Riding the Serpent's Back (27 page)

Then, when it had been light for only a short time, Cotoche stirred and opened her eyes. “It hurts a bit,” she said, in answer to Leeth’s questions. “But nothing feels broken. I’m all right.” Chi left them as soon as Cotoche became conscious and Leeth was left to help her through the ruins.

They found Joel in Iron Street, supervising a team searching the collapsed rows of lean-tos. He looked at them, and Leeth saw the grief in his eyes. “I feel so damned useless,” the horseman said. “I can’t even get down to help. Even Echtal is more use than me.”

Leeth looked across to where Joel indicated. The amputee was scrambling through the debris, pausing occasionally to listen for the sounds of anyone buried beneath.

Leeth had summoned Sky and now she appeared out of the morning mist and settled beside them. As Cotoche climbed into her harness, he patted Harken on the side and said, “There’s plenty you can do, Joel. You’re a healer aren’t you? Then heal the injured.”

He climbed on behind Cotoche and told Sky to take off.

“It’s okay,” he murmured into Cotoche’s ear. “We’ll go up to the encampment at Bilterswood. You can rest there.”

“But I’m okay,” she said.

“Then you can help me organise shelter for the homeless,” said Leeth. “People are going to need somewhere to go tonight, and for the nights ahead.”

~

Everyone worked hard in the succeeding days. Families cleared the ruins of their homes and started to rebuild. Teams of police helped move the bodies of the dead, whilst others carved death masks and constructed huge funerary rafts which could be dragged to the top of the Falls for the departure of the dead. Chi and Joel spent all their waking hours with the few Raggy Talents the boy had been coaching, and together they did what they could to repair the broken bodies of the fallen.

Many families refused to leave the ruins, even at night, but despite this a great drift of refugees slept in the open and in rough shelters up in the hills where Joel had first made his encampment.

Leeth worked so hard in the relief effort that he barely saw Chi for days on end. He hadn’t seen Cotoche since the morning he had flown her out of Edge City, when he recognised her slight form, walking desolately through the encampment.

“Cotoche!” he called, hurrying after her.

She turned and Leeth’s heart lurched as he saw her sad face break suddenly into a broad smile. “Leeth,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

Leeth looked anxiously around. “Where’s Chi?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him in days, either.”

“It’s all right,” said Cotoche, taking his hand. “He’s busy in the city. Let’s walk.”

They took a track across the flank of a hill, where goats stopped their grazing to watch them pass. They came to a copse which had been stripped bare of its undergrowth and lower branches to feed the refugees’ fires.

Suddenly, Leeth felt the need to unburden himself. “I’ve been avoiding him,” he said, staring at the ground. “There are times when I can’t bear to be in his company any more.”

Cotoche nodded. “I know,” she said. “I do the same, on occasions. He’s not an easy person to be with. Is that why I haven’t seen you?”

They stopped and faced each other and Leeth took both of her hands in his own. “I wouldn’t avoid you,” he said.

He leant tentatively forward and kissed her on the mouth. When she kissed back, he broke away, flustered, unsure how to go on.

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve wanted to be with you ever since that first day on the Serpent’s Back.”

“I know you do,” said Cotoche. Tears were swelling in her eyes. “I love you too.”

“I’m going away,” said Leeth. “I can’t bear it here any longer. Will you come with me, Cotoche? I’ll show you things you’ve never seen before. I’ll show you a real sea that doesn’t have to boil and belch steam. I’ll show you cities you’ve only ever dreamt of. Come with me, Cotoche. Please.”

But she was shaking her head. “I can’t,” she said simply. “I love you, Leeth, but I can’t go with you.”

Leeth felt as if he was being torn apart. He wanted to shout at her, plead with her, he wanted to berate her dumb native faithfulness. “Be true to yourself,” he said, trying to reason. “You can’t ignore what your heart desires. You can’t pretend our love doesn’t matter. You have to be true to your inner nature.”

“But I am,” said Cotoche. “I can’t betray Chi. If I betray him then I betray myself and everything I have ever held to be valuable.”

“But you love me,” said Leeth. He pulled her roughly towards himself and kissed her hard. He held her tight, felt her hands running up and down his back. He pulled away and said, “You love me.” This time, they kissed more tenderly, and for longer. When they pulled apart, he said, “Come with me, Cotoche. I’ll call Sky and we can go immediately.”

