Riding the Serpent's Back (9 page)

Leeth shook his head, watching as Cotoche reclined in the steaming ochre mud. “It’s the other way round,” he said. “Despite his body, Chi is still a man. Yet to control all these people, to form his own little pocket militias, makes him feel young again: playground manoeuvres.”

After a short silence, Cotoche – identifying Leeth with the religion of his childhood, as she often did – said, “It’s the lesson of your gods for us all: the divided nature of our existence. Ixi, Keeper of the Moon, gives us a woman’s regular blood and guards us in childbirth, yet also she brings deluge and flood to the world. Tezchamna is the sun that ripens crops and keeps us warm, yet at night he hurries through the underworld in disguise, leaving a trail of fire that erupts throughout the earth to kill thousands and thousands of people in volcano and earthquake. Ehna destroys with the winds he brings down from the north, yet your people would say it is he—” suddenly, impulsively, Cotoche leaned towards Leeth and blew softly, cooling the mud he had smeared across his cheeks “—who brought the physical expression of love into the world.”

Leeth’s pulse raced. Had the gesture been merely an illustration of her argument, or something more? Ever since the wind god Ehna had stolen Mayhuel from the underworld and lain with her on the earth, the gentle blow of air had acquired a deeply passionate significance for the people of the Rift: where the two had lain a beautiful tree with two strong branches had thrust skywards from the soil, and Ehna’s breeze had made sweet music as it blew through the tender young leaves. “What do you mean?” Leeth asked, shifting uncomfortably in the bathing muds.

Cotoche pointed both thumbs at herself, and said, “We Habnathi have only one god and He represents the balance of everything there ever is or was. We have survived so long because every one of us is complete, whole. That internal unity gives us the strength to endure. A people that carves up areas of responsibility between so many different gods, a people where even an individual god is internally divided between the powers of creation and destruction...You are all divided, struggling inside yourselves between the urge to create and the urge to destroy. Chi is a man and still a boy. He has created unity amongst a people who for generations have been so disregarded and abused that they accept it as their lot in life: he’s stirred them from apathy, yet to what purpose?”

“That was what I asked you,” said Leeth.

Cotoche shook her head, then reached to scoop more mud and spread it across her shoulders.

“It’s true what you say,” said Leeth. “The struggle, the conflicting urges.” He made a moue and blew softly. She was too far away to feel the movement of the air, but she saw the gesture clearly enough.

For an instant she looked flustered, indecisive, then she said, “Was that a creative urge, or destructive?”

Leeth looked away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I just...”

Cotoche gave a little half-shake of her head, then pulled herself up out of the mud and walked the short distance to the bubbling water pool and dived lithely in.

Leeth stayed in the mud, angry and confused. Was that shake of the head a warning? Or was it meant to reassure him, to say that she had not taken offence?

By the time he rejoined her, Cotoche acted as if nothing had happened and Leeth was left to wonder if that was really the gist of her message: that his clumsy advances had been so inconsequential that she considered that nothing of any import had, indeed, taken place.

~

“Come on,” said Leeth one sultry afternoon. “You’re wearing yourself to ash. We’re going away somewhere.”

Chi looked exhausted. His face was pale, his eyes sunk back in their sockets with deep shadows beneath.

“I’m getting it back,” he said, eagerly. He had just returned from one of his regular sessions healing Tezech Ferrea’s sciatica, and already the hopeful queues were forming outside the shack. “The only way to get it back is to
practise
it.” But there was an edge of ambivalence in his voice.

Leeth said nothing and after a few seconds the little boy beat the man and Chi said, “Where are we going?”

A short time later, Sky heaved herself into the air and they rose up above the slums. As always, Leeth marvelled at the mosaic of human existence spread out below them: the hills and hollows all covered with huts and mud tracks, the endless flows of people and animals and hand carts. There might have been half a million or more people below them, Leeth thought, and each of them the independent centre of their own world. It was a daunting thought.

Soon Edge City thinned out into sporadic clusters of homes, clinging to the track that led to the Falls.

“Your mother asked me to get you away for a break,” said Leeth, as they flew west, their course dogging the Falls track. “She thinks you’re doing too much.”

