The Great Wheel (16 page)

What little open-sky agriculture there was in the Magulf was clustered over the first few inland kilometers, where the autumn rains still fell. At first, John and Laurie had passed farms and plantations, stunted orangegroves protected by ferocious pony-sized dogs. Then flocks of skinny sheep picking over slopes of withered grass. Farther on, there was nothing.

They stopped at noon by a roadside foline vendor, and John waited near the van as Laurie haggled for fuel. Reddish brown sandstone hills shimmered in the east. The air was filled with the droning hiss of the wind. The old woman who operated the handpump was half hidden in flapping rags, and her arms made incomprehensible circling gestures as she spoke to Laurie. Blinking in the wind, stretching his limbs, feeling his sweat-sodden clothing unstick and slide over his flesh like sandpaper, he waited for them to agree on a price. Was this how he’d imagined it—a world beyond the Endless City, a rim beyond the rim? Yet for all the heat, the wind, the discomfort, the bittersweet smell of foline, and the wary scowl on the old woman’s face as she caught the silver of his eyes, it remained somehow distant.

They reached Sadiir as the light died. Climbing out of the van into purple night, feeling mosquitoes and nightflies bump seekingly into his face, hearing the clank of unoiled wind generators, breathing the ammoniac reek of humanity, John almost regretted leaving the dead plains.

Ahead through the rubble lay the lights of a hotel. Like the rest of Sadiir, it was ancient, half abandoned, tumbling in scraps of Moorish arch and colonial pillars. Dogs barked. Shutters creaked and turned. Music thrummed from doorways. Ulcerated children scurried out of the darkness as he and Laurie carried their bags up the broken steps of the hotel. Seeing the glowing arcs of his hands and the silver of his eyes, the children backed away.

Next morning, John was awakened by the crowing of cocks in the suddenly still air. He sat up, brushing off a layer of dead insects, and looked over to where Laurie lay asleep on her mattress beneath the shuttered window, stripes of morning light glittering in the quartz dust in her hair. He climbed out onto the gravelly floor and began to peel off his underclothes. He was in the process of picking dead bugs out of his pubic hair when he saw that Laurie’s eyes were open.

“Good morning.”

“Gunahana,”
she said. “These private arrangements were something we didn’t talk about.”

He stopped, his shoulders hunched. “It hardly matters, does it?”

She gestured a shrug.

He turned away, using a rag and the bowl of disinfectant-clouded water to clean himself. Last night, tiredness and this filthy room had made him postpone any efforts at washing. He sat on the bed and grabbed fresh underpants and socks out of his bag. He found that he didn’t feel particularly self-conscious.

“We’ll have to pay off the local elder here,” Laurie said, sitting up and pulling her teeshirt off over her head.

“How much?”

“I’ll sort something out.”

She began to gather up her clothes. He saw that she’d been bitten by bugs in the night, although she didn’t seem to notice or care. Laurie had pale-brown skin, narrow shoulders, flattish breasts, a deep pit of a navel. Opening the seal on her bag and pulling on a fresh shirt, she pushed back the shutters from the window and took in a breath of the warm morning air.

John came over and rested his elbows beside hers, gazing out. Blue-gray near the peaks, with shreds of cloud and hints of green, the Northern Mountains seemed to lie just beyond the angular sprawl of Sadiir’s corrugated roofs, almost close enough for him to touch.

They passed a sandy Christian graveyard filled with leaning crosses and angels as they drove out of Sadiir. Soon after, the jagged remains of a castle crowned the top of a hill to the east. As he looked west across the dead foothills, John wondered if he should ask Laurie how she got hold of the expensive cube of Halcycon nerve tissue that she’d used to pay off the village elder. But the moment never seemed quite right, and he guessed he knew what the answer was anyway: it was stolen. But why should Laurie’s behavior be any different from that of the rest of the people who worked in the Zone?

He wound down his window and blinked in the scalding dust. It seemed that all history was buried and forgotten in sand drifts over abandoned villages, in the ruins of checkpoints marking forgotten frontiers, in the bleached carcasses of vehicles and animals.

