Riding the Serpent's Back Read Free Page B

never let any of us die.”
    Leeth worked saliva into his mouth. Under his palm the baby wriggled. Naively, he had not considered the likelihood that Chi must still practise his dark healing arts out here in the wilds.
    Just then, Cotoche squeezed his hand. “Look,” she said.
    Below, a snake-like procession of travellers on horses and the reptilian mokes was climbing a steep fold in the continental crust. Ahead of them, the tattered remains of the jungle became even more patchy and scrubby, perhaps an indication that they were making progress towards the Michtlan Ridge and so down the gradient of ecological complexity and progression.
    Cotoche was pointing ahead, beyond the lip of the hill the travellers were climbing. She had spotted a town, an ugly grey scar on the next roll of hill, coughing the black smoke of industry into the sky like some great, malignant fumarole.
    Leeth didn’t know if this was good news or not, but he thought a command-shape at Sky and they side-slipped and swept in a wide circle back towards the rest of the group.
    ~
    The travellers gathered just below the crest of the hill to decide what to do. Most favoured skirting around the town – supplies of food were high and they had stocked up with water only the previous day.
    Chi, as was his way, changed everything. “You’re being very sensible,” he said, in a thickly sarcastic tone. He swung his drink canister so that an arc of spiced brandy sprayed out. “But why should we slope around in the shadows, afraid to show our faces? Why are we here, on the Serpent’s Back? Because it’s a free place. No regulations, no holy decrees yelled at you from the latest poster on the wall. If we have no freedom here then there’s nowhere left for us to go.” Even when he was drunk, Chi could win any argument with ease.
    Leeth chose to walk with the others, sending Sky out to roam. He had no wish to draw undue attention to himself or to the travellers.
    As their ragged procession approached the settlement, Jaryd said, through his thick tangle of beard, “Mining town. Maybe a hard time ahead, you hear me?” From the increased twitching of his tailed hair, it was clear that he was worried.
    Most settlements on the Serpent’s Back were agrarian trading centres where the widely dispersed farming communities came for supplies, and to trade their produce with the agents of the northern city-states. This town was larger, its buildings uniform and blocky, all erected together according to a grid street-plan instead of casually cast in the ramshackle disorder of the market towns. Clusters of slag heaps and mining gantries were spread around the fringes of the settlement, large ironworks and processing plants huddled either side of the street as the group passed through. The Serpent’s Back was a rich source of iron, copper, gold and all sorts of minerals used by industry and agriculture, most of which was processed and transported to the cities of the Rift valley in the north. The mines were scattered across the continent’s surface, but occasionally, as here, an entire town would be constructed on a particularly rich site and it would become a centre for processing raw materials from the entire region.
    “Fifteen years, I’d say.” Jaryd was referring to the age of the settlement: fifteen years ago, this plot of land would have been 550 leaps closer to the Michtlan Ridge, at about the edge of the region where the land became more stable and so inhabitable. The town would ride the Serpent’s Back for another eighty or ninety years and then all that could be removed would be transplanted to a virgin site near to the Ridge and the remainder would be abandoned to fall unwanted into the Burn Plain.
    Jaryd was muttering to himself. He had been the last to back down in the debate about whether to avoid the town or not. He saw no sense in crossing what he saw as enemy territory, and was too pragmatic to care whether any abstract ideas of freedom were challenged