Riding the Serpent's Back (6 page)

“I gave him something external to direct his anger at,” Leeth had said. “With my northern ways he could hate me as well as himself.”

Now, the boy leaned against him. When Leeth raised an arm Chi slipped under it and then climbed into his lap. “What do you want to know?” asked Leeth. “What can I tell you?”

“The first news we received was from New Penth,” said Chi. “The police squad reported killing a nomadic brigand, wanted for abduction and murder. From what was reported it was obvious they were referring to Chi.”

“They didn’t kill him,” said Leeth softly.

“We guessed the report wasn’t entirely true,” said Chi. “Lachlan would have wanted him alive, if possible. He’d have wanted to see for himself. Later, we heard from some freedom fighters who had interrogated a member of the police squad. He said Chi jumped before they could get to him.”

Leeth felt uncomfortable. The boy talked so glibly about a policeman’s interrogation, and all that implied. He had to keep reminding himself who this really was, curled up in his lap. “What can I tell you?” he asked.

“Was it a glorious death?” Then, in a smaller voice, Chi added, “Was he happy?”

Leeth thought again about the events he had relived so many times in the intervening years. He remembered the look on Chi’s face, the smile. “It was a victory,” he said. “A small victory, but one nonetheless.

“We rode just about as far west as it’s possible to ride from that side of the Michtlan Ridge. The police were never far behind. He pushed me off the horse we were sharing. The fall broke my ankle, so that all I could do was lie low and watch.

“The police were closing in and, just before the end, he looked back at them and then I think he really was happy, just for an instant. Then he jumped, made the final act his own.”

Chi nodded slowly. “It was fitting,” he said. “It will be remembered long after the police report is gone to dust.” Chi yawned, and over the top of the boy’s head Leeth saw Cotoche wiping the tears off her face. He felt sudden guilt. He had been completely oblivious to the effect his words would have on her. She had loved that former Chi.

The boy had sagged in Leeth’s arms, asleep at last.

Cotoche smiled now, eyes suddenly alight again. “He always told me you would join us,” she said. “He always said you would never let us down.”

Leeth rose gingerly and carried Chi inside. Gently, he lowered the boy to his sleep mat and covered him with a blanket he found bundled up on the floor. When he was done he went back to sit with Cotoche.

~

A domestic routine established itself rapidly. Chi would rise early and dominate everything, either through sheer infant exuberance or by adult character and guile. Early on, the boy would lead Leeth through the maze of streets and tracks, teaching him how to find his way around the chaotic jumble of Edge City, introducing him to its extraordinary diversity of inhabitants. Mostly, they concentrated on the slums, but occasionally they ventured into the Warren, a wealthy administrative quarter where trade officials lived side by side with ghetto barons and money men. The boy seemed to know everyone they met.

One festival day, Chi took Leeth to see the worshippers, giving him a running commentary on the dumb faith of the masses, regardless of who might hear. Leeth had seen the basalt pyramids scattered through both shanty-town and the city-proper, but on this day they were hidden by the thousands of worshippers who had prostrated themselves on their stone flanks, clothing the pyramids with flesh.

On another occasion Leeth had called for Sky and flown with the boy the twelve leaps west to the Junction, where a constant procession of steam trains hauled meat, grain, minerals and metals up from the docking facilities at the foot of the Shelf. The goods had been imported from the various communities of the Burn Plain, ferried across the molten sea by fleets of Charmed ships. They watched as the goods were loaded onto the enormous steam-powered barges waiting in the waters of the New Cut of the great river Hamadryad. And then, Leeth had to wait – suddenly aware of the heavy military and police presence at the Junction – as the boy met with a shifty-looking labourer who handed him a small package. It held gold coinage, the boy said, payment Chi was to pass on to one of the ghetto barons for some earlier service rendered.

Leeth learnt quickly that the boy was involved in an endless string of scams and rackets – they never went anywhere without a knowing nod, an exchange of goods or money or information. Sometimes Chi’s contacts would visit him in his home and more transactions would take place, and maybe some healing too – a Talent Chi had been careful to maintain, as a ready source of income and reputation. It was difficult to recall that the boy was still only three years old.

