[This time, since none of the interior titles of this three-part tale provide me with a good umbrella-cognomen, I'm using the faux-title taken from the cover of ARAK SON OF THUNDER #36.]
In my breakdown of the overall series I noted that its star "Arak Red-Hand" was a full-grown Native American man with his own belief-system when he was tossed into the matrix of Dark Ages Europe. Thus he does not at any time subscribe to the pagan mythos of the Vikings he first encounters or to the Christian beliefs of the friends he makes in the court of Charlemagne. But in addition to making the main character non-committal about others' gods, author Roy Thomas usually avoids showing evidence of supernatural manifestations belonging to the so-called "Peoples of the Book," i.e., Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Arak certainly meets several members of each faith during his travels, but the only named character who suggests some miraculous nature is an old man named Josephus, who may be the legendary Wandering Jew.
"Serpent," however, places the Arak character in a site where it is possible for him to correlate his own "Old Enemy," the Serpent-God of the Quontauka tribe, with the "serpent in the garden" common to Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. The desire to provide such a correlation may be why Arak, accompanied by the satyr Satyricus and Syrian travelers Alsind and Sharizad, visit the city of Syrian Damascus, which was said to have built over the remnants of Eden itself.
To be sure, there's a proximate plot-rationale for Alsind and his female cousin to guide Arak and his comic relief to that city. Alsind claims to be the son of a deposed emir, and thus the true heir of the rulership in that city. In exchange for his help, Alsind promises to help Arak secure a ship for his ongoing quest to find his people.
A further wrinkle is that Arak himself is a testimony to the existence of his own "pagan" religion, since he's revealed to be the literal offspring of the Quontauka thunder-god. This heritage means that he displays some roughly-defined shamanistic skills. One such attribute is demonstrated when he and his allies approach Damascus, and Arak sees a specter hanging over the city, one that no one else sees-- the image of a giant fiery sword.
Later that issue, Arak and friends get some backstory, in part from that recrudescent wanderer Josephus. According to legend, the angel Gabriel expelled Adam and Eve from Eden with a flaming sword, and this "Firesword" still exists somewhere in Damascus. Josephus fears that evil hands seek the sword's power to control all Peoples of the Book, and this fear is soon justified. While Arak and friends attend a welcoming feast at the home of Alsind's uncle, the guests are attacked by masked assassins-- who, when slain, turn out to be serpent-headed humanoids.
Arak employs his "shaman-sense" to guide his allies to a certain spot in Damascus, and Alsind informs them that the area once harbored the palace of the Ummayad line to which he belongs, a palace razed out of existence by the rival clan of the Abassi. The uncle's servants dig up the area, finding a skeleton. (Arak vaguely compares the skeleton to Adam, not remembering that Adam was supposed to have been driven out of Eden-- though Thomas may have been thinking of a legend that was spun out of Genesis 3:15, to the effect that Adam himself had "crushed the head of the serpent" at some point.) When the diggers flee the site, Arak takes over, and opens the way into a subterranean chamber defined by two visual aspects. First, the walls of the chamber are dominated by huge roots-- roots which Alsind's uncle compares to "the Holy Tree of Knowledge," though with no specific justification. Second, in the center of the chamber floats the Firesword, but this time the same size as an ordinary weapon. When Arak seizes the sword with his shaman-strength, a half-human, half-snake entity bursts through a wall and tries to wrest the sword from the hero. During the fight the snake-man confirms that the deity he worships is the same Old Enemy of Arak's thunder-father, but this only fires up Arak to slay the serpent with the sword. However, the snake-man is only the tool of a mortal servant of the serpent-god, the Lord of Serpents, and since he can't take the blade from Arak, the Lord uses his magic to spirit Alsing and Sharizad away, as ransom for the weapon.
Arak, hoping to rescue his friends without surrendering the great weapon, journeys with Satyricus into the desert-land adjoining Damascus, again using his shaman-sense to seek his enemy. A brief conversation establishes that Arak finds it difficult to control the Firesword, for its energies seem to want to return to Heaven. (Why they were held in place in the root-chamber, Thomas does not discuss.) A sandstorm separates the hero from his buddy, and for several pages, each of them experiences phantasias of the villain's creation. Satyricus finds himself in Hades, meeting his dead friend Khiron the Centaur again, and the satyr briefly fantasizes about gathering together all the denizens of the underworld to bring back the glories of Hellas to Greece. Arak is briefly seduced by a vision in which he rejoins his Quontauka people, but he soon discerns that it's an illusion. He dispels the vision and finds Satyricus, at which point they find themselves back in the desert.
The stone head of a serpent, the conduit to the magician's lair, pokes out of the sand. In the throneroom of the Lord, Arak gives up the sword to liberate Alsind and Sharizad, but then he assaults the evildoer, trying to regain control of the weapon. The warrior then uses his own skills to pull the flames off the physical sword in the hand of the magician, creating a separate sword of pure fire. With this fire-blade Arak stabs his foe, and then releases the power back to Heaven, so that only an ordinary metal blade remains on Earth. The serpent-lair conveniently collapses, but all four good guys escape. Though there's evidence that the mortal Lord also escaped despite his wound, he's never seen again as a primary antagonist. Thus, "Sword and the Serpent" is the first and last hurrah for both the Sword of Gabriel and the Lord of the Serpents.
ADDENDA: For the sake of exposition-clarity I left out one small point. Among the exploratory party is Dinar-Zad, sister of Alsind's uncle and mother to Alsind, though she's not seen her son in many years because of Alsind's exile. However, Dinar-Zad betrays both Alsind and Sharizad by pushing them into the clutches of the Lord. It turns out that at some point Dinar-Zad became the tool of the Serpent-God, having also helped the assassins gain egress to the palace. Thomas certainly chose the name Dinar-Zad because it's an alternate name for the ARABIAN NIGHTS name usually translated as "Dunyazad." In the NIGHTS Dunyazad is the loyal sister of Scheherezade. But Dinar-Zad's significance is not that of betraying her son and her niece, but that of being a woman who betrays humanity-- an even more obvious symbol-reference to that other deceptive female, Eve.
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