Week 5 Storytelling: Bhima and the Nagas

(Basilisk Rattlesnake)

There was a time and place when disputes were settled by a smoking gun. The law was what men shot it out to be, and lessons came from either your parents or the black and blue and red that colored your skin and advertised your poor judgement.

Mothers would fight every evening to save their sons from reality by teaching them how to survive. They tempered their tempers. They taught of justice, peace, and the dangers of an overripe pride. For those sons and daughters who could not hear their mothers’ pleas, fathers bore the burden of their children’s longevity. They taught their combative offspring how to choose their battles, how to save their bullets, how to fight, how to win.

But then, there are always those who cannot heed the warnings their parents impart for their own good. Those wild fools who lack insight, patience and moderation in spite of all their parents do. Past that, there are those who had the even greater misfortune of parents who did not teach them virtue enough to protect their lives.

Today, I tell you the story of one such boy. A child whose parents did not do enough to teach him his place, his manners and who, as a result, became the destruction of those he ought to have held dear.

David was the first son of Gertrude and Daniel Kingsman. Daniel was blind and had once thought himself destined to die alone in the Western wastes his parents abandoned him in. When Gertrude, the daughter of the local banker, found him and saved his life, he owed her everything and loved her more than life itself. When she bore him a healthy son, he loved that son as if he were the sun, the stars, and the rains all at once.

The people living in the town of Bigston noted his behavior and warned Daniel, telling him he should teach his son to be a good man before he showered him with gifts and spoiled him rotten. Daniel wouldn’t hear a single word of it, though. He was a blind man gifted with a strong, healthy son. He would give him every blessing without regard.

As the years went by, David grew strong, stubborn, and selfish, paying little regard to the needs of others when he sought to please himself. Once, he beat a weary traveler for being impudent enough to beg him for spare change, calling him a godless vagabond.

One day, a Westbound train carried in a letter telling of the death of Gertrude’s brother Peter. Peter’s wife Katherine and their sons begged Gertrude and Daniel for a place to live. The couple quickly consented to share their wealth with their destitute relatives, promising them a share of whatever they had to offer. The next month, Katherine and her five sons arrived on the train and were welcomed by Daniel and his wife to their new home. The only problem was David’s reaction to his cousins. Amon and Brandon were brave boys, easily as big as their cousin and twice as good shots as a result of the lessons their father had given them with a gun. No one could hit their target with as much precision or accuracy as those two boys, and Daniel grew incredibly jealous of them

At his sons complaints and rage, Daniel grew weary, bought him a new gun and hired a sharpshooter to tutor him. David grew better and quicker, but Katherine’s boys began tutoring with the sharpshooter as well and continued to improved, exacerbating their cousin’s intense jealousy.

Eventually, David’s jealousy festered into a cruel plot to eliminate his cousins who seemed to outshine him at every turn. According to his black plot, David stole his father’s horse and rode out one day before dawn with nothing but a net, a knife, a box, and a bloodhound. He came back that morning with a rattlesnake, the rattle carefully removed. David hid the serpent in Brandon’s room beneath the pillow on his bed so that the venom would be injected directly into his neck, removing any chance of survival.

That evening, Brandon returned to his bed after a hard day working for his uncle to earn his keep. He was exhausted and lay directly down onto his pillow. With a startling hiss, the snake bit the young man and he yelled loudly enough to draw his aunt from the dining room where she was cleaning supper off the table.

Gertrude cried out and wasted no time, running to the cabinet of medicines her father kept on hand and sending Amon for the local doctor. When he arrived, the doctor administered an experimental salve to Brandon’s wound that miraculously cured him and left him stronger than ever. Though David was displeased, he could express his frustration to no one for fear of being hanged as a murderer.

Amon camed to Brandon after his recovery, telling him of the snake’s missing rattle and David’s poorly concealed disappointment at his survival. The brothers were quietly enraged, and hatched a plot for their revenge that would not be traced back to them. Thus, the two houses’ feud began, and from that day on, none of Katherine’s sons would waste love on their hateful cousin.

Author's Note: I've decided to center my stories for these two weeks around Duryodhana's story and the result that his lack of restraint has on the other characters. You could almost say that it's a set of stories centered arround intrigue resulting from poor parenting choices. I chose the old west theme for two main reasons: 

1. There are not many settings where so much wanton killing and so many vile murder plots would go largely unpunished by the law. 

2. Who doesn't love a good high-noon shoot out? 

I hope you will enjoy the Wild West antics of these feuding cousins. 

(A couple o' gunslingers)