Riding the Serpent's Back (61 page)

He knew then that she was enchanting him, Charming him. Casting a bond he would never break. Relax, he told himself.

Play the game.

Enjoy.

Beyond Kalam’s shoulder, he saw that Estelle was squirming about on top of the carcass they had been eating. She had rolled the thing over onto its back and now Red could see that where its genitals should have been, the stiffened tail of her snake had poked through a split in the flesh. The tail had been painted purple at its grotesquely bulbous end and it twitched to the beat still being rapped out around the table. Estelle started to stroke it – gently, rhythmically.

She smiled, then reached across to Red and ran her fingers across his lips. She tasted of meat and blood.

Red met her look and she nodded and he bit down hard, crunching through the bone of her index finger.

Relax.

Enjoy.

Play

the

game.

~

He woke sore, disorientated. His head felt as if it was being pounded against a stone wall. His throat felt as dry and stony as the Heartlands all around Samhab.

He sensed that he was alone, but he didn’t dare move.

He tried not to think about the night before, but nonetheless a series of fragmented images rattled through his addled brain.

He had bitten off one of Kalam’s ears, although it hadn’t tasted anywhere near as nice as...teeth, sinking through the soft tissue of a pale white breast. He couldn’t remember whose, except that it was fuller and less firm than Estelle’s.

Jon Pascal.

Oh no! Jon Pascal!

Jon had joined Estelle’s dance and she had poked a finger into his mouth and torn away his cheek so that once again the teeth on that jaw were permanently exposed to the world.

And Jon had laughed, and when he had stopped laughing he had found a sharp bone and driven it into his own chest, splitting the skin from chin to crotch.

Red remembered the sight of Jon’s beating heart. He remembered the taste of his friend’s blood.

He rolled over and screwed his fists into his eyes, trying to blot out the relentless cascade of images. Then he opened his eyes and looked down at himself. There wasn’t a scratch on his body. He twisted to look at his left shoulder where Kalam had first sunk her teeth.

Not a mark.

He remembered the burning leaves, the drink, the pulsing sense of magic in the air. He remembered the look in Oriole’s eyes, her words: “Enjoy. Indulge. You are witnessing the beginning of a new age for the True Families.”

Pleasure, pain, the sheer intense pleasure of receiving and inflicting pain...all without any of the normal consequences.

He felt strangely relaxed about it all. He was aware that he should at least try to feel repelled, but after the initial shock of waking and remembering, all he could feel now was a warm satisfied glow.

He rolled over, and instantly fell asleep again. He dreamed of Estelle. Of eating her and fucking her, being eaten and being fucked, until only their two heads remained, pressed together, biting contentedly at each other’s face.

“I love you,” she told him.

“I love you too,” he said. And then they both bit at the same time, teeth locking together in a last dying rictus.

~

They all seemed to feel a little sheepish in each other’s company, immediately after the banquet.

As Red saw each of his companions for the first time since the night, he found himself surreptitiously examining them, checking that they bore no scars from the feeding madness. He was sure they did the same. But Estelle still had all her fingers, Melody Main still had the smooth skin and perfect physique she had acquired on entering Samhab, despite her legs being eaten to the bone at the banquet; Pieter bore no signs of the skewers that had been driven through his cheeks. The only person still injured was Jon Pascal, whose torn cheek still gaped wide open. Jon didn’t seem too concerned by this.

Red went off in the afternoon to take a look around Samhab. At one point he stood transfixed as he watched a team of labourers swarming over the wall of a half-built temple, setting semi-precious stones into its facade in the gradually forming pattern of a portrait of the androgynous creator, Habna.

He made himself look away, aware of how easily he was being seduced by this enchanted place. He could feel the energy rising from the ground and flowing through his body, he could hear the city’s tune in his head.

Just then, he caught the eye of one of the men in a gang off-loading building blocks from a succession of wagons. The labourer looked away, but seconds later looked again.