At twilight, the highway gave out and became a pitted track. After hovering tantalizingly all day, the mountains had at last begun to draw closer. Bending forward to see more of their lavender peaks, John hooked the van around the next curve in the hillside, then braked hard as the fans kicked into mounds of ash. He punched on the headlights. The cabin filled with the carbony reek of dead bonfires. Everywhere there were blackened trunks and jagged charcoal branches. He pushed on, anxious to get out of this dead place, but they were still within the burnt-out forest when storms of ash and the gathering night made it impossible for them to continue. John pulled off the track into a clearing. The van’s engines stilled. The flurries of ash settled. Clawing black trees encircled them.

They heated packs of stew inside the van. Laurie dropped a wine tablet into their water flask, then added two more. The cold deepened. Banging elbows, they climbed into their sleeping bags, reclining the seats and setting the keys for maximum heat. The scratchy darkness thickened, and the wind made the dead treetops click and rattle.

“I wonder how far you have to go,” Laurie said, “until there’s really nothing.”

John shifted in the fragile warmth of his bag. He heard a pop as she opened a tube. In here, with the windows up, he guessed that he’d have to share whatever mood it created. “I mean, John, do you really believe there’s something out there beyond what you can see and feel? Look at this place—you go so far and find it’s just us. And after that, nothing…What else is there to believe in?”

“What about the witchwomen, the rituals, the moonrocks, the carnivals?”

“That’s like a dance, John—something you let take over for a while. That’s about the thrill of
this
world, not the hope of some other. It’s a madness, too. The witchwomen take a burden from us. That’s why we give them gifts and accept their strangeness. If you really think about the way things are, maybe madness is the only sane response.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry—you don’t find this easy, do you, talking about what everything means?”

“It’s my job.”

“I mean your own faith. What you feel, what you are.”

“Believing in God is like being in love, Laurie. You can’t rationalize it. It has nothing to do with what’s in your head.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with emptiness.” Laurie ground out her tube and snuggled deeper into her seat, closing her eyes. “This world, and nothing else. Think about it. Is that really so bad?”

At one point, he awoke, hearing some other sound. Strange, half musical. He shifted and opened his eyes, gazing out at the witchy trees. Then he realized that it was Laurie. She was singing to the net, humming in her sleep.

They were back on the road before the light next morning and reached the walled town of Tiir at midday. The cold that had come in the night remained, and the wind still blew at them from the south. But it was different here. The air was scented with mountain sap and the tang of rain.

Tiir would have seemed a desolate place to anyone who hadn’t crossed the plains. The houses were the same gray as the cliffs and outcrops they were built on. Flapping sheets covered the doorways of the stony houses; washed-out jelt alternated with mossy thatch as a roof covering. The smoke that wafted from stubby chimneys smelled of grass and donkey dung and charcoal from the burnt-out forest below. Faces peered at them from narrow unglazed windows, and small crowds hovered around corners. The people here wore brown capes woven with threads of indigo, crimson, chrome yellow. The women had beads in their hair, the colors vibrant in the gray light beneath the mountains.

Tiir was a place of transition, a buffer between the Endless City and the desert wastes beyond. The squat walls that surrounded the town were well maintained, and the guards who stopped and questioned John and Laurie at the gateway carried ancient rifles that obviously weren’t for show. People from the coast, the koiyl merchants, the hawkers and dealers—John and Laurie, even—were admitted because they brought the trade on which the town depended. But the skulls in niches in the cliffs and outer walls declared that the others, the starving wanderers who still drifted in from beyond the Last Hammada, were as likely to be killed as sent away.

There was a market in the main square, overshadowed by the walls of an ancient castle keep. Wandering along the aisles, Laurie caused as much disruption as John: a Borderer walking close to a European! But the vendors shouted after them both and cheerily offered their wares. John was surprised not to find more hostility towards him from these people living on the fringe of Europe.

