Chapter Thirteen - Snake Vs. Mongoose

-Summer-

https://i.imgur.com/6VzHabA.png [https://i.imgur.com/6VzHabA.png]

The terror was quickly replaced with awe as Eefim swung the knife into the woman’s jaw, blood exploding over his hand and face.

The woman’s shriek was louder than the water around them, and she backhanded Eefim in his chest. The boy took it like a champion, and Belbet wanted to lunge forward and help, but she had Mohniit in her arms and it was far too deep to let go of him. He was already shrieking his fear in a dismal choir with the snake woman’s roars.

Eefim’s body sluiced into the water, but at the same time the woman’s claws slipped from Dahnei’s arm. Dahnei wasted no time trying to splash her way away from the snake woman, only to be shoved back against her side with one thick roll of that tail. Belbet hesitated, before screaming, “DEENAT!”

She hoped her sister was getting a weapon. She hoped her sister could step in, protect Dahnei and Eefim. She hoped that this would all end somewhat well, the same way the wolf had. Her hopes were dashed when the woman’s hand caught in Dahnei’s hair, and the two of them slid into the current of the water, the beast dragging her daughter away with it.

Deenat launched herself off the boulder, spear raised and stabbed into the snake-woman’s scaly stomach. Another unholy scream from the woman as she shoved at Deenat’s face, the two women struggling in the water. Belbet had to shield Mohniit from the waves, the water splashing into her eyes and ruining her view of it.

“Belbet!” Kaion cried over the noise, reaching for her as he limped in the water. An absurd part of her mind told her she was going to have to redo his bandages, but at that moment, she shoved her screaming child into his arms.

“Take him to shore! Keep him safe!” She screamed, turning and diving into the water with the sort of grace a mermaid might claim. Underneath the roiling waves, she could see the movement of the Lamia’s coils, and she raked her claws along the waterlogged scales hard enough to hopefully distract her.

A thick coil slammed into Belbet, sending her careening against the bottom of the river, rocks scraping her skin raw. She clawed at the coil, it’s weight holding her down. The only thing keeping her from panicking was the knowledge that she could hold her breath longer than this demon could survive the bloodloss she was suffering from. Belbet could see. through the murky muddy water, snippets of the fight occurring above the surface. Shapes moving in the bright sky void above the water, the pure white of her sister and the green of the beast clashing.

Blood clouded the water as Belbet tore through muscles and bone. She was aiming for spine, her lungs warm with the effort of holding her breath while fighting. She wrapped her legs around the coil she held so that it couldn’t slip away from her, She dug through it’s flesh, the screaming above muffled. A small tanned leg slid past Belbet’s vision, and she turned towards it, seeing Dahnei floating away from the beast.

A quick glance told Belbet that the creature was distracted with Deenat and so Belbet let go, kicking off the severely injured body to swim faster. She flipped belly up underneath her daughter’s drowning body, the depth of the river too much for her little girl here, and she wrapped her arms around Dahnei as they surfaced together. Using her own body to support Dahnei’s she kicked hard to get them to shore. Her baby’s hands clung to her as she choked violently on the water she’d almost swallowed.

Belbet got Dahnei to shore, pushed the hair out of her face, and checked her over for injuries. Upon confirming her little girl was not bleeding, and was only bruised, she pushed the girl up onto her feet, “Go, run. Get a knife and keep it on you. Find Kaion and your baby brother. Now. GO.” She pushed Dahnei, who stumbled, up the rocks towards their camp, before turning back to the water.

She took a moment to take in the fight, just in time to see Deenat flung into the water, spear gone from her hands. Belbet tried to spy her little nephew, and saw him nowhere, but she knew her sister wasn’t a good swimmer, and so she dove back into the river’s current again. She ducked under one of the swiping coils keeping the snake beast afloat, and surfaced in the center of the coils, hooking her claws in the torso of the lamia.

The beast shrieked, turning it’s attention to her, hands wrapping around Belbet’s throat. This was the moment Eefim chose to re-enter the combat, bursting from the water with a shout, hooking one arm and both legs around the lamia’s waist and neck, hanging from it’s humanoid back like a backpack. He gave no hesitation in drawing the blade he’d carried across it’s throat so deep that Belbet, who was sprayed with blood, could see the white of the snake’s spinal column.

