Riding the Serpent's Back (14 page)

Every year at the same time the town of Two Torrents closes down for the Festival of Zochena. The high point of the day is a road race in which every contestant must be a certified cripple with little or no use of what legs they might possess. In the days leading up to the festival, paraplegics and amputees from throughout the Rift make their way to Two Torrents. They gather at the eastern end of the town’s main thoroughfare and, at the sound of a bell, they must make their way to the finishing line twelve leaps down the valley by whatever means they can without the use of wheels, animals or human assistants.

Joel was quite taken aback when the nature of the race was described to him, as he stood with Principal Amer and his family and guests in their special box at the starting line. During the course of the race, the party would travel to various vantage points along the road until the Principal presented the winner with his award at the end of the day.

“Don’t pity them,” said Claudia Amer, fanning herself obsessively with a swan’s feather. “Really. They would not be grateful one tiny bit. Isn’t that entirely true, Oriole?”

The tall dark woman, with whom Joel had spent the previous day and a half, turned and smiled, and at last he knew her name. She waved a hand casually towards the starting line, where more than a hundred contestants had gathered. “Stefan Odre has come all the way from Tule to take part,” she said. “Tomas Ena from Broor. It is the only chance many of these individuals ever have to excel.”

“But...”

Oriole smiled again. “Have you placed any bets yet?” she asked him.

Joel noticed that the Principal’s wife had drifted away to join another group, leaving him alone with his lover. “I didn’t feel...” he said, but didn’t finish.

“Then why not have a little private bet with me?”

She took his hand and led him to the front rail of the box. When they stopped, Joel’s hand came to rest on the small of her back and the feel of bare flesh told him that her long cape was as illusory as the rest of her outfit.

“I...”

“Look at them,” she insisted, gesturing at the gathered racers.

There must have been more than a hundred contestants crowded around the start line. Cripples sprawled in the dirt, twisting their torsos, swinging their arms to limber up. Amputees rested on their stumps, staring out along the course, excluding the rest of the world from their thoughts. Able-bodied helpers were geeing the competitors up, strapping protective padding onto arms and bodies, removing their wheeled carts from the road behind the starting line.

“Study them,” said Oriole. “Who do you think will do well? If your contestant finishes before mine then you can do with my body whatever you choose. No limits.”

“And if yours finishes first?”

“The choice is mine, the body yours.” As she spoke, Joel felt a sudden squeezing sensation in his crotch. He looked down, but Oriole’s hands were resting innocently before her. Then one of her hands squeezed the rail and Joel felt it again, enclosing him, uncoiling his manhood.

She leaned closer to him, and said, “I have some tricks I didn’t show you.”

Joel’s chosen contestant was a slender young man whose body stopped halfway down the thigh. His name was Anton Echtal and it was one Joel had heard mentioned frequently from the clusters around the bet-takers near the starting line.

“You choose well,” said Oriole. “He has been successful at every sport he has attempted. He won the Tule road race two years ago.”

Joel looked at her, confused. The race at Tule was for able-bodied runners: he could see no way that a man with such a handicap could win at Tule.

“I told you,” said Oriole. “Contestants go to great lengths for the honour of racing at Two Torrents. Echtal had achieved all that he could achieve in conventional competition. Seven months ago he lay himself down across the main line between Tule and Annatras. A steam train severed his legs, ever since which he has trained to compete at Two Torrents. A lot of people think he will make the change of category very well.”

“And your contestant?”

Oriole pointed to the far side of the starting line where a dark-skinned man in thick leather gloves was limbering up by pulling himself up against an iron bar set into a wall. He was broad across the shoulders and his arms were long; his legs were atrophied and bound tightly together with shining, banded snakeskin.

“His name is Fever. I trained him myself.”

Joel’s surprise was interrupted by the sudden, unexpected clanging of a bell, the sound rebounding around the walls of the valley. Immediately, a roar rose up from the onlookers and Joel leaned forward over the rail.

The contestants surged scrappily forward in a tangle of flailing arms, bodies flipping like fish out of water. A small group collided and collapsed in a heap, then more fell and became tangled up behind and to either side, so that soon a great heap of writhing bodies had formed, blocking perhaps two-thirds of the road.

