Riding the Serpent's Back (55 page)

Finally, he sat back, exhausted and frightened. Sky was watching him.

“We’ll break the journey,” said Leeth. “Who says we have to get across the Zochi in a day, anyway?” Sky started to tremble, despite the intense, humid heat of the jungle.

Leeth looked around at the rising walls of green. He would explore their surroundings in a little while, but not yet. He was too scared right now.

~

Some time later, he realised he could stay in this clearing no longer. Sky was still hunched up where she had landed. She looked lifeless, like a boulder. It was only the intermittent activity of her brain that convinced Leeth the courser was still alive.

“We have to face it,” said Leeth. “Even if...
when
you’re well enough to fly out of here, you’re not going to be strong enough to take me with you, are you?”

She was going to die. He knew it. And he had just realised that even his fear of the jungle was not great enough to make him stay here and watch her death. It was cowardly, he knew – running away again – but he couldn’t watch his beloved courser die.

He tried to remember the process of forming a bond, how it had been when Muranitharan Annash had introduced him to Sky for the first time. He tried to find the shapes in his head, and match them to those in Sky’s, reversing what they had built between them. Breaking the bond they had shared for so long.

When Sky died, she would die free.

Sky’s feeble, vestigial thoughts were confused. She glanced up at the gloomy sky.

“That’s right,” said Leeth. “You’re free of me. Free to go when...when you’re better.”

He started to back away into the jungle, fighting down the tears.

He sensed a sudden flicker of comprehension in the beast’s mind, and then she closed her eyes.

“That’s right,” he said, again. “Rest now. When you’re better you can go.”

He turned and pushed his way through a wall of trailing vines. Soon he was surrounded by the rich growth of the Zochi jungle, alone and lost, leaps from the nearest civilisation.

It was dark when Monahl opened her eyes. But if this was the afterworld, then where was the metal smell of molten rock? Where was the continual wailing of the dead, grieving their own loss? All she knew was the darkness and the heat that was burning away what skin remained on her body.

She lost consciousness again.

~

Daytime. And above her, the intermeshed branches of pine trees swirling and rattling against each other in the hot breeze. This was not Michtlan, then. Not the land of the dead.

She tried to move, but it was all too painful so she stopped.

She remembered hurting her ankle and falling to her knees. She remembered crawling across the caustic mud, hauling herself along on her belly until she could move no more.

She must have dragged herself free.

She sensed that she was lying at a slight angle, so she must be on a slope. She could see the trees. Not only had she reached the edge of the soda-plains: she had come a short way into the first of the hills, too.

She heard a sound and suddenly thought fearfully of what wildlife must live here: wolves, bears, rats. Vultures or crows would readily eat a defenceless animal. Even mokes ate meat wherever they found it.

The sound came again, a soft shuffling, a creature approaching through the woodland litter of pine needles and cones.

She couldn’t move, but she kept her eyes open and made a croaking sound in her throat: if a scavenging beast knew she was alive it might steer clear of her, just in case she was dangerous. It was her only hope.

“So,” said a voice – a woman, with a wavering, tentative tone. “Awake, you are. I knew it would be soon, I did. ‘She’ll die if she’s not awake soon,’ I said. ‘Or perhaps she’ll be dying anyway.’ But you won’t, of course: I’m sure now that you will live.”

“I...” The words were so difficult to shape with her dry, sore mouth and throat.

Something brushed against her forehead, and moments later something cool and wet was pressed onto each temple. Yet, despite this attention, all Monahl could see was a brief glimpse of a pale hand as the woman kept out of her line of sight.

“Rest,” said the woman. “You need to rest.”

Monahl closed her eyes.

~

Monahl concentrated on finding her inner self, losing the world. When she was only animus, the wounds of her body were nothing to her. She meditated and prayed, she floated on a sea of blackness in a world of no light.

The woman tended to her continually, applying compresses all over her body, dripping into her mouth a liquid that tasted of herbs and which deadened the nausea and pain as soon as she swallowed.

