Riding the Serpent's Back (5 page)

He saw then that Chi was going to destroy himself.

He tried to intervene. “Cotoche is right,” he said. “We could be thirty leaps away by dark.”

Chi turned on him, his anger fuelled by drink. “You!” he yelled. “Why should we listen to
you?
How do we even know whose side you’re on? You could be a spy, for all we know – what little messages is your courser carrying while you bravely walk with us? Your skirts and your hair don’t fool anybody.”

Leeth turned away. He knew it was only anger and perhaps fear speaking, but Chi’s distrust – after so long – hurt deeply nonetheless.

Chi wouldn’t stop. “Why don’t you all just clear off?” he cried, staggering unevenly about the gathering. “Just clear off and leave me. I’ll go on alone.”

Cotoche approached him and raised a hand to touch his arm.

Chi lashed out so that she had to sway out of his reach, stopped only from falling when Jaryd caught her by the shoulders.

“Go on,” shouted Chi. “Just leave me!” Then, quieter: “All of you. Just leave me alone.”

~

By the time the sun had passed overhead only Chi and Leeth remained.

Chi was morose, muttering to himself continually, his drunkenness rapidly becoming hangover.

Leeth was just plain stubborn. He had travelled from one end of the continent to the other and in that time he had watched Chi transformed from the charismatic leader of his vagabond tribe to little more than a drunken wreck.

Leeth sent Sky away to roam and rode behind Chi on his handsome black mare. He felt vaguely responsible for what was happening and felt that he should stay close to Chi, to be on hand to help.

They skirted the settlement and continued west, through a landscape almost devoid of vegetation. Smooth-flanked hills folded around them, fumaroles smoked freely, great fissures opened up in the ground, their depths lit from within by the menacing glow of cooling lava flows.

“What about Cotoche?” Leeth asked, unwilling to let go of all hope. “What about your child?” He did not know, for certain, that the child was Chi’s but he was determined to provoke some kind of reaction.

“The child?” Chi laughed contemptuously. “The child’s the future. I’m the past, a relic. I don’t want to have any part in it, you hear me?”

They came to a staggering halt as the horse drew up just before plunging into a concealed rift in the slope. Chi tugged at the reins and they turned to the side until the ground closed over again and they could progress.

“Look where having children got me,” said Chi. “Eh?”

They rode on in silence.

It was late in the afternoon when Leeth realised they were being pursued. He suspected Chi had known for some time.

They crossed the flank of a low volcano, a river of thick lava just visible as it edged slowly down the north-west slope. Every time Leeth looked back the dark smudge that was the police squad appeared closer than before. He saw above the pursuing riders a dark cloud of volcanic dust kicked up by their horses and he realised that Chi’s horse, too, must be flagging its progress in dust clouds.

He turned back, and suddenly Chi’s elbow rammed hard into his ribs.

He gasped and his vision went momentarily dark with pain.

He tried to cling on, but Chi drove his arm again into his ribs and his fingers lost their grip. He was aware of a pounding in his head – perhaps the sound of the horse’s stamping feet – and then he was swinging vertiginously away from Chi, plunging down to the ground.

He felt a popping sensation in his ankle as he landed, and then it was all he could do to draw air into his lungs.

When his vision had cleared again, he saw Chi’s mount charging away, riderless, back towards the east. From that direction, the police squad was closing in steadily. Leeth had the presence of mind to drag himself into the shelter of a great globular swelling of pumice. There was a slight cleft where the lump thrust out of the ground and he squeezed himself hard into it, willing himself to become smaller, willing his body to flow into the space.

From his hiding place, he saw that Chi was fifty paces away, running hard, his westward course unbroken.

He could hear the drumming of the horse’s hooves echoing through the ground as if they were crossing the skin of a drum.

Someone shouted, but Chi continued to run, scrambling diagonally down the slope.

He came to a ridge and ran along its spine. The ridge became a promontory and Chi ran out along it.

Leeth saw clearly that Chi was trapped. Behind him, the police were closing in on foot. Ahead of him was a deep, smoking fissure.

The look on Chi’s face imprinted itself sharply on Leeth’s mind: he was grinning, happy for the first time since he had met Leeth and taken him, in his own curt way, into his trust. Happy for the first time in many years.

