Daniel • The Savior with Tony Daniel

  The Belisarius Series with Eric Flint

  An Oblique Approach • In the Heart of Darkness • Belisarius I: Thunder Before Dawn (omnibus) • Destiny’s Shield • Fortune’s Stroke • Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide (omnibus) • The Tide of Victory • The Dance of Time • Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset (omnibus)

  Edited by David Drake

  The World Turned Upside Down with Jim Baen & Eric Flint

  The Serpent

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by David Drake

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-9821-2557-8

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-812-1

  Art by Todd Lockwood

  First printing, July 2021

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Drake, David, 1945– author.

  Title: The serpent / David Drake.

  Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2021] | Series: Time of heroes ; volume 3

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021018949 | ISBN 9781982125578 (hardcover)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3554.R196 S46 2021 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018949

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Marcia Decker

  Proof that a feminist isn’t required to respond with screaming rage when faced with a differing viewpoint

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Serpent is based on the legendry of King Arthur as were The Spark and The Storm. Much of the action is adapted from the romances of Chretien de Troyes and the Prose Lancelot. These provided plot points, but more important was the feel of what went into a medieval romance.

  Besides those sources directly in the Matter of Britain (to use the term of Jean Bodin) I also used The Knight in Pantherskin, an Armenian epic of the twelfth century. There are Armenian castles in the neighborhood of Adana, Turkey, and I was privileged to visit one when we were visiting friends there. The world is full of wonderful things, especially if you’re willing to broaden your horizon to regions and subjects which are off the beaten track. When you visit a castle you get a feeling for why it was built there which a map only suggests.

  I suppose what I’m saying is that fiction isn’t divorced from reality, but that it should emphasize an emotional response over facts and logic.

  For the first time in this series I incorporated scenes from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. There are wonderful vivid scenes in the work, but to my surprise there is very little plot and I was reading it for connected plot. This is a useful reminder for any writer: action is not story.

  Some while ago I titled an RCN novel: In the Stormy Red Sky. The title was from “The Voyage of Maeldune,” a poem of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson had read an Irish epic which survives in a twelfth-century form but probably goes back to the eighth century. I went back to the Irish work, The Voyage of Mael Duin, for inspiration. It wasn’t as complete a model as I’d have liked because it involved a boatload of adventurers, rather than one or two, but it did provide vivid scenes.

  I incorporated elements from Flemish Legends, compiled by Charles de Coster and A Book of Danish Ballads by Axel Olrik, to get a pre-literary feel to my work.

  Dave Drake

  david-drake.com

  In our great hall there stood a vacant chair,

  Fashioned by Merlin ere he past away,

  And carven with strange figures; and in and out

  The figures, like a serpent, ran a scroll

  Of letters in a tongue no man could read.

  And Merlin called it “The Siege Perilous,”

  Perilous for good and ill…

  —The Holy Grail

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  CHAPTER 1

  Two Weeks Out of Dun Add

  The color of the Waste to either side of the Road had changed from muddy brown to something closer to gray/blue. Apparent color, of course, and even that had been translated through the eyes of my dog Sam.

  From the corners of my eyes the Waste looked like the reeds glimpsed from a causeway through a marsh. If I tried to look squarely at it, there was nothing really to see—which was the true state of affairs. Still the change in what my brain thought it was seeing meant something. I turned and called to my servant following a pace behind me, “Baga, is it Bo
yd’s Node we’re coming to?”

  “No, boss, that’s the second node on in this reach,” Baga said. “Then a couple uninhabited ones.”

  Mistress Toledana, the Clerk of Here, had provided us with a full itinerary before we left Dun Add fourteen days ago. I’d made a serious attempt to memorize it. I didn’t doubt that Baga was correct, though. He was a boatman, which is a different kind of mind from mine and maybe it was better tuned to distances and directions than mine was.

