To not overstretch the grace with which the government has granted us license for this article, we are going to skip any preludes and jump straight to the testimonies and interviews.
The first one comes from ‘Musa’, a hand who collects branches and twigs in the mangroves. ‘Musa’ is not his real name, but as you will see, ‘Musa’ is suspiciously well-spoken for a man who, according to record, can only sign his name and who obtained very bad grades at school. So, to ensure his integrity, we are exercising our journalistic right to preserve the identity of our witness.
Musa:
“It happened one day my return to the barge got cut by a huge crocodile. The shouts from my companions alerted me of the beast. In the mangroves, you are always expecting and watching out for crocodiles, so I dropped my load of twigs and ran with all my agility in the other direction, away from the water and the barge. I’m better suited to navigating mangrove roots than crocodiles, or in any case, than this particularly massive monster, and at the time I was even younger and nimbler than I am now. So, I ran for as long as I could, all the way to the other side of the islet, where I found a beach with good visibility over clear waters. Clever that I was, I even located a coconut palm that would be difficult for a crocodile to climb but not for me.
It was a small islet in the swamp, one of thousands like it, and I knew my crew would circle around in the barge and pick me up, so I set to wait next to the coconut palm. That’s when I saw the birretuda. The critter is many things, but subtle is not one of them. Its scales have the hue and the shine of an old bronze statue, and since it breathes air, as all snakes do, it swims with its nose above the water. This makes its birrettum all the more conspicuous as it zig-zags some centimeters above the shallow turf.
I had long minutes to react to its presence and walk away, but I was too enthralled looking at it. And, although it was swimming towards the beach, I could see it would land a good ten meters from where I was, so I deemed myself safe.
I was foolish, and the birretuda, cunning devil that it is, had been playing me. As soon as it landed, it slithered at top speed towards me. I tried to outrun it, but in the surprise, I snared my feet in fallen coconut leaves and fell. The birretuda bit me on the ankle, then it ran away before I could deliver any retribution. By the netjeru, I can swear it was chirping and clicking with merriment as it beat its retreat.
My vision had started to darken by the time my companions found me, and I passed out as soon as I was deposited on the barge’s floor.
Then I had the most bizarre dream. I was standing at the edge of a precipice, its bottom occulted by a red haze. In the dream, I knew there were terrible beasts at my back, about to push me into that void or worse. I didn’t dare to turn my head as the terror seeped into my bones.
At the same time, I had this ineffable warm feeling that, if only I knew how, I could sprout wings, soar into the skies, and escape all danger.
I woke up in the shack of the medicine man, and he said I was murmuring things about wings. The medicine man handed me a tome. It was from a reprint of Encyclopedia Britannica, this particular one containing words with the letter ‘W.’ The medicine man opened it for me on the entry for ‘wing.’ Diagrams and formulas about the mechanics and functioning of wings covered the page. I couldn’t understand them, but their contemplation gave me great peace: wings were a thing, and it wasn’t impossible for men to understand how they worked.
When my fear subsided, I asked the medicine man if he had administered an antidote for the venom. He touched the tome and said that this was the best he could do and charged me 500 debens for the book, which I hugged tightly as I walked home. My ankle didn’t even swell from the bite.”
That’s Musa’s story and the beast rising from the sea. There are others like him who met the serpent in its aggressive mood and fell victim to the venom. We of course can’t say how much of it is true, but nobody that we interviewed denied the widespread knowledge—or superstition—that Birretuda’s bite provokes strange dreams that arouse insatiable curiosity. Worse, many of those dreams, by their content alone, can be unequivocally linked to the Devil or to some of its worst manifestations. Luckily for Musa, he is now a converted Kemetic and can attribute the serpent’s visitation to an initiation by Renenutet, the netjer of nurturing.
Our second account is even more out there. It concerns a man we will name ‘Shua’. Oh, all names in this story are also made-up, including that of my ex-colleague ‘Standford’, who interviewed Shua and who believes himself in possession of too much incriminating information and has thus exiled himself to an undisclosed location of Asia. Our newspaper does not condone his attitude, but we have paid him a generous severance package, and wish the young man the best.
My ex-colleague Stanford met Shua, his wife ‘Amelia’, and their ten-year-old child ‘Hassan’ on a pier of our beloved Port Said, as the family readied to leave the country with all haste. Amelia is, or was, an accomplished eext officer who worked in the mangrove for more than a decade; that’s the reason her family had no trouble enrolling as crew of the Reef’s Reckoning, a pinas, which in case you don’t know, is a type of schooner built in Malaysia. Or a vessel very much like it, maybe it was The Whales’ Retribution, an Indonesian Lambo. At any rate, it was a vessel sailing under the international eext flag, but more than that we truly don’t know, since Stanford was intentionally vague in the microfilm he delivered to us via messenger pigeon relay.
