Riding the Serpent's Back (2 page)

Chi’s crime – his deviancy – was to delve too deeply into the arcane arts which were governed by strict edicts drawn from the great cyclical texts. To kill his son was bad enough, but it was still a normal crime; to do whatever had been required to steal him away from the great underworld of Michtlanteqez by bringing him back to life was a moral and religious crime of the highest order. Leeth had always hoped that he had an open mind, but even to him such interference in nature was shocking, even horrific.

Leeth had to fight the instinctive suspicion that he must be seated next to a demon.

~

He spent that night in the open, curled up against the bulky body of Sky, his courser. The beast had been bonded to him since Leeth’s sixteenth birthday and now he found the familiar feel of her rough wing membranes and her little sleeping movements very reassuring. Buckled into his harness on Sky’s back, the two of them could cover a distance of 500 leaps in a day. Now, as they lay semi-conscious together in the night, Leeth was aware of the dim surge of activity in the beast’s mind and he wondered again how Sky sensed her own end of the empathic bond. Did she have any kind of understanding, he wondered? Did she simply respond out of dumb instinct to the promptings that reached her brain, regardless of their origin? Was she even aware that they were not her own thoughts?

Eventually, Leeth managed to settle. He would never admit it, but one reason he chose to sleep in the open with his courser was that the beast’s intermittent snores and grunts and eructations served to disguise the subterranean grumblings and cracking sounds which always seemed so much louder at night. The animal noises, so close to his ear, protected Leeth from the paranoid fear that he might somehow sleep so long the Serpent would deposit him in the infernal depths of the Burn Plain. Before coming to this wild place he had been prepared for the frequent seismic tremors as the thin continental crust rode its molten substrate, but the unanticipated
loudness
of the place had disturbed him deeply. It was the noisiest place he had ever lived.

The Serpent’s Back – before his break for freedom he had called it by its official name of the Dependent Territories, but now it would always be the Serpent’s Back – was a great tongue of land, spread across the sea of molten lava known as the Burn Plain. Said to be some 8000 leaps from east to west, this enormous island was divided across its midriff by the Michtlan Ridge, a great fault in the earth’s surface, running north to south for a thousand leaps. The Ridge spewed out fresh lava and debris from its central gash, replacing and displacing the ground to either side in a continuous process. The newly formed continent rolled east and west at a rate thought to be about a hundred paces a day, or a standard leap every ten days – a perpetually moving landmass. The western half of this rolling island continent was a violently unstable wasteland; the east, by some geophysical quirk, was stable enough for human settlement. Four thousand leaps to the east and west of the Michtlan Ridge the continent broke up into islands, drifts, rock floes, which were eventually swallowed up by the Burn Plain.

For Leeth that was the great romantic attraction of this continually regenerating landmass: its sheer lack of permanence. In little more than a hundred years everything was gone, replaced by the new.

On the Serpent’s Back you have to keep walking just to stay where you are, and as you do so the whole continent passes you by.

~

The next day, Chi was stalking about the encampment earlier than usual, exuding the arrogance Leeth now saw as a carefully cultivated part of his veneer. “Come on, come on,” he kept saying, harrying his lethargic followers. “Let’s get ourselves moving.”

“Why the hurry?” Leeth asked. After the previous day’s slow progress he found the urgency unsettling, another example of Chi’s erratic mood swings.

“We’re going to make up some ground today,” said Chi. “The forest is more open here, we’ll be on the plains before long. I decided last night that we should take the opportunity to get back to where we were three months ago.”

The other travellers weren’t so keen, but nobody challenged Chi’s decision. Leeth was packing his things into Sky’s harness when he sensed from the beast’s thoughts that someone had joined them. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the pregnant one, Cotoche. He struggled to put out of his mind the noises she had made with Chi in the night, the two of them adding to the earth’s groans.

Apart from the abdominal bulge, Cotoche was a slight woman of about Leeth’s age. Her skin was dark, her eyes a jade green that would be highly prized in some of the more primitive settlements along the Hamadryad. From their very first encounter, Leeth had found her immensely attractive.

