Riding the Serpent's Back (45 page)

The heat beat down, reflecting up at her from the pink crust. At one point the brittle skin of the flats became a harsh crystalline white and the sun’s heat rose in great waves that seemed to be burning the skin from her body as she walked.

She remembered the big rag dolls, suspended in the long hall of the Morani, their bodies painted red to indicate the removal of their skin.

She remembered Qobi’s tale of the defeated warrior who led his family out onto the soda-plain, to dedicate their lives – and inevitable deaths – to Huipo.

She stopped to take another measured drink from her one remaining water bottle. She nearly gagged. The soda had seeped through the skin of the bottle so that she might as well have been drinking directly from one of the sodaic springs.

She made herself drink it dry, before it could get any worse. She discarded the empty bottle, along with the packets of horsemeat the Morani had given her for her journey: yet another of their taunts – the water rapidly becoming unpalatable, the meat certainly made inedible by the all-pervasive soda.

A short time later, she was sick.

~

She came to a wide expanse of water. Spoonbills waded across it, working the lake in small, methodical teams. A flock of tiny ducks with beaks shaped like spades swam in formation, all keeping a wary eye on the strange bipedal animal which had appeared in their midst.

Was this to be it?

Monahl looked from side to side: as far as she could tell, the sheet of water went on forever. There was no way across.

She looked at the spoonbills. The water only came up to just below their knees, even out in the middle of the lake. Reluctantly, Monahl stepped into the water.

Immediately her booted foot started to sink into the slime. After a time, it seemed to come to a rest: not on the layer of hard ground she had hoped for, but at the point where the mud became thick enough to counter the downward force of her body mass.

She took another step, and waited until her boot stopped sinking, then heaved the first foot free. Ahead of her, the formations of small ducks swam hurriedly aside, and she remembered how the crowds on Zigané and the Serpent’s Back automatically parted for an approaching devotee-priest. So long ago.

She took another step, and soon she had found a stop-starting, lurching rhythm as she stepped and then paused to heave her foot free, stepped and heaved.

The water here looked so clear, but when she dipped a hand into it her fingers were burnt, not by its heat but by its causticity.

By the time she was halfway across, she was so exhausted that she thought every step must be her last. But she couldn’t stop, because she knew that the impression that her feet rested on a solid layer was an illusion and that if she stopped moving she would continue, gradually, to sink. If she stopped for too long, she would never be able to haul her feet clear.

She stared at the far side of the expanse of water. It looked so far away. She took another step, which could easily be her last. And then she took another.

Another.

Another.

Another.

The water became shallower, until eventually it was only a translucent, scummy film coating the top of the mud.

The dry pink crust was the most welcome sight she had ever seen. She swung a leg forward and placed her mud-choked boot smack in the centre of the first polygonal plate.

It fragmented, and her boot plunged through into the black mud beneath, and then she very nearly gave up. She remained in that position for some time, her ragged breath gradually lengthening. She knew that if she stayed like this she would die.

She thought of Freya. She had never managed to tell Chi about their daughter.

Finally, she managed to haul herself free and continue on her way. The pink, crystalline crust was far more brittle than before, and every step broke through to the forbidding black ooze.

It was then that she came across the corpses.

The first lay alone, half-buried in the mud. It was crusted over with an exotic crystalline growth, so that at first the shape was barely recognisable as having once been human. Then, at one end of this strange hummock, Monahl saw empty eye sockets and realised she was staring at a skull.

She kept walking.

A short time later, she found two more, and then a scattering of perhaps twenty more fallen travellers. Beneath the pink fuzz encasing them, she could make out military uniforms.

She thought of Qobi’s story. Although Lachlan’s envoy had earned their hatred, the Morani had been bound by honour to pay the tributes he demanded from them.

But Qobi had said nothing of the subsequent fate of the man himself, or that of his followers.

Monahl continued on her way, resuming the step, heave, step, heave rhythm of her journey. She could no longer really think. All she could do was focus on that inner core of calm she had found that morning.

All she could do was keep going.

