Riding the Serpent's Back (56 page)

Noname reached out and took Monahl’s hand. “In the language of my people,” she said, “the word for ‘prophecy’ can also be translated as ‘warning’. I knew you had the Sight, as soon as I found you – your presence reached out to me even before I saw your fallen body. But you must not think that what you see is fixed. What you see has not yet happened. Your Art reaches out into the shapes time lays before us: it finds patterns where others see nothing.

“It’s like...like when I walk through a village. Ordinary people cannot see me at all: no bells, so I’m not a woman, my skin is even whiter than an outsider’s so I cannot be human. They don’t see me. A person with the Art might see me, yet even they only see the shapes I make, they don’t see
me
. Through your Art the Lord grants you glimpses of what might be, but you never see what
is
until it actually happens.”

“So if I warn Chi, he might survive?”

Noname nodded. “Use the Lord’s gift,” she said, “and your brother will survive.”

~

As she walked up the gentle incline, Monahl realised that what she had taken to be a forest was in reality no more than a small copse, tucked onto the hillside.

Noname accompanied her to its fringe, and then stood staring after her for a long time, a pink shape against the dark backdrop.

Every so often, Monahl looked back and the healer was still there, watching her go.

Over to her left, the great basin of the soda-plain spread out, glaring fiercely under the burning sun. The whole landscape flickered and shimmered, as if it really was another world entirely.

Monahl lowered her head and climbed the hill. She had to make up for the time she had lost. She had to find Herold, and then return to warn Chi that he was at risk. It sounded so easy, put like that. She did not even know how she could persuade Herold to join her.

She came to the crest of the hill. Before her was a dip and then another great fold in the landscape, even higher than the first. It would be like this all the way up into the Veneth Heights. It was going to be hard without her horse.

She looked back and for a moment she could not even see the copse.

She peered down the slope, realising that the heat haze had spread from the soda-plain, reaching out to engulf the small patch of pine trees. The small, pale notch in the dark blob must be Noname, she thought, still watching her on her way.

She rubbed her eyes. The distortions of the hot air were making her feel dizzy and disorientated.

And when she looked again, the dark patch of pine trees was gone. No matter how hard she looked, she could not see it. Had it all been merely a continuation of her ordeal – one long, painful vision? She looked at the skin of her hands and arms, now completely healed. She felt in her pack for the new water-bottle Noname had given her, the biscuits and berries she had insisted she take for her journey. They were still there.

She shook her head and turned. She had a long way to go.

She started to walk.

~

Monahl came upon a track just below the next ridge of hill, just as Noname had described. All she had to do was follow this rough road and it would take her all the way to the City of the Divine Wall.

She turned north and continued to walk, following the ancient trade route between the city and the plains of the Morani. Meat and precious metals would travel south along this track, to be exchanged for the caustic harvest of soda from the flats, which would go to Divine, and on to the cities of the north where it would be used to make soap, glass and woodpulp.

Occasionally, she glimpsed the shimmering pink basin over a dip in the hills to her left, and beyond it she saw the line of black volcanoes. At first she had taken their white caps to be snow, but Qobi had explained to her that it was lava: when it first erupted the lava was black, but within a day or so the moisture in the air had converted most of it to pure sodium carbonate. When this white ash was washed down into the basin there was nowhere for it to escape and so it concentrated in the flats, as the sun burnt off the water. Monahl’s skin stung just to see it again.

The difference made by a few hundred standard leaps in altitude was incredible. The air itself seemed thinner and there was a strange contradiction between the persistent chill of the air and the burning rays of the sun. The ground was stony, and where there was soil it was light and dusty. Scrubby clumps of thyme and box clustered on the hillside, with occasional stands of stunted pine trees and thorn bushes. Wherever she could, Monahl ate the berries of the latter, but they were sharp and almost without juice. Noname had warned her that water would be hard to find in these hills, so she took it where she could. Out here, human settlement was limited by the availability of water: the prevailing winds channelled most clouds down the Rift to the Burn Plain so that rainfall here was sporadic at best. To the west of the Veneth Heights the deserts began.