The entire body beneath the two of them seized, thrashing in its dying throws. Claws caught Belbet across the face and neck, one scoring along Eefim’s shoulder, Unable to keep itself afloat, the Lamia’s bulk began sinking towards the bottom of the river. Refusing to give up on the snake meat they could get from this, Belbet kicked, hard, turning herself onto her back and taking the weight of her nephew and the snake beast.

She swam the now-still corpse and Eefim to the shore, and collapsed panting upon it. She managed through a sore throat and exhaustion, to call for Eefim, “Are-, you alright-”

The boy nodded, sitting up and rolling off the body atop his aunt. He then helped push the bulk of the beast off of her too, so that she could turn and crawl further up the beach. “Your mother-” Belbet panted, looking back towards the water.

“Mother’s fine. She’s further up the beach.” Eefim promised her. His face glowed, and a vicious grin split his face. “Aunt, we won. We beat her.”

“You won.” Belbet laughed, exhaustion turning her bones to jelly. “Go on, go ahead.”

Eefim let out a cry of joy and turned to cut into the belly of the beast. Victoria cringed at the sight of such glee, at the quick and efficient strokes with which the boy cut open it’s lower belly and removed a round blue crystal. Even covered in blood, the stone was shining and carribean blue, etched with deep cracks. Belbet, however, watched with pride as her nephew swallowed down the beast’s core, knowing from memory that it would strengthen him like nothing else in the world.

“When you’re done there, go get your mother. I’ll guard the body. Tell her to bring the sled. We’ll need it to carry the corpse.” Belbet plopped down on one of the bigger rocks in the area, and let her aching legs splay out. Swimming was no hardship for her, but she often felt lazy and sleepy after long or difficult swims. A natural response, she supposed, to using too many calories.

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As her nephew ran off to go get his mother, leaving Belbet alone with the corpse, Belbet and Victoria had a bit of a tiff in her mind. On one hand, Belbet knew that the meat was edible, that there was nothing wrong with eating snake. On the other, Victoria didn’t know if the human-looking creature was sentient, was capable of conscious thought and speech. Therefore, she felt very uncomfortable with the idea of eating it.

“Perhaps if we just… cut off and cremate the upper body… we can pretend the lower is snakemeat.” She mumbled to herself. But even then it left a foul taste in her mouth to think of doing so. Her eyes roamed over the great beast, some of which was still in the rushing water, and when they came to it’s face, she realized that it was, in it’s death, staring at her.

“Eugh.” She shuddered, before reaching out a foot to kick the face away from her. At least that way it wouldn’t be looking at her. Her stomach recoiled, the touch of the cold, clammy skin making it heave, and she nearly emptied her lunch all over the poor dead woman. Ah, no, she couldn’t think of it as a woman. She had to think of it as a beast. Wiping at her mouth, she turned, the sound of hurried footsteps cascading rocks down the hilly side of the river attracting her attention.

“Sister! Are you alright?” Deenat called, her visage coming into view along with her voice. Deenat was in fact carrying the sledge. Her presence settled the fear that the dead body had risen in Belbet’s mind.

“Yes, I’m fine. Help me load the body. Your son’s already eaten the stone, so we don’t have to worry about that. But that’s a lot of snake meat I don’t want going to waste.” Belbet steeled herself, rising to her feet.

Between the two of them, they managed to get the heavy snake woman onto the sledge, and drag most of her bulk back to the camp. With that taken care of, Belbet took a moment to reassure herself her babies were alright, checking on each of them, and running her hands over their face and hair. Once that was done, and the children were giggling at their mother’s worry, she turned to the body.

“...We should cut the snake from the torso, and then cremate the torso. Anything human-faced should be burnt to ashes, and put to rest. We can’t afford to waste the snakemeat, so we’ll start smoking it immediately.” Belbet declared, only to see her family staring at her oddly.

“What?” She demanded, unsettled from the presence of a dead body and a little snappish.

“We could eat the torso as well?” Kaion stated, as if reminding someone of something they’d forgotten.

Victoria in Belbet’s skin recoiled physically in disgust. “No! We do NOT eat anything human-shaped! That’s disgusting! It’s cruel! We do NOT.”

Dahnei made a soft whining sound, snapping Belbet out of her vehemence. She sighed, sitting on one of the campfire logs, rubbing at her face as if to get rid of the itch beneath her skin. How to explain? How to teach these people, this family of hers, that it was fundamentally wrong to eat something that could be human. That it should be abhored?