But she turned away and he saw that she was crying. “I love you more than I ever felt possible,” she said. “It’s as if you’re flowing through my veins.” She turned to him and he saw the anguish in her eyes. “But I can’t come away with you. I can’t leave Chi.”

“Why not?” Leeth demanded harshly. “He doesn’t love you as I do. He
couldn’t
.”

“I can’t leave him, Leeth. I can’t leave my baby.”

The morning was just like any other – all necessary shows of farewell had been made the previous evening. Monahl and the ragged messenger, Angelo, slipped away almost unnoticed. She had decided to travel light: only a small pack of clothing over her shoulder, a knife and a flask at her belt. She had dressed herself in smock and leggings and the traditional silver jewellery of the Order. As a concession to travel, she wore a pair of heavy boots in place of her sandals. Angelo carried only what he was wearing. He had the air of someone who would always get by.

It was easy to arrange passage on a barge. Most left Zigané empty, the flow of trade being almost exclusively inward. No barges travelled directly to the Shelf from the floating city, but there were several returning that morning to the Serpent’s Back. Monahl secured a berth on a large hauler headed for the port of Qebahl, from where it should be easy enough to get to the Shelf.

The barge she selected was one of the largest in the docks that morning, a good fifty paces from prow to stern. It was constructed of calopa, a hardwood found only in the terminal jungle of the Serpent’s Back. Monahl stared at the barge’s heavy hull, the wood blackened by smut from the Burn Plain. She leaned over the side of the dock and peered down to where the barge rested on the thin, fluid lava of the harbour. The Charmed boundary between calopa and lava was indistinct, blurred; it hurt her eyes just to try to see it clearly.

She swallowed. Suddenly, she was nervous.

Captain Ulphat was a soft-voiced man who Monahl knew to be faithful and reliable, a devout follower of the Church of the Preserving Hand. He took her aboard and showed her to a small cabin at the bow. “It is mine,” he said. “But for this journey it is yours.” Monahl would have preferred to stay outside with the crew and the three business travellers, but nonetheless she accepted his offer graciously. He would be deeply hurt if a devotee-priest declined his sacrifice.

She stayed in the cabin until the whistle blew, tired from a night disturbed by frightening visions – frightening her not because of their content but because they hinted at another descent into her old madness. She also found that, in the confines of Captain Ulphat’s cabin, it was easier to ignore the fact that all that separated her from the Burn Plain was a few layers of wood.

When the barge began to move she made herself go up onto the deck for a final glimpse of Zigané. She might never see this sight again.

Captain Ulphat was waving farewells to his tiny wife and their five children. He had entrusted the barge’s protection to his assistant for now: a young man, sitting on a platform projecting from the bow of the barge, stripped down to loin-cloth and the jade amulets of his Guild. With professional eyes, Monahl admired the perfect composure of his body, the S-curve of his spine. She was starting to feel more composed now. She was in the hands of professionals. Throughout the journey that platform would be occupied by either the young man or Ulphat, Charming the barge on its way.

Monahl watched as the gap between barge and dock widened. The lava glowed intensely, occasional gaseous bubbles disrupting its surface skin. At the rear of the barge a twin set of Charmed paddles revolved on their axis, biting into the molten rock and pushing them farther out into the burning bay.

As she stared, Angelo appeared at her side. Despite Edric’s attentions, the boy had rapidly become as filthy and dishevelled as when she had first seen him. Now, Monahl rubbed a thumb across his cheek and said, “Been rolling in the mud?”

Angelo shrugged. “The clean felt funny. Smelt, too. And people were looking at me.” He clearly felt more comfortable now that he had resumed the uniform of the street.

Monahl was sweating heavily now. Out here, surrounded by the lava, the heat had become intense. She looked again at the man on his platform at the front of the barge. His golden skin was flushed bronze, scorched by the heat rising from below. His expression hadn’t changed. He seemed oblivious to all but his Charming.

Monahl looked at the docks again, the lines of retreating faces. Even the dockers had paused in their work to watch the big hauler pull away. No matter how many times you saw it, the Charmed passage of a barge remained an inspiring sight.

No one had come to see her off. Not even Freya.

