Casting Out The Serpent by herenortherenearnorfar

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Eating Its Own Tail

Warning for snake death and the weird power dynamics of the early elves and humans situation.

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For someone so tall and excessively jingly, Nóm could disappear concerning fast. You took your eyes off that golden figure for one instant and he vanished, only to be found later up a tree or surrounded by new friends. Balan wouldn’t have minded if Nóm were a little more careful about where he dispensed his wisdom. Teaching weavers about new dyes was one thing, telling a fractious and recently disinherited daughter exactly how to brew a poison was another entirely.

He didn’t mean ill, however ill intent did not mean much when it came to the actions of gods and demons. This forest spirit was gentle to them but Balan knew he could be dangerous if he wasn’t watched.

You kept your eye on what was most beautiful, his mother said, for more often than not the brightest berry hid a potent poison underneath.

“Father,” Baran whispered urgently, “I lost track of our wisdom.”

Balan, who had been having a vital conversation with one of his chieftains about tuber logistics, swore an oath to the gods they had left behind.

“Bela, please continue this conversation with my son.” It was about time his oldest boy learned to take on some of the administrative tasks of leadership. “I must attend to our guest, who is, as you know, of much importance.”

Bela nodded. It was understood that clever though Nóm was, he also needed close guarding and few among the older guard actually wanted to spend too much time with him. Balan, who found himself genuinely enjoying the company of their new, alien companion, had made Nóm-watching a function of leadership to help deal with these discomforts.

Balan set out through the camp, greeting his people and attending to the little tasks that a high chief must but also keeping his eyes peeled for the glimmer of sunlight on golden hair. Even when it was cloudy Nóm could find some sunlight to glimmer in.

“Have you seen Nóm?” he inquired of everyone he came across, and in return he received a number of answers. Nóm had been among the sheep, watching the lambing. No, Nóm had been speaking with some hunters on how to knap stone. Nóm had sat with the old talespinners and tried their words on his clever tongue, mumbling over ancient chants learned from the High Folk of The Night (who he said were kin of his, though long sundered) and laughing with delight when the phrases finally came to him.

(He had a lovely singing voice that put all others to shame, and he could do things to a harp that made grown men cry, but he tended to save that for the evenings. It had taken Balan a while to realize he was just a little vain, in his own bright way.)

All these sounded like things Nóm would do, and Balan had no doubt he had made a pretty circuit around the camp as he evaded Baran. But he was not in any of those places now, nor could he be found anywhere among the tents of Balan’s people.

Finally, in a stroke of inspiration, he sought out Tahalath, who had divorced him years ago, when their children together were just barely of age, but whose knowledge of the goings-on among their little band of wanderers was as peerless as that of any chieftain’s wife.

“Your strange creature went into the nor’eastern woods with a bunch of the young ones,” she reported.

“And you let him!” Balan tried not to sound too appalled.

“He offered to keep them busy. And he has to learn about children at some point,” here her tone turned contemplative, “Do you think they even have them?”

Balan was already running (a dignified run, a leaderly run) for the forest. Once it had held terrors, and indeed there were strange and cursed creatures about these parts- long shadows in the night who gossiped with Nóm in an uncanny tongue just on the edge of comprehensibility, monsters who left camp fires full of bones and sometimes strange misshapen corpses for their people to find- however Balan did not fear the forest itself when Nóm was there.

A few dozen yards from the campsite, in a thicket full of bird song and new leaves, he spotted a glimmer of gold. Clustered around Nóm in a loose semi-circle were half a dozen youth, ranging from near adolescence to toddlerhood and they were watching him warily. They were wary for while sunlight flashed off of his golden hair and white teeth as he spoke intently to them, sunlight also gleamed on the golden scales of the snake he was holding on a stick at arm’s length from his body.

It was a burnished yellow-brown, like polished oak, with darker markings down its length. For an experienced woodsman, especially one who had been travelling these mountains for so long, such markings were a glaring warning sign. Balan could not see the head to look for certain signs that this was a venomous specimen, but he suspected he could guess the answer.

“Children,” he shouted, as he drew closer to the group, “Move away from our friend Nóm, please!”

“Balan!” Nóm raised his voice in greeting, speaking as he ever did like one discovering their language for the first time. “I have found a- what was the word again, Abital?” his questing eyes sought a half-grown girl, who suddenly seemed quite keen to distance herself from this venture. “A serpent. Is it not lovely?”

