Harry Potter and the King of Serpents
In the end Harry didn’t ask Dave for an egg. He found eggs, fresh with preservation charms on them, fertilised and unfertilised, in an apothecary. Then he bought a toad. Suku, as he had named the Little Owl, was not happy when he set up the terrarium, but Harry promised him that the toad wouldn’t be staying, and he seemed to calm down. Then Harry set to work making the toad stay still over the pair of eggs. He had marked which one was fertilised and which one was not and, eventually, with the aid of a lot of string and some loose cobblestones, he was able to anchor the toad in place. That meant that he had to physically feed the toad and give it regular water over the next few weeks as he waited to see what would happen.
Harry was happy enough to stay indoors, periodically checking on the toad, venturing out to buy food for it, Suku, and himself. The room felt more like home than Privet Drive ever had. Suku’s sense of territoriality also seemed to be working. Harry kept his window open so that the owl could go out when he chose, and several other owls attempted to deliver messages to residents of the Leaky Cauldron through the window. Suku’s angry screams woke Harry in the night more than once and seemed to cause the toad some distress, but Suku saw off all these intruders and the room swiftly settled back into silence.
In the last week of August Harry began to be panicky. Would the egg hatch before he had to go to Hogwarts? What would he do with the toad? Was there a pond locally he could release it into? Or would Suku eat it? It seemed a bit big for him. Maybe if Harry killed it and chopped it up? But then if he wanted to experiment again, he’d have to buy a whole new toad. Why couldn’t he have a toad and an owl?
All these thoughts paled, though, when, on the 29th of August Harry awoke to Suku’s kew, which he used when trying to get his attention. He looked at his owl, and then looked at where his attention was focussed. In the tank, one of the eggs was rocking. He tiptoed towards the terrarium, afraid to make too much noise. Afraid that the egg was only rocking because of the toad’s restless movements. But no, it was really rocking. It was working. “It’s worked, Suku,” Harry breathed, stroking the owl’s feathers. “The King of Serpents.” Suku looked unimpressed, tucked his head under her wing and went back to sleep.
Harry couldn’t sleep. He watched the rocking egg, mesmerised. It was the fertilised one, he saw, and was tempted to take the other one away to give the baby some more room, but then the toad would fall off the egg, and that might ruin the whole thing. He watched and waited. Dawn broke, and with it so did the egg, the first crack giving fresh air to the being inside. Harry had never felt so tense. He didn’t go down to breakfast, and eventually Tom came up to ask if he was alright. Harry called back that he was, but he’d overslept. In fact, he’d slept barely three hours, but he felt no tiredness. The egg was nearly ready.
Harry had, in the course of three weeks, asked himself whether he was a fool for doing this. A deadly snake, whose very look could kill. He had therefore prepared carefully: a selection of blindfolds, depending on how big the hatchling was, and a set of crystal collection phials to milk off the venom. He looked at the blindfolds laid out on the chest of drawers next to the terrarium. How big would it be? The King of Serpents.
In truth that was what Harry kept coming up against. He loved snakes- they were fascinating, and if Hogwarts and Hagrid had allowed it, he would have a pet one now, instead of Suku. But the chance to own the King of Serpents was too much to resist. He loved Suku and knew that the basilisk would have to be kept secret at school, but he couldn’t give up this chance.
Eventually, after 10 hours, the egg fully hatched. Harry stared at the thing that emerged. It was as thick as his index finger and about 10 cm long. He’d been expecting something bigger.
This was smaller than a slow worm, and they weren’t even snakes. Harry tried to swallow his disappointment. The snake would grow. It needed to fit into a chicken’s egg to begin with. He gingerly reached into the terrarium and unbound the toad, which crawled off behind one of the stones Harry had used to imprison it. He was aware of a strange, satisfied kind of hum from the snake. Maybe it was a horned serpent, not a basilisk. They made musical sounds, didn’t they?
He picked up the unfertilised egg to remove it and dropped it in shock as a small voice screamed “Mine!” the egg cracked as it fell, and the small snake threw itself into the contents, drinking the yolk as quickly as it could.
“Alright,” Harry told it, “I won’t take it away from you.” The snake paused in its frantic sucking. It looked up and Harry’s green eyes met the snake’s yellow ones.
The snake made a noise like “grrr”. It was such an infantile attempt at a growl that Harry had to smile. He reached a hand back into the terrarium and stroked the brown hatchling tenderly. It made the little happy humming noise again. “Mine?” it asked, leaning its little body over the egg.
“Yours,” Harry confirmed. The little snake went back to eating. Harry sat down on the bed, overcome with both exhaustion and confusion. He had looked into the snake’s eyes and felt nothing. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even feeling a bit off colour. But the snake couldn’t be anything other than a basilisk. It had been born, as the book had said, from a chicken’s egg hatched beneath a toad. Maybe the preserving charm on the egg had made the basilisk’s eyes not work? And then there was the fact that it spoke.
All the books Harry had read (alright, the three books Harry had read) said that snakes couldn’t speak English, but that some humans could speak snake language. The last known parselmouth was Voldemort, but the one before him was Salazar Slytherin, who had lived about a thousand years ago. And before him had been Herpo the Foul. Three dark wizards, hundreds of years apart. Was it possible that Harry had this talent, too? He hadn’t enchanted the basilisk to talk, but he understood it. What if he had understood the boa constrictor, not because of something the snake was, but because of something he was?
He looked at the little snake in her terrarium and decided. “Will you be alright for a few hours?”
“Hours? Sleepy. Full. Sleep,” it replied. Harry grimaced. The snake was minutes old, what did it know of hours? But he needed information, and he needed it now. It was time to go to Knockturn Alley.