Riding the Serpent's Back (35 page)

Leeth was a shifter, a changer of forms.

Leeth was a shape-changer.

~

Back at the inn, Leeth rushed inside, through the crowd of drinkers. Denzi stood across the doorway through to the back of the inn, but Leeth dodged him easily and hurried up to her room. With the door shut firmly behind her, the lock turned, she threw herself on the sleeping mat.

She couldn’t lie down, though. She was too frightened, too upset.

She scrambled to her feet, went across to the window and threw the shutters open. Then she changed her mind and slammed them shut.

Pacing around the room, her mind a whirl, she was interrupted by a voice from the other side of the door. “You okay in there, love?” called Mags softly. Had she taken Leeth for a woman, too?

“Yes, yes,” snapped Leeth. “Just...just tired.”

She continued to pace around the room, her whole body twitching and jerking. Aware of the priest’s juices running down her legs. She couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t calm herself, couldn’t stop to think.

She remembered the look of surprise on that poor priest’s face when she had looked back along the street to see him emerging from the alleyway. “What’s wrong?” he had asked, his smock hanging down over his dangling genitals.

Now, Leeth went over to her jug of water, and sloshed some into a bowl. With a damp rag she wiped at herself, trying to remove all traces of the priest. It felt so peculiar to clean herself in this way. One of the oddest things was how it seemed so natural to have this strange arrangement of flaps and cavities and not the male genitals she had had all her life.

She even found herself doubting that she had ever been any different – already it seemed odd to think of having a penis and balls down there and not what she had. In the dim light of the room, she stared down at herself, then she lowered her kilt in panic, hiding her horrific change from sight.

Still, she couldn’t stop moving. She went over to the window again, and peered out through half-open shutters. She had no idea what she expected to see. A queue of sight-seers come to view the freak?

She made herself lie down on her blankets. Unable to face undressing, she would have to sleep in her clothes.

But sleep wouldn’t come. She hugged herself hard, and wished she was not like this.

The more her flitting mind considered it, the more incidents from the past kept returning to her. How, as a girl – a boy! a boy! – she had found it so easy to go unnoticed, how anonymity had always been such a natural form of defence.

Even Cotoche had known, she suddenly realised. She remembered finding her for the first time in Edge City, and Cotoche had said he – as he still was – had changed. He had tried to pass it off as growing maturity and experience, but he had seen a disbelieving look in Cotoche’s eyes, some intuition that there was more to it than merely the passing of years.

She lay there, scared to sleep, scared to remain awake. Her head started to pound, and she remembered the rhythmic pounding in her belly from earlier. She became hot and sweaty, but at the same time she shivered as if cold.

She twisted and turned, refusing to give in to sleep.

At one point, she found herself staggering across the floor, her head filled with an obsessive urge to clean every trace of the priest out of herself once again.

She threw herself at the wall, beating it with her fists. When she was able to stop, she slumped against it and rubbed at her face and was shocked to find a thick growth of beard along her jaw.

In sudden triumph, she unfastened her kilt and shoved a hand deep into her groin but, although male in the face, she was still completely female below.

She found the wet cloth and rubbed at herself vigorously, as if she might wash her femaleness away. Then she started to shiver and she crawled over to her sleeping mat and pulled the blankets tightly about herself.

She struggled to calm down. If she could only find the peace of prayer, then she might overcome her current state of panic.

She tried to focus, tried to still her heaving mind.

A little later, she explored herself again: a beard on a heavy, square jaw, breasts...a strange bulge in her crotch just to the front of her female genitals. She made herself keep her hand on the bulge. She was sure it was growing.

She was becoming male again.

But also, she was starting to shiver uncontrollably. Soon, her whole body was heaving about in her tangled bedding. Her hands scrabbled about on the floor, trying to find a grip to stop her body flipping from side to side.

She couldn’t stop it. She cried out, felt her brain clouding over.

Suddenly, she felt hands on her, great folds of flesh pressing her down, subduing her. “It’s all right, girl,” came a husky female voice. “Mags is here. You’re all right now.”

