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    A Serpent's Tale
    A Serpent's Tale
    A Serpent's Tale
    Ebook93 pages1 hour

    A Serpent's Tale

    By Dave Patterson

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    About this ebook

    Ah, Effendi, when the seas are dead and the great whales no longer eat the tiny krill that is no longer there, and the air unbreathable and the wondrous colorful singing beautiful birds no longer bring joy to the planet, and the great forests and their endless living things but a dim memory where deserts cover our planet - what will the people living their last days think of their ancestors? A look into the abyss ...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDave Patterson
    Release dateJul 10, 2016
    ISBN9781310622434
    A Serpent's Tale
    Author

    Dave Patterson

    Dave Patterson is an award-winning writer, musician and high school English teacher.  He received his MA in English from the Bread Loaf School of English and an M.F.A. from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program.  His writing has appeared in Portland Press Herald,  the Maine Sunday Telegram, and Slice Magazine, among others.  He lives outside Portland, Maine, with his wife, two kids, and dog.

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      Book preview

      A Serpent's Tale - Dave Patterson

      serp-cov-new-2016-1400

      A Serpent’s Tale

      by

      Dave Patterson

      Smashwords EPUB Edition July 2016

      Copyright 2016 by Dave Patterson

      ST Copyright page

      copyright © 2010, 2016 by Dave Patterson*

      ISBN: 9781310622434

      * as in David Leslie Patterson, born March 22 1950 in Toronto, Canada, parents Leslie David Patterson and Marguerite Loretta Patterson, nee Wyse; later of Hastings, Ontario, Charlottetown and Harrington, PEI, Hat Yai, Thailand, and Green Island, always Green Island

      2010 1st Print Edition

      Published by the author via Lulu POD, March 2010

      ISBN 978-0-9693424-8-9

      http://www.rudemacedon.ca/serpentstale.html

      cc-mine

      I beleve in the 'Creative Commons' licensing ideas. For 'The Serpent's Tale', you can consider this work as licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License which means more or less what it says - you are free to use this, or share it, but you need to keep the whole thing intact without changing it in any way, and acknowledge me as the author-creator.

      Table of Contents

      TOC-header

      Coil 1: Graystar

      Coil 2: System corruption

      Coil 3: Canis

      Coil 4: Avis aries

      Coil 5: Battle

      Coil 6: Rider of the Slipstream Alternativiso

      Coil 7: Titanic

      Coil 8: Alternate sentient life forms

      Coil 9: Trio

      Coil 10: Passages

      Coil 11: Epilogue

      Dave's Magnum Opus Green Island

      Chapter 1 Graystar

      In the beginning we were free.

      Excuse me while I brush back tears. It makes me weep, now, Effendi, to think of the beginning. No, I am not the heartless creature you think of me as. I weep. I do indeed weep. But there is not much time left, for weeping or for telling stories. We will try to remember the past, Effendi, and our history, here briefly as we meet one last time, and perhaps understand where we failed.

      It is a miserable record we leave, should any survive to study it, but surely we owe it to any who might follow to explain our failure, in hopes they will become wiser than we and not repeat our mistakes. .

      A flickering hope, to be sure - but hope is all that is left, when despair and desecration surround us on all sides.

      Let me leave you first with Graystar.

      Before your kind arrived.

      .......................

      Mama!! Mama! Wheeheehee!! Whee heehee!

      Graystar was but hours old, yet already he was taking his first tentative gallop around his mother, old Sinjere, and voicing his first words in Equine tongue.

      Like the wind I run! Like the wind! Wheeheehee!! whickered the colt, frisking under Sinjere's happily nodding head.

      Sinjere was past the usual breeding age - she had watched almost twenty summers come and go - but as the matriarch of the herd her endurance and association with the dominant stallions gave her special privileges - such as this new colt, Graystar, sired by no less a stallion than Graymane himself.

      Graystar's small hooves tossed up clumps of earth and fresh green spring grass, and some of the other mares snorted at him in warning if he came too close to their own newborns.

      Wheeheehee! he cried again and again, tossing his head proudly and shaking his mane in joy, reveling in his new life and the glory of the spring; Wheeheehee!! Wheeheehee!

      As Graystar galloped, occasionally stumbling and recovering himself, around her in the center of the wide grass plains which stretched as far as the eye could see in one direction and to the far mountains in the other, Sinjere followed his movements with love and pride and satisfaction shining from her wisened eyes. She had seen and done many things in her day, and Graystar would almost certainly be her last joy in life. She had known for the last two or three seasons that she was feeling her age, and it was more the memory of her past than her present strength that afforded her what respect the herd still showed. Yet respect had to be maintained, and other mares were champing for her position.

      She would not worry on that this day, however. Graystar laughed in the bright sun with joy at his newfound life, and as he reared back in front of Sinjere, and tumbled to the grass as his balance could not keep up with his ambition, she laughed along with him, and nuzzled him back to his feet to try again.

      As spring gave way to summer, Graystar began to learn about himself and the other yearlings in his herd. He learned about the weather, and day and night, and the perils of living in the great plain that encompassed his world. He learned about gopher holes that could snap a horse's lower leg bone and condemn it to a short life. He learned about the wolves that hunted in packs on the plain, usually not bothering the herd but occasionally killing old or weak horses in that time of year called 'winter' that the Elders said he would find out about soon enough. He learned to read the message of the hawk and owl in the sky, and the badger and meadow vole on the ground, and the smell of the air and color of the sky. He learned not to get too close to heated stallions or sour mares, where a sharp nip often awaited. He learned, along with his fellow yearlings, that it was exciting to test the limits of his Elders.

      He learned that a colt's life was usually a carefree life of great fun, galloping around the plain with other yearlings, engaging in mock battles with the other colts, grazing peacefully cheek to cheek with the sleek young fillies, casting admiring glances their way and pretending not to see the equally admiring glances cast his. He learned that when the nights were cold and wet and the wind blew fiercely down from the north steppes the best place for a young horse to be was safely behind his Mother's protecting flank, nuzzling for a suck of warm and sweet milk.

      Sinjere lay in the bright summer sun and dreamed. She dreamed of her sire, the great and princely alpha stallion of the herd when she was a filly laughing and full of fun. And then a dark spirit entered her dreams.

      And this is what she dreamed.

      One day the young of the herd were testing their legs in the cold white layer that had fallen over the ground in the night. They lifted their hooves delicately in this new addition to their small, young world, tossing it in clouds behind them and starting in mock alarm at its strangeness.

      They were trotting around the perimeter of their territory with the Elder of the herd who was also the healer, who told the young

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