Riding the Serpent's Back (33 page)

~

He came to Khalaham, his old college town, almost by accident.

Bored with life in Tahez, he headed north, not even bothering to consider which was the next large settlement upriver.

As it turned out, he was grateful simply to reach Khalaham, regardless of what it meant in terms of his personal history.

By the time he reached Khalaham, he was desperate just to take cover, to hide. He needed to come to terms with what he had seen that afternoon in a small village where he had stopped for supplies.

He needed to try to blank his mind of the horror.

He had been flying quite casually that afternoon, enjoying the rare sunny break in the grey clouds. Spread out below, all the colours of the world were suddenly so vibrant and crisply defined. The Hamadryad was about a leap and a half wide here, lined on either side with a narrow margin of salt-marsh and then a rising curtain of trees. Spreading out behind the trees was a wide carpet of irregularly shaped fields, slotting together like some vast jigsaw puzzle. Maize, barley, beans and bulbous, green leaf-vegetables. A small tributary wound its way down to the Hamadryad, its supply of fresh water tamed to irrigate tiers of rice paddies, stepped up the gradual slope of a long, low hill.

He saw a village tucked away at the foot of the slope. It was no more than a haphazard cluster of about twenty wooden houses, each raised on stilts to protect against flash-floods. A track disappeared into the wooded fringe of the Hamadryad, leading, no doubt, to a shabby little wooden jetty and a trading post somewhere on the banks of the great river.

It had been a sudden decision to leave Tahez and he hadn’t eaten all day. He didn’t know if it was some kind of vestigial sixth sense that had made him go, a scent for danger, but it had become a superstitious rule of his life since Edge City that when such an impulse hit him he trusted it and moved on.

He sometimes thought that might even be the real reason behind his decision to leave Edge City: a growing intuition that Chi was completely mad, a danger to all those around him. He recalled the look of triumph in the boy’s eyes when he had described how he reversed his healing powers to kill his kidnapper, the ghetto baron Tezech Ferrea. Leeth couldn’t live with the boy as he had become.

He sent a thought-shape into Sky’s mind and the courser broke away from her line of flight to side-slip into a wide circle over the village.

The place seemed deserted, the only sound the barking of a dog tied to a stilt-leg of one of the small houses.

Even then, Leeth felt a nagging doubt in his mind, but he did not recognise it as a warning.

He told Sky to land.

The dog fell quiet at the sight of them alighting in the village square. When Leeth climbed down from the beast’s back, the dog ran under the house to the full extent of its tether.

He approached the building and stooped to peer into the shadows underneath. The dog was crouching on the ground, tail between its legs, trembling.

He tried to send out reassuring thought-shapes to the poor animal. He knew how hard they could sometimes be on their animals in these poor little farming communities: a man hits his wife, who hits her children, who hit the dog. Often the intermediate stages were cut out altogether and the man just hit the dog straight away.

The dog stared at him, the whites of its eyes showing. Gradually, it stopped shaking, but there was nothing Leeth could do to entice it out.

He straightened and looked around. He would have assumed everyone was working in the fields, except he had flown in over the fields and they had been deserted.

A festival, he wondered? Had everyone gone away to a shrine or a temple in a neighbouring settlement?

He looked around and identified one building a little wider than the others. Above its door a carved effigy of Estether, the god of trade, had been nailed at a crooked angle. Leeth automatically touched his forehead in deference, the legacy of a childhood’s schooling in the ways of merchantry.

He smiled nostalgically and went over to the village store. He jumped the two steps up onto the raised wooden terrace, then pushed at the door.

It swung inwards and he stepped forward and peered inside.

There was a long counter bisecting the room and behind it sat an old woman, staring blankly. Behind her were shelf upon shelf of jars and tins and joints of meat wrapped tightly in greased paper to keep the flies off.

“Hello,” said Leeth, approaching the counter. “I’d like...”