He had a ring of snakes, Balan recalled, made with metals and stones so precious they seemed half-real. He had commented on it one night, when they were conversing, and Nóm had told him it was the symbol of his father’s house. At the time it had seemed humanizing- even fey creatures had father’s and houses to call their own- but now the emerald eyed serpents seemed like warnings.

Now Balan was a few feet away from him and he moved carefully, for the snake coiled around the branch was rearing threateningly. He did not want the beast near him, but neither did he want it on the ground, not when there were so many small, bare feet nearby for a scared creature to bite.

“It’s very nice,” he soothed, amazed at how calm he managed to sound “It does, however, look like one of the poisonous sort-”

“Venomous,” Nóm corrected and seemed delighted to know enough of their tongue to make the distinction. “If I ate it I would not die, so it is not poisonous.”

“Right,” Balan fought the urge to pitch his voice up, as if he was talking to a child. “That’s still, as we say in our language, bad , so if you could just stop waving it around…” Silently, he gestured for the children to move away, to return to the camp, but still they lingered, as if watching some terrible show. Perhaps they were not that well brought up. He’d have a talk with their parents after this.

“Oh, yes,” clever Nóm at least had the decency to look embarrassed. “My father kept serpents, you know, across the sea, in numbers and kinds that are never seen in this land, so I do know how to handle them. It was quite safe.” As if solely to contradict him, the snake writhed once more, making the long branch bob unsteadily.

Moving like a much younger man, Balan approached the dangerous duo at an angle, and managed with some effort to sidle next to Nóm. He wasn’t sure what the benefit of being closer was, but it nevertheless made him a feel a little more in control of the situation. Startled, Nóm turned his head to look at him, and in the process jostled the snake which hissed.

“Careful!” Balan said low. This close he could see the freckles across the bridge of his fair, snake-grappling friend’s nose. Nóm’s eyes, Balan realized dully, were the color of aconites- a vibrant shade of periwinkle that simply didn’t occur in Men. It seemed too saturated to be real, even in a forest full of bright spring colors.

“Yes, I know,” Nóm juggled the snake while Balan tried in vain to shoo the youth still watching in the shadows of the trees away. They’d managed to attract a even larger audience somehow- a few adults from the camp had come to investigate the noise and now stood gawping. At times like these, Balan was sharply reminded of why he’d been put in charge of this group of layabouts.

There’s a venomous snake, he mouthed to a nearby tanner woman. Move everyone away.

Is he doing magic to it? she mouthed back, and Balan despaired of his people’s fate.

“Like I was telling the young ones,” Nóm went on, breezily, “This is a breeding female- you can smell the scent markers if you’re careful enough. Usually there would be quite a few males after her-” Balan stiffened in horror, “But we’re a little out of their usual range. If you left me drop it and pin the head-”

“No!” Balan said, grabbing him bodily as if he could somehow physically stop him. Nóm, to his credit, didn’t drop the snake at the impact.

Holding his guest in his arms like a maiden in a dance, Balan realized that Nóm was staggeringly slender. It was not the slenderness of any mortal, but rather the round slipperiness of an eel. Sleek muscles in confusing configurations slid under Balan’s hands as he hastily released Nóm and stepped back. There were, after all, people watching.

“Are all your people as skinny as underfed boys?” he asked, without truly thinking about it. A smile dimpled Nóm’s face.

“No- my sister and brother are much more strongly built than I am.” He shrugged and the snake protested, “I am cursed to take after my father. What do you want me to do with this lovely thing,” and he used a word for ‘thing’ better applied to small cooking implements, a sharp reminder that he was new here “if you feel so strongly about it?”

Balan, glad the conversation was finally going as he wanted, took some time to consider such an open ended offer. In truth he would have preferred the serpent killed- for who knew what wanderer it would strike down out in the wild- but he sensed that would not go over well with his gentle minded guest. “Take it far away from here, to a place it will not be easily stumbled upon,” he ordered finally. This earned some nods of approval from his watching people. They admired fair mindedness. They also like to know they weren’t going to accidentally step on a viper while attending to the call of nature at midnight.

