Riding the Serpent's Back (46 page)

The foul weather seemed to have been sent to help them, the rain and wind driving everyone indoors. “How is she?” Red asked as they marched through the gardens towards one of the side entrances of the palace grounds.

Captain Eliazar glanced at Red. “For a woman awaiting execution she is in remarkably good spirits,” he said, in an even voice. For a moment, Red thought there was something hidden behind the captain’s words: some level of animosity, of bitterness. He recalled Estelle’s cleverly phrased speech before the Investigator where she had proclaimed her undying love for the man who had convinced her to leave Harrat for Totenang: that might just as easily apply to Captain Eliazar, he realised. Or any of the twenty or so soldiers who had accompanied them.

Perhaps this was all some elaborate plot they had hatched to get rid of him. Had she simply grown bored with him and wanted him out of the way? All he had to convince him of the truth of her story was the note and Captain Eliazar.

He stopped himself. He was becoming paranoid.

Only a matter of seconds later, his doubts were crushed when he heard screams and shouting coming from the domestic wing. Looking back through the gardens, he could see a light in his room as the shutters were thrown open. “My room!” he gasped. “Look.”

Eliazar glanced back, but his stride didn’t falter. “It’s not your room any more,” he said. “You’d better accept that you’ve lost all that now. It’s time you start paying for what you’ve been getting for free.”

Red realised that Eliazar had never really liked him, despite their bonhomie during the journey from Harrat, and the few times they had encountered each other since then. Red was too ineffectual to impress a man like the captain, too spineless.

“Right,” said Eliazar. “Be quiet and stay back here in the rain – where you can be seen, but not too clearly.”

They had come to an arch set into the tall stone wall that enclosed the palace gardens. The archway was closed by a tall, wrought-iron gate, and set just outside it was a small stone guard building lit from within by the oily glow of a lantern.

“Manseni! Cardon!” called Captain Eliazar. “Come and give me a hand with this.”

Two men stepped out into the night, pulling their capes tight against the driving rain. They pulled at the heavy gate as Eliazar pushed, and soon it stood half-open, enough for him and Red to slip through.

“Have you had word about Simeni – one of the Principal’s translators?” asked Eliazar. One of the men nodded and the captain continued, “Any sign of him? We’ve just come from his room and it’s empty. He mustn’t be allowed to leave the grounds.”

“No sign, sir,” said one of the men. “But we’re watching for him.”

“Good,” said Eliazar. “Good men.” He turned and put a hand on Red’s back. “Come on, Tomas,” he said to him. “To the docks. We’ll see how the search is going there.”

The two guards retreated to the shelter of their building and Red and Captain Eliazar marched off into the darkness.

“Are they really searching the city?” asked Red, as they went.

“Not properly,” said Eliazar. “Word has been sent to the taxmen at the harbour to be thorough in their duties, but it was assumed you would either be found in your room or caught staggering back drunk later tonight. By morning it will be clear that you are on the run and the search will intensify.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“I go to the docks to talk with the taxmen and their security staff,” said Eliazar. “Just as I told Manseni and Cardon. I’ve done what Estelle made me promise: I’ve extracted you from the palace.”

“And me?”

“I estimate you have about four hours until the search is on in earnest – you might even have until morning if it is assumed the reason for your failure to return to your room tonight is that you are in some tart’s bed. The search will probably centre on the docks and on the routes west and east. Everybody knows you’re a city boy: you’ll try to lose yourself in Tule, or up in the provincial capitals where you might hope to find some kind of influence with your gifted tongue.”

“So I steal a horse and ride south into the Heartlands,” said Red.

“Exactly,” said Eliazar. “And don’t stop until you reach the Burn Plain.”

~

Red did better than merely steal a horse.

Captain Eliazar left him in the Hangings. Red knew this district well, and now he knew what he had to do. And so, instead of fleeing as fast as he could, he went into a bar and chatted up a votary who was studying for the priesthood.

Back at the man’s lodgings, Red left him slumbering contentedly on the bunk and slipped away into the night.

