Riding the Serpent's Back (63 page)

He heard a sudden screech and looked up to see a blue and gold macaw hurling itself through a thatch of vines. In an instant the gaudy bird was lost to sight.

When he lowered his gaze he was confronted by a man, his skin painted in jagged stripes so that when he stopped moving he merged imperceptibly with the backdrop.

He was standing with a short spear loaded in an atlat-sling, poised ready to hurl it at Leeth.

Another movement caught Leeth’s eye and he realised there were at least four more men standing at the ready to either side of the first.

“I don’t suppose you speak the True Tongue,” he said, trying to smile, trying to sound unperturbed.

The man stared at him, saying nothing.

~

They led him through the city, occasionally speaking to each other in monosyllabic grunts. He counted ten of them, closed in around him like a human fence.

The paths were clearer, here, the overgrowth checked. The vegetation had not been cut back, Leeth noted, it was as if it had never been allowed to grow so chokingly thick in the first place.

It felt strange to be walking in bright sunshine. The heat, itself, seemed somehow drier, sharper.

Whenever Leeth slowed or hesitated, one of the men prodded him in the back with the blunt end of a spear. He tried to keep his thoughts calm, always watchful for an opportunity to escape.

The rest of the jungle citizens were waiting in an open space encircled by a low, overgrown, stone balustrade that was collapsed at irregular intervals. Women, men, white-haired oldsters and children, all kilted, their bodies painted in stripes and spots, blood-stained fangs drawn onto their mouths. Some of them were dancing, hopping along on one foot, then changing to the other in a strange, stop-starting rhythm.

Everyone watched Leeth as he was led past.

He crossed a wooden bridge over a wide drainage ditch, and finally the man in front of him stopped. Leeth looked up at a high pyramid which appeared to have been made entirely of earth – excavated from the ditch they had just crossed, he realised. He could see five faces to the construction, each delineated and emphasised by a prominent ribbed edge. It must have a ten-sided base, Leeth thought – one for each of Tezchamna’s children?

Steps had been cut into the nearest face. They began to climb.

Glancing back, Leeth saw that the crowd had closed in around the pyramid’s base, and some were starting to follow them cautiously upwards.

At a height of about forty standard paces they were level with the top of the jungle canopy. Now, Leeth could see into the richest layer of the jungle, where before he had only been able to hear the noises of its inhabitants.

The pyramid was flat at the summit, topped by a wood-roofed temple. Leeth counted ten columns supporting the roof, each carved into human form: six male and four female, the right numbers for Tezchamna’s children. Each carved figure carried an atlat in one hand and a clutch of spears in the other.

In the centre of the temple’s floor was a ten-sided sheet of haematite, about two paces across, its polished surface pink and cloudy. Overlooking it was a stone chair carved into the shape of a jaguar: its front legs raised as arm-rests, its chest forming the back-rest, its snarling head tipped up to the heavens.

Leeth looked around.

Suddenly, he was seized by the arms. A woman appeared from behind the chair, a jaguar skin draped across her shoulders, its paws hanging down to enclose her striped breasts.

She was carrying a golden cup.

Someone grabbed his hair and held his head firm as the cup was raised to his lips. He kept his mouth clamped shut but it was no good, a little of the sweet liquid seeped into his mouth and he had to swallow. Then his resistance weakened and he gulped down the sticky brew.

Now the woman produced a knife and held it up, smiling. She said something, but Leeth didn’t understand.

She lunged with the knife and he flinched, convinced that this was the end, but her move was precise. He looked down to see a slash down the front of his clothes, cut open to his skin, not a scratch on his body.

She pulled his split clothes free and stood back to study him. Stupidly, he felt himself becoming aroused under the intensity of her gaze.

He heard a low mutter amongst the men, a chuckle or two. The woman smiled, watching him grow.

Then blackness seeped into the periphery of his vision, spreading, engulfing. He felt the world begin to move, then nothing at all as he lost his grip on consciousness.

