Entangled (41 page)

She wasn’t so sure but Rotas settled the matter for her. Cupping a hand under Bahat’s grizzled head, the elder looked into his eyes, seeming to await some signal or affirmation, and then very gently slit his throat.

As Ria watched Bahat’s lifeblood soaking into the earth and heard his last choking gasps, something changed in the distant shouting of the Illimani. The roars of approval had stopped. Now they were baying like wolves.

‘THEY’RE COMING!’ Vulp yelled as he hurtled down the steps of the lookout tower, his white hair flying. ‘THOUSANDS OF THEM.’

Before she ran, Ria remembered Grigo.

Knife in hand, she hastened to where his body lay sprawled, his leggings around his ankles, and kicked him in the ribs with the toe of her moccasin.

As she’d suspected, he was still alive. With each laboured breath little bubbles of blood frothed out of the hatchet wound that split his face from his right eye to his nose.

‘Grigo’, she hissed. ‘Wake up.’ She tugged off his leggings and put them on. They were too big but she belted them tight. Then she kicked him again – ‘Wake up, you piece of shit’ – and his undamaged left eye fluttered open.

Good. He recognised her.

She stooped down, gathered his testicles, and gelded him with a single
savage blow. She didn’t take his penis because she didn’t want him to bleed to death.

She hoped he’d live.

Relishing his screams, she threw his balls in his face and sprinted out of the meeting ground, soon catching up with the rearguard of Grondin’s braves as they fled north towards the Snake.

The Illimani had begun their charge on the south-eastern side of the camp, at least a thousand paces south of the lookout tower and the meeting ground, but Ria couldn’t guess how much of a head start she still had after dealing with Grigo. She placed her foot badly and stumbled. A shock of pain jolted through her bruised and battered body, and an Ugly she’d never seen before, one of the newcomers Grondin had brought, reached out a strong hand to steady her as she ran.

Their retreat lay through the camp’s once populous north-western sector, lying between the meeting ground and the river. Rows of close-packed wattle shelters hid their pursuers but Ria knew from their excited shouts that they were closing in. She kept looking back over her shoulder, expecting new volleys of the terrible spears, but none appeared.

Had the Illimani spent all their projectiles on the meeting-ground massacre and not yet gathered them up?

Moments later Ria burst out through the last line of shelters and the river lay two hundred paces ahead.

But she couldn’t make any sense of what she saw there. There were Uglies everywhere and it seemed that a herd of reindeer had crouched down on the riverbank and somehow been persuaded not to flee while wooden platforms, lashed together from clusters of straight branches about the length of a man and the thickness of Ria’s arm, were placed on their backs. Each platform was supported by four reindeer. As she drew closer she saw the animals were legless and headless. But it wasn’t until she got her hands on one of them that she discovered it was just an empty skin stitched together into a tightly closed bag and filled with air.

Ten Ugly braves picked up one of the platforms with its inflated reindeer-skins, jumped into the Snake with it and –
What magic was this?
– the contraption floated on the fast-flowing waters. ‘It is called a jaala’ – Ria heard Grondin’s thought-voice before she sensed him looming up behind her. ‘Uglies have known this magic since the long-ago.’

The braves had already clambered up onto the jaala and now sat suspended on it, a hand’s breadth above the water, carried along by the current at great speed towards the west – the direction of Secret Place. Two of them held long flat blades of wood which they jabbed into the river, not guiding the little vessel across to the other side but keeping it in the midstream instead. Suddenly Ria grasped what Grondin had meant about using the river. The Uglies weren’t trying to cross it with the jaalas, they were going to use it to stage a spectacular escape and let its current carry them back towards their hideout.

She watched another group of braves enter the water, and another and another. ‘We have twelve jaalas,’ said Grondin as more continued to take to the water. ‘Enough for us all.’

Ria glanced at the northern edge of the camp. The Illimani were almost upon them and Grondin was already working fast, lashing Brindle to the platform of the last remaining jaala. Then, in the same instant of shock, she and Grondin both registered that Jergat was nowhere to be seen – had not, in fact, been with them when they’d fled the meeting ground. ‘He went to find my throwing stones,’ Ria remembered. Grondin nodded, his head cocked to one side. ‘Alive,’ he said, his gaze turning inwards. ‘Running. Illimani right behind him. Coming to us.’

Bont, Vulp and Rotas had drawn to one side on the riverbank and were hanging back, muttering to each other. Ria could understand why. None of them, including herself, had seen anything like a jaala in their lives before. Riding on water! The very idea made her head spin. But it was either that, and some hope of escape, or stay here and certainly die, so it was obvious what had to be done. ‘THERE’S NO TIME FOR THIS!’ she yelled at her Clansmen. ‘Get on the fucking jaala
now!’

There were no complaints – although Ligar refused to be tied down in the way that Brindle was, insisting, despite his injury, that he could fend for himself. Oplimar, Grondin, Bont, Vulp and Driff lifted the jaala into the water and held it there against the current to allow first Ligar and Rotas and then all the rest of them to board. The elder’s feet were unsteady and he had to crawl on his hands and knees to his position at the back of the little craft.

Ria waited until last, scanning the line of shelters two hundred paces behind them, sending out her thought-voice –
We are here, Jergat, we are here.
She felt a huge wash of fear – his fear – rolling back at her and suddenly, like a wish come true, the lean, short-statured Ugly
exploded into view from between the rows of huts, his hands full of salvaged items, and began to sprint towards the river. He raised his head and she saw utter terror in his eyes. Then a thousand Illimani burst forth behind him, screaming bestial war cries, their eyes wide, their teeth bared, their naked bodies painted with blood.