He had lost more than an hour, but now he was dressed in a priest’s smock, with all the beads and bangles of office. From his time at the college, he was sure he could carry off the act well enough to fool most people, and it gave him a more credible reason to be travelling alone, he thought.

He took the votary’s horse and was on the fringe of the city less than five minutes later. The votary was most unlikely to confess the circumstances of the loss of his horse and a set of his clothes.

The rain had stopped by now and the night was becoming quite cold. Red shivered on the horse’s back and thought of his warm bed back at the palace. He knew such thoughts were pointless now, but he could not stop them coming.

Looming over the main road south, there was a line of fifty or more posts driven into the ground at an angle of 60 degrees, their tips sharpened into fearsome points. As Red rode slowly past, he counted thirty-seven bodies driven onto the posts so that the spikes pierced their backs between the shoulder-blades, their points emerging through the chest. The corpses hung in a variety of contorted postures, heads lolling to the side, or thrown back as if by the impact of the spike.

Some of the corpses had been here for some time, long enough for the crows to have started picking them to shreds. Now, Red could hear the birds calling occasionally from their roost in some nearby trees, waiting for daylight when they could return to their feast.

Most of the corpses were fresh, though. In all the evening’s excitement, he had forgotten that the Investigators were in town again, performing their endless duty of rooting out all those who might promote opposition to the teachings of the True Church of the Embodiment.

He stared at the grotesquely suspended corpses as he passed, feeling that there should be a place reserved among them for him. His lack of faith was of a more personal kind. He had taken his pleasures without any thought for the consequences. He had betrayed a man who had been closer to him than any other, and now the woman they had both loved awaited execution for Red’s crimes.

He passed a group of soldiers raising another body on its spike. A horse pulled the post to the correct angle while two soldiers secured it with long bolts. Nearby, another body lay in the mud, two soldiers poised to drive the spike through its back with a heavy hammer.

And then the body moved – it was no corpse, it was a man, still living! His arms were bound tightly at the elbows, his feet kicking feebly.

Red watched, aghast, as the spike was positioned over the man’s back. He couldn’t help but think that this would be his own fate if he did not escape tonight.

The executioners paused as he approached.

“Have you got a blessing for the sinner?” said one of the men, laughing coarsely. Blood was splashed across his face from the night’s work. “Have you got a bead to put in his mouth?”

The condemned man twisted so that he could peer up at Red, hope evident in his staring eyes.

Don’t look at me like that, Red thought. Please.

He stopped and looked down at the soldiers. He raised a hand in benediction and said, “If you have any faith in your hearts you will abandon this work. Let him go. I will pray on behalf of you all.”

The soldier with the blood-spattered face looked away and spat in the mud.

“On your way, priest,” said one of the others, the menace heavy in his words.

Red rode on. A short time later he heard the thud of hammer on wood, a cry, and then there was only the sound of his horse’s hooves.

~

He took refuge in a village called Atrac on the northern fringe of the Rift Heartlands. It was ten days’ ride from Totenang, a distance he felt sure would be enough to protect him from Pieter’s search parties. Totenang did not even have any jurisdiction over this region, although that had become pretty much immaterial since the treaty: Red should know – he had translated the document into the native language of these people.

The villagers were descended from the nomadic tribes of the Heartlands proper, but they had been settled at Atrac for many generations. The village was next to a stream which had carved a shallow valley between two wide, rounded blocks of hill. With the occasional rains from the north and the shelter of the hills from the drying southern winds, the villagers could grow maize and ground beans in the valley, and there was plenty of scrubby vegetation in the area for their herds of goats to graze. It was a poor and monotonous way of life, but a stable one.

Red was accepted by these people immediately. They already had a True Church priest, but Eshi Mei was approaching his eightieth year and his mind had long since deserted him. Red moved into the old man’s hut and helped the women of the village tend to him. He looked after the small shrine appended to the back of the hut, and prayed every morning with the few villagers who bothered: the traditional nomadic belief was that life itself was prayer. To nurture the soil and the crops it grew, to feed and clothe one’s family...simply to breathe the air and open one’s eyes to the world’s beauty: all these were the most fundamental tributes to the gods there could be.