Without preamble, Cotoche said, “I used to ride on coursers when I was little. Before they killed my father. Is Sky strong enough to carry two adults?”

“Of course,” said Leeth, his heart surging. Travelling such short distances each day, he had taken to sending Sky off to soar alone while he walked with the others, struggling through the jungle growth with the horses and pack-mokes as he tried to get to know the people of Chi’s group.

Today they would fly. He set about reconfiguring the harness.

A short time later they were ready to go. Chi had set off earlier, riding his black horse with old Karlas Herckle mounted behind him. Already, they were lost to sight in the thinning jungle.

“Will you be all right?” asked Leeth. “With the...baby, I mean?”

Cotoche nodded, and then waited as Leeth helped her onto the crouching courser’s back and strapped her in. When she was secure, he straddled the beast’s shoulders behind her and tightened his own belts. With his arms around Cotoche he could feel the squirming movements of the seven-month foetus in her belly.

He gave Cotoche a reassuring squeeze and then thought the command-shape into Sky’s mind.
Fly
.

Sky grunted, straightened, heaved her wings into a V until they caught the irregular breeze that swirled in the small clearing. Then, with a single downward sweep, the courser lifted into the air. For a few seconds they were jerked roughly from side to side, up and down, as Sky struggled to lift through the gaps in the overhanging trees. And then there was a sudden change in the air – a new crispness replacing the dank humidity of the forest – and they were twenty, thirty paces up, lifting clear of the trees. Cutting across the breeze at an angle, Sky relaxed into a steadier rhythm of lazy wing-beats, interspersed with short, stiff-winged glides. In a short time they were beating their way over Chi and Karlas and then they were out in front of the group of travellers.

Cotoche whooped and yelled down at Chi and the others, and Leeth settled back a little, aware that he had been holding her more firmly than necessary.

Sky was coping easily with the extra weight and Leeth felt proud of the beast. He thought more commands into Sky’s head, taking them up higher so that the travellers appeared as tiny as termites, the trees like diminutive clumps of moss.

“How did you learn that you had the Talent?” asked Cotoche, leaning back into his embrace. “There aren’t many people who can fly like this.”

“I was twelve,” said Leeth, distractedly. He reached up to move a strand of her dark hair out of his mouth and smoothed it back against her head, only for the wind to lift it free again. “Playing alone on the Senechal Terrace in Laisan – the Terrace overlooks a bay full of lobster-rearing cages and fish farms. It was one of my favourite games: watching the gannets flying out over the bay, picking on one and trying to will it to stop and dive. I thought it was sheer chance, that I was playing a kind of gambling game with myself: will it or won’t it?

“One time, I picked out a bird and sure enough it broke its flight as if it was about to dive, but then it turned and flew in towards me. I watched, fascinated. It came closer and closer, directly towards me. So fast! I never knew they flew so fast. Then suddenly I could see the yellow staining on its neck, those squinting little black and blue eyes, that dagger-like beak. I realised it was coming straight at me and I threw myself to the ground. I felt the rush of air as it passed over me, and then a sharp stab of pain as its beak raked a fine scratch across my bare shoulders and then it was gone.”

Cotoche had twisted towards Leeth as he spoke, her eyes fixed on his. “Why did it do that?”

Leeth smiled. “It had no choice,” he said. “When I looked up there was an old man watching me with a peculiar smile on his face. His name was Muranitharan Annash and he had flown coursers for sixty years before his body became too frail. He had seen me before, playing my game, and realised that I had the Talent. That day when he saw me again he decided to train me to refine my empathies. The gannet was his little demonstration.” He paused, then went on. “My parents...my parents didn’t approve at first. They are True Family and bonding is usually a commoner’s Talent.”

“What happened?”

“Muranitharan was determined – to save a dying art, he said. He ingratiated himself with my father, convincing him that Annash was derived from the True name Hanesh. Then we put on a demonstration, in which Muranitharan cheated outrageously on my behalf. It’s the only argument I’ve ever won against my parents.”

Cotoche settled farther back against him and he became aware again of the gentle pressure of her body against his, the smell of her hair, the steady, rhythmic pumping motions of Sky’s flight – even the wind, tugging at their clothes, stirred him. Suddenly he was acutely aware of his own arousal.