The woman’s eyes didn’t move. She seemed completely frozen with incomprehension. She hadn’t registered his presence at all.

He studied her, and eventually detected the slight lifting and dropping of her chest as she breathed. She must be sick, he decided. He backed out onto the veranda, then approached the next building.

It was a small house, probably no more than two rooms. He rapped at the door to get attention, but there was no reply. The next house was probably a room larger. He knocked at the door, glancing uneasily back at Sky. He sent a command to the beast to take off and circle, as he finally recognised the feeling of apprehension lodged deep in his gut.

He gave the door a gentle tug and it swung out towards him. The shutters were closed and it was dark inside. 

He reached for the catches and swung the shutters wide and the bright sunlight he had been enjoying only a short time before flooded into the room.

There were three bodies, lying slumped across the bare wood floor. A woman, stripped from the waist down, a mess of blood at her groin. A girl, about ten years old, her throat slit neatly from ear to ear so that her trachea gaped wide. A man, his face battered into a shapeless, bloody pulp. The man’s trousers had been tugged down to his knees and his genitals had been hacked away.

Leeth approached him, drawn by some macabre curiosity. He pulled the man’s head back by the hair and saw that his severed penis had been stuffed into his mouth.

He let go, backed away.

As the man’s head flopped down onto his chest, he made a little grunting sound.

Leeth stared, horrified.

The man’s eyes had opened briefly, he was sure.

Leeth hugged himself, fighting the urge to run. The man was dead. He couldn’t possibly remain alive in such a condition.

Leeth made himself approach the man again. He reached out, felt for a pulse. There was nothing. The sound must have been caused by a movement of air in the man’s lungs as his head flopped forward. The movement of the eyes – if indeed there had been any – must have had the same cause.

Now, Leeth turned and heaved, his stomach so empty that all he produced was a burning cocktail of digestive juices.

He hauled himself to his feet and staggered out of the building.

In the next house there were four more bodies. The woman, again, had been stripped and used by the attackers. The three men, two of them old and frail, had been stabbed in some sort of frenzy.

The men’s clothes had been slashed clear and their torsos had been sliced open from chin to groin. With the same morbid curiosity, Leeth moved closer and stared into their opened bodies.

Dark organs glistened in the dim light of the house’s interior. In the third man – younger than the others – a twist of innard gave a sudden ripple, as if still going through the process of digesting the victim’s last meal.

Leeth backed away.

Cut the head off a chicken and it will still run about in circles, its nervous system functioning on beyond death. Headless chickens – that was why the man’s gut twitched, why the other man had blinked.

But then Leeth recalled the ancient practice of victorious soldiers, cutting the hearts out of their victims so that they could be eaten and the warrior’s strength augmented. According to legend, the victims could then be returned to life, in the service of the aggressor.

He couldn’t make himself look any closer, couldn’t make himself examine the abused corpses to see if their hearts had been removed. To see if they were, even now, in the process of returning from death.

And then he heard another sound.

He turned. The mangled woman had opened her eyes, was looking at him, smiling. She twitched her body, forcing him to look down to where her legs were spread wide, both hands buried in the bloody mess of her sex.

She started to moan.

As Leeth turned to flee he saw more movement: the man with the twitching innards, rolling over, trying to get up.

Leeth yanked the door open and suddenly he was face to face with a boy.

They stared at each other in an interval that stretched out interminably. The boy was about fifteen, in the little tin hat of a soldier, although he only had part of the uniform: a padded jacket, emblazoned with eagles and what looked like a few ragged chicken feathers. His trousers were open at the waist, as if he knew what was inside the hut, as if the tortured woman had known he was coming.

The boy was carrying a long knife, its blade smeared red.

Leeth stepped back, just as the soldier did the same. Then Leeth charged past him and leapt down into the dirt road, frantically summoning Sky from her low circuit above the village.

Seconds later, the courser swept down into the street and Leeth was about to throw himself onto her shoulders when he stopped and looked back at the house. The door was swinging lazily on its hinges, the boy nowhere to be seen.