~

When she spotted the white-haired warrior leading his family across the soda-plain, there seemed to be nothing incongruous in the sight, even though they must be long dead. When he had been defeated in his duel, Yulou-ab-Te had dedicated himself to his god, Huipo, so naturally he would be out here still. They would probably walk these plains forever.

The warrior had banished himself to this place three months ago, a time in which the envoy’s party had been reduced to skeletons.

Yet ahead of her – forms flickering in the heat haze – the white-haired Morani warrior and his wife and two small children paused in their journey to stare back. And then they went on their way, and soon all Monahl knew of their passage was the eerie tinkling of the woman’s bells.

When she reached where they had been she was faced by another expanse of water.

She sank to her knees, sobbing, and the tears left burning trails as they dissolved the crystalline coating that had formed on her cheeks.

“You win,” she whispered, her voice reduced to a thin croak. “Qobi...Edri-ab-Halahm...Huipo. You win.”

She opened her eyes when she felt a transient movement of air across her face. A V-formation of spoonbills was passing before the glaring sun, far too distant to have stirred the air around Monahl, but there was nothing else.

When she looked down, she saw that the mud had crept up her thighs where she knelt.

She tried to stand, and couldn’t.

“I didn’t mean it,” she croaked, heaving at her legs. “Not yet.”

But the more she heaved at one leg, the more she forced the other down into the mud.

Calm.

She tried to steady herself, to gather her panicky thoughts.

She didn’t understand why she had heard the word in Chi’s voice until she saw him standing a short distance ahead of her. On his left, the tall, beautiful Morani warrior rested nonchalantly on a long spear. His heavily bejewelled wife stood a discreet distance behind them, a small child resting on each arm.

On Chi’s right stood Huipo.

Monahl stared, aghast. He was as tall as the white-haired warrior, and he had the same high, slender head. Now, Monahl saw how appropriate was the skin colouring of the Morani: their deep bronze tones reflected and echoed the violent meat-red of their god’s flayed body. Not a shred of skin remained: all was muscle and sinew and exposed, white bone. His teeth grinned manically from his mouth, like those of a skull, and his big round eyes bulged from their sockets.

Monahl shrunk away.

Don’t fear us, her brother told her gently. Yulou-ab-Te saw you and called us here – at this the white-haired warrior gave a double nod of his head – and the lord, Huipo, is just as dual-natured as any of our gods. He is the destroyer and avenger, but for the people of this place, it is Huipo who brings food and honour.

“But you’re not here,” said Monahl. Suddenly, she realised that the Chi before her was the older version – the Chi from the Serpent’s Back. Uncertainly, she added, “You’re...in Edge City.”

The Huipo-figure cackled, and when she looked again, Chi and the Morani family had vanished.
Am
I
here, then?
the god asked, moving towards her.
Have I come to claim you?

She stared as he approached, her eyes bulging until they felt as big as the god’s. He reached out to touch her and where his fingers brushed her forehead she felt a searing pain so intense it was almost orgasmic.

Her body heaved, and she tipped backwards. The mud made a sucking sound and her knees shifted a little.

Go on!

This time the voice was her brother’s, although when she looked she was alone again.

Inside her head, the voice repeated,
Go on! Go right back!

She leaned back with all her weight, and again her knees shifted in the heavily glutinous mud. Harder and harder, she pushed back, until it felt that her spine would snap.

And suddenly, she sprawled full length in the mud.

She looked around, and was alone, and there was silence in her head, the silence of her deepest meditations.

The relentless suck of the mud brought her back to her senses and she made herself stand and start walking again.

Out, through the water. This channel was less wide than the first one, and she was soon across. She realised it was actually easier passing through the water, because the mud beneath it was slicker and less sticky. When she reached the far side, she was faced with more thinly crusted black ooze and she had to force herself to concentrate on every step, as if each was the only step required.

Chi returned to her later in the afternoon, and now she knew it for what it was: one of her waking dreams. One of the hallucinations which had so plagued her adult life with their glimpses of visionary clarity, their glimpses of insanity.