~

He came round, aware of a sharp pressure on his wrists and ankles and cold stone against his back.

He opened his eyes. They had tied him to the jaguar seat, painted his body a soft brown, shading to white on the belly, in mimicry of a real wild cat. They had clothed him in sandals and a kilt, and on his chest lay the pendant he had made from the Tezchamna disc.

Instantly, he started to concentrate on his hands and feet. Make them smaller, shift them so that they could slide free of their bindings.

The jungle people were closing in on him now, seeing that he was awake.

He looked beyond them and gasped. Down, across the city, he could see that the jungle had retreated dramatically, the toppled columns had risen and the broken buildings were as new.

He looked at the men, closing in on him...the woman, her striped breasts enclosed in the jaguar’s giant paws.

They were smiling, he thought, although with the fangs painted around their mouths it was hard to distinguish smile from snarl.

He could sense their minds, he realised. Like the monkeys at Hazlet, or Sky. Each a distinct mass of thoughts and emotions, somehow different to any human mind he had sensed before, confirming their primitivity to him, the sense that they should rightly exist in another time altogether.

He knew he had been drugged, but he didn’t know whether he was merely imagining things, or if it had actually
allowed
him to see things: were these changes an illusion, or a peeling back of the illusion of decay these people had used to conceal themselves?

They were talking, and suddenly he realised he understood at least part of what they said.

“He must be moved,” said the woman, who he guessed must be some kind of priest. “Jatta. Rae. Bring Azqama’s Man over so that he can see into the smoking mirror.”
Azqama
must be what these people called Tezchamna – in an ancient legend that largely went untaught these days, the sun god was said to have a smoking mirror through which he could watch over his kingdom.

Leeth sensed as much as saw a man approach from either side and release his bindings. He relaxed his concentration on hands and feet immediately, relieved to give up the effort of shifting their form; sometimes it seemed so difficult, whilst at others the changes came with frightening ease.

He stood.

With a rough push in his back, Leeth was sent over to join the woman, staring into the haematite mirror that was laid in the centre of the floor. He turned and cursed the two men: “Brainless shits of a frog!”

They understood him. They looked angry and one stepped forward until his gaze slid towards the priest and he retreated again.

She put a hand on Leeth’s bare arm, her touch so soft and delicate. He leaned towards her, grateful for her support. He still felt muzzy and disorientated.

He peered into the sheet of haematite and gradually its pink surface started to clear and shapes took form. He remembered the pool of lava in which Donn kept a watchful eye on the world.

He saw a man stumbling through the jungle. Himself. Looking tired and scared. Abruptly the man stopped and squinted at one hand, then slapped at it with the other. His hands were covered with dried blood. He looked around, then plunged his arms up to the elbow in a filthy pool. When they came out they were smothered with fat leeches.

He couldn’t bear to look at the expression of revulsion and defeat on his own face, the tears of frustration. He remembered walking for hours before, one by one, the leeches had released their hold and plopped off into the jungle.

Around him, the men and women laughed at the sight of him.

When he looked back, the view had shifted. He was walking through the jungle again. His face was bloated and pink, pocked all over with insect-bites. He stopped, swayed forward as he stared at something. Then he produced a knife and chipped away at some moss on the first stele he had found. When he had cleared a small patch, he paused for some time to stare, although from the look on his face he might easily have been asleep with his eyes half-open.

He jerked and set to work with his knife again until he had cleared some more of the frieze.

He moved on to another great block of stone and scraped away at the moss. When he found the Tezchamna disc, now suspended around his neck, he stopped and stared at it for a long time. Then he slid the knife in behind it, twisted the blade, worked it farther around and twisted.

Eventually, the disc came free. Now, he felt the priest’s hand tightening on his arm.

“Free,” she said. “After so long.”

He didn’t know what she meant.

“Locked in the rock until Azqama sends his messenger to release us,” she continued.

Now, Leeth noticed something he had missed before. He leaned over the mirror to see more clearly.

