Riding the Serpent's Back (52 page)

He found himself held tightly in her embrace, intensely aware of the touch of her flesh through what he knew must be an illusion of a dress.

“We danced once before,” she said to him. “You were good, but not as good as your brother.” With a powerful heave, she spun him and, involuntarily, he began to move in time to the music.

“My brother?” he said, his mind spinning yet again. He had drunk too much already this evening – he was in no state for such blunt revelations.

“Joel Carmady,” said Oriole, smiling. “He has your timing, but he is stronger and so I didn’t have to compensate so much.”

Red shook his head. The only time he had heard that name before was when it had been mentioned by Chi, as if a list of siblings’ names would substantiate his claims to be Red’s brother. “I don’t know who you mean,” he said. “I’m an orphan. My mother died in childbirth and my father died shortly afterwards. He—”

“—was a fine warrior, I know. Red, I’m not as dumb as some Hangings barmaid, or even poor, beautiful Estelle.” She leaned forward and kissed him tenderly, briefly, on the lips. “And I’m not playing games with you, either. All I’m saying is that I know your lineage and I think you should be proud that you are on the side of the Embodied Church and not that of your oldest brother.”

“Chi?”

She nodded. “He wishes to oppose my dear, poor Lachlan,” she said. “Your other brothers and sisters, too. All so short-sighted and easily swayed. But you, alone, are different. You see things clearly, while your siblings obediently fall into line behind Chichéne.”

Just then, Red was seeing things anything but clearly. Oriole was spinning him so hard at times that he felt his feet lift clear of the ground. He understood what she meant, though, remembering his refusal to join Kester when she had come to Totenang to recruit him: where the others had unquestioningly fallen in behind Chi, he alone had stood firm for what he...what he
believed
in.

Which was having a good time. Playing, as Estelle had said, the game.

~

Later, they ended up in a cabin on the barge. Pieter and Estelle were there, lying in a tangle of satin sheets, along with Jon Pascal and two of his peeling lady-friends.

“No clothes!” cried Estelle from the mattress which had been specially built to fit the cabin from wall to wall. “It’s the rule.”

Red stripped off and, at his side, Oriole merely decided she wasn’t wearing anything, and her illusory clothes faded to nothing.

She gave Red a push and he staggered forward, sprawling before the Principal and his wife. He looked up at the mock serious expressions on their faces and started to giggle.

Soon, everyone in the cabin was laughing. Estelle shuffled over to make room and Red slid in between her and her husband.

Pieter flopped back now, seeming more ready to accept Red’s company.

Red felt Estelle’s hand on the flat of his belly. He looked uneasily at Pieter, but despite the hollow look in his eyes the Principal was smiling now. As he watched, Pieter’s hand reached out and ran up Red’s flank until it rested at the base of his neck, a finger gently caressing the start of his hairline.

“What a lovely picture,” said Oriole, from the end of the bedding area, where she sat cross-legged. “‘The Reconciliation’, we might call it.”

Red looked away from Pieter to Estelle, who was rubbing gently at his belly, sending spasms of excitement darting through his body. He smiled, struggling to bury the last flicker of unease. They were all back together again: the confidant, his lover, his friend.

Everything was going to be all right.

“Go on,” whispered Estelle. “You and Pieter. I want to watch you together. Like you did for all those men in the Hangings when you were a teenager.”

He saw the excitement in her eyes, pausing only to wonder how she knew about a past he had been so careful to conceal. Then he looked down and saw that the hand on his belly was no longer Estelle’s, but a man’s, Pieter’s. He sighed and lay back, then turned onto his side to face the Principal.

For a moment, there was fear in his friend’s eyes, then the blank look of acceptance returned. Red kissed him and pulled away, then said, “Do you want me to?”

Pieter’s eyes broke away from Red’s look, found Oriole’s, then instantly returned to Red’s. Slowly, the Principal of Totenang nodded, then closed his eyes. “I’ve always wanted you,” he said. “Always.”

Red didn’t believe him, but nonetheless, he set to work.

~

The Principal’s visits continued every few days for several weeks. Sometimes he brought Oriole, who might stay on for a few days; sometimes she was away with Lachlan and sent her apologies.