Chi danced before her as if taunting her, his tread so light that he never broke through the brittle pink crust. He disappeared, then suddenly spoke from behind, startling her so that she stumbled and nearly fell – she knew that if she ever went down again she would not get up.

He spoke in voices that were not his own: a woman, an old man, once even Monahl’s own voice. Often he taunted her in a schoolboy voice, inverting what he had become: a child in a man’s body, instead of a man in a child’s.

She walked on.

A quieter time came, Monahl walking on the more solid ground of a slight ridge, Chi at her side. “Huipo told me I will be betrayed,” he said, as if merely passing the time of day. “He said I will be killed. Either one of my siblings will cross me twice, or two will cross me one time each. That’s not very good, is it? There are only seven of you, after all.”

Monahl stared at him. “Not me,” she said. “I would not betray you.”

Chi smiled. “One of you will betray me knowingly,” he said. “And I don’t believe that would be you, sister. But one will betray me in all innocence, and that could be any of you.”

“It won’t be me!” She almost screamed the words, although the raw pain of her throat strangled them somewhat.

Chi put a hand out and touched her arm. “You are the least likely, I agree,” he said.

She looked at him. “Do you know about this?” she asked. “The
real
you.” Because, of course, he was not really here. This Chi was merely a figment of her madness, or of her vision, whichever it was.

Chi shook his head. “No,” he said. “You must tell me, so that I can be prepared.”

“I will, I will! I’ll do anything!”

He just smiled, and started to flicker, as if he was a part of the ever-present heat haze rising from the flats. He became more pink, and she realised that she could see the spreading soda-plain through his fading body, and then he disappeared and she was alone again.

She continued, her stride not faltering.

Suddenly, the ground dropped again and she staggered forward and plunged through the crust. A pain shot up from her heel and she flailed her arms to stop herself falling.

But it was no good. She pulled the injured foot free but as soon as she tried to put weight on it she stumbled and fell to her knees.

She struggled and struggled, but could do nothing to haul herself to her feet again. So she slumped forward onto her hands and started to crawl.

She felt the skin on her palms peeling away, so that the caustic soda burned directly into her exposed flesh.

Soon, she crawled on knees and elbows, and then her body sagged. With a few wriggles of her torso, like a fish out of water, she found that she could still propel herself forward, but soon she had exhausted all of her reserves. She stopped moving.

Before losing consciousness, her single consolation was the thought that if she died out here, then at least she would not betray her beloved brother.

But even that last hope was snatched away from her: she was the only one who knew he would be betrayed. If she died now, she would not be able to save him. Was she doomed to be the one who betrayed him in innocence – unable to warn him that he will be crossed?

Soon, even that ceased to matter. Gradually, she lost awareness of her body, until all that remained was that deep, calm inner core. And then, slowly but relentlessly, she began to lose her grip even on that.

Red Simeni stared at Captain Eliazar.

He felt strangely relieved that it should end so quickly: he would never have been suited to life on the run. If the gods had intended him to be an adventurer he would not have been born in such a weak, ineffectual body.

“You’d better come with me,” said Eliazar. “And quickly. Estelle sent me.”

“But—”

“Or would you prefer to die?”

Red shrugged. “Perhaps not today,” he said. He pulled on a long, anonymous coat, tied a rain hood over his head and picked up his bag. “Shall we go?”

He followed Eliazar along the corridor and then down the back stairs. All the time, Red expected a sudden shout, a hand on his shoulder, a sword in his face. He dropped his shoulders and head, trying to look as ordinary as he could.

Outside, the rain fell in blocks.

“Stay close,” said the captain. “And stay quiet. I will do what talking is required.”

Red nodded, then pulled his hood tighter against the downpour. He didn’t like the way Eliazar walked with his hand resting on the hilt of his sword. It made it all seem somehow
serious
, and Red did not want it to be serious at all. His mind was still whirling through the consequences of this miserable evening: he would never make love to Estelle again and, what now seemed even worse, his friendship with Pieter was over for good.