The Great Wheel (3 page)

“No,” he said, “not in Europe—not until we grow old. There are these things, Juanita, special viruses in our blood, implants along our spines, inside our bodies. That’s why I can’t…”

Her brown eyes stared back at him as the translat repeated his words.

“I’m sorry, Juanita. Daudi’s going to die.”

“Will you pray for him?”

“Yes…of course.”

“Then pray for him. Pray for him now.”

John looked down at the child on the bed. He’d dealt with several leukemia cases and in his own laymanish way had become a kind of expert. The first case he’d had was a woman with lush, jet-black skin, still young enough to possess the bloom of beauty that Borderer women so rapidly lost. She’d come to him as they always did—too late. He still attempted treatment, but the ancient cytotoxic drugs that Tim Purdoe in the European Zone at Bab Mensor had synthesized for him were never intended for use outside a hospital, and the woman died anyway—pretty much as Tim had told him she would—but probably more horribly, from the green fungal growth of some secondary infection. He’d learned his lesson then; that the desire to help in useless cases was a selfish attempt to deal with his own guilt.

He unscrewed a flask of holy water and reached out towards the stained, sunken bed. The woman let out an instinctive gasp, but he knew she wouldn’t stop him from touching her son. At least not as long as he kept his gloves on. His sheathed fingers brushed the boy’s forehead, the skin as thin and pale as the bone it scarcely covered. Daudi was comatose, but for a moment the sunken eyelids seemed to quiver.

Speaking the too familiar words, pausing after each line for the translat to repeat them in a form that Juanita would recognize if not understand, John felt a sudden impulse to rip off the gloves. To heal, to touch. He shook his head and continued…

In the name of God the almighty Father who created you.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, who suffered for you.

In the name of the Holy Spirit, who was poured out upon you.

Go forth, faithful Christian.

As he spoke, the hot, silent room seemed to whiten.

The other call he’d planned to make was also on the edge of oldtown. Even he, a European, avoided going too far out in the Endless City at night, but he felt he was starting to acquire some feeling for navigation in the sprawling, unmapped, and ever-changing slum. It came from a mixture of many things: from the position of the sun when its glow could be discerned through the clouds, from the gritty feel of the almost constant southerly wind, from landmarks like the broken minaret of the Moulay Mosque and the rotted tower of his own Santa Cristina—or from the strength of the distinctive reek of the kelpbeds.

Down through the gateway in the old medina wall. A glimpse between the buildings of a tangled roof-fall all the way to the shores of the Breathless Ocean, where the kelpbeds gleamed in a break of moonlight like shattered green ice. And then right, and right again—into the blaze of the carnival in the Plaza El-Halili.

Too late, he realized the way he’d come. Inextricably entangled with the surrounding alleys, souks, and streets, the Plaza El-Halili was one of the bigger squares in the lower part of oldtown and usually crowded. But he’d never seen it like this. The buildings swam in a haze of light and smoke. People were everywhere. Bells and iron pots, drums and pipes were tooting and clanging. And there were the conflicting smells of incense, booze, the reek of stalls piled with fish, the fumes from fires, the sweet, teeth-aching aroma that came off graveyard piles of sugarballs in the shape of skulls, the smoke from tubes, the sweat-steam that sprayed off dancing bodies.

The instant that he stepped from the shade of an archway out into the light, the Borderers noticed him. They paused in their dancing, in their selling of wares and picking of pockets, in their arguments and their laughter. They fanned back and away. The sense of his presence passed through the square in a chilly, inaudible whisper.

Blue, green, and brown eyes studied him. Mothers reached down to grab the hands of children. Nearby music stopped, hanging on a discord. He nodded pointless thanks, wheeling his expensive bicycle through the space that parted for him, the battery coil slung beneath its crossbar and glowing, the big soft tires plowing through mud and litter.

Down the slope of the square, away from the frigid sphere of his influence, a stage had been erected against the castellated walls of the old Kasbah. The rusty scaffolding was draped with silks and flags, colored with smoky-pink chemlights, drifting fluorescent globes, endless shimmering ribbons. A play was in progress. A huge, leering mask loomed over a shrieking band of children. Their faces were blackened and their thin bodies smeared with ash. Their shrieks sounded alarmingly real.