He had been so intent on his souvenir that he had not noticed the change in the two uncovered frieze: where before they had shown hordes of jaguar-men dancing on the bones of their enemies, now they showed only the bones, the rest was blank.

He remembered an old legend now, about a primitive race that lived in caves in the Veneth Heights. Qez had sent a man amongst them to see that they still worshipped him in the prescribed manner, but the tribe had thought they could cope without their god by then and they had returned a bag of bones – all that remained of the serpent god’s messenger. He had cursed them to be bound into the rock itself until they had realised the error of their ways.

Leeth remembered Donn’s insistence that such legends were the distorted and exaggerated retellings of ancient stories and histories. A mountain tribe or a jungle tribe? Sun god or serpent god?

He looked into the mirror and sensed the shape of the priest’s thoughts as she stood patiently at his side. These people’s minds seemed so strange to him because they really were from a more ancient time. And inadvertently he had set them free.

He shuddered. His thoughts were verging on the insane. He had been drugged, he reminded himself. He wasn’t seeing things clearly, wasn’t thinking clearly.

He made himself stand up straight. He dragged his eyes away from the mirror.

When he turned to look at the priest, he saw that her features were sliding, twisting, the painted fangs taking on solid form, the snout bulging, whiskers sprouting. She blinked cat’s eyes at him and curled her lips up to expose her fangs.

He stepped back, looked around. All the men had become cat-people too, just like the figures he had seen in the friezes.

“What’s happening?” he gasped.

A thin pink tongue flicked between the priest’s jagged teeth. “Azqama’s Man has set us free,” she said, her words made more difficult to understand, distorted by the new shape of her mouth. “So now we must set
him
free.”

Leeth backed away until he collided with one of the men. He twisted and the man snarled. “Azqama’s messenger must be returned to Azqama.”

Returned to Azqama.

That could mean only one thing, Leeth realised. He saw that the man was holding the knife they must have taken from him earlier.

He looked at the priest and she held her hands raised in front of her: the fingers had become stubby, covered in fur, and long claws sprung out, more fearsome than any knife.

Leeth turned and instantly two of the guards closed in on either side of the cat throne to cut off his escape.

He took a long stride and then leapt up onto the throne. With his hands on the carved jaguar’s head he vaulted the back of the chair and landed on the run.

He heard a roaring, snarling sound erupt behind him and he threw himself through a gap between two pillars. Suddenly, he was tumbling down the steep, smooth rear of the pyramid.

When he was able to look back, he saw the cat-men scrambling down in pursuit.

He struck the ground with a heavy blow but made himself stagger to his feet.

He was in a wide avenue, lined with stone blocks, each with an empty panel that he was certain must once have held a frieze.

He ran as fast as he could, aware that they must catch him at any moment.

He stopped himself abruptly at the end of the avenue.

The wide ditch cut off his escape.

He glanced back and was surprised at how good a lead he had. He ran along the ditch and soon the trees had closed in again.

His heart was racing madly. He knew he couldn’t keep this up for long.

He spotted a low mud bank that cut across the ditch and he ran along it and was suddenly back in the jungle proper.

Away from the drainage channels of the Lost City, the ground became spongy again, saturated by the jungle’s high water-table. He slowed his pace when he realised what the cat-men must be doing: settling in for the long chase, letting him exhaust himself in the sprint so that they could catch him later. He tried to pace himself, but the memory of those fangs and claws drove him on.

He lowered his head, and started to feel the muscles and bones of his body shifting, realigning themselves. He focused only on running, on the most perfect use of his energy, and soon his body had become a running machine.

He soon lost track of how long he had been fleeing, but he never missed the sounds of pursuit. No matter how hard he ran, the cat-people matched his pace. He wondered what they were doing until suddenly he came upon a wide area where the trees grew up out of standing water.

Of course! The hunters knew their territory. It was inevitable that he would come to a dead-end, that he would be cut off by water or by sinking mud.

Behind him, for the first time, the sounds of pursuit drew nearer.