The Great Wheel (2 page)

“And doesn’t that bother you?”

“Of course it does. The Endless City shakes so many of our safe European conceptions. Life here is put to chance in a way that we barely understand. How many funeral rites do you think I’ve performed down at El Teuf? Little scraps of flesh that hardly had a chance at life gobbled up by the mouth of that big incinerator…”

“Don’t you get angry?”

“We’re here to be the shepherds of souls, not to burn with anger. Remember what Epictetus said.”

“
I
don’t want to lose my anger. If I lose that, I’ll be accepting things exactly as they are.”

“And tell me, why should this world need your acceptance?” Felipe slurped his tea, clattering the cup on the saucer. “We’re here for other reasons, my son. Believe me, this isn’t the priest in you that’s speaking—it’s the man. I know, my son, that you have your doubts, your troubles. I understand that. Truly, I understand and I sympathize. But that doesn’t…”

John let it wash over him. They’d talked this way, oh, far too many times before in the six months he’d been here. It never got them anywhere. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t engage anything in Felipe beyond this clever, weary, seen-it-all philosophizing. The old priest had spent too many years in the Endless City, lying back in the haze of the whisky and trisoma that he took to deaden the pain in his failing legs.

“John,” Felipe said, crumbs trembling on his lips as he fished through his pockets for a flask to add to his tea, “this seedcake really is excellent. Lent or no Lent, you must try.”

John reached to the old priest’s plate and took a bite. It had the bitter, salt-sour taste of the reeking kelpbeds down at Chott from which the flour was processed. He forced himself to swallow.

After the evening service and the cleaning of the paten and the chalice, John locked the shutters over the windows of the church of Santa Cristina. Most of the glass and the original roof had been destroyed long ago by the weather and were now patched with panels and sheets. Still, even if the pillars were tidemarked with damp and the floor was crumbling to rubble, Santa Cristina had managed to survive the centuries. He’d read up on its history back in Millbrooke Seminary when he’d first heard that he was to be assigned here. Or had he read it on board the shuttle? Now he couldn’t remember—any more than he could remember what the old analogue guidebook had said. Built by the Templars, sacked by the Merindes…Or was it the Berbers, the Saadians, the Alouites?

He paused beside the stone crusader in the east chancel. Time had eaten away the features, the cloak, the shield. Now, noseless and age-corroded, with hollow sockets for eyes, the figure resembled a skeleton more than anything else. He touched the stone with his gloved hands, crumbling away a little more. He didn’t mind the decay of the church, this statue, the looted ornaments, the smell of damp that in another hour or two would override the lingering odor of incense and the characteristic sweat-smell of his departed Borderer congregation. The church was old anyway, dying.

The sound of scuffling and scratching came from the high arches as the large black indigenous birds squabbled for nesting space outside on the roof. The votive candles and chemlights of the side chapel of the Inmaculada gave a flickering, cheery glow. It was one of the few bright spots in the rambling church: Our Lady wearing a blue dress and a quizzical smile, surrounded by an oddly Christmassy pile of tributes. Her eyes were greenish brown, like the Bellinis and Titians he had seen in Paris museums. Christ and Our Lady had faces like those he saw here on the street, with a strange gaze of brown or green or blue. Drawn towards the statue as he always was, he noticed that a blackish rime had formed in the outstretched palm of her right hand.

It was probably dried blood, like the fresh red trail he’d found leading to the church’s oak door one morning last winter when there’d been snow, and a purplish internal organ that had been left dripping on the altar rail. Looking closer at the candlelit pile that surrounded Our Lady, he saw chewed baby teethers, wedding rings worn thin, cheap and treasured prosthetics. An unworkable hand. False teeth. The gleam of a glass eye. Cobwebby scraps of hair. These undying bits of the dead never accumulated the gritty dust that settled everywhere else in the Magulf: his parishioners were always picking them up, rubbing them with callused fingers and whispering
Madre.
He thought of Saint Paul in Athens, of the shrines and idols in that city full of unknown gods. Did they represent false images—or other pathways towards the light? Paul had been clear enough in his condemnation, but after all these centuries, after the death in the poisoned weather of half the world and with it the other great religions that had once vied with Christianity, there was still no real answer.