“Don’t call her that,” said Chi, with a brief flash of his old aggression. “Please. I’m my own man.”

Leeth squeezed him reassuringly. “We just think you’re trying to go too fast.” An epidemic of dysentery was in the process of sweeping through Edge City and Chi’s Talent had been called on more and more frequently: first with neighbours, and then with friends and relatives of the neighbours, and then
their
friends and relatives, until finally the queues had stretched far into the distance along the streets and paths of the slum district, all hoping desperately for the touch of the Boy Healer.

Chi’s Talent was returning powerfully as he healed, but the intense mental effort was taking an increasing physical toll.

“If I’d taken it more slowly, do you think you’d be alive?” demanded the boy, referring to Leeth’s own bout of fever.

“Probably,” said Leeth. “I expect I’m fit enough to have survived. I’m not arguing that you haven’t worked wonders, that you haven’t saved the lives of dozens or even hundreds of people, and eased the suffering of many times that figure. I’m just saying you should think about the consequences for yourself. Your body isn’t strong enough yet for this kind of workload. You said yesterday that you thought some of the Raggies might have latent Talents – can’t you train them as your assistants and start to share the burden?”

Leeth sensed the tightness of the boy’s body, the sudden silence that often built up to tears. “You have it exactly right,” Chi said, his voice tight with emotion. “This cursed body can’t keep up with the man it contains. My Talents leave me exhausted in no time. People treat me like some snotty little upstart – even those who humour me and pretend to believe that I am who I claim I am. Even they don’t really believe me: I’ve hidden and listened to some of my captains – they laugh at me, they think I’m some kind of dwarf stuck in a body that hasn’t grown!” His control had improved in the months Leeth had been with him – even now, he managed to bite back on his tears. He leaned back against Leeth and struck himself on the chest with his own fists. “I hate this thing,” he said. “This body is sometimes more than I can bear!”

Leeth could see the billowing steam clouds of the Falls ahead. He thought the command-shape into Sky’s mind to tell her this was their destination. Then he said, “If you hate your body so much then why don’t you change it?”

Chi peered back at him, a quizzical look on his face.

“I mean...” began Leeth, struggling to work out exactly what he did mean – the question had made sense at the time. “I mean, you seem capable of so much. You can change an illness in another person – why can’t you change what it is that you so hate about yourself? Or why can’t you make yourself like what you are?”

“I’m not a shape-changer,” said Chi. “Yet you make it sound so easy. Have you tried? Is that your secret?”

Leeth shook his head. “You know I’m no healer,” he said. “My Talent is the bond with Sky and a little simple Charming. But you – you’re different, Chi.”

Chi squirmed, suddenly, within his harness. “Look!” he cried. “The rainbows!”

Sky was swooping in through the swirling clouds of the Falls and, unusually, the sun had broken through a thinning in the sooty grey atmosphere, smearing single and multiple rainbows across the backdrop of steam so that it looked as if a giant hand had hurled pots of dye into the air.

“Come on,” said Leeth. “We’ll find somewhere to land.”

~

By the time they had set down the sun had moved past the brief opening in the murky atmosphere and all was grey again. They walked carefully down a rocky path, the surface slick with a green slimy skin.

Leeth could hear occasional voices, pricked out against the background roar and hiss of the great river Hamadryad yet, surrounded as they were by thick walls of steam cloud, all he could see was the path ahead and the thick growth of moss-festooned trees to either side.

Walking with the boy, Leeth recalled that he had had his own reasons for getting Chi alone. “Tell me,” he said, trying to assume a serious tone as Chi scrambled down the path ahead, chasing puffballs that scattered whenever he approached. “Chi. What are you going to do? Are you planning to get back into politics again? Is that it?” It had been easy for Leeth, these last few months, to slide into the cosy shapes and patterns of family life, but his awareness had steadily grown that this was only a temporary respite, a holding period while Chi’s ambition asserted itself.

Chi laughed. “Politics?” he said. “You think that’d do any good with things as they are? Which faction would I side with? Lachlan’s conservative cronies in the Embodiment believe in carving out all the power for themselves. They argue that the mass of the common people exist only to serve in some higher design of which only they, the Embodiment, can be the arbiters. They get their way by murder, extortion, favouritism, exploitation on a huge scale. And those who oppose them? Exactly the same.