In a single, casual movement, he turned his back on the advancing policemen, spread his arms wide and dived clear of his rocky vantage point. For an instant, he was suspended in the air, lit by the malevolent glare from below, feathered hair streaming out behind him, and then he was gone.

~

Leeth cowered in his resting place for a night and a day. With Chi – and his sense of purpose – gone he was more scared than he had ever been before.

He was certain that the police must have seen him, must have spotted where he had gone to ground. At one point, as he lay squeezed into his crack in the rock, three policemen stood within paces of him and he was sure that at any moment they would see him. He concentrated hard, his eyes squeezed shut, willing himself smaller, more stone-like and, somehow, he remained concealed.

Later, when the police had departed, he remained in his nook, trembling in harmony with the tremors and groans of the rock, certain that they would soon be back for a more thorough search.

In his more lucid moments, Leeth tried to understand his sense of loss, his feelings for a man he had known so briefly. In his own terms, he supposed, Chi had triumphed. After years of running and hiding he had made his last action his own: by killing himself he had avoided being killed. He had travelled from one end of the Serpent’s Back to another, as far as a man could go; then he had gone one step further.

But he had died, nevertheless, and Leeth saw no sense in it.

By the time the sun sank ahead of Leeth the following evening, Chi’s fissure had cooled and when Leeth hobbled across to look down into its depths he saw that a scabby skin had formed over its molten contents.

He sat on the slope and drank the last sip of water from his flask. Tenderly, he explored his damaged ankle. The flesh was puffy. The bone was broken, he was sure.

He thought of Sky, willed him to come and find him. Some time later the courser landed nearby, her mean jaws smeared with the gore and fur of carrion she must have found on the plains. Leeth hugged her briefly, although, as always, the beast showed no sign of affection.

They slipped away from the unstable lands under cover of the night. They covered a lot of ground, distance important to Leeth just then. He needed it all to be far behind him before he could start to come to terms with what he had experienced. He needed to get it into perspective.

~

For three years he searched for Cotoche and the boy. In that time, he and Sky travelled thousands of leaps over the Serpent’s Back. He came across most of the others in the course of his travels: Jaryd and Bean, wandering as free as ever; Sunshine posing as a missionary in a mining town on one of the oldest parts of the continent; old Karlas Herckle had taken up with a teenaged shepherd and started a ranch out on the plains.

It was Coco Guderan who finally put Leeth on Cotoche’s trail.

Leeth had brought a healer out on her regular visit to the mining commune and was enjoying a little hospitality when Coco said to him, “Chi’s girl was asking after you – that’s what Idrez told Palenque, anyway. Cotoche. Palenque said she was surprised you’re still out here, you know?”

Cotoche had moved to the mainland, for the first time in her life. She had made herself a place in a sprawling shanty-town called Edge City, near to where the Hamadryad’s New Cut emptied itself into the Burn Plain.

As soon as he was able, Leeth made the long flight over the hellish lavascape of the Burn Plain. He arrived late one afternoon, landing on the edge of the city. Immediately, he unstrapped himself and dismissed Sky. The first thing that struck him about Edge City was the sheer tenacity of the human spirit. All around him, the Lost People – those without citizenship, the result of the migratory drift of the dispossessed southwards down the Rift – had forged themselves an existence out of nothing.

The track he climbed was steep, the city spread over a series of ragged folds at the edge of the continental shelf. The tops of the hills were lost in the heavy steam clouds drifting back from the great river’s discharge onto the Burn Plain. Thousands upon thousands of crude huts with mud walls and palm-branch roofs had been wedged onto shelves chiselled out of the slope. Animals and children wailed and the humid air was thick with the smell of ordure and decay. As he walked, Leeth had to keep stepping aside to let by men and women bowed under heavy burdens, on their way to market or the selling fields of the Junction.

He had been asking directions all the way, but still he did not believe she would be here. The blank looks of apathy on the faces of those he spoke to gave him no reassurance that they even understood his words; their brief gestures and gabbled Shelf slang could have meant almost anything.

Suddenly, a moderate earth tremor struck and Leeth had to brace himself against the slope until it had passed. All around him, the thronging masses carried on as if nothing had happened.

When he straightened she was standing on the track ahead, a tiny figure now that she was no longer carrying her child.

