Read Online Riding the Serpent's Back by Keith Brooke - Free Book Online Page B

Melved with silks were to be dashed, but his nose for a sale had not failed him. After a brief, muttered exchange, Captain Esquellion dipped his head to the trader and looked up at Cotoche. “You’re Rey’s girl, aren’t you?” he said, his tone as friendly as that he had always used with her father.
    She nodded, not ready to trust her voice.
    “Cotoche, isn’t it?”
    She nodded again, and tried to ignore him.
    “How would you like to work in Consul Melved’s household? I’ll take you straight there.”
    She shook her head, and then, just to emphasise her gesture, said, “No. I work for Roch.”
    But Roch shook his head now. “The officer said he will take you to the Consul’s residence,” he said. “So that is where you will go.”
    She looked at him, appalled. She couldn’t think what to say.
    Roch was adamant. “The price the officer mentioned is fair and I have accepted it as compensation for the loss of my most treasured worker.” He bowed his head and smiled, as if he had merely complimented her on her weaving, or the way the silk hung from the curve of her backside.
    Then, before she could say or do anything, Esquellion reached for her and pulled her down from where she was still standing atop the stall.
    She started to kick and curse, calling Esquellion and Roch all the foulest names she had ever heard anyone use in the fields or the refugee camp or the street. Esquellion merely laughed and patted her rump as he swung her over his shoulder and set off through the crowd.
    Just before they left the market hall, Cotoche sensed a fresh commotion and when she was able to look up briefly she saw Chi and an old man she later came to know as Karlas scuffling with three of Esquellion’s men. Then she was out in the street, being roughly handed over to a militia man sitting astride one of the mokes her dead father had once trained.
    ~
    Cotoche broke off her story when Chi arrived home, his nose bloody, tears flooding down his face. She cleaned him up, and held him until the crying had stopped.
    “It was one of the raggies,” he sobbed, eventually. ‘The raggies’ was what he called the gangs of dishevelled street children who roamed the slums. Nearly all of them were older than Chi, and many resented the three year-old’s high profile, the way he mixed so easily with the real brokers of street power instead of working his way up through the kids’ gangs first. They had picked fights with him before now.
    Leeth took him into the hut and readied him for bed. The last thing Chi said, before giving in to sleep, was, “Nobody knows what it’s like, Leeth. To be like this. I hate this body I’m in. So clumsy. So difficult to control. So weak . None of them really believes who I am yet. None of them believes who I’m going to be. None—” And then he was asleep, like a candle being snuffed.
    Outside, Leeth sat with Cotoche again. “Why did Melved want you?” he asked.
    Cotoche looked at him pointedly. “Why do you think?” she said. “As I say: he noticed me before, when I was barely out of childhood. Maybe he even liked me more as a little girl, who knows? Esquellion recognised me at the market and he remembered the Consul’s comments about me. He saw an opportunity to win favour so he bought me from Roch and had me taken back to the house, where he planned to present me to his master as a gift.”
    ~
    At Melved’s house, Cotoche was given into the care of the domestic staff, although ‘care’ was hardly the right word. The women distrusted and despised her: the older ones were mostly bitter and distrustful and assumed she was a prostitute; the younger ones were either jealous or had been through the same experience themselves. Even those who recalled Cotoche from her father’s days in Melved’s employ resented her for the part they themselves had to play in her presentation to the Consul. The men, similarly, assumed she was no more than a street prostitute, being cleaned up for the