  On the other hand, I was a warrior who could operate the weapons of the Ancients. Also I was a Maker and could in a trance repair the tools the Ancients had left in this shattered Cosmos. I didn’t have the natural skill for weapons which the greatest warriors like Lord Clain did, but because I understood weapons better than most warriors, I could use them to the limits of their power without exceeding it. I had also learned to use Sam’s ability to predict motion better than any human could, which was a trick that I thought any warrior should be able to learn.

  Very few had, however. As a result I was one of the most respected members of Lord Jon’s Hall of Champions. A status which my size and strength would not have earned me.

  The entrance to the node looked like a black stripe in the Waste from the Road, which meant that it got a fair amount of traffic. Contact points between the Road and nodes of Here grew closed slowly if they were not used. Even stretches of the Road squeezed shut.

  I guided Sam toward the line which became a gauze curtain for an instant as my feet stepped once more on firm ground. I had returned to Here. Landingplace in this node didn’t rise to formalities like the clerk or steward of the most populous places, but at the edge of the grassed clearing was a canvas tilt covering a rough table on which sat half a dozen jacks of tarred leather. A cask sat on trestles at the back and a boy hopped to his feet beside it when Sam and I appeared.

  “Ale, sirs?” the boy asked. “Or if you want a dram, Oscar right in town has some righteous gin! A lot better than what you’ll find at the Cowbell and that’s the other end of town besides.”

  I was going to pass on, but Baga said, “I’m pretty dry, Master?”

  “What do you charge for a stoup?” I asked the boy. “And what’s this place called anyway? Not Boyd, is it?”

  “Boyd’s is the next one left up the Road,” the boy said. “This is Winslow. It’s three coppers for the pair of you. And I can pour a pan of water free for your dog.”

  “We’ll do that,” I said, though it wasn’t cheap. The bronze points I counted out ran twelve to the silver Rider in Dun Add—but I wasn’t in Dun Add. The price wouldn’t have been robbery back home in Beune, though we mainly got along by barter because Beune gets bloody few strangers passing through.

  “I suppose you’re here for the mummy?” the boy said after filling the jacks.

  “What mummy?” I said. The ale was good but nothing I’d have hiked to the next node for, let alone come fourteen days out. The thought reminded me and I took out the little tablet in which I was jotting notes to give the Clerk of Here when I got back to Dun Add. Jon was determined to bring all Mankind into the Commonwealth, but that meant mapping it for administrative purposes.

  Administration didn’t mean only taxes, but it certainly meant taxes. The apparatus of law and order are expensive to create and maintain. Not everybody is going to agree with Jon’s priorities. I knew him well enough to be sure that Jon really meant the best for everybody, but some folks would certainly disagree, some of them violently. The violent ones ran into Champions of Mankind like me. The Champions’ job was to bring disagreements to Dun Add where they could be settled by a court.

  We were chosen from folk who could settle fights ourselves if a party insisted on pushing the matter, however.

  “A peddler came by last week,” the boy said. “He’d been prospecting in the Waste for Ancient artifacts to sell to Makers, there’s people who do that, you know?”

  “I know,” I said. I’d done it myself when I was a kid on Beune; mostly for my own use, though, rather than for sale.

  “Well, right up the Road from here he found a whole body of some guy who’d got lost in the Waste and died there. He borrowed a hand cart from Nonce who owns the Cowbell and brought it in. It was dry like a dead bird that’s been lying on a roof all year. Nonce bought it from him for silver and he has it on display in the common room in a glass case that he charges two coppers to take the curtains off.”

  “What!” I said. “Did the prospector who found the mummy know what Nonce planned?”

  “Hell if I know!” the kid said. “Guess he did, though. What else could Nonce have planned after paying money for the thing? And it was dead anyhow.”

  “It, as you call him, was a human being, a prospector a lot like the fellow who found him!” I said. A lot like me, was what I was really thinking. I strode up the path through a screen of spiky brush. I left my weapon and shield in my pockets, though I could have them out in a heartbeat if I needed them.