Leeth gasped as Cotoche wriggled a little to get more comfortable. He didn’t know what to do.

She had to be aware of what was happening to him.

There was no way he could move to make space between them without endangering their lives, yet he didn’t know what would happen if he stayed like this for much longer.

He realised he was holding her tight again and he eased his grip. The movement, as he did so, sent a shudder through his body. If she had been unaware of his state before, then she must feel it now, he thought.

Slowly, she twisted towards him, forcing him harder against her as she moved. She was smiling, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. She put a hand on his arm.

“Thank you for letting me fly with you,” she said.

Now, he met her look, and there was no reproach in it, no embarrassment. Just a friendly smile, her cheeks flushed with a deep bronze glow from the rushing of the air. “It’s...my pleasure,” he said, awkwardly.

She turned away again, the movement of her body giving him another spasm of pained joy.

“It must be very special,” she said, “to be in touch with another mind.”

“Hmm.” He tried to focus. “It’s how it is,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s like not to be like this.”

“Yet I don’t know what it
is
like,” said Cotoche. “There’s such a gulf between us all, don’t you think?”

“Hmm.”

Cotoche leaned across Sky’s shoulder to look down. “We’re making good progress today, now the jungle is thinner.”

The gently rolling hills below them were dotted with scrubby trees. “Why do you have so much ground to make up?” he asked.

Cotoche’s reply shocked Leeth so much that Sky sensed his reaction and was momentarily confused, her rhythm faltering.

“Brown Ague,” she said. She paused, as Leeth soothed Sky and their flight levelled again. “Jaryd, Lucy, Digger and Sunshine fell ill. Me as well.”

Brown Ague was a deadly disease, occasionally reaching plague proportions in some of the poorer districts of the Rift. Its symptoms were a deep fever with intense pains in the joints; its main threat was that it lowered the body’s resistance and in the majority of cases the victim died of some otherwise harmless secondary infection.

Leeth peered at what he could see of Cotoche’s face from over her shoulder. “No one died?” he asked.

She hesitated, then shook her head. She lifted one of Leeth’s hands and put it flat on her swollen belly. “Only the little man,” she said. “But Chi woke him up again. He would never let any of us die.”

Leeth worked saliva into his mouth. Under his palm the baby wriggled. Naively, he had not considered the likelihood that Chi must still practise his dark healing arts out here in the wilds.

Just then, Cotoche squeezed his hand. “Look,” she said.

Below, a snake-like procession of travellers on horses and the reptilian mokes was climbing a steep fold in the continental crust. Ahead of them, the tattered remains of the jungle became even more patchy and scrubby, perhaps an indication that they were making progress towards the Michtlan Ridge and so down the gradient of ecological complexity and progression.

Cotoche was pointing ahead, beyond the lip of the hill the travellers were climbing. She had spotted a town, an ugly grey scar on the next roll of hill, coughing the black smoke of industry into the sky like some great, malignant fumarole.

Leeth didn’t know if this was good news or not, but he thought a command-shape at Sky and they side-slipped and swept in a wide circle back towards the rest of the group.

~

The travellers gathered just below the crest of the hill to decide what to do. Most favoured skirting around the town – supplies of food were high and they had stocked up with water only the previous day.

Chi, as was his way, changed everything. “You’re being very sensible,” he said, in a thickly sarcastic tone. He swung his drink canister so that an arc of spiced brandy sprayed out. “But why should we slope around in the shadows, afraid to show our faces? Why are we here, on the Serpent’s Back? Because it’s a free place. No regulations, no holy decrees yelled at you from the latest poster on the wall. If we have no freedom here then there’s nowhere left for us to go.” Even when he was drunk, Chi could win any argument with ease.

Leeth chose to walk with the others, sending Sky out to roam. He had no wish to draw undue attention to himself or to the travellers.

As their ragged procession approached the settlement, Jaryd said, through his thick tangle of beard, “Mining town. Maybe a hard time ahead, you hear me?” From the increased twitching of his tailed hair, it was clear that he was worried.