Shua affirmed that, although he had a first-hand story concerning birretuda, he wouldn’t say a word until they had sailed the Red Sea and crossed Bab Iskandar. Stanford, who likes a good adventure as much as a good scoop, enrolled in the spot as crew as well.
We have edited Shua’s testimony quite a bit to remove profanities and things that border on blasphemy, as Shua was given to engaging in baseless scientific speculation. Here’s what he said as they sailed the currents of Alexander’s Gate:
Birretuda venom? Yes, I’ve heard of it. A colleague of my wife was bitten once, and he had a most bizarre dream where he was in a dark, chilly cave with no food, and all he could think in his dream was to build a nuclear fission reactor to warm himself and to grow potatoes. Not a fusion reactor, mind you; that would have been bad enough, but a fission one! The sort that, in another age, produced radioactive waste you needed to bury in the ground. Being an eext, the man was very upset for a long while.
We had a birretuda at home, but she never bit any of us. No, not as a pet; that would have been very illegal. She was free to come and go as she pleased. In fact, it was her decision to use our bookshelves as her lodgings. She infiltrated our house about a decade ago. At first, we removed her several times, but she glared at us with those big eyes of hers. The birrettum gives the creature a very dignified air; it felt like being told by one of my old teachers that she was very disappointed in me. Then we would find her, hours or days later, coiled again on her favorite bookshelf. We finally relented and let her stay.
My wife Amelia was in Clarisse’s camp—yes, we gave a name to the birretuda—earlier than me. You see, my beloved is a very conscientious eext, but Clarisse secreted all sort of perfumed oils to keep her scales clean, and Amelia couldn’t resist. The scent of agarwood was my wife’s favorite, but Clarisse could also do sandalwood, cedarwood, rosewood and hinoki, depending on her mood. During the first few days she used our curtains to rub the oil off, which impregnated our entire house with agarwood scent, but we later gave her a proper rubbing mat she could use if we didn’t have any fresh laundry we needed her to perfume.
I suppose I should stop circling around the subject. Yes, Clarisse loved books. All sorts of books. She couldn’t properly read, with her lack of extremities suitable for flipping pages. However, whenever I sat on my chaise longue with a tome, Clarisse would climb to the back of the piece of furniture and tilt her head just so that one of her eyes would face the pages. She had excellent vision; in fact, it was so good that later, when my son was learning calligraphy, Clarisse would help by pointing out the inks and papers that produced the least feathering. But back to her inability to pass pages, I’m pretty sure she understood everything written on them, as evidenced by the chirps and coos she produced, and how her scent changed depending on the text we were reading, and if the protagonist was about to be killed by the mongoose.
She was also good with human speech. She would understand us if we talked to her in Arabic, English, and the other language we talk at home from Amelia’s homeland. That was most impressive. We didn’t try any other spoken languages but when I gave it a go at learning Middle Egyptian glyphs, Clarisse was of great help clarifying the meaning of multiple hieroglyphs. Now, I don’t take this to mean she was an incarnation of some old Egyptian god, because we also tried Mandarin characters and she was just as capable.
That’s as much of Shua’s testimony as we will publish. It’s not the entirety of it; there are many other details about Birretuda that we found most peculiar and that made us doubt it is truly a serpent. Not a ‘serpent’ in lowercase, at any rate. Beyond that apprehension, we didn’t dare publish that part of Shua’s testimony for fear of violating the laws forbidding research and development that protect our world from the return of the Machines or breaking with the modern practice of responsible journalism.
In any case, there’s sufficient evidence that we are in the presence of a devil. We reached out to Reverend Bonifacious, of the Church of St. Mark, to give us spiritual guidance about Birretuda. We conclude this piece with his words.
Reverend Bonifacious:
No, I haven’t been in the mangroves, but I’ve seen those trees from a respectful distance. Yes, I’ve heard of people keeping the snakes as pets, and well, now with the witchcraft trial of Dr. Anasi Algumara more is coming into the purifying light.
One of the stories I happen to like is about the serpent struggling, in the middle of a rainy night of the monsoon, to carry holy scriptures from places of worship and reverence to some spot open to the skies and exposed to the skyfall. As if more proof of their nature were needed!
I don’t harbor hatred towards those creatures. On the contrary, they are a clear manifestation of the Devil and its ways, and they reveal the nature of God by showing us that that is antithetic to our Father.
As the Devil does, the snake tempts. It doesn’t force anybody to do anything against their will. It’s a test, and people should gather themselves and not fall for it, lest they have to suffer the fires of Hell in the afterlife for all of eternity.