Riding the Serpent's Back (7 page)

Hochi and Allasharne turned away immediately, but Cotoche was transfixed. Tears streaking the smut on their faces, the older girls each took one of Cotoche’s arms and pulled her away. Her heels dragging through the dirt, eventually Cotoche snapped into trance-like action and began to walk. When they were nearly back at their quarters behind Melved’s stables, Cotoche suddenly broke away and ran back through the streets. Her sisters called to her but made no effort to follow – they knew she could outrun them easily.

Back at the junction, Cotoche stopped to catch her breath. The chapel was completely burnt down by then and so the soldiers had gone. They would have other houses and chapels to burn, other Habnathis to kill, before the day was done.

Slowly, Cotoche approached the burnt-out ruins, the row of accusing heads. She stopped before Hinbo and stared into his face. She had to look a little up at him, just as she had in life.

She reached out and touched him.

His flesh was warm, although she did not know if that was his own body heat or simply the result of his position so close to the burnt chapel. She closed his staring eyes and opened his mouth. From the slip of muslin she had folded around her offerings she withdrew a single black bean and placed it on his tongue to sustain him on his journey to the next world. Stooping, she dipped her fingers in the ash and then reached up to her brother’s face and smeared parallel black lines across his cheeks and brow – she had no death mask to give him and so this would have to suffice as his eternal face. Then she turned away and placed what remained of her offering at the centre of the burnt shell of the chapel, where others, already, had left their gifts.

When she arrived home, she heard her sisters wailing and shrieking and she thought it was for their lost brother. It was some time before she learnt that it was for her parents, too, that they mourned, the family’s crime simply to be Habnathi.

~

It was dark now, and Chi was still away. While Cotoche had been speaking, Leeth had prepared the fire and then warmed some of the local maize gruel they called ‘atole’ in an earthenware pot. “I heard about the uprising,” he said, as he handed Cotoche a dish and piece of hard bread. It had taken place two years before his break for freedom. “They said it was all political.”

“As political as empty bellies,” said Cotoche bitterly.

Somewhere in the distance, a sudden burst of wailing pierced the night, a chilling counterpoint to Cotoche’s reference to her wailing sisters. The sound rose then died away quickly and Leeth decided it was not to mark a death, but rather the symbolic mourning of the faithful after a birth: a new child was always grieved because of the inevitability that, however far in the future, another death would be added to the world’s burden.

“How did you meet Chi?”

Cotoche smiled. “First of all at market in Catachris. The next time I saw him was at Tomas Melved’s official residence.”

~

Cotoche and her sisters fled the town of Catachris as soon as it was dark. They packed what food they could find and, each wearing a red scarf of mourning, they set out into the night.

The streets were busy and it was soon clear that most of the Habnathi population of the town had made the same decision. Refugee camps grew up in the climactic forest, the strong supporting the weak in the traditional way of their people. Racial memory was dredged for the survival techniques the Habnathi had relied upon in earlier pogroms. Barely drinkable water came from traps set up to catch moisture condensing out of the brown steam clouds at night. Parties of children were sent out to scavenge grubs and seeds from the forest, while adults hunted squirrels and dogs and the occasional half-starved deer. Some of the elders even began to talk of the possibility of creating their own self-sustaining community along traditional lines.

After five weeks of this existence, the rains returned. Immediately, the camps broke up as labourers went back to the fields where long-dormant crops, now blessed with moisture, had started to sprout once again. It was almost as if the riots had never taken place.

Cotoche returned to Catachris on her own, her sisters choosing instead to join the work gangs in the fields. Apart from a few burnt scars and a scattering of ruined buildings, the town seemed unchanged by the recent troubles. Hochi and Allasharne had said they could never bear to enter those streets again but Cotoche knew the memories would be with her wherever she chose to live: a street was just a street, after all, it had no hold over her.

She had not counted on Tomas Melved, though. She had not even been aware that he had noticed her, when she had lived in the lean-to behind his stables.