“The entire system is corrupt. It’s just waiting to collapse. The Industrial Renaissance drew people to the cities, used them and then dumped them without work. Nine-tenths of the population of Tule live on land to which there is no clear title. The Senate appoints Land Adjudicators according to how much they are willing to pay and these Adjudicators then cast judgement over any land disputes. The poor always lose – they can’t afford the bribes. The whole system is top-heavy and corrupt; it’s just waiting to fall.”

“And you’re going to push it.”

“A three year-old boy?” asked Chi, grinning. “I’d get nowhere. But I can tell you this: I’m going to do all I can to ensure it doesn’t happen here.”

They came to a wide open space and Chi scampered away into the mist.

Leeth found him leaning up against a chest-high boulder, part of a line of rocks that had been placed to mark the absolute edge of the Shelf. The roar of the Falls was far louder here and the mist swirled and twisted in the updraft from below.

Leeth stood by Chi and looked out into the grey. Immediately beyond the line of rocks, the ground plunged down to the Burn Plain, several hundred paces below. The great river Hamadryad was more than three leaps across where its New Cut ended at the Falls. Here its vast volume of water was dumped directly onto the molten rock below. Much of the water turned instantly to steam but its volume was so great that it had developed a small, boiling sea at the foot of the Falls, tens of leaps across.

Peering down, Leeth could see only the rising steam clouds, but he could imagine the seething turbulence that was below. Through the steam, he could look across to the nearest part of the Falls: a violent wall of creamy froth and spray. Sometimes a favourable wind would clear some of the clouds and more could be seen of the Falls, but today the air was thick with steam and spray, all tasting and smelling acrid and briny, the tang of salt reminding Leeth of home.

“Cotoche thinks the northern lakes and sea must steam and boil like this,” he said, musing. “No matter how often I describe it to her, she still asks, ‘But what about the steam?’ or ‘How can you swim in that heat?’” He looked up and the boy had vanished. He had been talking to himself.

Then Chi’s voice came from behind him, somewhere in the mist. “You’re close to Cotoche, aren’t you?”

He had been listening after all.

Leeth wondered what he was expected to say. He took the straightforward option and said, “That’s true.” He wondered if Cotoche had said anything to the boy about his clumsy advance at the mud baths. He didn’t believe that she had.

“I’m glad,” said Chi. “She needed someone. I remember her saying how Chi would talk to you out on the Serpent’s Back when no one else could get through to him. Cotoche needs someone like that now. It’s only natural to mourn a birth, but she’s been grieving too long. You came at a good time. You’re right to accuse me of trying to do too much too soon: I had become self-absorbed before you came, trying to recover what I thought might have been left behind with my old body. I wasn’t easy to be with.”

“You think you are now?” joked Leeth, and the boy giggled.

“I mean it,” said Chi. “You gave her an outlet, someone to talk to. You’ve lifted her. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

“Couldn’t you have talked with her?”

“She needed someone close to her own age to get through to her,” said Chi. “I tried, but what could I do?” He screwed an index finger into the side of his head. “In here I’m three times her age, but look at me! You think she could confide in a freak like me?”

Leeth stared into the grey distance, thinking of Cotoche.

“What is it?” asked Chi, lost again in the steam. Suddenly he appeared in front of Leeth, climbing back up over the rocks that divided Shelf from seething, boiling Burn Plain. “What’re you thinking about?”

“You,” he said, quickly. “You’ve got so much, yet you’re so impatient. You have a good woman, you have your Talents. In fifteen years’ time you’ll have a young man’s body with the experience of a lifetime to guide you. Why hurry?”

“If you don’t keep moving you always get dragged back,” said Chi. “You should have learnt that much on the Serpent’s Back. I have to keep pushing the limits. I can’t afford to wait.”

“Why not?”

“My destiny is calling me,” said Chi. “Louder and louder.”

“What do you mean?”

“All my life I’ve been waiting,” said Chi. “Knowing I had a central role to play. I thought I could achieve it through politics but look where that got me. I thought I could hide out on the Serpent’s Back. Lead the quiet life. Yet all the time, I was being dragged back.