After a time, Leeth realised that his presence was not required on these jaunts of Chi’s. The boy delighted in showing him his world, but he would quite happily do his work alone.

With Cotoche frequently out at work during the day, Leeth took to going off on his own, sometimes on foot, sometimes calling in Sky from wherever she had roamed. At other times he would stay at the shack, or in the streets nearby, using his crude ability to Charm toys into brief life for their young owners: jumping rag dolls, crazily bouncing wooden balls, muttering masks. Such low level Charming was the commonest form of Talent in those descended from the True Families – a skill Leeth had allowed to deteriorate since childhood.

One afternoon, he had Charmed a wooden doll for a little girl who was now charging her friends to play with it. He was sitting back in the shade, sweating heavily in the humidity trapped beneath a thick blanket of yellow-grey cloud. He was considering whether to exert himself a little more in order to break the little madam’s monopoly, but instead he found himself watching them at play, amused by the girl’s bossy antics. He wondered just how much Chi’s behaviour was rubbing off on the children of the neighbourhood – he was clearly held in high esteem, even by children four times his age.

“You should stop her,” said Cotoche, coming to join him. “Before they lynch her.” Just then, the street cleared of its continual flow of pedestrians and hand-carts, and a grossly over-muscled moke plodded its way sedately through the parting crowds. On the beast’s back a leather saddle had been mounted, with a padded back rest that extended upwards to support a canvas canopy gaudily printed with birds and a flaming sun emblem. Flanking the beast was a squad of bodyguards. Peering through their human screen, Leeth could see a thin man, about sixty years old, with skin so grey it merged with the colouring of his hair.

Leeth had seen this man before: one of the ghetto lords Chi had gleefully pointed out on their explorations. On one occasion, Leeth had even delivered goods from the Junction to this man’s palatial residence in the Warren. The man’s name was Tezech Ferrea, although how one so wan could be named after the Sun God, Leeth failed to comprehend.

Cotoche put a hand to Leeth’s face and turned his head away. “Don’t stare,” she hissed.

Leeth had been unaware that he was staring. Cotoche’s hand on his cheek was cool, tender. She removed it, so that now all that lingered was the imprint, the memory of touch.

“Madam Cotoche,” a soft voice called. Tezech was leaning down from his throne on the moke’s back. “Your boy – I have a job for him. Medicinal work. You’ll inform him?”

“Of course.”

The man smiled, straightened, continued on his way.

“The child runs with strange company,” said Leeth lightly.

“He’s no child,” said Cotoche, sadly. “He was never a child.”

They stood, the little girl’s game forgotten, and walked back up the track to their home. The light was starting to go and the boy would probably be back soon, although his comings and goings could never be predicted.

“On the Serpent’s Back,” said Leeth, as they walked. “Someone said – Jaryd, I think – they said it leaked out that Chi was still alive. What happened? How did Lachlan Pas come to know that his father was still alive, after all those years?”

Cotoche thought long before speaking, in that particular way of hers that gave her words, when she spoke, an earnestness Leeth had never noticed in anyone else.

“It was me,” said Cotoche. “I fell into trouble and Chi became involved, and so his story leaked out.”

“What happened?”

Again, she thought for a long time, and then she told him her story.

~

Cotoche’s parents were Habnathi, a race said to be descended from the peoples who ruled until the end of the last great Era, before the True Families. Most now lived in the southern part of the Rift valley, below the wide belt of the Zochi jungle which had, until the excavation of the New Cut, interrupted the flow of the two rivers, dividing north from south. Now, the Habnathi were just one part of the myriad races and cultures that made up the Lost People, denied citizenship both because of their confused lines of descent and their refusal to accept any god other than their sole creator, Habna. For the True Families, and particularly the new evangelicals of the Embodiment, Habna was only one god amongst many: creator and also destroyer, He cast Samna the sustainer from a sliver of his own heart. Between them, Habna and Samna gave rise to the serpent-god Qez, to the sun and earth-fire god Tezchamna, to Ixi, the Keeper of the Moon, to the wind and love god Ehna and all the other deities of the cyclical texts.