She found work in a silk parlour. She picked the skill up easily and soon grew accustomed to long days degumming the cocoons in filthy water, drawing out the single filament from each one and then rolling the strands together between palm and bare thigh. Soon, she became a favourite of Aslet Roch, the sunken-chested man who managed the parlour, and went on to learn weaving and even to help with the printing.

It came as a great shock to her that Roch’s interest was in anything but her dexterity and growing skill. He was married and particularly ugly and so when he started to take her with him to his little stall at the market, and when he held her close to him to help her through the crowd, she took is as the act of a kindly uncle, no more.

Soon, he had her standing on the rickety stall, swathes of fine silk wrapped around her slim body to advertise his wares. “Twist,” he would mutter to her breathlessly. “Twirl. Shake that ass!” She quite enjoyed her new role: from her vantage point she could look out over the ever-changing patterns of the crowd that filled the low-ceilinged market hall; she could see all the different stalls, with their meats and greens and spices, their silks and linens and yarns, their pots and knives, all their exotic finery.

Eventually, she had to realise that Roch held her and patted her and caressed her a little more often than was strictly necessary, that his excessive fussing about the precise hang of the silk always seemed to require frequent adjustments around her breasts, her legs, her backside.

One evening, with the marketeers packing up all around, Roch helped her down from the stall. He caught her, breathed hot chilli breath into her face, reluctantly let her go. Then he grabbed a corner of her silk drape and tugged it sharply so that she spun, stumbled, caught herself against the stall.

Inadvertently, she had turned away from him, and abruptly he took her from behind and held her tight. “I’m so sorry,” he said, although she did not know if he was sorry for making her stumble of for what he was now attempting to do – which was find the ties of her light cotton one-piece. “I’m so sorry.”

His face was buried in her hair, an arm held tight across her belly. He found the opening and his free hand squirmed into her clothes and engulfed a small breast, pinching the nipple painfully. She cried out but that only seemed to spur him on. She heard voices raised from nearby: joking, ribald, full of end-of-day good humour.

She stamped hard on Roch’s instep and felt something give way beneath her heel.

He cried out, released her, staggered back.

Now it was Cotoche’s turn to apologise, fearful of losing her job. But he was unable to fire her immediately, because he needed someone to push his hand cart back to the parlour – with his damaged foot it was all he could do to walk there with the aid of a stick. By the time they had returned Roch seemed so full of remorse, so desperate that she should say nothing about what had happened, that she ended up keeping her job. He never touched her unnecessarily again, but when the time came she was sure this incident was the reason he sold her so readily to Melved’s men.

It was a year after the food riots when Cotoche first saw Chi. First, it was Jaryd and Bean that she noticed, both of them admiring either her modelling or her silks – she had given up trying to make the distinction any more. It was their hair she noticed: the tails of dead rats interwoven and Charmed so that they twitched at will.

Chi joined his two friends, a hand on a shoulder of each, both of them tipping their heads towards him so they could hear whatever it was he was saying. His beard had been shorter then, recently trimmed, and the feathers in his blue-grey hair that day were white and yellow. Cotoche had never been remotely snobbish but as she studied this new man who, in turn, was studying her, she saw something in his poise and his angular handsomeness that she could only describe as noble.

She smiled at him, although it was only the weary smile she had already used a thousand times that day. She gave her hips a little wiggle and tipped her pelvis towards him.

His expression clouded and he gave a little shake of his head and she knew the tired old come-on had insulted him. She looked away, still not unduly concerned.

When she looked again, minutes later, the striking stranger had moved on.

A little later that same afternoon, she saw a face that she did recognise this time. It belonged to Luc Esquellion, the captain of Tomas Melved’s personal militia. Esquellion had always put up a show of comradeship with her father, and a playful flirting with her mother. But Cotoche knew that Melved’s militia had been heavily involved in putting down the food riots: if Esquellion was not personally responsible for the death of her parents or her brother then he was certainly responsible for the murder of countless others just like them.

