The Great Wheel (20 page)

Perched crosslegged on a rock across the dim cave, Hettie watched, singing to herself. He wondered how much of the previous night had been due to the puffball and how much had been simply him. He nodded
gunafana
to her and stood up. Before he had more time to think about it, he climbed down and out of the cave to the ledge below, where the wind blew back at him no matter which way he pissed.

Laurie and Hettie were eating the cold remains of last night’s food when he returned. Burrowing through yeasty socks to find the paintabs, he checked the radiation counter that lay hidden beneath a flap at the very bottom of his bag. The counter had been sampling the whole journey, sniffing the air, its tiny green snout projecting through a rent he’d made. Every day, the line on the display had climbed a little higher towards the red.

Half an hour later, in time for the implants in his body to reach a rough accord, they set out. The wind had dried the rocks along the gorge, leaving them reddish gray, but with bright pools in the hollows, reflecting the hurrying sky.

As Hettie led John and Laurie up a screefall to higher ground, he saw that the cliff face was covered with arrowslit openings, ledges, and huge weathered carvings of the faces of forgotten kings. He pressed on through the continuing pain in his head. Foothold after foothold up the steepening rock, he could feel the kings’ stern and implacable gaze on his back.

By mid-morning they had reached the rocky edge of an almost lifeless plateau. In the ashen valley below lay what looked to be a road—a path, at least—winding out of the mountains. They stood, the wind pushing against them, to catch their breath and gaze down, and Hettie announced that she would leave them to go on by themselves from here. The route was straight enough. It had led nowhere for centuries—nowhere but Ifri Gotal. She agreed to meet with them again at this same place that evening.

“
Skay go?
”

“
Skay.
”

Levering herself up with her umbrella, Hettie was about to go, but frowned, turned, and said something else to Laurie.

“What’s that?”

“She says Ifri Gotal’s a dangerous place, that we shouldn’t stay long.”

“Tell her about the counter and the suits.”

Laurie shook her head. “I’ll just tell her that we understand.”

There was more talk. Eventually, Hettie headed back the way they’d come, nodding dubiously, muttering to herself, prodding her umbrella at the sky. Slumped on a rock, watching as she became a black speck, John shivered. It was June, but he could feel the wind like ice on his face and through his clothing. In a gap in the mountains to the east, he could see the rippling orange plains of the Last Hammada, the edge of the desert that now covered most of Africa. Farther east still, where the hills fell away to purple, there was a glimpse of another landscape, a place where black clouds met the horizon and the land itself glimmered with a brightness that had nothing to do with the sun. He breathed the air again, realizing that the ugly tang nagging his senses all morning was actually burnt mineral oil. He saw now that there were smears on the rocks around him, sooty drifts of the oil in the crevices like black snow.

They descended from the plateau to the wide floor of valley. The road was concrete, ancient, yet in better condition than most of the tracks they’d followed up to now. Here, there was hardly any vegetation left to destroy it. The radiation counter bleeped intermittently for the first hour or so, then settled into a prolonged, irritating whine. That was just a preliminary warning—the Zone engineer had calibrated it to go louder if the short-term exposure levels became truly dangerous.

After sitting on a old dry-stone wall and deciding against eating or drinking, they unfolded the protective suits and masks from their backpacks. The reflective material felt slick and cold as they pulled it over their clothing, and crackled slightly as they walked. The masks made their breathing congested and loud. They passed wrecked vehicles along the road, tires mingled with remains. And here, as John and Laurie walked through the canyon of this glimmering world, was a shrine, a washing line of tin cans, garish strips of plastic, and wind-picked bones clanging in the wind, and a rough table of rock on which crystals and stones from other planets were piled.

He tried to remember what the net’s projections had shown of this desolate area on the far side of the Northern Mountains, but he’d never imagined they’d have to come this far. Anyway the data—or, as Laurie would have put it, the net’s level of interest—were scant. But there
had
been a road, a road that was once a main route through these mountains and now blocked in a score of places by rockfalls, broken bridges, collapsed tunnels. Even before he had made any connection with Ifri Gotal, John remembered thinking that it must have been along roads such as this that the great migrations flowed north from the dying wastes. Now, the signs were all around them. Broken trucks and wagons and handcarts poking out of the dust. The debris of people on the move: migrating, dragging their lives behind them. Shoes. Spoons. The limbs of a plastic doll. Tatters of clothing. Broken bottles.