Finally, Monahl glimpsed her rescuer.

One day, she woke to the sensation of moist bandages being lifted from her arms. When these dressings had been applied they were cool and soothing, a sudden, wonderful release from discomfort. When they were removed, it was as if a layer of her skin was being peeled away: a stinging, tearing sensation, leaving only a chilled rawness.

Monahl opened her eyes and the woman was leaning into her line of sight for the first time. Her wild, straggling hair was white, her smooth skin a pearly, almost translucent pink, her head raised and slender like the Moranis. Bloodshot eyes flitted towards Monahl’s and the woman gasped and jerked her head out of Monahl’s view.

“P...please,” gasped Monahl. “I...”

Slowly, the albino woman moved back to where Monahl could see her. She wouldn’t meet Monahl’s eyes and when she spoke it was in a hurried jumble of Morani. Monahl must have looked blank, because she then said, “Forgive me, priest-mother, for the sight I place before your holy eyes. Forgive me for betraying the true colour of Lord Huipo. Forgive me for daring to heal your holy body.”

The woman must be some kind of outcast, thrown out for not possessing the true bronze skin of her people – albinism must be taken as some kind of insult to Huipo, Monahl thought. She swallowed and said, “Of...course.”

The look of gratitude in the woman’s eyes was pathetic to see.

~

“Tell me your name,” Monahl said. She was sitting up, supported by a kind of sling between two trees. She could move her head to look around now. She could look down to see her body, still encased in healing bandages. She hadn’t had the nerve to look when the bandages were being changed, as yet: wherever her body was exposed, the skin was black and leathery, and she had no desire to see anything worse than that. She felt as if she was suspended in limbo. She felt a desperate need to find Herold and be comforted, yet the reason for her journey had been removed: Chi was going to die. She had seen it in her vision.

She put thoughts of resuming her journey aside for now – it would be days before she could even stand, let alone trek into the hills.

The albino squatted before her, naked but for a gold clasp pinned through the bridge of her nose. With her twitchy, wary movements and her unwillingness to communicate, she sometimes struck Monahl as more wild animal than human. That was clearly a false impression: from their few exchanges, Monahl knew the woman to be intelligent, educated in the traditions of her people and, unique amongst the Morani Monahl had encountered, fluent in the True tongue.

“Your name,” Monahl repeated.

The woman flicked her head briefly in denial. “Ah but I have none,” she said. “Only people are given names, but people are not born as an insult to the Lord Huipo.”

“You must have a name,” said Monahl. “What do people call you?”

The woman flicked her head again. “People live with their families, in villages and towns. People are born in Huipo’s image. People are given names, and I was not.”

“I don’t live in a village or town,” said Monahl. “And I am not in Huipo’s image.”

“But you are a priest,” said the woman. “You have been marked by the Lord Huipo to tell all before you that you bear his blessing.”

“I may be a priest, but I’m just an ordinary person,” said Monahl, too tired to argue.

The woman smiled. “I know,” she said. “And I am not.”

~

“Why did the Morani send me out there to die?” asked Monahl. “Qobi, the missionary, assured me they had decided to be merciful. He said they would allow me safe passage, yet they directed me out into the middle of the soda-lakes. Why would they do that?”

“Your friend was right that they were being merciful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“By granting you your trial they were expressing the highest regard for you. They sent you out to the heart of their world, the place where the plane of Huipo brushes against our own.”

“But I nearly died out there.”

“If you had died, you would have proven unworthy and my people would have acknowledged their mistake before the Lord Huipo. But you survived your trial, and so you will always be a better, more spiritual person for that. By surviving, you have justified the faith Huipo places in you, and so you have raised your own status and, equally, raised that of those who chose to test you. By your deeds, the world is blessed many times over.”

“By
your
deeds,” said Monahl. “If you had not saved me I would be dead.”

The woman shook her head. “You are the one who survived, not I.”

