The Jarl’s Neck Ring
The serpent ring is a significant gift from one’s liege lord, made of living gold.
The youth was nervous before the audience with the Jarl, which was regardful and sensible. I recognised a lot of a much younger me in the seventeen-year-old boy as we strolled from the star-boats docks through a giant armoured airlock — onwards into a maze of shop-lined streets, alleys and small squares.
Finally we reached the expansive park area with its dispersed grand longhouses of the utmost distinguished warriors, merchants and tech-priests.
I was accompanying him as the last living relative, less than an uncle yet quite more than a non-blood.
On a wooded uprise in the centre of the holy of the horticulture holies in the rotational habitat above the gas giant’s third moon, the Jarl’s residence stood, its thatched roof held high by six rows of the stoutest wooden columns, the walls bowed as tradition dictated, planked thickly with the best white oak the Central Biolabs could muster.
We approached the heavily guarded entrance to the longboat-shaped structure with a proud step and fearless bearing; the boy because of inexperience, I because of resignation.
As we left the House of Shields, the lad uneasily fingered his new torc in the shape of a coiled serpent with a raised head, its jaws unlatched, an accurate copy of my own.
“Honorable Ulfhednar,” he spoke to me finally, as we sat down at an open-fronted brewpub and I ordered drinks from a pretty android waitress, “it’s almost as if it were alive. Is it always this tight?”
I smiled encouragingly at him, instinctively rubbing the throbbing gold around my own neck.
“It is merely the nanotek inside, reacting to your thoughts. With the years, you shall wear the Ring-giver’s token of honour as if it were a feather,” I lied.
I looked away, upwards, where the curving landscape walls joined seamlessly into a ceiling of green rolling hills and streams dotted with the elite’s toylike farmsteads and minuscule herds of genetically engineered red cattle, the whole ballgame financed by raids across half of the Galactic Arm.
I exhaled.
“Just never, decidedly never, try to remove it.”
This text was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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