Joel tried to make sense of the chaos but was lost until suddenly he saw a figure out ahead of the mêlée: a slender figure, risen up straight, walking at a remarkable pace on the stumps of his legs. It was Echtal – thanks to the chaotic start, Joel’s runner had carved out an enormous lead within minutes.

After a distance of about a hundred standard paces, the road plunged sharply downhill. When he reached this point, Echtal raised his arms and tucked his head down so that his truncated body formed a near-perfect circle. With a slight squirming movement, he started to roll forward, head over stumps, a wheel made of human flesh.

Soon he was lost to sight.

Behind him, twenty or so others had avoided the fallen and were dragging themselves, rolling, hobbling on stumps, in pursuit of Anton Echtal. Back at the starting line, the heap of fallen contestants had turned into a bloody brawl as the fallen struggled free, lashing out with fists and heads, yelling and screaming into each other’s faces.

Joel glanced at Oriole. Her protégé was nowhere to be seen. “It often starts like this,” she said to Joel. “The spectacle of cripple fighting cripple is one of the reasons for the event’s tremendous popularity. I warned Fever of this – I did not want him to become involved.”

Suddenly, she smiled and Joel turned back to the race. For a moment it looked little different, then he spotted the man called Fever. He was hauling himself over the heap of writhing bodies from behind. One great arm swung forward and found a grip, then the other swung beyond it, hauling his body along. He reached the top of the seething heap and then started to drag himself down. Soon he was back on the road, his long, muscular arms swinging in near-hypnotic rhythm. He looked as if he was swimming along the dusty road. When he reached the top of the slope his pace did not falter and soon, he too, was lost from sight.

The afternoon took the form of a travelling party. Shortly after the front-runners had disappeared and most of the fighting had petered out, Principal Amer and his entourage descended into a convoy of carriages. The police rode ahead, clearing the crowds away from a series of side-streets that ran in parallel with the main road through Two Torrents.

Joel and three of his men chose to ride their own horses in the convoy; he liked to remind himself he was different to all these noble families upon whose hospitality he depended.

About a leap and a half down-valley an entire house had been commandeered. The race was in sight, back along the road, as the Principal’s party took up its vantage point. Joel and Oriole watched as Anton Echtal raced past them, his entire body lurching rhythmically as he hobbled from stump to stump.

Behind him, Fever seemed to be closing the gap, his great, swinging arms eating up the distance. Already, the rest of the field was far behind; it was clearly going to be a race between the two of them.

As the Principal’s party worked its way down-valley, Joel allowed himself to become drunk. He picked at food whenever he could, replenishing his reserves.

The finishing line was painted across the cobbles at the entrance to a wide, tree-lined square. Crowds thronged the roadside, while others picnicked in the square, or in the gardens that fringed one of the valley’s two rivers, which had paralleled the road for a short distance. Bands were playing and jugglers and puppeteers worked the crowds for spare change.

A raised stage had been erected immediately next to the finishing line and this was where Principal Amer led his party.

Joel climbed the steps, then turned and offered Oriole his hand in an exaggerated display of manners. “Tonight,” he said softly, as she passed him. “You can pay our debt tonight.” She ignored him, and went to join Amer and his wife, Claudia.

They were standing by a podium, upon which rested a pair of gold running shoes. “Our prize,” said one of the other guests, smiling indulgently at Joel. “The winner gets a pair of shoes. Isn’t it splendid?”

Joel turned away, suddenly wishing he hadn’t drunk so much.

The swelling roar of the crowd was the first indication that the race was drawing to a close. Joel went to stand as close as he could to the front of the platform. The last time he had seen anything his man had still been out ahead, his movements more ragged and uneven but his steady pace undiminished. There had been another hill and he had tucked his head down and looped his arms as before and rolled like a wheel even farther into the lead.

Now, it was Echtal who came into sight first, but the gap had narrowed dramatically. It looked as if the amputee had misjudged the race, and he was flagging visibly with every heave of his body. Fever was only a body-length or so behind and it seemed inevitable that he would move out and pass the leader within seconds.