She spotted him and came running down the slope. They hugged each other hard, and then little hands were pulling them apart, and a small voice said, “Hey! Hey! Stop it, will you?”

Leeth looked down into the truculent face of a small boy.

The boy stared back, smiling a little, the feathers tied into his long hair dancing in the breeze.

“So big already,” said Leeth, picking him up and hugging him. “Aren’t you the clever one?”

The boy pushed himself back in Leeth’s arms, so that he could look him in they eye. “Less of the baby talk, okay, mister?”

Leeth looked from the boy to the woman Chi had once described as his apprentice. “I wanted to find you,” he said. “I wanted to convince myself that my dumb suspicions were true.” He had often recalled the way Chi had so brusquely dismissed Cotoche that day on the Serpent’s Back, and the suspicion had grown that he had missed something vital in the exchange. “I wanted to find out what you intend to do – if you don’t just plan to keep on running, that is.”

The boy narrowed his dark eyes in an eerily familiar manner. “I’m going to need all the help I can get,” he said slowly. “He made me mad. He never should have made me mad.”

Cotoche ruffled the child’s hair. “Will you come back to our home?” she asked Leeth. “Will you join us?”

Leeth smiled at her, and then he swung the young Chi up onto his shoulders and let himself be led into the heart of Edge City.

Leeth sat with Cotoche, savouring the night air. Darkness had brought with it a breeze and welcome respite from the heavy, sulphurous humidity of the day’s steam clouds. Before them, the slope tumbled madly away, the palm-leaf roofs of the next tier of shacks starting at the level of the track on which they sat. In the distance, the sparks of countless fires, lanterns and candles spread like fireflies across the face of the next escarpment.

“For a long time we thought the police had killed you when they killed Chi,” said Cotoche.

“I told you: they didn’t kill Chi,” said Leeth. “He denied them the opportunity.”

Cotoche nodded. “I know,” she said. “I know that now.”

Leeth sat against the front wall of Chi’s shack, the sackcloth screen tied up above its door so they could listen out for the sleeping boy. The shack’s adobe walls leaned outwards, with a groove cut around the base and specially jointed corners so that in the event of a quake powerful enough to bring the building down the walls would always fall outwards, away from those within. It made it uncomfortable to sit against.

He shifted and glanced at Cotoche.

She saw his look and smiled. “You’ve changed,” she said. “You look different to how I remember.”

“You too,” he said, glancing pointedly at her flat belly.

She laughed, but insisted, “No. I mean it. You’ve changed...”

Leeth shrugged. He plucked at his bleached hair, now shoulder-length. “I’ve grown this. I shave my jaw more often. I’ve lived on the Serpent’s Back for three years – it’s knocked off all my soft city edges.” He didn’t know why he felt so defensive. “I’ve done a lot of catching up,” he concluded lamely.

Cotoche shook her head, but didn’t pursue the matter.

“You appear to have established yourself well,” said Leeth.

“There’s a strong Habnath community here amongst the lost people. That was my parents’ religion, when they were alive. The Habnathi helped me when I came here heavy with Chi, and after. Now I find work here and there, mending and cleaning and teaching children. Chi does what he can, too.”

“I’m glad I found you,” said Leeth. He saw the moisture heavy in her eyes, countless pinprick sparks reflected from the myriad nightlights all about.

Just then, he heard a sound from the hut and the young Chi emerged, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with balled fists. He came to stand uncertainly in the doorway, wearing only a nightshirt so oversized it dragged along the floor behind him as he moved.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said the boy. He came out and sat in the awkward space between Cotoche and Leeth. “Will you tell me about it?” he asked. “Will you tell me about how he died?”

Leeth was unsure which he found the more disorientating: the sheer fact of Chi’s rebirth, or the fact that the boy didn’t know him. By the time Leeth had joined the travelling group on the Serpent’s Back, Chi had already used his Talent to manipulate the child in Cotoche’s womb: the Chi Leeth had briefly known was no more – this Chi was from an earlier imprint. “I know all about you, though,” the boy had told him that afternoon. “Cotoche has told me so much. She told me Chi liked you a great deal. She told me you were the only person he had really talked to for months. I remember how it was, how depressed I had become – you must be a special person if you managed to penetrate all that gloom and self-loathing.”