Moñái: The Horned Serpent of the Fields and the Maiden Who Burned With Him
Of the seven monstrous sons of Tau and Kerana — that cursed brood whose brothers this chronicle has now followed through caves, siestas, hills, and graveyards — the third son was the one who ruled the open country. Moñái is the great serpent of the fields: enormous, iridescent, fast as spilled water through the grass, and crowned — his unmistakable mark — with two straight horns rising from his head like antennae. The old tellings are specific about what the horns do: they fascinate . Moñái climbs a lone tree in the campo, lifts his horned head above the crown, and sways it — and the birds of the whole district stop their business, wheel, and spiral down, entranced, into his open mouth. He is the hypnotist of the family: where his brother Ao Ao runs his prey down by brute persistence, Moñái makes the prey deliver itself, dazzled, in formation. And upon the human villages he practiced a subtler version of the same art, for Moñái's second office — unique among all the monsters of ...