Leeth moved out of Sky’s shadow and peered around the corner of the building. In the distance, he could see the boy running as fast as his legs could take him.

If it was possible, it seemed that the boy had been even more terrified by the sudden encounter than Leeth had been.

Leeth glanced along at the wide frontage of the village store.

The boy might be back at any time, either realising that Leeth had been unarmed, or with reinforcements. He didn’t dare think what those reinforcements might be, what malignant powers they had at their command.

Leeth sprinted across to the store and barged inside.

The woman had not moved.

“You have to come with me!” he demanded. Then he remembered her catatonic state and ran forward to take her by the arm.

She slumped and fell forward onto the counter. Leeth checked for a pulse in her neck but there was none. The shock – either of what she had seen or of Leeth’s approach – must finally have taken her.

Leeth scrambled back out of the shop and looked along the street.

Sky was waiting obediently. There was no sign of the soldiers. He ran over to the courser and climbed up onto her back, pausing only to fasten his harness before sending the command to lift, get away, fly as hard as possible until this grotesque village was left far behind.

~

As soon as he had landed in Khalaham, he sent Sky away to roam. The soldiers might have seen him flying away from the village, they might be searching for a lone flier even now.

He was relieved that Khalaham was such a sprawling place, and that his familiarity with it allowed him to blend in quickly.

Even as he walked away from the little ornamental gardens where he had landed, he was observing the people all about him. The faithful in their overalls and poke bonnets, the ragged, haphazard groups of the poorer workers, the middle classes of traders and church bureaucrats.

Immediately, he felt the changes settling into the way he walked and held himself. He felt the expressions moulding and remoulding themselves on his face. He had never tried so hard in his life to blend in, to change all that he could so that he would not be recognised in some chance encounter with that boy soldier.

He needed somewhere to stay, he realised. He had been walking so long, observing and mimicking, that he had been oblivious to the passing of time. Suddenly, he found himself wandering in the darkness, the crowds thinning all around him.

He remembered now something he had long ago forgotten from his brief time at the Embodied College in this town: the divided nature of the place. For centuries it had been no more than a provincial Church town, centred around its four colleges and the temples and shrines that drew people in from the surrounding area. More recently, though, it had become an important port, fed by the growing riverboat trade from the south. And so it was that the town had two sides to its nature: the restrained, conservative side, devoted to the Embodied tradition, and the brasher, rowdier life of a river port, with its associated violence and drunkenness. At no time was this more obvious than early evening, when the streets of the Waterside district were transformed into the playground of the bargees and dockers.

When he had first lived in Khalaham, the night-side of the town had intimidated him, but now it came as something of a relief, far more in keeping with the life he had been living in the south.

He wandered around for a time, then entered an inn close to the harbour. The atmosphere inside was boisterous, to say the least, but Leeth was certain it would not be a drinking place for the soldiers: the dockers wouldn’t give up their territory so easily.

He approached the bar and was immediately confronted by a huge mountain of a man, leaning his slab-like arms on the bar’s surface and staring aggressively at him. “Yes?” the man said brusquely.

Leeth swallowed. “I need somewhere to stay,” he said. “One night, maybe more.”

The man stared at him, his expression sullen and doubting. Then he jerked a thumb back over his shoulder to indicate a door at the side of the bar. “Mags’ll see to you,” he grunted, and turned away.

Leeth pushed through the door into what appeared to be no more than a dark cupboard with a gap at the top of the back wall. Then there was a soft cry and the wall retreated before him. “I...” he said. “The, um, gentleman behind the bar said I should come in here. I need a room.”

The wall shuddered and meaty arms brushed self-consciously down the front of a dress. Mags was even bigger than the barman, so wide she blocked the entire corridor. “He did, did he?” she said. As she spoke her whole head wobbled on her shoulders and two bunches of jewellery suspended from either ear rattled and glittered in the light that came over her shoulders.