~

Leeth opened his eyes and looked around. He thought it must be night, until Denzi moved away from the window and the light flooded back in.

He tried to sit, and ended up resting on his elbows. He realised he was thinking straight, and that his body was no longer heaving and shaking violently beyond his control. He didn’t need to look down at himself to know that he had become a man again: he was somehow more in tune with his body than before.

“You feeling better, then?” asked Denzi, peering at him suspiciously.

Leeth nodded. “I don’t know what happened,” he said, lamely.

Denzi nodded. “You was under for six days,” he said. “Feverish. Delirious. Mags thought we’d lost you, but I told her you’d pull through.”

Leeth touched his face tentatively. The beard had gone, in fact it felt as if nothing had changed. “Am I...?” He didn’t know how to phrase the question.

Denzi nodded again. “Should have seen yourself, though,” he said. “I told Mags, I did. I told her you was something different as soon as I set my eyes on you.”

Leeth felt tears welling in his eyes. “I’m a freak,” he said. “A...”

Denzi reached out and squeezed his hand. “No,” he said. “You got to remember that it isn’t your shape that matters: it’s what’s in
here
.” He struck his chest, sending quivering waves through his enormous torso. “You’ve got to learn to be strong.” He paused, then added, “In the family, is it? I could tell you was True, of course.”

Leeth thought hard. His mother had always had something of a reputation: the eccentric woman who refused to obediently follow her husband’s way of life; creative and artistic where she should have been docile and homely. But not this. He shook his head.

“You might not know,” said Denzi. “Just because someone doesn’t change, doesn’t mean they can’t.”

“My mother’s father,” Leeth said eventually. “He was always a bit odd. They said he was mad. I never met him. Maybe this is the reason he was so mad.”

He sat up now, and waited for his head to stop spinning. “I have to go,” he said. He had decided to return to Laisan. It was five years since he had seen his childhood city and his family.

But it wasn’t mere nostalgia, he knew. He had to see his mother. He had to find out about his grandfather, how he had coped with his Talent, if that was, indeed, the explanation of his strange reputation.

Or, he corrected himself, how his grandfather had
failed
to cope with his Talent...

~

He had only been back in Laisan for about an hour when he spotted his cousin, Ellen. Already, it had been long enough to feel deflated, for his childlike anticipation of seeing the lake city again to lose its edge.

Coming home, he realised, was far better than actually getting there.

Upon reaching Tule he had dismissed Sky, knowing the courser would come when she was needed. The best way to approach Laisan was by boat: to see the dark ridge rising out of the choppy waters of the lake, to edge closer until you could make out one or two of the neighbouring islets in the chain. Closer still, you could start to distinguish the densely packed buildings rising up the flanks of the extinct volcanic ring, and then the long sweep of the bridges connecting the islands together. Perhaps even as early as Tule he was trying to delay the end of his journey, prolonging his return.

He had climbed steadily up the steep streets that zigzagged away from the docks. Houses crowded either side of the road, sometimes meeting above him. The place didn’t seem quite as luridly bright and clean as he remembered. The walls were flaking and cracked – so much so that he even wondered if the citizens of Laisan had been lapsing in their prayers, weakening the Pact that protected the city.

He reached the crest of the hill and looked down across the city’s interior. The rim of the caldera stretched away to either side, converging to form a crater a standard leap in diameter. Before him, tier upon tier of houses dropped away until they were below the level of lake Lai, held back outside the volcanic rim. Ragged clumps of buddleia sprouted from the walls and roofs and many of the buildings bore platforms loaded heavily with the untidy stick-rafts of stork nests. In the centre there was a small crater lake, barely visible past the buildings huddled around it.

Laisan and its neighbouring islands had been protected for hundreds of years by Lai’s Pact. Until that time, only a few small fishing communities had been able to live on the islands, fleeing at the first sign of any volcanic disturbance. Lai was a mystic, later credited as the city’s first mage, from whom nearly all of Laisan’s True Families claimed descent. One time he was deep in prayer when the ground began to shake and the vents at the volcano’s summit started to fume. There was nothing the villagers could do to rouse him until they gave up and prepared to manhandle him in his stupor into one of the boats.