‘It’s going to be close,’ Ria told Grondin. She had one foot on the jaala, which was bucking and bumping against the current, and one foot on the bank. She was acutely aware of the moment, which seemed to extend for ever, as Jergat thundered towards them. But the fastest Illimani braves were closing the distance behind him. Putting on a burst of speed one caught up and raised a stabbing spear above his head. ‘Behind you, Jergat!’ Ria sent her thought-voice. ‘Dodge to your left.’ He reacted at once – the spear thrust missed him and the brave stumbled.

Now there were just ten paces to go. Ria gave the signal to launch the jaala, and at five paces Jergat threw himself into space and landed crouched on the platform amongst his companions as the little craft was wrenched away from the bank. For a moment it juddered and veered as though it might pitch them all into the river, but then returned to balance and began to skim along on its floats. Grondin and Oplimar took control of its direction, using flat wooden slabs like those she’d seen on the other jaalas.

Amongst the objects Jergat had salvaged from the battlefield were Ligar’s bow and three arrows. ‘Give me those,’ the archer demanded. Mastering his pain, he sat upright, nocked an arrow and drew back the string.

Ria followed his eyeline and saw he’d taken aim at a young Illimani, naked as they all were, who stood amongst the swelling crowd of braves lining the edge of the riverbank. His body was lean and hard, red-gold hair fell in thick waves to below his waist, and he might have been very beautiful had he not been covered from head to foot in blood.

The current was sweeping the jaala away, increasing the range. Grimacing, Ligar drew back the string to its maximum extent and took the shot. Ria watched the arrow flying true, a sure kill, but at the last moment the young man sidestepped lightning fast, snatched the shaft from the air and snapped it between his hands.

Then they were out of arrow range, heading towards mid-river. Ria sensed a peculiar force of personality emanating from the beautiful
blood-soaked Illimani, and she knew, with a sudden shiver of certainty, that he was Sulpa.

Weirdly, in that instant of recognition, it was as though he had also recognised her.

His eyes followed her, tracking the jaala as it was swept away. With lazy, almost careless movements he unslung a spear-thrower from his back and held out his hand. Ria’s heart fell when she saw another brave reach over and pass him one of the short spears.

After that things happened very fast. There was a whirl of movement and the spear disappeared up into the sun and shot down again straight towards the jaala. Vulp didn’t even see it coming. He was seated at the front, on the right side, above one of the inflated reindeer-skins. The flint spike took him through the spine, exited at his groin and plunged between his legs where it punched through the skin of the float, releasing the air it contained in a great hiss.

At once the jaala sagged lower in the water, nose down on the right, ceased its smooth forward movement and began to turn in dizzying circles.

From the warriors on the bank there came a growl of anticipation.

For an instant, as she held on to the Blue Angel’s hand, Leoni could imagine she had a mother who loved her, who put her first, whose presence was so reassuring she could vanquish all terrors, whose strength was so great no enemy could defeat her.

They moved to the middle of the immense granite chamber and a long silver wand appeared in the Angel’s free hand. She touched its point to the flagstones and made Leoni turn slowly anticlockwise with her as she inscribed a circle around them both. Even before it was complete an unearthly glow had began to spill out from its rim and now the floor dropped away beneath them and they tumbled, as Leoni had guessed they must, into another of the familiar tunnels of light.

She had no sense of up or down. But she was out of body, flying with an angel! What could be cooler than that? Around them she could see the opaque glowing walls of the tunnel shooting by and she realised they were moving fast – much faster than she had ever done before – but she felt no fear.

Leoni was thinking
This is where I want to go, this is who I want to see
when the journey ended as suddenly as it had begun. They swirled through the last curves and turns of the tunnel, decelerated, and materialised in a high-ceilinged, spotlessly white circular room, fifty feet across. The room was bare of all furniture, but the floor was carpeted in thick white fleece. Panoramic windows provided an unbroken three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view over a futuristic cityscape very far below.

In a body again, clad once more in a simple smock, Leoni walked barefoot to the windows and gazed out at the two suns of the land where everything is known. She had recognised the city at once. It straddled the floor of a lush green valley. The Angel had shown her its towers, obelisks, ziggurats and canals just before sending her to Sulpa.

‘I feel like I’m in a computer game,’ Leoni confided. ‘Sulpa, Jack, my
childhood, my parents, you, Don Apolinar, these tunnels that run between different realms and worlds, monsters, demons … Is this where you finally tell me what’s going on?’

‘That is my intention.’ The Angel waved her hand and a row of the floor-to-ceiling windows slid back, giving access to a wide balcony beyond. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Shall we talk outside?’

Two striped canvas deckchairs stood on the balcony. The Angel settled into one and indicated that Leoni should take the other and for a few moments they looked out, saying nothing, over the strangely empty and silent city that lay far below.

‘What do you know about the problem of evil?’ asked the Angel at last.

‘I know evil when I see it,’ Leoni retorted. ‘It’s come into my life. It used to come into my bed. I can put a face to evil and it’s the face of my father.’

‘Yes. But how would you define this evil? What is it? What’s it all about?’

‘Evil takes an innocent child and violates her again and again, and afterwards tries to convince her she imagined the whole thing. Evil takes whatever’s good and tries to turn it into shit. Evil takes whatever wants to fly and tries to tie it down. Evil takes whatever’s beautiful and tries to make it hideous. Evil takes the truth and tries to make it look false. Evil can’t abide love and tries to turn it into hate. That’s what I know about evil.’