“Hey, Fatoo,” someone shouted out.

He saw a Borderer youth towering over the hunchback woman nearest him. The youth’s hair was tangled with beads, and a cosmetic implant pulsed bluish red through the skin beneath his rib cage, like a second heart.

“Fatoo, you come anyway, huh? You here, and join in? Tonight…”

The lad was smiling—and John could see no trace of irony in the smile. Borderers weren’t like Europeans anyway; they usually said exactly what they meant. The people around John began to nod and laugh. To beckon. The invitation spread. Koiyl-stained teeth grinned. Someone else laughed and pointed at the sky. Yes, come on, Fatoo. Join in.
Skay.
Come and share with us.
Cum.
Share…

John shook his head and pushed on towards the escape of the nearest archway. He passed quickly into the shadows, away from the carnival to where the blind walls and windows glistened in the faint red light of the Magulf sky and rats and caroni birds fought over something in the mud and the pulse of light and music faded.

He turned on his bicycle’s front light, kicked in the standby motor, and rode slowly uphill. He could remember harvest carnivals back in Hemhill when he was a child, the great painted wagons, the good smell of the corn in the church beforehand, the Sunday perfume of the women, the beery breath of the men. And he remembered laughing and wrestling with Hal in the churchyard grass when the service ended, the two of them tumbling down the hill towards bright canopies, clangorous carnival engines, all the sweet discord of the fair. Thinking of vast European grainfields, the smell of dust, the hum of the compound in the valley that signified the end of summer, John dismounted from his bicycle in a dank Magulf square.

It was steeply enclosed on all sides, and in the center was the mouth of a communal sewer. His ears still rang from the carnival, but that only increased the sense of silence. Could
everyone
have possibly gone out tonight? Surely there had to be people other than the ill, the infirm, and the odd European priest who didn’t want to participate.

He climbed the sagging steps and found the right door. It was open. Inside, he had to rely on touch. There was a passageway—a left turn?—definitely another set of stairs. He stumbled on through the darkness. The silence around him was no longer absolute. There were the creaks and stirrings that came from the flexing of the jelt floor and walls—also from the disturbance his passage was causing to the old building’s many nonhuman inhabitants. He paused. Normally, there would be lights, kids in the corridors, music blaring…

But for the glow of his gloves—now pale red at the tips—and the faint light that came from the small personal monitoring screen of the watch set into the flesh just above his left wrist, the darkness was absolute. A few more steps, and he had to stop. Perhaps he should go back. He’d visit old Banori on the way to the clinic tomorrow morning. After all, the difference was only one night…But then he heard a sound, a low moaning that could have come from the livestock that the Borderers sometimes kept in their homes, but could just as easily have been human. He took another step forward. His right foot banged something, and he reached out to grab a wobbly stair rail. He began to climb.

The landing was illuminated in the glow of a chemlight from the one open door, and he saw the dim shapes of waste barrels and of the water butts that in times of rain were fed from the roof by an elaborate system of pipes; otherwise they were filled laboriously by bucket from the pump in the yard. Such arrangements were always the subject of much local argument. It sometimes struck him that this was almost their primary purpose, especially as the things regularly broke through the weak floors to either comic or disastrous effect.

The open door was the one he wanted. He crossed the landing towards the light and entered.

He saw instantly that he’d come too late. Banori’s corpse sat facing him from the old high-backed chair, its eyes already sunken and lifeless in the chemlight’s dying radiance. The room was in an odd kind of mess, but John had picked his way around the furniture towards the body before the truth dawned. Even in the soupy atmosphere of a Borderer tenement, the place was filled with the bland, salty reek of blood. Black sprays of it garlanded the walls. They were still wet, scrawled by a strong, sweeping hand into hieroglyphs whose meaning he couldn’t even guess at.