There were strung lines of cooking pans clanging in the wind, the wormy carcasses of lambs and hares, brilliant orange gourds, and scraps of European technology—screens, night-sights, transmitters, and sexual aids. They found a stall of the woven capes that they saw worn all around them. The cloth was stiff, warm, smelling richly of sheep oil. Watched by giggling, disbelieving children, they bought one each and pulled the capes over their dusty clothes. But they found no koiyl. The crop, Laurie was told by the stallkeeper, hadn’t been harvested yet. But, yes, it would be gathered soon and sold here before it was taken down to the Endless City.

They already knew that Tiir would be the end of the line for the van, and had left it parked on a patch of ground outside the walls with a barrier field humming around it. From now on, they would have to go on foot—and would need a guide to show them the way.

It was hard to make sense of what was happening in the shadow of the keep where witchwomen had gathered. Bells were clanging, smoke was trailing. The air reeked of old sweat. The witchwomen, squatting under tented rugs, chattered, thumped goatskin drums, fanned the smoke from chalices. A few moaned and swayed, apparently in a trance. Others looked simply drunk. Laurie spat on a Magulf dollar and tossed it into a, brass bowl. Then she began to pick her way between their nests of possessions.

“How do we know which one to choose?” John shouted after her.

She continued walking. “They’ll choose us.”

Glancing around him, John saw that a nearby witchwoman was tending a sore on a young man’s thigh. He winced as he watched her prod at the open flesh with grubby fingernails and then, using a twig as a spool, begin to extract a long white length of worm. He hurried to catch up with Laurie.

She was asking questions in an unfamiliar dialect of Borderer. Whenever they paused by a ring of chemlights or a row of dried chickenheads, people pointed them on towards the far corner of the keep. There, a little apart at the end of the line, the last witchwoman sat. She was squatting alone, not under a tented rug but under a large black umbrella hung with rodent skulls.

Seeing John and Laurie, she beckoned for them to sit down on the paving. She leaned across the usual litter of figurines and glowing incense cones to peer closely at them. Although she must have registered the color of John’s eyes, she looked at him in a way that was uncommon among Borderers; she actually seemed to study his features. Her own eyes were moist in the depths of a cracked face, and even the whites were brown. Then she nodded slowly to herself, muttering something.

John sat back as Laurie and the witchwoman began to talk, wishing he hadn’t decided not to bring his translat on this journey. He couldn’t make out a word of it: the accent here was strange, softer and quicker than the one he’d grown used to hearing in the Magulf, and he guessed from Laurie’s expression that even she was occasionally struggling.

After a while, she said to him, “Her name’s Hettie. She says you’re a strange kind of
baraka
.”

He smiled and nodded to the witchwoman, and her mouth broke into a one-toothed smile. From what he could make out in the gloom of the keep and the shade of her umbrella, he guessed that Hettie was no more than middle-aged, and that exposure to the elements probably explained the ancient leather of her skin. Whatever color her clothes had started out, they were now mostly black, and she gave off the dull, salty aroma that Borderers who never changed or washed eventually acquired.

“Well?” he asked when she and Laurie slapped hands in some sort of agreement. “Will she do it? Will she take us?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Laurie said something more to Hettie, then leaned back. “She says we must go right away.”

“We’ve only got two or three hours of daylight left.”

“She says, exactly.”

“Does she want payment?”

“Not yet. I think she wants to get a better idea of how much we’re worth.”

Hettie licked her lips, turned slowly towards John.

She swallowed, wiped her mouth, licked her lips again.

“That right, Fatoo,” she said.

Pausing on the steep track, John looked back one last time at the lights of Tiir in the bowl of the hills below. Where the path hooked around the ravine ahead, he could just make out Laurie as she clambered over a rock and, more faintly, the shape of Hettie still holding her umbrella aloft. Shifting the straps of his backpack until they bit into a different place on his shoulders, he forced his legs to continue on and up the dim path.

Hettie had managed to cram her entire belongings into an old carpetbag, but John and Laurie were more heavily burdened. After much agonizing at the van, they’d dumped the second barrier-field generator and a large portion of their spare clothing and replaced the food and water purifier with a tube of fizzy tablets they’d bought in the market. That still left a satellite transmitter for emergencies, a filter mask each, the radiation counter, and endless seemingly vital odds and ends. And after the cold of the dead forest the night before, neither of them wanted to leave their heated sleeping bags behind.