On a rusty stand beside the altar was a plate for offerings and prayers. As usual, it was well stocked. Each card crackled out its message as he picked it up. He could only make sense of a few on first hearing. The cards were thin and cheap—and even when his parishioners tried to speak clear European, the clotted Magulf vowels still came through.

A woman, with the sound of a baby crying in the background. “To Lady. Pray the soul of our son Josh.”

Another woman. Something about the roof of her shack blowing in.

A man, in tears, too choked to say anything at all.

To get anywhere near understanding the rest, John had to take the translat from his belt and hold it close. Each time a card spoke, the translat’s screen flickered and the power meter sagged before it barked out the words. The translat didn’t get on well with the speech cards, but its flat, Eurospeak voice eventually echoed each message.

“Please mercy and forgiving. In the name of the gods.”

“Pray now for rain, and for my friend Delo. As it was in time of the Dark King. Amen.”

One card had pinned to the back of it a small plastic bag filled with titanium bolts. “For Jesus,” it chirped, and the translat gave a clear but tinny echo a moment later. “Please remember.”

Remember what? For whom? He gazed up at the face of Our Lady. She was smiling and sad, self-absorbed, and her carved lips always seemed to be holding back the same eternal secret. He wiped the rusty stand and then the main altar rail with a fresh dysol-impregnated cloth from the pack he always carried with him, an anointing that was part of the ritual of reassurance that took place between Borderer and European even when there were no witnesses. Then he changed gloves. Pulling at the thread and dropping the old pair to the floor, he watched them flare and dissolve, and brushed away the ash with the toe of his shoe.

He destroyed the unused wafers. Normally he would have gone through at least two of the sealed packs in an evening service, but today the congregation had been limited to a few old women, a few old men, and the babies that they’d agreed to look after while the rest of the people enjoyed the carnival. He’d had half a mind to acknowledge the fact during the service, even try—through the translat, or by testing his own stumbling command of the dialect—to crack a joke. But when he gazed down at those strange eyes, and at those warm and gnarled hands that he could never touch, the silence had closed in.

Freewheeling, his cassock flapping, he cycled down the cobbled hill from church.

These empty zigzag streets had once belonged to a town with its own name and history. The Endless City stretched along the north coast of old Africa, reaching through the dried-up regions of the Nile and the ancient battlefields of the Holy Land as far as the Black Sea before finally tapering out in the frozen wilderness of the Russian Plains. For the most part, the urban sprawl was narrow, hemmed in by mountains and the wildfire desert, pressed up against the gray waters of what had once been called the Mediterranean and was now named the Breathless Ocean. In this easterly part known as the Magulf, where John worked, the coastlines of Europe and old Africa almost touched. It had once been called Morocco—or possibly Algeria. The maps had blurred long ago.

Typically by this time on a warm, reddish dark spring Magulf evening, the candles and the cooking flames and the chemlights would be glowing, the streets would be spilling with beggars, vendors, fights, snake charmers, family arguments, scurrying children. Tonight it was much quieter. The alleyways were empty—even the dogs were single and furtive. Everyone who could manage to get there was farther down the hill in the old plazas, the bombsites, the open spaces. Enjoying the carnival.

He slowed and dismounted where the slick cobbles steepened and broke into a stairway of rubble between the houses, joined halfway down by the flow of what had probably started out as a stream somewhere up in the Northern Mountains. He picked his way with care, lifting the bicycle over a rock and banging his ankle in the process, conscious of the gaze of an old Borderer woman sitting at a window above him. She was watching the carnival’s flickering lights, listening to the squawk of untuned trumpets and the thump of drums and firecrackers that filtered up along this damp maze.

“Hello,” he called, looking up. “
Gunafana.
What can you see up there?”

He’d asked the question slowly, but the woman only blinked back at him. He was considering raising his voice or turning on the translat, when she spoke.

“Go home,
baraka.
We don’t want you here,” she said. “Get back to your own hell.”