“Do you have a family?” she asked Angelo. He looked at her as if she was speaking in tongues. “How about friends? Do you have many friends back at Edge City?”

The boy was still staring at her, the line of his eyes never quite coinciding. Finally, he said, “Chi only told me to give you the message. He didn’t say anything about having to make
conversation
.” Then he turned and walked down into the hold and soon Monahl heard his little voice pestering someone for food.

She sighed. She never had been good with children.

The barge was approaching the mouth of the bay, where the two arms of the cove drew closer together at either side.

Monahl leaned against the side of the barge, craning to see who was on the Downe Silver spur.

The barge passed by much closer than she had expected and suddenly she saw the spur thrusting out over the glowing sea. Seated at the end, her body perfectly composed, was Cheri.

The barge passed so close Monahl could see the sweat picked out on her friend’s body. Beyond her, a small crowd of devotees lined the railings along the clifftop. When they spotted Monahl a cheer rose up and they waved and clapped and shouted to her. She saw Amathyr and Claudia, Edric and Jamie and Tess. Freya was there, with all the others, dressed in the samite smock of the Order, her first silver charms hung from the band around her neck, that silly pink flower tucked into her dark hair.

When Monahl looked back at the spur, Cheri had opened her eyes and was smiling. She held out her hands and cast a shower of petals into the air, a blessing for Monahl’s journey. As each hit the lava it vanished in a tiny puff of smoke.

~

On the third day of the voyage, Monahl tried to prepare herself for the shock of the new. If all went well they would dock at Qebahl that evening.

She found herself in a peculiar frame of mind, a state which had been growing on her throughout the journey. The last time she had travelled from Zigané to the Serpent’s Back had been over thirteen years ago, and the two Burn Plain landmasses had been so far apart that the trip had taken fifteen days.

That trip to the Serpent’s Back had been her only real act of rebellion.

For fifteen years she had been an orphan, left in the care of the Order. And for fifteen long years she had been subjected to their stifling kindness and sympathy. “You’re very special,” they always told her. “Your mother was the most Talented devotee-priest of her generation, and your father...your father was the greatest mage the world has known.” They had meant well – that most damning of phrases – but not even Cheri had seen the damage they were inflicting by repeatedly emphasising the specialness of her line and not of herself. “Such special parents,” they would say, and Monahl would complete the line in her head: and such an
ordinary
child.

When her hallucinations and nightmares started, everyone lauded her as a great visionary. They had always known her line would prove true – and so even her madness was not her own.

Whenever a vision came true – a tragedy with one of the barges, an outbreak of the dreaded ophidy – Monahl was terrified by the powers she had so fleetingly tamed. On the many occasions her nightmares proved to be no more than bad dreams, she was equally terrified by what that might mean: that she was mad, that her Talents were mere illusion.

She tried to kill herself one time in her twentieth year. Early one morning, she stood at the top of a cliff, looking down at the Burn Plain. But it had rained in the night and the lava was obscured by a seething blanket of mist. She would have jumped if she could see the lava, but that mist frightened her: she could not jump unsighted. By the time the mist had thinned she had passed the stage where she could have taken her own life. Instead, she sat on the cliff’s edge and watched a barge setting out for the Serpent’s Back, its great paddles churning up the lava behind it.

If death was not an option then she realised she would have to learn how to live, and she could only do that far away from this city.

She hadn’t told them she was going.

She went straight to the docks and talked her way into passage on a barge due to leave that afternoon. She spent the days of the journey marvelling anew at the great variety of the Burn Plain – the strewn out chains of volcano islands, the forest that seemed to take root in rock that had not yet hardened, the lizards that rose up on their toes and sprinted across rock so hot it would have killed any other living thing. The nights she spent fending off the clumsy advances of the captain of the barge.

For the last several hundred leaps of the journey the barge had threaded its way through the haphazard archipelago of craggy, forested islands and rock floes which had broken away from the end of the Serpent’s Back. The islands varied in size from mere boulders to blocks larger even than Zigané. Some bore the remains of human settlement, some were even inhabited by those who had refused to abandon their homes or by gangs of professional scavengers. Yet others had tipped over upon calving away from their mother continent, so that trees thrust out horizontally and the strange globular forms of suddenly cooled magma distorted their upper surface into the perverted, abstract landscapes of dreams.