  Jon’s Champions all had top-quality hardware, some of it better than mine. Mine, however, were uniquely compact. Most warriors wore harnesses to support their hardware. My shield and weapon fit comfortably in the pockets of a normal, loose-fitting tunic. The disadvantage was that taking them out was immediately threatening in a fashion that an armed warrior was not.

  The houses of Winslow had heavily stuccoed walls and thatched roofs. A couple of dogs barked as I strode up the street but nobody came over to try conclusions with Sam. He didn’t bark back. He could sense my mood and knew that we were at work though my shield and weapon weren’t live yet.

  The tavern at the end of the street had a large wooden silhouette of a cowbell rather than simply a real bell. There were three loungers on the bench outside. “Where’s Nonce?” I said when one of them looked up as I approached.

  “Who wants to know?” a different lounger responded.

  “The Commonwealth of Mankind!” I said. I brought out my gear though I didn’t switch it on yet. The loungers leaped up as though the bench had become a grill on a hot fire. Baga pulled the door open for me so that I didn’t have to pocket the shield or weapon to free a hand.

  The interior was lighted by an eight-paned window in the end wall to the left. The fireplace was to the right, and the bar faced me. Under the window was a box resting on two sawbucks and covered by what seemed to be a dark towel.

  “You’ve come to see the mummy, sirs?” asked the bald man behind the bar. There were half a dozen in the common room all told. The pair standing in the fireplace nook seemed to be travellers; the rest were local.

  I nodded to Baga, who whisked the towel away. The man behind the bar said, “That’ll be five coppers, sirs. Since you’re a gentleman, that’s five for you and your servant both.”

  I looked into the box. I’d seen mummies from the Waste. The skin blackens and all the moisture is drawn out of the flesh so that it wraps the bones in a thin coating that could almost be paint.

  The tendons shrink also, so the corpse was in a fetal position with his knees and arms tight against his chest. I say “his” because I’ve never met a woman who prospected in the Waste. The facial features were no more evident than those of a skull.

  “This was a human being!” I said to Nonce. “He was working at one of the most unpleasant and dangerous jobs a man can do, probably scraping a bare living for himself and his family. You do not make him a spectacle because his luck ran out!”

  “And who are you to say that?” Nonce demanded. His hand found the mallet he used to set bungs in fresh casks, but he wasn’t fool enough to openly threaten an armed man.

  “I’m Pal of Beune, a member of the Leader’s Hall of Champions,” I said. “I order you in the name of the Commonwealth to give this poor devil a proper burial!”

  “Well, what about the money I paid for it?” Nonce said, now plaintively rather than threatening.

  “Baga,” I said. “Toss him a silver piece. And out of that,” I added, gesturing toward Nonce
with my weapon, “you’ll pay for the burial. He was a man, like you and me, Nonce. Remember that.”

  Every time I went into the Waste I thought of what would happen if I got lost and couldn’t find my way back to Here. There are no wayposts in the Waste and you could wander forever in it if you missed your direction even slightly as you tried to return. Unless you found a node or a stretch of the Road, you would wander until you overheated and died.

  As this unknown prospector had done an unknown number of years ago.

  “I didn’t know there was some law about bodies you find in the Waste,” Nonce said. “I guess you folk in Dun Add are just too highfalutin for us common folks out in the sticks.”

  “I think common decency is pretty much the same everywhere,” I said, “and you’re the first person I’ve met who thinks Beune is highfalutin. Anyway you’d better get moving on burying the fellow. Do you have a priest here on Winslow?”

  “We bloody well do not!” Nonce said.

  Another of the local men said, “Oscar at the Flower is a lay preacher. He could say a few words—if you want that, milord?”

  “I do want that,” I said. “That’s the other tavern we came past? Baga, go fetch Oscar up to do the honors if he would.” I looked at Nonce and added, “I’ll pay him if he charges for this kind of thing.”

  “Look, it’s a dead body and no kin to any of us,” Nonce said. “Or to you either so far as I can see.”