That day, she saw no one. The only animals larger than a crow were a herd of wild mokes, barging down a stand of young pine trees on the far hillside. Looking for birds’ nests, she supposed, or fresh shoots that would otherwise have been out of reach. She was glad they were so far away. Mokes were normally scavengers and cowards, but there were many stories of a lone traveller being killed by a wild herd, either by accident, or deliberately for food.

She kept a look out for other signs of danger. There might be snakes or wolves out here; there was probably not enough cover for anything as large as a bear. The big tawny eagles were rumoured to have an occasional taste for a lone human, too, and coursers might equally take their luck if they were hungry enough.

She walked all day, aware of the risks but not dwelling on them, content that she had avoided the most dangerous beast of all: her fellow humans.

It was good to be alone.

She decided to sleep in a rocky niche she had found tucked into the hillside. Here, a spring emerged from beneath a crag of granite, only to sink into the ground again five paces down the slope. It was a substantial cairn of stones by the track that had drawn her attention to this place. After adding a stone of her own to the pile, she had followed her ears to the tuneful sound of fresh water.

She stripped off and washed, then lay full length in a natural basin and let the water flow over her. The water was so cold it might nearly have been ice and she had to leave it soon and dry herself as best she could.

She gathered kindling from the desultory patches of scrub nearby, but all the more substantial firewood had long since been gathered and burnt by travelling traders. Her meagre attempt at a fire guttered and sparked and soon burnt itself out.

She wrapped herself in every piece of clothing she had, but still the night air chilled her to the bone. She lay shivering, thinking longingly of the blankets she had been forced to leave with Qobi, of the luxurious body-heat of her horse. It would be a harsh irony if she had survived the soda-plains merely to freeze to death on her first night in the foothills.

She set off before it was light. Just before dawn was the coldest part of the night and she could no longer bear to stay still.

She had to break a skin of ice from the truncated stream. She made herself drink the chill water, long and deep, remembering Noname’s advice to take water wherever she could.

The walking warmed her quickly, and even the fatigue was not as bad as she had feared. She had endured far worse than a cold, sleepless night before now.

The climb up into the foothills meant that, even in the middle of the day, the sun’s rays lost their potency. Monahl soon began to fear the night ahead.

In mid-afternoon, she came across a young goatherd.

The track passed through a notch between two hills and as Monahl approached this narrowing she heard a sudden bleating. Soon, the path ahead was filled with thirty or forty jostling, piebald goats, squeezing through the space between the walls of rock rising at either side.

She scrambled up the steep bank and clung onto a crack in the cliff as the goats rampaged over where she had stood.

The goatherd appeared then, whistling and calling. He was a tall and thin adolescent, with a wisp of beard and a sparse moustache. He saw Monahl and nodded, as if it was not at all unusual to come across a traveller clinging to the face of the cliff to get out of the way of his goats.

Freeing a hand, Monahl touched lips, chin, nose and forehead and said, “Please, do you speak the True tongue?”

The goatherd nodded, but did nothing else to confirm that he could.

“Can I buy a blanket from you?” she asked. “Some warm clothing?”

He shrugged, then gestured back over his shoulder.

Monahl waited until he had passed, then jumped down and hurried on her way. Soon the track plunged down the hillside towards a cluster of stone huts, each with a twist of smoke coming out of a central opening in the roof.

As Monahl entered the village, women and children glanced at her with little apparent curiosity. She approached one of them and asked if there might be someone willing to sell her what she required, and if she might find somewhere to sleep for the night. These people barely acknowledged that they understood her, but she ended up with a heavy woven poncho and a begrudging invitation to sleep on the floor of one of the huts.