“Why?” Mohniit’s little voice called her attention, and Belbet turned to look at him, suddenly tired and sad.

“Because they are so like us, sweetheart.” She opened her arms and he came into them with all the ease of a child. She wrapped him up, hugging him close to comfort herself. “Because if we eat them, what is to say that we could not eat each other? It is a slippery slope, a quick path to cruelty and sickness. We must not ever eat anything that can speak, anything that can think as we do. We wouldn’t want to be eaten, right?”

Mohniit shook his head, agreeing with his mother. Belbet nodded, happy to see it. She turned her gaze up to Kaion and Deenat, her mouth frowning and her eyes pleading.

The two other adults looked to each other, before looking to her. “Alright,” Deenat agreed. “We will not eat anything that looks human. Although when winter comes, that may be a hard promise not to break.” She warned.

Thinking of the Donner Party, and how humans reacted in extreme conditions, she sighed, nodding. “If it comes to starvation or that, we will choose that. But not unless starvation is guaranteed otherwise.”

Agreed on this, they began the process of cutting the torso from the snake tail. It was long, and arduous, and Belbet had to stop and walk away many times, lest she throw up. Worst still was that their knives couldn’t get through the bone proper, so they had to seek out the tendons between spinal column bones, and cut those to get through. In the end, the torso, arms and head of the beast were separated from the snake tail, the part with the most meat upon it.

Belbet asked Deenat to take the torso out of the clearing and set it on fire, burn it to ashes so that hopefully they could then sprinkle those ashes on the garden. It wasn’t a proper burial or anything, but when she’d said they should bury it, Deenat frowned, confused.

“It is a beast. It does not deserve the work of digging a grave. Best to make it useful.” Deenat began hacking away at the snake woman’s hair, pulling clumps of the several-feet long hair to the side. “Even the hair can be used as a net.”

Victoria recoiled from such butchery, but she had to admit that weaving cloth with that hair would be a lot easier than using tree-bark fibers or grass. So she shoved Victoria’s discomfort down and agreed with Deenat. And so, the creature was burnt to bits, the leftover bones crushed, and the ash and bone dust scattered among their plants.

Belbet left the harvesting of meat to Deenat and Eefim, who seemed to know more about it, asking them to pile the bones up so that they can eventually dry and crush them into bonemeal to mix into the earth too. She took a few of the bones and made them into bone-needles, for sewing.

And while they were cutting the meat into strips for drying, Belbet prepared the fire in the smoker, carefully picking only what appeared to be oak wood to her. She let the fire get going pretty good, and then started laying the strips of snake meat filet over sticks, letting it dangle, and then wedging the sticks into the smoker. She was able to get about six sticks (only as long as from her fingertips to her elbow) lodged in for the first test. She put on the lid Eefim designed, and left them to smoke.

Belbet had internally already written off this first round of snake, because she didn’t know the proper process for smoking meat. Honestly, this was a test run. She hadn’t rubbed any herbs or soaked the meat or anything, so she could only imagine what kind of jerky-like texture she’d get out of that first smoking. But it would be a learning experience that helped them perfect it later on down the road.

Checking the sundial, she determined it was roughly four o’clock in the afternoon. Still a bit early for dinner, but she could at least start something interesting. She picked up five snake-steaks, and the clay pot that held the gazpacho they’d made this morning in it. Dumping out the gazpacho and making quick work of washing the pot, she began the marinading process. Putting berries, rosemary and thyme in the pot, she mulled the berries a bit with a stick, and then added the snake steaks, before pouring water in to just cover the meat.

She covered that with a basket, and then went to get another dried gourd from the pumpkin patch. Dahnei and Mohniit tagged along, the two of them wanting to stick close to their mother. Belbet assumed they were anxious from the sudden attack. So, to distract them, she had them help her roll the dried pumpkin home, and clean it out.

They went through the arduous process of waxing the inside. And once it was done, she poured in boiled water, berries she’d cut up, and honey. This, she left to mix until dinner as well.

Dinner ended up being fried snake steaks, charred greens and herbs, and berry punch, which the children absolutely adored. Belbet sipped at it, and found herself wishing she had real sugar. But the smiles on her family’s faces was worth suffering a bit.

https://i.imgur.com/6VzHabA.png [https://i.imgur.com/6VzHabA.png]