The valley narrowed to a cliff face on either side. With the piled wreckage, the road grew almost impassable. Clambering up over the top of a van, John caught a glimpse inside of hunched, mummified bodies, eyeless sockets staring out at him. Laurie’s movements through the wreckage beside him were slow, and her face was barely discernible beneath the mask. Ifri Gotal: maybe this was it. Maybe they should turn back now. But Laurie was pushing on towards another dip and turn.

Here, where the road crested, the valley widened into a huge, ash-colored bowl. John stood swaying from exertion, looking down. As the haze of his mask began to clear, he saw that the expanse before him consisted mainly of human bones. Grayish white, a lapping shore reaching mountainside to mountainside.

So this was Ifri Gotal. The radiation counter was screaming in his backpack now, and he began to shiver. On impulse, he pulled off his mask. Laurie did the same. Now, real at last, the end of all speculation, Ifri Gotal lay all around them, the chattering wind and the powdery smell of death like an unremitting ache. His shivering was starting to get beyond control. Briefly, Laurie put an arm around him, and they stood together in the wind blowing from a sea of femurs, skulls, rags of clothing, broken possessions, teeth.

They stayed at Ifri Gotal for an hour, their breather masks back on as they struggled with the sampler scoops, hearing only the wind and the clink of disturbed rocks and the close hard sound of their own breathing. John lifted a stone to weigh down a small sampler that buzzed into the dust, but the stone turned out to be light and hollow, not a stone at all but a child’s skull. He placed it back, trying to concentrate on the work he was doing, to see only what he needed to see. It was a trick he’d done his best to develop, focusing on the matter-of-fact details before him, shutting out everything else.

Later, he stood up and looked at the graveyard around him, knowing that he should pray. But all he saw were the fruits of an ancient conflict, the wind-picked bones of a people who had long ceased to be mourned. It seemed to him that all acts of violence, even ones as atrocious as this, eventually merged with the dust of history. What was truly terrible was the way that good and bad ultimately lost their distinction.

He stared at the child’s skull. Meeting a bland empty gaze of sockets that had once contained flesh and life, he wondered why he had fought so hard to keep his faith. Laurie was right: if you ceased to expect purpose or meaning from the universe, then the knowledge of horrors such as this became a little easier to bear. You could forget, get on with your life.

He set to work again.

Squatting under her umbrella, Hettie was waiting at the rise in the rocky valley where she left them.

Driven on flakes of soot, a dry dusk was shining in the rain-bowed puddles. They had dumped their suits and masks on the way from Ifri Gotal, but their backpacks were heavier now with foil-shielded packages of samples. John had had to pull out the batteries of the radiation counter to stop its screaming.

“
Ah fond?
”

Yes, they’d found. Hettie studied them, her eyes gleaming in the shade of her umbrella, a fringe of glass and bone. Then, nodding to herself, she turned again to the north.

John and Laurie followed between the rocks and the high cliff walls. The sky overhead billowed and churned, but here in the valley it was almost windless, still.

Full darkness came. Hettie lit a chemlight and pushed it onto the tip of her umbrella, waving it over her head, jumping over puddles and from rock to rock as she led the way. The shadows slid back and forth, leaped over the cliffs—a witches’ Sabbath—but John kept his eyes mostly at his feet, picking his way, occasionally stooping to collect another sample of stone or dry powder. When he looked up and saw the giant faces carved on the crags around Hettie’s home, they too were demonic, with sightless stone eyes.

Watched by Hettie, John and Laurie removed and shook off their outer clothing beside the cut-stone steps leading to her cave. Then they climbed the stairway into the rock past the carvings of long-dead beasts, the whorled innards of stone, and they breathed the rank and yet now oddly refreshing human odors of smoke, sweat, urine.