Esquellion approached the stall and Roch hobbled to his feet, sensing the possibility of becoming supplier to one of the few True Family households this side of the continental shelf.

Roch’s hopes of supplying Melved with silks were to be dashed, but his nose for a sale had not failed him. After a brief, muttered exchange, Captain Esquellion dipped his head to the trader and looked up at Cotoche. “You’re Rey’s girl, aren’t you?” he said, his tone as friendly as that he had always used with her father.

She nodded, not ready to trust her voice.

“Cotoche, isn’t it?”

She nodded again, and tried to ignore him.

“How would you like to work in Consul Melved’s household? I’ll take you straight there.”

She shook her head, and then, just to emphasise her gesture, said, “No. I work for Roch.”

But Roch shook his head now. “The officer said he will take you to the Consul’s residence,” he said. “So that is where you will go.”

She looked at him, appalled. She couldn’t think what to say.

Roch was adamant. “The price the officer mentioned is fair and I have accepted it as compensation for the loss of my most treasured worker.” He bowed his head and smiled, as if he had merely complimented her on her weaving, or the way the silk hung from the curve of her backside.

Then, before she could say or do anything, Esquellion reached for her and pulled her down from where she was still standing atop the stall.

She started to kick and curse, calling Esquellion and Roch all the foulest names she had ever heard anyone use in the fields or the refugee camp or the street. Esquellion merely laughed and patted her rump as he swung her over his shoulder and set off through the crowd.

Just before they left the market hall, Cotoche sensed a fresh commotion and when she was able to look up briefly she saw Chi and an old man she later came to know as Karlas scuffling with three of Esquellion’s men. Then she was out in the street, being roughly handed over to a militia man sitting astride one of the mokes her dead father had once trained.

~

Cotoche broke off her story when Chi arrived home, his nose bloody, tears flooding down his face. She cleaned him up, and held him until the crying had stopped.

“It was one of the raggies,” he sobbed, eventually. ‘The raggies’ was what he called the gangs of dishevelled street children who roamed the slums. Nearly all of them were older than Chi, and many resented the three year-old’s high profile, the way he mixed so easily with the real brokers of street power instead of working his way up through the kids’ gangs first. They had picked fights with him before now.

Leeth took him into the hut and readied him for bed. The last thing Chi said, before giving in to sleep, was, “Nobody knows what it’s like, Leeth. To be like this. I
hate
this body I’m in. So clumsy. So difficult to control. So
weak
. None of them really believes who I am yet. None of them believes who I’m going to be. None—” And then he was asleep, like a candle being snuffed.

Outside, Leeth sat with Cotoche again. “Why did Melved want you?” he asked.

Cotoche looked at him pointedly. “Why do you think?” she said. “As I say: he noticed me before, when I was barely out of childhood. Maybe he even liked me more as a little girl, who knows? Esquellion recognised me at the market and he remembered the Consul’s comments about me. He saw an opportunity to win favour so he bought me from Roch and had me taken back to the house, where he planned to present me to his master as a gift.”

~

At Melved’s house, Cotoche was given into the care of the domestic staff, although ‘care’ was hardly the right word. The women distrusted and despised her: the older ones were mostly bitter and distrustful and assumed she was a prostitute; the younger ones were either jealous or had been through the same experience themselves. Even those who recalled Cotoche from her father’s days in Melved’s employ resented her for the part they themselves had to play in her presentation to the Consul. The men, similarly, assumed she was no more than a street prostitute, being cleaned up for the master.

Even old Josa, who had sometimes helped her father in the stables, denied that he knew her. In one of the back rooms he cut her clothes away from her body with deft sweeps of a razor, then prodded her towards the door and marched her through the cold, hidden passageways of the house to a room that was filled with sulphurous steam.

“Sorry,” he said, and gave her a gentle push. She fell headlong into a pool of scalding mud.

She screamed, then gagged as her mouth filled with the vile ooze. She rose to her knees and spat and retched, but the lining of her throat had already been damaged so much that it would be six days before her voice fully recovered.