This time the man’s brief break from work was noticed and a soldier with a split cane stepped towards him and switched it across the man’s bare arms. Slowly, the labourer turned his gaze on the soldier, stared at him for a second, and then returned to his work.

Red turned away.

He remembered the man now. Rhan Khoe. Shortly after his arrival in Atrac, Red had supervised the grieving ceremony to mark the healthy arrival of Rhan’s first child. He was one of the first group of men the press-gang had taken from the village.

Now, as Red passed through the city, he found that he watched the workers more closely, looking for – fearing – the familiar.

He didn’t find any more faces he recognised, but what he did see was far worse.

He was cutting across a square paved in sheer turquoise flagstones when he noticed a group of labourers waiting to be led away. There was something odd about these men, an air of dejection. After a few seconds, Red realised that he had lost the uplifting spiritual hum of the city’s earth-power. It was as if it was being channelled away from him...sucked in to where these shabby labourers stood.

And then Red saw that each man bore a wound from navel to throat, a deep festering gash that had gone blue-grey at its puckered edges.

He recalled the stories from the time when the villagers of Atrac had decided to flee: the latest press-gang raids in the area, the fate of those who resisted...slaughtered, their hearts ripped out and eaten by the troops, their bodies Charmed back to a semblance of life in the service of their conquerors, just as legend said Michtlanteqez did with those who opposed him.

Red stared at the waiting labourers, trying to resist the conclusions he was drawing.

He knew Chi’s story about why his son hated him so. Now, even through his repulsion, Red understood something of what Lachlan Pas must feel. In bringing him back to life, Chi had lowered Lachlan’s standing to little more than one of these undead labourers. Nobody could go lower than that.

He hurried on, no longer knowing what to think. When he was away from those men he found it hard to accept the conclusion he had come to. He was getting paranoid.

He went back to the palace, where the guards let him through unchallenged. After a time he found the suite, and then he followed the sounds of voices to the mud-bath and pool where his companions were slithering about and swimming, drinking from the bottles lined up around the side.

He saw Estelle watching him from the mud, took a step and threw himself in. Her eyes opened wide. “Your clothes!” she cried.

He hit the mud in an explosive belly-flop, then twisted over onto his back, giggling hysterically. He reached for Estelle’s face and pulled her down to kiss him. It was a game, after all.

No more than a game.

~

That night, as Estelle lay curled up on her side, Red found himself staring at the back of her head, the delicate curves of her neck and shoulders. He might have been staring at her like that for hours, his mind lost in blank wonder at the simplicity of the curving, meeting planes of her skin.

Then everything lurched and he found his viewpoint rising up above the bed, looking back down: a naked young woman, lying with her knees tucked right up to her chin, a thin sheet draped over the lower half of her body; a naked man, lying on his back with his head on one side. Such an innocent scene.

Then, as he watched from the ceiling, another figure entered the room. It might almost have been the first woman’s twin, except there was something fundamentally different about her: a layer of puppy fat instead of the tough muscular form of the sleeper, a tentativeness about her movements and her approach that, even in sleep, the other clearly did not possess. Something in the eyes, too, a naive curiosity the sleeper could never regain.

The figure of Red was sitting up in the bed now, staring at the newcomer. From up high, he could see the look of shock on his own face, a trembling of the lips.

Another lurch of viewpoint, and he was sitting in the bed, staring at Estelle as she had once been, while Estelle as she had become lay asleep on her side, giving little animal twitches as she dreamed.

“Estelle,” he gasped, struggling for words, for comprehension.

She stared at him disbelievingly. “Is that you, Red?” she asked. Even her voice was subtly different. He had forgotten how softly she had once spoken.

He nodded, then held out a hand to her.

“But...but you seem different.” Then she looked at her sleeping alter ego. “And so does
she
.”

When she didn’t take his hand, Red lowered it to rest on the jutting hip of the sleeper.

“Do you still love me, as you once did?”