John unslung his backpack and slumped down in a corner. Incinerating his gloves and wiping off with dysol the grit that had worked beneath them, he watched as Hettie prepared dinner. Laurie was holding a pan for her over the flames. Her arms, shoulders, and legs were bare, and he saw the play of light over and along them. Her hair was tangled, greasy, almost the same no-color now as Hettie’s—and no doubt as his. She chewed at a strand of it as she swished melting fat in the pan, then asked Hettie a rising-falling question and reached into the pan, pushing at a barely warm scrap of meat with her finger. The stoop of her brown back raised notches. Hettie said something. Laurie smiled and shook her head. She scratched beneath her arm, pressed something dead with her fingernails, threw it into the flames.
Spat,
a little fusillade of sparks. Smoke drifted, and the smell of curried meat slowly rose.

Leaning more against the rock, he felt something dig into his shoulder but ignored it. It was good to be back amid life.

“Here.” Laurie handed him a plate. She and Hettie sat closer to the fire, their faces shifting and changing like the stone giants outside.

“Ask her,” he said, when the two of them finally fell to tooth-picking silence, “how she became
chicahta
—a witch-woman.”

In response to Laurie’s question, Hettie smiled and held her hands to the flames. She swayed as she spoke, and her voice was like a scatter of pebbles.

“She says it was when she was a girl,” Laurie began. “On a night just before the rains, when the whole Endless City lies still and the sounds carry over miles, and people sweat in their beds and the air is like the breath of a dog panting close to your face…”

“She said
that?
”

“Shush, John. Listen—I know what it’s like too. Hettie was up in her room at night, lying between her sisters, trying to lose the heat and get to sleep, when she heard this sound coming through the open window, singing like water. The tip-tapping of drums. It was faint, but so close too that it was almost inside her head. She crept from the room and down the stairs. She went out into the empty street dressed as she was.

“She walked barefoot through the dust. There was no one about. The world seemed different, but the sound that drew her was something she recognized even though she’d never heard it before. She followed it up the hill, and the sound grew louder in her head rather than in the air, and everything else was so quiet and empty that she thought she might be dreaming. But there were the clattering drums and cymbals and bells, so she walked on through the night, the cool sound drawing her…

“She found the witchwomen in a square, gathered around a fire, their shadows huge across the buildings behind them. As she drew closer, she realized that what the fire gave off wasn’t heat, but it was like the music, refreshing and cool, and when the witchwomen drew her into their circle, she felt both rested and drowsy. She stayed with them for the rest of the night…”

Silent now as Laurie finished her tale, Hettie smiled, shivered, and drew her hands back from the flames.

“And they took her with them?” John asked. “She became a witchwoman?”

“No,” Laurie said after Hettie spoke some more. “She went home in the morning, and her parents were furious. She didn’t become a witchwoman until she’d had children of her own and they grew old enough to leave her. But it was
then
that she knew, that she decided.”

Later into the night, Hettie grabbed up a seemingly random pile of electronics and shooed the red mites out of a large nervebox. Crouching over it, licking at the wires and pushing in the connectors, weaving it all together like a tapestry, she persuaded tiny green lights to glow. Music began to fill the cave. The looping strings of an orchestra…It started, stopped, played with a long and easy melody, drawing the listener on and in. John recognized it, although he couldn’t quite place the name. Perhaps a Strauss waltz…

His eyes stinging with smoke and tiredness, he watched as Laurie and Hettie linked arms and danced, laughing, around the cave.

Hettie took them as far as Lall next morning. It grew warmer as they descended, and the high slopes around them were suddenly green and alive. Once or twice, watched by Hettie, John stopped to gather more samples. As far as he knew, Laurie had made no effort to explain the real purpose of their journey, yet the witchwoman, though curious, seemed to accept everything they did. He imagined that she thought the sample-taking was some priestly ritual; she’d naturally look upon their journey to Ifri Gotal as a pilgrimage.

The air grew brighter as they descended the widening valleys along the southern flanks of the mountains. A hawk circled. Rabbits darted under the gorse. And now, singly at first then in clumps amid the tall ragged grass, grew koiyl bushes. He could now smell the tarry, sweet pollen from the small white flowers that bowed and lifted here, sheltered from the wind that drove towards Europe.