She pursed her thin lips and spat. The saliva plopped on a mossy stone beside his feet, stained red from her chewing the koiyl leaf.

Then, with more accuracy, she spat again.

He had two calls to make that evening. He visited the homes of a few of his parishioners each day, even though those Borderers who were prepared to embrace the faith he represented were often unwilling to accept him personally. The only invariable exception came when someone was seriously ill. Then, the Borderers wanted him, and not simply because of the clinic he ran each morning from the old post office in the Plaza Princesa next to the bombed-out towerblock. Even when the doctor’s medicines and scans had been exhausted, they wanted John to pray and touch his silver cross and mutter to Jesus, Mary, and the Lord.

His first call was down the hill on the Cruz de Marcenado, one of the main streets that bisected this part of the Endless City in line with the coast. Here, the music was louder—he was closer to the carnival’s glittering fringe. Cooking smoke was rising over the patched rooftops, the light in it gleaming on the rancid lakes of winter mud that still filled the middle of the thoroughfare. A couple ran out towards him from an alleyway, laughing, hand in hand, the boy pulling the girl against a show of weak reluctance, her shirt flapping open to show her sweat-shining breasts. Riding his bicycle along the sticky pavement, John stopped; for a moment he thought that they hadn’t noticed him. But the boy and girl had the same unerring sense for the presence of a European that all Borderers had. They halted and turned, their laughter momentarily stilled. Under a starless Magulf sky, they studied him with grave and questioning eyes. Then, laughing again, they ran on.

John propped his bicycle against the wall in a nameless street, leaving it unlocked in the certain knowledge that its obvious cost and newness would warn any light-fingered Borderer kids to keep clear. He banged hard on an old doorframe. After a pause, the burlap nailed over it was jerked aside.

“Fatoo. You here. Please, he get worse.”

He hesitated. Then, turning the translat to Transmit, he followed the woman inside.

She led him down a low corridor and into the one ground-floor room that was home for her and her family. He heard the familiar scurrying rustle of departing cockroaches as she turned up the lantern.

The air stank of sickness. There was a cheap, newish sofabed, a methane cooker in an alcove topped by a few cans of Quicklunch, the drip of a water purifier in the corner. A screen hung at a slight angle on the wall, and in it hovering figures moved with a distorted impression of depth. She was picking up some faint transmission from Europe: through the jittery fuzz, he recognized the tanned, smiling faces. The silver eyes.

He asked, “How is he?”

A moment later, the translat’s electronic voice declared
How ice uhe?
To John, it seemed a reasonable rendition of the Magulf dialect, but he didn’t doubt that, booming out in this hot, dank place, it sounded as artificial to the woman as the translat’s European sounded to him.

“He’s worse, Father.” She pulled back the blanket that screened off one corner of the room to show him her son. “Have you brought any medicine?”

“No. No medicine.”

…
meed-shun.

He studied the little figure that lay before him. The boy was about six or seven—the woman’s only son. His name was Daudi. And her name, he how remembered, was Juanita. Unlike many of the Borderers who came to his morning clinics, Juanita had already been one of the regulars at Santa Cristina when her son fell ill. Usually it was the other way around. They’d turn up at the clinic, and if a treatment worked, they’d show an interest in Christianity. Even if things continued to get worse, the Borderers would often offer to take the sacrament in case John was holding something back from those patients who didn’t embrace his faith.

“Will he live?”

She’d asked him that question several times before—even that first morning when she brought Daudi to the clinic. Then, Daudi had still been able to walk, although he was weak, dazed and bleeding from the gums and colon. After the buzzings and drillings of its consultation, the clinic’s doctor, which for once had been almost fully operational, confirmed John’s fears of acute myeloid leukemia.

“Will he live?”

“He’s very ill. It’s cancer, a disease that can’t be cured. It’s a cancer of the blood, leukemia.”

…
bludrut.

“In Europe? Even in Europe, he can’t be cured?”

“In Europe, cancer is different.”

“There is no cancer?”

He took a deep breath, feeling the sour wash of his own body heat. Juanita was standing at the usual safe distance the Borderers assumed, two or three steps from him—which in here meant that she was on the opposite side of the room.