Red’s presence was soon accepted, and he managed to bury most of his doubts. If he had been told when he swam ashore that life in the ophidy refuge would be one endless party, and that he would be reunited with an apparently unscathed Estelle and reconciled with Pieter, it would have exceeded his wildest dreams. He was certain that it was only his own sense of guilt that made him interpret some of Pieter’s looks and words as barely concealing a bitter hatred of Red.

One day, the barge arrived with neither Pieter nor Oriole on board. As soon as it was sighted in the bay and Jon Pascal dragged him down to the docks to watch its approach, Red knew there was something amiss. Apart from anything else, the Principal had always been discreet about his obsession, he had never come here in daylight before.

It was a rough and gloomy day, Ixi’s Wind driving in from the north as it had done for several days already. Red and Jon stood in the shelter of a dockside doorway and watched the barge cut across the choppy waters of the bay.

Apart from its crew and a few barrels of drink, the barge was empty.

Red climbed aboard and Captain Street, the regular pilot of the barge, came out to greet him. “Col,” said Red, shaking him warmly by the hand. “What’s happening?” He knew Col Street from his time at the palace: for a soldier, he had always been remarkably good company – probably because he had only joined the army at Pieter’s insistence; by trade and upbringing he was a bargee.

Col produced a document from within his heavy coat. “At the invitation of the good Principal,” he said.

Red broke the gummed seal and unfolded the piece of paper.

My dearest Red Simeni, it said, in flowing script that smudged with rain as he read it. Please allow Captain Street to escort you and my beloved wife in the barge to Broor. From there your party will travel by train to our new, and oldest, capital, Samhab. You may bring four guests, if you choose. I await you in the First City. Your Principal, Pieter Lammer of Totenang.

Jon had been reading over Red’s shoulder. Now he smacked him on the shoulder and said, “The gods be buggered! We’re going on a trip!”

Red beamed at Captain Street. “We’ll be ready soon,” he said, then turned and leapt down onto the quay. With no hope of leaving Coltsmore’s Haven, he had resigned himself to this life, but now that he was to depart he suddenly became aware of how oppressive the seamless facade of jollity had become. He had never before been as glad that a party was over.

~

Red stood as far forward as he could.

With one hand he smeared his rain-soaked hair back across his head, clear of his eyes. In the other he held a bottle of beer, his arm hooked across Estelle’s shoulders. Ahead of them was only grey, giving no indication that the heaving paddles at the barge’s rear were doing any more than treading water. Red could feel in his gut that they were moving, though, he could feel it in every ounce of his being.

He turned to Estelle and kissed her on the forehead. “We’re going,” he said. “Getting away from that forsaken place.”

She nodded. “I feel a little sad,” she said. “There were no barriers there, no prejudices. No inhibitions or rules. They were my friends.”

“They still are,” Red told her. “And most of them are coming with us, after all.”

He released Estelle and turned to wave his bottle back at the rest of the barge.

The passengers were gathered all around the sides of the vessel, peering anxiously out into the rain-lashed waters. Many of them had been on the island refuge for decades, and all must have abandoned any hope of ever setting foot on the mainland again. Pieter’s message had mentioned only four guests, but when Jon Pascal, as one of the guests, had invited his own four guests, and they, in turn, had invited more, the calculations were somehow brushed aside. “It won’t matter,” Estelle had insisted, as the barge steadily filled up. “Most of them won’t dare leave the barge at Broor. They can come along for the trip.”

Captain Street had shrugged, and Red sensed that he was quite enjoying his role as granter of unanticipated freedom to these people – he was clearly one man in whom the ancient prejudice had long since been set aside.

~

By evening the barge was enveloped in fog and they lay at anchor a few leaps out into the lake at the head of the Little Hamadryad. The waters at the entrance to the river were too busy to risk entering in these conditions. Around them, as the grey blanket faded to black, Red heard the clanging of the bells of their countless neighbours, all waiting until morning before entering the river.