Suspended from the eaves of the huts she saw a number of effigies of Sheera, god of medicine and healers. She wondered if she had some local significance, as Huipo did for the Morani, but when she said something to this effect her hostess stared at her as if she was stupid.

“It is Sheera’s feast day,” the woman said, enunciating her words carefully, each syllable heavy with the harsh accent of the region. She clearly did not believe Monahl’s claim to be a priest, and this admission of ignorance served only to confirm her scepticism.

“But...”

Sheera’s Day should be long past. Monahl counted the days in her head, from when she had first arrived in the soda-plains to the many days lost as Noname had healed her injuries. Sheera’s Day should have been the day after she left the Morani village...

If this really was Sheera’s Day then the time Monahl had spent with the albino healer had melted away to nothing.

She remembered her last look down the hill to where Noname’s copse had been, only to see it vanish into the shimmering heat haze of the soda-plain. She had wondered then if her time with Noname had merely been an extension of the vision she had experienced out on the soda-flats. But her injuries! The water bottle! She looked at her hands, and saw that the last signs of her ordeal were almost completely healed.

“Sheera’s Day, of course,” she said. “I’ve been travelling so long...I lost track.”

The woman shook her head and told Monahl how much it would cost to sleep on her floor with the hens and the children and the caged lizards being fattened for the pot.

~

The City of the Divine Wall filled the head of a valley that was tucked away at the heart of this mountainous region, where the foothills finally started to rise up into the Veneth Heights proper. After passing for five days through such barren, lifeless lands, the valley appeared as a leafy green paradise to Monahl’s eyes. In reality, it was not so much verdant as merely less barren than the surrounding landscape.

She saw the valley for the first time late one morning. The track was wider now, and she frequently passed traders on their way to and from the outlying settlements. Where the track passed over another fold of hill it spread out and there was a little stone shrine standing sentinel. Monahl went inside and prayed at the effigies and the candles lit by passing travellers. She had nothing to offer, so she removed one of her blessed bracelets and hooked it over Samna the Preserver’s jutting nose. Whenever she prayed she thought of Freya. Zigané seemed so far away.

When she left the shrine she saw for the first time the view it commanded: the valley which it had no doubt been erected to bless.

Tall trees – themselves an unusual sight in this region – formed a ragged line down the spine of the valley, presumably following a water-course. Spread out from either bank were fields stacked up on terraces that climbed the sides of the valley. She could see gangs of labourers working in the fields with primitive digging sticks and hoes, scarves wrapped around their faces to protect their lungs from the dusty soil they disturbed.

Her eyes returned to follow the course of the trees, and eventually she spotted the river they flanked: a rocky torrent, plunging over its boulder-strewn bed in a mass of white froth and spray. It emerged from the foot of a cliff that abruptly truncated the head of the valley.

Then she saw that the road, too, passed through an opening in this rock face, and she realised that this was no cliff, it was the Divine Wall, itself. A sheer screen of rock, stretching right across the valley for a distance that must have been easily a leap at its base and half as much again at its highest point, perhaps a hundred paces above the floor of the valley.

The wall cut off a wedge-shaped section of valley, where the city itself had been built. On the remaining two sides the city was protected by the abruptly rising sides of the mountains themselves, so high and treacherous that no man had ever been able to approach Divine from the far side: the only access was through the wall.

The wall was said to have been created by a catastrophic earthquake at the beginning of this Era. Entire mountains had shaken and heaved, so that great blocks of rock cleaved and slid against each other. The valley had been opened up in this upheaval, and then a slice of supernaturally resilient rock had slid across to cut off the head of the valley. Herold traced his line back to the first mage of this city, a woman who had Charmed a pact that blessed this valley with a new stability, locking the wall of rock in place to provide an impenetrable stronghold for her people.

Monahl had heard Herold talk of his home city on many occasions, but nothing quite prepared her for the sight of this immense sheet of rock suspended across the valley.

She gathered herself and resumed her journey, suddenly dreading the encounter that was to come.