~

Monahl called her rescuer Noname. By persistent questioning, she established that Noname had been raised in her home village until the age of eleven, by parents who were always careful to ignore her presence, whilst ensuring that food was left out by ‘mistake’. She acquired her education by listening to conversations in which her mother would carefully include useful information. She learnt the True tongue from a missionary – not Qobi, Monahl confirmed – who took some time to realise that she was a non-person whom he should ignore.

During her twelfth year, when the hair started to sprout from pudenda and armpits and the breasts to bud on her chest, her mother suddenly became more houseproud. Food and drink were carefully shut away, and conversations suddenly seemed to exclude her, rather than containing snippets directed towards her.

She left, and had lived now for twenty years in the pine forest where the hills rose away from the soda-plain. “I go back there,” she told Monahl. “I walk right through the villages sometimes and nobody ever sees me. I could piss in their soup and they’d eat it, they would, because they’d be blind to what I’d done.”

Noname was a herbalist – a lot of her vicarious education had made little sense to her until she started this life: conversations steered towards the mention of a shrub with five-lobed leaves whose furry berries loosened the bowels, and so on.

“How do your people appeal to you for help?” Monahl asked.

“When they are so desperate that they come here, they are usually so sick that they must be carried,” said Noname. “So what they do is this: they are carried through here and they and their attendants talk loudly to each other. It is like I am a child again, and I am listening to my mother talking to her sister. ‘Fine woods, they are, and did you know that Aki’s sister is to be married, and,
oh
but how my guts have been heaving and my body has been burning.’ When I have prepared a treatment I just go down and slip a pouch of herbs into their hand and say to myself, ‘I’d be taking some of that two times a day, I would,’ and they go. Sometimes I walk with them for a short distance, if I am in the mood for company.”

“Why do you do it?”

Noname didn’t seem to understand the question. “I am a healer,” she said. “That is why I was born the way I am, so that I could be banished here to perfect the Art.”

“And when will I be healed?” asked Monahl. “I have a journey to resume.”

“Then you’ll be needing to walk,” said Noname. Immediately, she bent over Monahl’s legs and started to unravel the bandages.

This time Monahl watched and was amazed to see that the skin beneath was golden and babyish. The skin of her knees was still inflamed and her hands remained bandaged, but otherwise it was as if she had been reborn.

Noname pulled her to her feet and backed away. Before taking her first steps, Monahl waited until the albino would meet her eyes. “You really are a gifted healer,” she said softly. “I wish I could do something for you in return.”

Noname shrugged, a gesture she had very recently acquired from Monahl. “You bless me with your presence,” she said. “That is more than adequate recompense. And more, you talk to me, although I don’t always understand what it is that you say. It’s a fine thing to talk to someone at least once in a lifetime, is it not?”

Monahl stepped towards her.

She expected to stagger and lose her balance, but her legs held her strongly and her head remained calm.

She took another step and Noname retreated, her hands held ready to catch her if she fell.

But she remained on her feet, suddenly feeling stronger than she could ever remember feeling. She would be ready to go soon. Perhaps tomorrow. Ready to resume her search for Herold.

~

In the morning she said to Noname, “I had a vision when I was out on the soda-flats. I thought then that it was the heat and the exhaustion and the pain conspiring to make me mad before I died. I saw a dead tribesman and his family – still, apparently, alive. I saw your god, too.”

Noname nodded. “I told you,” she said. “My people were testing you before the Lord Huipo. It’s only to be expected that he should take an interest in your fate.”

“But what did it mean?”

Noname looked confused. She had become far more forthcoming in the days they had shared, but even so Monahl’s questions still ran up against the cultural gap between them sometimes. Now, Noname said, “Huipo blessed you. He approved that you should survive. He has the power to preserve as well as to destroy. It means nothing more than that you live.”

“My brother came to me, too,” said Monahl. “He appeared in a form he hasn’t taken for at least five years. He told me that one of his siblings will betray him in innocence, and another quite deliberately. He said that one of these incidents will lead to his death.”

“Then you must warn him,” said Noname.

“But he told me that it would happen!” said Monahl. “He said he would be killed. How can I avert something so certain?”