For a moment, Red wasn’t sure which of the two had spoken. He stared at the young Estelle for a long time. They had professed their love so many times the phrase had lost all meaning other than as punctuation to their love-making. He had always denied to himself that he loved her: back then it
had
been no more than a game, a series of challenges, a bit of fun. Yet recently, he had found himself thinking more and more in terms of love.

As his hand lay on the sleeping Estelle’s hip he started to caress her, to knead the flesh. “Yes,” he said. “I love you more than ever.”

He had always lied to himself, he realised. His love for Estelle, in the early days, had been genuine, something he had been too scared to admit to himself. “I loved you right from the beginning,” he said, but he didn’t understand why she had suddenly started to cry. “I love you now!”

Beside him, Estelle stirred, responding to his kneading fingers on her hip.

Suddenly, she rolled over, and for an instant Red was horrified by what he saw: the hollow, sunken eyes, the trail of spittle traversing her cheek, the fetid odour of her breath, her body.

She opened her eyes and looked at him, smiling. “I love you too,” she said, pulling him closer, sliding a leg up across his thighs, pressing against him.

Red ran a hand over the swell of her rib-cage, found a breast and squeezed it so hard she cried out.

The dream was evaporating away from him now. He had a vague picture in his head of the young Estelle, and he remembered the realisation that, even as he had denied it, he had always loved her intensely.

And now, as he watched a sequence of expressions flash across her face, he knew that what he felt for her could never again be described in such simple terms.

Love? It had lost meaning.

What they had now was a gut thing, an animal madness. Something far more basic than mere love.

Pleasure? Yes.

Pain? Most certainly.

And, perhaps more than anything, fear, panic, a terror of the forces that flowed through the night connecting them, distorting them, killing them slowly with its corrupt touch.

He ran his hand up her back, her neck, buried it in her hair and yanked her head sharply back so that he could bite at her throat and her breasts. Drive her insane with his blessings of pain and pleasure.

~

This time, the marks remained the next morning. The imprint of his teeth all over her body, the scratches and scrapes across his back and chest, the handful of his body hair lying loose on the bed.

When he woke she was staring at him and immediately she started to chuckle. “Oh, my dear,” she said, reaching out to run a finger down the line of his jaw. “You’re learning. You’re so much easier to train than Pieter.”

He stared at the marks all over her body, then rolled away from her and left the bed. She laughed even harder as he dressed and backed out of the room. “I...I need some air,” he said lamely from the archway.

“I’ll be here,” she said, flopping over onto her belly. “I’ll be waiting.”

He wandered through the garden of fountains in the hope that the sweet water music might soothe his battered spirit.

He needed calming, relaxing.

He needed to sort out his confusion and he cursed that dream for complicating things, for making him long for what had been and not what was.

He came across Oriole, walking slowly towards him through a twisting archway of coloured water. She smiled and stretched out a hand towards him.

He nodded but refused her hand. He didn’t want to touch anybody right now.

“You are upset,” she said. “What has happened?”

Red shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, reluctant to elaborate. He was aware that she was studying him closely as they walked.

“You are feeling trapped,” she said at last. “A victim of the relentless flow of history. You wish life wasn’t so complicated.”

He peered at her, but her expression betrayed nothing. He would have used exactly those terms if his mind had been functioning properly. “I’m not at my best early in the morning,” he said, trying to make light of it.

Oriole glanced at him, her eyebrows arched. “You fear being at the centre of all this?” she asked, waving a hand to indicate the gardens and the palace. “You’re scared of responsibility?”

“I sometimes think,” Red said, “that if I had never gone to Harrat to escort Estelle back to Totenang, none of this would have happened. I would have remained a mere servant to Pieter. I’d be settled down with Hellia of Jess, perhaps, and it would be so much easier.”

“But you’re not, and it isn’t.”

“Events dictated otherwise. Opportunities I was too stupid to ignore.”

“Trapped by circumstances – and urges – beyond your control. It’s not your fault – you’re only an innocent young fool, you can’t be expected to have any judgement, any guiding principles, all you can do is go with the flow, do what is expected.”