The Thorn Snakes’ Tail

 by kaleeM rajA

Long ago, long before God’s comb had furrowed the land into mountscapes, the Hairy Backs lived in peace with the People of the Small Feet.

Together they toiled in the mines and filled their caskets with burnished Russian silver. In the markets they bartered with mischievous determination and at the table, the Hairy Backs exchanged their slabs of cured meat and blocks of smoked cheese for the People of the Small Feet’s boxes of trinkets and poached fish.

Just as the air worked with the sun to pull new life out of the soil, so the two folks lived and worked.

In the first epoch, the Age of Pennies and Pounds, co-dependence reigned. They contently passed the generations in the First Summer and the Second. Even in the first few Times of Hard and Rime, they lived in relative harmony.

But then into the land came the Thorn Snakes. As they slithered through the mountain, the plates of the Earth shifted and entire nations plunged to their deaths through the gaps. The rivers sloshed and drowned the fish. The stench of the Thorn Snakes and their acrid faeces clouded over the sun as if the sky had been smothered with tar.

With a menace in the world the likes of which the world had never seen, a chasm grew between the Hairy Backs and the People of the Small Feet. Silence brooded and bristled into resentment. The markets closed and fights broke out at the mines over territory and possession.

With stocks in short supply, amongst the feuds, was a famine.

The streets of the Hairy Back strongholds were caked with Thorn Snake faeces which spread strange, new plagues. These the Hairy Backs spread into the valleys and banks where the People of the Small Feet resided.

The Gods of the Pink People peered down through purple clouds, and muttered under the wind, “You people of the world with empty hands you pray, for we your makers, ourselves, believe in nothing, and so cannot rescue you from your fates. Pray no more. Pray no more…”

Years passed. And then came the meeting. Angered by their plight, the Hairy Backs brought to the table brute force born of anger. The People of the Small Feet, ravished by the years of pestilence and famine, took the hues of berries and the scent of flowers and painted upon their person, a masque of beauty to conceal their grief. This they bought to the table. They parleyed and debated what would be done to banish the evil tyranny of the Thorn Snakes.

Finally, answers appeared and a master plan arose.

The Dance. The drums. The hypnotic lure of the lutes, brought the Snakes hissing, bemused at first at this unexpected cynosure.

Unable to resist the trance of the tribal beats and the scent of honeysuckles and jasmine blooms, the People of the Small Feet wore in their hair, the Snakes sluggishly slowed down into a catatonic state.

Then suddenly, as if to wake them from their comas, the Hairy Backs bellowed at the Snakes and thundered their drum skins. The noise rumbled across the land, knocking the mountain goats off their footholds.

Shocked and awed, and angered by the noise, the great Thorn Snakes inhaled deeply and twisted themselves tightly into a coil ready to spring and swallow the Hairy Backs one and all.

And in so doing, the Thorn Snakes fatally forgot the deadly power of their own weaponry. Having coiled themselves, the snakes impaled themselves upon the hundreds of poisoned thorns that lined their sides and died.