In the twenty or thirty years that saw the rise of the True Church of the Embodiment, the Habnathi people – always regarded as outsiders – came to be seen as blasphemers and corrupters. Their numbers swelled in Edge City and the other settlements of the Shelf and, as more came from the north, so they started to migrate to the island communities scattered across the Burn Plain and, in particular, to the growing settlements of the Serpent’s Back. Trade with the Serpent’s Back grew rapidly in that time, its rich mineral and metal deposits and its new, fertile soils increasingly valuable to the gaping maw of the northern city-states. New labour was required, regardless of the religious or racial characteristics of those who came to meet that demand. Cotoche’s parents were part of that influx; the voyage across the Burn Plain triggered her mother’s labour and Cotoche was born, literally, in the gutter of the dying town of Catachris.

Now, Catachris was a ghost town, in the process of being dismantled before its part of the Serpent’s Back was plunged into the molten sea. When Cotoche had grown up there Catachris had still been a thriving port. Her mother and brother and sisters – and, from the age of about four, Cotoche, too – went out to work in the labour gangs harvesting maize, black beans, manioc and potatoes from fields where the encroaching jungle had been kept clear; at other times, they planted the crops and tended them, or looked after the turkeys and goats that foraged the jungle floor. Her father had a native empathic Talent and he managed the mokes and coursers for Tomas Melved, a young overseer who had just come down from Tule.

—Leeth recognised the name: Melved had constructed a powerful business empire as one of the central figures in the Serpent’s Back’s export of supplies to the north. At the time Leeth had first headed south, three years ago, Melved had just become the first ever full Governor of the Dependent Territories, a sure sign of the region’s growing status—

Cotoche’s parents and her only brother died when she was fourteen. It was the time of the food riots in Catachris.

Water on the Serpent’s Back came from two main sources: the endless cycling of moisture in the steam clouds, which formed wherever water ran off into the Burn Plain; and those heavy clouds driven down the Rift all the way from the northern seas. It was the latter, fresh input, that was most valuable for the agriculture of the Serpent’s Back, and when these sporadic rains failed completely for the worst part of a year and an increasing proportion of the dwindling harvests continued to be exported to make up the shortfall, something had to break.

Cotoche’s family would have nothing to do with the sudden lawlessness, but that did not spare them. One day, at the peak of the unrest, Cotoche had gone with her two older sisters to a little Habnathi chapel in the Remedies district. They had offerings of beans and calabash to put before a candle lit to the One Habna – food they could not truly spare but, as their mother had told them, in order to reap one must first sow.

They rounded the corner, expecting to find the usual queue: the faith had grown in the recent adversity. Instead, they saw flames, thick black smoke, a squad of thuggish young militia-men lined up with beaters to ensure the fire did not spread to neighbouring buildings.

Cotoche understood immediately what had happened: for days her father had said they must prepare themselves for the backlash. The poor had rioted out of desperation, but it was also a fact that the rebellious labourers of the Dependent Territories were mainly Habnathi in origin. It was inevitable that a fitful and largely unsuccessful uprising triggered by hunger and exploitation should be simplified to a matter of race and religion. No longer the food riots, they became officially known as the Habnathi Uprising.

Cotoche stood on the street corner with her sisters. None of them knew what to do. Gradually, the scene etched itself into Cotoche’s memory. The rows of squat, single-storey buildings with their whitewashed adobe block walls and their lightweight timber roofs. A dry well in the centre of the junction, a family of street sparrows nesting noisily in its thatch roof. Those militia-men in their green uniforms, with long-handled clubs inset with obsidian blades tied at their belts, their impractical little conical tin hats, their beaters at hand in case the fire spread to non-Habnathi property.

Onlookers gathered at the junction, or farther down the street, many of them fearful Habnathi worshippers, many others with the paler skin of the Rift families and the smug that’ll-teach-them expressions of the righteous.

It was some time before – through the gathered smoke – first Cotoche and then the others saw the line of severed heads driven onto a row of stakes close by the burning chapel. As soon as they were spotted, however, she also noticed one head in particular: that of her eighteen year-old brother, Hinbo.