Dai-San - 03 by Eric Van Lustbader Read Free Book Online

thick beard. Then: ‘How you hate home.’
    Ronin sat with his hands over his drawn-up knees.
    ‘Home is an evil place for me, Moichi.’ He wiped the grease from his lips. ‘But that is all over now.’
    The navigator’s eyes were a deep moss green as he watched Ronin from across the fire.
    ‘My experience has been that it is never truly over. Home has a peculiar hold on us all.’
    ‘Only on those weak enough to want to return, I think.’
    Moichi shrugged.
    ‘Perhaps.’ He twirled the fruit stem between two fingers as he scraped along his teeth with his fingernail. ‘But it is also true that potent forces are set in motion at the precise moment of our births, because of our births. But these forces are not so well defined as to affect only us; they touch those who are around us also.’ He spat out a piece of skin. ‘I do not mean just physically close.’
    Ronin’s eyes were half-closed and Moichi was not even certain that he had been listening at the end. There was no more movement at fireside.
    Aloft, the humid night shuddered with the flight of numberless wings.
    Late the next day, as they climbed over a series of stiff, gray roots, spiralled and fibrous, which arched from the rich, loamy floor of the jungle like a line of miniature bridges, Moichi stopped in his tracks. Perfectly still, he said nothing and Ronin was on the point of asking him why he had paused when he saw the movement, sinuous and glittery, at the big man’s feet. Rising, curling about his ankles, slithering above the tops of his muddy boots, was a serpent, glossy, diamonds of green and ocher along its length, its flat blunt head questing.
    They stood, transformed into two more trees in the jungle. The serpent wound its way upward, silent and deadly, across Moichi’s buttocks, along the ridged muscles of his back, until it wound itself along his left arm. Its forked tongue flickered in and out, searching, its eyes two sharp points of obsidian.
    In a blur, Moichi’s right hand leapt for its head, his thumb and forefinger digging into each side of its jaw, jamming the hinge. The mouth gaped open, long fangs, needle-sharp and hollow with venom, glistened. The body writhed, winding and unwinding. Moichi broke its jaws, then for the first time, he spoke:
    ‘Get me a broad green leaf, will you, Captain.’
    Moichi knelt and placed the broken head upon the carpet of the leaf Ronin had found for him. Carefully he withdrew one copper-handled dirk and slit the top of the creature’s head from snout to the beginning of its still twitching body. He pressed down on the exposed flesh, using the tips of two fingers. Through the hollow fangs oozed the venom, dark red and thin, until it had all pooled onto the leaf.
    Moichi threw the serpent from him and, cutting green moss from the bole of an adjacent tree, let the venom be absorbed by the substance. He wrapped the wet moss in the leaf and stood.
    ‘There, my friend. The world is not very often either black or white but only shades of gray.’ He put the packet into his sash, then replaced his dirk. ‘You see, from the most deadly creature comes a liquid which would kill us if the serpent had bitten us. Yet now, drying within the organic matter, it becomes an antidote to the other poisons of this place.’
    ‘How come you to know of this creature?’ said Ronin as they continued through the jungle.
    ‘You are from the north, Captain, where the serpent cannot live. But I am from the south. Farther still than this island.’ They cut through a dense thicket of ferns. ‘It is a land, I am told, that was once part of the continent of man, many centuries ago, but as the crust of the planet resettled, it broke away.’
    ‘How came you then to the continent of man?’ asked Ronin. ‘Are your people seamen?’
    ‘The Iskamen?’ Moichi smiled. ‘Ah no, Captain. We are tillers of the soil by tradition. But we are fishermen, also, and are greatly skilled at sailing close to shore.’ He bent to avoid a