“You think that’s bad?” asked Rubi, an adolescent girl who had just explained to Red her father’s reasons for refusing to pray with the new priest from the north.

Red shook his head.

He held his bangles and beads up in the air so that the sun caught them. “It’s honest,” he said. “So it can’t be bad. When one’s bond with the gods becomes obscured by trinkets and rules, it becomes more and more easy to overlook the basic truths: we breathe, we eat, drink, reproduce. All were created by the gods. Your father is a good man.”

The girl looked puzzled – she had clearly hoped to hear her father criticised. “Then I shouldn’t pray with you?” she asked.

“You should remember the basic truths of your life and acknowledge the gods in whatever way you can that is true and honest. Betrayal comes in many forms, but to betray yourself is to betray the gods too.”

Red found it easy to slide into this way of life: betrayal and dishonesty seemed only natural to him. Contact with the rest of the world was rare in Atrac, as it was largely a self-sustaining community. With the activity of the village all around him he could almost believe that this was the only life he had ever known, and the only one he would ever know.

At night, it was different. Red found it impossible not to dwell on what he had left behind. He reached the point where he was even grateful when old Eshi had a bad night, waking in a screaming fit as he often did. It broke Red’s melancholic reminiscing.

Often, Red lay staring up into the darkness, cursing the day he had been sent to escort the Principal’s wife-to-be from her provincial home in Harrat. He cursed the old hag, Anathea, who had misunderstood their explanations and blessed Red and Estelle as if they were the ones to be married. He cursed the Garden of Statues for providing such a perfect place for them to establish their illicit relationship.

He could never curse Estelle, though.

She had led him on, it was true, but she was young and naive: Red was the one who was sophisticated in the ways of the city and of the palace, it had been Red who had it in his power to stop things before they had ever started.

Yet it was Estelle who must be dead by now, at the hand of his one-time friend, Pieter, who he had driven to such jealous extremes.

He wondered why it was that he could never form a worthy relationship with another person and why, the few times he had made a start, it became inevitable that he would destroy the bond. His adoptive parents, Pieter, Estelle, the old merchant Rani Anesh, various friends from college and his time at the palace...Chi, even. He had always blamed other people for rejecting and abandoning him, but now he saw that over the course of his life it had always been the other way around: it was always
Red
who dumped
them
.

He seemed to have a gift for driving people away, or hurting them if they stayed close. It was as if he had some hidden self-destructive tendency, a defence against anything that might be good in life.

Even before the soldiers came to Atrac, Red knew it was inevitable that the life led in the village for so long would soon be wrecked. It was the way, taught by the True Church, after all – a birth inevitably leads to death: his new beginning was bound to end.

When he heard the commotion, he was sure that Pieter’s men had found him, but when he peered out of the hut, he saw that the soldiers wore the dun uniform of Tullans and he knew there must be some other reason for this sudden intrusion.

He watched as more troops entered the village. They came from the south, not the north as Red had expected. He estimated there must be about forty of them, fully protected with the traditional cotton padding studded with steel discs, their little tin helmets decorated with plumes. They were all riding horses, and armed with an assortment of swords, clubs, atlats and one or two heavy rifles.

As a convoy of four long wagons rolled into the village, pulled by pairs of mokes, Red stepped back into the shade of the hut.

He heard the voice of Shenethra Loe, the senior woman of the village. “May the lord Samna bless your presence in our village with peace,” she said, speaking in the language of the nomads.

The officer in charge of the squad of soldiers wasted no time. In True Tongue, he said, “The Senate of Tule has vested in me full powers to collect tributary taxes from your people.”

“But we have nothing,” said Shenethra. “We eat what we can grow and gather. We have no trade to tax. In any case, we owe no allegiance to a distant city.”