Teranesia

foot touched mud, the snake shifted, dragging his left leg back, overbalancing him. He hit the water with his hands over his face, cringing with fear—terrified of coming eye to eye with the thing, though he knew that was the least of his problems. He swam forward clumsily, fighting both the instinct to right himself and the weight of his boots dragging his feet down. Then he felt something pass by swiftly and smoothly in the water ahead of him, and his arms came down against the body of the snake, blocking his way again.

He backed away, staggering to his feet, shifting the tightening noose from his lungs to his abdomen just in time. He still couldn’t see any part of the snake, but he’d felt its girth. This wasn’t one of the placid four-metre pythons he’d seen feeding on birds as a child, merely adapted to salt water. It was half as thick as his torso. It would be more than capable of swallowing him.

He opened his mouth to cry for help, but the sound died in his throat. What could Grant do? Tranquilliser darts wouldn’t penetrate the water, and even if she could pump her whole supply into the snake, its body weight would be hundreds of times greater than the largest of the birds they’d used the darts to subdue. She’d end up standing helplessly on the shore watching him die, or getting killed herself trying to rescue him. He couldn’t do that to her. He couldn’t sentence her to either fate.

Prabir groped for his pocket knife, shivering with fear. He scanned the water desperately; if he plunged the knife into the snake’s head with enough force, the blade might just penetrate its skull. The coil of its body slid smoothly over his hips, tightening its hold. He followed his sense of where the motion was coming from, and saw a ripple in the water, a faint wake disturbing the surface.

It was six metres away. He’d be wrapped all the way up to his shoulders before the head came within reach.

He started stabbing wildly at the snake’s body, bringing the knife down from high above his head. The blade bounced off its skin. He collected himself; he was wasting his energy splashing up water. He put both hands underwater and drew the knife up towards his belly with all the strength in his arms and back, seppuku in self-defence. The knife burst through the leathery hide and sank up to the hilt. He tried to drag it along, to make a cut, giddy for a moment with triumphant visions of flaying the snake from head to tail. The knife wouldn’t budge; he might as well have tried to split a tree trunk this way. He pulled it out, and repeated the thrust that had proved successful. As the blade made contact, the snake shifted again, and the knife went spinning out of his hands.

He bent down and fumbled for it. The snake jerked him off balance, immersing him completely. He groped across the mud, but he couldn’t find the knife. He lifted his face up, arching his back to get his mouth out of the water, spluttering for breath. The tell-tale wake was passing in front of him again; the snake had almost completed a second coil. Grant might be able to reach its head. She might find a way to attack it without risking her own life.

And if she couldn’t?

She wouldn’t martyr herself. And if there was nothing she could do, and he died in front of her, she wouldn’t be crippled by the experience. She wasn’t a child.

He filled his lungs and bellowed, ‘Gra-a-a-ant! Help me!’ The snake had finally worked out how to drown a biped: Prabir could feel it change the tension in its muscles, skewing the angle of the coils, forcing him down. He tried to fill his lungs again while he still had the chance, but the constriction around the bottom of his ribcage stopped him dead half way through; it was like hitting a brick wall.

Then he went under.

Prabir lay beneath the water, no longer struggling, faint lights dancing in front of his eyes. This was all wrong: he should have died in the minefield of the garden instead. The first blast would have been enough to kill him instantly; no one would have had to follow him in. His parents would have grieved for the rest of their lives, but they would have had Madhusree, she would have had them.

Suddenly he heard a loud, rhythmic splashing noise. It wasn’t the snake turning hyperactive: someone was beating the water with a heavy object. The timbre gradually changed, as if the water was being struck in successively shallower locations. Then there was a resounding thwack, wood against wood.

The snake’s muscles slackened perceptibly. Prabir fought to raise his head. He caught a shallow breath, and then a glimpse of the lower half of someone standing on the shore. Not Grant: a woman with bare dark legs. The snake twitched back to life and jerked him down again. The beating sound resumed, ten, fifteen powerful blows.

As he struggled to snatch another mouthful of air, Prabir heard the woman slip into the water. He didn’t question his sanity: he knew he wasn’t hallucinating. As he turned the strange miracle over in his head, he felt no fear for her. Everything would be all right, now that they’d been reunited.

The woman said urgently, in bad Indonesian, ‘You need to work, you need to help me! It’s only stunned. And I can’t pull you out on my own.’ Prabir forced himself upright, fighting the passive weight of the snake. The woman wasn’t Madhusree.

She helped him loosen the coils enough for him to climb up on to her back. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he was even weaker from the ordeal than he’d realised; she carried him like a child to the water’s edge, then manoeuvred him on to the ground before she clambered out of the water herself. She picked up the heavy branch she’d used to bash the python senseless, then reached down and hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on. Back from the water before we rest. It won’t be out cold much longer.’

Prabir staggered after her, still holding her hand. His teeth were chattering. He said in English, ‘You’re a biologist, aren’t you? You’re with the expedition?’

She frowned at him, and replied in English. ‘You’re not Moluccan? I knew there were no villages here, but— are you a scientist?’

Prabir laughed. ‘I must be, mustn’t I?’ Stick to the cover story. His legs collapsed.

She crouched beside him. ‘OK. We’ll rest for a bit, then I’ll get you back to base camp.’

‘What were you doing here?’

She nodded towards the snake; its head was still lying exposed on the mangrove roots where she’d cornered it, but it was showing signs of regaining consciousness. ‘Observing them, amongst other things. Though I prefer not to get quite as close as you did.’ She smiled uncertainly, then added, ‘You’re lucky; given that it already had prey secured, I wasn’t sure that even the most frantic imitation of an animal in distress would catch its attention. There’s a paper in there somewhere, on supernormal stimuli versus inhibition signals.’

The snake slid drunkenly off the mangroves, its body rising to the surface in a horizontal sine wave as it swam away. It had to be at least twenty metres long.

Prabir asked numbly, ‘What do they live off? There can’t be that many tourists.’

‘I think they eat wild pigs, mostly. But I’ve seen one take a salt-water crocodile.’

He blinked at her, then jumped to his feet. ‘There are crocodiles? My friend’s back there!’ He started running frantically towards the shore. ‘Martha? Martha!’

Grant appeared suddenly out of the jungle behind him. She seemed about to berate him jokingly for his tardiness, then she saw his rescuer. She hesitated, as if waiting for introductions, then made her own. ‘I’m Martha Grant. I’m with Prabir, we got separated.’

‘Seli Ojany.’ They walked up to each other and shook hands. Grant turned to Prabir expectantly, clearly aware that she was missing something significant, but he didn’t know how to begin. If the python hadn’t fled, he would have just pointed at it and mimed the rest.

Ojany was staring at him too, with an expression of disbelief. ‘You’re not Prabir Suresh? Madhusree’s brother?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You followed her here, all the way from Toronto?’

‘Yes.’

Ojany broke into a wide, delighted grin.

She said, ‘You’re in trouble!’