He opened his eyes and one look was enough to stop his neighbours in their tracks. They stared at him in awe: his face had taken on the appearance of Tezchamna, the sun god whose nightly passage through the underworld fed the fires of the deep.

He shook his head and said, “Go now. While you can. My volcano must burn one more time, but when it is done it will be tamed by a Charmed Pact and you may live here in peace. So go!”

The mountain gave a mighty heave and the villagers sprinted to the harbour. When they were a short distance out into the lake there was an enormous explosion and several boats were lost in the resulting waves. The first people returned to the island a month later and they found that the central dome of the volcano had collapsed into a caldera a thousand paces in diameter.

Just as Lai had promised, the volcanoes of this chain had lain dormant ever since.

Leeth looked over to his right, about a third of the way down the inner slope. He could see the block of roofs, one of which was the family home, and it was now that he began to lose the anticipatory buzz of returning.

Suddenly, he wondered why he was here, how he could possibly explain. It had seemed so easy when he told Denzi that he was going to return home so that he might learn how to cope with his accursed Talent.

He took a narrow street that cut across the inner slope of the caldera. He had walked along here twice a day as a boy, on his way to and from school. So much had happened to him since he had walked over this cobbled surface.

He saw a group of students approaching through the crowd. They weren’t much younger than he had been when he left Laisan.

He stared at them, and then he recognised the voice of one of the girls. Ellen! She had always been tall for her age, but now she had been overtaken and was shorter than her companions. She had an easy laugh and spoke all the time so that she seemed the hub of the group. She was continually touching her friends: squeezing, patting, prodding. She was a lot slimmer than she had been, and she had grown into her adolescent gawkiness.

Leeth remembered being repelled by his parents’ notion that he would one day marry Ellen and reinforce the family line. Now, the possibility didn’t seem quite so abhorrent.

He thought guiltily of Cotoche and cut off his train of thoughts. If he could not have his one love, then he would have none.

Ellen saw him staring and leaned over to one of her friends to say something. They both glanced at Leeth and he smiled. He had never been close to Ellen but it still stirred something deep inside to see her now.

The two girls giggled.

Leeth stopped and waited as they approached, starting to feel awkward and exposed. And then they were level with him, about to walk past.

“Ellen?” he said.

She looked at him, frowning, but didn’t stop walking. A little later, she glanced back but it was clear that she didn’t have the first idea who he was.

Leeth slumped back against a wall. He couldn’t have changed so much his own cousin would fail to recognise him!

And then, he remembered, he could.

He started to feel dizzy, to feel the sudden hot flushing that he knew could easily presage another shifting crisis like the one he had suffered in Khalaham.

He thought of all the tiny, incremental changes he must have made to himself in all the years away: the sort of changes Cotoche had seen in him, the additional changes he had made so he could pass unnoticed during his time in the river cities. He had become a different person to the one who had left Laisan five years before, both internally and externally.

As he leaned against the wall, pressing his head against its coolness, he knew he had changed so much in that time that he could no longer remember how he had felt and, more to the point, how he had looked back then. Or how he should look now if he hoped to be recognised.

The journey to Divine would be treacherous, whichever way Monahl chose to go. Herold’s home city was situated farther to the west than any other sizable settlement – strictly speaking, Divine was not even a Rift city, it was up where the foothills became mountains, in the last of the habitable lands before the parched and barren wastelands of the far west.

The most direct route would take Monahl across the Shelf to the soda plains of the Morani people and then up into the foothills. On horseback, she felt sure she could cover the journey in about twenty days.

Less directly, she could head north along the banks of the New Cut, then try to find one of the old trade roads westwards through the Zochi jungle. If the jungle road was clear this route might be just as quick, but since the New Cut had been completed thirty years before, most trade to Divine had shifted to the Two Rivers Road to the north of the jungle; there was no guarantee she would not get several days into the jungle only to be forced back when the way became too tangled and overgrown to penetrate.