“Anton! Go
on!
You’re nearly there!” cried Joel, joining with the roaring masses. Those around him raised eyebrows and edged away, but Joel didn’t care. “Go on!” he cried. “Go
on!
”

Echtal, with his upright gait, was the first to see how close they were to the finish line and he managed to summon the last dregs of energy in a final burst that took him further ahead. Behind him, his chin leaving a trail of blood as it bumped along the ground, Fever seemed unaware of anything but maintaining his steady pace.

Suddenly Joel realised that Oriole had come to stand at his side. She was staring at the race intently and Joel thought that what he saw in her expression was the struggle to accept the inevitability that she would lose. “I’ll be kind,” he said. “I’ll be ever so kind.”

She ignored him. “Go on, Fever,” she said, so softly Joel barely heard her words. “Fever: go on.”

The dark man’s pace faltered for the first time in the entire race. His head turned as if to look up at the Principal’s party and Joel saw just how much it had suffered from being dragged through the dirt, pounded on the cobbles for near to three hours.

From the bloody pulp, eyes stared out, the lids pulled back or torn away to reveal enormous whites. Lips peeled apart to reveal an awful, toothless grin.

Fever spat a mouthful of frothy red spittle into the dirt, then flopped back onto his belly and resumed his crawl.

Joel watched in horror at the renewed frenzy of the man’s swinging arms, hauling him along at more than double his previous pace.

Ahead of him, young Echtal appeared to sense that something was happening – perhaps from some animal level of perception, perhaps just from the changed tone of the crowd.

Fever caught him about fifteen standard paces short of the line. Echtal was struggling frantically, by then no doubt aware of the relentless slap-slap-slap of Fever’s gloved hands on the road behind.

Then, with one more looping swing of the arm, one of Fever’s hands fell heavily onto Echtal’s back. The impact sent him sprawling forward in the dirt. The sound of his head striking the ground was audible even above the roar of the crowd.

Another swing of the arm and Fever was dragging himself on top of the fallen runner. Another and he was right on top, his new rhythm unfaltering. And then Oriole’s contestant dragged himself onward, clear of the body, across the winning line to claim his pair of golden shoes.

~

“Everyone was gathering around Oriole, congratulating her, praising her,” said Joel, staring down into the fire. “I felt sick at what I’d witnessed. And I’ll admit that I was starting to feel scared. I realised then that Oriole had been playing games with me and that she was far more than the merely Talented bitch she had claimed to be. I began to think about slipping away. I found Marsalo and Cadez with the horses and I swung myself up onto Harken, here. But then I heard Oriole’s voice.

“I turned and she was smiling at me. I made a brave fist of it and said, ‘So it’s you who has me, then. Tonight?’ She shook her head and said, ‘No, Joel Carmady. Right now.’”

Joel shuffled his hooves in the dust. He spread his hands wide and smiled. “I looked around and there were people everywhere. I thought she was going to humiliate me by having me there in front of everyone. As the boy said: I think with my balls even at the worst of times.

“‘You were going to run away,’ she said. ‘Maybe I should keep you for next year’s race – Fever will be past his best by then. Would you lay yourself across a railway line for me, Joel?’

“I shook my head. I told her I liked my legs too much to part company with them. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If you like legs so much, then perhaps four would be better than two?’ She laughed at me and turned away. I felt a strange sensation in my legs then: a shifting, a pulling. I didn’t understand what was happening. Oriole’s riddles made me suddenly angry and I tried to jump down and run after her. Needless to say, that was beyond me. Harken and I have never been parted since that day nineteen months ago.”

Leeth stared at the form bulging beneath Joel’s blanket. He remembered the brief glimpse of human and horse flesh merging. He tore his eyes away.

“What became of your runner?” asked Cotoche. She rocked gently from side to side, easing Chi into sleep in her lap.

“After I had tried for some time to part myself from my mount, I went with Cadez and Marsalo into the street. Someone had dragged Anton out of the way of the rest of the contestants who even then were struggling towards the finishing line. He lay face down, an old woman smoothing his hair back, pressing a herbal compress against his forehead. There was a trail of blood the length of his back, to mark where Fever had passed over him. I couldn’t reach him from my permanent mount, so I had Marsalo lift him as carefully as he could up to my level, where he could be laid across in front of me.