The solution seemed to strike Nóm as agreeable as well. He smiled amiably and then, to Balan’s horror, drew the snake laden branch close to his chest and crooned a few foreign words to the creature, which promptly stopped wriggling and coiled happily around his neck.

“What the actual fuck,” said Balan.

Nóm looked up from his new snake necklace absently. “What? It’s just basic animal handling. I wanted to show the children the more crude way of doing things- for it’s always good to know the simpler forms- but if you’re going to have me take her away…” He looked suddenly worried he’d done something wrong.

(He needn’t have worried. Among the scattered people of Balan’s tribe there were whistles of appreciation, and some calls for him to do the trick again.)

“Is it possible…” Balan said slowly, “That what you have just done is magic?”

Somehow before Nóm spoke he already knew the answer. Nóm never considered such charms to be magic. When he had sung fish into the fisherman’s nets he had smiled blithely and called it “just advanced fishing” and when he had helped stem the Michala’s terrible childbed bleeding he’d spoken of it as healing alone- not some great spell. Little charms that the wise men and women of Balan’s people labored hours to perform came so easily to Nóm that he did not consider them charms at all. His life was full of small magics and he lived and breathed power in such an effortless manner that he could almost trick you into forgetting it was power at all.

“Oh, no,” Nóm reassured him, “This is just how my father taught me to soothe a stressed serpent. They come in such small sizes here that it’s barely any trouble at all.”

“Excellent,” Balan agreed, as a headache built in his left temple. He did love to converse with Nóm, for he spoke of matters with insight and wit, but he could be challenging in more ways than one. “Now if you could take it- sorry, her- somewhere very far from here?” Already the gaggle of observers was breaking up, perhaps hoping to avoid Balan’s inevitable ire by simply not being present when he finally had attention to spare.

Then Nóm stepped forwards, deeper into the woods, and Balan stepped back to let him go. His foot came down on something that moved and before his brain could fully register alarm he felt a sharp pain in the other leg, just above his shoe.

There were screams.

It only took a few seconds to put the pieces together and a quick glance downward confirmed that a dun snake, similarly patterned to the one around Nóm’s shoulders but rather duller in coloration, was slithering away. Balan, now in a considerable amount of pain, watched as one of his quicker hunters bore down on its head with a sickening crunch.

Well, that was one less viper out there, he thought as he sank to one knee and shouted, “Everyone out! Fetch the healer but get away, I’m not having another snakebite on our hands!” They rushed to obey, suddenly remembering their duty to listen to him. Nóm, who he had expected to protest the sudden, tragic snake demise, was at his side now, aconite eyes fixed on Balan as he half-sung strange words in his own, fey language.

“You’re supposed to be getting the snake away,” Balan complained as Nóm inspected his wound. Indeed, the snake was still twined about Nóm’s slender neck, watching with bronze eyes as Nóm pulled off Balan’s footwear and made him lie down.

“I must take care of you first,” Nóm told him, taking a break from his strange muttering to speak in a comprehensible language. “Now, do you mind going to sleep for a while? I’d rather not have you move.”

Before Balan could answer, he felt drowsiness overtaking him. His immediate urge was to fight it off, to struggle to remain conscious, but he had enough faith in his friend to press down that instinct. Instead he let the magic- for that was what it was, no tricky words about “healing” or “repair” could disguise it- envelop him. The last image he saw before he drifted off was of Nóm’s too bright eyes and a content snake both hovering over him.

 

“Well, that could have been dangerous,” Nóm said cheerfully when he woke up. “Luckily your people know a lot about plantains and they even had some marigold and snakeroot on hand! The swelling in your leg should go down in about a week.”

“Excellent,” Balan said weakly and then his time was taken up tending to Baran (who, along with his siblings, had handled himself quite well during their father’s brief incapacitation, but did still need help litigating some thornier matters of leadership) and handling all the duties expected of a ruler who had just woken up from twelve hours of sleep.

When his people dispersed, he asked the hovering Nóm, “What happened to the snake?”

“I managed to get her in a basket and some of your young men took her up the mountain and released her,” he said, “At least that’s what they said they did, and I’m trying to trust them at their word.”

“Mmm.” It was quiet in Balan’s tent for a while, for his children had seen fit to leave him alone with the snake charmer, and then he commented, “It was a rather pretty thing.”