He slept in the open, waking stiff and damp and hearing a continual ringing sound which it took some time for him to realise was within his aching head. He disentangled himself from an overweight redhead, who seemed to be wearing only a length of chain and a piece of netting over her weeping, crusty body. At some point someone had wedged a candle deep in her cleavage and during the course of the night it had burnt down to leave a pool of off-white wax in the hollow of her chest.

He stretched and groaned, preparing himself for a dash to the side of the barge if he felt the need to vomit. When his stomach had become accustomed to being upright, he wandered back around the side of the boat. From the debris of bodies and bottles, he suspected it had been quite a night, but he couldn’t really remember.

He came across Estelle sitting on the upper deck, her back against the bridge, her knees drawn up to her chin. Just then, as he caught sight of her in the shy morning sun, he remembered how things had once been: the flirting young girl, the simple temptation which had become relentlessly more complicated, no matter how hard he tried to be good.

She looked quite beautiful.

She saw him and smiled – rather sadly, he thought. He sat with her and looked out across the water to the dark fringe of land that bordered the lake and the river, which they were now entering. Over a rising hill, he could see the twin towers of Totenang’s main temple, so close to the palace. The fog had hidden the city from them when they had passed it more closely the day before. He wondered if he would ever see the city again – this rehabilitation suddenly offered that possibility, where he had given up on it before.

The river was busy now, catching up with all the traffic the fog had delayed the previous day. Occasionally, passing boats chimed their bells or hooted their horns when the Principal’s barge was recognised. The ophidy victims always waved back cheerily in response.

“It’s just like the first time,” said Estelle sadly. “When you took me to Seedrickston and put me on this barge. All the little boats that followed us on the way to Totenang. Even when I was on dry land I could hear the bells chiming in my head.”

“You were only a girl, then,” said Red. “So much has changed.”

“I was a fool,” said Estelle. “I walked around with my eyes closed. I couldn’t even imagine all the possibilities life held.”

Red was surprised at the passion in her voice. He had mistaken her mood entirely. Where he had thought she was thinking fondly of the lost innocence of her youth, instead she had been cursing it as so much time wasted.

He looked away, wishing her intensity didn’t make him so uncomfortable at times. On the deck at his feet he saw something flapping in the breeze, a piece of skin. Then he saw that what he had taken for an oily patch was in fact an entire sheet of skin, stuck to the deck where it had detached itself from someone’s back at some point in the night.

He stood and walked away, leaving Estelle where she sat staring into the distance. She hardly seemed to notice him leaving until, just as he glanced back before descending the steps to the lower deck, her eyes flicked towards him and she smiled, then pouted and blew a kiss.

“Find me later, lover,” she said. “Or I’ll have to come looking for you.”

~

At Broor they left the barge behind. Red had been here once, about four years ago, as a junior clerk on the somewhat drunken Totenang delegation to an administrative conference. Back then it had been no more than a quiet river port made wealthy by its position halfway down the Rift’s second river, at the nexus of several trade routes with the provinces and principalities of the eastern fringe.

Now, Broor was a thriving place, wealthy in its own right. Its territories had been promoted from province to principality, although it was still legally bound to Tule by the treaty that established its new status.

The barge had to wait its turn, anchored in the river, until a berth was vacant at the docks. Most of the other barges here had come down the tributaries from the mountains, carrying vast cargoes of stone and timber for the First City. Cranes hauled loads continually, shifting them directly onto wagons on the railway which extended all the way to the riverside. Gangs of labourers and mokes filled every available space so that it was a wonder that anything got moved in the apparent chaos.

Four years ago, although the docks had been busy, the levels of activity had been nowhere near as high as this. Four years ago there had not even been plans for a railway. There had not been the current number of soldiers either: buildings at either end of the harbour had been fortified and armed with cannons: all along the docks soldiers patrolled and sat talking and playing cards in little sentry-posts that had been constructed out of sandbags to look out over the water.

From the barge, it was a walk of no more than forty standard paces to the portable steps placed for them to climb up into their carriage. Despite Estelle’s earlier confidence that most of their fellow travellers would be too scared to leave the barge, only a handful remained on board. The rest were either too excited or too drunk to care and a procession of about fifty people trooped across the quay to the waiting train.