He looked around. He crossed himself. Whatever else it was that witchwomen did for the death rite, they generally left the place looking like an abattoir—although, as far as he could tell without undertaking a pointless analysis, the blood hadn’t been the old man’s. Not that it mattered now. In death, Banori smiled. He was wearing his best clothes, with his white hair slicked neatly down. He also had a set of teeth in, something John could never remember him wearing in life. Or perhaps the teeth were just another part of the ritual. They’d probably end up with all the other teeth in the chapel of the Inmaculada at Santa Cristina.

By Felipe’s account, Banori had been a church regular even before John’s arrival in the Magulf, a true Christian, turning up every Sunday at Mass propped on his walking stick until a succession of strokes finally grounded him to his flat. The neighbors complained about his cantankerous and unsanitary ways, but as far as John could tell, they had always made sure that he had the necessities to live. And every week or so, John looked in. Usually, he offered to say prayers or Mass, and Banori would decline—in an accent that strained even the abilities of the translat—saying that he was close enough to God, to Scuro Rey, to be past that kind of thing.

Now, he’d gone the last mile. Maybe another stroke—but more likely he’d had enough of the indignities of age and got hold of something to end the pain. Peering at the clenched and smiling lips, John saw the glitter of tiny glass flakes that might have come from a crushed vial, and a sticky bubble that looked too black to be simply blood. Whatever it was, the presence of the witchwoman who’d scrawled these walls could hardly have been coincidental. It seemed as if this Church old faithful had finally chosen the witchwoman’s comforts over those of a priest when he decided to bring his life to an end.

John pulled off his gloves. What difference could it make here? He took out the flask of holy water, flicking away the beetle that had crawled out from the sleeve onto the old man’s hand. Once again, John began to recite the too familiar words:
May Christ be merciful in judging our brother…

He heard the moaning sound again—obviously some pig or goat on the floor above. The clump of feet. The footsteps faded, then suddenly grew loud and close, bringing with them the moaning and a bizarre, Christmassy jingle of bells.

He ceased his blessing and spun around to look at the open doorway behind him, which was blocked by a shadow.

“There’s a dead man in here.” He buried his bare hands in the pockets of his cassock. “I’m from the Church of Santa Cristina. Do I—”

The figure spat out a chain of sound that lay far beyond his understanding of the Magulf dialect.

“Look—
danna-comma
—I don’t understand—”

Still muttering, the witchwoman stepped into the room. John was torn between shock and curiosity—he’d never seen one at such close quarters before—and the first thing that struck him was the feverishly intense body heat she gave off. Even at two or three meters, it was like standing close to a fire. And then her eyes. She had some sort of fringed cape over her head, and the rest of her face was deep in shade, but the eyes were like wet slate and impossibly big. He tried to calm his breathing.

The witchwoman was breathing heavily, too. Her shoulders were shuddering, heaving, jingling the forest of silver and gold that hung on her. There were boxes dangling from the knotted ribbons, tiny cages that contained chittering insects, gilded skulls. The whole thing made a tinkling, whispering cacophony, like the crackle of frost…a flock of panicked sparrows…a thousand windchimes caught in a breeze. Then the pebble-bright eyes blinked back at him, and every sound stopped at the same instant.

In sudden, absolute silence—the chirping of every insect hushed, every bell magically still—the witchwoman stepped towards him.

“I suppose you and I…” His voice came out as a whisper. “We have something in common. We see to the needs of the dead.”

The witchwoman studied him. More slowly this time, she spoke again. He still couldn’t understand a word, but the voice was young, and he saw now that she wasn’t as he’d imagined such creatures to be. All he could see of her face was her eyes, but through the silent curtain of bells and insect cages and the elaborately woven smock beneath, a sense of youth and physical power beat from her almost as strongly as the body heat.

Rocking gently, the witchwoman began to moan. And with her movement, the insects resumed chirping, the bells jingling. Tiny flashes of light sparkled through the swaying veils of her smock.

He stared. The noise seemed to pulse and sway with her movement, filling the room. The sound of it was as compelling as her heat and her scent. Glittering, unearthly, musical.

He saw her hands emerge from the frayed golden cloth around her waist and penetrate the chattering curtain of cages and bells. Transfixed, he watched her turn her palms towards him. They were bloodied red, and each bore a wide gash, a yawning mouth, a wound; like stigmata, a vulva.