Nóm brightened, “Yes, lovely colors given the season and how far north we are.”

“You said your father used to keep them? Was it for meat or-”

“No, no, just as, you know, pets,” Nóm sighed wistfully. “They came in such a variety, back where I come from. Greens and blues and bright reds, water snakes and little snakes that hid under houses. And cobras! You don’t get cobras here at all- though I suppose they must exist somewhere in Arda.” The word was not entirely new to Balan, though it was not in his native tongue. He had heard Nóm use it before, when they spoke of the earth and its nature and he tried to explain the land of fairies and gods he hailed from.

For the first time, Balan fully understood the creature he was hosting. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No, I’m not.”

“And you really do know nothing of Men and what we are like.”

Nóm leaned over his sick bed. “You are the first of your kind that I ever spoke with, Balan son of Barach. You knew this when we met.”

Tentatively, Balan reached out and took his arm, feeling again the inhuman slimness of it, the way the tendons did not seem to be connected in quite the right ways. Nóm shifted to allow him better access as Balan moved slowly up his forearm to graze fingers over his chest- and that too was not quite right. It was not how bodies moved, it was the idea of how bodies moved, as if some dreamer had half-remembered how to construct a form and animate it but had forgotten the solidity of how flesh interacted with flesh.

Once he had been half afraid of this being, but he’d already been bitten by a snake because of him, so what was the worst that could happen? “May I?” Balan asked, and when Nóm half-voiced an assent, he pulled him into an embrace.

It felt like hugging a cord of snakes. It was unsettling. It was wonderful.

Balan let him go and Nóm, laughing, fell across his chest.

“Is this a human thing?” he asked, full of delight.

“It can be if you want,” Balan said slowly, trying to ignore the Nóm’s weight and how he smelled of fresh water. “But first, let’s have a conversation about snakes. How possible would it be for you to use some of your skill with animals to ward my camp against serpents who could harm my people?”

 

“You’re going with him,” Baran said accusingly, many months later.

“I am.” Balan did not bother with disguise or falsehood, not with his oldest son, who would succeed him sooner than either of them would like.

“You would leave all of us to follow him? Father, you’re enchanted somehow, you’re under a spell.” Now his child’s voice was pleading and far too young. “You love him too well. Who knows if it’s even safe for us to live in his halls?”

“Baran! Calm yourself.” Balan held up a hand. “You think me bewitched, and I will not argue it. Our friend is the bewitching sort. But I know the affection I hold for him is dangerous and I am still aware of my own limits on that account. No, I follow Finrod for the sake of our people, not despite them.”

His son stilled, a statue stricken in grief. “What use is it to our people if you leave us and go far away?”

It was hard to keep his voice calm, hard to be reasonable, and hardest of all to put voice to the churning thoughts that had consumed his mind for months before his decision. “We are to live near his people. Estolad borders the land of his cousins, who he holds dear, and is close to his brothers. Even now our people and the elves mingle. Finrod is king over many of them, and his generosity has served us well, but not all of his kin are so well inclined to us.”

Baran inclined a head in agreement.

“What then,” his father asked, “Might be our fate if he forgets us? I would not have it happen, for as you so sharply noted, I love him well. But we have only known his kind for a short time- we do not know how fast their tempers change or if they keep promises they make today far into the future. We do not know if Felagund will always speak on our best behalf.”

Keep the serpent close, he thought. Watch always for poison. Make friends but do not leave your destiny in the hands of some other. Not when they are so terrible and strange.

“Then you would swear yourself to him simply to act as some surety of our fate? A slim chance to wager servitude on, Father.”

Balan closed his eyes. “Swear at me, name me vassal, call me that for the rest of my days. But I would spend a thousand years in a mountain in service of some elven king if it meant I was there to remind him of our people’s interests when it was necessary. Baran, my firstborn, please believe me when I say that I do not leave you lightly.”

“And yet you still love him,” Baran said tightly.

“I love him,” Balan agreed, “For all that means between us.”

It was said even now that snakes never came into Estolad nor any other place where Balan's people roamed. Balan was ready to put rather more weight behind the affections of elves than he cared to admit.

Baran bowed his head. “I wish you well then, Bëor. I hope you find Felagund more like us then not.”

And Balan nodded and said all the right words but privately he thought, Like us? Where would be the fun in that?